We have pictured an ideal burner for our homes in the fore part of this paper, and I cannot refrain from holding up to your view this ideal fuel, which has no smoke, no dirt, no ashes, and entails on the housewife no extra labor, can be regulated automatically to one steady temperature, and does not require a workingman, after doing a hard day's work, to come home and find a ton of coal dumped on the front sidewalk, which has to be wheeled or carried in before night comes on.
Now that we have seen an ideal street light, an ideal house light, and an ideal fuel, we will endeavor to show you an ideal gas company; and we cannot do it in a more concise way than to say that an ideal gas company is one that keeps all these ideal commodities for sale at a reasonable price.
This may look visionary on my part to some of you, perhaps all of you; but, nevertheless, I feel that this is the place and time to talk over "our future prospects," and if this paper is the cause of any one investigating the subjects spoken of or bringing forth discussion regarding the same, I shall feel I have not written in vain.
THE APPLICATION OF ELECTRICITY TO LIGHTING AND WORKING.[5]
By W. H. Preece, F.R.S.
LECTURE I.
I appear before you to give a short course of two lectures on the application of electricity to lighting and working. To-night I shall confine my attention entirely to lighting, and if we succeed in getting through our subject, we shall devote ourselves next Wednesday to the application of electricity for working tramways, to the transmission of power for various purposes, and generally to working.
[5] Two juvenile lectures recently delivered before the Society of Arts, London.—From the Journal of the Society.
Many people imagine the electric light to be a cold light. It is a delusion. It is called a cold light because in many of its forms it gives what we may call a cheerless light; it has not got the warmth, the comfortable look, of other artificial means of illumination.