551.] In the case of the electric current, we find that, when the electromotive force begins to act, it does not at once produce the full current, but that the current rises gradually. What is the electromotive force doing during the time that the opposing resistance is not able to balance it? It is increasing the electric current.
Now an ordinary force, acting on a body in the direction of its motion, increases its momentum, and communicates to it kinetic energy, or the power of doing work on account of its motion.
In like manner the unresisted part of the electromotive force has been employed in increasing the electric current. Has the electric current, when thus produced, either momentum or kinetic energy?
We have already shewn that it has something very like momentum, that it resists being suddenly stopped, and that it can exert, for a short time, a great electromotive force.
But a conducting circuit in which a current has been set up has the power of doing work in virtue of this current, and this power cannot be said to be something very like energy, for it is really and truly energy.
Thus, if the current be left to itself, it will continue to circulate till it is stopped by the resistance of the circuit. Before it is stopped, however, it will have generated a certain quantity of heat, and the amount of this heat in dynamical measure is equal to the energy originally existing in the current.
Again, when the current is left to itself, it may be made to do mechanical work by moving magnets, and the inductive effect of these motions will, by Lenz's law, stop the current sooner than the resistance of the circuit alone would have stopped it. In this way part of the energy of the current may be transformed into mechanical work instead of heat.
552.] It appears, therefore, that a system containing an electric current is a seat of energy of some kind ; and since we can form no conception of an electric current except as a kinetic phenomenon[1], its energy must be kinetic energy, that is to say, the energy which a moving body has in virtue of its motion.
We have already shewn that the electricity in the wire cannot be considered as the moving body in which we are to find this energy, for the energy of a moving body does not depend on anything external to itself, whereas the presence of other bodies near the current alters its energy.
- ↑ Faraday, Exp. Res. (283.)
