THE FUTURE OF ELECTRIC INVENTION.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XVI, Issue 238, 6 October 1881, Page 4

THE FUTURE OF ELECTRIC INVENTION.

Professor Perry, at the Society of Arts recently, painted a most alluring picture of the future of electricity. Telegraph?, telephones, photophones, photograph?, microphones, and electric ppns are the mere beginning of the scieu c, and will, by the time we are too old to use them, be regarded with ni K-b the same respectful interest that Stephenson's » Racket " i_ viewed hv a modern engineer, or Coster's "Spiegel ouzer BedhoudeniA' by a member'of the typographical union. By-and-by we .hail not only correspond, talk, send our portrait?, and •' manifold " by electricity, but have our houses lighted and •: a:i r-r-d, our railway trains and tram-cars p_v*po' ! *. 1, and our machinery drive:: by the s..*ne omnipotent agent. If need.-; .;_, every weaver's shuttle, every viUage blacksmith's bellows, evi-ry milliner's sowing-machine, and cv* rv •*v:v.;nc_.l baby's cradle will be j drive!!, blown, or roci.ed by lhat "Yrir power, of whose future development by the eomner race Mr Perry has almost as sanguine a hope as had Lord Lyrton after a less scientific fashion. Coa! gas, at which Sir V.'a.tor Scott jeered, ami for a belief iv which Dr Chalmers was con-itlered by his shrewd countrymen to be not' altogether " soond," is, we are told, doomed as a lighting agent. In a few years it will subside into the humble oflice of a generator of electricity Ly setting steam-engines j in motion, or by being consumed in a voltaic cell. Bm as powvr can be transmitted by electricity, there is, as Sir William Thompson once suggested, ! nothing to prevent us from importinf our force from America, just as at I present we import beef, wheat, "caned" peaches, and wooden nutmegs. In the fall- of Niagara there is energy enough to generate sufficient electricity to light and heat all London drive all the mac inery in Birmingham or Manchester, and send a score of flying Scotchmen with easy swiftness from one end of tho kingdom to the other. " Transmitted energy " will be consigned to us from tbe Amazon and the Arnoor, from the smoke-enveloped "foss" ofthe Hjommel Saka, or the tumbling water of the Trollhata. In the future we are to drive, build our houses, plough our fields and manure them, sail our yachts, propel our steamers and trains, print our books, and perhaps write them, by tbe aid of electricity. Men will then have subdued the forces of nature, and the lord of creation will relapse into manual idleness, or dream away life in one afternoon, until he dies of an overdose of electricity, and is buried in an eletric-dug grave, or cremated by a touch of his bereaved family's private "PerryAyrton" machine. That this and a great deal more will come to pass is evident to all wl o can read within the lines of Professor Perry's discourse Sydney Smith, who, like Southey, had a limited appreciation of se'ence, considered that "from electricity and M. P.'s we expected too much." In the Siemens electric railway the propelling force is alone sent with the cars, but not the machine for generating that force. A generator of electricity is driven by a large stationary engine somewhere in the vicinity of the railway. A motor on a carriage receives electric energy by the conducting rails, and converts this iuto mechanical work to drive the carriage. The introduction of electric railways is merely a question of capital and the sacrifice of mnch existing plant. But as soon as this is resolved on there will be economy effected for a- no heavy locomotives will be required, ihere will be saving in the! weight of steel rails, in the cost of! bridges, and in the wear and tear of' permanent way. And as each carriage will have its own driving and breaking machinery, the energy at present wasted in stopping a train "will be simply given back to the generator." The problem of lighting"and heating houses by electricity is practically solved. When people generally avail themselves of that solution smoke and soot and dirt will desert our murky atmosphere, while the same engine that warms the merchant's office will light his warehouse, enable him to correspond with his agent by word or letter, order dinner, synchronise his clocks, receive the portrait of a suspicious visitor to his country house, call the police, and blow the fog-horn wl ich is to warn off the rocks the crew of his homeward-bound ship. Nor need its use stop there. In time the advancement of electricity will penetrate even the darkness of the vestrie-. The citizen who tumbles into his electrically wtrmed bed with the snow a foot deep on the ground will wake up in themorning to toast his toes at the electric st' ye and see dry streets and the beadle trundling home the parish Framme. Already Edward Bright in ten minutes de-electrifies in a vacuum hi 3 hirsute bobbins of yarn, instead of, as formerly, allowing nature to do so in half a year — during which his capital must lie fallow in the factory. Sbelford Bidwell produces pictures of distant stationary objects in shaded lines on paper, by electro-chemical decomposition ; and Mr Perry, by taking a hint from Mr, Punch, is by no means certain that very soon an aged couple at home may not be able to see on their drawing-room wall an image of their grand-children playing B-dminton in India, and to learn from the telephone how they are enjoying the game. All this, of course, must seem to be in the far distance. Still, we must remember that science is moving rapidly, and every year sees fresh students and busy brains intent on improving the handiwork of tbeir predecessors. It seems like yesterday since Oersted was vainly endeavouring to explain to the Danish Queen Dow" ager, who died last week, the first glimmering of the electric telegraph. Yet the telephone already promises to supersede the telegraph. Men still living can remember Sir John Barrow warning his friend George Stephenson not to hurt a good cause by talking foolishly about being able to run a locomotive more than five miles an hour, or of carrying over " a few hundred " passengers in the course of a year. .But already coal-driven engines, are likely, within another fifty years, to be entirely eclipsed by electrical ones, jlt© chances sre that telegraphs will l>j

that time be as obsolete as are semaphores, beacon fires, and smoke signals and that the heliograph will be only examined at museums as an interesting step in the development of tbe photophone. The Bacons, Newtons, Boyles, Watts, Faradays, Oersteds, Joules, and Thomsons pointed the way to Stephenson, Cooke, Wheatstone, Gramme Edison, Graham, Bell, and Hughes. The wonders of to-day may be only the curiosities of the future. Photography is, for instance, so familiar to us that when tho actual discoverer of that wonderful art pass:d away, four years ago, his death was barely roticed, simply because few could imagine that a discovery, seeming so old, had been the work of men of our generation. Posterity, wbich has done noihin«- f or us is to rece've a mighty legacy, which it will be expected to transmit without decease to the generations vet unborn. Theirs will be a happy lot, andonemight well wish to live long enough to witness the wonderful century of which some of us may see the dawn, but tbe end of which none of us can survive. Yet tbe men of those days may, after all, be a thought-racked, careworn race. They may be saved much manual toil, though before they cau regulate all their mechanical appliances they will be a people of short lives and weary brains. But perhaps by tbat time in electricity will be found the alchemist's elixir of life, or '^those fountains of perpetual youth for which Ponce Se Leon sought in .am. — London Standard.