In 1879 and 1880, Edison in the United States, and Swan in | conjunction with C. H. Stearn in England, succeeded in completely solving the practical problems. From and after that date incandescent electric lighting became commercially possible, and was brought to public notice chiefly by an electrical exhibition held at the Crystal Palace, near London, in 1882. Edison, moreover, as well as Lane-Fox, had realized the idea of a public electric supply station, and the former proceeded to establish in Pearl Street, New York, in 1881, the first public electric supply station. A similar station in England was opened in the basement of a house in Holborn Viaduct, London, in March 1882. Edison, with copious ingenuity, devised electric meters, electric mains, lamp fittings and generators complete for the purpose. In 1881 C. A. Faure made an important improvement in the lead secondary battery which G. Planté (1834-1889) had invented in 1859, and storage batteries then began to be developed as commercial appliances by Faure, Swan, J. S. Sellon and many others (see ACCUMULATOR). In 1882, numerous electric lighting companies were formed for the conduct of public and private lighting, but an electric lighting act passed in that year greatly hindered commercial progress in Great Britain. Nevertheless the delay was utilized in the completion of inventions necessary for the safe and economical distribution of electric current for the purpose of electric lighting.

Telephone.-Going back a few years we find the technical applications of electrical invention had developed themselves in other directions.

Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 invented

the speaking telephone (q.v.), and Edison and Elisha Gray in the United States followed almost immediately with other telephonic inventions for electrically transmitting speech. About the same time D. E. Hughes in England invented the microphone. In 1879 telephone exchanges began to be developed in the United States, Great Britain and other countries.

Electric Power. Following on the discovery in 1873 of the reversible action of the dynamo and its use as a motor, efforts began to be made to apply this knowledge to transmission of power, and S. D. Field, T. A. Edison, Leo Daft, E. M. Bentley and W. H. Knight, F. J. Sprague, C. J. Van Depoele and others between 1880 and 1884 were the pioneers of electric traction. One of the earliest electric tram cars was exhibited by E. W. and W. Siemens in Paris in 1881. In 1883 Lucien Gaulard, following a line of thought opened by Jablochkov, proposed to employ high pressure alternating currents for electric distributions over wide areas by means of transformers. His ideas were improved by Carl Zipernowsky and O. T. Bláthy in Hungary and by S. Z. de Ferranti in England, and the alternating current transformer (see TRANSFORMERS) came into existence. Polyphase alternators were first exhibited at the Frankfort electrical exhibition in 1891, developed as a consequence of scientific researches by Galileo Ferraris (1847-1897), Nikola Tesla, M. O.von Dolivo-Dobrowolsky and C. E. L. Brown, and long distance transmission of electrical power by polyphase electrical currents (see PoWER TRANSMISSION: Electric) was exhibited in operation at Frankfort in 1891. Meanwhile the early continuous current dynamos devised by Gramme, Siemens and others had been vastly improved in scientific principle and practical construction by the labours of Siemens, J. Hopkinson, R. E. B. Crompton, Elihu Thomson, Rudolf Eickemeyer, Thomas Parker and others, and the theory of the action of the dynamo had been closely studied by J. and E. Hopkinson, G. Kapp, S. P. Thompson, C. P. Steinmetz and J. Swinburne, and great improvements made in the alternating current dynamo by W. M. Mordey, S. Z. de Ferranti and Messrs Ganz of Budapest. Thus in twenty years from the invention of the Gramme dynamo, electrical engineering had developed from small beginnings into a vast industry. The amendment, in 1888, of the Electric Lighting Act of 1882, before long caused a huge development of public electric lighting in Great Britain. By the end of the 19th century every large city in Europe and in North and South America was provided with a public electric supply for the purposes of electric lighting. The various improvements in electric illuminants, such as the Nernst oxide lamp, the tantalum and osmium incandescent lamps, and improved forms

of arc lamp, enclosed, inverted and flame arcs, are described under LIGHTING: Electric.

