54 SELLERS — TRANSMISSION OF ENERGY BY ELECTRICITY. [Feb. 3, 



Steam engine on wheels had to be brought together to make a 

 perfect whole. 



The beginning of this century saw in our country and by our 

 own people the first great steps taken to make our railroad sys- 

 tem of transportation possible through the demonstration of the 

 advantage of using high-pressure steam. This knowledge was 

 necessary even to make the steamboat a commercial success on the 

 inland waters of the United States. On March 2, 1825, at 

 the end of the first quarter of this century, refrigeration by 

 rarefaction of air was being discussed.^ This fact will be worth 

 remembering when I come to speak briefly of the recent transmis- 

 sions of energy by other means than electricity. Prof. S. F. B. 

 Morse, as early as 1832, had formed an idea of his electro-magnetic 

 system of electric telegraphing, and in 1835 ^^ constructed his first 

 recording telegraph instrument and used it on short distances, but 

 it was not until 1843 ^^^.t Congress, after great opposition, voted 

 the sum of $43,000 to construct the line of communication between 

 Washington and Baltimore, which was put in successful operation 

 by 1844, thus giving an illustration of long-distance transmission of 

 power to energize the magnets that gave motion to the instruments 

 required in telegraphy. On December 16, 1848, Prof. Henry, 

 in his second annual report to the Board of Regents of the Smith- 

 sonian Institution, proposed that so far as the funds of the Institution 

 would permit, the magnetic telegraph be used in the investigation 

 of atmospheric phenomena, in order that notice of the approach of 

 storms might be given to distant observers. This was just four 

 years after the electric telegraph had been installed. 



On March 19, 1853, forty-six years ago. Prof. Henry, in an 

 address at the close of the exhibition of the Metropolitan Me- 

 chanics' Institute at Washington, explained the true relation 

 between power and the means at command for transmitting and 

 utilizing power. He pointed out an error in text-books even of 

 that late day, when elementary machines — namely, the lever, the 

 wheel, the axle, the inclined plane, the pulley and the screw, em- 

 ployed separately as instruments for the application of power, or in 

 combination as parts of complex machines — were classed as '' me- 

 chanical powers," 'Svhen every tyro in science," he says, *' knows 

 they have no power in themselves ; yet, through a wrong name and 



1 See Prof. Jos. Henry's paper on this subject, read before the Albany Institute 

 on the date above mentioned. 



