Electric Power.
Electricity will be used for fans, vibrators for massage, shoeshining, and other household devices that may demand it as time rolls on. Besides this there will be an industrial use for power which I will discuss in a later chapter.[A]
[A] Until some cheaper source of power is developed electric heating will remain an expensive luxury.
Telephones.
Electric buttons and signals and bells can be used for the “top” and “bottom” doors of the house, signaling to central stations when preferable to the telephone. The telephone, the cheapest of the pipe and wire group of civilizing agents, common though it is, has not yet come into universal use. In New York City alone there are over three million people who have no telephones and in the United States there are 60,000,000 deprived of that great necessity. In Roadtown the cost of installing telephones will be practically the cost of the instruments, switch-boards and twenty-one feet of wire. If the automatic system is used, which is likely, in local service between a public service center and the houses they wait upon, the cost will be but those of interest on installation and cost of repairs. A telephone expert has estimated that the system complete would be less than ten dollars per family, and that the expense of operation or telephone rent less than one dollar a year, net, per family, or eight cents per month.
Dictograph.
At the present date there is in practical operation a loud speaking telephone called the dictograph. If this modern invention is installed in the Roadtown home, it will be possible by simply pressing a button to talk over the telephone while sitting in a chair or lying in bed. This instrument has been most successfully utilized in conveying music, which, if received through a horn can scarcely be told from the first-hand product. This wonderful invention, as many other similar ones that now exist, cannot be put into practical use on a large and systematic scale, because of the present city construction, the conduit and other trusts.
Since the preceding paragraph was written, M. K. Turner, the inventor and proprietor of the dictograph, has donated the use of all of his wonderful patents to the Roadtown, and in addition has offered to design an entire system of loud speaking telephones especially adapted to Roadtown use, because of the great uplifting influence he recognizes in its principles when put into practice.
This donation, together with the house pouring scheme of Mr. Edison and the Boyes Monorail, gives to Roadtown fundamental patents on house building, transportation and intelligence transmission—the three great essentials of a new civilization.