Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 June 1892 — Farming by Electricity. [ARTICLE]

Farming by Electricity.

Some of our rising young journalists are finding food for amusement in a bill recently introduced by Senator Peflfer, of Kansas, providing for the establishment of an experimental station for the purpose of determining If electricity can be profitably used and applied as a motive power in the propulsion' of farm machinery. Now we would like to place ourselves on record with the opinion that, if Congress would make as liberal an appropriation for this purpose as it did for certain idiotic experiments in “rain-making” not long ago, which served to make that august body the laughing stock of the civilized world, and the business could be put in charge of some such intelligent and technically trained electrical engineer*, as those, for example, who have within a few years revolutionized our methods of municipal transportation, the ultimate result would not -be one whit less valuable to the people of the United States than that of the his-

twrtc appropriation of 130,000 with which Morse’s experimental telegraph line was built from Washington to Baltimore half a century ago. Of course, if the appropriation is made, the chances are that it will be squandered or stolen outright by some electrical fakers who are always on the lookout for such opportunities. Nevertheless we believe in Senator Peffer’s idea, and do not hesitate to prediet that the day is not distant when the entire labor of preparing and tilling the ground, as well as that of seeding, harvesting, threshing, and transporting the crops to the nearest railway station, wherever done on a large scale, will be performed by electric motors, at a cost as much below the cost of animal-power as the latter has proved to be below the cost of manual labor. The emancipation of the car-horse will be followed at no distant day by the emancipation of the farm-horse, and the results of the substitution, in the purely agricultural districts of our country, will constitute an industrial revolution of almost inconceivable magnitude.— Engineering Magazine.