Again, all parts of the circuit are agitating the ether. Coming next to specific capability, though there are media, as air, which appear to have no conductivity, yet, by the continuity of the electric present, they can support present; not regular, however transient, and stopped elastically. Now, although nothing but very cautious inculcation at a tender age, continued unremittingly as much as maturity, of the doctrine of the materiality of electricity, and its motion from place to position, would have made me believe it, still, there may be a lot in electric phenomena to support the thought of electricity being a distinct entity, and the power of behavior is so great, that it isn't straightforward to get rid of the idea when as soon as it has been formed. Had we not better hand over the concept power is transmitted by way of the wire altogether? However, leaving private particulars of no significance to anyone however myself, let us consider the transmission of energy by means of a wire. Outside the wire, in the dielectric, nevertheless, there is a distinction, for the electric drive varies not solely at totally different distances from the wire but additionally at the identical distance outdoors totally different elements of the wire. This has reached its fullest improvement in the fingers of the German philosophers, from Weber to Clausius, leading to ingenious explanations of electric phenomena based mostly upon forces appearing at a distance between shifting or fastened particular person parts of electricity.

In the historical development of the science, static phenomena got here first. Let or not it's so first. To repair ideas, let our circuit be an insulated suspended wire from London to Edinburgh, and that we transmit vitality to Edinburgh from a battery in London, the circuit being accomplished by the earth. Similarly the opposite power-current goes by the earth to Edinburgh almost unabated in strength, and is then directed from Edinburgh to the center of the wire, where its energy also falls to nothing. In passing from the battery to the wire via the dielectric the power-present is continuous, the state being steady (or the ether machinery frictionless) ; however instantly it reaches the conducting matter of the wire dissipation commences and the current begins to fall in strength, and on reaching the axis has fallen to nothing. If of most strength at the battery it falls almost to nothing on the distant end, and fairly to nothing through the earth up to the other pole of the battery.

Following this up, it may be nothing in any respect. As Maxwell remarked, we all know nothing concerning the velocity of electricity; it may be an inch in a year or one million miles in a second. But admitting the ether to propagate gravity instantaneously, it should have wonderful properties, not like anything we know. This had its disadvantages; one can get on quicker if one has ample faithwhich we know moves mountainsto accept a sure speculation unhesitatingly as a fact, and work out its penalties undoubtingly, whatever the hazard of fixing ones concepts prematurely. In just one sense do I believe we can converse of the velocity of electricity, in step with Maxwells theory, viz., by the hypothesis that the electric current in a wire is the continuous discharge of contiguous charged molecules, when plainly we can name the velocity of movement of a molecule the velocity of the cost it carries.

The electric current just isn't itself heat; but as its existence within the wire entails the continued production of heat, we conclude that some kind of motion is essentially involved within the electric current apart from the heat produced, and from the uniformity of effect in numerous elements of the wire, that it is a kind of stationary motion. To this I ought to have answered formerly, when crammed with "Heat as a Mode of Motion," that it's a reality that there is a transformation of energy in the battery, and that this energy is transmitted via the wire, there suffering one other transformation, viz., into heat; that when the present is set up steadily, the heat is generated uniformly; that the electric present in the wire is subsequently some type of stationary movement of the particles of the wire, not exactly like heat, however having some peculiarity of a directional nature making the difference between a positive and a adverse present; but that there was no evidence within the closed circuit of any motion of electricity via the wire, however solely of a switch of vitality through the wire. After all, if it involves numerical comparisons we should have to contemplate the ratios of models within the extraordinary to what I could name the rational system.