ACME ELECTRIC.
Combines batteries and lamp in one case, which is neither cumbrous nor very heavy, and resembles nothing so much as the small carriage clock. The lamp is, of course, a small incandescent bulb; the battery is the long cylindrical cell cut up into three short ones and carried in the lamp case, as shown. Turning down the handle on top closes the circuit and starts the lamp; lifting the handle cuts the lamp out. The cells are furnished with wire connections on, and the rider does not have to make a single attachment, nor need he have the slightest knowledge of electricity or any conjecture how the lamp operates. He has only to slip his fresh cells (which are joined as one piece) into the case, observing that he puts them right side up. They make their own connections by being pushed into place, and the lamp “does the rest.” One charging runs eight hours. In favor of this lamp is its freedom from odor and trouble of filling and care, absence of smoke to dull the reflector and its independence of jars and wind, for nothing can extinguish it so long as the current remains and is turned on.
ACETYLENE GAS LAMPS.
Although nearly two years have elapsed since the introduction of acetylene for purposes of general illumination, yet the present season is the first one in which this new illuminant has been used in bicycle lamps, and it seems eminently fit and proper that this gas should be appropriated to the uses of wheelmen, because it was in 1888, at Spray, N. C., that Mr. Thomas L. Willson, a member of the Kings County Wheelmen of Brooklyn, N. Y., who was famous in his day as a hardy road rider of the old “[ordinary]” and presented to his club the trophy that bears his name, while experimenting on the reduction of refractory metallic oxides of carbon in an electric furnace came upon the happy but unexpected outcome of producing by a cheap and simple method calcium carbide, so that the use of acetylene became at once a commercial possibility. He was trying to obtain the metal calcium by reducing lime with pulverized charcoal, but the temperature of the arc fused the mass, and it solidified into an extremely hard, gray crystalline rock. As this was not the substance that Willson sought to produce, it was thrown into a stream near by, and there was an instant evolution of gas in large quantities which, when lighted, burned with a smoky, luminous flare. Chemical analysis showed the rock to be carbide of calcium (Ca C) containing 60 parts by weight of calcium and 40 parts of carbon, and its gaseous offspring to be acetylene. This generation of acetylene by means of the immersion of carbide of calcium in water is the result of two exceedingly simple chemical reactions. The carbon in the carbide unites with the hydrogen in the water to form acetylene, and the calcium in the carbide takes up the oxygen of the water to form slaked lime, the only by-product of the double reaction.
Acetylene is a gaseous compound of 24 parts by weight of carbon and two of hydrogen. Although it was first discovered and isolated by Davy in 1836, it was twenty-three years later before the scientific world obtained a clear conception of its interesting character and properties through the investigations of M. Berthelot. Since that time, and up to the discovery as before stated by Mr. Willson, it had been produced only in small quantities as a laboratory product by tedious and costly processes.
Acetylene, when burning, gives a flame of intense brilliancy, and owing to its richness it can only be consumed in small burners. It possesses not only great luminosity, but great diffusive qualities. The light produced by acetylene is of a pure white color, soft and agreeable in tone. It resembles sunlight more closely than any other known luminant. Pure acetylene is not explosive. Mixed with air in certain proportions it can be detonated, and the same can be said of every known gas; but in a bicycle lamp, containing an ounce and a half, or two ounces at the utmost, of the calcium carbide, there cannot be produced enough gas to cause an explosion.
