Page:Cassier's Magazine Volume XV.djvu/249

Rh shop, they would have provided an excellent place for boiler-shop tools on one side and tank work on the other side. In the Boston and Maine shop are realised, for the first time in the United States, as far as is known to the writer, that which he regards as the ideal conditions for a locomotive repair shop where large power cranes are used.

It has been the purpose of this article to show the advantages of such a plan, or others, where the principal departments required for locomotive repairs are arranged in one building.

HE electric motor is rapidly becoming the most favoured medium for the transformation and transmission of energy for all industrial operations, whether on a large or small scale. This is due to the paramount advantages it possesses over any other method of utilising potential energy. These advantages, as stated by the writer in a paper recently read before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, while well known to electrical engineers, are indifferently appreciated by a large number of mechanical engineers, and almost unknown by the general manufacturer and tradesman. To the last of these three, the general manufacturer and tradesman who is using machinery driven at present by steam or water-power, the electric motor must in the days to come prove of exceptional value; and yet, strangely enough, very little effort has hitherto been made, either by the motor maker or by the managers of electricity supply undertakings, to open up this very wide and lucrative field of enterprise.

It is not necessary to enumerate here the many excellent and distinctive features which the electric motor possesses. The intention here is rather to consider the reasons why its application up to the present time has been confined to a few special trades and manufactures. We are familiar, for instance, with electrically driven pumps, electric hoists and cranes, electrically driven machine tools, and electric power transmission in works,—cases in which the generation, transformation, and application occur practically under one roof. Many manufacturers and constructional engineers, wisely and readily incurring additional capital outlay with the object of securing more economical production, have adopted electric motors, which do not entail the use of endless and power-absorbing shafting and countershafting. As yet, however, it cannot be said that the electric motor is in general use, or scarcely other than just past the threshold of its future domain.

The smaller producer and tradesman, to whom motive power in some form or other is essential, and who feels more acutely than his larger confrère the effects of competition, has, in the great majority of cases, still to put up with very much more cumbersome and very much less efficient means of power production. Almost every town with any pretension to size and importance has its own large staple industries, as well as many minor industries and busi-