"CANNED" ELECTRICITY

King Country Chronicle, Volume IV, Issue 250, 13 April 1910, Page 5

"CANNED" ELECTRICITY

Mr Edison has once more announced the perfecting of the storage battery upon which he has been working for the last five or six years. He believes that he has discovered a new principle in electric battery construction, and that the motor-cars and tramway cars of the future will be propelled by electricity, supplied from batteries that will be easily and rapidly recharged at any generating station. There has been a hitch somewhere, however, for although the great inventor has stated at intervals that the battery is a proved success it has not yet been placed upon the market as an article of commerce. Towards the end of February a tramway car equipped with a series of batteries was tested in New York, and it achieved a considerable measure of success. The car had been designed by Mr Ralph Beach, an engineer in Mr Edison's employ. He stated that the battery had been perfected two years previously, but certain technical difficulties had lain in the way of its practical use for traction purposes. A sum of over £IO,OOO had been spent on experiments before a suitable design was evolved, and the battery was now doing a lot more real work than most people believed. Mr Edison had stated that the car would cover a distance' of 150 miles on one charge, but as a matter of fact it gave out on its sixty-sixth. Even this measure of success, however, astonished the experts present, more especially as the cost of running per mile proved to be lower than that of the ordinary trolley car. The car could run on any rails, and of course did not require overhead wires, so that an enormous saving in cost of construction could be effected by its use. "We have already received orders from Alaska and from New Zealand and the Spanish West Indies," remarked Mr Beach. "I call the car a 'canned current' car. We have a capacity at the plant now of a car a day, but will soon increase it." The development of the invention will be watched with keen interest by everyone interested in electric traction.