A Journey in Other Worlds [14]
thunderstorms, chemical action, and slow-moving
quadruple-expansion steam engines, provides the power required to
run our electric ships and water-spiders, railways, and
stationary and portable motors, for heating the cables laid along
the bottom of our canals to prevent their freezing in winter, and
for almost every conceivable purpose. Sometimes a man has a
windmill on his roof for light and heat; then, the harder the
wintry blasts may blow the brighter and warmer becomes the house,
the current passing through a storage battery to make it more
steady. The operation of our ordinary electric railways is very
simple: the current is taken from an overhead, side, or
underneath wire, directly through the air, without the
intervention of a trolley, and the fast cars, for they are no
longer run in trains, make five miles a minute. The entire
weight of each car being used for its own traction, it can ascend
very steep grades, and can attain high speed or stop very
quickly.
"Another form is the magnetic railway, on which the cars are
wedge-shaped at both ends, and moved by huge magnets weighing
four thousand tons each, placed fifty miles apart. On passing a
magnet, the nature of the electricity charging a car is
automatically changed from positive to negative, or vice versa,
to that of the magnet just passed, so that it repels while the
next attracts. The successive magnets are charged oppositely,
the sections being divided halfway between by insulators, the
nature of the electricity in each section being governed by the
charge in the magnet. To prevent one kind of electricity from
uniting with and neutralizing that in the next section by passing
through the car at the moment of transit, there is a "dead
stretch" of fifty yards with rails not charged at all between the
sections. This change in the nature of the electricity is
repeated automatically every fifty miles, and obviates the
necessity of revolving machinery, the rails aiding communication.
"Magnetism being practically as instantaneous as gravitation, the
only limitations to speed are the electrical pressure at the
magnets, the resistance of the air, and the danger of the wheels
bursting from centrifugal force. The first can seemingly be
increased without limit; the atmospheric resistance is about to
be reduced by running the cars hermetically sealed through a
partial vacuum in a steel and toughened glass tube; while the
third has been removed indefinitely by the use of galvanized
aluminum, which bears about the same relation to ordinary
aluminum that steel does to iron, and which has twice the tensile
strength and but one third the weight of steel. In some cases
the rails are made turned in, so that it would be impossible for
a car to leave the track without the road-bed's being totally
demolished; but in most cases this is found to be unnecessary,
for no through line has a curve on its vast stretches with a
radius of less than half a mile. Rails, one hundred and sixty
pounds to the yard, are set in grooved steel ties, which in turn
are held by a concrete road-bed consisting of broken stone and
cement, making spreading rails and loose ballast impossible. A
large increase in capital was necessary for these improvements,
the elimination of curves being the most laborious part,
requiring bridges, cuttings, and embankments that dwarf the
Pyramids and would have made the ancient Pharaohs open their
eyes; but with the low rate of interest on bonds, the slight cost
of power, and great increase in business, the venture was a
success, and we are now in sight of further advances that will
enable a traveller in a high latitude moving west to keep pace
with the sun, and, should he wish it, to have unending day."
CHAPTER V.
DR. CORTLANDT'S HISTORY CONTINUED.
"In marine transportation we have two methods, one for freight
and another for passengers. The old-fashioned deeply immersed
ship has not changed radically from the steam and sailing vessels