Ixxviii. PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 



companies continue to be formed, and it is proposed to 

 establish one in Huntingdonshire on a still larger scale, with 

 overhead lines, should the sanction of Parliament be obtained. 



The Metropolitan Railway, hitherto worked by steam, has in 

 the last year been transformed into an electric railway, and other 

 electrical improvements in connection with light and signals 

 have been developed on railways. Amongst these should be 

 mentioned the system of applying wireless telegraphy to trains 

 in motion, by which communications can be made to the train 

 from a station. Advantage is being taken of the Wireless 

 Telegraph Act in this country, and a fair number of licences 

 have been granted and messages transmitted under it. 



There has been much development of electricity in other ways, 

 such as new forms of lamps, but the only other process that I 

 shall allude to is that of type-writing by telegraph, for which a 

 new machine has lately been invented, which is now in use on 

 several English lines, and is said to be an improvement on its 

 predecessors, of which there have been more than one. The 

 machine is complicated, but acts by means of a tape, in which 

 holes are first punched by a special arrangement of typewriter. 

 Five holes are available, and a different arrangement, containing 

 one or more of them, serves for each letter. The tape is then 

 used to control the movements of a rod which presses against it 

 as it moves along. When the rod passes through a hole it 

 causes contact, and thereby transmits the message by producing 

 a smilar perforation in a tape at the other end. The second 

 tape thus punched is used as a guide in a special typewriter. 



CHEMISTRY. 



The constant association in Nature of certain elementary 

 substances, such as silver and lead, together with the recent 

 theory of the gradual production of helium out of radium, has 

 suggested that other similar processes of transmutation are 

 going on, but experiments on the subject are so delicate and 



