was administered on aristocratic principles.

The steamer,

The demo

of steam.

from its first introduction, was worked on a democratic plan. Railway directors could not imagine cratic effects that it would pay to carry passengers at high speed and low fares; and their best trains were therefore reserved for the rich, while the poor were carried at slow rates, at inconvenient times, and in uncomfortable carriages. It was otherwise with the steamer. The shipowner had the wisdom to see that, if the vessel ran at all, it would pay him to carry every one whom he could attract to it; and he did not commit the folly of providing a comfortable and fast steamer for the rich, and an uncomfortable and slow steamer for the poor. But, in the course of forty years, a mighty change occurred in the ideas of railway directors. They discovered that, if their enterprise was to be successful, it must be supported by the shillings of the poor and not by the sovereigns of the rich. With rare exceptions the poor man can now travel at the same speed and with almost the same comfort as his richer neighbours, and the wisest railway managers are annually endeavouring to provide more and better accommodation for the many.

An indica

increasing prosperity ing-classes.

The facts which have thus been mentioned afford perhaps the best proof that can be given of the growing prosperity of the people. If the working-classes had remained in the abject poverty in which Peel found them, they would not now be travelling in third-class carriages in express trains. It was their increasing wealth of the workwhich gave them means to travel, and induced the railway companies to make adequate provision for their accommodation. But, if these facts furnish the best proof of the growing prosperity of the people, they are also symptoms of their greater power. In a neighbouring country, men, when they effect a revolution, write égalité on the walls. In our own country we do quite another thing, we attach third-class carriages to express trains.

The application of steam to locomotion was, then, the greatest fact in the commercial history of the century, but it was accompanied with two other circumstances of great moment

and prodigious influence. The first of these, the institution of cheap postage, was a reform accomplished by Parliament which has already been related in the previous volume. The second of them, the transmission of messages by electricity, has still to be recorded.

Man, from the earliest ages, has probably devised means for the rapid propagation of intelligence. Gibbon relates that, in the second empire, fire-signals were repeated from Electricity. one mountain to another, and a chain of stations commanded a space of 500 miles; while those who are familiar with Scott's poetry, with Macaulay's ballads, and with Mr. Froude's history will easily remember picturesque descriptions of beacon-signals. In the period of the great war, when early intelligence of the enemy's movements was of essential importance, a new system was introduced, and messages were signalled from hilltop to hilltop by a succession of semaphores. This method of communication was called a telegraph; and the word "telegraph" was in common use long before electricity was applied to telegraphy. For instance Croker, writing from the Admiralty in 1813, said that the Plymouth telegraph had announced a new victory; while the compiler of the "Annual Register" records in 1827 that telegraphic communication had been established between Holyhead and Liverpool, and a message conveyed from place to place in five minutes.? The word was in equally common use in other countries. To take a curious illustration, Guizot inserts in his "Mémoires" the elaborate telegraphic message in which the third Napoleon's attempt on Strasburg was conveyed to Paris,3 and adds the curious statement that the message was interrupted in the middle of it from the line becoming enveloped in mist.

It is not improbable that a reader who meets with such passages as these a century hence will wholly fail to attach to them their proper meaning. He will associate a telegraph with the only telegraph which he has ever known, and will be

1 Gibbon, Roman Empire, vol. x. p. 130.

2 Croker, Memoirs, vol. i. p. 53; Ann. Reg., 1827, Chron., p. 130. 3 Guizot, Mémoires, vol. iv. p. 198.

at a loss to understand how an electric current could have been interrupted by a fog. For the telegraph to which these passages refer is already as extinct as the dodo; and, unlike that bird, has left no fossil or other remains behind it to enable future investigators to record its history.

It is difficult to give the whole credit of any invention to any individual. De Caux and Lord Worcester preceded Watt, and Trevithick constructed a steam carriage before Stephenson built a locomotive. When we say that Watt applied steam to production, and that Stephenson extended it to locomotion. we mean that these are the two men who proved to mankind that steam could be thus used. It is not possible to speak with similar exactness in the case of electricity. The knowledge of this marvellous force which has already annihilated time, and which in the future may turn darkness into light and supersede steam itself as a power, has been communicated to us by a succession of investigators. Its use and the methods of using it have only gradually been discovered by a succession of experimentalists.

