1882.] 



President's Address. 



325 



takings, neither have any of those larger enterprises which I took 

 occasion to mention last year, such as the circumpolar observations, or 

 the Transit of Venus Expeditions, as yet been brought to their final 

 issue. Nevertheless, in some of them we have evidence that good 

 work is already being done, and in the others, of which we have as 

 yet no information, there is no reason to doubt that the same is the 

 case. Nor again, in the border-land between science proper and its 

 applications, have I to record anything so important as the Paris 

 Electrical Exhibition. That Exhibition, however, bore legitimate 

 fruit in the Electric Lighting Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, and in 

 the technical experiments lately carried out on a large scale at 

 Munich. Perhaps the most prominent feature of the Crystal Palace 

 Show was the incandescent light. At Paris that mode of illumina- 

 tion appeared to be little more than a possibility, in London it had 

 become an accomplished fact. The importance attaching to this 

 advance in electric lighting may be measured both by the rapid 

 extension of its use, and also by the fact that not a few of our leading 

 minds consider that the incandescent lamp is the lamp of the future, 

 not merely for domestic, but even for many other public purposes. 



But in another way the present year has witnessed the most 

 important step which could have been taken for the promotion of 

 electric lighting in this country. The Legislature has passed the 

 Electric Lighting Bill, and, so far as legislation can effect the object, 

 it has brought electricity to our doors. Up to this time installations 

 of greater or less magnitude had sprung up sporadically in many parts 

 of the country, in railway stations, manufacturing works, and 

 occasionally in private houses. But, compared with the lighting of a 

 whole town, or even of separate districts of a large city, even the 

 most important of these must be confessed still to partake of the 

 nature of experiments ; experiments, it is true, on a large scale, and, 

 as I believe, conclusive as to the ultimate issue. Indeed, by mul- 

 tiplication of machines it is certainly, even now, possible to increase 

 the lighting power to any required extent ; but this can hardly be 

 regarded as the final form of solution of the problem, inasmuch as 

 such a method would be as uneconomical as it would be to use a 

 number of small steam-engines instead of a large one. And when we 

 consider that at the time of the passing of the Act in question, there 

 was but one machine actually constructed -which was capable of 

 illuminating even one thousand incandescent lamps (I mean that of 

 Edison), we cannot but feel that much remained to be done before the 

 requirements of the public could be fully met. I do not mean 

 thereby to imply that the Act was passed at all too soon ; on the con- 

 trary, it has already given just that impetus which was necessary for 

 producing installations on a larger scale. In illustration of this, I 

 cannot help mentioning, as the first fruit of the impetus, a remarkable 



