with this burning-machine in your hand, you may take about sixty steps
in walking about your room. When it is electrified strongly, you may
take it into another room, and there fire spirits of wine with it. If,
while it is electrifying, you put your finger, or a piece of gold
which you hold in your hand, to the nail, you receive a shock which
stuns your arms and shoulders.

A tin tube, or a man placed upon electrics, is electrified much
stronger by these means than in the common way. When you present this
phial and nail it to a tin tube, fifteen feet long, nothing but
experience can make a person believe how strongly it is electrified.
Two thin glasses have been broken by the shock of it. It appears
extraordinary, that when this phial and nail are in contact with their
conducting or non-conducting matter, the strong shock does not follow.

_The Self-moving Wheel._

The self-moving wheel is made of a thin round plate of window-glass,
seventeen inches in diameter, well gilt on both sides, to within two
inches of the circumference. Two small hemispheres of wood are then
fixed with cement, to the middle of the upper and under sides,
centrally opposite, and in each of them a thick strong wire, eight or
ten inches long, making together the axis of the wheel. It turns
horizontally on a point at the lower end of its axis, which rests on a
bit of brass, cemented within a glass salt-cellar. The upper end of
its axis passes through a hole in a thin brass plate, cemented to a
long and strong piece of glass, which keeps it six or eight inches
distant from any non-electric, and has a small ball of wax or metal on
its top.

In a circle on the table which supports the wheel, are fixed twelve
small pillars of glass, at about eleven inches distance, with a
thimble on the top of each. On the edge of the wheel is a small
leaden bullet, communicating by a wire with the upper surface of the
wheel; and about six inches from it is another bullet, communicating,
in like manner, with the under surface. When the wheel is to be
charged by the upper surface, a communication must be made from the
under surface with the table.

When it is well charged it begins to move. The bullet nearest to a
pillar moves towards the thimble on that pillar, and, passing by,
electrifies it, and then pushes itself from it. The succeeding bullet,
which communicates with the other surface of the glass, more strongly
attracts that thimble, on account of its bein