It came into the house with the cat
on any dry day and crackled insinuatingly whenever he stroked her fur.
It rotted his metals when he put them together.... There is no single
record that any one questioned why the cat's fur crackles or why hair
is so unruly to brush on a frosty day, before the sixteenth century.
For endless years man seems to have done his very successful best not to
think about it at all; until this new spirit of the Seeker turned itself
to these things.
How often things must have been seen and dismissed as unimportant,
before the speculative eye and the moment of vision came! It was
Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth's court physician, who first puzzled his brains
with rubbed amber and bits of glass and silk and shellac, and so began
the quickening of the human mind to the existence of this universal
presence. And even then the science of electricity remained a mere
little group of curious facts for nearly two hundred years, connected
perhaps with magnetism--a mere guess that--perhaps with the lightning.
Frogs' legs must have hung by copper hooks from iron railings and
twitched upon countless occasions before Galvani saw them. Except
for the lightning conductor, it was 250 years after Gilbert before
electricity stepped out of the cabinet of scientific curiosities into
the life of the common man.
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