The Electric Railway - 2

The Electric Railway - 2

 This is a fitting stage at which to review briefly what had been done in electric traction up

to that date. There was absolutely no art, but there had been a number of sporadic and

very interesting experiments made. The honor of the first attempt of any kind appears to

rest with this country and with Thomas Davenport, a self-trained blacksmith, of Brandon,

Vermont, who made a small model of a circular electric railway and cars in 1834, and

exhibited it the following year in Springfield, Boston, and other cities. Of course he

depended upon batteries for current, but the fundamental idea was embodied of using the

track for the circuit, one rail being positive and the other negative, and the motor being

placed across or between them in multiple arc to receive the current. Such are also

practically the methods of to-day. The little model was in good preservation up to the

year 1900, when, being shipped to the Paris Exposition, it was lost, the steamer that

carried it foundering in mid-ocean. The very broad patent taken out by this simple

mechanic, so far ahead of his times, was the first one issued in America for an electric

motor. Davenport was also the first man to apply electric power to the printing-press, in

1840. In his traction work he had a close second in Robert Davidson, of Aberdeen,

Scotland, who in 1839 operated both a lathe and a small locomotive with the motor he

had invented. His was the credit of first actually carrying passengers--two at a time, over

a rough plank road--while it is said that his was the first motor to be tried on real tracks,

those of the Edinburgh-Glasgow road, making a speed of four miles an hour.

The curse of this work and of all that succeeded it for a score of years was the necessity

of depending upon chemical batteries for current, the machine usually being selfcontained

and hauling the batteries along with itself, as in the case of the famous Page

experiments in April, 1851, when a speed of nineteen miles an hour was attained on the

line of the Washington & Baltimore road. To this unfruitful period belonged, however,

the crude idea of taking the current from a stationary source of power by means of an

overhead contact, which has found its practical evolution in the modern ubiquitous

trolley; although the patent for this, based on his caveat of 1879, was granted several

years later than that to Stephen D. Field, for the combination of an electric motor

operated by means of a current from a stationary dynamo or source of electricity

conducted through the rails. As a matter of fact, in 1856 and again in 1875, George F.

Green, a jobbing machinist, of Kalamazoo, Michigan, built small cars and tracks to which

current was fed from a distant battery, enough energy being utilized to haul one hundred

pounds of freight or one passenger up and down a "road" two hundred feet long. All the

work prior to the development of the dynamo as a source of current was sporadic and

spasmodic, and cannot be said to have left any trace on the art, though it offered many

suggestions as to operative methods.

The close of the same decade of the nineteenth century that saw the electric light brought

to perfection, saw also the realization in practice of all the hopes of fifty years as to

electric traction. Both utilizations depended upon the supply of current now cheaply

obtainable from the dynamo. These arts were indeed twins, feeding at inexhaustible

breasts. In 1879, at the Berlin Exhibition, the distinguished firm of Siemens, to whose

ingenuity and enterprise electrical development owes so much, installed a road about

one-third of a mile in length, over which the locomotive hauled a train of three small cars

at a speed of about eight miles an hour, carrying some twenty persons every trip. Current

was fed from a dynamo to the motor through a central third rail, the two outer rails being

joined together as the negative or return circuit. Primitive but essentially successful, this

little road made a profound impression on the minds of many inventors and engineers,

and marked the real beginning of the great new era, which has already seen electricity

applied to the operation of main lines of trunk railways. But it is not to be supposed that

on the part of the public there was any great amount of faith then discernible; and for

some years the pioneers had great difficulty, especially in this country, in raising money

for their early modest experiments. Of the general conditions at this moment Frank J.

Sprague says in an article in the Century Magazine of July, 1905, on the creation of the

new art: "Edison was perhaps nearer the verge of great electric-railway possibilities than

any other American. In the face of much adverse criticism he had developed the

essentials of the low-internal- resistance dynamo with high-resistance field, and many of

the essential features of multiple-arc distribution, and in 1880 he built a small road at his

laboratory at Menlo Park."