difference is that instead of standing up, the culprit sometimes has to
put his head under a table, while the Captain rushes across the room
with uplifted rod. Etonians say that though smacking sometimes draws
blood, the worst part of the punishment is the suspense of waiting
between blows with your head under the table. The offences punished by
smacking are disorder and disobedience in the house. On an average, the
head master has only half a dozen boys or so to swish each term, and the
average boy is not smacked more than a dozen times during his six years
at Eton. Many people, of course, think bodily punishment very brutal,
but I never knew a public-school boy or a master who did not approve of
it as practised nowadays. In fact, you could hardly enlist the older
boys on the side of law and order without giving them a means of
discipline which the younger boys respect; and if you didn't do this,
you would have to give up the best parts of the public schools.
The houses at Eton are clustered about the college, and look very
comfortable with their broad, ivy-covered fronts, and window-boxes
blazing with flowers. In the description of Winchester, there was so
much to say about the college that I had no room to speak of the houses;
but at Eton the houses are the more important part. Instead of large
common sleeping-rooms, the boys have each a room of his own. These are
not usually more than ten feet square, and besides a folding-bed,
bath-tub, and wash-stand, they contain not only a fireplace, to cook
meals, and a tea table, but also a study table and chair, and sometimes
a bookcase and ottoman. You wouldn't think there was much space left for
a boy to live in, to say nothing of making a racket, but there is. A
favorite joke in some of the houses is to gather all the bath-tubs in a
hall, and shove them through the transom into some poor fellow's room.
This fills the room so full that the boy who owns it has to get the
care-taker to drag out each separate bath-tub, amid vast sound and
confusion, before he can go to bed. In the winter months the boys play
football up and down the halls, using the doors at either end for goal.
This also makes enough noise. But these are not the only diversions. In
a number of rooms you will find collections of books far larger and more
wisely selected than is usual on the shelves even of American university
men.
A boy enters his house at about twelve years old. From this time on he
is carefully watched by the house-master, with a view to checking his
bad traits and developing his good ones. Most of the masters make it a
point to find out all they can about a boy from his parents, and then
carry on his training as it was begun; or if he thinks his training
unwise, to correct it. The fact that most of the troublesome details of
discipline are in the hands of the elder boys makes a master's relations
with his pupils unusually frank and affectionate. And as the masters are
always well educated, usually sensible, and often famous athletes, they
have a strong and very admirable influence. Much of all this, of course,
the boy never suspects. He simply grows to respect and like his master
without quite knowing why.
A master's best means of bringing out a boy's character is to put him in
the way of having the right sort of comrades. Sometimes the older
boys--perhaps at the master's suggestion--invite new boys to breakfast,
as second-year men at the university invite freshmen; but usually a boy
becomes acquainted with his seniors by fagging for them. His severest
duties as a fag are to cook breakfast and supper in his fag-master's
room; but in many of the houses the boys eat their meals together, so
the fags have a pretty easy time of it. In fact, altogether too much has
been said about the tyranny and brutality of fagging. Most small boys
are glad enough to be with the big boys, and a Senior who plays football
or rows well might have as many youngsters to wait on him as he chose.
Fag-masters are often the fags' best friends, and even at the
universities afterward keep a kindly eye upon them. Sometimes it happens
that a fag turns out a great cricketer or oarsman, in which case his old
fag-master is as proud of him as of a younger brother. Like as not in
after-life a country parson can look back upon the time when he fagged
the bishop of his diocese. Like tunding or smacking, fagging is at
bottom more humane than the neglect which a small boy suffers at an
American school.
The boys are kept very much together in each house by their meals and
the early hour of "lock-up"; while chapel, frequent school-hours, and
"absences"--that is, roll-calls--keep them from spending much time away
from the school. As a result the fellows in a house get to know each
other thoroughly, and to stick together like brothers. Each house has
its debating and literary society, its football and cricket teams, and
its crew. Where there is so much loyalty to the house, it is only
natural that rivalry among the houses should be keen. Ten times as many
boys go into athletic contests as in America. Altogether a house is a
miniature college, and a school a small university. Even if a boy didn't
know a soul outside of his house, he need never become lonesome, and
seldom homesick. This life in the houses is almost all the society boys
have at most public schools.
Eton, however, is so large that it supports several school societies.
The most important of these is the Eton Society, or "Pop," as it is
generally called. When Pop was founded early in the present century, its
aim was purely literary. Mr. Gladstone relates that in his time they
used to elect now and then a solid athletic man, because they believed
in encouraging sports. To-day Pop still holds debates; but it has grown
almost exclusively athletic. One of the younger masters told me that as
a boy he and a few others succeeded in electing a Captain of the College
who, though a good fellow, was not an athlete; but that to do it they
had to blackball everybody else till their man got in. Present members
say that only good athletes are elected. The clever fellows have a
society of their own, which is much what Pop was at first.
