In thousands of ways to-day this magnetic power is utilized.
You can buy strawberries in baskets very cheap, partly because
the baskets cost very little for labor. The man who tacks them
together uses a magnetized tack hammer. This magnetic tack
hammer picks up the tacks of its own accord, and the man drives
them in the basket as fast as he can touch the magnet to the
heads of the tacks and strike the basket.
In the great steel works where armor plate is made powerful
magnets are used to carry the hot plates from one place to
another. The magnet lifts up the hot, soft metal without denting
it or damaging it and drops it down where it is wanted. The
power which moves trolley cars through the streets is nothing in
reality but an application of the force of the magnetic
principle. ----
That the earth itself is a great magnet cannot be questioned.
And there is no doubt that each of us human beings is a compound
magnet on his own account, depending for his welfare on magnetic
force.
The millions of red corpuscles in the blood, each with its
infinitesimal particles of iron, absorb in the lungs and
distribute throughout the body the electric forces on which we
depend, and with which we do our work.
When you read of men and women dealing in a blundering kind of a
way with abstract, abstruse speculations and problems, do not
laugh at them too heartily.
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