6.

When Pope, in the eighteenth century, in a well-known couplet expressed his wonder how the devil" the hairs had got into the amber, 2400 years had passed since man had first observed that the amber possessed a property much more marvellous than the dust. But it would have surprised Pope to learn that this property was to make the name which the Greeks had given to amber (electron) the most notable of modern names; since it was to be applied to the force which perhaps will ultimately account for many unexplained phenomena of the universe, and which is already the most powerful that man has taken into his service.

Though, however, in the sixth century before Christ, Thales had observed and recorded the power of attraction which amber possessed, little came of his discovery for 2400 Thales. years. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

of our era, indeed, Gilbert and Boyle and Newton in our own country, and Von Guericke abroad, succeeded in showing that other substances besides amber possessed the power of

attraction; and that light and sound could both be produced by "electrical excitation." But it was not till the eighteenth century that any real advance was made in the study of the new force. Even thoughtful men at the present time are only beginning to recognise the debt which the world owes to the eighteenth century. The work which that century did was not of a kind to attract superficial attention. It was work of preparation, and the foundations of a building do not catch. the eye so readily as the superstructure. Yet mankind should not be ungrateful to those who pave the way for future progress; and should remember that it was in the laboratory of the eighteenth century that the nineteenth century was prepared.

Before the first thirty years of the eighteenth century were complete, Stephen Gray, a Fellow of the Royal Society, showed that electricity could be conducted from one body Gray. to another. The discovery was, in one sense, hardly new. The fisherman of the ancient world who touched an electric ray with a harpoon and received a shock in his own body had experienced the fact, which he was unable to explain. Gray, however, did much more. He suspended an ivory ball by some common packthread from a piece of rubbed glass at the top of his house, and he found that he could conduct the electricity from the glass to the ivory. He endeavoured to conduct the electricity in a horizontal instead of a perpendicular direction, suspending his packthread by strings of packthread, and the experiment failed. At the suggestion of a friend he substituted silken for hempen strings and the experiment succeeded, and he was actually enabled in this way to convey electricity 886 feet It was obvious from these experiments that, while hemp conducted the electricity, silk did not. In other words, that while some bodies had, others had not, the power of conducting electricity.

While Gray was conducting this experiment in England, Dufay, a Frenchman, was simultaneously engaged Dufay. on investigations which resulted in a fresh disHe found that the electricity produced by exciting a

covery.

vitreous subject like glass was different from the electricity produced by exciting a resinous subject like amber. For "a body with vitreous electricity attracted all bodies with resinous. electricity and repelled all bodies with vitreous electricity; while a body with resinous electricity attracted all bodies with vitreous electricity and repelled all bodies with resinous electricity." While, a few years afterwards, a German, Muschenbroeck or Leyden, reasoning on this discovery, conceived the idea that "the electricity of bodies might be retained The Leyden by surrounding them with bodies which did not conduct it." The idea led to the invention of the Leyden jar, in which electricity may be accumulated or stored.

jar.

Galvani.

These three great discoveries were made, it must be recollected, by men experimentalising for the sake of acquiring knowledge, without the faintest idea of the mighty consequences which were to result from their labours. The next great advance, in the discoveries which were ultimately to lead to the electric telegraph, was, on the contrary, made by accidentif the term accident can properly be applied to the observations, made by men of learning, of facts which ordinary persons ignore. At the end of the last century Galvani, an Italian professor, noticed that the leg of a dead frog -in course of preparation for his table-was convulsed on being brought into contact with the dissecting knife of an assistant engaged in working an electric battery. Some time. afterwards he observed that the legs of other dead frogs, which had been suspended on some copper hooks in an iron balcony, were similarly excited into motion whenever the wind brought them into contact with the iron of the balcony. A compatriot of Galvani, Volta, hearing of the discovery, was led to deduce from it that electricity had been generated by two metals being brought into communication through the moist limb of the frog. Galvani, on the contrary, inferred that the electric fluid was present in the frog's limb, and that it had been excited by the contact of the metals. Later experience has shown that both deductions were partly right. Electricity is present in the frog's limb, and it may be gene

VOL. V.

E

Volta.