Between 1890 and 1900, electric traction advanced rapidly in the United States of America but more slowly in England. In 1902 the success of deep tube electric railways in Great Britain was assured, and in 1904 main line railways began to abandon, at least experimentally, the steam locomotive and substitute for it the electric transmission of power. Long distance electrical transmission had been before that time exemplified in the great scheme of utilizing the falls of Niagara. The first projects were discussed in 1891 and 1892 and completed practically some ten years later. In this scheme large turbines were placed at the bottom of hydraulic fall tubes 150 ft. deep, the turbines being coupled by long shafts with 5000 H.P. alternating current dynamos on the surface. By these electric current was generated and transmitted to towns and factories around, being sent overhead as far as Buffalo, a distance of 18 m. At the end of the 19th century electrochemical industries began to be developed which depended on the possession of cheap electric energy. The production of aluminium in Switzerland and Scotland, carborundum and calcium carbide in the United States, and soda by the Castner-Kellner process, began to be conducted on an immense scale. The early work of Sir W. Siemens on the electric furnace was continued and greatly extended by Henri Moissan and others on its scientific side, and electro-chemistry took its place as one of the most promising departments of technical research and invention. It was stimulated and assisted by improvements in the construction of large dynamos and increased knowledge concerning the control of powerful electric currents.

In the early part of the 20th century the distribution in bulk of electric energy for power purposes in Great Britain began to assume important proportions. It was seen to be uneconomical for each city and town to manufacture its own supply since, owing to the intermittent nature of the demand for current for lighting, the price had to be kept up to 4d. and 6d. per unit. It was found that by the manufacture in bulk, even by steam engines, at primary centres the cost could be considerably reduced, and in numerous districts in England large power stations began to be erected between 1903 and 1905 for the supply of current for power purposes. This involved almost a revolution in the nature of the tools used, and in the methods of working, and may ultimately even greatly affect the factory system and the concentration of population in large towns which was brought about in the early part of the 19th century by the invention of the steam engine.

Development of Electric Theory.

Turning now to the theory of electricity, we may note the equally remarkable progress made in 300 years in scientific insight into the nature of the agency which has so recast the face of human society. There is no need to dwell upon the early crude theories of the action of amber and lodestone. In a true scientific sense no hypothesis was possible, because few facts had been accumulated. The discoveries of Stephen Gray and C. F. de C. du Fay on the conductivity of some bodies for the electric agency and the dual character of electrification gave rise to the first notions of electricity as an imponderable fluid, or non-gravitative subtile matter, of a more refined and penetrating kind than ordinary liquids and gases. Its duplex character, and the fact that the electricity produced by rubbing glass and vitreous substances was different from that produced by rubbing sealing-wax and resinous substances, seemed to necessitate the assumption of two kinds of electric fluid; hence there arose the conception of positive and negative electricity, and the two-fluid theory came into existence.

Single-fluid Theory.-The study of the phenomena of the Leyden jar and of the fact that the inside and outside coatings possessed opposite electricities, so that in charging the jar as much positive electricity is added to one side as negative to the other, led Franklin about 1750 to suggest a modification called the single fluid theory, in which the two states of electrification

were regarded as not the results of two entirely different fluids but of the addition or subtraction of one electric fluid from matter, so that positive electrification was to be looked upon as the result of increase or addition of something to ordinary matter and negative as a subtraction. The positive and negative electrifications of the two coatings of the Leyden jar were therefore to be regarded as the result of a transformation of something called electricity from one coating to the other, by which process a certain measurable quantity became so much less on one side by the same amount by which it became more on the other. A modification of this single fluid theory was put forward by F. U. T. Aepinus which was explained and illustrated in his Tentamen theoriae electricitatis et magnetismi, published in St Petersburg in 1759. This theory was founded on the following principles: (1) the particles of the electric fluid repel each other with a force decreasing as the distance increases; (2) the particles of the electric fluid attract the atoms of all bodies and are attracted by them with a force obeying the same law; (3) the electric fluid exists in the pores of all bodies, and while it moves without any obstruction in conductors such as metals, water, &c., it moves with extreme difficulty in so-called non-conductors such as glass, resin, &c.; (4) electrical phenomena are produced either by the transference of the electric fluid of a body containing more to one containing less, or from its attraction and repulsion when no transference takes place. Electric attractions and repulsions were, however, regarded as differential actions in which the mutual repulsion of the particles of electricity operated, so to speak, in antagonism to the mutual attraction of particles of matter for one another and of particles of electricity for matter. Independently of Aepinus, Henry Cavendish | put forward a single-fluid theory of electricity (Phil. Trans., 1771, 61, p. 584), in which he considered it in more precise detail.

