IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 
25 
and beverages from Japan and Java and the valley of the 
Amazon. In the United States alone there are nowin 
operation nearly 200,000 miles of railway, carrying yearly 
one billion tons of freight and 550 millions of passengers. 
The carriage of power is accomplished at present almost 
wholly by the transportation of fuel. The value of this 
service may be seen by contrast with some railroadless 
country such as China, where according to Colquhon, 
coal selling at the mine at fifteen cents per ton, cost as 
many dollars ten miles away. But the future doubtless 
has in store the distribution of power as an article of mer- 
chandise. The possibility of long distance transmission of 
electricity has already been demonstrated at Niagara, and 
the time may be near when in our cities power from coal 
field or waterfall may be purchased for use in factory 
and home as readily as water or gas today. 
What has already been said of the debt of industry to 
science in the development of its motive powers applies 
here equally in transportation. Permit a single illustra- 
tion further of the value of pure science in the evolution 
of the circulatory system. Every engineer is aware of the 
large contribution which the steel rail has made to the 
success of the railway. Durable, strong and cheap, it has 
displaced on all our railways the weak and short-lived rail 
of iron. It has made possible heavier trains and higher 
speeds. Together with other factors it has so cheapened 
traction that, according to Professor J. J. Stevenson, the 
coal of West Virginia is now sold at New York City for less 
than one-fourth the railway freight charges of a quarter 
of a century ago. But it is no belittlement of the laurels 
of Sir Henry Bessemer, the inventor who has made all this 
possible, to point to the fact that the success of his pro- 
cess which, by ushering out the Age of Iron and ushering 
in the Age of Steel, has revolutionized industry and 
touched every home with its beneficence, is due not only 
to his use of a great body of facts in the chemistry of the 
metals, but in especial to the utilization by Mushet of the 
facts regarding the influence of manganese and its relation 
to carbon, — facts ascertained in the laboratories of science 
