Word: magnetized
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Instead of using cosmic rays or esoteric mathematics for his demonstrations, Professor Ehrenhaft impressed the gathered physicists with little experiments a man can do on his desk with a glass of water, a magnet or two, a compass, some acid and some electric wires...
...acidified water a piece of soft iron sends up bubbles of hydrogen (the metal reacts with the dilute acid and hydrogen is given off). But when the submerged bar was magnetized, Professor Ehrenhaft found oxygen as well as hydrogen bubbles. The only place the oxygen could come from was the water. It seemed that the water decomposed under the influence of the magnet just as water does when an electric current runs through an electrolytic solution. Professor Ehrenhaft argued from this that as no electric current was involved in the experiment, a magnetic current must have done the trick...
When the gas coming from each end of the magnet was analyzed, that from the north pole was found to contain the most oxygen. Professor Ehrenhaft thinks that oxygen "bears a magnetic charge" like the north pole and was therefore repelled. He calls such charged particles "magnetic ions," compares them to electric ions...
Alexander Graham Bell came to the Cooper house to show old Peter Cooper his telephone. The Hewitt boys studied it, cut out a wooden earpiece, made coils and a magnet, got a piece of black enameled iron from a tintype photographer for a diaphragm, and ran wires to the bed of their brother Erskine, who had scarlet fever, found they could talk to him without breaking quarantine. The doctor was astonished. Thomas Edison demonstrated his talking machine to Peter Cooper, and the boys copied that too. They used their telephone diaphragm and the cook's rolling pin, which they...
...ought to be made for at least 55,000,000 workers. . . . The least hopeful aspect of our future is that amateurs are likely to be tinkering with our economic machinery. . . . It should be kept in mind that generous, even fabulous, rewards for those at the top are as a magnet that all along has been exerting an upward pull. . . . After all, what you find in a pay envelope is profit and most of the people I have known in my life have been constantly trying to get a fatter pay envelope...