r listen at
the telephone, as we turn the button of an incandescent lamp or travel
in an electromobile, we are partakers in a revolution more swift and
profound than has ever before been enacted upon earth. Until the
nineteenth century fire was justly accounted the most useful and
versatile servant of man. To-day electricity is doing all that fire ever
did, and doing it better, while it accomplishes uncounted tasks far
beyond the reach of flame, however ingeniously applied. We may thus
observe under our eyes just such an impetus to human intelligence and
power as when fire was first subdued to the purposes of man, with the
immense advantage that, whereas the subjugation of fire demanded ages of
weary and uncertain experiment, the mastery of electricity is, for the
most part, the assured work of the nineteenth century, and, in truth,
very largely of its last three decades. The triumphs of the electrician
are of absorbing interest in themselves, they bear a higher significance
to the student of man as a creature who has gradually come to be what he
is. In tracing the new horizons won by electric science and art, a beam
of light falls on the long and tortuous paths by which man rose to his
supremacy long before the drama of human life had been chronicled or
sung.

Of the strides taken by humanity on its way to the summit of terrestrial
life, there are but four worthy of mention as preparing the way for the
victories of the electrician--the attainment of the upright attitude,
the intentional kindling of fire, the maturing of emotional cries to
articulate speech, and the invention of written symbols for speech. As
we examine electricity in its fruitage we shall find that it bears the
unfailing mark of every other decisive factor of human advance: its
mastery is no mere addition to the resources of the race, but a
multiplier of them. The case is not as when an explorer discovers a
plant hitherto unknown, such as Indian corn, which takes its place
beside rice and wheat as a new food, and so measures a service which
ends there. Nor is it as when a prospector comes upon a new metal, such
as nickel, with the sole effect of increasing the variety of materials
from which a smith may fashion a hammer or a blade. Almost infinitely
higher is the benefit wrought when energy in its most useful phase is,
for the first time, subjected to the will of man, with dawning knowledge
of its unapproachable powers. It begins at once to marry the r