Two-fluid Theory. In the elucidation of electrical phenomena, however, towards the end of the 18th century, a modification of the two-fluid theory seems to have been generally preferred. The notion then formed of the nature of electrification was something as follows:-All bodies were assumed to contain a certain quantity of a so-called neutral fluid made up of equal quantities of positive and negative electricity, which when in this state of combination neutralized one another's properties. The neutral fluid could, however, be divided up or separated into its two constituents, and these could be accumulated on separate conductors or non-conductors. This view followed from the discovery of the facts of electric induction of J. Canton (1753, 1754). When, for instance, a positively electrified body was found to induce upon another insulated conductor a charge of negative electricity on the side nearest to it, and a charge of positive electricity on the side farthest from it, this was explained by saying that the particles of each of the two electric fluids repelled one another but attracted those of the positive fluid. Hence the operation of the positive charge upon the neutral fluid was to draw towards the positive the negative constituent of the neutral charge and repel to the distant parts of the conductor the positive constituent.

C. A. Coulomb experimentally proved that the law of attraction and repulsion of simple electrified bodies was that the force between them varied inversely as the square of the distance and thus gave mathematical definiteness to the two-fluid hypothesis. It was then assumed that each of the two constituents of the neutral fluid had an atomic structure and that the so-called particles of one of the electric fluids, say positive, repelled similar particles with a force varying inversely as a square of the distance and attracted those of the opposite fluid according to the same law. This fact and hypothesis brought electrical phenomena within the domain of mathematical analysis and, as already mentioned, Laplace, Biot, Poisson, G. A. A. Plana (1781-1846), and later Robert Murphy (1806-1843), made them the subject of their investigations on the mode in which electricity distributes itself on conductors when in equilibrium. Faraday's Views.-The two-fluid theory may be said to have held the field until the time when Faraday began his researches

on electricity. After he had educated himself by the study of the phenomena of lines of magnetic force in his discoveries on electromagnetic induction, he applied the same conception to electrostatic phenomena, and thus created the notion of lines of electrostatic force and of the important function of the dielectric or non-conductor in sustaining them. Faraday's notion as to the nature of electrification, therefore, about the middle of the 19th century came to be something as follows:-He considered that the so-called charge of electricity on a conductor was in reality nothing on the conductor or in the conductor itself, but consisted in a state of strain or polarization, or a physical change of some kind in the particles of the dielectric surrounding the conductor, and that it was this physical state in the dielectric which constituted electrification. Since Faraday was well aware that even a good vacuum can act as a dielectric, he recognized that the state he called dielectric polarization could not be wholly dependent upon the presence of gravitative matter, but that there must be an electromagnetic medium of a supermaterial nature. In the 13th series of his Experimental Researches on Electricity he discussed the relation of a vacuum to electricity. Furthermore his electrochemical investigations, and particularly his discovery of the important law of electrolysis, that the movement of a certain quantity of electricity through an electrolyte is always accompanied by the transfer of a certain definite quantity of matter from one electrode to another and the liberation at these electrodes of an equivalent weight of the ions, gave foundation for the idea of a definite atomic charge of electricity. In fact, long previously to Faraday's electrochemical researches, Sir H. Davy and J. J. Berzelius early in the 19th century had advanced the hypothesis that chemical combination was due to electric attractions between the electric charges carried by chemical atoms. The notion, however, that electricity is atomic in structure was definitely put forward by Hermann von Helmholtz in a well-known Faraday lecture. Helmholtz says: "If we accept the hypothesis that elementary substances are composed of atoms, we cannot well avoid concluding that electricity also is divided into elementary portions which behave like atoms of electricity." Clerk Maxwell had already used in 1873 the phrase, "a molecule of electricity." Towards the end of the third quarter of the 19th century it therefore became clear that electricity, whatever be its nature, was associated with atoms of matter in the form of exact multiples of an indivisible minimum electric charge which may be considered to be Nature's unit of electricity." This ultimate unit of electric quantity Professor Johnstone Stoney called an electrons The formulation of electrical theory as far as regards operations in space free from matter was immensely assisted by Maxwell's mathematical theory. Oliver Heaviside after 1880 rendered much assistance by reducing Maxwell's mathematical analysis to more compact form and by introducing greater precision into terminology (see his Electrical Papers, 1892). This is perhaps the place to refer also to the great services of Lord Rayleigh to electrical science. Succeeding Maxwell as Cavendish professor of physics at Cambridge in 1880, he soon devoted himself especially to the exact redetermination of the practical electrical units in absolute measure. He followed up the early work of the British Association Committee on electrical units by a fresh determination of the ohm in absolute measure, and in conjunction with other work on the electrochemical equivalent of silver and the absolute electromotive force of the Clark cell may be said to have placed exact electrical measurement on a new basis. He also made great additions to the theory of alternating electric currents, and provided fresh appliances for other electrical measurements (see his Collected Scientific Papers, Cambridge, 1900).

