The cable-telephone has been perfected; one can converse directly with a friend or business correspondent in Liverpool, London, or Paris, at the rate of twelve cents a minute. How these things promote terseness and pithiness of speech! I believe no one, unless it be the stockholders of one or two old lines, regrets that all telegraphic and telephonic communication in this country has been taken under the control of the government. Underground laying of telegraph wires is now nearly universal.
Photographing in colors, a French invention, is one of the newer and more attractive arts. Printing one's own books has become almost too easy, by using the type-writer, with sheets of celluloid, warmed to 300°, instead of paper. The celluloid hardens at once sufficiently for stereotyping; so that any number of thousands of copies can be taken from such off-hand plates. Truly, "of making many books there is no end." Pencils, moreover, whose marks are permanent, have so improved as to render that intolerably nasty fluid, ink, unnecessary, and confined in its use entirely to a few old-fashioned people.
Magnifying sound has gone far beyond the microphone and megaphone of the last century. Deaf persons are now helped by instrumental aid almost as much as defective sight is by proper glasses.
Gunpowder and nitro-glycerin have both been utilized for the production of continuous motion, especially in the propulsion of the contents of transportation tubes. By these agencies, all the local letter distribution of Boston and Portland, and a good deal of that of New York, is effected by tube-transmission to and from the various branch deposit-offices of the cities.
Locomotives are at present running, at a speed limited by law, on our best common roads. Several wealthy gentlemen in Philadelphia use small private steam-carriages to go daily between their homes and places of business. The pocket magneto-electric lamp is one of the neatest of modern inventions; and wiring power one of the most tremendous. It is said that the energy of a twenty-horse-power steam engine may be conveyed from place to place as far as 25 or 30 miles, by suitable cable under ground. The only difficulty is to make its management safe, as the least contact with the cable is as destructive as lightning; but this will no doubt soon be done.
With all these ingenuities, no one has yet contrived a really successful flying-machine. Man seems designed by his Creator to remain always "a little lower than the angels" in this prerogative.
It is a good thing to be able to be rid, as we now may be, of dirty anthracite or other coal in our houses. The distribution of heat,—by pipes conveying hydrogen gas for burning in gas-stoves, ranges, or furnaces, by steam, or by hot water,—is provided for on the pipe system, extending under and through houses from large street mains, in most of our cities. I am much pleased also with the method of floor and wall-warming now common; although, for the wealthy, an open wood fire is still one of the greatest of all costly luxuries. The uses of coal, moreover, are yet so numerous, that all coal-carrying railroads are earning and paying large dividends.
For the summer time, the "can't get away" Philadelphians may be congratulated on the delightful sea-water baths they can have on Broad Street, in water brought by the great marine aqueduct from Atlantic City. The water is raised from the sea by tidal power (a kind of motor now having many applications) to a reservoir at a sufficient height to give the requisite descent towards the city. Its rate of movement, also, is such that, being under cover all the way, it retains much of the coolness of the ocean-surf.
The blanching or bleaching of the London fogs, by the improved methods of consuming smoke, must be a very fine thing for the dwellers in that overgrown city. We hear, however, of one old lady, a duchess, who thinks the fog now to be very vulgarly pale; and regrets the good old days of what she thought a much more picturesque gloom.