ascertaining the conductivity, polarisability, and other
electrical properties of matter is dull and exacting work, but it opens
to the student new windows through which to peer at the architecture of
matter. That architecture, as it rises to his view, discloses one law of
structure after another; what in a first and clouded glance seemed
anomaly is now resolved and reconciled; order displays itself where
once anarchy alone appeared. When the investigator now needs a substance
of peculiar properties he knows where to find it, or has a hint for its
creation--a creation perhaps new in the history of the world. As he
thinks of the wealth of qualities possessed by his store of alloys,
salts, acids, alkalies, new uses for them are borne into his mind. Yet
more--a new orchestration of inquiry is possible by means of the
instruments created for him by the electrician, through the advances in
method which these instruments effect. With a second and more intimate
point of view arrives a new trigonometry of the particle, a trigonometry
inconceivable in pre-electric days. Hence a surround is in progress
which early in the twentieth century may go full circle, making atom and
molecule as obedient to the chemist as brick and stone are to the
builder now.

The laboratory investigator and the commercial exploiter of his
discoveries have been by turns borrower and lender, to the great profit
of both. What Leyden jar could ever be constructed of the size and
revealing power of an Atlantic cable? And how many refinements of
measurement, of purification of metals, of precision in manufacture,
have been imposed by the colossal investments in deep-sea telegraphy
alone! When a current admitted to an ocean cable, such as that between
Brest and New York, can choose for its path either 3,540 miles of copper
wire or a quarter of an inch of gutta-percha, there is a dangerous
opportunity for escape into the sea, unless the current is of nicely
adjusted strength, and the insulator has been made and laid with the
best-informed skill, the most conscientious care. In the constant tests
required in laying the first cables Lord Kelvin (then Professor William
Thomson) felt the need for better designed and more sensitive
galvanometers or current measurers. His great skill both as a
mathematician and a mechanician created the existing instruments, which
seem beyond improvement. They serve not only in commerce and
manufacture, but in promoting the strictly