14 REPORT—1890. 
tant from the Fills, with a view to the erection of mills for utilising the 
power, which it is also proposed to transmit to distant towns, and an 
International Commission, with Sir William Thomson at its head, and 
with Mascart, Turrettini, Coleman Sellers, and Unwin as members, will 
carefully consider the problems involved in the execution of this grand 
scheme. 
The application of electric traction to water-traffic, first successfully 
demonstrated in 1883, is receiving gradual development, as illustrated by 
the considerable number of pleasure-boats which may now be seen on 
the Upper Thames during the boating season, and in connection with 
which Professor George Forbes proposed, at our meeting last year, that 
stations for charging the requisite cells, through the agency of water- 
power, should be established at the many weirs along the river, so as to 
provide convenient electric coaling-stations for the river pleasure-fleet. 
Electrically-transmitted energy was first applied to haulage work 
in mines in Germany, by the firm of Siemens some years ago, and 
great progress has since been achieved herein on the Continent and in 
America. Comparatively little has been accomplished in this direction in 
England ; but it is very interesting to note, on the present occasion, that 
the first successful practical application of electricity in this country to 
pumping and underground haulage-work was made in 1887 in this neigh- 
bourhood, at the St. John’s Colliery at Normanton, where an extensive 
installation, carried out by Mr. Immisch, so well known in connection 
with electric launches, is furnishing very satisfactory results in point of 
economy and efficiency. The gigantic installations existing for the same 
purposes in Nevada and California afford remarkable indications of 
the work to be accomplished in the future by electrically-transmitted 
energy. 
Among the many subjects of importance studied by Joule, with the 
originality and thoroughness characteristic of his work, was the applica- 
tion of voltaic electricity to the welding and fusion of metals. Thirty- 
four years ago he published a most suggestive paper on the subject, 
in which, after dealing with the difficulties attending the operation of 
welding, and of the interference of films of oxide, formed upon the 
highly heated iron surfaces, with the production of perfect welds either 
under the hammer or by the methods of pressure (of which he then 
predicted the application to large masses of forged iron), he refers to 
the possibility of applying the calorific agency of the electric current to 
the welding of metals, and describes an operation witnessed by him in 
the laboratory of his fellow-labourer, Thomson, of fusing together a bundle 
of iron wires by transmitting through them, when imbedded in charcoal, a 
powerful voltaic current. Joule afterwards succeeded in uniting by fusion 
a number of iron wires with the employment of a Daniell battery, and in 
* welding together wires of brass and steel, platinnm and iron, &c. In 
discussing the question of the amount of zinc consumed in a battery for 
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