THE

AMERICAN

JOURNAL OF SCIENCE AND ARTS.

[SECOND SERIES.]

ART. I.-Charles Grafton Page.

Prof. CHARLES GRAFTON PAGE, whose death at his residence in Washington, D. C., was announced in the last July number of this Journal, was born in Salem, Mass., on the 25th day of January, 1812. He was prepared for College in the Grammar School at Salem, and entered Harvard University in 1828, graduating in 1832. He studied medicine at the medical school in Boston, and in the year 1838, he removed with his parents into Virginia, pursuing there the practice of his profession. About the year 1841, he was appointed one of the Principal Examiners in the United States Patent office. that time there was but one other Principal Examiner, and the office was one of great responsibility, since upon the Principal Examiner alone generally depended the decision of all applications for patents in the classes of inventions under his charge.

In 1844, he was elected Professor of Chemistry, in the Medical Department of Columbian College, D. C., but in 1849, he resigned his professorship on account of the pressure of his duties in the Patent Office. In the year 1852, he retired from the Patent Office for the purpose of devoting himself to the effort in which he was then engaged to introduce electro-magnetism as a motive power. This enterprise having been relinquished with the failure of means to extend his experiments, he associated himself with Messrs. J. J. Greenough and Charles L. Fleischman in the publication of the American Polytechnic Journal, which commenced with the beginning of the year

AM. JOUR. SCI.-SECOND SERIES, VOL. XLVIII, No. 142.—JULY, 1869.

1853. After the discontinuance of that Journal with the close of the year 1854, Prof. Page does not appear in any public capacity until the year 1861, when he again entered the Patent Office as Examiner of Patents, a position which he held for the remainder of his life.

Prof. Page is best known to the scientific world as an electrician. We have learned, moreover, "from his mother and other near friends that he evinced a most remarkable fondness for natural science in all its branches at a very early age. Once when about nine years old he was missing during a severe thunder storm, and on being sought by his anxious friends he was found on the top of the house, holding up at arm's length a fire shovel to see if he could not catch a shock of electricity from the surcharged cloud!" It has been related also by his early friends that at ten years of age, having begged a lamp glass of his mother, he in due time surprised her with a successful electric machine made by himself. Entomology received a portion of his attention while a school boy, and he had a passion for botany and floriculture and indulged in it to the extent of his ability. Respecting his school and college life we extract the following from a communication of Dr. Henry Wheatland, President of the Essex Institute, of Salem, Mass. "My acquaintance with C. G. Page commenced when we were classmates in the Salem Latin School. At that time he had the reputation of being interested in electricity, having made or was making an electric machine. ***** The same taste followed him in his college course. In our junior year several of us, including Page, organized a chemical club. Each of the members was expected to lecture in alphabetical order. Page lectured on electricity, the air pump, &c. At this time he had a large collection of apparatus for a student, an electrical machine, air pump, &c. Several of us were also interested in natural history, as botany, mineralogy, insects, &c. Page was also enrolled in our number. After leaving college, whilst a medical student, he carried his investigations still further, taking up voltaism and constructing batteries of different kinds, culminating in his extensive researches in 1836, or thereabouts, which resulted in producing motion by the magnetic power. During his medical studies he delivered a course of lectures in chemistry to a class in the Lyceum Hall. Page during his school and college days, was always full of fun and frolic and took a lively interest in all boyish occupations. He was a leader among the gymnasts, a famous skater, a good singer, a loved companion, and a very great favorite * Prof. Page, in the American Polytechnic Journal, vol. i, p. 6, attributes the invention of the first electro-magnetic engine to Prof. Henry.—L.

with all." To this, Gen. H. K. Oliver, of Salem, his early instructor and friend, adds, "I myself remember seeing during Prof. Page's residence here-at his office-a miniature railway, an elliptic curve of about twelve feet long and six wide, around which travelled a miniature magnetic engine drawing at high speed a miniature car."

