wire.

Many merchants will have their telephonic apparatus fitted with
arrangements for setting up type or perforating strips of paper, as
already described; and also with receiving apparatus for making the
records in typewriting. If they fail to find a subscriber or
correspondent on hand at the time when he is wanted, they can write a
note to him which he will find hanging on a paper strip from his
telephone when he returns. Another mode of accomplishing a somewhat
similar result is to provide the telephone receiver itself with a
moving strip of steel, which, in its varying degrees of magnetisation,
records the spoken words so that they will, at some distance of time,
actuate the diaphragm of the receiver and emit spoken words. The
degree of permanency which can be attained by this system is, of
course, a vital point as regards its practical merits.

Still unsolved electrical problems are the making of a satisfactory
alternate current motor suitable for running with the kind of
currents generally used for electric lighting purposes--the
utilisation of the glow lamp having a partial vacuum or attenuated gas
for giving a cheap and soft light somewhat on the principle of the
Geissler tube--and last, but not least, the direct conversion of heat
into electricity.

With regard to the first-mentioned, the prospects have been materially
altered by a discovery announced at the New York meeting of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science within a few weeks
of the close of the nineteenth century. The handy and effective
alternate current motor indeed seemed then as far distant as it had
been in 1896, when Sir David Salomons remarked, in his work on
_Electric Light Installations_ (vol. ii., p. 97): "No satisfactory
alternate current motor available on all circuits exists as yet,
although," he added later, "the demand for such an appliance increases
daily". It seems, however, that electricians have been looking in the
wrong direction for the solution of using the same wire for alternate
current lighting and for motive power at the same time. Professor
Bedell, of Cornell University, announced at the New York meeting
referred to his discovery of the important fact that when direct and
alternate currents are sent over the same line each behaves as if the
other were not there, and thus the same line can be used for two
distinct systems of transmitting electrical energy. No time will be
lost in putting this announcem