Part 30

HEROES OF SCIENCE.

MICHAEL FARADAY--SIR WILLIAM SIEMENS--M. PASTEUR.

The loftiest class of scientists pursue science because they love truth. They derive no animation from the thought of any practical application which they can make from their scientific discoveries. They have no dreams of patents and subsequent royalties, although these sometimes come. They enter upon their work, smit with a passion for truth. If to any one of them it should happen to be pointed out--as Sir Humphrey Davy showed the ardent young Michael Faraday--at the beginning of his career, that science is a hard mistress who pays badly, they are so in love with science that, really and truly, they prefer from their very hearts to live with her on bread and water in a garret to living without her in palaces in which they might fare sumptuously every day.

There are others by whom science is regarded only in the measure of its fruitfulness in producing material wealth. Their great men are not the discoverers of principles, but the inventors, the men who can apply the discoveries of others to supplying such wants as men are willing to pay largely to have satisfied. As has been said--

"To some she is the goddess great; To some the milch-cow of the field; Their business is to calculate The butter she will yield."

Our highest admiration must be for the discoverers; but we may do well to remind ourselves, from time to time, that to such men we are indebted not only for thrilling insight into the beautiful mysteries of nature, and for the withdrawal of the veil which shuts out from ordinary sight the august magnificences of nature, but also for the discovery of those principles which can be turned to the best practical account, ministering to us in our kitchens and bed-chambers and drawing-rooms and factories and shops and fields, filling our nights with brilliancy and our days with potencies, giving to each man the capability of accomplishing in one year what his ancestors, who lived in unscientific ages, could not have achieved in twenty; not only exhibiting the forces of nature as steeds, but also showing how they may be harnessed to the chariots of civilization.

To keep us in healthful gratitude to the men who, having turned away from the marts of the money-makers, have unselfishly set themselves to discover what will enrich the money-makers, and, content to live in simple sorts of ways, have sent down beauty and comfort into the homes of rich and poor, it is well to make an occasional résumé of the results of the work of useful scientists, and ponder the lessons of their single-mindedness.

FARADAY.

Few names on the roll of the worthies of science are better known through all the world than that of Michael Faraday, who was born in England in 1791 and died in 1867. Rising from poverty, he became assistant to Sir Humphrey Davy, in the Royal Institution, London, where he soon exhibited great ability as an experimenter, and a rare genius for discovering the secret relation of distant phenomena to one another, which gave him his skill as a discoverer, so that he came to be regarded, according to Professor Tyndall, "the prince of the physical investigators of the present age," "the greatest experimental philosopher the world has ever seen."

His greatest discoveries may be stated to have been magneto-electric induction, electro-chemical decomposition, the magnetization of light, and diamagnetism, the last announced in his memoir as the "magnetic condition of all matter." There were many minor discoveries. The results of his labors are apparent in every field of science which has been cultivated since his day. Indeed, they made a great enlargement of that field. His life of simple independence was a great contribution to the highest wealth of the world. He might have been rich. He lived in simplicity and died poor. It is calculated that, if he had made commercial uses of his earlier discoveries, he might easily have gathered a fortune of a million of dollars. He preferred to use his extraordinary endowments for the promotion of science, from which he would not be turned away by honors or money, declining the presidency of the Royal Institution, which was urged upon him, preferring to "remain plain Michael Faraday to the last," that he might make mankind his legatees.

While Faraday does not claim the parentage of the electric telegraph, he was among the earliest laborers in the practical application of his own discoveries, without which the telegraph would probably never have had existence. It was on his advice that Mr. Cyrus W. Field determined to push the enterprise of the submarine cable. His labors were essential to the success of the efforts of his friend Wheatstone in telegraphy. It was his genius which discovered the method of preventing the incrustation by ice of the windows of light-houses, and also a method for the prevention of the fouling of air in brilliantly lighted rooms, by which health was impaired and furniture injured. He discovered a light, volatile oil, which he called "bicarburet of hydrogen." It is now known to us as benzine, which is so largely employed in the industrial arts. Treated by nitric acid, that has produced a substance largely used by the perfumer and the confectioner. From that came the wonderful base aniline, which was not only useful in the study of chemistry, as throwing light on the internal structure of organic compounds, but has come also into commerce, creating a great branch of industry, by giving strong and high colors which can be fixed on cotton, woolen, and silken fabrics. It may be worth while to notice what gratifying beauty was provided for the eye, while profitable work was afforded to the industrious.

