HISTORY OF ELECTRICITY IN AMERICA 125 



vent this device, which has since been so widely apphed in 

 the electrical arts. 



Page afterwards distinguished himself by constructing 

 an electric locomotor with which he drew a train of cars on 

 the Baltimore and Ohio railroad between Washington and 

 Bladensburg at a maximum rate of nineteen miles an hour. 

 This was in 1851, after congress had appropriated $30,000 

 to further the project. At this time Page was an exam- 

 iner in the United States Patent office, having entered it 

 in 1841 as one of the two principal examiners then employed 

 in the office. Page was so deeply interested in the scheme 

 of electric locomotion, and had so much faith in its future, 

 that he withdrew from the patent office in 1852 in order that 

 he might devote his whole time and attention to it. For 

 reasons w^hich are now well understood, his hopes were des- 

 tined to disappointment. Still he accomplished much, and 

 succeeded in convincing a senate committee, of which Mr. 

 Benton was chairman, that electricity as a motive power 

 had great possibilities which the government ought to assist 

 in developing. Before this committee he exhibited a recipro- 

 cating electric engine which operated a planing machine. 

 On another occasion he showed them an electric motor run- 

 ning a Napier printing press at the rate of twelve hundred 

 impressions an hour. But the appropriation which these 

 experiments succeeded in calUng forth from congress was 

 insufficient, necessarily, to accomphsh the impossible. A 

 friend of Professor Page's, who also withessed many of the 

 experiments referred to, as well as the trial on the Baltimore 

 and Ohio railroad, states the situation with tolerable exact- 

 ness as it appeared to an intelligent observer writing before 

 the perfection of the dynamo. 



"Although Professor Page failed to realize his first 

 cherished hope of seeing electricity take the place of steam 

 for a motive power on a large scale, for which he underwent 

 so much la])or, and for the pursuit of which he relinquished 

 his hold upon a lucrative office, yet his labors had this result : 

 the concentration within a moderate space, and by simple 

 means, of a large amount of electro-mechanical power; and 

 so soon as a galvanic battery shall be discovered which is 



