Nothing irritates an electrical engineer more readily than the repetition of the phrase, 'Electricity is in its infancy.' The words have been used by countless mayors and aldermen while 'inaugurating' tramway or electric lighting schemes; they have been echoed by innumerable journalists who persist in maintaining a Jules-Verne attitude towards the electrical industry. And what disturbs the electrical engineer is not only the banality of the phrase but the use of it as a comment upon the achievements to which he has devoted his life.

Nevertheless it will be admitted, from the rapid survey which we have taken of electric traction, that the potentialities of electricity in locomotion make an even stronger appeal than the actualities. Except in one field—the tramway field—engineers have only touched the fringe of possible developments in electric locomotion.

Even in tramway work we may, if legislative conditions improve and if current becomes much cheaper, see a considerable development in passenger and also in agricultural lines. Meanwhile the trolley omnibus offers a prospect of extension in electric road traction; and there is a great deal yet to be done with petrol-electric vehicles and with electric automobiles in certain classes of transport.

The great field, however, lies in railway traction. There are 200 miles of electric railway in the United Kingdom; and there are nearly 13,000 miles of steam railway. Not even the most sanguine electrical missionary will believe that this difference can be materially altered within the next decade, but there is ample ground for faith in the steady increase of the electrical figure. If the advance of electric traction on railways must be slow, it is because financial and not engineering considerations govern the speed of conversion. No railway company can take a step involving hundreds of thousands of pounds, and a revolution in working methods, without prolonged consideration and elaborate preparation.

On roads, on tramways, and on railroads, the future lies with electricity—wholly on railroads and tramways, perhaps not wholly on roads. There is scope for it also at sea; and if our canals are worth the cost of reconstruction on modern lines, electric haulage will be used there on the model of the canal haulage installations which exist here and there on the Continent. For marine work the advantages of electricity have yet to be confirmed by practical experience; but on land it has already proved that it supplies a means of locomotion which is more efficient, cleaner and more attractive, and more closely adapted to the needs and distribution of modern population than any other.

The fashion for devising Utopias is not so popular as it used to be, but in every ideal world which is more than a spiritual vision, and in every intelligent forecast of an advanced civilisation, universal electric transport is taken for granted. Electrical engineers are ready to prove that this standard element in Utopia is available at the present day on the basis which is the ultimate justification of all engineering projects in this workaday world—the basis of profit.

Their confidence will be intensified when we approach the 'all-electric' age prophesied by Mr Ferranti in his Presidential Address to the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1910. Mr Ferranti looks forward to a national scheme for the supply and distribution of electric power. Under this scheme, the production of electricity would be concentrated in one hundred huge power stations, using engines of enormous capacity and acting as wholesale suppliers of electrical energy to towns, railways, tramways, and factories. The price of electricity would then be a fraction of what it is now; and all the economies of electricity in action would be multiplied accordingly. Technically, the scheme is quite feasible; and it could be realised in the near future if capitalists and the Government could be brought to appreciate the tremendous stimulus it would offer to industrial activity and the effect it would have in conserving the power which is latent in our coal measures.