Mr. Lawless: For say an equipment of about twenty or thirty cars, how many generators would you require in the power house to charge the cells?

Mr. Bracken: Eight-horse power for each sixteen-foot car.

Mr. Lawless: What is the lifetime of the cells?

Mr. Bracken: As to the lifetime of the cells, I would require time to answer that question fully. Any man who thinks he knows exactly the lifetime of a battery, knows more than I do. There are some men who maintain they do. I do not know; but I can say this, that I know of storage batteries that have been in use over two years, subjected to hard work, that to-day are in service and doing good service. I will instance the Pennsylvania Railroad, to which we sold batteries on June 28th, 1886; and if there is any gentleman who is interested in applying to the Pennsylvania Company, they will inform him that these batteries have been in constant use since, and not a single cell exchanged. The Executive Mansion at Albany is lighted by our batteries; they have there over two hundred lights, and we are informed by the gentleman in charge, whom I have never seen, entirely disconnected with us, that he has not changed a single cell in that time. I will go further and state that if the batteries will last only six months, as I believe the most skeptical will admit they do I do not care if they last only three months-they will be cheaper than horses.

Mr. Lawless: What is the cost?

Mr. Bracken: The cells will cost six dollars. It would be dangerous for you to offer less; I might give them to you for four dollars and a-half. I believe it requires eight horses to run a car for a day; and you can see for yourself the difference.

Mr. Lawless Mr. President-What I want to get at is the financial result, in order to be able to report to my Company whether it would be a financial success for them to adopt electricity.

The President I am ready to equip ten lines to-morrow if I can get the right sort of thing to do it with. I want to know fully about it, and all these gentlemen do.

Mr. Hurt I would like to ask the gentleman the cost of renewal of the batteries?

Mr. Bracken: Two men, to whom you will pay a dollar and seventy-five cents or two dollars a day, and two girls, and a ma

chine costing five hundred dollars, with one-third of the original cost of the battery, will in four days replace the battery. In Camden we pay forty cents a day to the two girls. It is heartless, we know, but then we are trying to protect them, all the same. [Laughter.] Say the cells cost five dollars apiece; the material of your cell, with the exception of the active matter, is never destroyed, and is perfectly good to cast over and be remade, and by putting your elements into the solution, in four days you can reproduce the battery of the car.

Mr. Keefer, of Ottawa, Canada: The cost of the material in reproduction?

Mr. Bracken: It varies; some people buy the lead cheaper at one time than at another; it may be cheap now and next week it may be dear. Assuming, however, that the active material and the lead itself would amount to five cents a pound, for two tons that would be two hundred dollars for the material in the whole battery.

Mr. Wm. Richardson: Do you use copper?

Mr. Bracken: Nothing but lead; lead is the chief ingredient; ninety-four and one-half per cent.

Mr. Eppley I would like to ask the gentleman what is the cost of the motive power equipment, exclusive of the car. He said the car cost four thousand dollars, complete. I want to get at the cost of putting the machine under a new car.

Mr. Bracken I assume the car body costs one thousand dollars; that makes the other equipment three thousand. If you please, I will make one statement more in relation to the Fourth avenue car. I went over the line in the electric car with an officer of the New York Central Road the other day just about dark. This is simply an illustration of the effect it produces. It is lighted with sixteen candle power incandescent lights. We got off at Seventy-first street to return to our hotel, and took one of the horse cars, with dim, struggling lights, one at either end, and the officer looked about, and he said, "Skitt, this will never do; we must have electric traction.”

REMARKS OF MR. JOHN C. LOVE ON THE UNDERGROUND SYSTEM OF ELECTRIC TRACTION.

Mr. John C. Love, of Philadelphia: Mr. President, we have heard the able remarks of the gentleman who represents the storage battery system; we all listened attentively. The overhead

system has been tested by Mr. Sprague at Richmond, where he runs forty cars.

I am here more particularly to speak of a system underneath the road-bed, where it is desired to use electricity in large cities, such as New York, Boston, Cincinnati, St. Louis and other large cities. A writer in "Scribner's," in March last, who took a review of the whole subject from the time of Faraday down to the time of writing his article, and did not forget any inventors who were working on the system up to that time, gives a full description of everything that has been done. He said in this article that a number of inventors were at work on a system to carry the line conductors underneath the road-bed, and which, he believed, would be accomplished in due time. For instance, you take your telegraph or telephone system, and there is not a particle of leakage in a thousand miles. Now, what we want to do is to get underneath the road-bed and make the line so that you can start out with either one, fifty or three hundred cars and have all the power that is necessary to move them, but how are we going to do that? In my system the conduit is placed in the centre of the track on top of the cross ties, which are nine inches below the centre of the street. The depth of our conduit is nine inches and it is eight inches wide. On the side of the conduit close to the top is situated a pair of jaws with insulating block to enter them, and having an opening through it, and electrical conductors having tongues to them to enter such opening and a key to secure the tongues in place and thus we attain complete insulation for our conductors. The current is taken from the line conductors, of which there are four, situated near the ceiling of the conduit by a contact carrier, consisting of rollers, pressed against the bottom of the conductors by springs, and operated from the car by a lever, and thus it at all times gives us a perfect contact.

