POWER
GROUP 14
CHAPTER 1
The Story of Where Power Comes From, What It Does, & How It Works
M
What This Story Tells US
AN has magnified his powers a millionfold. What a wonderful world there comes to mind as we think of electricity-its waves spreading themselves about the world innocently and invisibly until they touch a thing that man has made, and, 10, there is power to drive our ships and trains and light our cities. And what a vision of the past comes as we think of oil, lying buried in the earth a million years and more to come bursting out at last to turn half the wheels of Europe. Out of the past, also, comes coal. Is it not strange to think of coal growing as a great green plant ? Yet so it was. Here we shall read of all the sources of power that men have found, and of all the mechanical powers they have invented. W. shall have wireless explained, the telegraph and the telephone, the motor-car and the aeroplane, ships and trains and engines of all kinds.
THE VERY HEART OF MATTER of years ago, in a certain part of the world, shepherds noticed with curiosity that bits of rocky mould clung to the crude iron hooks of their crooks. In other climes men bedecked with amber beads had noticed, with the same mere curiosity, that these beads when rubbed against their garments would sometimes attract little bits of straw or silk, which clung to the amber through some mysterious force. These two forces were magnetism and electricity, which today have revolutionised the world, and have made the wizardry bv which the voice is carried round the Earth, by which a waterfall will drive a train or light a town, and by which the common clay is turned into shining aluminium. Electncity is the heart of matter, tor recent discoveries have shown beyond all doubt that everything in the world consists of mmute particles called atoms, themselves composed of tiny specks of negative electricity called electrons, which are held together by a central bond of positive electricity. Electricity is the great secret that matter has held within it for millions of years and we now know that it has weight and is matTHOUSANDS
ELECTRICITY路 WIRELESS路 OIL
ter. As far as our Earth is concerned, electricity in one form or another has proved to be the sale material used by the Creator in building up its fabric. The miracle of electricity is thus around us every day, every instant. The world, revolving round the Sun with the other planets which form the Solar System, is a tiny speck in the vastness of space; but space itself is filled with a rare material which, because we can think of no better name, we call ether. The invisible ether is capable of being thrown into agitation iust as water is if it be beaten up with a stick or disturbed by a stone thrown into it. The water of a lake may become calm and still when there is no wind to disturb it, but the ether is always in a condition of unrest. Waves of millions upon millions of different sizes and forms are continually passing through it. The light of the sun, the heat from the kitchen fire, wireless signals and X-rays, all come from these waves, some so tiny that millions of waves go to an inch, others so long that they reach twenty miles from crest to crest. But they all travel with uniform speed through the ether, three thousand times as far in a second as an
GAS . MOTORS . ENGINES' SHIPS 105