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Again, all elements of the circuit are agitating the ether. Coming next to specific capability, though there are media, as air, which seem to have no conductivity, but, by the continuity of the electric current, they will help present; not steady, however transient, and stopped elastically. Now, although nothing but very cautious inculcation at a tender age, continued unremittingly up to maturity, of the doctrine of the materiality of electricity, and its motion from place to place, would have made me consider it, still, there's so much in electric phenomena to help the thought of electricity being a distinct entity, and the power of behavior is so great, that it's not straightforward to get rid of the thought when once it has been formed. Had we not higher surrender the concept vitality is transmitted by the wire altogether? However, leaving private particulars of no importance to anybody however myself, let us consider the transmission of power through a wire. Outside the wire, within the dielectric, nonetheless, there's a distinction, for the electric drive varies not solely at totally different distances from the wire but additionally at the same distance outdoors completely different components of the wire. This has reached its fullest growth in the hands of the German philosophers, from Weber to Clausius, leading to ingenious explanations of electric phenomena primarily based upon forces performing at a distance between moving or fixed particular person components of electricity.

Within the historic development of the science, static phenomena got here first. Let or not it's so first. To repair concepts, let our circuit be an insulated suspended wire from London to Edinburgh, and that we transmit vitality to Edinburgh from a battery in London, the circuit being completed by way of the earth. Similarly the opposite energy-current goes by the earth to Edinburgh nearly unabated in power, and is then directed from Edinburgh to the middle of the wire, where its energy also falls to nothing. In passing from the battery to the wire by means of the dielectric the energy-present is continuous, the state being regular (or the ether machinery frictionless) ; but straight it reaches the conducting matter of the wire dissipation commences and the current begins to fall in power, and on reaching the axis has fallen to nothing. If of maximum energy at the battery it falls nearly to nothing on the distant end, and fairly to nothing via the earth up to the opposite pole of the battery.

Following this up, it could also be nothing in any respect. As Maxwell remarked, we know nothing about the velocity of electricity; it could also be an inch in a year or 1,000,000 miles in a second. But admitting the ether to propagate gravity instantaneously, it must have fantastic properties, not like something we know. This had its disadvantages; one can get on quicker if one has adequate faithwhich we all know strikes mountainsto settle for a sure speculation unhesitatingly as a reality, and work out its consequences undoubtingly, whatever the hazard of fixing ones concepts prematurely. In only one sense do I feel we are able to communicate of the velocity of electricity, per Maxwells idea, viz., by the speculation that the electric current in a wire is the steady discharge of contiguous charged molecules, when plainly we can call the velocity of movement of a molecule the velocity of the cost it carries.

The electric current is not itself heat; but as its existence in the wire involves the continued production of heat, we conclude that some sort of movement is necessarily concerned within the electric current aside from the heat produced, and from the uniformity of impact in different elements of the wire, that it's a type of stationary movement. To this I should have answered formerly, when filled with "Heat as a Mode of Motion," that it is a reality that there is a transformation of vitality within the battery, and that this vitality is transmitted by way of the wire, there suffering one other transformation, viz., into heat; that when the current is arrange steadily, the heat is generated uniformly; that the electric present in the wire is due to this fact some sort of stationary motion of the particles of the wire, not exactly like heat, however having some peculiarity of a directional nature making the distinction between a constructive and a destructive current; but that there was no evidence in the closed circuit of any movement of electricity by way of the wire, however solely of a switch of power through the wire. In fact, if it involves numerical comparisons we should always have to think about the ratios of items in the bizarre to what I could name the rational system.