The zeal and activity in the pursuit of electrical science and experiment, which marked especially these few years that he resided in Salem, after completing the study of his profession, are evidenced by his numerous contributions to this Journal about that time. He had much fertility of invention, and delighted in mechanical contrivances for the practical application and for the interesting illustration, of the laws of electric and electro-magnetic action. He was not only a skillful experimenter, well versed in the theory of electricity, but was also a ready and spirited writer, and his published papers must have contributed greatly to extend the knowledge of, and excite an interest in, electrical science. The writer of this notice can certainly testify to his own obligations to him in this respect. In the year 1836, he made a valuable series of experiments, published in the 31st volume, 1st series of this Journal, upon the induction of electric currents, following up the previous discoveries of Prof. Faraday and Prof. Henry on that subject. Prof. Henry (this Journal, 1st series, vol. xxviii, p. 328) had obtained sparks and shocks from the "Calorimotor" by means of the induction of the current upon itself in a long copper riband wound into a close flat spiral, after having been wrapped with an insulating covering. Prof. Page repeated and varied these experiments with a spiral riband an inch wide and 220 feet long, and made the important step of augmenting the intensity of the shock by means of a reduced length of battery circuit in conjunction with a greater length of induction circuit, the induction circuit being, of course, in part or in whole exterior to the battery circuit. Among other forms of experiment detailed in the paper alluded to, he obtained the shock from a part of the spiral entirely external to the part in the battery circuit, which is in conformity with Faraday's elementary observation of. the induction of a current upon a neighboring conductor, but he ascertained that the greatest shock was obtained, with that helix and the battery of a single pair used, when the whole length of the spiral was included in the induction circuit, and a fraction only of its length in the battery circuit. He did not offer any theory in explanation of this result, but at this day, when the laws of the voltaic circuit have become not only known but familiar, and since the laws of induction have become better under

stood than they were at the time of which we speak, especially from the extensive series of investigations made by Prof. Henry about two years afterward, it is easy to see that after a given volume of conducting metal has been filled (so to speak) with a current by an amount of battery surface proportional to the volume of metal, the effectiveness of the resistance of a break in the circuit in the rapidity with which it destroys the current, is measurably proportional to the smallness of the number of plates into which the battery surface is divided in series, with the volume of metal disposed in a length suitable thereto, and that the intensity of the shock from the induction circuit, the length of the latter remaining unchanged, will in this way be increased by reducing the length and intensity of the battery circuit. Or, to state the same otherwise, if the spark formed by a break in the induction circuit is to be of greater length (resistance) than the short spark formed by the break in the battery circuit, the length of the induction circuit must be in like ratio greater than that of the battery circuit; and it is in this point of view that Prof. Page himself has stated the primary characteristic principle upon which the voltaic induction coils depend for their effects. The step made by him in 1836, as above mentioned, was, so far as we are aware, the first step made in this direction. An account of it was carried to Europe by the late Francis Peabody of Salem, and communicated, rather imperfectly, to the English philosopher Sturgeon, in advance of its publication here. This communication would appear, by Sturgeon's account, to have given the first impulse to a quite extensive series of experiments made by the latter, and, within a year from the time of his interview with Peabody, he constructed an induction coil, described in the Annals of Electricity for Oct., 1837, vol. i, p. 477, in which the battery circuit consisted of an inner helix of rather thick bell wire 260 feet long, and the induction circuit of an outer helix of 1300 feet of very thin wire. This he used sometimes with, and sometimes without, an iron core in the common axis of the two helices, and obtained strong shocks in either case. In the meantime, however, Prof. Callan of Maynooth College, Ireland, had been making experiments on an extensive scale, and had carried the multiplication of the length of the induction circuit, as compared with that of the battery circuit, to a much greater extent than was done in the coil of Sturgeon, just noticed, and his results had been published in Sturgeon's Annals. But in his experiments he used the induction of very large solid masses of iron, and by overlooking the interference of the electric currents that must be induced in the solid metallic mass of the electro-magnet, he was prevented from dis