Future of Electricity - Its More Complete Development Will Add to the Pleasures of Life

In a brilliant paper on the anticipated triumphs of electricity during the next 50 years, T. C. Martin, in Success for February declares that the farmer, the chemist, the miner and the householder will be among the chief beneficiaries, while railroads will discard steam for the third electric rail. He continues:

“Of course, we shall see by electricity. The telescope is a beautiful apparatus, but antiquated in many respects. It is not unlikely that the electric heater and electric fan will be rivaled by mechanism creating the sensation of coolness and warmth more subtly. Electricity, while abolishing many outworn methods and predecessors, will, meanwhile, be refining upon itself. It will obtain much of its supply of current directly from fuel, without boiler, engine or dynamo. By present methods, we get only about five per cent. from fuel, of the possible energy in it; and our best house lights have an efficiency of only about three per cent. There lie two great problems for the twentieth century. Electricity will, however, furnish economical ‘cold-light’ lamps, in which no stick or filament of carbon consumes. It will transmit without tangible circuits. It will help to make the balloon as feasible and commonplace as the automobile. But its nature bids fair to rest in mystery.

“The electrical successes of the next 50 years will depend upon men who have been trained to be electrical engineers and inventors. The triumphs of the past 50 years have been achieved entirely by men who had no electrical education in their youth, and whose mastery of the five ‘c’s’ of electricity — copper, carbon, castings, coal and cascades — is due to their own efforts.

“It le not rash to assume that the electrical inventions near at hand will at least equal those in the past of Morse, Edison, Bell, Siemens, Kelvin, Tesla, Sprague and others of equal intellectual rank in their respective branches. “The greater lies before.”