ELECTRICITY LET LOOSE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume L, Issue 60, 19 September 1907, Page 4

ELECTRICITY LET LOOSE.

We are living in the age of electricity. Day by day mankind is becoming more and more dependent on this mighty force. lie bakes his bread by it; be lights his house by it; he utilises it for propelling tramcars and trains; huge hammers are worked by it; and gigantic cranes are under its control. It is, in fact, becoming the ruling power in the universe. So important is it that without it nun would be as though bereft of one of his senses. And yet we hardly realise the power of this mighty force by which we are accomplishing so much and overcoming so many difficulties. It is not so many years ago that it was practically unknown, and even now, in spite of the gigantic strides we are making, we know very little about it. The bonds with which we tackle and enslave this monster are confessedly weak. What would happen if all the electricity generated in London were to amalgamate into one mighty explosive cloud and then break loose? It is awful to contemplate. The crash would be heard all over the globe. Lead would run like water.' The iron framework of our big buildings would become soft, like putty, and the brick and stone would collapse with a. tremendous crash and would be heard for miles. Glass would melt and the air would be made hideous by the weird sounds and dying cries of seven million people as they were electrocuted. The Tower Bridge would become, a white-hot blob of twisted metal, and fall with a tremendous spluttering and hissing roar into the Thames, and raising a dense cloud of scalding steam as it touched the water. The noble structure of St. Paul's would instantaneously become a pile of ruins, and steamboats and barges would catch fire and flo.it down the Thames. The stench of human bodies being roasted and scorched > —that would be the fate of most of the dead bodies—would be overpowering. The teeming millions of living humans would by morning only be little piles of ashes; but here and there a body would be found which the fire had not touched, with features composed just as they were previous to be- ! ing overtaken by the giant. Huge : tongues of flames, displaying all the colors of the rainbow, would disport and frolic about the streets, now licking the paving stones, now passing over the surface of a wood-paver road, and wherever it touched there would devastation reign. Whole streets would disappear with a reverberating roar into the bowels of the earth, as the many tube railways started to collapse, and ere the sun rose London would be wiped off the face of the earth. Nothing but a barren waste of smouldering ashjs, with here and there part of a charred building standing on the edge of a tremendous chasm, would remain to identify the largest city in the world. Theoretically, that is what would happen. A scientist will tell you that such an occurrence is impossible—that if all the electricity in the world were to escape it would have no more effect than if a balloon full of air were to escape into the outer atmosphere. And yet, despite scientific assertions, New York recently witnessed a most terrifying spectacle, through the current short circuiting on one of the railways, which stamps the foregoing prophetic cataclysm as being