Steam, Steel and Electricity Part 2

The industry was slow, painful, and uncertain, only because the mechanic arts were pursued only to an extent possible with the skill and muscular energy of men. There were none of the wonderful automatic mechanisms that we know as machine-tools. There was only the almost unaided human arm with which to subdue the boundless savagery of a continent, and win independence and form a nation besides. The demand for huge ma.s.ses of the most essential of the factors of civilization has grown since, because the ironclad and the big gun have come, and those inadequate forces and crude methods supplied for a time the demand that was small and imperative. The largest ma.s.s made then, and frequently spoken of in colonial records, was a piece called a "sow;" spelled then "sowe." It was a long, triangular ma.s.s, cast by being run into a trench made in sand. [Footnote: When, later, little side-trenches were made beside the first, with little channels to carry the metal into them, the smaller castings were naturally called "pigges." Hence our "pig-iron."]

[Ill.u.s.tration: MAKING A TRENCH TO CAST A "SOWE."]

Those were the palmy days of the "trip hammer." Nasmyth was not born until 1808, and no machine inventor had yet come upon the scene. The steam-hammer that bears his name, which means a ponderous and powerful machine in which the hammer is lifted by the direct action of steam in a piston, the lower end of whose rod is the hammer-head, has done more for the development of the iron industry than any other mechanical invention. It was not actually used until 1842, or '43. It finally, with many improvements in detail, grew into a monster, the hammer-head, or "tup," being a ma.s.s of many tons. And they of modern times were not content merely to let this great ma.s.s fall. They let in steam above the piston, and jammed it down upon the ma.s.s of glowing metal, with a shock that jars the earth. The strange thing about this t.i.tanic machine is that it can crack an egg, or flatten out a ton or more of glowing iron.

Hundreds of the forgings of later times, such as the wrought iron or steel frames of locomotives, and the shafts of steamers, and the forged modern guns, could not be made by forging without this steam hammer.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE STEAM HAMMER.]

Then slowly came the period of all kinds of "machine tools." During the period briefly described above they could not make sheet metal. The rolling mill must have come, not only before the modern steam-boiler, but even before the modern plow could be made. Can the reader imagine a time in the United States when sheet metal could not be rolled, and even tin plates were not known? If so, he can instantly transport himself to the times of the wooden "trencher," and the "pewter" mug and pitcher, to the days when iron rails for tramways were unknown, and when even the "strap-iron," always necessary, was rudely and slowly hammered out on an anvil. [Footnote: About 1720, nails were the most needed of all the articles of a new country. Farmers made them for themselves, at home.

The secret of how to roll out a sheet and split it into nail-rods was stolen from the one shop that knew how, at Milton, Ma.s.s., to give to another at Mlddleboro. The thief had the Biblical name of Hashay H.

Thomas. He stole the secret while the hands of the Milton mill were gone to dinner, and served his country and broke up a small monopoly in so doing.]

Shears came with the "rolls;" vast engines of gigantic biting capacity, that cut sheets of iron as a lady's scissors cut paper. This cut the squares of metal used for boiler plates, and the steam-engine having come, was turned to the manufacture of materials for its own construction. Others were able to bite off great bars.

The first mill in which iron was rolled in America, was built in 1817 near Connellsville, in Fayette county, Penn. Until 1844, the rolling mills of this country produced little more than bar-iron, hoops, and plates. All the early attempts at railroads used the "strap" rail; unless cast "fish-bellies" were used; which was flat bar-iron provided with counter sunk holes, in which to drive nails for holding the iron to long stringers of wood laid upon ties. When actual rail-making for railroads began, the rolling mill raised its powers to meet the emergency. The "T" rail, universally now used, was invented by Robert Stevens, president and chief engineer of the Camden and Amboy railroad, and the first of them were laid as track for that road in 1832. From this time until 1850, rolling mills for making "U" and "T" rails rapidly increased in number, but in that year all but two had ceased to be operated because of foreign compet.i.tion.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SHEARS FOR CUTTING BAR-IRON.]

During some five years previous to this writing a revolution has taken place in the construction of buildings which has resulted in what is known as the "sky-sc.r.a.per." This was, in many respects, the most startling innovation of times that are startling in most other respects, and was begun in that metropolis of surprises and successes, the city of Chicago. This innovation was really such in the matter of using steel in the entire framing of a commercial building, but it was not the first use of metal as a building material. The first iron beams used in buildings were made in 1854, in a rolling mill at Trenton, N. J., and were used in the construction of the Cooper Inst.i.tute, and the building of Harper & Brothers. For these special rolls, of a special invention, were made. These have now become obsolete, and a new arrangement is used for what are known as "structural shapes."

