s the regulation of the
household clock, is eminently a department of domestic economy in
which wireless telegraphy will prove itself useful, because it does
not demand that a subscriber shall have gone to the expense of
installing a wire to his house and of paying a rent or fee for the use
of one.

The clock controlled by wireless telegraphy will doubtless undergo a
rapid development from the time when it is first introduced.
Practically the same principles which enable the electrician to
utilise the "Hertzian waves," or ether vibrations, for the purpose of
setting a clock right once a day, or once an hour, will permit of an
impulse, true to time, being sent from the central station every
second, or every minute, and when this has been accomplished it will
be seen that there is no more use for the maintenance of elaborate
clockworks at any place excepting the central station. The domestic
clock will, in fact, become mainly a "receiver" for the wireless
telegraphic apparatus, and its internal mechanism will be reduced,
perhaps, to a couple of wheels, which are necessary to transmit the
motion of a minute-hand to that which indicates the hours.

The fire-alarm of the future must be very simple and inexpensive in
order to ensure its introduction, not only into offices and warehouses
but also into shops and houses. The fire-insurance companies will very
shortly awake to the fact that prompt telegraphic alarm in case of
fire is worth far more than the majority of the prohibitions upon
which they are accustomed to insist by way of rendering fires less
likely. The main principles upon which the electric fire-alarm will be
operated have already been worked out and partially adopted. In the
system of fuses and cut-outs used in connection with electric
lighting, the methods of preventing fire due to the development of
excessive heat have been well studied. But simplification is
particularly required in the case of those fire-alarms which are to be
useful for giving intimation of a conflagration from any cause
arising.

As the telegraphic and telephonic wires are extended so as to traverse
practically all the streets of every city, the fire-insurance
companies will find it to their advantage to promote a simple plan,
depending on the use of a combustible thread passing round little
pulleys in the corners of all the rooms and finally out to the front,
where an electrical "contact-maker" is fixed, so that on the thread
being b