Electro-optics. For a long time Faraday's observation on the rotation of the plane of polarized light by heavy glass in a 1 H. von Helmholtz, "On the Modern Development of Faraday's Conception of Electricity," Journ. Chem. Soc., 1881, 39, p. 277. 2 See Maxwell's Electricity and Magnetism, vol. i. p. 350 (2nd ed., 1881).

"On the Physical Units of Nature," Phil. Mag., 1881, [5], 11, p. 381. Also Trans. Roy. Soc. (Dublin, 1891), 4, p. 583.

high vacua, having been led to it by his researches on the radio- | meter. The particular details of the phenomena observed will be found described in the article CONDUCTION, ELECTRIC (§ III.). The main fact discovered by researches of Plücker, Hittorf and Crookes was that in a vacuum tube containing extremely rarefied air or other gas, a luminous discharge takes place from the negative electrode which proceeds in lines normal to the surface of the negative electrode and renders phosphorescent both the glass envelope and other objects placed in the vacuum tube when it falls upon them. Hittorf made in 1869 the discovery that solid objects could cast shadows or intercept this cathode discharge. The cathode discharge henceforth engaged the attention of many physicists. Varley had advanced tentatively the hypothesis that it consisted in an actual projection of electrified matter from the cathode, and Crookes was led by his researches in 1870, 1871 and 1872 to embrace and confirm this hypothesis in a modified form and announce the existence of a fourth state of matter, which he called radiant matter, demonstrating by many beautiful and convincing experiments that there was an actual projection of material substance of some kind possessing inertia from the surface of the cathode. German physicists such as E. Goldstein were inclined to take another view. Sir J. J. Thomson, the successor of Maxwell and Lord Rayleigh in the Cavendish chair of physics in the university of Cambridge, began about the year 1899 a remarkable series of investigations on the cathode discharge, which finally enabled him to make a measurement of the ratio of the electric charge to the mass of the particles of matter projected from the cathode, and to show that this electric charge was identical with the atomic electric charge carried by a hydrogen ion in the act of electrolysis, but that the mass of the cathode particles, or corpuscles" as he called them, was far less, viz. about gooth part of the mass of a hydrogen atom.1 The subject was pursued by Thomson and the Cambridge physicists with great mathematical and experimental ability, and finally the conclusion was reached that in a high vacuum tube the electric charge is carried by particles which have a mass only a fraction, as above mentioned, of that of the hydrogen atom, but which carry a charge equal to the unit electric charge of the hydrogen ion as found by electrochemical researches.2 P. E. A. Lenard made in 1894 (Wied. Ann. Phys., 51, p. 225) the discovery that these cathode particles or corpuscles could pass through a window of thin sheet aluminium placed in the wall of the vacuum tube and give rise to a class of radiation called the Lenard rays. W. C. Röntgen of Munich made in 1896 his remarkable discovery of the so-called X or Röntgen rays, a class of radiation produced by the impact of the cathode particles against an impervious metallic screen or anticathode placed in the vacuum tube. The study of Röntgen rays was ardently pursued by the principal physicists in Europe during the years 1897 and 1898 and subsequently. The principal property of these Röntgen rays which attracted public attention was their power of passing through many solid bodies and affecting a photographic plate. Hence some substances were opaque to them and others transparent. The astonishing feat of photographing the bones of the living animal within the tissues soon rendered the Röntgen rays indispensable in surgery and directed an army of investigators to their study.

