Four months later a correspondent of a Sheffield, England, paper, writing from London to the _Railway Review_ of the recent trial of electric lights on the Pullman train of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway, says:
There is no doubt whatever on the point that this, apart from the question of cost, is a decided success. It is easily manageable, and diffuses through the train a pleasant, equable light, scarcely less agreeable than daylight. It is turned on and off with instantaneous effect as the train enters and leaves a tunnel, and of course is kept burning the whole of the time during the night journeys. The electricity is stored in a number of lead plates, which are kept in water in iron boxes in the guard's van. There are two lots, one at either end of the train, and two mechanics in charge of them. This discovery of the ability to store electricity for application to lighting purposes seems to carry the discovery farther than anything since it was first introduced. It gets over many difficulties which seemed insuperable--especially the important one of the great waste of power which is illustrated every night at the Savoy Theatre--and would be applicable to the introduction of electricity for household use.
At the Savoy, when the exigencies of the play require that the lights should be turned down in the auditorium, there is no cessation of the enormous power required to produce the full effect. What happens is that by a mechanical contrivance, the electricity is carried off from the light and goes to waste. With this system of storing, electricity can be used just like gas, as much or as little as people chance to want. Another great advantage is the freedom from jumping, inseparable from the action of the driving power of the steam engine, or of the motion power of water. The lights of the Brighton train burn just as steadily as gas, an effect not in any way obtained where the light is maintained directly by the driving power of steam.
But after all, the question of gas vs. electricity will resolve itself into one of cost, and it is here where gas will inevitably hold its own. The fundamental principle of the electric light is that for a given exertion of power you obtain a given proportion of light, neither more nor less. For every hour it is burning there will be required a certain exactly-ascertained proportion of revolutions of the steam engine, and therefore, if the whole town is lighted it can be done only at a strictly proportionate expense to the lighting of a single house. As to what that expense will be, as compared with gas, the Brighton train would, if we had an idea of the actual figures, afford a precise means of information. I met on the train a well-known gas engineer, attracted, like myself, by the novelty of the experiment. What the electric light cost he was not able to say, but when we take into account the capital sunk in plant, involving a steam engine with the necessary buildings, consumption of coal and necessary employment of skilled labor, it must be something considerable. Against this is the bare fact that the Brighton train could be lighted with gas for the double journey at the cost of 10d. It is a physical impossibility that electricity should ever come anywhere near this, and that probably explains the singular phenomenon that at the time when electricity is making conspicuous advances in public favor, the value of gas shares is not only steadily maintained, but is actually rising in the market.