Cornell Congress

Present day industrial civilization was born with the electric generator. England's great, famed Michael Faraday, nearly 100 years ago made this epochal discovery. Until last week, however, few in the U. S. knew precisely how he did it.

When the American Physical Society met last week at Cornell University (Ithaca, N. Y.) they were read momentous pages from Faraday's unpublished diary. The reader: Sir William Bragg, onetime Nobel Prizeman, England's foremost living physicist, who owns the diary.*

Century ago most people considered electricity the product of the sorcerer's fancy. Formulae, which today are the property of most high school students. were the choice possessions of a handful of scholars.

Michael Faraday set to work in the field of electricity not as a dilettante but as a common laborer. He had to discover almost everything that he wanted to know. Of his greatest discovery, which ultimately resulted in the electric generator, he wrote: ". . . had an iron ring made. . . . Wound it with many coils of copper wire, one-half of them being separated by twine and calico. When all was ready . . . the battery was communicated with [the end of one coil]. . . . The helix strongly attracted the needle of [a galvanometre]."

A later notation tells of, "putting the apparatus over the poles of a bar magnet and [found] it easy to affect the galvanometre." Conclusion drawn: "This must show that as long as the wheel moves electricity is evolved. . . . Must consider 'this more presently. Probably build a machine."

His discovery was, of course, that by breaking lines of force in a magnetic field he had made electricity from mechanical power.

This was probably the greatest work of Physicist Faraday. Greatest contribution of Metaphysician Faraday was his concept that all physical phenomena are interrelated. Of this, he wrote in his diary:

"I have been arranging certain experiments in reference to the notion that gravity . . . may be related . . . to the other powers of matter and proceeded this morning to make them. . . . It was almost with a feeling of awe that I went to work, for if the hope should prove well founded . . . how large may be the new domain of knowledge opened up to the mind of man."

It fell to Albert Einstein, in the next century, to realize this hope of Faraday's.

Chemists. While the physicists were in session, members of the American Chemical Society and the National Research Council gathered in other Cornell halls for a colloidal symposium./- Cornell's Dr. G. H. Richter read one of the more important papers, on the chemistry of unconsciousness. Excerpts:

"We have come to believe that . . . narcosis [unconsciousness] . . . is due to reversible coagulation of the cells. If you coagulate materials in cells by heat, for example, when the room is hot, you go to sleep."

This process probably takes place in nerve fibres, causes them to look like tiny white eggs. When the process is reversed the "eggs" disband, the person awakens. This process is responsible for normal as well as drug-induced sleep.

Probably the first anesthetic was that employed by the Egyptians. A block was fitted snugly over the patient's head and struck a sharp blow with a mallet. This was not too satisfactory for patients often had their skulls fractured, died. Reason: coagulation had gone too far to be reversed.

*It will be published in the U. S. next summer.

/-Colloid: a fine substance consisting either of single large molecules or aggregations of smaller molecules (examples: jelly, soap, bread, living cells).

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