ADDRESS AS PRESIDENT OF THE ELECTRICAL CONFER- 

 ENCE AT PHILADELPHIA, SEPTEMBER 8, 1884 



[Report of the Conference, pp. 12-28, Washington, 1886] 



To the student of science who has a disposition to look into the pages 

 of history, no life has greater interest than that of Archimedes, and yet 

 there are few men about whom so little is known. Living more than 

 two thousand years ago, the accounts of him which have come to us are 

 little short of fabulous, and yet they are of such a nature that we can 

 say without any doubt that he was a genius such as the world has sel- 

 dom seen. To him we owe some of the fundamental facts of mechanics, 

 such as the principle of the lever and the pulley, and the fact that a 

 body immersed in a liquid loses in weight as much as an equal volume 

 of the liquid weighs. And in military engineering his success was so 

 great that he prolonged the siege of Syracuse by the Romans from what 

 would probably have been a few days to three years. His engines shot 

 against the enemy immense numbers of darts and huge stones, which 

 mowed them down in columns, and falling on their ships destroyed 

 them. He thrust out huge beams from the walls over the ships and 

 drew them into the air, where they swung to and fro to the amazement 

 and terror of the Romans and were finally dropped and sunk to the bot- 

 tom of the sea. He is even said to have set them on fire by means of 

 the reflected light of the sun. But his principal work was in geometry, 

 and of this I only need to quote the words of Professor De Morgan re- 

 ferring to those geometrical works of Archimedes which have come 

 down to us. " Here," says Professor De Morgan, " he finds all that re- 

 lates to the surface and solidity of the sphere, cone and cylinder and 

 their segments. A modern work on the differential calculus would not 

 give more results than are found here." As to the quality of the indi- 

 vidual, the impression which his writings give us is that of a power 

 which has never been surpassed. No one has a right to say that New- 

 ton himself, in the place of Archimedes, could have done more. 



Thus before the birth of modern science, in the dim ages of the past 

 when the light of history begins to fade and the mist of legend to cover 



