T

HOMAS B. WELLS of New York and Spring Lake, New Jersey, claims no kinship with the mystic Aladdin, who, we are assured, could by the simple process of rubbing a magic lamp summon a genie and cause him to execute any commands his master might give him. But Mr. Wells seems to be about the nearest approach to that wonderful personage of which we have any record, for he produces results almost as marvelous and his methods are similar. About the only difference is that, instead of a magic lamp, he uses the modern electric switch, while the mystic electric current takes the place of the genie.

Mr. Wells has recently brought into being the first electric residence. Ac

cording to his own

story he was forced

into doing it.

While a

wealthy

man, Mr. Wells objected very strenuously when the bills, which came in from the Spring Lake Electric Lighting Company, showed that he was being charged eighteen cents per kilo

watt hour. Protests availing nothing, Mr. Wells determined to become his own electrician.

Here are some of the things he has succeeded in doing: making ice for sixtenths of a cent per pound; lighting and heating his bungalow; doing the cooking, washing and ironing; mixing drinks; running his own moving picture machine and phonograph, and an electric fountain for table decoration; operating an apparatus for drying hair; a vacuum cleaner; mechanically mixing bread, beating eggs, chopping meat,

slicing potatoes, freezing ice cream, boiling coffee, making toast, sharpening knives, buffing silver, operating a sewing machine, electrocuting mice-and he is still working on new things.

Mr. Wells' first move was to install in his bungalow, which is really a handsome summer villa, a ten-horsepower gas engine with the necessary equipment for manufacturing current. Immediately, the cost of lighting his house was reduced from eighteen cents to one cent per kilowatt hour. This engine, of the

four-cycle, water-cooled gasoline type, is directly connected to a five-kilowatt generator, supplying direct current at one hundred and fifteen volts.

SOME OF THE HOUSEHOLD DEVICES The percolator works rapidly at very little cost: the toaster and the broiler have the same advantages for table use; the home moving picture machinewell, just think of that for all the family.

The abundance of current set Mr. Wells to thinking and later to experimenting and inventing with the idea of making it work, not only

after sunset, but all through the day. What he accomplished in a few months has already been chronicled. His

house today is undoubtedly the most perfectly appointed and smoothly working electric dwelling in the world, a fact which is due in large measure to two comparatively recent inventionsthe Edison storage battery and an automatic controller which regulates voltage.

Along with the gas engine there is located in the rear of the Wells' bungalow one hundred storage batteries. By running the engine only seven hours,

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enough current is stored. up in these batteries to supply the house for a week. By an ingenious device, the engine, which is self-starting, is automatically shut off as soon as the batteries are charged. The automatic controller keeps the voltage the same whether one light or fifty are turned on at the same time. The battery requires no attention with the exception of an occasional addition of distilled water, for which purpose an automatic filler is provided. Moreover, it can be left standing definitely, either charged or uncharged, and in either a hot or a freez

in

HITCHED UP IN THE KITCHEN

Most of the appliances speak for themselves, but the little portable motor on the table is everything from a remarkably good vacuum cleaner to a silver polisher.

has cut the combined work of washing and ironing by hand from three and onehalf to four days to one or one and onequarter days. The daintiest laces may be washed absolutely clean without fear of injury, and the machine handles the heaviest blankets and thoroughly cleans them. The electric ice making plant enables Mr. Wells to make fifty pounds of ice daily and maintain his ice box with a refrigeration capacity of two hundred and fifty pounds besides, for the modest sum of fifteen cents. With ice at forty cents per one hundred pounds this is no small saving.

The equipment of the dining room is equally perfect, with its array of electric percolators, toasters, and chafing dishes. Two real novelties here are an electric drink mixer, and a tiny electric fountain in the center of the dining-room table, the water playing over subdued colored lights, producing a unique and very beautiful effect.

The owner's bedroom in this electric wonder house contains everything that the comfort-loving could desire. In the dre. sing room are an electric heater for the curling iron, an electric hair dryer, which supplies both hot and cold air, and

every necessary appliance for massage treatment worked by the same means. Even electric pads take the place of the old-fashioned hot water bags.

Mr. Wells' success does not mean that the next man, who objects to the exorbitant prices charged by most electric companies for current, can follow the same plan independently, for the cost of installing an individual plant is high. Mr. Wells, however, has figured out a rather interesting plan of an isolated plant, which he calls the "block system," intended to cover equipment for a block of ten residences, supplying each with seventy-five sixteen candle power lamps, one hundred pounds of pure ice per day, and power to run small motors, such as are used on sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, silver polishers, etc. The total cost of equipment for such a plant Mr. Wells has figured would be about four thousand dollars, or four hundred dollars per house, and the fuel cost two hundred and seventy dollars per year, or twenty-seven dollars per house. The cost of current would amount to only one and one-tenth cents per kilowatt hour, as against eighteen cents, which is charged by many companies.

A

T last there is a place on the eastern coast of America where the greatest dreadnaught likely to be built within twenty years can be properly massaged and groomed for a fight or a frolic. This recently completed Drydock Number Four in the Brooklyn Navy Yard was not built, however, without extraordinary difficulties being overcome. In fact it is called the "hoodoo drydock", since it cost the lives of twenty men, the serious injuring of four hundred others, and brought two big contracting firms to ruin. Yet naval officers say it is worth it. Although the whole structure occupies a space only

seven hundred and twenty-six feet long and one hundred and ten feet wide, it was almost eight years from the time the work was started until the first ship was floated into the finished dock. When Congress appropriated one million dollars for its construction, in 1905, it was expected that the dock would be ready for use in two years.

It seemed a comparatively simple task, at first. After all, a drydock is merely a lined hole in the shore with water gates at one end and pumps for emptying the dock when the ship has been floated in and the gates closed. The building of such a dock had never before attracted

be of masonry construction, built on a foundation of piles driven deep into the earth. A certain big contracting company planned to surround the entire site of the dock with steel-sheet piling and thus secure a large open excavation. The chief engineer had hardly gone lower than the surface soil when every pile his men drove showed a strange desire to return to the surface. No matter how hard the drivers pounded them down, they came bobbing up to the surface again. Soundings proved that there was a thick layer of quicksand underlying the

This was not the worst of the contractor's misfortunes. Two big sewers, one six, and the other seven feet, flowed past the dock site. One of these burst and poured its waters into the excavation; then the other cracked and added its share so that the contractor had to stop all other work and build a concrete dam across the face of one sewer, while he patched up the other as best he could.

So far the great drydock was nothing but a big jagged hole in the ground, littered with debris, and filled at the bottom with pools of sewer leakage. Hun