The members of Pop are mainly the cricketers who play against Winchester
and Harrow, and the boating-men who row for and often win the Ladies'
Plate at Henley. These together make, say, twenty, and eight more or so
are chosen from the fellows who "get their colors" for playing the Eton
games of football, which are so different from all other Rugby football
that they can play them only among themselves. You must not think,
however, that a man will get on Pop merely for being a great athlete. He
must be a first-rate fellow besides, and as it happens, there are always
a number of clever men and good scholars among the athletes in the
society. In a word, Pop is the best society that can be made up from the
athletic men, and is even more purely athletic than the Dickey at
Harvard or Vincent's at Oxford.
The authority Pop exercises over the school, though so peculiar as to be
difficult to describe, is enormous. It is as great, for instance, as
that of the three Senior societies at Yale, and is shown in much the
same way. Yet such revolts of public opinion as have occurred of late at
Yale, for instance, during the discussion of the undergraduate rule, are
unknown. It would be more just to compare Pop to the Yale Senior
societies at their prime--that is, before the university began to
outgrow them. The most obvious way in which Pop affects Eton life is, of
course, in matters of school discipline. Such offences as do not come
directly within the province of the Captains or the masters, Pop deals
with in no faint-hearted manner. For instance, some years ago a boy who
had gone with the Eton eleven to Winchester sent home bogus telegrams
about the match, and kept the fellows swarming about the bulletin-boards
at Eton in anxious suspense. Now there is nothing an English boy likes
better than a hoax, but not about such serious subjects. When that
youngster got back to Eton, Pop smacked him soundly--or, in the Eton
phrase, he was "Pop-caned." On another occasion, when a number of boys
had been expelled for a very serious offence which had been proved
against them, one of them made an imposing exit in a drag at an hour
when the street in front of the college was swarming with the boys.
Being a popular fellow, he was loudly cheered. For this outbreak against
the action of the masters, numbers of the elder boys were Pop-caned.
Such societies as Pop form almost the entire social life at most
American schools and universities; but in England the members never lose
loyalty for the college or house they belong to. This is the reason why
at Eton Pop has such a strong and good influence over the rest of the
school. In America, when a man gets into a leading society he is
naturally and almost inevitably drawn away from his earlier and less
fortunate friends, so that the school or university is split up into two
parts--those who are in things and those who are not. Very often, too,
as at Harvard, those who are in things are divided among themselves, so
that there is no unity of spirit. Our societies will, of course, always
exist; but their evil influence might be destroyed, and their good
influence strengthened, by forming the school into houses as soon as the
boys arrive, and the universities into something like colleges.
By this time you must have suspected that in spite of a lingering class
prejudice against the tugs, the Eton spirit is really democratic. At
Oxford and Cambridge Lord So-and-so may often find his way where plain
So-and-so could not go; but English schoolboys refuse to give way to
mere lords and earls. A tradesman once told me of the experience of the
little Earl of Blank, who used to present his card when buying things.
The other boys found it out, followed him from shop to shop, and booted
him every time he did it. "All the same," said the tradesman, "it is
awkward when a nobleman tells you his plain name, and you send the goods
to _Blank, Esq._" As often as not one gets to know a fellow pretty well
before finding out that he has a title. The little Princes of Connaught,
and even the Duke of Albany, will boil their own kettles for tea, and
perhaps even fag with the other boys. It was not only on the
playing-fields of Eton that the battle of Waterloo was won. It was in
the school-rooms and houses as well.
THE EVOLUTION OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING.
BY HERBERT LAWS WEBB.
Electrical engineering began with the telegraph, some sixty years ago.
The road for the telegraph was paved by many great experimenters and
discoverers. Under their patient and fostering care the infant showed
its first teeth, so to speak.
In 1837, when Queen Victoria was just beginning her long reign, the
telegraph began to do practical work. Cooke and Wheatstone started a
system in London, with instruments having five little needles bobbing
about, by which the signals were read. Five wires had to be strung
between the two stations, but the system was soon improved so that only
one was required. This telegraph very early in its life received a
splendid advertisement by causing the arrest of a murderer, who
otherwise might have escaped. He was travelling to London after his
crime, and expected to lose himself among the crowds of the city. But it
so happened that a trial of the telegraph was being made along the very
line of railway. His description was telegraphed to London, and he
stepped from the train into the arms of the police.
At the same time that Cooke and Wheatstone were working in England,
Morse was hard at work in America. His system was very complete and
practical, and, once he was able to give it a fair trial in public, it
was received with great enthusiasm in this country and all over the
world. The instrument that makes the furious rattling you hear in the
halls of all the hotels is Morse's instrument.
Morse's first public trial was made in 1844--fifty-three years ago.
