Every-day Science: Volume 6. The Conquest of NatureWilliams, Henry Smith
Science
Every-day Science: Volume 6. The Conquest of Nature
Williams, Henry Smith
Industrial arts; Machinery
between the electrical attractions and repulsions."
The salient and striking feature of this theory, it will be observed,
is that the electrical fluid, under normal conditions, is supposed to
be incorporated everywhere with the substance of every material in
the world. It will be observed that nothing whatever is postulated as
to the nature or properties of this fluid beyond the fact that its
particles repel each other and are attracted by the particles of common
matter; it being also postulated that the particles of common matter
likewise repel each other under normal conditions.
At the time when Franklin propounded his theory, there was a rival
theory before the world, which has continued more or less popular ever
since, and which is known as the two-fluid theory of electricity.
According to this theory, there are two uncreated and indestructible
fluids which produce electrical effects. One fluid may be called
positive, the other negative. The particles of the positive fluid are
mutually repellent, as also are the particles of the negative fluid,
but, on the other hand, positive particles attract and are attracted by
negative particles. We need not further elaborate the details of this
two-fluid theory, because the best modern opinion considers it less
satisfactory than Franklin's one-fluid theory. Meantime, it will be
observed that the two theories have much in common; in particular they
agree in the essential feature of postulating an invisible something
which is not matter, and which has strange properties of attraction and
repulsion.
These properties of attraction and repulsion constituted in the
early day the only known manifestations of electricity; and the same
properties continue to hold an important place in modern studies of
the subject. Electricity is so named simply because amber--the Latin
_electrum_--was the substance which, in the experience of the ancients,
showed most conspicuously the strange property of attracting small
bodies after being rubbed. Modern methods of developing electricity
are extremely diversified, and most of them are quite unsuggestive
of the rubbing of amber; yet nearly all the varied manifestations of
electricity are reducible, in the last analysis, to attractions and
repulsions among the particles of matter.
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