THE PARIS ELECTRICAL EXHIBITION.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3270, 24 December 1881, Page 4

THE PARIS ELECTRICAL EXHIBITION.

M. Jules Bourdin, late student of the Polytechnic School of Peris, and a member of the Syndical Chamber of Electricity, says of the above-named exhibition, in the course of an article in the current number of tbe *' Journal Usines a Gaz," that " there is no lack of persons who think that electricity is destined to dethrone gas, just as the latter has dethroned oil and candles. This manner of grasping the progress made in the industry of lighting does not appear to be quite according to facts, and it is necessary to at first disabuse the reader of a hypothesis which it is easy to perceive has no foundation. Gas has been substituted for oil and candles in every instance where its uso has been found to better answer tho requirements of public or private lighting ; but there have never been more oil and candles consumed than since the introduction of gas. So will electricity, without doubt, replace gas in places where it offers advantages as regards quantity, or quality, or in reducing the co3t of the light. Far from expecting a diminution, one ought to be fully convinced that the extended use of electricity will of itself have, as a sequence, an immediate increase in the consumption of gas, which, in most cases, combines at a cheap rate —taking into consideration its valuable property of being, at one and the same time, a source of light, heat, and motive power. Gas companies can therefore look the results of the International Exhibition of Electricity calmly in the face. They will, no doubt, find there numerous subjects of shidy; but as far as the actual state the ' science of electricity ' is in, I think that all fears which the variety of apparatus brought together at tho Palais de l'lndustrie is likely to produce are premature." M. Bourdin justifies this conclusion by passing in review first of all the various electric currents producing the luminous phenomena; then he explains tho most interesting machines producing theso electric currents j and, lastly, he compares, as regards actual cost, the unit of light produced by ga3 and by electricity. After describing the various appliances, he concludes thus : My opinion, for the time being, is that the quantity of coal which 13 required to supply the power for the electric apparatus at the exhibition would more than suffice for the production of an equal quantity of light obtained by the direct consumption of gas ; and thi3 i 3 besides confirmed by the new theories in physics, of which I will give a resume at the end of my detailed examination of the things shown, without taken up any side."