It is not to be forgotten that, whatever we have of magneto-electric light, in all its various applications, is due to Faraday's discoveries.

Faraday's distinguished successor, Professor Tyndall, in his admirable and generous tribute to his famous predecessor, says: "As far as electricity has been applied for medical purposes, it is almost exclusively Faraday's." How much of addition to human comfort that one sentence includes, who can estimate? And who can calculate the money-value to commerce in the production of instruments used in the application of electricity to medicine? Professor Tyndall continues: "You have noticed those lines of wire which cross the streets of London. It is Faraday's currents that speed from place to place through these wires. Approaching the point of Dungeness, the mariner sees an unusually brilliant light, and from the noble Pharos of La Hève the same light flashes across the sea. These are Faraday's sparks, exalted by suitable machinery to sunlight splendor. At the present moment (1868), the Board of Trade and the Brethren of the Trinity House, as well as the Commissioners of Northern Lights, are contemplating the introduction of the magneto-electric light at numerous points upon our coast; and future generations will be able to point to those guiding stars in answer to the question, what has been the practical use of the labors of Faraday?"

SIEMENS

One of the most useful of modern men was Sir William Siemens, who was born in 1823 and died in 1883. The year before his death he was president of the British Association, and was introduced by his predecessor, Sir J. Lubbock, with the statement that "the leading idea of Dr. Siemens's life had been to economize and utilize the force of Nature for the benefit of man." It is not our purpose to give a sketch of his life, or a catalogue of his many inventions, all of which were useful. It was his comprehensive and accurate study of the universe which led him to discover, as he thought, that it is a vast regenerative gas furnace. The theory has been that the sun is cooling down; but Dr. Siemens saw that the water, vapor, and carbon compounds of the interstellar spaces are returned to the sun, and that the action of the sun on these literally converted the universe into a regenerative furnace. On a small scale, in a way adapted to ordinary human uses, and by ingenious contrivances, he produced a regenerative gas furnace which so utilized what had hitherto been wasted that, in the last lecture delivered by Michael Faraday (1862) before the Royal Society, he praised the qualities of the furnace for its economy and ease of management; and it soon came into general use. It is probably impossible to calculate the amount of saving to the world due to his practical application of the theory of the conservation of force to the pursuits of industry. It has changed the processes for the production of steel so as to make it much cheaper, and so revolutionized ship-building. The carrying power of steel ships is so much greater than that of iron ships that the former earn twenty-five per centum more than the latter. So great a gain is this, that one-fourth the total tonnage of British ship-building in 1883 consisted of steel vessels.

Sir William Siemens's name is popularly associated with electric light. Perhaps it can not be claimed that he was the sole inventor of it, since Faraday had discovered the principle, and at the meeting of the Royal Society, in 1867, at which Siemens's paper was read, the same application of the principle was announced in a paper which had been prepared by Sir Charles Wheatstone, and a patent had been sought by Mr. Cromwell Varley, whose application involved the same idea. But it is believed that Sir William did more than any other man to make the discovery of wide and great practical benefit. His dynamo machine is capable of transforming into electrical energy ninety per cent of the mechanical energy employed. His inventions for the application of electricity to industry are too numerous to mention. He has made it a hewer of wood and a drawer of water and a general farm-hand, and has shown how it can be applied to the raising and ripening of fruits. He has shown us how gas can be made so that its "by-products" shall pay for its production, and demonstrated that a pound of gas yields, in burning, 22,000 units, being double that produced by the combustion of a pound of common coal. He has put the world in the way of making gas cheap and brilliant. His sudden death prevented the completion of plans by which London will save three-fourths of its coal bill by getting rid of its hideous fog. His suggestions will, undoubtedly, be carried out. He was also the inventor of the "chronometric governor," an apparatus which regulates the movements of the great transit instruments at Greenwich.

These are some of the practical benefits bestowed upon mankind by Sir William Siemens. He did much, by stimulating men, to make science practically useful, and has left suggestions which, if followed out with energy and wisdom, will add greatly to the comfort of the world. He calculated that "all the coal raised throughout the world would barely suffice to produce the amount of power that runs to waste at Niagara alone," and said that it would not be difficult to realize a large proportion of this wasted power by-turbines, and to use it at greater distances by means of dynamo-electrical machines. Myriads of future inhabitants of America are probably to reap untold wealth and comfort from what was said and done by Sir William Siemens.

