RECENT ELECTRICAL DISCOVERIES 125 



and feed-cutting machine, water-pumping appar- 

 atus, incandescent lamps, threshing and grist mills, 

 saw mill, automatic plough and electrical agricul- 

 tural machines, all run by charged batteries and 

 a fifty-horse power stationery engine moving two 

 dynamos. Thus farming is made attractive and 

 free from drudgery, and is run like a machine by the 

 electric current. Electricity is used not only to 

 run some farms, but also to hasten and increase 

 the growth of farm products by running wires a 

 few inches beneath the surface to energize the soil. 



The Commercial Cable Company announce that 

 their ocean cable connections will be complete with 

 Manila, in the Philippines, by the 4th of July of 

 this year, 1903, and that on that day they will 

 telegraph around the world in forty seconds. What 

 a miracle of wonders ! Fifty years ago the speediest 

 communication from point to point was by swift 

 horsemen making fifty miles a day. Now the round 

 earth's antipodes is only forty seconds apart by 

 reason of electric appliances. 



So wonderful has been the growth of electrical 

 appliances and utilities that Prof. H. B. Shaw, of 

 the Missouri University, in a recent lecture, said : 

 "In twenty years the electric light industry has 

 developed from nothing to the manufacture of over 

 100,000 incandescent lamps per day. Ninety-five 

 per cent, of the street railways in this country are 

 electrically operated. Yet this industry was cradled 

 in Kansas City, Mo., only about twenty years ago." 



This was when I first had my attention drawn 

 to electricity, for I saw the building of that line 

 on East Fifth street, in that city. That and the 

 lighting of the gas by an electric flash from a human 