[Ill.u.s.tration: HYDRAULIC SHEARS. THE KNIFE HAS A PRESSURE OF 3,000 TONS, CLIPPING PIECES OF IRON TWO BY FOUR FEET.]

I have spoken of the use of wood-fuel in the early stages of iron manufacture in this country, followed by the adoption exclusively of coal and its products. Then, many years later, came the departure from this in the use of gas for fuel. The first use of this kind is said to date as far back as the eighth century, and modifications of the idea had been put in practice in this country, in which gas was first made from coal and then used as fuel. Then came "natural gas." This product has been known for many centuries. It was the "eternal" fuel of the Persian fire-wors.h.i.+ppers, and has been used as fuel in China for ages.

Its earliest use in this country was in 1827, when it was made to light the village of Fredonia, N. Y. Probably its first use for manufacturing purposes was by a man named Tompkins, who used it to heat salt-kettles in the Kenawha valley in 1842. Its next use for manufacturing purposes was made in a rolling mill in Armstrong county, Penn., in 1874, forty-seven years after it had been used at Fredonia, and twenty-nine years after it had been used to boil salt.

Now the use of natural gas as manufacturing fuel is universal, not alone over the spot where the gas is found, but in localities hundreds of miles away. It is one of the strangest developments of modern scientific ingenuity. That enormous battery of boilers, which was one of the most imposing spectacles of the Columbian Exhibition of 1893, whose roar was like that of Niagara, was fed by invisible fuel that came silently in pipes from a state outside of that where the great fair was held. We are left to the conclusion that the making of the coal into gas at the mine, and the s.h.i.+pping of it to the place of consumption through pipes, is more certain of realization than were a hundred of the early problems of American progress that have now been successful for so long that the date of their beginning is almost forgotten.

THE STEEL OF THE PRESENT.--The story of steel has now almost been told, in that general outline which is all that is possible without an extensive detail not interesting to the general reader. In it is included, of necessity, a resume of the progress, from the earliest times in this country, of the great industry which is more indicative than any other of the material growth of a nation. I now come to that time when steel began to take the place that iron had always held in structural work of every cla.s.s. The differences between this structural steel and that which men have known by the name exclusively from remote ages, I have so far indicated only by reference to the well-known qualities of the latter. It now remains to describe the first.

In 1846 an American named William Kelley was the owner of an iron-works at Eddyville, Ky. It was an early era in American manufactures of all kinds, and the district was isolated, the town not having five hundred inhabitants, and the best mechanical appliances were remote.

In 1847, Kelley began, without suggestion or knowledge of any experiments going on elsewhere, to experiment in the processes now known as the "Bessemer," for the converting of iron into steel. To him occurred, as it now appears first, the idea that in the refining process fuel would be unnecessary after the iron was melted if _powerful blasts of air were forced into the fluid metal_. This is the basic principle of the Bessemer process. The theory was that the heat generated by the union of the oxygen of the air with the carbon of the metal, would accomplish the refining. Kelley was trying to produce malleable iron in a new, rapid and effective way. It was merely an economy in manufacture he was endeavoring to attain.

To this end he made a furnace into which pa.s.sed an air-blast pipe, through which a stream of air was forced into the ma.s.s of melted metal.

He produced refined iron. Following this he made what is now called a "converter," in which he could refine fifteen hundred pounds of metal in five minutes, effecting a great saving in time and fuel, and in his little establishment the old processes were thenceforth dispensed with.

