him. He suspected that somewhere deeper than he had dug-lay that eternal zest to living, which was love. When she woke up, Martha Daborn, the wheelwright's wife, was standing over her, looking concerned, yet waggish. She said: "Your old man come back, then, Beetrus? I see the dirty plates as I come through. An' there 'ain't a bit o' food left in the place." Beatrice sat up, and her eyes comprised the room. At first she seemed scared; then she laughed, that laugh which nobody liked. "My young man he come home," she said, proudly. "He don't look a day older. Might be my son. I reckon he've gone agen, to jine his ship. Told me larst night he wur paid off; hadn't got the heart to tell me the truth. George wur allus tender. But he'll be back next Christmas Eve an' then he'll stay fer good an' all." She stared at the clock, then stood on her feet. "Nearly ten. I nivir!" "Yes, an' I bin waitin' fer you ter draw them turkey giblets, fer you've got wrists stronger 'n a man. Tell you what it is, Beetrus, you'll be murdered one o' these fine days. Why, the door warn't bolted, an' some tramp hev bin in a'ready an' cleared the house." "My George couldn't bolt it arter him, could he?" Beatrice was unconcerned, cheerful, and quite herself. "You wait a bit while I have a sluice down at the sink. Fancy me fallin' off like thet an' nivir takin' my clothes off!" When the wheelwright's wife was alone in the parlor she picked up the paper caps and folded them. "Make believe! Beetrus gits worse instid o' better," she said, thoughtfully. "But leave her alone Christmas Eve an' she'll come round by Christmas mornin'. Ready, Beetrus?" ELECTRICITY AND CIVILIZATION BY CHARLES P. STEINMETZ HE chief characteristic of our age is time, by steamship and railway train, THE chief characteristic off his iammes diate surroundings. The savage necessarily must depend upon his immediate neighborhood for the necessities of life. Some barter and commerce developed during the barbarian ages, but in the absence of any efficient means of transportation, even up to fairly recent times, such commerce could deal with luxuries and rare articles only, but for the common necessities of life man was still dependent on his immediate surroundings, and a local crop failure meant famine and starvation. The great French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century made man politically free, changed him from a serf to a citizen; and so unfettered the ability, initiative, and ambition of all. The invention of the steam engine advanced man from a machine doing the mechanical labor of the world to a machine tender, directing the machines capable of doing the work of thousands of men, and set him mechanically free. The higher intelligence and knowledge required for this demanded education of the masses of the people, and so gave them an intellectual freedom which the illiterate man of former ages could not have possessed. Thus came the great and rapid development of our modern industrial and engineering civilization, which is characterized by the almost complete independence of man of his surroundings. No matter where we live, whether in the center of the great metropolis, or in a small village far out in the wilderness, anything that man and earth produce anywhere, is available to us; the mail takes the order at our house, and in due by express company or mail, it is deliv ered at our house. This development of the means of transportation of materials by the steamship lines which cover the oceans, the railways which cover the continents with a network of tracks, the system of express and mail service, has been the great achievement of the nineteenth century, the foundation of our civilization, as we are forcibly made to realize whenever the transportation system breaks down in the slightest degree, as it did during the last years. But civilization depends on two things-materials and energy. As vitally important as materials, from the necessities of life to its luxuries, is energy, or power, as we often call it. That is, the thing which makes the wheels go around, which drives the factories and mills, which in the steam locomotive carries us far better and faster than our feet could; which, in the rays of the electric light or the gas flame, lights our homes and turns night into day; which, in the heat of coal burning in the stove, warms our houses and makes our climate inhabitable, and in our homes fetches and carries, cools the air by the fan motor or cooks our food, drives the sewing machine or the ice-cream freezer, sweeps and dusts by the vacuum cleaner, washes, irons, and does more and more of the manual labor, and can and will do still more in the future to make life agreeable and efficient. But while the methods of supply, transportation, and distribution of materials have been developed highly by the transportation systems, which were the great work of the last century, we are still backward in the energy supply for the needs of man; and this is the present great limitation of our civilization which the engineer is endeavoring to overcome. We cannot make or create energy. Thus, we have to take it from where we find it in nature, and bring it where we need it. The two big stores of energy in nature are in the coal mine and the waterfall, the former supplying the chemical energy of fuel (coal, oil, natural gas, etc.), which is set free as heat energy by combustion, and the latter supplying the hydraulic or mechanical energy. The first problem which we meet, then, is how to transport the energy from its source to the place where we need it. We can do this