When a builder wants to make an old house over into a new one he takes it apart brick by brick and stone by stone, then he puts them together in such new fashion as he likes.  The electric furnace enables the chemist to take his materials apart in the same way.  As the temperature rises the chemical and physical forces that hold a body together gradually weaken.  First the solid loosens up and becomes a liquid, then this breaks bonds and becomes a gas.  Compounds break up into their elements.  The elemental molecules break up into their component atoms and finally these begin to throw off corpuscles of negative electricity eighteen hundred times smaller than the smallest atom.  These electrons appear to be the building stones of the universe.  No indication of any smaller units has been discovered, although we need not assume that in the electron science has delivered, what has been called, its “ultim-atom.”  The Greeks called the elemental particles of matter “atoms” because they esteemed them “indivisible,” but now in the light of the X-ray we can witness the disintegration of the atom into electrons.  All the chemical and physical properties of matter, except perhaps weight, seem to depend upon the number and movement of the negative and positive electrons and by their rearrangement one element may be transformed into another.

So the electric furnace, where the highest attainable temperature is combined with the divisive and directive force of the current, is a magical machine for accomplishment of the metamorphoses desired by the creative chemist.  A hundred years ago Davy, by dipping the poles of his battery into melted soda lye, saw forming on one of them a shining globule like quicksilver.  It was the metal sodium, never before seen by man.  Nowadays this process of electrolysis (electric loosening) is carried out daily by the ton at Niagara.

The reverse process, electro-synthesis (electric combining), is equally simple and even more important.  By passing a strong electric current through a mixture of lime and coke the metal calcium disengages itself from the oxygen of the lime and attaches itself to the carbon.  Or, to put it briefly,

CaO  +  3C   —­>   CaC_{2} + CO
lime   coke       calcium    carbon
carbide    monoxide

This reaction is of peculiar importance because it bridges the gulf between the organic and inorganic worlds.  It was formerly supposed that the substances found in plants and animals, mostly complex compounds of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, could only be produced by “vital forces.”  If this were true it meant that chemistry was limited to the mineral kingdom and to the extraction of such carbon compounds as happened to exist ready formed in the vegetable and animal kingdoms.  But fortunately this barrier to human achievement proved purely illusory.  The organic field, once man had broken into it, proved easier to work in than the inorganic.