ELECTRIC LIGHTING.

The electric light differs widely from all modes of artificial light previously invented. It is the latest method that man has discovered for the production of light. In its practical form this invention is quite recent. In England the arc light was produced in lecture-room experiments as early as 1802. Prof. Michael Faraday, a learned Englishman and celebrated chemist, experimented many years in electricity and magnetism in the Royal Institution at London. He continued his studies and experiments in developing the science of electricity through his whole life, but he died, an old man, before a single electric arc was seen in the streets of London.

In ancient times an invention was frequently the result of one man's efforts, but at the present time it is often quite otherwise. Many men are now engaged in the development of electric lighting. Charles Francis Brush was a farmer's boy in Ohio. He pushed himself through the Cleveland High School and graduated at the University of Michigan. He established a laboratory in Cleveland and turned his attention to the invention of apparatus for electric lighting. He was one of three or four great American inventors who successfully put into operation the dynamo and furnished electricity for the electrical lamp. This dynamo is a machine which produces electric currents by mechanical power. Brush's dynamo at the outset was so perfect and complete that for many years it has continued in regular use with but very little change.

Elihu Thomson graduated at the Central High School in Philadelphia and taught chemistry in that school. He studied with great care the subject of electricity, giving special attention to lighting. He organized the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, and has patented nearly two hundred inventions relating to electric lighting and other applications of electricity. He was also the inventor of the system of electric welding.

Among the great American inventors in electrical science is Thomas Alva Edison. He was an Ohio boy whose Scotch mother taught him to read. When he was twelve years old he was a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railroad. Here he acquired the habit of reading. He studied chemistry and conducted chemical experiments on the train. He learned to set type, and edited and printed a newspaper in the baggage car. He was constantly noticing the telegraph stations along the road, and he soon began to study electricity.

One day the little child of a station master was playing on the track just as a freight car was moving down toward him. Almost as swift as lightning itself young Edison dashed out, stepped in front of the coming car, and at the risk of his own life snatched the child from danger. In gratitude the station master, knowing the boy's interest in the telegraph, taught him how to use a machine. After that he acquired great skill in this art and operated in many sections of the country, perfecting himself in the subject.

For over twenty years he has had a large establishment, with an immense workshop and many mechanics, at Menlo Park, N. J., where he has devoted his whole attention to inventing. He has perfected his system of duplex telegraphy and invented the carbon telephone-transmitter, the phonograph, the platinum burner, and the carbon burner for the incandescent light. He has patented very many inventions, and his system of electric lighting for houses is now in general use. Edison's whole life is an interesting study for young people.

At the present time the two methods of lighting by electricity are the arc light and the incandescent light. The arc light is used for lighting large buildings like churches, halls, and railway stations, and for lighting the streets of a city. The incandescent light, or the glow-lamp as it is called in England, is in general use for lighting dwelling houses. This lamp consists of a glass bulb from which air has been excluded so that it is almost a perfect vacuum and in which is inserted a looped filament of carbon. The electricity is made to pass through this carbon wire, which is thereby heated to a white heat and thus furnishes the light. Being in a vacuum, the carbon is but slightly burned. It therefore can be subjected to this heat for a long time without breaking or wearing out.

At first Edison used a platinum wire in the little electric lamp. He wanted something better. He needed some form of bamboo or other vegetable fibre. He sent a man to explore China and Japan for bamboo. He sent another, who traveled twenty-three hundred miles up the Amazon River and finally reached the Pacific coast, searching for bamboo. He sent a third to Ceylon to spend years in a similar search. Eighty varieties of bamboo and three thousand specimens of other vegetable fibre were brought him. He tested them all; three or four were found suitable.

This system of incandescent lights has been rapidly extended within a few years. There are millions of these lights now in use in this country. They are used not only for lighting the rooms of hotels and private houses, but also for lighting steamships, railway trains, and street cars, and for nearly all indoor illumination. This light is not as cheap as kerosene or gaslight, but it is so convenient and so simple, requiring no daily care, that it is rapidly coming into use in all towns and cities.

Among its advantages may be named the four following points. Matches are not needed in making a light. Thus the danger from accidental fires, which have so frequently occurred from the careless use of matches, is avoided. Very little heat results from an electric light, while from kerosene lamps and gaslight much heat is produced. In warm weather this freedom from heat is agreeable. The burning lamp and the gas jet make the air of the room impure and unfit for breathing. This is not true of the electric light. In the use of kerosene and of illuminating gas there is frequently danger of explosion. Not so with the electric light.

It will be seen that we are thus using to-day for lighting purposes occasionally the candle, quite largely the kerosene lamp, and to a great extent in towns and cities the gaslight, and best of all—the cleanest, the neatest, giving the brightest light, requiring the least attention from the consumer, and manifesting the highest development of man's inventive genius thus far—the electric light. Here at present man's invention in this direction has stopped. What the next step will be, no one can tell.

Slowly through the ages man has been developing. Gradually he has grown in mental power and advanced morally and spiritually. It is very clear that although he is an animal and has the nature and desires of an animal, he has high mental capacity and is endowed with a spiritual nature, a soul. At the very beginning of creation we are told, "God said, Let there be light: and there was light." How and whence it came we cannot tell. It would almost seem that man in his effort to create light has kept step with his own development. The first light was produced from the simplest substances, solids: wood on the hearth, the pitch-pine knot, and the candle. Then followed light produced from liquids: olive oil, whale oil, refined petroleum. Afterward the inventive genius of man extracted from coal an invisible gas which would burn and give a bright, clear light. Rising higher and higher, man soars above all solids, liquids, and gases, and with a sudden bound leaps almost out of the realm of matter and produces the electric light, which is merely a form of motion. How clearly the progress of man, his elevation, his civilization, his increased conveniences and luxuries of life are made to appear in this study of his methods of obtaining artificial light!