Professor Crookes has tested the cost of electric lighting for
himself by lighting his whole house with fifty lamps, of which twenty-nine are twenty-candle and twenty-one four-candle lamps. Although the cost of his generator is greatly increased by the necessity of making it silent, he finds that the light costs him 22 19s. a month, while gas would cost him 23 6s. 6d. It is, therefore, distinctly cheaper even under disadvantageous circum- stances to burn the light which does not soil the curtains or blacken the ceiling, or destroy the gilding of books, or produce the sense, and sometimes the reality, of suffocation. Mr. Crookes places this saving against the original cost of the apparatus, which he estimates at 2300. This would, of course, be absent if the wires were fed from a central generator, and the expense of the lamps may be reduced to a minimum. They broke at first constantly, but Mr. Crookes has so improved them and their management that he has latterly lost only one in three months. We want now experience in lighting a whole block.
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