Electrical Railways

Abstract

ONE of the most striking of the many new departures in the practical application of electrical science, which made the Paris Exhibition of 1881 memorable, was a short tramway laid down, under the direction of the late Sir William Siemens, from the Palais de l'Industrie to the Place de la Concorde, upon which a tramcar worked by an electric motor plied up and down with great regularity and success during the period of the Exhibition. Yet few of those who saw in this experiment the possibilities of a great future for a new mode of traction would have ventured to predict that within ten years' time, in the United States alone, over 5,000 electric cars would be in operation, travelling 50,000,000 miles annually, and carrying 250,000,000 passengers, or that electrical traction would have solved the problem of better communication in London and other large cities. Two years before the exhibition in Paris the iate Dr. Werner Siemens had exhibited at the Berlin Exhibition in 1879 an experimental electric tramway on a much smaller scale, and his firm had put down in 1881 the first permanent electric railway in the short length of line at Lichterfelde, near Berlin, which, I believe, is still at work. In the same year Dr. William Siemens undertook to work the tramway, then projected, between Portrush and Bushmills, in the north of Ireland, over six miles in length, by electric power, making use of the water power of the Bush River for the purpose, an underiking which I had the advantage of carrying out under his direction. It is no part of my object to-night to follow further the history of electric traction, which is so recent that it is familiar to all; but, in alluding to these initial stages of its development, I have desired to recall that it was to the foresight and energy of Dr. Werner and Dr. William Siemens, and their skill in applying scientific knowledge to the uses of daily life, which gave the first impulse to the development of the new electrical power.