124 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
To explain the task of the Bramwell Lecturer we must recall the meeting 
of 1881, when the Association was celebrating its jubilee in the heyday of 
Victorian prosperity and confidence. It was a jubilant jubilee. Never, 
perhaps, was applied science more actively progressive. From day to day 
its achievements compelled attention. Electricity was knocking at the 
door, bringing a wallet big with gifts, wonderful gifts that established 
new contacts between the sciences of the laboratory and the arts of 
social life. 
The world of invention was in a ferment; the brew was seething and 
bubbling. Some of the froth on the surface had to be blown away, but 
beneath that there were changes in substance which fifty years have 
strengthened and matured. 
Think for a moment of what the late seventies and the early eighties 
gavetomankind. The telephone, the phonograph, the incandescent lamp, 
the dynamo in a practical form, the electric motor, the storage battery, 
the transformer, the internal-combustion engine using liquid fuel, cold- 
storage and refrigerated transport of food, the idea of public electric 
supply, the use of alternating currents, the first clear recognition of the 
potentialities of electricity as an agent for lighting, for traction, for the 
conveyance and distribution of power. There, indeed, was a dish to set 
before the potential rulers of a kingdom which was waiting to be explored, 
where every engineer in the bud might well fancy himself to be a coming 
ling. 
a ‘ Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 
But to be young was very heaven.’ 
Looking back now, it is curious to reflect how poor was the equipment 
of most of the pioneers. There were, indeed, a few great leaders—a 
Kelvin or a Hopkinson—who possessed the right kind of basic under- 
standing, who could turn to theory for guidance and had the engineer’s 
instinct to give it application. Here and there was a Ferranti, with vision 
and imagination to compensate for the lack of formal knowledge. But 
most of the zealous workers of those days were empirics, groping in what 
was at best a half light, full of enterprise and enthusiasm and not much 
more. They could get little help from textbooks. Some of them made — 
what may now seem strange mistakes, and in that way they acquired a 
costly education. 
Among those fertile years I would specially mention 1881, which was 
the date of Bramwell’s prophecy as well as the Jubilee of the Association. 
Apart from that it marks an epoch. For the world then realised that a 
problem was at last solved with which it had been much concerned, 
the problem called the subdivision of the electric light. Before that 
the electric ight had meant the electric arc—a dazzling unit, brilliant, 
overpowering, capricious, admired out of doors, but quite unfitted 
for the home. It was a tiger burning bright which declined to become 
a domestic pet. 
Then came Edison and Swan who, working separately, taught us how 
to tame it by inventing the incandescent filament enclosed within a 
vacuum bulb. Near the end of 1881 Sir William Thomson (as he then 
was) lighted his house in Glasgow by means of Swan’s lamps, using with 
a 
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