The evolution of the electric motor followed, as a natural thing, from the evolution of the dynamo, for a motor is simply a dynamo reversed. In the dynamo you revolve the armature—as the coils that move between the magnets are called—and the machine gives out current. In the motor you feed current into the armature, and it revolves and gives out mechanical power. There is a very pretty story to the effect that this action was discovered quite by chance. In some accidental way the wires leading from a dynamo at work were connected to another dynamo, and this second one at once began to turn merrily round, as if by magic. However this may be, the dynamo had been in existence for some time before any practical work was done in sending power from place to place along a slender wire. The electric motor, as a commercial machine, is barely ten years old. Yet now its busy cheerful hum may be heard under thousands of street cars in hundreds of towns. It is used to work all sorts of machinery, from the sewing-machine and the dentist's drill (beastly thing!) to heavy factory machines of all kinds. Ten years ago the electric motor was in its swaddling-clothes, and was never placed out of sight of its nurse, the dynamo. Nowadays electrical engineers think nothing of building motors of several hundreds of horse-power, and of placing them many miles from the dynamos that supply them with current. In this way a factory may be run by the power of a waterfall ever so many miles distant. The waterfall drives the dynamo, the dynamo sends its current along wires carried on poles up hill and down dale until they reach the motor, and the motor drives the machinery of the mill. At Niagara Falls work of this kind will be done on a very large scale, and many places round about will be supplied with light and power from the huge dynamos that are to be placed there.
Perhaps the most beautiful and intelligent of this wonderful family of "infants" was born eighteen years ago—the telephone. Even when it was the tiniest kind of an infant, and many men, some of them quite clever in other lines than prophesying, thought it would never be more than a puny little creature—a sort of scientific freak—the telephone was the most wonderful thing of the century. It did something absolutely new. It took your voice, made an electric current of it, and turned it out at the other end voice again, with all the little quivers and tones that each voice has of its own. The telephone, more than any other electrical invention, made people think that anything is possible with electricity. It was such a marvellous performance to send the voice along a wire from one end of a city to another, that when people became a little familiar with it they were prepared for anything. A famous electrician once raised a laugh at a dinner by relating in his speech that when a friend had asked him over the telephone if he recognized his voice, he replied, "Yes, and I can smell your cigar." But you would not be surprised if you learned to-morrow that you could see the man at the other end of the wire, or smell his cigar by electricity, or that a line of flying ships between New York and London was to start skimming next week.
But it was some little time before people got familiar with the telephone. At first they did not believe in it, though now they will believe in anything called electrical. For some time there were few telephones in use, and the lines were very short. Then the exchange system was started, and telephony began to grow with leaps and bounds. In 1874 the telephone, as the saying goes, "was not born nor thought of" outside of the laboratory of Professor Bell. In 1894, there were 250,000 telephone subscribers in the United States. New York and Chicago each has 10,000. The number of conversations carried on each day by means of the telephone—well, you might almost as well try to count the grains of sand on the sea-shore. Not only has this infant learned to talk a great deal—and, surprising to say, it speaks all languages with equal ease, even the hopelessly difficult ones—but it has got amazing lung power. Its voice reaches in a moment farther than you can travel in a day. When young, it whispered a distance of a mile or two. At six or eight years of age it talked clearly with a couple of hundred miles between speaker and listener. For three years or more people in Boston and New York have talked with people in Chicago, and to-day they think nothing of that, and want to talk to San Francisco.
The reform in interscholastic athletics in the middle West seems to be going forward most satisfactorily. We hear fewer complaints of semi-professionalism among the school teams, and most of these have no foundation in fact. It seems clear now that most of the breaches of amateur spirit that we have had to record heretofore were largely the result of a lack of knowledge and appreciation of the strictness of the rules which have to govern amateur sport, rather than of a desire to defeat the ends and purposes of these regulations.
MADISON, WISCONSIN, HIGH-SCHOOL FOOTBALL TEAM.