Electric Arc Phenomena

Abstract

THIS book surprises the reader by its extraordinary inequality: its excellencies in some directions and its absolute badness in others. Either the author, who is understood to be a professor at Potsdam, is amazingly ignorant of scientific and technical progress outside Germany, or else he suppresses the work achieved by discoverers in other nations. And his translator, who is apparently American, makes no attempt to remedy the very obvious limitations of the author: he not even attempts to reclaim for American pioneers in arc lighting—Elihu Thomson, Brush, Steinmetz, and more recent workers—the credit which is justly theirs. As for English investigators of the electric arc, they are almost all ignored except Mrs. Ayrton, whose work the author does not altogether understand, and Prof. Silvanus Thompson, to whom he gives more credit than that industrious person ever claimed. His historical methods are peculiar. For example, when referring to Davy's early accounts of his experiments on taking spark discharges from a voltaic pile between electrodes of charcoal—experiments which certainly did not begin before the invention of the pile in 1800— he quotes a passage in the first person from Priestley's “History of Electricity,” so making Priestley, whose last edition was in 1794, responsible for Davy's words. Again, referring to the commercial impossibility of applying the arc for electric lighting so long as a battery of voltaic cells was the only available source, the author, oblivious of Holmes's success in establishing electric lights in lighthouses by means of currents generated by an alternator, oblivious, too, of Faraday's report and lecture thereon in 1862, makes the following absurd statement:—

Electric Arc Phenomena.

By Ewald Rasch. Translated from the German by K. Tornberg. xvi + 194 pp. (London: Constable and Co., Ltd., 1915.) Price 8s. 6d. net.