well enough with the chemical energy of coal, by carrying the coal in railway train or steamship, and so we are doing, though it is rather an inefficient way, as it costs more to bring the coal from the mine to the consumer than it does to mine it. But mechanical energy, as the hydraulic energy of water power, we cannot transport as such at all (or “transmit," as we usually term the transportation of energy), and before the advent of electrical energy transmission the water powers were practically useless. The only way was for the user of energy to locate at the water power. But the place where the water power is found is rarely suitable for an industry, hardly ever for a big city, and these are the two largest users of energy. It was the electrical engineer who made the water powers of use, by changing, "transforming" the hydraulic energy of the waterfall into electric energy, to send it over the electric transmission line to the distant places where energy is needed, and distribute it as electric energy. There are only two kinds or forms in which energy can be economically carried over long distances, "transported" or "transmitted”—as the chemical energy of fuel by the railway car or steamship, and as electrical energy by the transmission line; and when from your train window you see the coal cars going by or the electric transmission lines flying past, you realize that both fulfill the same function, carrying the energythat is, the power of doing things, on which our civilization depends, from its source where it is found in nature to the place where we need it. But, while fuel energy and electrical energy both can be economically transported or transmitted, there is a vast difference in them when we arrive at the destination and meet the problem of distributing and transforming the energy into that form which we need-heat energy to warm our homes and cook our food; light energy to extend the hours of daylight; mechanical energy to fetch and carry, to bring us to and from our work or pleasure, to turn the wheels of industry, drive the motor, whether the small fan motor of a fraction of a cat's power which cools our room, or the giant motor in the steel mill, which with the power of ten thousands of horses squashes steel ingots of tons of weight, as though they were soft putty, into the shape of rails to carry the train, or steel beams to support our building structures, or span the rivers as bridges. We can change the chemical energy of fuel into heat by burning it in our stoves and furnaces in a fairly simple, though rather inefficient, manner. But when we wish to convert the fuel energy into mechanical power we can do it efficiently and economically only in very large units, in the huge and highly complicated steam-turbine stations of ten thousands or hundred thousands of horse power; and we cannot mechanically distribute this energy except in a highly wasteful and inefficient manner, by shafts and belts and countershafts. If we want light, we have to select special fuels, as kerosene, or first convert the fuel energy of coal into that of gas in gas works, and distribute the gas; and even then we are far from the convenience and cleanliness of the electric light. It is the characteristic of electric energy that it can be distributed and converted into any other form of energy in a very simple and highly efficient manner, and that the economy of distribution and conversion is practically the same, whether we want the minute amount of energy to ring our door bell, or the power of hundred thousands of horses to drive the propellers of the battle cruiser. I press the button, and the electric light flashes up; I close the switch, and the fan motor starts at my desk, or the elevator begins to move, carrying tons of load, or the giant electric locomotive starts pulling the thousand-ton train. And there is little difference in the efficiency of the small motor driving a sewing machine and the giant motor on the rolling mill of the steel plant: either gives in mechanical power practically the full amount of the electric power which it receives. Electrical energy is unique in this respect, and it is the only form of energy which can be transmitted, distributed, and converted into any other form of energy with high efficiency-that is, with losses which are almost negligible, in the simplest possible manner and with practically no attention: closing the switch starts it, opening the switch again stops it, and that equally well and efficiently for the most minute power as for the largest amounts of power. Electrical energy thus is the form of energy best suited for the transmission and supply of the world's demand for energy, is indeed the only form of energy capable of doing this; and when you see the electric transmission lines crisscrossing the country and spreading over it in a network of wires, just as during the last century the railways spread their network of tracks over the country, you should realize that the electrical engineer is doing to-day for the world's energy supply what the railway engineer did during the last century for the world's material supply-he is organizing the world's energy supply required to complete and maintain our civilization. Thus, electric energy is the most useful form of energy, and at the same time it is the most useless; it is not found in nature in usable quantity; the electrical energy of the lightning flash is too erratic and too small in amount to make it worth while to collect it, even if it could be done, and all electric energy is produced by conversion from some other form