EXPLANATION OF ELECTRICITY 



a basis, the chemist weighs and measures his atoms 

 of gold or sulphur or iron as if they were so much 

 sugar or salt in his scale pans. A few years ago the 

 notion that there exists a similar natural unit of 

 electricity would have been deemed bizarre enough. 

 But the researches of Professor Thomson and others 

 have shown that the bits of flying matter in the 

 nearly absolute vacuum of a Crookes tube bear a 

 high electrical charge ; a stream of them may be bent 

 and deflected by a magnet as if it were a piece of 

 iron. Having found an extremely ingenious way 

 actually to count the number of corpuscles within a 

 tube, and knowing the total amount of electricity 

 they bore, it was merely a problem in very long 

 division to calculate the charge on each corpuscle. 

 No matter what the origin of the corpuscles, or 

 the substances employed, this charge is always the 

 same. It is nature's electrical unit; obviously it 

 needed a label, and Professor Stoney called it an 

 electron. 



Now the initiate are endeavoring to determine 

 what is the relationship of the electrical charge, the 

 electron, to the bit of matter, the corpuscle, which 

 carries it. Strange as it may seem, this may be 

 but a school-man's riddle. .The electron is known 

 only as it is associated with a something which has 

 mass, or weight that is, matter brief, the cor- 

 puscles. In turn, the corpuscles arc unknown save 



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