"FOR ONE WORD A MAN IS OFTEN DEEMED TO BE WISE, AND HAWKINS' A CYCLOPEDIA OF WORDS, TERMS, BY N. HAWKINS, M. E. AND ASSOCIATES INCLUDING THE STANDARDIZATION 141529 MAY 7 1910 6968954 66 GIVE INSTRUCTION TO A WISE MAN, AND HE WILL BE YET WISER, TEACH A JUST MAN AND HE WILL INCREASE IN LEARNING."-Proverbs. TNB AUTHOR'S FOREWORD. Total and sudden transformations of a language seldom happen, says Samuel Johnson, author of the first practical and comprehensive dictionary defining English words. But, he says, there are causes which, though slow in their operation and invisible in their progress, are perhaps as much superior to human resistance as the revolutions of the sky. By the cultivation of various sciences, language is amplified. Thus, the words and terms relating to electricity have, in the course of about fifty years, come to be a part of a language which has been growing and expanding for a thousand years. Electrical terms differ widely from words which have grown out of one's daily life and which are seen and used so often that one becomes familiar with their meaning almost without effort. The incorporation of these new electrical terms in the old, to use a scriptural phrase, is like putting new wine in old vessels, albeit the new words have been and are being coined by highly educated scientific men to express some process, result or phenomenon which has been discovered only by months or years of careful and laborious experiment in the new field. Many of these words, such as erg and dyne, for instance, are seldom seen by the general reader, hence the necessity for a work like the present one which shall explain in simple language many of these terms which are of such recent origin that the literary dictionaries treat them inadequately or do not mention them. at all. George Herbert says, step after step the ladder is ascended, and so have the definitions and meanings of electrical words made their way until now it has seemed to the author that the time has arrived when a work embracing a description of the elements and practical applications of this new industrial agent, wide in its extent and minute in its application, can be advantageously presented. vii While a great part of the contents of the dictionary is written for engineers and managers of electrical properties, much of its matter will be found to be of genuine interest to the intelligent public. For instance, the meanings which grow out of the use of such words as the electric light, the motor, the telephone, the dynamo, telegraphy, electric traction, lighting and heating, electric metallurgy, the central station, etc. In the use of these words there is a wealth of theory given, as well as of practice. Every phrase given contains the germ of more or less enlarged technical discussion; as a sailor would express it, each word is the end of a rope, which pulled out to its extreme length leads to a beneficial educational end. For more than kind co-operation in the arduous task incident to the completion of this work the author desires to name specially EDWARD F. STEVENS, B. A., formerly Head of the Technical Reference Department, Pratt Institute Library, for his co-operation and efforts from the inception of this work to its completion, involving extensive research through the entire field of electrical science, also FRANK DUNCAN GRAHAM, B. S., M. S. (Princeton University, 1899, 1902), and M. E. (Stevens Institute, 1902.) The author's thanks are extended to JOHN HARMS, M. E. (Leyden University), who pending his work on this book received an appointment as chief engineer in laying out the hydro-electric power plant at Rio Janeiro. Credit is also due to MR. VICTOR HAWKINS for untiring industry in word selection and in the general make-up of the volume. Following in order, the author names CHARLES E. BOOTH, and R. SPRING for skillful work in the preparation and revision of author's manuscript, also to MR. HARRY HARRISON and MR. SAMUEL B. ASCHER of the L. MIDDLEDITCH PRESS. The inclusion of a considerable number of mechanical terms requires no apology when one realizes that electrical science is only the highly specialized development of one branch of mechanical engineering. N. HAWKINS. viii |