PASTEUR.

M. Pasteur, now a member of the French Academy, after years of scientific training and study and teaching, began a career of public usefulness which has been a source of incalculable pecuniary profit to his country and to the world.

He began to study the nature of fermentation; and the result of this study made quite a revolution in the manufacture of wine and beer. He discovered a process which took its name from him; and now "pasteurization" is practiced on a large scale in the German breweries, to the great improvement of fermented beverages.

This attracted the attention of the French Government. At that time an unknown disease was destroying the silk-worm of France and Italy. It was so wide-spread as to threaten to destroy the silk manufacture in those countries. M. Pasteur was asked to investigate the cause. At that time he had scarcely ever seen a silk-worm; but he turned his acute, and practical intellect to the study of this little worker, and soon detected the trouble. He showed that it was due to a microscopic parasite, which was developed from a germ born with the worm; and he pointed out how to secure healthy eggs, and so rear healthy worms. He thus gave his countrymen the knowledge necessary to the saving of the French silk industry, and to a very large increase of the value of the annual productiveness of the country.

Of course, a man who had gone thus far could not stop. If he «could save the silk-worm, he might save larger animals. France was losing sheep and oxen at the rate of from fifteen to twenty millions annually. The services of M. Pasteur were again in demand. Again he discovered that the devastator was a microscopic destroyer. It was anthrax. The result of his experimenting was the discovery of an antidote, a method of prevention by inoculation with attenuated microbes. Similar studies and experiments and discoveries enabled him to furnish relief to the hog, at a time when the hog-cholera was making devastations. As he had discovered a preventive remedy for anthrax, he also found a remedy for chicken-cholera, to the saving of poultry to an incalculable extent.

Having thus contributed more to the material wealth of his country than any other living Frenchman, M. Pasteur naturally turned his discovery of the parasitic origin of disease toward human sufferers. A man of convictions and of faith, he has had the courage to ask the French minister of commerce to organize a scientific commission to go to Egypt to study the cholera there under his guidance.

M. Paul Best, who was M. Pasteur's early rival in scientific discussion, paid a generous tribute to his great ability and services, and declared that the discovery of the prevention of anthrax was the grandest and most fruitful of all French discoveries. M. Pasteur's native town, Dole, on the day of the national fete last year (1883), placed a commemorative tablet on the house in which he was born. The government's grant of a pension of $5,000 a year, to be continued to his widow and children, was made on the knowledge that if M. Pasteur had retained proprietary right in his discovery, he might have amassed a vast fortune; but he had freely given all to the public. According to an estimate made by Professor Huxley, the labors of M. Pasteur are equal in money value alone to the one thousand millions of dollars of indemnity paid by France to Germany in the late war. It is also to be remembered that M. Pasteur's labors imparted stimulus to discovery in many directions, setting many discoverers at work, who are now experimenting on the working hypothesis of the parasitic origin of all other infectious diseases.

Now here are three men, to whom the world is probably more indebted than to any other twenty men who have lived this century; indebted for health, wealth, comfort, and enjoyment; indebted in kitchen, chamber, drawing-room, counting-house; at home and abroad, by day and by night, for gratification of the bodily and aesthetic taste. They were the almoners of science. Practical men would have no tools to work with if they did not receive them from those who, in abstraction, wrought in the secluded heights of scientific investigation. It is base to be ungrateful to the studious recluses who are the devotees of science.

These three men were Christians--simple, honest, devout Christians. Faraday was a most "just and faithful knight of God," as Professor Tyndall says. Sir William Siemens, it is said, was a useful elder in the Presbyterian Church, and M. Pasteur, still living, is a reverent Roman Catholic. Surely, when we find these men walking a lofty height of science, higher than that occupied by any of their contemporaries, and when we find these men sending down more enriching gifts to the lowly sons of toil, and all the traders in the market places, and all seekers of pleasure in the world, than any other scientific men, we must be safe in the conclusion that to be an earnest Christian is not incompatible with the highest attainments in science; and we can not find fault with those who look with contempt upon the men who disdain Christianity, as if it were beneath them, when it is remembered that among the rejecters of our holy faith are no men to whom we have a right to be grateful for any discovery that has added a dollar to the world's exchequer, or a "ray to the brightness of the world's civilization."--DR. DEEMS, in the New York Independent.

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XXII.