File:A history of electricity - the intellectual rise in electricity from antiquity to the days of Benjamin Franklin (1898) (14578192179).jpg

Identifier: historyofelectri00benj (find matches)
Title: A history of electricity : the intellectual rise in electricity from antiquity to the days of Benjamin Franklin
Year: 1898 (1890s)
Authors: Benjamin, Park, 1849-1922
Subjects: Electricity Magnetism
Publisher: New York : J. Wiley & Sons
Contributing Library: Harold B. Lee Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Brigham Young University

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and and all the princes sitting in the Diet atRatisbon that thirty horses, (fifteen attached to each hemi-sphere, and the two huge teams tugging in opposite direc-tions), could not pull them apart? Verily, he was a won-derful wizard—the Herr Burgomaster. The Magdeburgerssaid that he had a devils contrivance which told him whenthe storms were coming, and that while his prophecieswere always right it was dangerous to live near him—forthe thunder one day fell on his house and broke a lot ofhis infernal toys, and heaven might serve him worse nexttime for tampering with the spirits of the air, which heshut up and tortured in his tubes and globes.^ But the Burgomaster knew his Magdeburgers and theyhim, and there was little danger that the fellow-officialswith whom he dined and smoked and joked would halehim before their courts for sorcery. Besides, he was coun-cillor to his most serene and potent Highness, the Elector ^Monconys: Voyages. Lyons, 1665.2 Phil. Trans. Abridgt, vol. ii., 29.
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OTTO VON GUERICKE. 389 of Brandenburg, and he had other titles bespeaking greatconsideration. But, at the present time, a couple of cen-turies later, the moths have eaten all these dignities andwe know Otto von Guericke best as one of the first andgreatest of the electrical discoverers. Now, we have to find out what Monconys saw. Otto von Guericke was Burgomaster of Magdeburg forthirty-five years. He was a many sided man. He hadstudied law at I^eipsic, Helmstadt and Jena, and mathe-matics at Leyden, and had travelled through France andEngland. He had established himself as an engineer atErfurt, when the attractions of an official career provedmore potent than those of his profession, and he enteredpolitical life in 1627 ^^ ^^ alderman of his native town.But he could not divorce himself from his interest in phy-sical science; and so, throughout his long public service,he made work in his laboratory his relaxation and hisplay: just as President Jefferson found pleasure in experi-menting

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