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 grills, chafing dishes, percolators, flatirons, curling irons, bed warmers, hair driers, and so on. These domestic conveniences are steadily increasing in number, and their advent may be said to mark a new epoch in housekeeping, but it is in the industrial field that the amount of electric energy used as heat has lately become truly enormous. A well-known engineer has recently predicted that before the year 1935 we shall see as much electricity used industrially in this country for heating as is used in turning the wheels of machinery.



This development was undreamed of a generation ago. Look back to the year 1882, and you find Edison establishing in New York city the first public plant for supplying electricity. A 200-kilowatt generator sufficed for its needs and the output was devoted entirely to lighting. A few years later the motor load began to figure in central-station operations, with the advent of desk fans in offices. Electric elevators and other applications of the motor followed. By the early nineties of the last century, electricity was driving a large variety of machines, electric railways were rapidly multiplying, and the business of producing and selling electric current had come to be known as the electric-light and power industry, a name that it still retains. In the statistics of the industry, the part of the output used for lighting is usually segregated, while that used for driving motors, for heating and for electrochemical purposes is lumped together under the head of power. Not until the second decade of the present century did the central stations begin to supply more energy for power than for lighting, and only within the past six or eight years did the portion of the former applied to industrial heating begin to bulk large.

Let us now see how this new electrical giant is serving the needs of industry.