Horses in 1999 were no longer beasts of burden in the great American Republic. Emancipated by Electricity. They had been emancipated by electricity and compressed air. In remote sections of the American Republic, like the pampas of the State of Brazil and the mountain regions of the State of Peru, horses were frequently to be seen, but seldom employed as beasts of burden. It took many centuries to wipe the equine race from the face of the globe. The history and achievements of the noble brute had been for many centuries linked to that of man. In 1999 the Arab still loved his faithful charger, guarding it as the apple of his eye. The noble animal still shared his tent. In his estimation a wife or two were of little worth compared with the swift, graceful animal that so often carried him from danger and left his pursuers in the rear. It would have been sad indeed for the world, so early as 1999 to lose an animal endowed by nature with so much intelligence, an animal that again and again had decided a thousand fields of battle and had braved all dangers by land or sea. But from the thraldom of labor, the horse in 1999 had been emancipated and this tribute was one worthy of his peerless fame.
Even the reindeer of the Polar regions felt the touch of twentieth century genius. The Laplander had no further use for the dog-power of his ancestors. His sleds glided along the fields of ice, propelled by electricity, of which inexhaustible supplies were drawn from the aurora borealis.
In 1999 automobiles required only three days to traverse the distance from Montreal in the American State of East Canada to Washington, our national capital in the State of Mexico. The roads throughout the Americas had reached a high grade of perfection and travel on electric automobiles Good Roads Everywhere. became a pleasure even in all the Southern States of the American Union, such as Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Argentina. Uncle Sam’s farm in 1999 was a big one and was covered with good roads. Horses and steam engines were altogether too slow for the twentieth century.
The exclusion of steam from all railroads in 1999 proved a great boon to travel. Railroad smoke was a drawback to steam roads, while sparks, cinders and live coal were a constant danger to property. When a happy bride and groom took their departure on a train for their honeymoon in 1899 their friends pelted them with rice, while the old fashion steam engine attached to the train rounded the compliment by pelting the newly wedded pair with cinders and soot. Dense volumes of black smoke Delights of Steam Travel. poured into the railway coaches, filling every crevice and corner, rendering the human face unrecognizable. Travelers in these old-fashioned cars, clad in the bravery of fashion, in their silks and fine raiment, would journey only a short distance when they would become almost unrecognizable from the torrents of black soft-coal smoke that pierced their cuticle and darkened their lives. It was hard to determine at the end of a brief journey of a thousand miles whether the white man who bought a through ticket in New York was a Caucasian or an Ethiopian when he landed in Chicago, so dense was the smoke through which he had traveled.
The delightful atmosphere of a tunnel formed one of the great attractions of steam travel in the good old days of 1899. Our unhappy American travelers while journeying on these steam roads would suddenly be rushed into a black hole, the damp and foul air of which was enough to kill a salamander, filled with smoke and asphyxiating gases. The marvel is that one-half of the people ever pulled through a tunnel alive.
In 1999 these monstrosities of steam railroad The Single Rail is King. travel were entirely done away with. Not a steam engine was anywhere to be found. The single rail electric railroad was monarch of all it surveyed, and there were none to dispute its sway. It ruled the universe. The new-born electrical power drew its forces from the air. Electricity was greater than light itself. Its rule was felt by day as well as by night.
In 1999 when an electric train dashed through a tunnel, its arch was aglow with electric fire, rendering the passage light as at noon time in a blazing sun. A touch of the button turned on every light in the coaches. The air of the tunnel, instead of being black with smoke and noxious vapors, was pure as the open air. Travel was rendered delightful in these swift-speeding trains on the single-rail electric railroads, which easily maintained a speed of two miles per minute. In point of speed they were easily outwinged by the ærodromes, but for all that, grass did not have much time to grow under the gearing of any electric car in 1999.
These single-track electric railroads covered the Americas like a network of cob-webs. They were much safer than the two-track system of railroads peculiar to the old period of 1899, when steam engines, going around curves at two miles per minute, were liable to lose their heads and lay down in the ditch to try and figure out where they were at. The single rail upon which the electric car was balanced in 1999, was built about three feet above the track. The cars were so constructed that Two Miles per Minute. the wheels ran along their whole length, the sides of the car being built to a point about two feet below the rail. The trolley wire overhead gave more steadiness to the car. It could not upset.
Through lines from Chicago to Washington, in the State of Mexico, attained high speed, as well as the electric lines that crossed the isthmus from the State of Mexico to Rio Janeiro. It frequently happened that strawberries gathered at the base of Mt. Orizaba, in Mexico, were delivered in Chicago in season for supper the same day. Fish of highly esteemed flavor that were swimming in the bay of Vera Cruz at break of day were frequently placed on ice and reached Manhattan in time for dinner at seven p. m. the same day.
