The Montgomery advertiser., 1906-03-27

total of nearly five billion fare passen- gers a year and giving employment to an army of 150,000 men, about twice as many as are in the regular stand ing army of the United States.
 Since the first little group of horse ears began to jangle and rattle out ward from the West End of Boston, across the bridge immortalized by LonRfelIow. over the then untenanted narshes of Cambridge port to the clas- sic precincts of Harvard university, nomentous changes have been wrought in the ever improving street car ser vice with which every American city IS now provided. Sociological effects have everywhere been noticed. Through cheap transportation facilities the population has been spread out; people have been enabled to live at dls- tance from their work, and the clus- fer of suburbs around every American centre of population, something almost unknown in European countries, has become one of the most marked teat- ures of our civilization. Everybody has come to take the convenient street car and its hve-cent fare as matter or course, and only the older generation of Americans remembers the time when there was a reason as well as rhyme in Mark Twain's haunting Jinglei
 "Conductor. when you receive fare Punch in the presence of the passen-
 jare."
 with it's attendant adjurstion to be careful about the color of the trip slips representing three, five and eight cent fares.
 The technical changes alone in the methods of street car operation have been of tremendous importance Ami maI traction has nearly gone out, for less than two hundred miles of horse car line are now in use in the United States. The cable systems. too, which at one time were so popular in many of the cities of the country, have become well nigh obsolete. They were first in troduced about 1873: before 1898 they had virtually disappeared in favor of overhead or underground trolley sys- tems. Electricity as a motive power was already being seriously considered at the time when the first successful horse car line was operated in Boston, but many inventions were necessary before a dependable trolley car could be put upon rails. Just such tireless energy as is now being expended upon the problem of navigation of the air as spent for many years by experimenters in electric traction. who often seemed to their contemporaries to be hopeless visionaries
 The pioneer work of Thomas Daven- port. Professor Moses G. Farmer. Pro- lessor c e. Page of the Smithsonian In- stitution, Thomas Hall of Boston, Hen ry Pinkus, stephen B. Reid, Thomas A. Edison, Leo Draft, Charles J. Van De- poole. John c. Henry, Professor Sidney Fl. Short of the University of Denver, Dr. Wellington Adams of St. Louis and almost innumerable other inventors whose names deserve to be enrolled In the industrial Hall of Fame. contrib
 uted to the total result which was first brought to commercial fulfllment at
 Richmond, Va, by Frank J. Sprague,
 in 1888. and which was put into opera
 tion In a large city system for the first
 time Tn Boston in the year following.
 Between the earliest crude electric cars, often the size of toys. shown as curiosi- ties at expositions summer resorts and county fairs and the finest type of ele- vated trains or interurban street ears today, there Is of course, an immense difference-such a difference as that between Dr. Bells queer little tele- phone of 1876 and the perfected instru- ment of today. The electric dynamo had to be developed in order that cleo
 tric traction should be more than the oretically possible. A method of over head contact had to be devised. for the
 third rail type. in the perfection Of which the Germans also had hand is