e" which reduced the price of coal by almost seventy per cent and
which made it possible to establish the first regular passenger service
between Manchester and Liverpool, when people were whisked from city to
city at the unheard-of speed of fifteen miles per hour. A dozen years
later, this speed had been increased to twenty miles per hour. At the
present time, any well-behaved flivver (the direct descendant of
the puny little motor-driven machines of Daimler and Levassor of the
eighties of the last century) can do better than these early "Puffing
Billies."

But while these practically-minded engineers were improving upon their
rattling "heat engines," a group of "pure" scientists (men who
devote fourteen hours of each day to the study of those "theoretical"
scientific phenomena without which no mechanical progress would be
possible) were following a new scent which promised to lead them into
the most secret and hidden domains of Nature.

Two thousand years ago, a number of Greek and Roman philosophers
(notably Thales of Miletus and Pliny who was killed while trying
to study the eruption of Vesuvius of the year 79 when Pompeii and
Herculaneum were buried beneath the ashes) had noticed the strange
antics of bits of straw and of feather which were held near a piece of
amber which was being rubbed with a bit of wool. The schoolmen of the
Middle Ages had not been interested in this mysterious "electric" power.
But immediately after the Renaissance, William Gilbert, the private
physician of Queen Elizabeth, wrote his famous treatise on the character
and behaviour of Magnets. During the Thirty Years War Otto von
Guericke, the burgomaster of Magdeburg and the inventor of the air-pump,
constructed the first electrical machine. During the next century
a large number of scientists devoted themselves to the study of
electricity. Not less than three professors invented the famous Leyden
Jar in the year 1795. At the same time, Benjamin Franklin, the most
universal genius of America next to Benjamin Thomson (who after his
flight from New Hampshire on account of his pro-British sympathies
became known as Count Rumford) was devoting his attention to this
subject. He discovered that lightning and the electric spark were
manifestations of the same electric power and continued his electric
studies until the end of his busy and useful life. Then came Volta with
his famous "electric pile" and Galvani and Day and the Danish professor
Hans