Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/122

 propelled. Perhaps this discovery lies so far in the foreground of the future as to be irrelevant to any anticipations of the world's condition a hundred years hence. The full development of electrically-driven machinery lies in the middle distance, and the duration of the electrical age can hardly be pre-calculated with any greater exactness than the suggestion that it will probably have reached, or at all events approached, its end in about a century's time.

The most important problem connected with this subject is to imagine, if we can, how electrical power will be applied. It is quite evident that the device of long conductors, either overhead or below ground—the "live wires" of alarmed America—is too clumsy and too dangerous to be long tolerated. It is indeed a public scandal that cables carrying an electrical charge capable of killing or paralysing at a touch should be suspended over the heads of the citizens, exposed to momentary breakage by snowfall, high wind, or the inevitable wear which careless inspectors may overlook: and the mere fact that a horse can occasionally set foot on a ground plate and fall dead from the contact shows that even the vaunted "conduit system" must not be regarded as anything but a strictly-temporary device. Some of the dangers of the underground electric wires arise out of the use of our present illuminating gas, when a pipe