Triumphs and wonders of the 19th century, the true mirror of a phenomenal era, a volume of original, entertaining and instructive historic and descriptive writings, showing the many and marvellous achievements which distinguish an hundred years of material, intellectual, social and moral progress .. . e to the higher question of utility and indispensability. VII. ELECTRIC LOCOMOTION. The dawn of the nineteenth century saw, as vehicles of locomotion, thesaddled hackney, the clumsy wagon, the ostentatious stage-coach, the prim-itive dearborn, the lumbering carriage, the poetic one-hoss shay. The
Triumphs and wonders of the 19th century, the true mirror of a phenomenal era, a volume of original, entertaining and instructive historic and descriptive writings, showing the many and marvellous achievements which distinguish an hundred years of material, intellectual, social and moral progress .. . e to the higher question of utility and indispensability. VII. ELECTRIC LOCOMOTION. The dawn of the nineteenth century saw, as vehicles of locomotion, thesaddled hackney, the clumsy wagon, the ostentatious stage-coach, the prim-itive dearborn, the lumbering carriage, the poetic one-hoss shay. The WONDERS OF ELECTRICITY 45 universal energy was the horse. A new energy came with the applicationof steam, and with it new vehicular locomotion, — easier, swifter, stronger, forthe most part cheaper, rendering possible what was hitherto impossible as totime and distance. This signal triumph of the century may not have been eclipsed by theintroduction of subsequent locomotive changes, but it was to be supplementedby what, at the beginning, would have passed for the idle dream of a vision-ary. The horse-car came, had its brief day, and went out with all its incon-veniences, cruelties, and horrors before, in part, the traction-car, and, in part,the rapidly revolutionizing energy of ELECTIUO LOCOMOTI VK. The first conception of a railway to be operated by electricity dates fromabout 1835, when Thomas Davenport, of Brandon. contrived and moveda small car by means of a current from voltaic cells placed within it. In1851, Professor Page, of the Smithsonian Institution, ran a car propelled byelectricity upon the steam railway between Washington and Baltimore, butthough he obtained a high rate of speed, the cost of supplying the current bymeans of batteries —the only means then known — prohibited the commer-cial use of his method. With the invention of the dynamo as an economic and powerful generatorof electricitv, and also the invention of the motor as a means
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, bookidtri, booksubjectinventions
