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BRITISH PACIFIC CABLE STATION ON FANNING ISLAND.

Including views of station building, cable staff, and cable ship.-Fanning lies a little north of the equator, due south of Hawaii.

the current which causes the signal. The reading of a message by the sounder, which is practiced on land lines, is not possible with long ocean cables, as the signals could not be made intelligible by that means; and so all recording is done by the siphon. If the message has to be received from or transferred to a land line at the cable office, it is transcribed into longhand, and then disposed of by other operators at the land-line instruments, just as in an ordinary telegraph. office. Sometimes defective chirography causes very ridiculous mistakes, as in the case of the message sent from Calcutta to London some years ago, which read, on receipt, "Viceroy twin sons"-to the

send messages to different capitals. A gentleman in the audience rose and said, "Ask Vienna what time it is?" The answer came, '8:20 P. M.," it being then nine o'clock in London. The inquirer thereupon observed, "That's a lie; the lecturer is an impostor." The time in Vienna should have been 9:40; but the cable was broken across the Channel, and the secretary of the cable company, who personated these places, instead of adding the forty minutes, took them off.

Cost of Cables

An Atlantic cable costs about half as much as a first-class battleship; and for maintenance, in about a proportionate

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PERFORATED RIBBON CONTAINING MESSAGE TO BE SENT. The large holes in top and bottom row are the various letter combinations, through which contacts are made to control variations in the current; the middle row of small, evenly-spaced holes, is part of the feeding device.

degree. The fifteen cables now submerged in that ocean, therefore, represent the outlay on a large modern fleet. These lines have a total mileage of about 40,000, and a capitalization of $100,000,000, while their gross annual traffic is valued at $6,000,000. The tariff when the first cable was laid was $5 a word; now it is down to 25 cents, and some cable reformers predict a ten-cent rate in the not distant future.

Repairing Ocean Cables

Repairs are frequently very protracted and costly. They are necessitated by a variety of causes-crushing by icebergs, dragging anchors, etc.; and recently a cable was put out of service by a whale, which, getting the cable in its mouth, floundered about so that the cable was twisted in a loop around its jaw, effectually imprisoning the monster and drowning it. The location of a break

in a cable is determined with remarkable accuracy nowadays by the electricians at the terminals; for the resistance in ohms of the complete cable is known, and the resistance of the portion which can still be energized enables them to give a repair ship directions which will place her within a mile of the fracture in midocean. On reaching the locality, she "trawls" for the cable with grapnels, and, having got it on board, "splices" it, or inserts a new section, cutting out the broken piece. Sometimes a cable is repaired very speedily and cheaply; buf one trans-Atlantic cable cost $375,000, or almost a tenth of its original figure, to make good; while a cable in the Bay of Biscay used up 300 miles of new material and was worked at for 215 days, before it was perfect again. It has been stated that the cost of repairing one Atlantic cable has averaged $40.000 a year for thirty years. In one instance the

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outer shield of steel wires was abandoned, and 100 miles of new cable, with only rope protector, was inserted in midocean, but with such unfortunate results that the experiment is not likely ever to be repeated.

The greatest depth at which a cable has been laid is 3.211 fathoms, on the British Pacific cable; and the greatest depth from which a cable has been recovered is 2.744 fathoms, between Lisbon and Madeira. The grappling for a cable, and raising it from such a depth, rarely Occupy less than 24 hours, though the picking-up gear of one of the largest ships is capable of lifting thirty tons at a speed of one knot per hour. Once the repair ship Minia lifted a cable from three. miles of water beyond the Newfoundland Banks, and was six hours getting it to the top. Although gutta-percha is the insulating substance chiefly used, some 2,500 miles of cable have been treated with vulcanized india-rubber, and have worked with much success for years, india-rubber being found superior to gutta-percha for tropical waters infested with teredos or sawfishes, which are the worst enemies of cables in moderate depths in those regions.

The World's Cable Business

The world's total of cable mileage, January 1, 1904, was:

Government-owned Company-owned

Total

22,799 miles 187,122 miles .209,921 miles

Their total capitalization was $223,257,720. Of this total mileage, Britain possesses 131,593, all but 10,700 being company-owned. About 13,000,000 cablegrams are transmitted across the world's under-sea wires annually, or 36,000 every twenty-four hours. The figures for landline messages annually are 478,300,000, and daily 1,400,000; and the estimated yearly outlay for the world's cables and land lines is $850,

000,000.

The longest stretch of cable is that between Vancouver, B. C., and Fanning Island, on the British Pacific system, 3.457 miles, the next being the French

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Superintendent of Cable Station at Heart's Content, the first Trans-Atlantic Cable Station.

landing-place of the first ocean cable; and for nearly forty years, without a single intermission, has been carrying on the work of a half-way house between the two hemispheres. It is the premier cable. station of the world. It handles 5,000 messages every day, and does a specially large volume of stock-exchange business, its land-line connections leading directly into the bourses in London, New York, and Chicago, and messages being transmitted between the brokers of the former two cities, and replies obtained within one or two minutes. About 75 per cent of the cable business is in "code" words; and while ordinarily 5.95 plain language words go to one code word, yet some pri

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Secret of Victory

ENERALLY speaking, the life of all truly great men has been a life of intense, incessant labor. They have commonly passed the first half of life in the gross darkness of indigent humilityoverlooked, mistaken, condemned by weaker menthinking while others slept, reading while others rioted, feeling something within them that told them they should not always be kept down among the dregs of the world. And then, when their time has come, and some little accident has given them their first occasion, they have burst out into the light and glory of public life, rich with the spoils of time, and mighty in all the labors and struggles of the mind.-SYDNEY SMITH.

A Commercial Necessity Evolved Through the Application of Electricity

to Industrial Uses

E

By J. B. BAKER, S. B.
With the General Electric Company

ALECTRICITY is one of the most important agents of modern civilization. Its applications have profoundly affected the whole of modern life. Stupendous amounts of electric power are used to propel the ever-multiplying trolley cars, to illuminate lavishly our streets and homes, and to drive the machines in our factories.

These millions of kilowatt-hours (a kilowatt is about one and one-third horse power) in electrical energy, must be measured if they are to be paid for, whether it is a matter of the lighting of a house or of a whole White City (Chicago) pleasure resort. The energy that an electric company delivers to its cars or to its street-lighting circuits, should. also be measured; for modern conditions demand careful accounting, and the manager must show a due output of electric work for every pound of coal burned under the company's boilers. Electric meters, then, and vast numbers of them, are needed; and the manufacture of "recording wattmeters" has arisen in the last fifteen years from comparative insignificance to the front rank among great electrical industries.

Delicate and Complicated
Mechanism

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ASSEMBLING AN INDUCTION METER.

The iron field cores, built up of thin sheets of iron insulated from
one another, are being screwed to the aluminum frame of
the meter. All parts are drilled from templates,
which facilitates rapid and accurate assembling.

Like many other supremely useful things, an electric meter is an unobtrusive object. To the casual observer, it is a black box, tucked away in a corner, with a row of dial hands in front that make it look cousin-german to a gas meter. But this is only the external appearance. On removing the case, there is a perfect revelation of dainty mechanism. A hollow shaft, literally "as light as a feather" but wonderfully rigid, turning on a jewel bearing, and carrying, near its top, a motor armature wound

mill wheel. It is a very high grade instrument, as durable as any machine, and designed to run in exact accordance with the amount of electric power passing through it, running very slowly when registering the power consumed by a lamp or two or a small fan motor, and speeding up when the "load" increases, say, to a general illumination. Its refinement of construction, and the success with which friction has been eliminated,

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