ELECTRICITY AS A FACTOR IN HAPPINESS.
pERHAPS the most marked feature of the hour, outside politics, is the anxious and hopeful attention paid to applications of Electricity. Investigation and experiment have been going on for years, hundreds of minds have given them- selves to the subject; in one department, telegraphy, great results have been achieved and great fortunes made ; but this explosion of interest in the matter is new. The world, as some- times occurs to it, is on intellectual tip-toe. The terminology of the science is novel and unusually abominable, the difficulty of showing experiments is considerable, and the reporters con- stantly misunderstand alike what they hear and what they see ; but the interest of the public overcomes every obstacle. At the meeting of the British Association, nothing attracted like electricity, the papers even republishing long discourses which, for most of their readers, might as well have been written in Greek ; while no telegrams are read so eagerly as the excessively crass ones in which the wonderful show of electric appliances now going on in Paris is so dully de- scribed. The special correspondents are shown everything, and not only understand nothing, but seem to lose their control of their art, and cannot even describe. The interest is the more noteworthy because it is the interest of expectation, rather than. the interest of assured faith. The electric savants, unlike most men of science, are doing their thinking aloud, performing ex- periments in public, talking to each other across continents and in the ears of half mankind, showing instruments which they confess are imperfect, exhibiting processes which are acknow- ledged to be merely tentative, securing patents which are de- fended as only " precautionary," and in many instances letting drop hints as to the methods by which they are inquiring, and the results they barely hope to obtain, which on other sub- jects would arouse in their hearers a sense of angry tedium. The public, however, is tireless upon electricity. It has one big fact to go upon, the Electric Telegraph—the one thing, perhaps, which Friar Bacon, if he could come back for a week, and talk to the luminaries of Science, would admit to surpass his reveries—and in spite of the doubts of the scientific, who are excited, too, and see their way to many things, but do not yet, see their way to a lot of electric force cheap, the public persists in believing that steam is played out, and that the world is about to have a greater, less cumbrous, and more universally applicable force placed at its disposal. Thousands who know no more what an "Ohm " is than they know what Arius taught are the happier for that belief, and hold it fixedly. The world may be wrong, as it was wrong when it fell into a similar condition of excitement about Montgolfier's balloon. There was the balloon, and it did go up, and better balloons were made, and have been going up ever since from dancing platforms, and besieged cities, and battle- fields, and all manner of places ; but the world is not flying, for all that, national boundaries have not disappeared, and there are custom-houses still existing. The world, however, this time does not think itself wrong; the scientific men, though not quite certain—being worried in their minds, as we said, as to where that cheap lot of force is to come from, unless they can previously accomplish the task of controlling Niagara, or pass- ing the Atlantic tide through a stop-cock, or utilising the Earth's rotation—are inclined to agree with the world ; and the mechanics point, with a sort of awed laugh, half- triumph, half-puzzlement, to what has already been done. That is really very surprising in its suggestiveness. No electric appliance not intended for the transmission of messages is as yet perfect, or rather, we should say, complete ; but still the first idea of impossibility has, in many departments of work, been finally removed, and that is a great step. Electricity—we shall want a shorter word very soon, 0 philologists ! and a better one, " amberishness " being a stupid description, and the proper
one, if you knew it, would be " Indra "—can already be made to do many things, though it does them all imperfectly, expensively, or with a certain uneasy hesitation, as if some Demiurgus did not quite know whether he was justified in giving such power as that to such a race as Man, and every now and then held his hand. Man may—and man will, if ten more years are given him—use his new slave upon his favourite work, the only work he permanently and always admires, that of killing his brothers wholesale ; and Deminrgus may be worried about that. Still, electric work is done, and work greater than ringing angry little hotel bells. There is, to begin with, always the telegraph, which does take messages across the Atlantic ahead of time. Then, though the big electric lights flicker and go out unexpectedly, and the little lights are not as bright as they should be, and all the lights are more or less disagree- able in colour, and nobody will give you the least dependable hint about cost, and everybody tells a different story about the distance at which the force begins to tire and slacken, there is certainly light, light, if you will pay the money, almost limitless in quantity, and in practice able to go all the distance from the generator that is wanted. And, slowly, slowly, but quite visibly, the obstacles to the use of that light pass away. Subdivision, the old difficulty, considered insuperable, has been mastered; a measuring instrument for the light con- sumed has been invented ; yesterday, some weeks ago, the colour of light that human eyes find easiest was secured ; to-day —this very week—the flicker has been conquered by an appli- cation of Faure's accumulator ; and to-morrow, perhaps, the easiest, cheapest, and handiest generator of the force will be sho to a Parisian audience, anxious chiefly to know if with electri *ty substituted for gas, theatres will not light up very