broken by
a switch.

Electricity is the ideal power for automobiles. Being clean and easily
controlled, it seems just the thing; but it is expensive, and sometimes
hard to get. No satisfactory substitute has been found for it, however,
in the larger cities, and it may be that creative or "primary" batteries
both cheap and effective will be invented and will do away with the one
objection to electricity for automobiles.

The astonishing things of to-day are the commonplaces of to-morrow, and
so the achievements of automobile builders as here set down may be
greatly surpassed by the time this appears in print.

The sensations of the locomotive engineer, who feels his great machine
strain forward over the smooth steel rails, are as nothing to the almost
numbing sensations of the automobile driver who covered space at the
rate of eighty-eight miles an hour on the road between Paris and Madrid:
he felt every inequality in the road, every grade along the way, and
each curve, each shadow, was a menace that required the greatest nerve
and skill. Locomotive driving at a hundred miles an hour is but mild
exhilaration as compared to the feelings of the motor-car driver who
travels at fifty miles an hour on the public highway.

Gigantic motor trucks carrying tons of freight twist in and out through
crowded streets, controlled by one man more easily than a driver guides
a spirited horse on a country road.

Frail motor bicycles dash round the platter-like curves of cycle tracks
at railroad speed, and climb hills while the riders sit at ease with
feet on coasters.

An electric motor-car wends the streets of New York every day with
thirty-five or forty sightseers on its broad back, while a groom in
whipcord blows an incongruous coaching-horn in the rear.

Motor plows, motor ambulances, motor stages, delivery wagons,
street-cars without tracks, pleasure vehicles, and even baby carriages,
are to be seen everywhere.

In 1845, motor vehicles were forbidden the streets for the sake of the
horses; in 1903, the horses are being crowded off by the motor-cars. The
motor is the more economical--it is the survival of the fittest.

[Illustration: AN AUTOMOBILE PLOW
A form of automobile that can be applied to all sorts of uses on the
farm.]

THE FASTEST STEAMBOATS

In 1807, the first practical steamboat puffed slowly up the Hudson,
while the people ranged along the banks gazed in wonder. Even the grim
walls of the Palisades