12 REPORT-——1890. 
Board of Trade standardising laboratory, established for the purposes of — 
arriving at and maintaining the true values of electrical units, and of 
securing accuracy and uniformity in the manufacture of instruments 
supplied by the trade for electrical measurements, may be referred to 
with much satisfaction as a practical illustration of official recognition 
of the firm root which the domestic and industrial utilisation of electric 
energy has taken in this country. 
The achievements of the telephone were referred to by Siemens 
in glowing terms eight years ago; yet the results then attained were 
but indications of the direction in which telephonic inter-communi- 
cation was destined speedily to become one of the most indispensable of 
present applications of electricity to the purposes of daily life. Preece, 
in speaking at Bath, two years ago, of the advances made in applied elec- 
tricity, showed that the impediments to telephonic communication be- 
tween great distances had been entirely overcome; and now, although 
considerably behind America and France in the use of the telephone, we 
are rapidly placing ourselves upon speaking terms with our friends 
throughout the United Kingdom. ‘The operations of the National Tele- 
phone Company well illustrate our progress in telephonic intercommuni- 
cation: that company has now 22,743 exchange lines, besides nearly 
5,000 private lines; its exchanges number 272 Pana its call-offices 526. 
The number of instruments at present under rental in Eneland is 
99,000; but, important as this figure is compared to our use of the tele- 
phone a very few years ago, it sinks into insignificance by the side of the 
number of instruments under rental in America, which at the beginning 
of the present year had reached 222,430, being an increase of 16,675 over 
the number in 1889. Only thirteen years have elapsed since the telephone 
was first exhibited as a practically workable apparatus to members of 
the British Association at the Plymouth Meeting, and the number of 
instruments now at work throughout the world may be estimated as 
considerably exceeding a million. 
The successful transmission of the electric current, and the power of 
control now exercised over the character which electrically-transmitted 
energy is made to assume, are not alone illustrated by the efficiency of 
the arrangements aiready developed for the supply of the electric light 
from central stations. Siemens dwelt upon this subject at Southamp- 
ton with the ardent interest of one who had made its advancement 
one of the objects of his energetic labours in later years, and also with 
a prophet’s prognostications of its future importance. In speaking 
of the electric current as having entered the lists in competition 
with compressed air, the hydraulic accumulator, and the quick-running 
rope driven by water-power, Siemens pointed out that no further 
loss of power was involved in the transformation of electrical into 
mechanical energy than is due to friction, and to the heating of the con- 
ducting wires by the resistance they oppose, and he showed that this loss, 
