The Birmingham age-herald., 1906-01-28
MODERN HOTEL IS HOUSE IF WONDERS The Imagination of Jules Verne
 is Outstripped ELECTRICITY IS A POWER  Orders Recorded by Pencils Moved by Invisible Hands-carriaees Are
 Called by searchlight.
 Other conVeniences.
ELECTRICITY IS A POWER

New York, January 27-(Special) With all his imaginative genius, Jules Verne never conceived the idea of the twen- tieth century hotel. The man who de- scribed the journeys of a submarine boat a quarter of a century before the na- tions of the world found such vessel practicable for the purposes of warfare never once hinted that the time would come when the model hostelry would be equipped not merely with it's own electric | light plant, telephones in rooms and in elevators. and machinery for keeping the | air in every apartment fresh and pure | day and night but also with useful de- vices hardly less magical than Aladdins s lamp.
 A vertable mechanical wonderland is the twentieth century hotel It is apt 1 to startle guest at first, if he should | stroll into one of the department head quarters of the Astor, the latest of the big metropolitan hotels to see a pencil 1 writing messages automatically on q roll Of paper kept moving by some invisible force; yet this is but a part of the telau- tograph, which is used to transmit orders from one department to another. The man who writes the order uses a machine that is very much like the contrivanee used by the clerks in a department store; but the marvellous part of this latest feature of hotel management is that while the message is being written by hand 1t is being duplicated mechanically upon a receiving machine perhaps ten stories distant.
 Chambermad Easy to Find.
 Nor, now that the American inventor has studied her case. can the chamber maid continue to be elusive. In this ho tel she is found whenever she is wanted. | When she enters a chamber she inserts a small electric globe into socket on | the frame of the hall door, This little globe instantly lights up revealing her whereabouts, and al the same time Il l little glass button on a dial in the office | down stairs becomes luminous. As, of course, every room is connected by tele- phone with the office, this novel signal system enables the clerk to summon the maid for any guest who wants her with out delay. In the up-to-date hotel the days of the old puzzle of find-the-cham- bermaid have gone,' never to return.
 Equally wonderful are the devices adapted by the enterprising hotel mana | ger to protect his guests from danger in
 
 apparatus, there is device in every room in the Astor which sends in an | alarm of fire whenever the temperature around it is abnormally high, and the instant the alarm sounds at the office desk and in the basement the hotel fire l brigade responds While this machine renders it practically impossible for a fire to gain any headway before it is dis 1 covered, at the same time precautions | have been taken to meet the most seri- ous emergency. For example, the twelve elevators in the building are in constant | communication by telephone, not only with the office, but with one another. So. in the event of fre-a remote event, indeed, considering all the safeguards in | use, but yet an event that must be pro- vided against-this telephone signal sys- tenn would enable the operators to avoid the confusion and delay which is apt to | prove a great source of danger. Besides, the elevator signal system would prove very useful if one of the cars should meet with an accident between floors.
 Light Won't Go Out.
 Another remarkable fact about this in- teresting caravansary is that the lights can never go out. except for the instant required to set the storage battery in motion. Accidents to dynamos and the consequent loss of electric light through out the house, with the accompaniment | or poftefS ana Dell-DoyS pumping their way from room to room lighting the gas jets have been one of the chief banes of the hotel mans existence. A capa- cious storage battery precludes trouble of this kind, and only the hotel cleo tricians themselves know when the great power wheels far below the level of the pavements of Broadway have stopped while upstairs people have continued to dine or dance in the brilliancy of thou sands of electric lights.
 Comfort and convenience are the prime object of all these mechanical wonders, and even small matters do not escape the revolution. Once upon time the delivery of keys to the desk involved much loss of time not only to the guests themselves, but also to the employees. In this house the maid who takes the key from the guest places 1t in a pneumatic tube and-presto! it is in the hands of