t, the
machine usually being self-contained and hauling the batteries along
with itself, as in the case of the famous Page experiments in April,
1851, when a speed of nineteen miles an hour was attained on the line
of the Washington & Baltimore road. To this unfruitful period belonged,
however, the crude idea of taking the current from a stationary source
of power by means of an overhead contact, which has found its practical
evolution in the modern ubiquitous trolley; although the patent for
this, based on his caveat of 1879, was granted several years later
than that to Stephen D. Field, for the combination of an electric motor
operated by means of a current from a stationary dynamo or source of
electricity conducted through the rails. As a matter of fact, in 1856
and again in 1875, George F. Green, a jobbing machinist, of Kalamazoo,
Michigan, built small cars and tracks to which current was fed from a
distant battery, enough energy being utilized to haul one hundred pounds
of freight or one passenger up and down a "road" two hundred feet long.
All the work prior to the development of the dynamo as a source of
current was sporadic and spasmodic, and cannot be said to have left any
trace on the art, though it offered many suggestions as to operative
methods.

The close of the same decade of the nineteenth century that saw the
electric light brought to perfection, saw also the realization in
practice of all the hopes of fifty years as to electric traction. Both
utilizations depended upon the supply of current now cheaply obtainable
from the dynamo. These arts were indeed twins, feeding at inexhaustible
breasts. In 1879, at the Berlin Exhibition, the distinguished firm of
Siemens, to whose ingenuity and enterprise electrical development owes
so much, installed a road about one-third of a mile in length, over
which the locomotive hauled a train of three small cars at a speed of
about eight miles an hour, carrying some twenty persons every trip.
Current was fed from a dynamo to the motor through a central third rail,
the two outer rails being joined together as the negative or return
circuit. Primitive but essentially successful, this little road made a
profound impression on the minds of many inventors and engineers, and
marked the real beginning of the great new era, which has already seen
electricity applied to the operation of main lines of trunk railways.
But it is not to be supposed that on the part of the public ther