Gas Versus Electricity

Abstract

THE gas companies are at last awakening to the peculiarity of their position, and gas-shareholders are recovering their confidence in the stability of their property. It is interesting to observe how steadily the shares in all the great gas companies have during the last few weeks been rising, and unless any untoward event occurs there is no reason why in a short time they should not recover the position they so singularly lost in August of last year. Looking dispassionately upon the events that have occurred, it is difficult to understand how such a panic and scare eould have arisen. Nothing of any sort or kind has been discovered either in the laws of electricity or in their application to electric lighting to account for it. We know no more of the electric light now than we did in 1862, when as great a display was made in our Exhibition of that year as was made in the French Exhibition of last year. There is no doubt, however, that the enterprise of our neighbours on the other side of the Channel in lighting up so brilliantly one of their grand new streets produced a sensation that will not easily be forgotten. Englishmen never like to be beaten. We are accustomed to be startled by inventions from the other side of the Atlantic, but we are not accustomed to be beaten either in commercial enterprise or in inventive skill by our neighbours on this side of the Atlantic. Hence, all of those, whose name is legion, who visited Paris last year came back with exaggerated ideas of the effect of the electric light in the Avenue de l'Opéra, and spread through England a profound opinion of the value of electricity as a means of illumination.