752 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



around the stables and in the car sheds for looking after these 

 four hundred and fifty horses. For these the company substi- 

 tutes two or three electrical operatives, and saves about five thou- 

 sand dollars a month in expenses, and anticipates an increase be- 

 sides of twenty-five per cent on receipts by the increase of busi- 

 ness, by the saving of time and the douljling of train schedules.* 

 Against such startling economies as these economists would 

 ordinarily place the usual offsets of more highly skilled and better- 

 paid labor required to handle the more subtile and complicated 

 motive. Such a rule should apparently best operate in a case 

 when an invisible power is substituted for one, where ethereal 

 energy so literally takes the place of brute force as when elec- 

 tricity supersedes a horse. In every other situs the rule would 

 obtain. When we put a criminal to death by hanging, any boor 

 could haul at or cut a rope, but when we electrocuted we were 

 obliged to get a higher-priced aid a rather more accomplished 

 Jack Ketch. But not so the trolley. Its machinery was so purely 

 and elementarily automatic so in a nutshell and within the 

 control of the faintest pressure that the material out of which 

 drivers and conductors were made was worked over in a day 

 into electric motormen, who, instead of a wilder found a far more 

 tractable and manageable horse one that went without goad, 

 reins, or word of command ; one that needed not to be put in or 

 out or changed for shorter or longer routes. Furthermore, the new 

 steed not only guided but regulated himself, thus dispensing with 

 a switchman ; and a horse that not only hauls, but obligingly 

 lights and heats the cars as well. Switchmen are dispensed with 

 by the simplest of expedients at the busiest junctions ; the simple 

 placing of an insulated rail in a track, and of disconnecting a cur- 

 rent supplied by the car passing over it, being found to throw and 

 replace a switch with absolutely infallible accuracy. And, again, 

 this docile horse will not only do its own work, but anybody 

 else's ; for it has been found that where two trolley lines cross, 

 and an accident to one withdraws its power, the power used by 

 the other will leap over into the unoccupied wires of the disabled 

 road and operate them both. Against such figures as these the 

 railways will not attempt to compete, but will struggle on, meet- 

 ing their fixed charges when they can, and striving to keep down 

 their daily deficits by reorganization committees, and ciphering 

 on the backs of old envelopes instead of writing pads ! f 



* Of collateral economies, it is not improbable, for example, that insurance companies, 

 chartered to handle electric risks alone, will make their appearance, nor will they find them- 

 selves without an exceedingly profitable investment area. 



f A general order to this etfeot was sent out from the president's office of the Delaware, 

 Lackawanna and Western Railroad a few months since. 



