Abstract
THE lecturer remarked that it was no less than forty-five years since the magnetic properties of materials had formed the subject of an evening discourse before the British Association. At the Oxford meeting in 1847 the lecturer was Michael Faraday, who had only a little while before made his great discovery of diamagnetism and been led to the splendid generalization that all substances are in one way or other, and in greater or less degree, susceptible of magnetic influence. And it was an interesting coincidence that in the same year, partly indeed at that same Oxford meeting of the Association, the foundation of the modern mathematical treatment of magnetism had been laid by that infant phenomenon, whom in the vigour of his maturity we were now learning to call Lord Kelvin. Discarding the arbitrary hypotheses of earlier theoretical writers, Lord Kelvin, then a stripling at Cambridge, had proceeded to give mathematical expression to the observations and intuitions of Faraday. In recent years the science of magnetism had advanced fast, keeping pace with the advance of its industrial applications. In common with other branches of electricity it had discovered the advantage of being useful. The debt which practice owed to science had been repaid with interest. In other departments of science it might be true that there were devotees whose chief pride in their work lay in their reflection that it could never be of any use to anybody: this temper of mind was not possible to an electrician. The language of electricians had passed with bewildering rapidity into Acts of Parliament and provisional orders of the Board of Trade, and the demands of industry had stimulated discovery and fostered exactness in measurement. It was the beneficent reaction of practice on science that had enabled the great work of the Electrical Standards Committee of the British Association to be brought to a successful issue. As a fruit of that work electricians were in high hope that this Edinburgh meeting would result in an international agreement with regard to the electrical units, so that whatever the Great Powers might find to differ about they would at least be of one mind as to the magnitude of the volt, the ampere, and the ohm. In the co-operation of Prof, von Helmholtz on the part of Germany, and of M. Mascart on the part of France, with Lords Kelvin and Rayleigh and their English colleagues, there were surely the elements of a Triple Alliance which should secure to the electrical world peace, not only with honour, but with precision.
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Magnetic Induction1. Nature 46, 552–554 (1892). https://doi.org/10.1038/046552b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/046552b0