l62 LOUIS BELL 



than the incandescent lamp, and is still a rarity, not yet 

 seriously to be considered in the grand total of electric illumi- 

 nation. The mercury arc, another recent candidate for light- 

 ing honors, has little yet to show in the way of results, and 

 its color is so hopelessly bad that unless remedied by some 

 very radical step, the lamp will entirely fail of material use- 

 fulness as a general illuminant. If the public could be edu- 

 cated up to the point of liking the color of the mercury arc, 

 it would already have welcomed the incandescent gas mantle 

 to the exclusion of nearly everything else. 



The incandescent lamp is then to-day as it has been all 

 through its history, the mainstay of modern illumination so 

 far as interior lighting is concerned. It may in due season be 

 supplanted by something better, but that something will have 

 to be equally steady and simple and convenient and good in 

 color. At the present time there are nearly twenty million 

 incandescents in lighting service from central stations in this 

 country alone — how great a harvest from the seedtime of 

 1879! Electric lighting has won its way into the front rank 

 of American industries, and there it is likely to stay. Its full 

 history cannot be written apart from that of the country's 

 industrial growth with which it has more than kept pace. 



