All About Inventions and Discoveries
The Romance of modern scientific and mechanical Achievements

Coming of Electric Lighting 219 As may be supposed, the diversion of inventive activity into a new and more promising field brought forth a bounteous crop of improvements. Each in- dividual effort may not have represented a great advance in the light of current knowledge, but in those days, when very little was known about elec- tricity—it was an infant science—each contribution was considered a distinct forward stride. Generally speaking, progress was comparatively rapid, and in 1845 electric arc lighting underwent a decisive revival. A British inventor, Thomas Wright, of London, devised a means of automatically adjusting the carbons, so that the gap between them was kept fairly constant at the required distance. It was acknowledged to be a fearsome-looking apparatus, but it sufficed to indicate that the hope of electric lighting becoming reckoned as an accomplished fact was very much alive. The automatic feeding of the carbons appears to have attracted the greatest measure of attention during this period, because numerous devices to this end appeared in rapid succession, culminating in the arrangements of Senin, Duboscq, and Professor F. H. Holmes. Serrin introduced a method of feeding the carbons which represented a distinct advance upon any preceding devices; in fact, the main features thereof were subsequently revived and introduced into arc lamps of the con- temporary era of this form of illumination. Duboscq contrived a distinct form of arc lighting, while Pro- fessor Holmes, in 1858, designed and built a powerful magnetic electric machine upon the broad principles laid down years before by Faraday. Ihis appara- tus was driven by a steam engine, and, as may be