* * * * * THE ARC ELECTRIC LIGHT.[1] [Footnote 1: A recent address before the New York Electric Light Association.] BY LEO DAFT. I shall experience one difficulty in addressing you this evening, which is, that although I do not wish to take up your time with purely elementary matter, I wish to make the subject clear to those who may not be familiar with its earlier struggles. If we begin at the beginning we have to go back to the time when Faraday made the discovery that light could be produced by the separation of two carbon rods conducting a current of considerable tension. That is the historical point when electric lighting first loomed up as a giant possibility of the near future. This occurred about the year 1846. In some experiments he found that although the circuit could not be interrupted by any considerable interval when metallic terminals were used without breaking the current, when carbon was substituted the interval could be largely increased, and a light of dazzling brilliancy appeared between the points. This remarkable effect appears to be produced by the rarefaction of the air, due to the great heat evolved by the combustion of the carbon, and also to the passage of incandescent particles of carbon from pole to pole, thus reducing the resistance, otherwise too great for the current tension. That was the beginning of electric lighting; and perhaps it will be well to bridge the long and comparatively uninteresting interval which elapsed between this discovery and the equally important one which alone gave it commercial value--I refer to the production of suitable currents by mechanical means. That is to say, the substitution of energy obtained from coal in the form of steam power reduced the cost to a fraction of what it necessarily was when the galvanic elements were used. Here is the point; the cost of zinc today is something over fifty times that of coal, while its energy as a vitalizing agent is only about five times greater, leaving a very large margin in favor of the "black diamonds." This is not the only advantage, for the resulting impulse in the case of mechanical production is much more uniform in action, and therefore better suited to the end in view, while the amount of adjustment and attention required is beyond comparison in favor of the latter means.