Radioactivity. One outcome of all this was the discovery by H. Becquerel in 1896 that minerals containing uranium, and particularly the mineral known as pitchblende, had the power of affecting sensitive photographic plates enclosed in a black paper envelope when the mineral was placed on the outside, as

1 See J. J. Thomson, Proc. Roy. Inst. Lond., 1897, 15, p. 419; also Phil. Mag., 1899, [5], 48, p. 547. 2 Later results show that the mass of a hydrogen atom is not far from 1.3X1024 gramme and that the unit atomic charge or natural unit of electricity is 1.3X10-20 of an electromagnetic C.G.S. unit. The mass of the electron or corpuscle is 7.0X10-28 gramme and its diameter is 3X10-13 centimetre. The diameter of a chemical atom is

of the order of 10 centimetre.

See H. A. Lorentz, "The Electron Theory," Elektrotechnische Zeitschrift, 1905, 26, p. 584; or Science Abstracts, 1905, 8, A, p. 603.

well as of discharging a charged electroscope (Com. Rend., 1395, 122, p. 420). This research opened a way of approach to the phenomena of radioactivity, and the history of the steps by which P. Curie and Madame Curie were finally led to the discovery of radium is one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of science. The study of radium and radioactivity (see RADIOACTIVITY) led before long to the further remarkable knowledge that these so-called radioactive materials project into surrounding space particles or corpuscles, some of which are identical with those projected from the cathode in a high vacuum tube, together with others of a different nature. The study of radioactivity was pursued with great ability not only by the Curies. and A. Debierne, who associated himself with them, in France, but by E. Rutherford and F. Soddy in Canada, and by J. J. Thomson, Sir William Crookes, Sir William Ramsay and others in England.

Electronic Theory.-The final outcome of these investigations was the hypothesis that Thomson's corpuscles or particles composing the cathode discharge in a high vacuum tube must be looked upon as the ultimate constituent of what we call negative electricity; in other words, they are atoms of negative electricity, possessing, however, inertia, and these negative electrons are components at any rate of the chemical atom. Each electron is a point-charge of negative electricity equal to 3·9X10-10 of an electrostatic unit or to 1.3 X 10-20 of an electromagnetic unit, and the ratio of its charge to its mass is nearly 2X 107 using E.M. units. For the hydrogen atom the ratio of charge to mass as deduced from electrolysis is about 104. Hence the mass of an electron is both of that of a hydrogen atom. No one has yet been able to isolate positive electrons, or to give a complete demonstration that the whole inertia of matter is only electric inertia due to what may be called the inductance of the electrons. Prof. Sir J. Larmor developed in a series of very able papers (Phil. Trans., 1894, 185; 1895, 186; 1897, 190), and subsequently in his book Aether and Matter (1900), a remarkable hypothesis of the structure of the electron or corpuscle, which he regards as simply a strain centre in the aether or electromagnetic medium, a chemical atom being a collection of positive and negative electrons or strain centres in stable orbital motion round their common centre of mass (see AETHER). J. J. Thomson also developed this hypothesis in a profoundly interesting manner, and we may therefore summarize very briefly the views held on the nature of electricity and matter at the beginning of the 20th century by saying that the term electricity had come to be regarded, in part at least, as a collective name for electrons, which in turn must be considered as constituents of the chemical atom, furthermore as centres of certain lines of self-locked and permanent strain existing in the universal aether or electromagnetic medium. Atoms of matter are composed of congeries of electrons and the inertia of matter is probably therefore only the inertia of the electromagnetic medium.' Electric waves are produced wherever electrons are accelerated or retarded, that is, whenever the velocity of an electron is changed or accelerated positively or negatively. In every solid body there is a continual atomic dissociation, the result of which is that mixed up with the atoms of chemical matter composing them we have a greater or less percentage of free electrons. The operation called an electric current consists in a diffusion or movement of these electrons through matter, and this is controlled by laws of diffusion which are similar to those of the diffusion of liquids or gases. Electromotive force is due to a difference in the density of the electronic population in different or identical conducting bodies, and whilst the electrons can move freely through so-called conductors their motion is much more hindered or restricted in non-conductors. Electric charge consists, therefore, in an excess or deficit of negative electrons in a body. In the hands of H. A. Lorentz, P. K. L. Drude, J. J. Thomson, J. Larmor and many others, the electronic hypothesis of matter and of electricity has been developed in great detail and may be said to represent the outcome of modern researches upon electrical phenomena.

1 See J. J. Thomson, Electricity and Matter (London, 1904).