For fifty years mechanical engineers have looked enviously upon unshackled Niagara, and have striven to solve the problem of transmitting its power. It were easy enough to harness the great Fall, but futile to do so, so long as the power generated must be used in the immediate vicinity. So, many schemes for transmitting power were tried one after another, and as often laid aside. There was one objection to even the best of them--the cost. At one time it was thought that compressed air might solve the problem. But repeated experiments did not justify the hope. Then it was believed that the storage battery might be made available. The storage battery, it might be explained, does not really store electricity in the sense in which the Leyden jar, for example, stores it. Rather is it to be likened to an ordinary voltaic cell, the chemical ingredients of which have been rendered active by the passage of the electric current. The active ingredients of the storage battery are usually lead compounds, which through action of the electric currents have been decomposed and placed in a state of chemical instability. The dissociated molecule of the lead compound, when permitted to reunite with the atoms with which it was formerly associated, will give up electrical energy. Such a storage battery might readily be charged with electricity generated at Niagara Falls. It might then be conveyed to any part of the world, and, its poles being connected, the charge of electricity would be made available. Such storage batteries are in common use in connection with electric automobiles, as we have seen. But the great difficulty is that they are enormously heavy in proportion to the amount of electricity that they can generate; therefore, their transportation is difficult and expensive. In practice it is cheaper to produce electricity through the operation of a steam engine in a distant city than to transmit the electricity with the aid of a storage battery from Niagara. So the storage battery served as little as compressed air to solve the engineer's problem. When the electric dynamo became a commercial success for such purposes as the operation of trolley lines it seemed as if the Niagara problem was on the verge of solution. And so, in point of fact, it really was, though more time was required for it than at first seemed needed. The power generated by the dynamo could, indeed, be transmitted along a wire, but not without great loss. Sir William Siemens, in 1877, had pointed out in connection with this very subject of the wasted power of Niagara, that a thousand horse-power might be transmitted a distance of, say, thirty miles over a copper rod three inches in diameter. But a copper rod three inches in diameter is enormously expensive, and when Siemens further stated that sixty per cent of the power involved would be lost in transmission, it was obvious that the method was far too wasteful to be commercially practicable.