Article March 8, 1900 Issue

Uses of Electricity

Charles W. Price

New York Sun

An address on "Every-day Uses of Electricity" was delivered at the Montauk Club, Brooklyn, by Charles W. Price, editor of the Electrical Review. In speaking of the telephone, Mr. Price said:—

"To show what remarkable doings take place every day under our very ears, as it were, I would state that at the present time between all important telephone centres of the United States, while the trunk wires are being used for transmitting speech, there is being sent over them simultaneously telegraphic messages without producing any interference with the spoken words. Were it not for immutable laws of nature, which cannot be varied by man or corporation, you might, by listening, take off the telegraphic message thus traversing these very conductors. Although the telegraphic impulses actually traverse the coil in the telephone at your ear, and actually speed aiong the identical copper conductor at that time conveying the voice currents, you hear neither dot nor dash of the telegraphic message. The ear, keenly tuned to those rapid vibrations constituting sound, is deaf to the vibrations of the slow rate of the telegraph."

Mr. Price said that over six hundred million dollars had been invested in electric lighting in the United States, and that the total horse-power required in the electric lighting, are and incandescent, of Greater New York required not less than two hundred thousand horse power. This would be sufficient to pump the East River dry in a day, and yet this power would be nearly doubled by the electric traction plants now in existence and building. In speaking of the progress of the electric railway, Mr. Price stated that it was less than thirteen years old, and yet within that period an expenditure had been made of more than $1,700,000,000, and he believed that the year 1900 would see the gross earnings of the electric traction interests of the United States amount to considerably more than $200,000,000.

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