MECHANICAL ENGINEERING. 141 



PEOGRESS AND TENDENCY OF MECHANICAL ENGINEER- 

 ING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.— II. 



By Pkofessor ROBERT H. THURSTON, 



DIRECTOR OF SIBLEY COLLEGE, CORNELL UNIVERSITY. 



IN 1800, Galvani and Volta had sewed the seed, and since has sprung 

 up the whole science and art of electrical physics. Ten years ago we 

 had about 700 miles of electric railway; to-day about 15,000 miles are 

 in operation in the United States alone; a thousand millions of dollars 

 are invested in the stock, and an army of two hundred thousand men 

 is employed by them, mainly in the great cities, but with steady growth 

 towards all sections and into all aggregations of population. Two thou- 

 sand millions of dollars are reported to be now invested in apparatus of 

 electrical distributions of energy, converted ultimately into light and 

 power. About two-thirds of a hillion of dollars are invested in the 

 property of the electric light companies. We have between one and 

 two million miles of telephone wire, and can talk from Boston to Chi- 

 cago; from Chicago to San Francisco will soon be found an easy con- 

 versational distance. The Bell Company alone owns a million miles of 

 wire, a million and a half instruments, and receives six millions of 

 dollars a year from its business. The world, outside the United States, 

 utilizes not quite as much capital in this most wonderful of the inven- 

 tions of the century as does our own country, having about a half- 

 million exchanges to our six hundred thousand and over on the Bell 

 system alone. 



Of steam power, about twenty millions of the engineers' Tiorse- 

 power,' the equivalent of perhaps seventy-five, or even possibly more 

 nearly a hundred, millions of horse-power developed by animal forces, 

 move the fleets of the world, merchant and naval, and drive our ships 

 across every sea. It even has been found practicable to apply steam- 

 power to the sewing machine, and of the million or more manufactured 

 in the United States and the fifty per cent, added to the total by other 

 nations, a very considerable fraction are operated by steam-power, and of 

 the hundred thousand people engaged in its manufacture and the mil- 

 lions engaged in its use, a corresponding proportion are aided by this 

 mighty engine of civilization. Steam supplies the power for dri^dng the 

 machinery which produces a quarter of a million mowers and reapers in 

 the United States — an unknown industry a century ago — and thus, with 

 the help of the steam-plow and other machinery of agriculture, all 

 inventions of the century, secures for the nation a foreign market for 



