The Discharge of Electricity through Gases

Abstract

THIS work is an expansion of a series of lectures delivered at the University of Princeton, New Jersey, U.S.A., in October 1896. This practice of the American universities of inviting distinguished authorities to deliver courses of lectures is an admirable one. Lord Kelvin's Baltimore lectures were delivered under similar auspices, and it is to be hoped that the promised publication of these most interesting lectures will soon take place. By thus bringing our greatest living authorities into personal relations with the staff and students of a university an energetic stimulus is given to their studies and investigations. It might be said that the local staff and students can, if they wish, read the works of any authorities they desire to study. This is no doubt true, and it makes it now possible for each university by producing new knowledge to teach all the world, and not only those who come to reside in its vicinity. Thus the real students of each university are now spread all over the world and not confined to its precincts, as they were before the reproduction and distribution of thought was as easy a matter as it is to-day. And this is a great and important duty for universities, this producing and teaching new knowledge to mankind, but it is not their only duty. They should produce investigators and discoverers as well as investigations and discoveries. Under existing conditions, investigations and discoveries in the borderlands of science cannot reasonably be expected to lead to immediately useful results to mankind. They may be most useful to our grandchildren, but one cannot reasonably expect the ordinary motives of self-interest, to which the greater part of the good work of the world is due, to produce great work which may be of use to other people's grandchildren. For the production of such work, society, which has the greatest interest in the matter, must depend upon other motives for the production of great discoveries in pure science. The motives and abilities that must here be depended on do not exist in at all the same proportion of mankind as self-interest and that general ability to carry out rules which is sufficient for so much of the world's work. Enthusiastic devotion to the investigation and discovery of what is true, and the intellectual acuteness required for its successful pursuit, are not of common occurrence, and in a great many cases without special encouragement and training will, even in those who are capable of having these capacities highly developed, be overpowered by the distractions of other motives claiming attention to other fields of work. It is an important duty for universities to seek out those in whom it is possible to develop these motives and abilities; to encourage them to cultivate these abilities, and to strengthen in every way the hold of these motives on them. Almost the only way in which such motives can be strengthened is by the sympathetic encouragement of those who are already enthusiastic investigators and discoverers. That this is a really successful way of producing the character desired is fully proved by the existence of disciples in every branch of human endeavour that involves enthusiastic devotion of life. How is it that so many of the passing generation of chemical discoverers have been workers in the laboratories of Liebig, for example? The proportion of chemists who studied with Liebig to the whole body of those who have studied chemistry is very small indeed, but the proportion of leaders of chemical discovery who have studied under Liebig to the whole number of leaders of chemical discovery is quite large. Why? Because Liebig's example was catching, his personality was inspiring, his enthusiasm begot enthusiasm in his pupils; they became more than pupils, they became disciples.

The Discharge of Electricity through Gases.

By Prof. J. J. Thomson Pp. 203. (Westminster: Archibald Constable and Co., 1898.)