Little Masterpieces of Science: Invention and Discovery
History
Little Masterpieces of Science: Invention and Discovery
Inventions
In the home electricity has equal versatility, at once promoting
healthfulness, refinement and safety. Its tiny button expels the
hazardous match as it lights a lamp which sends forth no baleful fumes.
An electric fan brings fresh air into the house--in summer as a grateful
breeze. Simple telephones, quite effective for their few yards of wire,
give a better because a more flexible service than speaking-tubes. Few
invalids are too feeble to whisper at the light, portable ear of metal.
Sewing-machines and the more exigent apparatus of the kitchen and
laundry transfer their demands from flagging human muscles to the
tireless sinews of electric motors--which ask no wages when they stand
unemployed. Similar motors already enjoy favour in working the elevators
of tall dwellings in cities. If a householder is timid about burglars,
the electrician offers him a sleepless watchman in the guise of an
automatic alarm; if he has a dread of fire, let him dispose on his walls
an array of thermometers that at the very inception of a blaze will
strike a gong at headquarters. But these, after all, are matters of
minor importance in comparison with the foundations upon which may be
reared, not a new piece of mechanism, but a new science or a new art.
In the recent swift subjugation of the territory open alike to the
chemist and the electrician, where each advances the quicker for the
other's company, we have fresh confirmation of an old truth--that the
boundary lines which mark off one field of science from another are
purely artificial, are set up only for temporary convenience. The
chemist has only to dig deep enough to find that the physicist and
himself occupy common ground. "Delve from the surface of your sphere to
its heart, and at once your radius joins every other." Even the briefest
glance at electro-chemistry should pause to acknowledge its profound
debt to the new theories as to the bonding of atoms to form molecules,
and of the continuity between solution and electrical dissociation.
However much these hypotheses may be modified as more light is shed on
the geometry and the journeyings of the molecule, they have for the time
being recommended themselves as finder-thoughts of golden value. These
speculations of the chemist carry him back perforce to the days of his
childhood. As he then joined together his black and white bricks he
found that he could build cubes of widely different patterns. It was in
propounding a theory of molecular architecture that Kekule gave an
impetus to a vast and growing branch of chemical industry--that of the
synthetic production of dyes and allied compounds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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