What Electricity is Doing for Us

The Mysterious Force Is Revolutionizing Human Effort.

COOKING WITH A CURRENT

No Waste of Fuel or Unpleasant Heat in the Kitchen of the Future.

DANGER TO LIFE IS PAST

It Is Now Possible to Make a Powerful Current Harmless — Tesla’s Wonderful Experiments.

A well known electrical expert said the other day: “Anything in our line nowadays to attract attention must be little short of marvelous.”

But there are a great many things which an expert might not consider “marvelous” at all, but which the public would like to know about. For instance, the latest development in heating and cooking by electricity.

One firm now has three manufactories running and is totally unable to supply the demand for electrical cooking utensils and heating apparatus.

The model kitchen of the future will have no stove whatever. There won’t be any superfluous heat to make life a burden for the cook, and yet she will be able to prepare your dinner in half or at most two-thirds of the time it now takes, and wholly without dirt and ashes.

This model kitchen will contain a heat service boiler. It looks just about like the ordinary boiler, except that it has two wires entering it. These wires are connected with an electrical coil on the inside of the boiler, and it is this coil which, when a current is passed through it, becomes hot on account of its resistance and brings the water to the boiling point.

The next arrangement is the oven and grill. This is on top of the oven and your steak or chop sizzles over it until it is beautifully “done,” while the fumes are carried away by a well arranged smoke flue. The grill is the only part of this electrical outfit from which anything is carried away by a flue. There is no smoke from the coils because nothing is burned — only heated.

The oven is a good deal like the one used with an oil or gasoline stove. The heat coils are placed inside, one at the top and one below, and are so arranged that the heat is all directed toward the center. Thus the outside of the oven never becomes hot, while your bread or cake or meat is baked or roasted quickly and cleanly.

Instead of the ordinary stove top to put your teakettle, coffee pot, chafing dish, etc., on, the electrical kitchen is supplied with a plain, flat topped table. Above it, on the wall, is a switchboard, into which the street wire is led, and from which run the small loops, or “cords,” to the different cooking utensils. These are exactly like the ones ordinarily used, except that each has a coil under it which applies the heat directly to its bottom without waste. One of the greatest advantages of this system is its economy. In an ordinary wood or coal stove only about 5 per cent. of the heat generated is available for cooking. Ninety-five per cent., therefore, is wasted. It takes a long time to build the fire and get the oven hot enough for baking or the coals in a good condition for broiling. And then there is the intolerable heat radiating from the stove and frying the cook at the same time it bakes the bread. With the electrical arrangement 95 per cent. of the heat generated is applied directly to the use for which it is intended.

There is practically no waste, and when you are through with the teakettle, the grill or the chafing dish you can switch off the current and let them get cool. You don’t have to “keep the fire up” till you want to use it again. A steak broiled on this electrical grill will not burn, because the cook, with a little experience, will learn just how much heat is required to broil without burning and has the heat entirely under control. Beef can be roasted in an electric heater at the rate of seven and one-half minutes to the pound. The heat is applied so uniformly that it is not necessary to baste meat, nor to turn bread or cake while cooking. It takes the usual time to broil, except that the grill is always ready and you don’t have to “wait till the coals get red.” Tea and coffee can be made “from the cold” in from six to ten minutes. Electricity for cooking purposes can successfully compete with coal at $5.50 a ton, and for heating with the best hard coal used economically at $6 per ton.

The electric heat coil is a wonderful thing. The following tools and utensils, to which it is attached, will give an idea of what we are coming to before long: Pressing irons, soldering irons, chafing dishes, coffee pots, kettles, skillets, plate heaters, glue pots, embossing plates, sealing wax heaters, curling irons, griddles, tailors’, hatters’ and laundry irons in all shapes and sizes; crucibles, mufflers and cigar lighters.

