September 24, 1903] 



NATURE 



507 



Jenatzy covered a distance of 327J miles in 6 hours 39 

 minutes, or at the rate of 4qJ miles an hour, though he 

 attained to a speed of 61 miles an hour between the points 

 of control. Even this speed was exceeded at a trial in 

 Phcenix Park, Dublin, when Baron de Forest attained to 

 a rate of 86 miles an hour. But between racing speed and 

 ordinary travelling speed there is necessarily a great differ- 

 ence, and our twenty miles maximum on country roads is 

 in excess of that allowed in France, where it is now fixed, 

 though I believe not enforced in the open country, at \%\ 

 miles, and at 12J miles where there is much traffic. The 

 two classes of motors used for higher speeds are the petrol 

 and the electric. The former are mainly internal-combus- 

 tion engines ; having to be light, they run at the com- 

 paratively high speed of 800 revolutions per minute. They 

 are generally used in connection with bicycles, tricycles, or 

 light carriages. They have also been used for light vans 

 and coaches, and successful trials have been made with 

 self-propelled lorries for military purposes, and by local 

 authorities for watering and dust collecting. Their appli- 

 cation to omnibuses has not proved economical, owing to 

 the difficulty of providing pneumatic tyres for such heavy 

 vehicles. 



The electric motor depends on storage batteries ; those in 

 general use are of Plants 's lead-couple type. Like the 

 petrol motor, the electric motor is rather a luxury ; most 

 of the automobile carriages used in London are of this 

 class ; there is liability of injury to the batteries by over- 

 discharging them. Colonel Crompton, in a paper recently 

 read at the Engineering Conference, suggested the use of 

 " standardised accumulators," to be supplied to the owners 

 of electrical vehicles at dep6ts on production of a subscription 

 .ticket, and the Engineering Standards Committee has 

 appointed a sub-committee to consider the question. Motor 

 cars are now used by some of the railway companies as 

 feeders to their lines, and also in competition with tramway 

 lines. 



The increasing use of motor cars renders more than ever 

 necessary the regulation of traffic in crowded thoroughfares, 

 a subject which will doubtless be dealt with in the paper 

 on " The Problem of Modern Street Traffic," which Colonel 

 Crompton is about to read before this Section of the British 

 Association. 



The use of motor-driven vehicles for road traffic is so in- 

 timately associated with improvements in prime movers that 

 it will interest the members of this Section to be reminded 

 of the opinion expressed more than twenty years ago by 

 Sir Frederick Bramwell, F.R.S., Past President Inst.C.E., 

 who presided over the Meeting of the British Association 

 at Bath in 1888. In a paper read before this Section at the 

 Jubilee Meeting of our Association at York in 1881, and 

 afterwards printed in extenso, Sir Frederick Bramwell said : 

 " However much the Mechanical Section of the British 

 Association may to-day contemplate with regret even the 

 mere distant prospect of the steam-engine becoming a thing 

 of the past, I very much doubt whether those who meet 

 here fifty years hence will then speak of that motor except 

 in the character of a curiosity to be found in a museum." 

 In a letter addressed to the President of this Association 

 on July 2 last, Sir Frederick Bramwell directed attention 

 to the largely increasing development of internal-combustion 

 engines, and expressed a feeling of assurance that, although 

 steam-engines might be at work in 193 1, the output in that 

 year would be small of steam as compared with internal- 

 combustion engines. 



To keep alive the interest of the Association in this sub- 

 ject, Sir Frederick Bramwell has kindly offered, and the 

 Council has accepted, the sum of 50/. for investment in 2^ 

 per cent, self-accumulative Consols, the resulting sum to 

 be paid as an honorarium to a gentleman to be selected by 

 the Council to prepare a paper having Sir Frederick's 

 utterances in 1881 as a sort of text, and dealing with the 

 whole question of the prime movers of 193 1, and especially 

 with the then relation between steam-engines and internal- 

 combustion engines. That paper will doubtless prove to be 

 a very valuable contribution to the proceedings of this 

 Association, and one can only regret that many of those 

 assembled here to-day cannot hope to be present when it is 

 read, and to listen to an account of the nearest approach 

 which has then been made towards the production of a 

 perfect prime mover. 



