The Electric Wonders of the Age.

Waikato Times, Volume XXII, Issue 1797, 12 January 1884, Page 2 (Supplement)

The Electric Wonders of the Age.

Hon. S. S. Cox, in the annual address delivered before the Indiana Ashbury University, at Greencastle, on the 19th ult. said : "The electric monograph transmits messages in the original handwriting. The hektograph multiplies your epistles ; the telephone enables people to make contracts through an orifice ; bat as there is no witness, photography comes in and records the shadow of the sound by curves in vowels and consonants ! "Electricity is an element elusive and subtle, yet it is stored in a box and imprisoned in a metal to be used at pleasure lor portraiture, sound, light, or power. I have seen an organ played in Berlin by electricity, but this is simple compared with other experiments. Is it not a marvel that we can telegraph from a moving railroad car or the speeding steamship? A Californian photographer obtains six photographs in one leap of a clown in six different positions. He catches a horse on the galop, a rabbit on a run, and a bird on the wing. By means of a wire, a circular saw or a locomotive maybe — nay, has been — run miles distant from its source of force. Electricity is born of the flan. It may be converted back to its source, so that when one talks by telephone he may see his distant colloquist. It is shrewdly believed that nerve power depends for increased strength on light. It will not be strange if *tho polyscope illuminates the^animal organism, rendering the body transparent. The vast current of liquid force which we call electricity is condensed in boxes like dessicated meats, or spread over continents to con-

vey intelligence. Man can never overdraw from this vast, bankruptless depository of nature.