Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE MODE OF SOLAR ENERGY. But is there such an available force ? There is one, and only one,—electricity, when properly generated and suitably applied. It is an axiom of electrical science that any fluid which will at all conduct a current of electricity can be decomposed by a current of electricity. (See Urbanitsky's work, " Electricity in the Service of Man," Cassell's edition, page 154.) It is there stated (page 152), " We have frequently had occasion to mention certain chemical effects of electricity,—namely, the decomposition of gaseous compounds into simple gases." Page 157, " Whatever the substances we expose to the action of the galvanic current, decomposition takes place proportional to the strength of the current." Page 152, " Hydrogen is always evolved at the negative pole of the battery and oxygen at the positive pole. The gases can then be collected in different tubes, the hydrogen tube receiving twice as much gas as the oxygen tube; since water consists of two volumes of hydrogen and one volume of oxygen, it follows that the galvanic current decomposes water into its constituents. As chemically pure water has so great a resistance as almost to force us to consider it a nonconductor, it is generally acidulated with -sulphuric acid. The smallest amount of acid diminishes the resistance considerably. The silent discharge is far more effective in bringing about this transformation than the spark discharge." Page 37, " Gases are bad conductors of electricity; if it had been otherwise, we should never have become acquainted with electricity, as it would have been conducted away by the air as fast as it was generated. The vacuum also does not conduct electricity, but moist air becomes a partial conductor. Moist air also will spoil the insulation of non-co...