New Age of Electricity

No One Can Say What Advances Are Yet to be Made.

We may be on the verge of startling developments in electricity. The engineers of the American Telephone and Telegraph company, headed by John J. Carty, have made it possible to talk by wire and wireless from New York to Honolulu and Paris. Nikola Tesla is to share the Nobel prize in physics with Edison and thinks that it is for his recent discoveries in the wireless transmission of electrical energy. What these things may mean to the future life of our race cannot be clearly imagined. But we think the great electrical service of the last fifteen years has consisted in the tireless, detailed working out of the application of this agent to the needs of daily life.

Our country has been gridironed with telephones and trolleys; thousands of generating stations have been put to work; railroad terminals have been made cleaner and almost indefinitely more efficient; and countless inventions have brought electricity into the constant service of business and of the home. This process has gone on so quietly and steadily, and with such cumulative effect, that it takes a distinct effort to recall what things were like before these uses of electricity became so many and so universal. The miracles of yesterday are the habits of to-morrow.

The public problems of regulation and control must be viewed from this standpoint of unceasing growth, for the supreme public interest concerning electricity is that the possibilities of the future shall be realized, that this force shall become an even more basic factor in our everyday life. This is a matter not of cutting financial melons, but of founding a new sort of civilization. We are only at the beginning of the age of electricity, and no one can say what advances are yet to be made. — Collier’s Weekly.