The examination of the phenomena of electrolysis had, in fact, led to results of the highest importance on the constitution of liquids, and the gaseous media which presented themselves as particularly simple in all their properties ought, it would seem, to have supplied from the very first a field of investigation easy to work and highly productive.
This, however, was not at all the case.

Experimental complications springing up at every step obscured the problem.

One generally found one's self in the presence of violent disruptive discharges with a train of accessory phenomena, due, for instance, to the use of metallic electrodes, and made evident by the complex appearance of aigrettes and effluves; or else one had to deal with heated gases difficult to handle, which were confined in receptacles whose walls played a troublesome part and succeeded in veiling the simplicity of the fundamental facts.

Notwithstanding, therefore, the efforts of a great number of seekers, no general idea disengaged itself out of a mass of often contradictory information.
Many physicists, in France particularly, discarded the study of questions which seemed so confused, and it must even be frankly acknowledged that some among them had a really unfounded distrust of certain results which should have been considered proved, but which had the misfortune to be in contradiction with the theories in current use.

All the classic ideas relating to electrical phenomena led to the consideration that there existed a perfect symmetry between the two electricities, positive and negative.