CHAPTER VII.

SOME NEW INVENTIONS.

After breakfast the next morning the professor took me out to the barn to show me his appliances for heating and lighting his house, and also his carriages. His generator was peculiar in that it turned the energy existing in gas into electric energy direct. There was standing on a platform a jacketed cylinder about three feet high and a foot and a half in diameter. At one side of that was a door, near the bottom, which the professor opened for me so that I could see the gas jets striking the coils of wire; and he explained that the wire was composed of two metals of very great difference in polarity, and that these metals were so welded that, whereas in the thermopile of the nineteenth century only about five per cent. was obtained, in this almost ninety per cent. of the heat energy was transformed. I realized that here at last was the solution of the great problem of how to

generate electric energy direct from coal; and while standing before this simple little boiler my thoughts went back to my own times, when our greatest inventors were toiling night and day over this problem, in many cases simply from their love of science; and I recalled the doings of certain charlatans who claimed everything, had nothing, but succeeded in fooling the ignorant.

"This must make a great difference in the ease and comfort of living, professor," said I.

"You can hardly realize the difference. Why, housework for the women is nothing compared to what it was in your time, as all the disagreeable work is done by electricity. The washing, sweeping, mixing of food, drying of dishes, cooking, heating, cooling — every. thing is performed by our servant that you see before you; and when you remember that most of the dirt existed because you lived in cities where thousands of boilers poured their volumes of smoke hourly into the air, where horses powdered the streets into the finest dust, where the congested travelling spread that dust everywhere; when you come to realize that the primary causes of dirt and filth, with the coexisting disease, were concentration and the use of coal, you are forced

to ask yourself whether there is any comparson between your time and to-day, when we have sense enough to have a system which éoes not necessitate crowding, and when our inventors have even as a cheap and clean method of testing our houses and doing al our work."

“But, professor, city people are in general in better health than country people."

“Which only proves the adage, Necessity is the mother of invention.' As fast as dis ease springs up, a doctor springs up to cure it. To get a living a doctor must be where there is disease, therefore you find him in the city. I do not think you can truly say that the civilization of your times had blotted out disease; rather the opposite was true, it had increased the number of diseases, but it had also, directly from this fact, been the cause of the existence of that large body of specialists, the medical profession. This was only another example of the waste which went on in your times, since if it had n't been for concentration, a great many diseases would not have existed, and, therefore, a large body of men could have turned their attention to other and more profitable things; but people's thoughts seemed to be upside down then, as you would

hear that such and such a disaster was a good thing, since it meant work for men. People were always talking about wanting work or wanting to give men work; they never seemed capable of understanding that work was only a means to an end; that what men wanted was to satisfy their desires, or, in other words, to be happy. But we are diverging. Let me show you the arrangement of the gas."

"I should think, professor, it would be cheaper to generate electricity at the mines and wire direct from there."

"In some cases, where the distance is not too great, that method is used, but here it is found cheaper to pipe for gas and use individual generators. Come this way and see the carriages."

The professor then took me into another room which was on the ground floor and had large folding doors. It was much like our carriage houses. Here there were four automobiles of different capacities, each having a < small electric generator burning kerosene; and the professor told me that on average level roads these carriages-which differed from any I had been familiar with in that the frame of each was built of thin steel tubing after the fashion of our bicycles, which made

7

a very light but strong construction — could attain easily a speed of twenty miles an hour. L At the right of the driver were the guiding levers, and the professor assured me that at all times the machine was under perfect control.

We left the carriage house, and walking back, entered the kitchen; and the professor took great interest in showing me all the cooking appliances. There was a large switch board at one side, and on a table under it was an electric oven, which was nothing more nor less than a large magnesium, air-tight box, in the centre of which was a coil of wire. The food was put in the box, the door was shut, a current of electricity was turned on, and the cooking began. One very interesting feature of this was that the door of the box was glass, through which, by the aid of an electric light in the oven, the process could be watched; and there was also a thermometer inside, so that the temperature could be kept constant, and that simply by the turn of the switch; no coal, no ashes, no drafts. The machine for washing dishes stood near the sink, while the drying box was nothing but another oven, having an outlet for steam. Surely here was perfection in the culinary department.