The Birmingham age-herald., 1905-09-25

= OsTON, September A.-(speeial.)-
 K When Benjamin Franklin sent up
 D his famous kite and captured cleo tricitv he would, perhaps, have been even more surprised had he suddenly realized that in less than two centuries humanity would be cooking it's breakfast with this same mysterious substance. Using cap tured lightning to toast bread and boil an egg or two seems almost disrespectful to Providence. But every years more and more people are doing it. Heating by electricity-and heating means cooking. washing the dishes, and various other everyday household utilities-has made goodr In all the larger American cities and in many of the smaller ones. What we should do without electricity as it is utilized in the convenient trolley car and the almost universal telephone. Is as difficult for a modern to imagine as it would have been the world ever got on without candles and Dutch ovens.
 Everybody knows more or less about electricity as applied to the big public utilities. but acquaintance with the many uses of the fluid" to make domestic live ing more comfortable is still confined largely to the individual users How many persons know, for example that a man may go on a journey with stove in his steamer trunk? Such is the fact however; the stove together with a cup that will hold three and half pints of water, packing away in something less than the space needed for a pair of shoes The little stove looks like plain iron disk but inside of il are the wires that generate heat whenever it is con nected with an electric light fixture. And this heat is without flame, and. therefore. much safer than an alcohol burner. It pro vides him with hot water for shaving bathing or drinking-if he happens to be one of the good-sized army of men who find that good digestion waits on a regu- lar glass of hot water-or, maybe, for a little laundry work neeessitated by the exigences of travel.
 If he likes to keep his clothes pressed his trunk may also contain an electric pressing iron which hitches to q convent tent electric light fixture. Women travel CTS nowadays often carry these conveni- ent irons, and their remarkable safety Is illustrated by q bit of carelessness that recently occurred in a New York hotel and might, under any other form of heat ing, have had the most serious conse- quences. A woman who had been using an electric iron left it standing on the floor and departed on 8 shopping expe- diton without turning off the current The iron remained hot; but without set ting the house on fire it slowly burnt it's way through the wood and was discov- cred when it was just about to continue burning it way through the plastered ceiling of the room underneath It had settled slowly. literally eating up the flooring and leaving hole the exact size of the iron.
 In many city apartments electricity nowadays does practically everything do- nestle. from calling up the butcher over the telephone to order steak, to broil- ing the steak on an electric broiler and washing the dishes in electrically heated water To make the thing complete the up-to-date butcher is not unlikely to bring the steak in an electric delivery wagon: and the mistress of the house may go again to the telephone and invite a friend to the feast who comes dashing up a few minutes later in an electric runabout
 Aside from it's most simple manifesto tion as a box on the wall through which one may converse with half a continent the telephone Itself has a remarkable number of adaptations to domestic living There are telephones so arranged, for ex- ample, that the transmitter and receiver may be taken down at night and carried to bed with you-which is much better protection for the family silver than to put it under the mattress. Special in- struments of this kind are made for phy- siclans and so designed that the owner