The discoveries of Michael Faraday (1791-1867), the distinguished English chemist and physicist, led to another phase of the science that has revolutionized modern life. Faraday made an experiment that contains the germ of all forms of the modern dynamo, which is a machine of comparatively recent development. He found that by winding a piece of insulated wire around a piece of soft iron and bringing the two ends (of the wire) very close together, and then placing the iron across the poles of a permanent magnet and suddenly jerking it away, a spark would pass between the two ends of the wire that was wound around the piece of soft iron. Here was an incipient dynamo-electric machine--the germ of that which plays such an important part in our modern civilization. Having brought our history down to the present day, it would seem scarcely necessary to recite that which everybody knows. It is well, however, to call a halt once in a while and compare our present conditions of civilization with those of the past. Our world is filled with croakers who are always sighing for the good old days. But we can easily imagine that if they could go back to those days their croaking would be still louder than it is. Before the advent of electricity many things were impossible that are easy now. In the old days the world was very, very large; now, thanks to electricity, it is knocking at the door of every man's house. The lumbering stage-coach that was formerly our limited express--limited to thirty or forty miles a day--has been supplanted by one that covers 1000 miles in the same time, and this high rate of speed is made possible only by the use of the electric telegraph. In the old days all Europe could be involved in a great war and the news of it would be weeks in reaching our shores, but now the firing of the first gun is heard at every fireside the world over, almost before the smoke has cleared away. Our planet is threaded with iron nerves that run over mountains and under seas, whose trembling atoms, thrilled with the electric fire, speak to us daily and hourly of the great throbbing life of the whole civilized world. Electricity has given us a voice that can be heard a thousand miles, and not only heard, but recognized. It has given us a pen that will write our autograph in New York, although we are still in Chicago. It has given us the best light, both from an optical and a sanitary standpoint, that the world has ever seen. The old-fashioned, jogging horse-car has been supplanted by the electric "trolley," and we no longer have our feelings harrowed with pity for the poor old steeds that pulled those lumbering coaches through the streets, with men and women crowded in and hanging on to straps, while everybody trod on every other body's toes. "In olden times we took a car Drawn by a horse, if going far, And felt that we were blest; Now the conductor takes the fare And puts a broomstick in the air-- And lightning does the rest.