ELECTRIC LIGHTING.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 8734, 21 February 1890, Page 4

ELECTRIC LIGHTING.

According to the latest intelligence from New York (says Money) public electric lighting has utterly collapsed in that city. We cannot wonder at it. The number of fires and fatalities caused by contact with the wires conveying the electric current has naturally produced a feeling of general consternation. Hardly a day lately lias passed without the recurrence of some mishap calamitous to life or property. The city government, spurred on by public opinion," recently decided to deal with the wires for the street lights as a public nuisance, and although the companies succeeded in arresting active interference for a few days by means of an injuuction, the withdrawal of that injunction, as a matter of public Bafety, enabled the municipal officials to take sweeping measures for the destruction of the danger-fraught and obnoxious wires. The removal of these sources of grave danger began some fortnight ago, and has been going on briskly ever since. Miles upon miles of wire have been ruthlessly chopped down. The citizens of New York have preferred even the disadvantage of no lighting at all to the peril of overhead wires. A cablegram on the 20th inst. was to the following effect:—"The | electric light companies here are practically going out of business, and preparations are being rapidly made to light the city with gas again. The Brush Company has discharged all its men, numbering about 500. The wires are being cut and the poles taken down by the city government every day, and at night compaiative darkness reigns. A small fire was started by an electric wire in Barclay street yesterday. High or low currents seem to make no difference in the danger, and the whole idea of electric street lighting has become obnoxious." It is not, however, only with regard to overhead wires that the objection on the score of danger is raised. There is an equal, if not even a greater, share of risk attending underground wires. Another cablegram from New York, dated the 22nd inst., reads as follows :— " Explosions in the subways designed to carry the electric wires underground are becoming alarmingly numerous. The cause is supposed to be the filtering in of gas from leaky mains., which i 3 exploded by a causual spark coming sometimes from electricity, Last night without the least warning a considerable length of pavement, amounting to several tons weight, rose many feet in the air amid a geyser of flame, Many pedestrians bad their clothes and their persons injured by the subsequent fall of the debris." With the Scylla of overhead wires facing them on the one hand and the Charybdis of the underground currents on the other, electric light apostles must find themselves in a pretty awkward fix. We can easily understand, as the cable further informs us, that " experts having testified that no insulation can permanently and infallibly confine electricity under a high tension, the gas interests are elated, and the public bewildered between a dislike of gloomy nights and a fear of a sudden and mysterious death." ' .