The effects of such
confusion make themselves still further felt in the reading of foreign
publications. Thus, for example, in Germany that part of a dynamo
electric machine that is called in France the _induit_ (armature) is
sometimes styled _anker_, and more rarely _armatur_. The _north pole_ of
a freely suspended magnetized needle is the one that points toward the
geographical north of the earth. In France, and by some English authors,
this pole is called the _south_ one. Among electricians of the same
country, what by one is called _electro-motive force_ is by another
styled _difference of potential_, by a third _tension_, and even
_difference of tension_.
Our confrere Ruhlmann, of the _Elektrotechnische Zeitschrift_, gives a
still more remarkable example yet of such confusion. The word
_polarization_, borrowed from optics, where it has an unequivocal sense,
serves likewise to designate the development of the counter
electro-motive force of galvanic elements, and also that essentially
different condition of badly conducting substances that is brought about
by the simultaneous influence of quantities of opposite electricity.
In Germany, the word _induction_, coupled with the word _wire_, for
example, according to the formation of compound words in that language,
may also have a double meaning, and it is by the sense alone of the
phrase that we learn whether we have to do with an induced wire or an
inducting one.
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