At the time of the Centennial, electricity was used almost exclusively for telegraphic communication. By 1893 new inventions, as wonderful as Morse’s own, had overlaid even that invention. A single wire now sufficed to carry several messages at once and in different directions. Rapidity of transmission was another miracle. During the electrical exposition in New York City, May, 1896, Hon. Chauncey M. Depew dictated a message which was sent round the world and back in fifty minutes. It read:
“God creates, nature treasures, science utilizes electrical power for the grandeur of nations and the peace of the world.” These words travelled from London to Lisbon, thence to Suez, Aden, Bombay, Madras, Singapore, Hong-Kong, Shanghai, Nagasaki, and Tokio, returning by the same route to New York, a total distance of over 27,500 miles.
Interior of the Power House at Niagara Falls.
Self-winding and self-regulating clocks came into vogue, being automatically adjusted through the Western Union telegraph lines, so that at noon each day the correct time was instantly communicated to their hands from the national observatory. Another invaluable use of the telegraph was its service to the Weather Bureau, established in 1870. By means of simultaneous reports from a tract of territory 3,000 miles long by 1,500 wide, this bureau was enabled to make its forecasts indispensable to every prudent farmer, traveller, or mariner.
The three great latter-day applications of electrical force were the telephone, the electric light, and the electric motor. In 1876, almost simultaneously with its discovery by other investigators, Alexander Graham Bell exhibited an electric transmitter of the human voice. By the addition of the Edison carbon transmitter the same year the novelty was assured swift success. In 1893 the Bell Telephone Company owned 307,748 miles of wire, an amount increased by rival companies’ property to 444,750. Estimates gave for that year nearly 14,000 “exchanges,” 250,000 subscribers, and 2,000,000 daily conversations. New York and Chicago were placed on speaking terms only three or four days before “Columbus Day.” All the chief cities were soon connected by telephone.
At the Philadelphia Exposition arc electric lamps were the latest wonder, and not till two years later did Edison render the incandescent lamp available.
The use of electricity for the development of power as well as of light, unknown in the Centennial year, was in the Columbian year neither a scientific nor a practical novelty. On the contrary, it was fast supplanting horses upon street railways, and making city systems nuclei for far-stretching suburban and interurban lines. Street railways mounted steep hills inaccessible before save by the clumsy system of cables. Even steam locomotives upon great railways gave place in some instances to motors. Horseless carriages and pedalless bicycles were clearly in prospect.
It was found that by the use of copper wiring electric power could be carried great distances. A line twenty-five miles long bore from the American River Falls, at Folsom, California, to Sacramento, a current which the city found ample for traction, light, and power. Niagara Falls was harnessed to colossal generators, whose product was transmitted to neighboring cities and manufactories. Loss en route was at first considerable, but cunning devices lessened it each year.
Thomas Alva Edison and Nikola Tesla were conspicuously identified with these astonishing applications of electric energy. Edison, first a newsboy, then (like Andrew Carnegie) a telegraph operator, without school or book training in physics, rose step by step to the repute of working miracles on notification. Tesla, a native of Servia, who happened, upon migrating to the United States, to find employment with Edison, was totally unlike his master. He was a highly educated scientist, herein at a great advantage. He was, in opposition to Edison, peculiarly the champion of high tension alternating current distribution. He aimed to dispense so far as possible with the generation of heat, pressing the ether waves directly into the service of man.