Electricity at the Crystal Palace

Abstract

I. THE work of installing the apparatus and machines at the Crystal Palace Electrical Exhibition is progressing very slowly, owing perhaps to the absence of any formal day of opening to hasten it. Before everything is fairly in its place, at least another fortnight will have elapsed, for a great deal of time is necessarily consumed in making electrical connections. Enough has been done, however, to give a fair idea of what the exhibition will be like. The official catalogue has been published in advance, and there are about five hundred exhibitors enumerated in its pages. Of these only about a hundred are from abroad, including America, so that the exhibition is rather an English than an “international” one. At the Paris International Exhibition of Electricity there were over two thousand exhibitors, and of these only one-half were French, the remainder being from every other civilised country, including Japan, which offered the first fruits of its electrical science in the shape of some porcelain telegraph insulators, and battery pets of porous clay. Comparison with the famous show at Paris is naturally provoked by the public statements which have been made, to the effect that the Sydenham exhibition will be equal, if not superior to that in the Champs Elysées, but there is really no comparison between the two displays. It is not merely in the number and variety, of the exhibits that the difference is so marked; but in the arrangement of the whole, and the intrinsic value, ingenuity, and workmanship of the articles exposed. The Paris exhibition was a compendium of all that electricity had achieved since it became a science, and the visitor could there see within the compass of a single building the rough experimental apparatus with which all the great discoveries in electricity had been made, and the most powerful and magnificent effects which modern invention has elicited from them. Everything had been done by the exercise of French taste to make the exhibition as interesting and attractive as possible. A lighthouse, a model theatre, a picture-gallery, had been erected to show the capabilities of the electric light; the powers of the telephone were exemplified by means of a “salle d'audition,” where visitors could hear the music of the Grand Opera and the elocution of the Comédie Française; an electric boat plied on the waters of an ornamental basin; an electric balloon was propelled through the air; and a great diversity of machines were put in motion by the electric current from sewing-machines and fans, up to hammers, pumps, and printing-presses.