ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING PROBLEMS 623 



form of electric lighting, both in large and in small units, is remark- 

 ably high, over four times as high as that by ordinary incandescent 

 lighting, and the simplicity of the apparatus is ideal. In addition to 

 its high efficiency the mercury vapor lamp has the great advantage 

 over all other forms of electric lamps in the fact that its light pro- 

 ceeds from a source which is distributed over a large area. This pre- 

 vents the formation of sharp shadows, a great desideratum in work- 

 shops, where it is important that the workman should be able to see 

 all around the object which he is handling. For this reason the lamp is 

 making a rapid headway into factories, draughting-rooms, libraries, 

 and laboratories. Its poverty in red rays will keep it temporarily out 

 of the drawing-room and other places where the complexion of things 

 and of people must be shown off at all cost. This, however, seems to 

 be the only defect of this new form of electric lighting and it is 

 sincerely hoped that this defect will soon be remedied. 



The Telephonic Problem 



The engineer has to determine how much time, money, and per- 

 sonal convenience the average subscriber is willing to sacrifice, in 

 order to communicate with another subscriber in some other place, 

 and then provide a satisfactory service which will retuni some profit 

 to the operating company or to the state. The proposition is ex- 

 tremely complex, particularly in this country where unexpected legis- 

 lative action introduces so many unknown quantities into the cal- 

 culation of the engineer. Every now and then the legislator takes it 

 into his head that he knows more about the science and art of tele- 

 phone engineering than anybody else, and then, with a bold stroke of 

 his pen, he cancels the final figures of the engineer, the permissible 

 charge, and substitutes his own, looks wise, and leaves the engineer 

 to lament the loss of the fruits of his laborious calculations and 

 to wish that he lived in autocratic Russia where the telephone 

 system belongs to the Czar and no conceited legislator is allowed to 

 interfere with a business of which he has not even the faintest shadow 

 of anything approaching the semblance of an idea. Thanks, how- 

 ever, to the superior intelligence of the engineers of the American 

 Telephone and Telegraph Company and to their extraordinary courage, 

 telephonic art is progressing very favorably in spite of the arrogant 

 legislator and the wicked demagogue, and of the most annoying and 

 heartbreaking difficulties which they are placing, at almost every 

 step of progress, in the way of the patient and intelligent worker in 

 the telephonic field. The American telephone engineer must reckon 

 with an unknown and unknowable quantity, the legislator. The 

 only satisfactory way to handle this quantity is to ignore it and to 

 adjust the other elements of telephonic problems in such a way that 