It was locally known as "Kelley's air-boiling process." It proved finally to be the most important, in large results, ever conceived in metallurgy. I refer to it hurriedly, and do not attempt to follow the inventor's own description of his constructions and experiments. When he heard that others in England were following the same line of experiment, he applied for a patent. He was decided to be the first inventor of the process, and a patent was granted him over Bessemer, who was a few days before him. There is no question that others were more skillful, and with better opportunities and scientific a.s.sociations, in carrying out the final details, mechanical and chemical, which have completed the Kelley process for present commercial uses. Neither is there any question that this back-woods iron-making American was the first to refine iron by pa.s.sing through it, while fluid, a stream of air, which is the process of making that steel which is not tool steel, and yet is steel, the now almost universal material for the making of structures; the material of the Ferris wheel, the wonderful palaces of the Columbian exposition, the sky-sc.r.a.pers of Chicago, the rails, the tacks, [Footnote: In the history of Rhode Island, by Arnold, it is claimed that the first cold cut nails in the world were made by Jeremiah Wilkinson, in 1777. The process was to cut them from an old chest-lock with a pair of shears, and head them in a smith's vise. Then small nails were cut from old Spanish hoops, and headed in a vise by hand. Needles and pins were made by the same person from wire drawn by himself. Supposing this to be the beginning of the cut-nail idea, _the machine for making them_ would still remain the actual and practical invention, since it would mark the beginning of the industry as such. The importance of the latter event may be measured by the fact that about the end of the last century there began a strong demand. In the homely farm-houses, or the little contracted shops of New England villages, the descendants of the Pilgrims toiled providently, through the long winter months, at beating into shape the little nails which play so useful a part in modern industry. A small anvil served to beat the wire or strip of iron into shape and point it; a vise worked by the foot clutched it between jaws furnished with a gauge to regulate the length, leaving a certain portion projecting, which, when beaten flat by a hammer, formed the head. This was industry, but not manufacture, for in 1890 the manufacturers of this country produced over _eight hundred million pounds_ of iron, steel, and wire nails, representing a consumption of this absolutely indispensable manufacture for that year, at the rate of over _twelve pounds_ for each individual inhabitant of the United States.] the fence-wire, the sheet-metal, the rails of the steam-railroads and the street-lines, the thousand things that cannot be thought of without a list, and which is a material that is furnished more cheaply than the old iron articles were for the same purposes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SECTIONAL VIEW OF A BESSEMER "CONVERTER."]

The technical detail of steel-making is exceedingly interesting to students of applied science, but it _is_ detail, the key to which is in the process mentioned; the forcing of a stream of air through a molten ma.s.s of iron. The "converter" is a huge pitcher-shaped vessel, hung upon trunnions so as to be tilted, and it is usual to admit through these trunnions, by means of a continuing pipe, the stream of air. The converters may contain ten tons or more of liquid metal at one time, which ma.s.s is converted from iron into steel at one operation.

Forty-five years ago, or less, works that could turn out fifty tons of iron in a day were very large. Now there are many that make _five hundred tons_ of steel in the same time. Then, nearly all the work was done by hand, and men in large numbers handled the details of all processes. Now it would be impossible for human hands and strength to do the work. The steel-mill is, indeed, the most colossal combination of Steam and Steel. There are tireless arms, moved by steam, insensible alike to monstrous strains and white heat, which seize the vast ingots and carry them to and fro, handling with incredible celerity the ma.s.ses that were unknown to man before the invention of the Bessemer process.

And all these operations are directed and controlled by a man who stands in one place, strangely yet not inappropriately named a "pulpit," by means of the hand-gear that gives them all to him like toys.

No one who has seen a steel-mill in operation, can go away and really write a description of it; no artist or camera has ever made its portrait, yet it is the most impressive scene of the modern, the industrial, world. There is a "fervent heat," surpa.s.sing in its impressions all the descriptions of the Bible, and which destroys all doubt of fire with capacity to burn a world and "roll the heavens together as a scroll." There is a clang and clatter accompanying a marvelous order. There are clouds of steam. There are displays of sparks and glow surpa.s.sing all the pyrotechnics of art. Monstrous throats gasp for a draught of white-hot metal and take it at a gulp. Glowing ma.s.ses are trundled to and fro. There are mountains of ore, disappearing in a night, and ever renewed. There is a railway system, and the huge ma.s.ses are conveyed from place to place by locomotive engines. There is a water system that would supply a town. There may be miles of underground pipes bringing gas for fuel. Amid these scenes flit strong men, naked to the waist, unharmed in the red pandemonium, guiding every process, superintending every result; like other men, yet leading a life so strange that it is apparently impossible. The glowing rivers they escape; corruscating showers of flying white-hot metal do not fall upon them; the leaping, roaring, hungry, annihilating flames do not touch them; the gurgling streams of melted steel are their familiar playthings; yet they are but men.

