applying the ground pile to micro-telephone stations.

Being given any two stations, he puts into the ground at the first a
copper plate, and at the second a zinc one, and connects the two by a
line wire provided with two vibrating bells and two telephone
apparatus. The earth current suffices to actuate the bells, but, in
order to effect a call, the inventor is obliged to run them
continuously and to interrupt them at the moment at which he wishes to
communicate. The correspondent is then notified through the cessation
of noise in the bells, and the two call-apparatus are thrown out of
the circuit by the play of the commutator, and are replaced by the
micro-telephone apparatus.

It is certainly impracticable to allow vibrating bells to ring
continuously in this manner. The ground pile would, at the most, be
only admissible in cases where the call, having to be made from only
one of the stations, might be effected by a closing of the
circuit.--_La Lumiere Electrique_.

* * * * *


The advantage of lighting vessels by electricity was shown when the
steamer Carolina, of the old Bay Line between Baltimore and Norfolk,
ran into the British steamship Riversdale in a dense fog off Cedar
Point, on Chesapeake Bay. The electric lights of the Carolina were
extinguished only in the damaged part of the boat, and her officers
think that if she had been lighted in any other way, a conflagration
would have followed the collision.