Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/772

752 around the stables and in the car sheds for looking after these four hundred and fifty horses. For these the company substitutes two or three electrical operatives, and saves about five thousand dollars a month in expenses, and anticipates an increase besides of twenty-five per cent on receipts by the increase of business, by the saving of time and the doubling of train schedules.

Against such startling economies as these economists would ordinarily place the usual offsets of more highly skilled and better-paid labor required to handle the more subtile and complicated motive. Such a rule should apparently best operate in a case when an invisible power is substituted for one, where ethereal energy so literally takes the place of brute force as when electricity supersedes a horse. In every other situs the rule would obtain. When we put a criminal to death by hanging, any boor could haul at or cut a rope, but when we electrocuted we were obliged to get a higher-priced aid—a rather more accomplished Jack Ketch. But not so the trolley. Its machinery was so purely and elementarily automatic—so in a nutshell and within the control of the faintest pressure—that the material out of which drivers and conductors were made was worked over in a day into electric motormen, who, instead of a wilder found a far more tractable and manageable horse—one that went without goad, reins, or word of command; one that needed not to be put in or out or changed for shorter or longer routes. Furthermore, the new steed not only guided but regulated himself, thus dispensing with a switchman; and a horse that not only hauls, but obligingly lights and heats the cars as well. Switchmen are dispensed with by the simplest of expedients at the busiest junctions; the simple placing of an insulated rail in a track, and of disconnecting a current supplied by the car passing over it, being found to throw and replace a switch with absolutely infallible accuracy. And, again, this docile horse will not only do its own work, but anybody else's; for it has been found that where two trolley lines cross, and an accident to one withdraws its power, the power used by the other will leap over into the unoccupied wires of the disabled road and operate them both. Against such figures as these the railways will not attempt to compete, but will struggle on, meeting their fixed charges when they can, and striving to keep down their daily deficits by reorganization committees, and ciphering on the backs of old envelopes instead of writing pads!