EXPLANATION OF ELECTRICITY 



ending ether which fills up the blue outside the 

 sky. 



Later, to the mind of Clerk-Maxwell, the English 

 physicist who died so young, came the thought 

 that electricity and light are, at bottom, identical 

 light, short ether-waves; electricity, long ones. 

 Maxwell never lived to see his brilliant guess veri- 

 fied. Heinrich Hertz, of Karlsruhe, did that, ten 

 or fifteen years after Maxwell was gone. 



Naturally, then, scientific workers came to think 

 of electricity in the same terms as those of light. 

 Franklin's " fluid" theory was discarded, along with 

 Newton's corpuscles, and dismissed. 



Recently the distinguished successor of Clerk- 

 Maxwell in the chair of physics at Cambridge, 

 England, Professor J. J. Thomson, took these rel- 

 ics from their hiding-place, and found them sin- 

 gularly alive. The result is what has come to be 

 known as the electron, or corpuscular theory of 

 electricity, and, by inference, since the two can 

 no longer be kept separate, of light as well. And 

 there is hot talk now between the adherents of the 

 newly old and the oldly new. 



Readers whose memories run back twenty years 

 may recall something of the flutter aroused when 

 Sir William Crookes sought to demonstrate the ex- 

 istence of a fourth state of matter. Studying the 

 peculiar actions which go on in that same Crookes 



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