well in d. There is light, and, moreover, movable light, which erred impossible. On Monday, while the British Associ ion were discussing the use of the light in mines, and , menting the chance of explosion at the point where the 'wire enters the lamp, Mr. Swan produced a lamp which, by the aid of Faure's secondary battery, dispenses with the wire. It will only burn six hours, but it can be carried about, and refilled at will from the wire connected with the central generator. That lamp next year will burn twenty-four hours, and then we have a lamp universally useful for domestic purposes. Again, though no great feat of hauling, or heaving, or pushing has yet been performed by electricity, we know the force can be made to push and haul and heave. A man has driven about Paris in an electric tricycle ; a girl has sewn a shirt with a sewing-machine moved by the same power; a bit of rock has been attacked by an electric borer ; a toy boat runs about in a lake, driven by elec- tricity; and, best of all, Messrs. Siemens are now carrying passengers in a "tram," which has no other motor than the electric "fluid," or modification of motion, or whatever it ought to be called. It is not only probable, but certain, that many of the difficulties now impeding the application of the force to heavy work will be dissolved, under the pressure of the brain- power now applied to them from every corner of the civilised world ; and quite possible that in a year or two a cheap method of generating electricity will be applied—not discovered, for we know already that falling water, in governable masses, is what is wanted—and that the storage of the force will not only be a credible, but an easily accomplished, process. That is not supposing more than has occurred in the application of electricity to message-sending, and that accomplished, and cost reduced, as science always reduces it, we should have from the new agent at least two things—a light full, per- manent, and cheap, to be used wherever wanted, in the street, workshop, and house, as in the mine ; and a motor, manageable, tireless, light, and as effective for small work in the hands of the individual as for great work in the hands of a mighty company. That which will drive a railway train will drive a girl's sewing-machine or a boy's mechanical horse, that which will urge a rock-borer will help to carve a sixpenny bloodstone seal. Indra chained can be made to perform all tasks that can be performed by unintelligent force.
And these things gained, what will be the addition to human happiness ? It is always necessary to ask that question, for, as a rale, the grand prizes of human intelligence, the additions to human knowledge of which we are so proud, have added little to the happiness of the millions who, and not the few rich, constitute Man. The growth of wisdom, especially of political wisdom, has probably, by abolishing slavery and
diminishing terror, whether proceeding from Kings, or armed enemies, or domestic criminals, done more to increase the happi- ness of the race than all that science, usually so called, has ever achieved. Freedom from oppression has secured more for Englishmen, measured directly in happiness, than steam, just as security from robbers has done more for their wealth than the electric telegraph. It would be difficult, indeed, to prove that any great scientific discovery,—except the lucifer-match, which made light and heat, as it were, portable, chloroform, which extinguished some forms of pain, and vaccination,—has ever done very much to reduce the mighty sum of human misery. There would seem, how- ever, if all hopes be justified—even excluding these hopes raised in a somewhat dim way by Dr. Siemens' strange ex- periments with plants, experiments which somehow raise in minds not usually fanciful a sort of sympathy with plants, as if they must suffer, instead of benefiting, as they appear to do, from the sleeplessness to which he condemns them—to be good omens for man in electricity. Light in the bowels of the earth, permanent, pellucid, and safe, must indefinitely diminish the terror and the toil of those who work there, even if it does, as we fear it will, protract the hours of labour ; and miners of all kinds are many, and we want more from inside the world. Bright light, indeed, if it can but be carried about, must relieve man at least of the terror of darkness ; and terror, not pain, is for humanity—which is in the aggregate timid, but healthy—the master-evil. Then it would seem probable that in electricity we have a motor which will do what steam has not done, add to the strength and freedom of the individual ; and that must be a gain. The instinct of luxury is rarely wrong when it is permanent, and the desire of the rich for horses and carriages must, if realised by the poor, increase their happiness. Rushing about is not happiness, but freedom of locomotion is an element in it, and in the electric tricycle there is a probability of that for all healthy men. The power of working a machine which will do almost all labour must be, one would think, to man a gain almost equivalent to increased health, or a doubled strength of muscle. The peasant may have no more land, but the elec- tric plough will do his spade-work as well in less time and with less expenditure of vital energy—for of all elasses, it is not ploughmen who live longest, as, in the idyllic theory, it should be, but gamekeepers and clergymen—and the addi- tional force gained in agriculture will be gained also in every department of human labour, the weaver guiding without stoop- ing an electric loom, while the shoemaker orders the fluid to perfect his stitches. Electricity is force without the limitations which make cumbrous steam comparatively so useless ; and if anything can make man happier, except more resignation, it must be an increase of force granted to every one for the battle with the blind powers of Earth, which yield only to 'compulsion his food and drink.
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