Note 142 — Chapter IX

Faraday’s Experimental Researches on Electricity. This philosopher has shown, by the most conclusive experiments, “that the electricity which decomposes, and that which is evolved by the decomposition of, a certain quantity of matter, are alike. What an enormous quantity of electricity, therefore, is required for the decomposition of a single grain of water! We have already seen that it must be in quantity sufficient to sustain a platinum wire 1/104 of an inch in thickness, red hot, in contact with the air, for three minutes and three quarters. It would appear that 800,000 charges of a Leyden battery, charged by thirty turns of a very large and powerful plate machine, in full action—a quantity sufficient, if passed at once through the head of a rat or cat, to have killed it as by a flash of lightning—are necessary to supply electricity sufficient to decompose a single grain of water; or, if I am right, to equal the quantity of electricity which is naturally associated with the elements of that grain of water, endowing them with their mutual chemical affinity.”