so vivid that the sunshine, compared with it, appeared feeble."[1] Such effects reached their culmination when, in 1808, through the liberality of a few members of the Royal Institution, Davy was enabled to construct a battery of two thousand pairs of plates, with which he afterward obtained calorific and luminous effects far transcending anything previously observed. The arc of flame between the carbon terminals was four inches long, and by its heat quartz, sapphire, magnesia, and lime were melted like wax in a candle-flame; while fragments of diamond and plumbago rapidly disappeared, as if reduced to vapor.[2]
The first condition to be fulfilled in the development of heat and light by the electric current is that it shall encounter and overcome resistance. Flowing through a perfect conductor, no matter what the strength of the current might be, neither heat nor light could be developed. A rod of unresisting copper carries away uninjured and unwarmed an atmospheric discharge competent to shiver to splinters a resisting oak. I send the self-same current through a wire composed of alternate lengths of silver and platinum. The silver offers little resistance, the platinum offers much. The consequence is that the platinum is raised to a white heat, while the silver is not visibly warmed. The same holds good with regard to the carbon terminals employed for the production of the electric light. The interval between them offers a powerful resistance to the passage of the current, and it is by the gathering up of the force necessary to burst across this interval that the voltaic current is able to throw the carbon into that state of violent intestine commotion which we call heat, and to which its effulgence is due. The smallest interval of air usually suffices to stop the current. But when the carbon points are first brought together and then separated, there occurs between them a discharge of incandescent matter which carries, or may carry, the current over a considerable space. The light comes almost wholly from the incandescent carbons. The space between them is filled with a blue flame which, being usually bent by the earth's magnetism, receives the name of the Voltaic Arc.
For seventy years, then, we have been in possession of this transcendent light without applying it to the illumination of our streets and houses. Such applications suggested themselves at the outset, but there were grave difficulties in their way. The first difficulty arose from the waste of the carbons, which are dissipated in part by ordinary combustion, and in part by the electric transfer of matter from the one carbon to the other. To keep the carbons at the proper distance asunder, regulators were devised—the earliest, I believe, by Staite, and
- ↑ Davy, "Chemical Philosophy," p. 110.
- ↑ In the concluding lecture at the Royal Institution in June, 1810, Davy showed the action of this battery. He then fused iridium, the alloy of indium and osmium, and other refractory substances. See "Philosophical Magazine," vol. xxxv., p. 463. Quetelet assigns the first production of the spark between coal-points to Curtet in 1802. Davy certainly in that year showed the carbon-light with a battery of 150 pairs of plates in the theatre of the Royal Institution ("Journal of the Royal Institution," vol. i., p. 166).
