THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



OCTOBER, 1893. 

 ELECTRICITY AT THE WORLD'S FAIR. 



BY CHARLES M. LUNGEEN. 

 I. 



A PERIOD of but seventeen years separates the first great 

 ^JL. American exhibition from the second, yet what a vast differ- 

 ence between the two in the display of electrical appliances ! The 

 Centennial was not indeed without its electrical wonders, but 

 these were unobtrusive and formed but isolated examples in an 

 industrial domain which yet remained to be cultivated. Elec- 

 tricity had not then been brought home to the attention and 

 interest of the thousands by multiplied daily use. It made no 

 appeal to the imagination, and the immediate future that was to 

 open for it was hardly dreamed of even by those in the vanguard 

 of electrical discovery. The telephone here made its debut ; the 

 quadruplex telegraph, but recently put into commercial service, 

 was here shown for the first time ; and the dynamos and arc lamps 

 of Wallace were on exhibition. The Gramme machine, which 

 was shortly to play such an important part in the commercial 

 development of the electric light, and to prove such a stimulus to 

 the inventors of electric apparatus, was also to be seen here, but 

 beyond these electricity was very little in evidence at the earlier 

 exposition. At the Columbian it is omnipresent. It is called upon 

 to do the lighting of the great buildings and grounds, to the exclu- 

 sion of all other means of illumination; to drive the trains of the 

 intramural railway which winds through the exposition inclosure ; 

 to propel the graceful launches which glide through its water- 

 ways ; to furnish the power distributed throughout the various 

 buildings, and to make itself known in innumerable decorative 

 effects. Grown too large to have a place merely, along with other 



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