[Illustration:  DIAL FACE.]

JEHL AND RUPP. 
Bruenn, Sept. 26, 1887.

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STORAGE BATTERIES FOR ELECTRIC LOCOMOTION.[1]

  [Footnote 1:  From a paper read before the National Electric Light
  Association, New York, August, 1887.]

By A. RECKENZAUN.

The idea of employing secondary batteries for propelling vehicles is almost contemporaneous with the discovery of this method of storing energy.  To Mr. Plante, more than to any other investigator, much of our knowledge in this branch of electrical science is due.  He was the first to take advantage of the action of secondary currents in voltaic batteries.  Plante is a scientist of the first grade, and he is a wonderfully exact experimenter.  He examined the whole question of polarization of electrodes, using all kinds of metal as electrodes and many different liquids as electrolytes, and during his endless researches he found that the greatest useful effect was produced when dilute sulphuric acid was electrolyzed between electrodes of metallic lead.

A set of Plante’s original cells was exhibited for the first time in March, 1860, before the Paris Academy of Sciences.  Scientists admired and praised it, but the general public knew nothing of this great discovery thus brought to notice.  Indeed, at that period little commercial value could be attached to such apparatus, since the accumulator had to be charged by means of primary batteries, and it was then well known that electrical energy, when produced by chemical means in voltaic cells, was far too expensive for any purpose outside the physical laboratory or the telegraph office.

It was twenty years after this exhibition at the Academy of Sciences in Paris that public attention was drawn to the importance of storage batteries, and that Mr. Faure conceived the idea of constructing plates consisting of lead and oxides of lead.  At that time the advantages accruing through a system of electrical storage could be fully appreciated, since electrical energy was already being produced by mechanical means through the medium of dynamo-electric machines.

It was the dynamo machine which created the demand for the storage battery, and the latter was introduced anew to the public at large and to the capitalist with great pomp and enthusiasm.  One of Faure’s accumulators was sent to Sir William Thomson, and this eminent scientist in the course of experiments ascertained that a single cell, weighing 165 lb., can store two million foot-pounds of energy, or one horse power for one hour, and that the loss of energy in charging did not exceed 15 per cent.  These results appeared highly encouraging.  There we had a method of storing that could give out the greater part of the energy put in.  The immense development which the electric transmission of energy was even at that early day expected to undergo pointed to the fact that a