"
I make these parallel quotations for the benefit of those who imagine
that electricity is making such vastly greater strides than other
sources of power. I well remember making this journey to Boxmoor, and
four or five years later traveling on a circular electro-magnetic
railway. Comparing that electric railway with those now exhibiting,
and comparing the Boxmoor trip with the present work of the London and
North-Western Railway, I have no hesitation in affirming that the rate
of progress in electro-locomotion during the last forty years has been
far smaller than that of steam.
The leading fallacy which is urging the electro-maniacs of the present
time to their ruinous investments is the idea that electro-motors
are novelties, and that electric-lighting is in its infancy; while
gas-lighting is regarded as an old, or mature middle-aged business,
and therefore we are to expect a marvelous growth of the infant and no
further progress of the adult.
These excited speculators do not appear to be aware of the fact that
electric-lighting is older than gas-lighting; that Sir Humphry Davy
exhibited the electric light in Albemarle Street, while London was still
dimly lighted by oil-lamps, and long before gas-lighting was attempted
anywhere. The lamp used by Sir Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution, at
the beginning of the present century, was an arrangement of two
carbon pencils, between which was formed the "electric arc" by the
intensely-vivid incandescence and combustion of the particles of carbon
passing between the solid carbon electrodes.
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