The early gasoline automobiles sounded, when moving, like an artillery company coming full tilt down a badly paved street. The exhausted gas coughed resoundingly, the gears groaned and shrieked loudly when improperly lubricated, and the whole machine rattled like a runaway tin-peddler. Ingenious mufflers have subdued the sputtering exhaust, the gears are made to run in oil or are so carefully cut as to mesh perfectly, rubber tires deaden the pounding of the wheels, and carefully designed frames take up the jar. Steam and gasoline vehicles can be used to travel long distances from the cities, for water can be had and gasoline bought almost anywhere; but electric automobiles, driven by the third of the three powers used for self-propelled vehicles, must keep within easy reach of the charging stations. Just as the perfection of the gasoline motor spurred on the inventors to adapt the steam-engine for use in automobiles, so the inventors of the storage battery, which is the heart of an electric carriage, were stirred up to make electric propulsion practical. The storage battery of an electric vehicle is practically a tank that holds electricity; the electrical energy of the dynamo is transformed into chemical energy in the batteries, which in turn is changed into electrical energy again and used to run the motors. Electric automobiles are the most simple of all the self-propelled vehicles. The current stored in the batteries is simply turned off and on the motors, or the pressure reduced by means of resistance which obstructs the flow, and therefore the power, of the current. To reverse, it is only necessary to change the direction of the current's flow; and in order to stop, the connection between motor and battery is broken by a switch. Electricity is the ideal power for automobiles. Being clean and easily controlled, it seems just the thing; but it is expensive, and sometimes hard to get. No satisfactory substitute has been found for it, however, in the larger cities, and it may be that creative or "primary" batteries both cheap and effective will be invented and will do away with the one objection to electricity for automobiles. The astonishing things of to-day are the commonplaces of to-morrow, and so the achievements of automobile builders as here set down may be greatly surpassed by the time this appears in print. The sensations of the locomotive engineer, who feels his great machine strain forward over the smooth steel rails, are as nothing to the almost numbing sensations of the automobile driver who covered space at the rate of eighty-eight miles an hour on the road between Paris and Madrid: he felt every inequality in the road, every grade along the way, and each curve, each shadow, was a menace that required the greatest nerve and skill. Locomotive driving at a hundred miles an hour is but mild exhilaration as compared to the feelings of the motor-car driver who travels at fifty miles an hour on the public highway.