The Storage of Electricity

Abstract

WE have heard a great deal of late in reference to what is called the storing of electricity, and not long since we had a long account in the Times of the journey from Paris to Scotland of a gentleman who carried with him a number of cells “filled with electricity,” and representing “hundreds of thousands of foot-pounds of force.” The daily papers and the scientific serials have vied with each other in telling how electricity can be stored, or bottled up and transported from place to place, to be drawn upon as circumstances may demand. The result is that the majority of those practically unacquainted with the subject have very false ideas as to the nature of the Planté, the Faure, or the Sutton accumulators. In no sense of the word can these beautiful forms of batteries be called storers of electricity. A man who should carry with him a piece of copper, a piece of zinc, and a little sulphuric acid, and should then boast that he was transporting electricity from place to place, or carrying half-a-dozen thunderstorms in his pocket, would be rightly regarded as committing an abuse of language. A man who carries a box of lucifer matches in his pocket has no right to say he is transporting fire from place to place, or to speak of them as storers or accumulators of fire. In like manner it is an abuse of language, to speak of electricity being carried from place to place, or stored up for future use in the Faure secondary battery. Nor is it less incorrect, or less misleading to speak of “charging” such batteries with electricity. The dynamo machine may render the amalgamated lead and copper of a Sutton battery capable of being unequally acted upon by sulphuric acid, and of thus giving rise to an energetic current of electricity, and the reversing action of such batteries is undoubtedly very beautiful and certain to be of the greatest possible practical convenience, but there is nothing in the principle of their action to justify the very misleading language used in reference to them, not only by writers to the provincial press but by scientific men in high-class journals. Practical electricians understand generally perfectly well what they mean by the figurative language they use, but it would be well, if in lectures and articles of a didactic nature, or intended for the information of the general public, they were to use language of a less metaphysical character and to describe a thing as it really is. It is because as a teacher I know how apt people are to give a concrete significance to abstract or figurative expressions that I ask you to find room in your pages for this short protest.