Cantor Lectures on the Electromagnet (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Cantor Lectures on the Electromagnet

Other electro-mechanical contrivances, come within the purview of the electrical engineer. In every one of these, and in many more of the useful applications of electricity, the central organ is an electromagnet. By means of this simple and familiar contrivance - an iron core surrounded by a copper-wire coil - mechanical ao tions are produced at will, at a distance, under control, by the agency of electric currents. These mechanical actions are known to vary with the mass, form, and quality of the iron core, the quantity and disposition of the copper wire wound upon it, the quantity of electric current circulating around it, the form, quality, and distance of the iron armature upon which it acts. But the laws which govern the mechanical action in re lation to these various matters are by no means well known, and, indeed, several of them have long been a matter of dispute. Gradually, however, that which has been vague and indeterminate becomes clear and pre cise. The laws of the steady circulation of electric cur rents, atone time altogether obscure, were cleared up by the discovery of the famous law of Ohm. Their ex tension to the case of rapidly interrupted currents, such as are used in telegraphic working, was discovered by Helmholtz; while to Maxwell is due their future exten sion to alternating, or, as they are sometimes called, undulatory currents. All this was purely electric work. But the law of the electromagnet was still undiscovered; the magnetic part of the problem was still buried in obscurity. The only exact reasoning about magnetism dealt with problems of another kind; it was couched in language of a misleading character for the practical.

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