The "rolling" of these slabs and ingots into rails is a following operation still. The continuous rail is often more than a hundred feet in length, which is cut into three or four rails of thirty feet each, and it goes through every operation that makes it a "T" rail weighing ninety pounds to the yard with the single first heat. There are trains of rolls that will take in a piece of white-hot metal weighing six tons, and send it out in a long sheet three thirty-seconds of an inch thick and nearly ten feet wide. The first steel rails made in this country were made by the Chicago Rolling Mill Company, in May, 1865. Only six rails were then made, and these were laid in the tracks of the Chicago and North Western Railroad. It is said they lasted over ten years. The first nails, or tacks, were made of steel at Bridgewater, Ma.s.s., at about the same date.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ROLLING INGOTS.]

Some thirty years ago there were but two Bessemer converters in the United States, and the manufacture of steel did not reach then five hundred tons per annum. In 1890 the product was more than five million tons.

In 1872 the price of steel was one hundred and eighty-six dollars per gross ton. It can be purchased now at varying prices less than thirty dollars per ton. The consumption of seventy millions of people is so great that it is difficult to imagine how so enormous a ma.s.s of almost imperishable material can be absorbed, and the latest figures show a consumption greatly in excess of those mentioned as the sum of manufactures.

We turn again for the comparison without which all figures are valueless to the good year 1643, when the "General court" pa.s.sed a resolve commending the great progress made in the manufacture of iron which they had licensed two years before, and granted the company still further privileges and immunities upon condition that it should furnish the people "with barre iron of all sorts for their use at not exceedynge twenty pounds per ton." We recall the first little piece of hollow ware made in America. We remember how old the old world is said to be and how long the tribes of men have plodded upon it, and then the picture appears of the progress that has grown almost under our eyes. The real Age of Steel began in 1865. It is not yet thirty years old. By comparison we are impressed with the fact that the real history of the metal is compressed into less than half an ordinary lifetime.

THE STORY OF ELECTRICITY

[Ill.u.s.tration: ERIPUIT CAELO FULMEN, SCEPTRUMQUE TYRANNIS.]

There is a sense in which electricity may be said to be the youngest of the sciences. Its modern development has been startling. Its phenomena appear on every hand. It is almost literally true that the lighting has become the servant of man.

But it is also the oldest among modern sciences. Its manifestations have been studied for centuries. So old is its story that it has some of the interest of a mediaeval romance; a romance that is true. Steam is gross, material, understandable, noisy. Its action is entirely comprehensible.

The explosives, gunpowder, begriming the nations in all the wars since 1350, nitroglycerine, oxygen and hydrogen in all the forms of their combination, seem to be gross and material, the natural, though ferocious, servants of mankind. But electricity floats ethereal, apart, a subtle essence, s.h.i.+ning in the changing splendors of the aurora yet existent in the very paper upon which one writes; mysteriously everywhere; silent, unseen, odorless, untouchable, a power capable of exemplifying the highest majesty of universal nature, or of lighting the faint glow of the fragile insect that flies in the twilight of a summer night. Obedient as it has now been made by the ingenuity of modern man, docile as it may seem, obeying known laws that were discovered, not made, it yet remains shadowy, mysterious, impalpable, intangible, dangerous. It is its own avenger of the daring ingenuity that has controlled it. Touch it, and you die.

Electricity was as existent when the splendid scenes described in Genesis were enacted before the poet's eye as it is now, and was entirely the same. Its very name is old. Before there were men there were trees. Some of these exuded gum, as trees do now, and this gum found a final resting place in the sea, either by being carried thither by the currents of the streams beside which those trees grew, or by the land on which they stood being submerged in some of the ancient changes and convulsions to which the world has been frequently subject. In the lapse of ages this gum, being indestructible in water, became a fossil beneath the waves, and being in later times cast up by storms on the sh.o.r.es of the Baltic and other seas, was found and gathered by men, and being beautiful, finally came to be cut into various forms and used as jewelry. One has but to examine his pipe-stem, or a string of yellow beads, to know it even now. It is amber. The ancient Greeks knew and used it as we do, and without any reference to what we now call "electricity" their name for it was ELEKTRON. The earliest mention of it is by Homer, a poet whose personality is so hidden in the mists of far antiquity that his actual existence as a single person has been doubted, and he mentions it in connection with a necklace made of it.

But very early in human history, at least six hundred years before Christ, this elektron had been found to possess a peculiar property that was imagined to belong to it alone. It mysteriously attracted light bodies to it after it had been rubbed. Thales, the Franklin of his remote time, was the man who is said to have discovered this peculiar and mysterious quality of the yellow gum, and if it be true, to him must be conceded the unwitting discovery of electricity. It was the first step in a science that usurps all the prerogatives of the ancient G.o.ds.

