Morning journal and courier., 1880-01-20

reasonably expected to reform without pun ishment, he is placed on probation for the term of three or twelve months, the officer becoming his bondsman, and requiring him to report himself at stated periods to the courts and furnish evidence of continued good behavior. Proper objects of charity, like street waifs, fallen women who desire to re- form, and others, sailors and strangers, whose offense consists of nothing worse than revel- ling or drunkenness, are allowed to depart In the first fourteen months of this experi- ment, about two per cent. of the twenty five thousand persons brought before the courts were placed on probation, and of those five hundred, less than fifty have been surren- dared to punishment for violation of the con- ditions of probation, or run away from the supervisors. The majority of the cases were for first offenses of the lighter kind, and such as come from yielding to temptation rather than deliberate criminality, and of those who have been assisted to work, sent home, or placed in charitable institutions, a very large proportion have apparently reformed. Every city ought to have Probation Oficer''
 AA@S AASSR zeal. MT. Charles T. Bright an expert con- sidered an authority on the subject, proclaims in the London press his conviction that Edi- sons latest invention will turn out no practi~ cal advance upon the stage to which the de- velopment of the electric light has been al- ready brought. He says that Edison has achieved nothing but what has been already tried, and that though he is the Ikeliest man to solve the question he has not yet succeeded in doing so. The Sanitary Engineer also seeks to establish the fact that Edison is simply travelling over region previously explored by others. In the first place, as regards the latest development at Menlo Park, namely, the carbon flament inclosed in the exhausted globe: In 1845 an American inventor, named Starr, took out, in England, through his agent, King, patent for producing light by electricity, which had for its basis the use of metallic conductors, or of continuous carbons, heated to whiteness by the passage of the electric current. The best metal for this pur- pose was declared to be platinum, and when carbon was used thin rod or filament was inclosed in glass vessel The specifications state: "A vacuum is previously established in the bell, and the apparatus vertically forms 8 barometer, with one of the poles of the bat tery in communication with the column of mercury, and the other with the conductor D." The conductor D is represented as sealed directly into the glass globe or bell, and the reference to the barometer shows clearly that the vacuum produced was what is known as the Torricellian vacuum, which, as far as the absolute exclusion of air goes, is considered by the Sanitary Engineer to be fully equiva-. lent for practical purposes to what Edison produces in his lamps. If, therefore, these lamps are of any practical use, so also would lamps be if made according to the King pat ent, which is, of course, open to all the world. As to the countless devices for regulating the current and distributing it through numerous lamps, about which Edison has taken out so many patents, it is curious to see how com- pletely they are described in publications now twenty years old. At meeting of the French Academy, held March 1, 1858, there was re- ceived from M. Jobart communication in which Edison's experiments seem to have been anticipated. As for the so called Edison Electric Generator, this critic considers it in every essential feature duplicate of the we'll known Siemen's Dynamo-Electric machines.