are so many of what they term "bizarreries," or unaccountable phenomena in the course of electrical experiments, that a man can scarce assert anything in consequence of any experiment which is not contradicted by some unexpected occurrence in another;" and the same correspondent quotes the famous naturalist De Buffon as saying, that the whole subject of electricity is "not yet sufficiently ripe for the establishment of a course of laws, or indeed of any certain one, fixed and determinate in all its circumstances," which is significant in view of the persistence with which Abbé Nollet was advocating his favorite effluence doctrine, to which allusion has already been made. Lemonnier had (probably in Watson's eyes) committed the indiscretion of announcing discoveries which Watson insisted he himself had in petto. The natural philosopher while sometimes, like other humanity, apt to indulge in the wish, "Pereant male qui ante nos nostra dixissent,''1 has a better method of self assertion, at hand which has the merit of being useful. It consists simply in making additional experiments, which, even if they go to support the discovery of one's rival, completely eclipse, by their magnitude or striking character, those on which the latter has rested his conclusions. There is much sagacity in this, because human nature is very apt to link the great results to the great object lessons, and not to the little ones, especially after time has befogged the chronology. Thus did Watson, with respect to Lemonnier; in dealing with Franklin, as we shall see later, he adopted a different course, equally favorable to himself, and equally tinctured with worldly wisdom. 'Less sententiously, but perhaps as well said in Chevalier D'Aceilly's version: "Dis-je quelque chose assez belle L'antiquité tout en cervelle WATSON'S ELECTRICAL CIRCUIT. 549 Lemonnier had apparently caused electricity to traverse the pond in the Tuileries gardens. This Watson determined to outdo; and, not without some misgivings, prepared to make the "commotion," as he calls it, felt across the River Thames. With the aid of several members of the Royal Society he laid a wire along Westminster Bridge-a distance of some twelve hundred feet-and carried its ends. to the water edge. On the Westminster side of the river one of the company held the wife in his left hand and touched the water with an iron rod held in his right. On the Surrey side, a second person held the extremity of the wire in his right hand and a charged Leyden jar in his left -the ball of the jar being touched by a third observer, who also grasped an iron rod dipping into the river. All three individuals felt a smart shock the instant the circuit was closed, and alcohol on one bank of the stream was fired by electricity discharged on the other. This experiment, which was repeated with various. changes in detail, was made in July, 1747. Martin Folkes, then president of the Royal Society, the Earl of Stanhope, and other distinguished persons, took part in it; and this alone would have attracted public attention even if the results had not been of such great philosophical interest. Watson, however, cared nothing for the sensational or popular side of the achievement. The observation which seemed to him of most importance was the great advantage which wire, as a conductor, possesses over chain -for "the junctures of the chain not being sufficiently close. . . caused the electricity in its passage to snap and flash at the junctures where there was the least separation, and these lesser snappings in the whole length of the chain lessened the great one at the gun barrel," which formed a terminus of the line. This suggested to him the possibility of sending the discharge over circuits of wire and water even greater than 2400 feet in length; so he changed the scene of his operations to Stoke-Newington, where the windings of the New River gave him (although the two extreme points were distant, in a straight line, but 280c feet) a water course nearly 8000 feet in length. Here a wire, from the outer coating of a Leyden jar, disposed in the window of a house overlooking the river, was led over the meadows to the distant point, where, as before, an observer held its end in one hand, and established communication with the water with the other. A second wire from the window went directly to the river, so that it was necessary merely to bring the house end of this wire to the ball of the jar to discharge the latter. The experiment was successful-but a new question arose from it, because it had been noticed that the "commotion" traveled over the circuit even when the distant end of the wire did not communicate with the water but with the land, touching the earth at a distance of even twenty feet from the stream. Was the electrical circuit formed throughout the windings of the river, or by way of the much shorter path through the meadows? Tests showed that the meadow-earth would conduct, and this was supposed to be due to its damp condition. At all events, thought Watson, the matter must be tested. So observers, at the ends of a wire about 500 feet long, were insulated on pitch cakes and told to touch the ground with their iron rods. The shocks from a jar in the circuit were felt smartly by both. That, and similar trials, settled the matter of the feasibility of making the earth a part of the circuit, and made further experiments on long water-courses needless. Watson had noticed that when the wire running across Westminster Bridge touched wet stones the shock transmitted seemed to lose strength, and that the same result happened when it lay on wet grass. He surmised at once that a leakage of the charge thus took place from the wire. He now provided a circuit nearly four miles in length, being two miles of wire supported on dry sticks and two miles of earth. The observers at the distant stations fired muskets to notify the man at the jar when WATSON'S EXPERIMENTS ON LONG CIRCUITS. 551 they wanted the discharge to take place. The shock was so severe that some of them demurred to receiving it through their bodies, although they found amusement in the antics of the astonished countrymen whom they persuaded to join hands with them. Successful transmission over a four-mile circuit-"a distance without trial too great to be credited"—left Watson wondering how far the commotion would actually manifest itself, and what experiments he should try in order to find out. If he could determine the velocity of electricity, then perhaps he could form some idea of the length of circuit which would serve to test the matter. He attacked that problem very much as Lemonnier had done, by endeavoring to make a comparison between the speed of the commotion and the velocity of sound; but the effort was as unavailing as that of his French rival, and his conclusion the same; that the transmission of electricity "over any of the distances yet experienced is nearly instantaneous." None the less, however, had Watson invented and used the circuit of wire and earth which, in later years, proved of such great value in long telegraph lines. But no intelligence was sent electrically over Watson's wire. The shock of the jar made the observers jump-and that was all. No one thought of transmitting shocks at varying intervals so as to signal intelligence by them. There was not the slightest notion of telegraphic communication present in Watson's mind. He was merely seeking to discover how far the "commotion" would travel, and in that way to obtain some knowledge of its strength and speed. Next to having one's discoveries prematurely made by another, nothing is more disconcerting than to have somebody else bring home the conviction that the fundamental hypothesis upon which one has based a whole series of creditable deductions and experiments is probably wrong. However excellent the last may be in themselves, they are left in the air, so to speak, and something must be done without delay to replace the shattered underpinning, a task often requiring much ingenuity and some subtlety. Watson had already suffered the first annoyance at the hands of Lemonnier. When Collinson gave him Franklin's letters, he found that the second was also to be encountered. He could not dispute Franklin's conclusions, because he was himself convinced that they explained matters very much more reasonably than did his own. He felt instinctively that if he had only thought of them he would have promulgated them without hesitation. Unfortunately he had not done so. In brief, he was willing to admit the validity of Franklin's theory, but unwilling to concede the invalidity of his own. The communication which Watson sent to the Royal Society in January, 1748, would have been more in harmony with the reputation of its brilliant and ingenious author had he shown in it greater candor. As it was, his chosen course precipitated a controversy which has retained vitality to the present time, and which has engendered dissensions exhibiting British insularity in some of its least agreeable phases. Without seeking to revive it here, it will suffice to say that Watson found, in his own mind, arguments which justified him in affirming that his theory, as a whole and radically, had always been the same as that propounded by Franklin, although a suspicion of salving his conscience is unavoidable when it is found that afterwards he really reverses his hypothesis in detail to make it accord. His partisans saw in the first proceeding reason for ascribing to him, rather than to Franklin, the full credit for originating the plus and minus doctrine; and in the second, only proof of ingenuous willingness on the part of the most eminent philosopher in the kingdom to defer to any one, however humble, rather than permit conclusions presented by him to retain the semblance of inaccuracy. But even an advocacy which included that of the all-knowing Whewell, and left its mark in the |