ELECTRIC RAILWAYS 



equipped with one hundred cells of Grove nitric-acid 

 battery, each having as one element a platinum plate 

 eleven inches square, dipped in the acid. Bladens- 

 burg, a distance of about five and one-quarter miles, 

 was reached in thirty-nine minutes, and a maximum 

 speed of nineteen miles an hour was attained; the entire 

 trip to and from Bladensburg occupied one hour and 

 fifty-eight minutes. But many disasters happened to 

 the batteries. Some of the cells cracked wide open, and 

 jolts due to inequalities of track threw the batteries out of 

 working order. These experiments must have been ex- 

 tremely costly, and no little discouragement among people 

 in general attended this failure ; but Professor Page was 

 not daunted, and for some years continued his work on 

 electric motors, displaying great ingenuity, but not 

 able, apparently, to give up the reciprocating principle." 

 The invention of the commercial dynamo, shortly 

 after the middle of the nineteenth century, opened the 

 era of practical electric-railway construction on both 

 sides of the Atlantic. The German experimenters, 

 Siemens and Halske, and later the American, Stephen 

 D. Field, paved the way by numerous experiments and 

 discoveries. It was not until about 1880, however, that 

 the idea of using a third rail for transmitting the current 

 was conceived. Hitherto, most of the inventors had 

 attempted to use one rail as a receiving part of the 

 circuit to the motor, the other rail completing the return 

 part of the circuit. And it was several years after the 

 idea of the third rail had germinated before the attempts 

 to utilize one of the traction rails for conveying the 

 current was abandoned. 



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