Electric Tramways and Light Railways. 

 I now pass to the application of electricity to tramways, 

 and in doing so may quote from the careful expression of 

 opinion given in this town from this Chair twenty years 

 ago by the late Sir (then Mr.) James Brunlees, President- 

 of the Institution of Civil Engineers : " The working of 

 railways by electricity has not advanced further than to 

 justify merely a brief reference to it in this paper as among 

 the possibilities, perhaps the probabilities, of the not distant 

 future." 



It was stated in a paper read by Mr. P. Dawson in April 

 last before the Tramways and Light Railways Association, 

 that the total route-length of electric tramways and light 

 railways in the United Kingdom, either completed, under 

 construction, or authorised, amounted at the end of last 

 year to 3000 miles, the length of single track being 5000 

 miles, on which some 6000 cars were running. 



It cannot, in my opinion, be regarded as being fair to 

 the railway companies^— which have to pay large sums of 

 money for the land on which their lines have been con- 

 structed — to have to compete with tramways which are laid 

 along the public roads without any payment being made 

 for their use. The roads are disfigured by aerial conductors 

 and the supporting posts by which the electric current is 

 conveyed to the cars, except in those comparatively rare 

 instances in which the conduit system is used ; nor can it 

 be denied that tramways greatly interfere with the use of 

 the roads for ordinary traffic. The effect of electrolytic 

 action on iron pipes laid beneath the roads is still under- 

 going investigation. 



Railways. 



Turning now to railways, it may be noted that on some 

 of the principal lines in Great Britain the length of the 

 runs without a stop is being increased in the case of fast 

 trains, the speed of which is in some cases from forty-eight 

 to fifty-nine miles an hour. 



Railway companies are turning their attention to the in- 

 troduction of electric traction wherever it can be beneficially 

 used, as for instance on the Mersey Railway, the North- 

 Eastern Railway between Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Tyne- 

 mouth, and the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway between 

 Liverpool and Southport. With the object of facilitating 

 the introduction and use of electrical power on railways. 

 Parliament has passed an Act entitled the " Railways 

 (Electrical Power) Act, 1903," which will come into oper- 

 ation on January i next. 



The electrical service on the Mersey Railway has now 

 been in regular and uninterrupted operation since the 

 beginning of May in the present year. Trains are run at 

 three-minute intervals, there being 750 trains in all between 

 5 a.m. and 12 midnight; and as it is the first example of 

 a British steam railway converted to the use of electric 

 traction, a short description of it cannot fail to be of interest. 



The Mersey Railway viras first opened for traffic on 

 Februarv i, 1886, and was afterwards extended at both 

 ends, the last extension to the Liverpool Central Station 

 being opened for traffic in January, 1892. With steam 

 locomotives, largely owing to the want of adequate ventil- 

 ation, the railway was not a success. Electrification was 

 decided upon, and in the latter part of 1901 the British 

 Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, 

 Limited, undertook the entire contract. The length of the 

 railway is about 3S miles, and there are gradients in the 

 tunnel below the river of i in 27 and i in 30. 



The power station is at Birkenhead, and contains plant 

 aggregating more than 6000 horse-power, comprising three 

 engines of the Westinghouse-Corliss vertical cross-compound 

 type. 



The generators are all three alike, mounted on the engine 

 shaft between the cylinders. They are standard Westing- 

 house multipolar machines, of the double-current type, of 

 1250 kilowatts capacity. Direct-current is collected from 

 the armature at 650 volts, no alternating current being used 

 at present. 



Leads are carried below the floor from the machines to 

 a switchboard, from which are controlled the main gener- 

 ators, the auxiliary lighting sets, battery, booster, and 

 feeders. The battery consists of 320 chloride cells con- 

 nected in parallel with the generators through a differential 

 booster, and charge or discharge according as the line 



NO. 1769, VOL. 68] 



