Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/72

62 These results are not only of obvious practical value, but they seem to establish a fixed relation between current, temperature, and light produced, which may serve as a means to determine temperatures exceeding the melting-point of platinum with greater accuracy than has hitherto been possible by actinimetric methods in which the thickness of the luminous atmosphere must necessarily exercise a disturbing influence. It is probably owing to this circumstance that the temperature of the electric arc as well as that of the solar photosphere has frequently been greatly overestimated.

The principal argument in favor of the electric light is furnished by its immunity from products of combustion which not only heat the lighted apartments, but substitute carbonic acid and deleterious sulphur compounds for the oxygen upon which respiration depends; the electric light is white instead of yellow, and thus enables us to see pictures, furniture, and flowers as by daylight; it supports growing plants instead of poisoning them, and by its means we can carry on photography and many other industries at night as well as during the day. The objection frequently urged against the electric light, that it depends upon the continuous motion of steam or gas engines, which are liable to accidental stoppage, has been removed by the introduction into practical use of the secondary battery; this, although not embodying a new conception, has lately been greatly improved in power and constancy by Planté, Faure, Volckmar, Sellon, and others, and promises to accomplish for electricity what the gas-holder has done for the supply of gas and the accumulator for hydraulic transmission of power.

It can no longer be a matter of reasonable doubt, therefore, that electric lighting will take its place as a public illuminant, and that, even though its cost should be found greater than that of gas, it will be preferred for the lighting of drawing-rooms and dining-rooms, theatres and concert-rooms, museums, churches, warehouses, show-rooms, printing establishments, and factories, and also the cabins and engine rooms of passenger-steamers. In the cheaper and more powerful form of the arc-light, it has proved itself superior to any other illuminant for spreading artificial daylight over the large areas of harbors, railway-stations, and the sites of public works. When placed within a holophote the electric lamp has already become a powerful auxiliary in effecting military operations both by sea and land.

The electric light may be worked by natural sources of power such as water-falls, the tidal wave, or the wind, and it is conceivable that these may be utilized at considerable distances by means of metallic conductors. Some five years ago I called attention to the vastness of those sources of energy, and the facility offered by electrical conduction in rendering them available for lighting and power-supply, while Sir William Thomson made this important matter the subject of his admirable address to Section A last year at York, and dealt with it in an exhaustive manner.