202 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



advised, states positively that he did not strenuonsly oppose the 

 use of the alternating current ; that he did not oppose it at all ; 

 and that, moreover, his opinion was given in 1889, not 1890; that 

 what he did advise at that early date, in view of the untried state 

 of either direct or alternating current transmission, was merely 

 caution in adopting plans, which advice, we may add, was most 

 carefully followed, as will be seen from the fact that the main 

 plans, not to speak of the details, were not decided upon until 

 three years later, during which interval some most remarkable de- 

 velopments had taken place both in the design of machinery for 

 use with alternating current and in the practical transmission of 

 the latter over an immense distance in Europe. 



Our writer says : " Until I went to America the manufacturers 

 of electrical machinery never had a consulting engineer to reckon 

 with, but dealt directly with the financiers, who knew nothing 

 about cost or efficiency of machinery," and reference is later 

 made to his being the first to get guarantees of performance from 

 manufacturers of such machinery. The present writer speaks 

 from personal experience in declaring this to be incorrect. The 

 way in which a company, larger and even more representative 

 than the chief one with which Prof. Forbes did business, filled an 

 eleven-hundred-horse-power contract under guarantee, and later 

 supplied an auxiliary generator to make the guarantee good, 

 would perhaps have impressed that gentleman. The particular 

 occurrence referred to is immediately within the writer's knowl- 

 edge, and the extremely exacting specifications for the said ma- 

 chinery were written and insisted upon by consulting engineers 

 and not by the financiers. It should, however, be unnecessary to 

 say that, of course, the method of requiring guarantees and of 

 employing engineers to write specifications was common in the 

 electrical business, as well as in all others, long before the advent 

 of Forbes. 



There are other points in the professor's paper besides those 

 already referred to which require contradiction, and still others, 

 covered by the matter in controversy between himself and Prof. 

 Rowland, which there is every reason to believe might be im- 

 proved in the matter of accuracy, but which, since directly oppo- 

 site statements are put forth by the two men, we must be content 

 to let stand in default of other sources of information regarding 

 them. 



An opinion of Prof. Forbes that surprises us is set forth in the 

 sentence, " I had always wished to put the dynamos at the bot- 

 tom of the pit close to the turbines, and I still believe that this 

 arrangement would have served us better." It is the opinion 

 of the writer that it is an unusually good thing for the Niagara 

 Falls Power Company that the above was not done. In his ex- 



