EDITOR'S TABLE. 



417 



states that the telegraph business which, 

 when assumed by the Government in 

 1870, brought in £550,000 per annum, 

 now yields £2,000,000 per annum; and 

 that the annual number of messages has 

 increased from 6,000,000 to 52,000,000. 

 What the increase in revenue and work 

 done would have been had the tele- 

 graphs remained in private hands, it is 

 impossible to say. Government tele- 

 graphing is cheap — Qd. for a message to 

 any part of the United Kingdom — and 

 that, no doubt, tends to make it popu- 

 lar. Mr. Preece refers with natural 

 pride to the leading part Great Britain 

 has taken in the laying of submarine 

 cables. British ships, he states, have 

 laid 110,000 miles of cable; and British 

 capital to the amount of £40,000,000 

 has been expended in this very useful 

 work. The railway system of to-day 

 could not have reached its present de- 

 velopment without the aid of the tele- 

 graph, by means of which the whole 

 movement of trains is checked and con- 

 trolled from moment to moment. A 

 well-equipped signal-box on a main line 

 of railway is a very interesting place to 

 visit. To quote the words of the ad- 

 dress : " The signal-man is able to survey 

 the lines all round him by the aid of his 

 electric signals ; he can talk by telegraph 

 or telephone to his neighbors and his 

 station-master; he learns of the motion 

 of the trains he is marshaling by the dif- 

 ferent sounds of electric bells ; he con- 

 trols his out-door signals by the deflec- 

 tion of needles or the movement of 

 miniature semaphores; he learns the 

 true working of his distant signals by 

 their electric repetition; machinery gov- 

 erns and locks every motion that he 

 makes, so that he can not make a mis- 

 take." The safety thus secured for the 

 traveling public is indicated by the fact 

 that in the whole United Kingdom the 

 average annual loss of life by railway 

 accidents in the five years ending 1887 

 was only sixteen, or, as Mr. Preece com- 

 putes it, one life to every 35,000,000 

 journeys made by train. 

 VOL. XXXIV.— 27 



Great inventions have often a con- 

 siderable period of incubation before 

 they assume their proper importance 

 and development. Thus, nearly seventy 

 years elapsed between the discovery of 

 the electric light by Sir Humphry Davy 

 and its practical introduction for pur- 

 poses of street-lighting. Mr. Preece is 

 enthusiastic for the electric light, which 

 he contrasts in its purity and whole- 

 someness with "filthy gas and stinking 

 oil." He states that in the Central Sav- 

 ings-Bank, at London, the introduction 

 of the electric light was followed by an 

 appi-eciable improvement in the health 

 of the staff. Every year sees some in- 

 crease of efficiency or diminution of 

 cost in connection with this admirable 

 system of lighting. At this moment it 

 is beyond comparison the cheapest meth- 

 od of producing any given unit of light. 

 For the working of tram-cars or street- 

 railways, Mr. Preece is of opinion that 

 electricity is incontestably the agency 

 destined to be most extensively used in 

 the near future. In saying this he has 

 in view the climatic conditions of the 

 British Isles ; but there is good reason 

 to expect that experiments now being 

 made in this country will demonstrate 

 that, even where snow-storms have to 

 be contended with, electricity will carry 

 the day in the contest with horse-flesh. 

 The progress made in the electrolytic 

 extraction of metals from their ores is 

 shown in the fact that whereas not long 

 ago it was considered economical to ab- 

 sorb 0'85 horse-power in depositing one 

 pound of copper per hour, the same work 

 can now be done with 0"3 horse-power. 

 The uses, however, of electricity are al- 

 most beyond enumeration. We have 

 electric welding, electric production of 

 chlorine, iodine, and oxygen, electric de- 

 composition of poisonous gases, electric 

 fire-alarms and frost-alarms, electric pho- 

 tography, electric bells, electric clocks, 

 electricity as a curative agent, and elec- 

 tricity as a substitute for hanging. The 

 question as to what electricity is, or how 

 it may be most correctly defined, will 



