Yet all these seeming impossibilities, and many more, have become realities. So, too, will electrical marine propulsion, and, although we live in a more enlightened era than our ancestors, few persons even now perhaps realise that ships will be navigated without either sail or steam power.
By this time, however, the public have become so familiarised with scientific marvels, that they have ceased to wonder at anything. For instance, there is nothing really more marvellous than that hundreds, or even thousands, of horse-power should be borne by a copper wire, or a moderate cable, and despatched to a distant point with the speed of lightning for traction purposes; but, without knowing what the nature of the force is, we cease to be astonished at it. In point of fact, it is not more occult than heat or light, the attraction of gravity or cohesion.
Therefore when it was announced last year that Edison had solved the problem of how to store electrical force effectually, everybody took it for granted that he had been, or would eventually be, as successful in this direction as in multiplying electric light and applying it to a thousand new purposes.
The “Wizard of Llewellyn Park” is necessarily a sanguine inventor, but he has taken the right and only satisfactory way to determine the question—that of varied and long-continued experiment. Electricity differs from all other forms of power in two respects—it can be stored, and transmitted to a distance. The task of transmission has been, and is being, rapidly achieved. The far greater object of light and efficient storage, the most momentous problem awaiting solution in the whole range of practical physics, may very shortly be solved.
In brief, Edison’s storage battery cells are composed of tiny bricks of specially-prepared iron and nickel. In charging and discharging, oxygen is driven from one metal to the other and back again through the action of a potash solution, and without corrosion or waste. Renewal of the water supply is all that is needed to keep the cells in good condition, and a process of recharging has been improved, so that less time is consumed than for the recharging of other batteries. No wonder he believes that the application of storage batteries will ultimately be extended to trains, and especially to ships.
The claim of the Edison Accumulator is that it will occupy about the same space as the present battery, and that it will weigh only about seventy per cent. as much, and will be more durable. Men conversant with the theory of electrical science are not so thoroughly impressed with the work accomplished as is Mr. Edison. The tests that have been made have been more than duplicated, it is said, by the batteries now on the market. We may assume, then, that either Edison’s or somebody else’s method of storing up electricity for the propulsion of sea-going vessels will be perfected.
FIG. 34. ELECTRIC STORAGE BATTERIES
By permission of the Electric Power Storage Co., Ltd., London