MAGNETISM IN ITS RELATION TO INDUCED ELECTROMOTIVE FORCE AND CURRENT.[1]
[Footnote 1: A paper read before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, New York, May 22, 1889.]
There is perhaps no subject which at the present time can have a greater interest to the physicist, the electrician, and the electrical engineer than the one which heads this paper. The advances which have been made in the study from its purely theoretical or scientific side, and the great technical progress in the utilization of the known facts and principles concerning magnetic inductions, can but deepen and strengthen that interest.
On the side of pure theory we find the eager collection of experimental data to be submitted to the scrutiny of the ablest and brightest minds, to be examined and reasoned upon with the hope of finding some clew to satisfying explanations, and on the side of practice we find the search for new facts and relations no less diligent, though often stimulated by practical problems presented for solution. Indeed, the urgency for results is often the greater on the practical side, for theory can wait, practice cannot, at least in the United States.
We must look for continued triumphs in both directions, and the most welcome of all will be the framing of a theory or explanation which will enable us to interpret magnetic and electric phenomena. The recent beautiful experiments of Hertz on magnetic waves have opened a fertile region for investigation.
It would seem that the study of magnetism and electricity will give us the ability to investigate the ether of space, which medium has been theorized upon at great length, with the result of leaving it very much where it was before, a mysterious necessity.
"Such an action may be a function of the ether, for it is not at all unlikely that if there be an ether it should have other uses than simply the conveyance of radiations." 3,075. Vol. III., Exp. Res.
"It may be a vibration of the hypothetical ether, or a state of tension of that ether equivalent to either a dynamic or a static condition," etc. 3,263. Vol. III., Exp. Res.
Faraday again says, speaking of the magnetic power of a vacuum:
"What that surrounding magnetic medium deprived of all material substance may be I cannot tell, perhaps the ether." 3,277. Vol. III., Exp. Res.