The electron, its isolation and measurement and the determination of some of its properties — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
The electron, its isolation and measurement and the determination of some of its properties
John Stuart Mill · en
And now this twentieth century, though but twenty-four years old, has
already attempted to take a still bigger and more significant step. By
superposing upon the molecular and the atomic worlds of the nineteenth
century a third electronic world, it has sought to reduce the number of
primordial elements to not more than two, namely, positive and negative
electrical charges. Along with this effort has come the present period
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of most extraordinary development and fertility—a period in which
new viewpoints and indeed wholly new phenomena follow one another
so rapidly across the stage of physics that the actors themselves
scarcely know what is happening—a period too in which the commercial
and industrial world is adopting and adapting to its own uses with a
rapidity hitherto altogether unparalleled the latest products of the
laboratory of the physicist and the chemist. As a consequence, the
results of yesterday’s researches, designed for no other purpose than
to add a little more to our knowledge of the ultimate structure of
matter, are today seized upon by the practical business world and made
to multiply tenfold the effectiveness of the telephone or to extract
six times as much light as was formerly obtained from a given amount of
electric power.
It is then not merely a matter of academic interest that electricity
has been proved to be atomic or granular in structure, that the
elementary electrical charge has been isolated and accurately measured,
and that it has been found to enter as a constituent into the making
of all the seventy-odd atoms of chemistry. These are indeed matters of
fundamental and absorbing interest to the man who is seeking to unveil
nature’s inmost secrets, but they are also events which are pregnant
with meaning for the man of commerce and for the worker in the factory.
For it usually happens that when nature’s inner workings have once been
laid bare, man sooner or later finds a way to put his brains inside
the machine and to drive it whither he wills. Every increase in man’s
knowledge of the way in which nature works must, in the long run,
increase by just so much man’s ability to control nature and to turn
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her hidden forces to his own account.