He recorded his discovery, and was impressed with awe by it, and accounted for the phenomenon he had observed by ascribing to the dull fossil a living soul. That is the unconscious impression still, after twenty-five hundred years have pa.s.sed since Thales died; that hidden in the heart of electrical phenomena there is a weird sentience; what a Greek would consider something divine and immortal apart from matter.

But neither Thales, nor Theophrastus, nor Pliny the elder, nor any ancient, could conceive of a fact but dimly guessed until the day of Franklin; that this secret of the silent amber was also that of the thunder-cloud, that the essence that drew to it a floating filament is also that which rends an oak, that had splintered their temples and statues, and had not spared even the image of Jupiter Tonans himself.

The spectral lights which hung upon the masts of the ancient galleys of the Mediterranean were named Castor and Pollux, not electricity.

Absolutely no discovery was made, though the religion of ancient Etruria was chiefly the wors.h.i.+p of a spirit by them seen, but unknown; to us electrical science; a science chained, yet really unknown and still feared though chained. It is the story of this servitude only that is capable of being told, and the first weak bands were a hundred and forty-six years in forging; from the Englishman Gilbert's "_De Magnete_," to Franklin's Kite.

During all this time, and to a great degree long after, electricity was a scientific toy. Experiences in the sparkling of the fur of cats, the knowledge that there were fishes that possessed a mysterious paralyzing power, and various common phenomena all attributable to some unknown common cause, did not greatly increase the sum of actual knowledge of the subject. There was no divination of what the future would bring, and not the least conception of actual and impending possibilities. When, finally, the greatest thinkers of their times began to investigate; when Boyle began to experiment, and even the transcendent genius of Newton stooped to enquiry; from the days of those giants down to those of the American provincial postmaster, Benjamin Franklin, a period of some seventy years, almost all the knowledge obtained was only useful in indicating how to experiment still further. So small was the knowledge, so aimless the long experimenting, that the discovery that not amber only, but other substances as well, possessed the electric quality when rubbed, was a notable advance in knowledge. Later, in 1792, it was found by Gray that certain substances possessed the power of carrying; "conducting" as we now term it; the mysterious fluid from one substance to another; from place to place. This discovery const.i.tuted an actual epoch in the history of the science, and justly, since this small beginning with a wet string and a cylinder of gla.s.s or a globe of sulphur was the first unwitting ill.u.s.tration of the net-work of wires now hanging all over the world. The next step was to find that all substances were not alike in a power to conduct a current; _i.e._, that there were "conductors" and "non-conductors," and all varying grades and powers between. The next discovery was that there were, as was then imagined, several kinds of electricity. This conclusion was incorrect, and its use was to lead at last to the discovery, by Franklin, that the many kinds were but two, and even these not kinds, but qualities, present always in the unchanging essence that is everywhere, and which are known to us now by the names that Franklin gave them; the _positive_ and _negative_ currents; one always present with the other, and in every phenomenon known to electrical science.

Probably the first machine ever contrived for producing an electric current was made by a monk, a Scotch Benedictine named Gordon who lived at Erfurt, in Saxony. I shall have occasion, hereafter, to describe other machines for the same purpose, and this first contrivance is of interest by comparison. It was a cylinder of gla.s.s about eight inches long, with a wooden shaft in the center, the ends of which were pa.s.sed through holes in side-pieces, and it is said to have been operated by winding a string around the shaft and drawing the ends of the string back and forth alternately.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE FIRST ELECTRICAL MACHINE.]

The Franklinic machine, the modern gla.s.s disc fitted with combs, rubbers, bands and cranks, is nothing more in principle or manner of action than the first crude arrangement of the monk of Erfurt.

All these experiments, and all that for many years followed, were made in electricity produced by friction; by rubbing some body like gla.s.s, sulphur or rosin. Many men took part in producing effects that were almost meaningless to them--the preliminaries to final results for us.

Improved electrical machines were made, all seeming childish and inadequate now, and all wonderful in their day. There is a long list of immortal names connected with the slow development of the science, and among their experiments the seventeenth century pa.s.sed away. Dufaye and the Abbe Nollet worked together about 1730, and mutually surprised each other daily. Guericke, better known as the inventor of the air-pump, made a sulphur-ball machine, often claimed to have been the first.

