The early metallurgist had no hotter a fire than he could make by blowing charcoal with a bellows. This was barely enough for the smelting of iron. But by the bringing of two carbon rods together, as in the electric arc light, we can get enough heat to volatilize the carbon at the tips, and this means over 7000 degrees Fahrenheit. By putting a pressure of twenty atmospheres onto the arc light we can raise it to perhaps 14,000 degrees, which is 3000 degrees hotter than the sun. This gives the modern man a working range of about 14,500 degrees, so it is no wonder that he can perform miracles. When a builder wants to make an old house over into a new one he takes it apart brick by brick and stone by stone, then he puts them together in such new fashion as he likes. The electric furnace enables the chemist to take his materials apart in the same way. As the temperature rises the chemical and physical forces that hold a body together gradually weaken. First the solid loosens up and becomes a liquid, then this breaks bonds and becomes a gas. Compounds break up into their elements. The elemental molecules break up into their component atoms and finally these begin to throw off corpuscles of negative electricity eighteen hundred times smaller than the smallest atom. These electrons appear to be the building stones of the universe. No indication of any smaller units has been discovered, although we need not assume that in the electron science has delivered, what has been called, its "ultim-atom." The Greeks called the elemental particles of matter "atoms" because they esteemed them "indivisible," but now in the light of the X-ray we can witness the disintegration of the atom into electrons. All the chemical and physical properties of matter, except perhaps weight, seem to depend upon the number and movement of the negative and positive electrons and by their rearrangement one element may be transformed into another. So the electric furnace, where the highest attainable temperature is combined with the divisive and directive force of the current, is a magical machine for accomplishment of the metamorphoses desired by the creative chemist. A hundred years ago Davy, by dipping the poles of his battery into melted soda lye, saw forming on one of them a shining globule like quicksilver. It was the metal sodium, never before seen by man. Nowadays this process of electrolysis (electric loosening) is carried out daily by the ton at Niagara. The reverse process, electro-synthesis (electric combining), is equally simple and even more important. By passing a strong electric current through a mixture of lime and coke the metal calcium disengages itself from the oxygen of the lime and attaches itself to the carbon. Or, to put it briefly, CaO + 3C --> CaC_{2} + CO lime coke calcium carbon carbide monoxide