ELECTRICITY

Related Subjects: Light, Machinery, Power, Radio, Science, Thunder and Lightning

1. Man could not study the behavior of electrical currents until he found some way of producing and controlling them. It is no wonder, therefore, that we have not developed an "electrical common-sense" like the mechanical common sense which has become almost instinctive. There is really nothing more mysterious about electrical forces than about the forces which lift weights or pull trains, in fact it is the latter which are the more complicated.—W. L. BRAGG, Electricity

2. Striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound.—BYRON, Childe Harold
   

3. Not to make a large or a blinding light, but a small light having the mildness of gas.
   
   Object: Edison to effect exact imitation of all done by gas, so as to replace lighting by gas by lighting by electricity.—THOMAS EDISON, Note-Book

4. Electricity—carrier of light and power, devourer of time and space, bearer of human speech over land and sea, greatest servant of man, itself unknown.—CHARLES W. ELIOT
   

5. A machine that is like the tools of the Titans put in your hands.—CHARLES FERGUSON
   

6. Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence: or shall we say it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we dreamed it.—HAWTHORNE, The House of the Seven Gables
   

7. The phansy of Amber delights to allect straws, chaffe and other festucous bodies by an attraction, we confess, obscure and weake enough, yet sufficiently manifest and strong to attest an Electricity or attractive nature.—HELMONTS, Ternary of Paradoxes (London, 1650). First appearance of the word "Electricity."
   

8. The narrative of that particular branch of science which we call Electricity commences with a pretty trinket—a yellow necklace of amber beads. Therein begins the story of the telephone, of the X-ray, of radio. . . . The power of amber to attract and "clutch" light bodies is due to the fact that it becomes elec­trified when it is rubbed or subjected to friction. That strange behavior of amber which earned it the name of "clutcher" was probably the first intelligent observation of an electrical action.—ALFRED P. MORGAN, The Pageant of Electricity
   

9. Some readers may expect me at this stage to tell them what electricity "really is." The fact is that I have already said what it is. It is not a thing like St. Paul's Cathedral; it is a way in which things behave. . . . When I say that an electron has a certain amount of negative electricity, I mean merely that it behaves in a certain way. Electricity is not like red paint, a substance which can be put on to the electron and taken off again, it is merely a convenient name for certain physical laws.—BERTRAND RUSSELL, A B C of Atoms