Hawkesbee constructed a gla.s.s machine that was an improvement over that of Guericke. Stephen Gray unfolded the leading principles of the science, but without any understanding of their results as we now understand them. The next advance was made in finding a way to hold some of the electricity when gathered, and the toy which we know as the Leyden Jar surprised the scientific world. Its inventor, Professor Muschenbrock, wrote an account of it to Reaumur, and lacks language to express the terror into which his own experiments had thrown him. He had unwittingly acc.u.mulated, and had accidentally discharged, and had, for the first time in human experience, felt something of the shock the modern lineman dreads because it means death. He had toiled until he held the baleful genie in a gla.s.s vessel partially filled with water, and the sprite could not be seen. Accidentally he made a connection between the two surfaces of the jar, and declared that he did not recover from the experience for two days, and that nothing could induce him to repeat it. He had been touched by the lightning, and had not known it. [Footnote: The Leyden Jar has little place in the usefulness of modern electricity, and has no relations.h.i.+p with the modern so-called "Storage" Battery.]

Then began the fakerism which attached itself to the science of electricity, and that has only measurably abandoned it in very late times. Itinerant electricians began to infest the cities of Europe, claiming medicinal and almost supernatural virtues for the mysterious shock of the Leyden Vial, and showing to gaping mult.i.tudes the quick and flas.h.i.+ng blue spark which was, though no man knew it then, a miniature imitation of the bolt of heaven. That fact, verging as closely upon the sublimest power of nature as a man may venture to and live, was not even suspected until Franklin had invented a battery of such jars, and had performed hundreds of experiments therewith that finally established in his acute, though prosaic, mind the ident.i.ty of his puny spark with that terrific flash that, until that time, had been regarded by all mankind as a direct and intentional expression of the power of Almighty G.o.d.

Thus Franklin came into the field. He was an investigator who brought to his aid a singular capacity possessed by the very few; the capacity for an unbiased looking for the hidden reasons of things. There was no field too sacred or too old for his prying investigations and his private conclusions. He was, as much as any man ever is, an original thinker. He knew of all the electrical experiments of others, and they produced in his mind conclusions distinctly his own. He was, upon topics pertaining to the field of reason, experience and common sense, the clearest and most vigorous writer of his time save one, and such conclusions as he arrived at he knew how to promulgate and explain. All that Franklin discovered would but add to the tedium of the subject of electricity now, but from his time definitely dates the knowledge that of electricity, in all its developments, there is really but one kind, though for convenience sake we may commonly speak of two, or even more.

He first gave the names by which they are still known to the two qualities of one current; a name of convenience only. He knew first a fact that still puzzles inquiry, and is still largely unknown--that electricity is not _created_, produced, manufactured, by any human means, and that all we may do, then or now, is to gather it from its measureless diffusion in the air, the world, or the s.p.a.ces of the wide creation, and that, like "heat" and "cold," it is a relative term. He demonstrated that any body which has electricity gives it to any other body that has at the moment less. Before he had actually tried that celebrated experiment which is alone sufficient to give him place among the immortals, he had declared the theory upon which he made it to be true, and by reasoning, in an age that but dimly understood the force and conditions of inductive reason, had proved that lightning is but an electric spark. It seems hardly necessary to add that his theories were ridiculed by the most intelligent scientists of his time, and scoffed at even by the countrymen of Newton and Davy, the members of the Royal Society of England. Franklin was a provincial American, and had, in other fields than electricity, troubled the British placidity.

[Ill.u.s.tration: B. FRANKLIN]

Only one of these, a man named Collinson, saw any value in these researches of the provincial in the wilds of America. He published Franklin's letters to him. Buffon read them, and persuaded a friend to translate them into French. They were translated afterwards into many languages, and when in his isolation he did not even know it, the obscure printer, the country postmaster who kept his official accounts with his own hands, was the bearer of a famous name. He was a.s.sailed by the Nollet previously mentioned, and by a party of French philosophers, yet there arose, in his absence and without his knowledge, a party who called themselves distinctively "Franklinists."

Then came the personal test of the truth of these theories that had been promulgated over Europe in the name of the unknown American. He was then forty-five years old, successful in his walk and well-known in his immediate locality, but by no means as prominent or famous among his neighbors as he was in Europe. He was not so fertile in resources as to be in any sense inspired, and had privately waited for the finis.h.i.+ng of a certain spire in the little town of Philadelphia so that he might use it to get nearer to the clouds to demonstrate his theory of lightning.