of energy-mechanical in the generator, chemical in the battery. Electric energy is never used as such (except in minute amounts occasionally medicinally), but when used, it is always first converted into some other form of energy. Thus, electrical energy is the intermediary in the problem of taking some form of energy from somewhere and delivering it as some other form of energy somewhere else. Electric energy is the only energy fitted for this function as intermediary, as carrier between the source and the user of energy, due to its ease, simplicity, and efficiency of production from other forms of energy and conversion into other forms of energy, and the efficiency and economy of its transmission. Thus, with the rare exception where a power user can locate at the waterfall, water powers are always converted into electrical energy and transmitted and distributed as such, and it was the development of electrical engineering which has opened up to the uses of man in the water powers, the second largest source of energy. The chemical energy of fuel, from coal mine, oil well, or gas well, is still usually transmitted or transported as chemical energy by railway train or steamship line. The proposition has been made and discussed to burn the coal at the mine under steam boilers, convert its energy into electrical energy, and transmit it as such. To some extent, at least, this will undoubtedly be done in the future, as the major part of the cost of coal is not its mining, but its transportation, and, besides, a considerable part of the coal taken out of the mine is wasted by being so poor and mixed with dirt that it cannot be economically transported; it could, however, be burned in proper furnaces at the mine, and so made useful as electrical energy. The extent, however, to which we could hope to do this is limited by the limitation of the steam engine. The steam engine requires not only fuel to produce the steam, but also large amounts of water to condense the steam, and very often such condensing water is not available at the coal mine. But, while most of the fuel energy is still transmitted or transported as such, when it comes to the distribution of energy, more and more the electrical form of energy is used. That is, in a big electric station near the demand of power-the big city, mill, or factorythe fuel energy is converted into electrical energy, and distributed as such. We could distribute and deliver the energy as fuel-coal, oil, or gas-but what then? There is no simple and efficient way to convert the energy of coal, etc., into mechanical energy to propel the trolley car, or drive the sewing machine, into light to light our homes, etc., such as is afforded by the electric power. The difference in the usefulness of electrical energy in deriving any other form of energy from it, compared with the energy of coal, is best illustrated by such a simple convenience as the electric fan -push the button, and the fan starts; push it again, and it stops. Now imagine the problem of operating your desk fan by means of the energy of coal; you have attached to the fan a little steam engine, and to it a little boiler, and a little coal furnace, and when you want to start the fan you start a fire in the little furnace on your desk and get up steam in the little boiler, and operate the little steam engine to drive the fan. You see how impossible it is to use fuel energy for general energy distribution. You may say: "We should not use coal, but gas or oil, in a gas engine. We should have a little gas engine attached to our fan." This is simpler, but you fill your room with the ill-smelling hot exhaust gases, and, after all, to keep the gas engine running you have to have a magneto for ignition, and this is larger than the whole electric-fan motor. Or, if you use battery ignition, the power you take out of the battery could by a small electric motor drive your fan. This illustrates the superiority of electric power in energy distribution, and so a whole new industry has grown up the last twenty-five years-the industry of electric-power generation and distribution. From the small electric-lighting stations of the early days have grown up huge electric-power stations, some of them approaching a million horse power, and more and more supplying all the energy demand of the city or country, whether for lighting homes or streets, for driving the surface trolleys or the rapid-transit systems and the terminals of the steam railroads, supplying energy to factories and mills-in short, taking care of the energy supply and distribution. In the field of rail transportation, the electric motor has superseded all other means, except the steam locomotive on our trunk-line railways. But every engineer who has looked into the situation knows that the steam locomotive is doomed by its frightful wastefulness, and electrification is inevitable. By electric operation of our railways, even if all the electric power were generated by steam and no water power used, we should save about two-thirds of the coal now consumed by the locomotives-that is, hundreds of millions of tons-and at the same time, without a single mile of additional track, increase the capacity of our railroads by a quarter or more, due to the quicker start, better control, and higher speed of the electric train. In factories and mills the electric motor is replacing the steam engine, and thereby changing our industrial system. So we have seen in the last twenty-five years the cotton industry shifting from the New England states to the South, due to the economic advantage afforded |