ELECTRICAL COOKING.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3158, 11 August 1881, Page 4

ELECTRICAL COOKING.

The forthcoming exhibition of electricity at Paris (says the Globe) will contain a great number of curiosities illustrative of the new advances which have recently been made in that fascinating science, and not the least curious of them will be the electrical cooking range of M. Salignac. That ingenious gentleman is going to fit up his apparatus in the grill-room of the restaurant, and intends to furnish forth a great variety of meats which haye been cooked by heat generated from the electric current. At the last Paris exhibition M. Mouchot roasted mutton in condensed sunshine, and liberally turned his spit on the hearth of the sun ; but a hyperbolical American would say that M. Salignac had far surpussccl this in broiling steaks by lightning and warming coffeo with the aurora borealis. As a nuttier of fact the electric current is just as well fitted to produce heat as it is to produce light, if it is treated with that end in view, and just as electricity will, in all probability, be made to yield the principal artificial light of the future, so will it be applied to household heatins. The same machines which light the house by night will heat and cook by day, besides performing other duties, such as driving a coffee mill or a sewing machine. The fire of coke or coal is well known to bo a wasteful source of heat, and it is a fact that with all our improved furnaces and modes of working, that every ton of steel requires eighteen times more heat for its manufacture than is absolutely necessary. All tho surplus is wasted in tho process. Some saving may be effected, in this wide margin by moans of new inventions, but, if Dr. C. W. Siemens is correct, the introduction of electricity as a heating agent will provoa radical cure for such waste ; and tho electric furnace which ho recently exhibited is a step in this direction. The temperature obtained in the crucible of this apparatus is so high that several pounds of cold, hard steel, were melted down in a very few minutes.