There are many forms of apparatus designed for the heating of buildings. Of these the radiators are not unlike steam radiators, except that the place of the steam is taken by coils of resistance wire. There is, of course, no danger from leakage, and the substitution of cheap wire for the costly pipes is a great advantage. It has taken a great deal of time to solve the problem of heating cars by electricity, but this method, it is said, makes it not only practicable but economical.

NOTHING DANGEROUS ABOUT IT.

The question may suggest itself to some readers: Is the current required for these purposes sufficient to cause death to a human being? The current required is so slight that a child could take the full charge without the least danger of death.

It is possible, with the aid of transformers, to use an alternating current of the highest tension — one that would instantly kill any animal body through which it passed — and so change it that a person taking hold of one of the house wires leading from it would not only be entirely unharmed, but could only feel the current by touching the wire with the tongue or some other supersensitive part of the body.

Therefore, the “transformer” is a great invention. It is the induction coil reversed. The induction coil is a bunch of small wires in the shape of a “core,” around which are wound two coils of other wire, that next to the “core” being very fine and wound a great many times and that on the outside being a great deal coarser and wound in the opposite direction. When a current is passed through the outside coil it “induces” a current in the inside coil, but traveling in the opposite direction. This in turn magnetizes the “core,” and when it is held at the proper distance from an electric conductor, sparks pass from it to the conductor. For reasons which it would be hard to explain simply, the “induced” current in the fine wire of the inner coil is of a much higher tension than that in the outer coil which induces it. And it is the reversal of this principle which produced the “transformer.” For if you connect a high tension alternating current with the fine wire coil, a current of low tension will be “induced” in the coarse wire coil, and it is this low tension current which is conducted into the house, having lost its killing power, but not its mechanical energy.

CONCERNING ELECTRIC LIGHTS.

The recent decision by which the General Electric Company was given a practical monopoly of the incandescent light trade through its ownership of the Edison patents, has set hundreds of minds at work to devise a lamp which should answer the same purpose and avoid infringement. The Edison lamp is formed by passing a current of electricity through a bamboo filament inclosed in a bulb from which the air has been exhausted. The vacuum feature. These have been the principal points of attack, and one of the results is a lamp now being sold by the Westinghouse Company, in which the “lead wires” enter the bulb through a base of cement, which forms a cap for the bulb, and another is the substitution of an inert gas in place of a vacuum. This last method is said to have the advantage of preserving the original brilliancy of the lamp until it is worn out. In the Edison lamp so-called sixteen candle power filament would give sixteen candle power light at first, but, owing to the impossibility of securing a perfect vacuum, as the filament became worn, this brilliancy would decrease, and its disintegration result in blacking the bulb and still further decreasing the light. The gas lamp, it is said, is likely to prove a distinct improvement over the old style.

AT THE WORLD’S FAIR.

The World’s Fair presents the most wonderful example of light decoration in the world, and this would be impossible by any other means than electricity. The theater has profited greatly by the substitution of electricity for other methods of lighting, and is likely to profit still further. One of the most interesting exhibits of one of the large electric lighting companies at the Fair is in the form of a scenic theater, where is produced by the aid of electric lights what is pronounced the most realistic artificial representation of dawn, daylight and sunset ever witnessed.

The illumination of the fountains and buildings is a further illustration of the adaptability of the electric light for decorative purposes, and its use by miners and divers shows one of its practical sides. Divers have always been compelled to work in the dark, except where the water was shallow enough for the sunlight to penetrate to the bottom, but with the aid of the incandescent lamp they can prosecute their work in comparative safety and comfort at the greatest depths. Electric mining is a decidedly modern term; and by electric mining is meant not only running the drills but lighting the mine, hoisting the ore and propelling the cars on which it is loaded. Steam and the dangerous miners’ lamps have been entirely supplanted in a great many cases, and the new agent does its work much more satisfactorily than the old. In winter the electric current can be carried, without loss of power, to distances where steam would be rendered totally inefficient by condensation. Water is the source of power in most of these mining plants, turbine wheels running the dynamos, and the current being conveyed by wire many miles in some instances. This method is especially adapted to mountain mining, where there is no water convenient for furnishing steam power.

