Surveyors well know
that no such accuracy is attainable. R. W. McFARLAND,
* * * * *
ELECTRO-MANIA.
By W. MATTIEU WILLIAMS.
A history of electricity, in order to be complete, must include two
distinct and very different subjects: the history of electrical science,
and a history of electrical exaggerations and delusions. The progress of
the first has been followed by a crop of the second from the time when
Kleist, Muschenbroek, and Cuneus endeavored to bottle the supposed
fluid, and in the course of these attempts stumbled upon the "Leyden
jar."
Dr. Lieberkuhn, of Berlin, describes the startling results which he
obtained, or imagined, "when a nail or a piece of brass wire is put into
a small apothecary's phial and electrified." He says that "if, while it
is electrifying, I put my finger or a piece of gold which I hold in my
hand to the nail, I receive a shock which stuns my arms and shoulders."
At about the same date (the middle of the last century), Muschenbroek
stated, in a letter to Reaumur, that, on taking a shock from a thin
glass bowl, "he felt himself struck in his arms, shoulders, and breast,
so that he lost his breath, and was two days before he recovered from
the effects of the blow and the terror" and that he "would not take a
second shock for the kingdom of France." From the description Of the
apparatus, it is evident that this dreadful shock was no stronger than
many of us have taken scores of times for fun, and have given to
our school-follows when we became the proud possessors of our first
electrical machine.
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