The first electrical railway was constructed and operated at Berlin in 1879, by Messrs Siemens and Halske. It was two thousand seven hundred feet long and built on the third rail system. This was an experiment but a successful one. It was followed very soon by another line near Berlin for actual traffic; then still another in Saxony. At the Paris Exposition in 1881, Sir Wm. Siemens had in operation a road about one thousand six hundred feet in length, on which it is estimated ninety-five thousand passengers were conveyed in seven weeks. Then in the next year in London; and then in the following year one in the United States near New York, constructed by Edison. And thus they spread, until every important town and city in the world seems to have its electric plant, and its electric car system, and of course its lighting, telephone and telegraph systems. In 1882 Prof. Fleeming Jenkin of England invented and has put to use a system called _Telpherage_, by which cars are suspended on an overhead wire which is both the track and electrical conductor. It has been found to be advantageous in the transportation of freight from mines and other places to central stations. With the coming of the electric railway, the slow, much-abused horse, the puffing steam engine blowing off smoke and cinders through the streets, the great heavy cars, rails and roadbeds, the dangerous collisions and accidents, have disappeared. The great problems to solve have related to generation, form, distribution and division of the electric current at the dynamos at the central stations for the purposes of running the distant motors and for furnishing independent supplies of light, heat, sound and power. These problems have received the attention of the keenest inventors and electrical engineers and have been solved. The description of the inventions made by such electrical magicians as Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla would fill volumes. The original plan of sending but one message over a wire at a time has also been improved; and duplex, quadruplex and multiplex systems have been invented (by Stearns, Farmer, Edison and others) and applied, which have multiplied the capacity of the telegraphs, and by which even the alleged all-talk-at-the-same-time habit of certain members of the great human family can be carried on in opposite directions on the same wire at the same time between their gatherings in different cities and without a break.