A letter to Prof. Faraday, on certain theoretical opinions / by R. Hare.

  • Hare, Robert, 1781-1858.
Date:
[1838?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A letter to Prof. Faraday, on certain theoretical opinions / by R. Hare. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    what other cause than an intense afFinity between it and the metallic particles with which it is associated, can its confinement be ascribed consistently with your estimate of the enormous quantity which exists in metals ? If “ a grain of water, or a grain of zinc, contain as much of the electric fluid as would supply eight hundred thousand charges of a battery containing a coated surface of fifteen hundred square inches,” how intense must be the attraction by which this matter is confined ? In such cases , may not the material cause of electricity be considered as latent agreeably to the suggestion of QErsted, the founder of electro- magnetism. It is in combination with matter, and only capable of producing the appropriate effects of voltaic currents when in act of transfer from combination with one atom to another; this transfer being at once an effect and a cause of chemical decompo- sition, as you have demonstrated. If polarization in any form, can be conceived to admit of the requisite gradations of intensity, which the phenomena seem to demand; would it not be more reasonable to suppose that it ope- rates by means of an imponderable fluid existing throughout all space, however devoid of other matter? May not an electric cur- rent, so called, be a progressive polarization of rows of the electric particles, the polarity being produced at one end and destroyed at the other incessantly, as I understood you to suggest in the case of contiguous ponderable atoms. When the electric particles within different wires are polarized in the same tangential direction, the opposite poles being in prox- imity, there will be attraction. When the currents of polariza- tion move oppositely, similar poles coinciding, there will be repulsion. The phenomena require that the magnetized or polar- ized particles should be arranged as tangents to the circumference, not as radii to the axis. Moreover, the progressive movement must be propagated in spiral lines in order to account for rotary influence. Between a wire which is the mean of a galvanic discharge and another not making a part of a circuit, the electric matter which intervenes may, by undergoing a polarization, become the medium of producing a progressive polarization in the second wire moving in a direction opposite to that in the inducing wire j or in other words an electrical current of the species called Ftu’adian may be generated.