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Updated: July 13, 2025
For in this case there would occur, at a certain point in the nexus of phenomena, a piece of work done, however small it might be, for which there was no equivalent of energy in the previous constitution. But this is, since the days of Helmholtz, an impossible assumption.
So remarkable a coincidence as that which the moon's motion shows could not reasonably be explained as a mere fortuitous circumstance; nor need we hesitate to admit that a physical explanation is required when we find a most satisfactory one ready for our acceptance, as was originally pointed out by Helmholtz.
To make such measurement had been regarded as impossible, it being supposed that the flight of the nervous impulse was practically instantaneous. But Helmholtz readily demonstrated the contrary, showing that the nerve cord is a relatively sluggish message-bearer. According to his experiments, first performed upon the frog, the nervous "current" travels less than one hundred feet per second.
Helmholtz had performed this experiment simply to demonstrate the physical basis of sound, and seems to have had no idea of its possible use in telephony. That an electro-magnet could vibrate a tuning-fork and so produce sound was an entirely new and fascinating idea to the youth. It appealed to his imagination, quickened by his knowledge of speech.
You will find in the "Annual of Scientific Discovery" for 1858 a very interesting lecture by Professor Helmholtz of Bonn, in which it is maintained that a certain portion of force is lost in every natural process, being converted into unchangeable heat, so that the universe will come to a stand-still at last, all force passing into heat, and all heat into a state of equilibrium.
He brought Bell to his house and showed him what Helmholtz had done how he had kept tuning-forks in vibration by the power of electro-magnets, and blended the tones of several tuning-forks together to produce the complex quality of the human voice. Now, Helmholtz had not been trying to invent a telephone, nor any sort of message-carrier.
This opinion of the great German chemist was in a measure substantiated by experiments of his compatriot Helmholtz, whose earlier experiments confirmed, but later ones contradicted, the observations of Schwann, and this combined authority gave the vitalistic conception a blow from which it had not rallied at the time when Pasteur entered the field.
But if the principle thus enunciated by Helmholtz as a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics is at bottom identical with that discovered by Gibbs, it is more difficult of application and is presented under a more mysterious aspect.
It is quite true, as Helmholtz says, that Young was in advance of his age; but something is to be added which illustrates the responsibility of our public writers.
By so doing he prepared the way for the subsequent researches of Faraday and Clerk-Maxwell into the properties of electricity and magnetism, and for the investigations by Helmholtz and others into the connexion between electric attraction and chemical affinities.
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