382 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



TELPHERAGE IN PRACTICAL USE. 



By FREDERIK A. FERNALD. 



A VAST field of application which electricity is only just en- 

 tering upon is the transportation of freight and passengers. 

 The use of electric motors for propelling passenger-cars on street 

 railways may be said to have passed through the experimental 

 stage into the domain of commerce. There are roads, using one 

 or another of four or five different systems, in operation or in 

 process of construction, in all parts of the United States, and new 

 contracts are frequently being announced. Nothing, however, 

 has been accomplished in this country in the direction of carry- 

 ing freight by electricity. But a system, called " Telpherage," has 

 been worked out in England, wljich is especially adapted to take 

 the place of horses in carting, as they are already being displaced 

 from the propelling of cars. 



Telpherage may be regarded as a development of what is called 

 in England the " wire-rope haulage " system, by which freight is 

 conveyed in buckets suspended by a grip from an elevated wire 

 cable. For distances of a few hundred feet, an inclined cable, 

 down which loaded buckets suspended on traveling wheels move 

 by their own weight, has also been used. The telpher system 

 resulted from a union of the joint inventions of Profs. W. E. 

 Ayrton and John Perry with those of Prof. Fleeming Jenkin. 

 Prof. Jenkin had had in mind for some time the idea of propelling 

 electrically a continuous stream of light trains without attend- 

 ants along an elevated single rope or rail, which should be also 

 the conductor of the electricity. He had not solved the problem 

 of preventing automatically these trains from running into one 

 another, when he read an account of the plan for dividing elec- 

 trically the rubbed conductor of electric railways into sections, 

 devised by Profs. Ayrton and Perry, and described by the former 

 in a lecture at the Royal Institution, London, toward the close of 

 1882. This plan, designed to prevent leakage of electricity, also 

 furnished an absolute block, cutting off the power automatically 

 from any train whenever it approached too close to the one in 

 front of it. At Prof. Jenkin's suggestion, a partnership was 

 entered into by these three gentlemen, and " The Telpherage Com- 

 pany was soon afterward formed, to bring their system into 

 practical use. Experimental work was carried on for over two 

 years on the estate of Mr. Melton R. Pry or, the chairman of the 

 company. 



Various details of construction were worked out in these 

 experiments, and at the beginning of 1885 the scheme was suf- 

 ciently developed to be put in practical operation. Arrangements 