MR. EDISON’S NEW DISCOVERY.

Mr. Edison also claims that he has a nearly perfected method of separating iron ore from the dirt and stone surrounding it, which will be worth millions of dollars when completed, and will result in reopening many mines which cannot be profitably worked under existing methods. Whether he will be able to supply the missing links to make this glowing prediction a dazzling reality only time can tell.

Another very modern use of electricity is in welding, and this, it is claimed, is one of its chief fields of usefulness. The advantage is that “you have your heat directly in your work, and not surrounding it.” Here, as in the cooking appliances, there is scarcely any waste, and the current being directly under the operator’s control, and capable of developing almost any degree of heat up to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, the process which has hitherto been attended with much discomfort and unreliability has been reduced almost to child’s play. The electrical current, by some means not easily explainable, also renders the metal more susceptible to welding, and the joint, electrically formed, retains over 96 per cent. of the original tensile strength of the metal. The process of making shells for projectiles has been greatly simplified by the use of electricity in welding them, and in many other instances the saving in cost has reduced the price of welded products. Here also the current used, though of enormous power, is absolutely harmless to human life.

PROFESSOR TESLA’S EXPERIMENTS.

Professor Nikola Tesla has succeeded in doing things which the profession has hitherto looked upon as impossible. For instance, by means of what are termed high tension currents of enormous frequency he causes an incandescent lamp to burn brightly when held between two metal plates, while a current of electricity is passing from one of them to the other, though the lamp has no wire connections whatever. He also causes the same current, while being propelled through the air without the use of wires, to operate an electric motor. It is his belief, amounting almost to conviction, that electricity is simply a form of motion, similar to sound, heat and light waves, and he hopes eventually to propel electric currents to great distances without the use of wires. Professor Tesla’s principal object is to find a means by which the great loss of power in the conversion of mechanical energy can be obviated. In the case of the electric light, for instance, from the time the coal is thrown into the furnace until the current reaches the lamp, there is a loss of more than six-sevenths of the mechanical energy in the fuel. Tesla hopes to find a means of transforming the coal directly into electricity by chemical or other means, thus saving the enormous energy wasted in combustion, steam engines, dynamos, etc. To the skeptical it looks a good deal like the search after the philosopher’s stone, but Tesla believes the solution of the problem is only a question of time, and most people acknowledge that Tesla knows more about electricity at the present day than any one else.

Professor Hertz of Germany has discovered that the electric current has the property of resonance, and one of his experiments is interesting. He propels a current of electricity through the open air after the Tesla method. Then he takes a coil of wire formed in the shape of a hairpin, and wound so that its “keynote,” so to speak, or vibratory frequency, corresponds to that of the electrical current. When the coil is held at a distance of from one to thirty feet in front of the source of the current sparks pass from one pole of the coil to another, but if a coil is presented which does not correspond in vibratory frequency to the current no spark is produced.

The experiments of Hertz and Tesla possess only a scientific value at present, but the time is not far distant when they will revolutionize the science of physics.

ELECTRICITY IN MEDICINE.

Doctors have expected a great deal of help from electricity. It is an old saying that “electricity is life,” and, true or untrue, thousands of people have believed it and other thousands do so to this day. Experts, however, claim that about the only application which can be proved valuable is the one recently applied to little Marthena Harrison, granddaughter of ex-President Harrison. This consists in subjecting the patient to a discharge of static electricity, taking the form of an electric breeze or spray, and producing about the same effect as a good rubbing. The current has been used for the purpose of reducing tumors, strictures and like growths, but the methods are generally dangerous and the results questionable.

The storage battery has reached a point in its development where it is used for running small motors, fans, dental apparatus, etc., and has even been applied to small boats. The new United States cruiser New York is provided with an electric launch. The great design of this form of battery, the propulsion of railroad cars economically, has not been accomplished. Many experts are working on the problem, and some of them claim that the end is already in sight.