We start out with three out-going wires and one common return wire connected electrically with the conduit, making a perfect home circuit.

If we should start out with twenty-five cars on each conductor, or seventy-five cars in all, and an accident should happen to any one of our circuits, or going over a heavy grade, we can switch to any one of the circuits or to them all, if necessary, without any of the passengers being aware of the change.

In large cities, you are all very well aware, storage batteries for

long lines of road, where cars are stretched a mile or two apart, are very good in their way. I am talking for railroads where you run from twenty to sixty or five hundred cars. I will equip a road of five hundred cars without any trouble and handle them all. Each line conductor has its own generator and is separate from the other, just as much so as if one was in Boston and the other in San Francisco, and yet they are in the same conduit and only half an inch apart. Well, now, to run a road with sixty cars, if you please. It would require, at the least, in the neighborhood of one thousand volts to run sixty cars. I divide these volts and make three hundred and fifty on each wire, which makes it perfectly safe, with no danger of any accident occurring. I want you to understand this, and I want you to question me, because I know you are all anxious to get something, so that you can do away with horses.

Mr. Barr, of Philadelphia: How do you provide against lightning?

Mr. Love: The conductors are all encased; neither water, dirt, filth nor lightning can get to them.

Mr. Perin, of Baltimore: That is a very important question. We had an experience a few days ago on our electric road in Baltimore, where the lightning struck the contact wire, went up through the motor and burned the motor out. There is no way of getting rid of that.

I understand how you can overcome it at the power station, but along the road it is a question for consideration.

Mr. Love: I will say in answer to this gentleman's inquiry that my wires, of which there are four, are all of them encased, and you might turn on the hose of a fire engine and you cannot get a drop of water, nor a particle of dirt on them, nor can lightning touch them. In a thousand miles there is not a drop of leakage. I run upon low potential, three hundred and fifty volts or twentytwo amperes. The current of electricity would not hurt a child.

Mr. Maxon, of St. Louis: If your wires are perfectly encased, so that no electricity can escape, please tell me how you get your electricity from your wire to carry your cars?

Mr. Love: The wires are held in close adjustment near the ceiling of the conduit, and the contact carrier presses against them and carries the current to the motor.

Mr. Maxon: Does the gear touch the wire encased?

Mr. Love: The wire that runs from the conduit is thoroughly encased, but we have got to have a point of contact.

Mr. Maxon: Exactly!

It would be

We have got

Mr. Love: But these line conductors are encased. impossible to take a contact from a covered wire. to have our wires naked at the point of contact. of concealing the wires, that is my invention-the conducting wires are concealed and encased.

But the method

Mr. Maxon: You must have an exposed point, in order to make a contact.

Mr. Love: Of course, you have got to have a contact, that is right.

Mr. Lawless Only one question. In case of a heavy rain-fall, and there are parts of the road situated where the side streets slope and form a hill in the direct line of the electric line. I understand that water is a great conductor of electricity. You take a heavy day's rain, and it might prove a serious trouble. I would like to know from you what effect the flow of water down these side streets into the slots and coming in contact with the conductor would have upon the electric current.

Mr. Love: We are running upon low potential. In place of carrying one thousand volts on one wire, I carry three hundred and fifty volts on each wire, really giving me one thousand and fifty volts, so that a wire seven-sixteenths of an inch in diameter would hold the electricity. In place of the electricity going into the water, it would remain in the copper; it has more affinity for copper than water.

Mr. Lawless: In case of a continuous flow of water through the slot rail in your conduit, would not that interfere with the electric current?

Mr. Love In case of a continuous flow, we propose to have a drain to the sewer to carry the water off.

Mr. Lawless: There are some cases where you cannot do that. Mr. Love I have provided thoroughly for that, sir. When we come to such a place as you speak of we have an overhead wire stretched on poles, and we cut the current off the submerged part. Now for crossing a bridge or a number of railroad tracks, we use an overhead system; by means of the lever we lift the contact carrier out of the conduit and make our connections from the overhead wires, which are in reach of the motor man.