Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/215

Rh it is a practical impossibility to keep penstocks under great head from leaking, and the moisture thereby communicated to the atmosphere, as well as that due to the location of the dynamo room at the bottom of a narrow pit one hundred and fifty feet deep, with a torrent carrying a hundred million gallons per hour raging immediately beneath, could not well fail to impair the machines' insulation. Since the latter must carry a vast electrical pressure of alternating current, any impairment would be fatal to the maintenance of the plant. An instance occurs to mind in which a generator plant was located on a level with the wheel cases, and this not at the bottom of the pit by any means, but at the top of a draught tube some feet above the level of the surrounding ground, and in which, owing to the moisture unavoidably present, the generators had subsequently to be removed.

It is impossible, without quoting most of the article in question, to convey an adequate impression of the egotism that pervades it. A few phrases may, however, be of assistance to an understanding of this.

 "The electrical work which I have carried out has been done at a cost that seems incredible to many." "I did not care to go much into society." "On such occasions I would write to my millionaires and tell them that if they did not do what I told them," etc. "I had a lovely house in parklike grounds." "I had a nigger servant." "I had thus become well acquainted with the system which Nicola Tesla, a young Montenegrin, was experimenting on," etc.

We fancy that most people know the name and fame of "the young Montenegrin" a good deal better than they do those of Forbes.

In fact, the whole article is quite alliterative from the continuous repetitions of the first personal pronoun singular.

In an opening paragraph Prof. Forbes speaks of the production of the paper under discussion as the result of an attempt to curb a natural tendency to reticence, and, later, in describing the Falls of Niagara, he says, "The most impressive points of view are those that make you feel the smallest." It is not apparent whether the professor himself experienced the sensation, but, if he did, the depression must have been evanescent, for near the end he says that, while his company ascribes his "splendid results" mainly to engineering skill, "I am inclined to believe that they were fully as much the result of an exercise of tact, judgment, and forbearance, combined with firmness—qualities which I do not hesitate to say that both the officers of the company and myself recognized in each other." All of which, while possibly true, is scarcely the utterance of a man hampered by a temperament in