Improvement Era, Vol. 7

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Excerpt from Improvement Era, Vol. 7: December, 1903 Of equal value as a fundamental principle of nature with the law of the persistence of matter is the law of the Persistence of Force or Energy. A great variety of forces exist in nature. As, for instance, gravitation, electricity, chemical affinity, heat and light. These forces may all be made to do work, and energy, in fact, may be defined as the power of doing work. In early days these forces were supposed to be distinct and not convertible, one into the other, just as gold and silver, with our present knowledge, are dis tinct and not convertible into other elements. As will be shown in the fourth paper of this series, students of light and heat began to demonstrate in the early part of the nineteenth century, that these two natural forces were different manifestations of one universal medium. This in turn led to the thought that possibly these forces, instead of being absolutely dis tinct, could be converted one into the other. This idea was con firmed ih various experimental ways. Sir Humphrey Davey, about the end of the eighteenth century, rubbed together two pieces of ice until they were nearly melted. Precautions had been taken that no heat could be abstracted from the outside by the ice. The only tenable conclusion was that the energy expended in rubbing, had been converted into heat, which had melted the ice. About the same time Count Rumford, the distinguished American, was superintending the boring of a cannon at the arsenal at Munich, and was forcibly struck with the heating of the iron due to this process. He, like Davy, believed that the energy of the boring instruments had been converted into the heat. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.