The World Set Free

Section 5

Electricity, though it was perhaps the earlier of the two to be studied, invaded the common life of men a few decades after the exploitation of steam.  To electricity also, in spite of its provocative nearness all about him, mankind had been utterly blind for incalculable ages.  Could anything be more emphatic than the appeal of electricity for attention?  It thundered at man’s ears, it signalled to him in blinding flashes, occasionally it killed him, and he could not see it as a thing that concerned him enough to merit study.  It came into the house with the cat on any dry day and crackled insinuatingly whenever he stroked her fur.  It rotted his metals when he put them together….  There is no single record that any one questioned why the cat’s fur crackles or why hair is so unruly to brush on a frosty day, before the sixteenth century.  For endless years man seems to have done his very successful best not to think about it at all; until this new spirit of the Seeker turned itself to these things.

How often things must have been seen and dismissed as unimportant, before the speculative eye and the moment of vision came!  It was Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth’s court physician, who first puzzled his brains with rubbed amber and bits of glass and silk and shellac, and so began the quickening of the human mind to the existence of this universal presence.  And even then the science of electricity remained a mere little group of curious facts for nearly two hundred years, connected perhaps with magnetism—­a mere guess that—­perhaps with the lightning.  Frogs’ legs must have hung by copper hooks from iron railings and twitched upon countless occasions before Galvani saw them.  Except for the lightning conductor, it was 250 years after Gilbert before electricity stepped out of the cabinet of scientific curiosities into the life of the common man….  Then suddenly, in the half-century between 1880 and 1930, it ousted the steam-engine and took over traction, it ousted every other form of household heating, abolished distance with the perfected wireless telephone and the telephotograph….