May 17, 1901.] 
of about forty years ago to the enormous 
electric stations, furnishing power for 
our expanding industries, turning night 
into day in our cities and making prac- 
ticable the great development in electric 
traffic in urban districts, electric elevators 
in our stores and electric apparatus of in- 
finite variety everywhere to minister to our 
needs and comforts. Through the electric 
transmission of power has a vast field of 
industry been opened. Through all the 
ages had great water power been useless 
because of its remoteness, until the develop- 
ment of electric machinery, suited to the 
purpose, made practicable the transmission 
of power, twenty, thirty, forty miles, with 
much greater distances in prospect. As 
indications of the inevitable result, witness 
the busy life in the new cotton mills of the 
Piedmont regions of the Southern States, or 
the quickened industries of the Pacific 
Coast. 
The mechanical engineer had invented the 
steam engine before the beginning of the 
century just closed, but its development 
was crude, as shown by the winding and 
pumping engines, the sun and planet, and 
beam engines placed in South Kensington 
Museum to illustrate the practice of that 
day, engines which were then considered 
unusual if they developed one two-hun- 
dredth part of the power of engines of to- 
day; while the total for the world is now 
not far from seventy million horse-power, 
which is greater than the aggregate physical 
power of the total population of the world, 
even were it possible to exert this power 
without cessation. And the engine is only 
one instance of the unparalleled advance; 
we should also mention such inventions 
and developments as the cotton-gin and 
cotton-bailing machinery, the gas and oil 
engines, the harvester, the sewing machine, 
the hydraulic press and other hydraulic 
machinery, the steam-hammer, and count- 
less other labor-savying, epoch-marking ma- 
SCIENCE 
773 
chines of wide import and far-reaching 
significance, like the printing press, capable 
now of printing, folding and counting 1,600 
eight-page newspapers per minute, where 
the hand-press a century ago could make 
not more than four or five impressions in 
-the same length of time. 
The metallurgical engineer has added his 
full share to the increased productive ca- 
pacity of the world. A hundred years ago 
only a pitiful modicum of iron and steel 
was produced, and this with great expense 
and almost infinite pains. The blast fur- 
naces then were about one-half their pres- 
ent diameter and one-third the height, pro- 
ducing perhaps five thousand tons per an- 
num, where furnaces now will produce 
thirty to forty times that amount. Wrought 
iron was produced by the Bloomery, Cata- 
lan or other crude direct processes, or by 
the direct open-hearth fineries of Sweden or 
Wales ; and steel by the Catalan, cementa- 
tion or crucible steel processes, likewise 
very expensive and slow. At the present 
day we have, for the production of pig iron, 
blast furnaces a hundred feet high, costing. 
seven hundred thousand dollars each ; and 
for the finished product we have the pud- 
dling furnace (first introduced by Cort 
close to the end of the eighteenth century), 
producing malleable iron, and the Siemens 
open-hearth and the Bessemer processes 
(developments of the last half-century) for 
the production of steel. These last two in- 
ventions mark the greatest advance ever 
made in metallurgical processes, and have 
made possible the wide range in construc- 
tion in steel in all the various branches of 
engineering. Figures are wanting to give 
the quantity of steel produced a century 
ago. It could not have exceeded a hun- 
dred thousand tons, for fifty years ago Shef- 
field, then the great steel-producing city of 
the world, manufactured about fifty thou- 
sand tons per year; and the cost of crucible 
steel, made from Swedish iron, worth sey- 
