320 



SCIENTIFIC NEWS. 



[Sept. 21, 1888. 



each like an insane postman " till Mr. Winkle, waking 

 up from a dream " that he was at a club where the 

 chairman was obliged to hammer the table a good deal 

 to preserve order," met with the catastrophe which the 

 readers of " Pickwick " will remember. 



But if some houses can still dispense with mechanical 

 or other methods of transmitting power, even to ring 

 bells, factories cannot. The looms, the lathes, or what- 

 ever the machinery used in the factory may be, must 

 either be worked by hand or foot, in the old style, or it 

 must be connected with the steam, gas, or water engine, 

 in the new. On entering a large factory you see lines 

 of rapidly rotating shafting, and a network of rapidly- 

 moving belting, all employed in transmitting power. As 

 a contrast to this, I now throw on the screen a photo- 

 graph of Sir David Salomon's workshop at Tunbridge 

 Wells, in which every machine is worked by a separate 

 electric motor, thus saving to a great extent the loss of 

 power that usually accompanies the mechanical trans- 

 mission. In America there are 6,000 electro motors 

 working machinery; in Great Britain hardly 100. 



But it is not only in transmitting the power from the 

 steam, gas, or water engine of a factory to the various 

 machines working in it, that electricity can be utilised. 

 An incredible amount of power is daily running to waste 

 in this and other countries because many of the rapid 

 streams of water are too far away from towns for their 

 power to have been hitherto utilised. 



The holiday tourist, when admiring the splashing 

 water dashing over the stones, hardly realises that the 

 money loss is as if the foam were composed of flakes of 

 silver. 



If we take a low estimate that a large well-made steam 

 engine burns only 2 lbs. of coal per horse power per 

 hour, the coal consumption which would be equivalent 

 to the waste of power at Niagara would exceed 150 

 millions of tons per annum, which at only 5s. or 6s. per 

 ton means some 40 million pounds sterling wasted. And 

 descending from big things to small, the river Avon 

 flowing through Bath, which so far from being a roaring 

 cataract, especially in dry weather, pursues its course 

 with only a respectable, orderly swish, still represents a 

 certain amount of lost power. It has been estimated 

 that from 25 to 130 horse-power runs to waste at the 

 Bathwick Weir behind the Guildhall, depending on the 

 season. If we take as an all-round average that the fall 

 at this weir represents 50 horse-power, and that a steam 

 engine producing this power burns 150 lbs. of coal per 

 hour, it follows that with steam coal at 16s. per ton, the 

 price at Bath, the waste at Bathwick Weir represents 

 an income of ^450 per annum, not a princely fortune, 

 it is true, but too large to be utterly thrown away as at 

 present. 



This state of things will, I hope, however, be shortly 

 remedied, for as you will see from the large map on the 

 wall, it is proposed to put up 81 electric arc lamps 

 throughout the streets of Bath, and to supply the 50 

 horse-power required for these lamps by the fall at the 

 Bathwick Weir, supplementing the fall with a steam 

 engine at dry seasons. 



The next large diagram shows the use that Lord 

 Salisbury has made of the river Lea to electrically light 

 Hatfield House and to supply electric motive power to 

 the various machines working on his estate. The next 

 diagram shows the course of the Portrush electric 

 railway, 6i miles long, which is worked by the Bushmill 

 Falls, situated at about one mile from the nearest point i 



of the railway. And lastly, this working model on the 

 table, kindly lent me by Dr. E. Hopkinson, as well as 

 the diagram on the wall, represent the Bessbrook and 

 Newry electric tramway, a little over three miles in 

 length, which is also worked entirely by water power, 

 the turbine and dynamo which convert the water power 

 into electric power being at about three-quarters of a mile 

 from the Bessbrook terminus. 



The newspapers of last week contained a long account 

 of the spiral electric mountain railway that has just been 

 opened to carry people up the Burgenstock, near 

 Lucerne, and worked by the River Aar, three miles 

 away, so that we see that electric traction, worked by 

 distant water power, is extending. But splendid as are 

 these most successful uses of water power to actuate 

 distant electro motors, it is but a stray stream here and 

 there that has yet been utilised, and countless wealth is 

 still being squandered in all the torrents all over the 

 world. 



The familiarity of the fact makes it none the less strik- 

 ing that while we obtain in a laborious way from the 

 depths of the earth the power we employ we let run to 

 waste every hour of our lives many, many times as much 

 as we use. 



It is also a well-established time-honoured fact that 

 large steam engines can be worked much more 

 economically than small ones, and that therefore if 

 it were possible to economically transmit the power 

 from a few very large steam engines to a great num- 

 ber of small workshops there would be a great saving 

 of power, as well as a great saving of time from the 

 workmen in these many small workshops having only to 

 employ this power for various industrial purposes, in- 

 stead of having to stoke, clean, repair, and generally 

 attend to a great number of small, uneconomical steam 

 engines. 



When delivering the lecture which I had the honour 

 to give at the meeting of the British Association at 

 Sheffield nine years ago, I entered fully into Professor 

 Perry's and my own views on this subject, and, therefore, 

 I will not enlarge on them now. You can all realise the 

 difference between the luxury of merely getting inlo a 

 train instead of having to engage post horses, of being 

 able to send a telegram instead of employing a special 

 messenger, or being able to turn on a gas tap and apply 

 a match when you want a light instead of having to pr - 

 chase oil and a wick, and trim a lamp. Well, a gene 

 supply of power to workshops is to the manufacturer 

 what a general supply of light or a general supply of 

 post-office facilities is to the householder ; it is all part 

 of the steady advance of civilisation that leads the man 

 to go to the tailor, the shoemaker, the baker, the butcher, 

 instead of manufacturing his own mocassins, and lassoing 

 a buffalo for dinner. And in case any of you may be 

 inclined to think that we have gone far enough in these 

 new-fangled notions, and we are all perhaps prone to 

 fall into this mistake as we grow older, let me remind 

 you that, while each age regards with unjustifiable 

 pride the superiority of its ways to those of its ances- 

 tors, that very age will appear but semi-civilised to its 

 great-grandchildren. Let us accept as an undoubted 

 fact that a general distribution of power would enable 

 the wants of civilised life to be better satisfied, and 

 therefore would greatly benefit industry. 



There are four methods of transmitting power to a 

 distance : — 



(1) By a moving rope. 