After that telegraph lines were built up very quickly in all parts of
the world. Many clever men took up the work, and invented methods and
devices for improving the systems, and to-day the extent of the
telegraph lines of the world and the amount of work done are simply
stupendous. To give just two examples: In the early years of the
telegraph the lines were quite short, and only a few words could be
signalled in a minute. To-day a line is building from Cairo to Cape
Town, the clear length of the African continent, and there are in daily
use automatic instruments which send long press messages at the rate of
450 words a minute. In sending by hand forty words a minute is quite a
common speed.
As soon as land telegraphs were fairly started men said, why not lay
wires under the sea? Why not? So in 1850 they laid a wire under the
English Channel, from Dover to Calais. It was a very short-lived line,
because the day after it was laid a French fisherman picked it up with
his anchor, and knowing nothing about telegraphs, and caring less, cut
it in two to clear his miserable anchor. The next year they laid a
strong cable, sheathed with iron wires, proof against fishermen's
knives. That worked splendidly, and they say that parts of that same
cable are still working under the Channel. Of course it has been often
repaired and pieced out with new, but it shows what sturdy offspring an
infant can have when a submarine wire forty-five years old still does
service.
After that submarine cables were laid down between various countries.
Some of them were costly failures, because, although the men who had
taken the infant in charge had learned a great deal about its little
ways, they had not learned all the refinements necessary to success in
laying and working deep-sea ocean cables. So, in 1857, when Cyrus Field
formed his Atlantic Telegraph Company, the cable that he and his plucky
companions laid under the Atlantic failed completely of its object. But
Field and some of those with him simply would not accept defeat. So they
spent more money, laid more cables, failed again, toiled and moiled and
worked like beavers for years, until at last in 1866 they finished a
cable from Ireland to Nova Scotia that worked like a charm. It was,
without exception, the greatest piece of work ever done in electricity,
and its history is one of the finest of the many tales of engineering
enterprise.
To-day there are about a dozen cables between North America and Europe,
and three between South America and Europe. There are cables in every
sea and ocean in the world, and across every ocean except the Pacific.
In all there are more than 150,000 miles of submarine cable under the
waters of the globe, and there is a fleet of forty ships, large and
small, fitted out solely for the purpose of laying and repairing
submarine cables. Nowadays the laying of an Atlantic cable attracts no
attention, and the fishing up of a slender rope less than an inch thick
from the floor of the ocean, 12,000 or 15,000 feet down, is a thing done
a dozen times a year. In Cyrus Field's time the Atlantic cable was the
topic of the world for years, and the recovery of the broken cable was
for a long time impossible, because no machinery then made could stand
the strain.
In 1866 a telegram from New York to London took hours on the way. For
many years past the merchants of the two cities have been in the habit
of grumbling vigorously if they don't get replies to their messages
within half an hour of despatching. The result of the Derby is known in
New York before the winning horse has slacked his pace after passing the
judge's box, and it is all over the world before the proud owner has had
time to lead him back into the paddock. A cable message goes round the
world in an hour or so, and the sun gets so rattled that people hear of
events that happened to-morrow.
No sooner had the world got fairly settled down to submarine telegraphy
than the dynamo came along. Up to that time electricity had always been
procured from chemical batteries. To obtain it mechanically by moving a
coil of wire in front of a magnet was a great step in advance. The
infant was now striding along lustily. Batteries are expensive,
inconvenient, and of very small power. Once get electricity from a
machine, and there is no limit to the amount to be got. The arc-light
had been produced by means of joining many hundreds of batteries
together, but that was a brilliant experiment--there was nothing
practical or commercial about it. But with an electric machine it was
different, and once the machine was in existence the electric light was
something to think about.
[Illustration: AN ELECTRIC LIGHTING PLANT.]
The evolution of the electric motor followed, as a natural thing, from
the evolution of the dynamo, for a motor is simply a dynamo reversed. In
the dynamo you revolve the armature--as the coils that move between the
magnets are called--and the machine gives out current. In the motor you
feed current into the armature, and it revolves and gives out mechanical
power. There is a very pretty story to the effect that this action was
discovered quite by chance. In some accidental way the wires leading
from a dynamo at work were connected to another dynamo, and this second
one at once began to turn merrily round, as if by magic. However this
may be, the dynamo had been in existence for some time before any
practical work was done in sending power from place to place along a
slender wire. The electric motor, as a commercial machine, is barely ten
years old. Yet now its busy cheerful hum may be heard under thousands of
street cars in hundreds of towns. It is used to work all sorts of
machinery, from the sewing-machine and the dentist's drill (beastly
thing!) to heavy factory machines of all kinds. Ten years ago the
electric motor was in its swaddling-clothes, and was never placed out of
sight of its nurse, the dynamo. Nowadays electrical engineers think
nothing of building motors of several hundreds of horse-power, and of
placing them many miles from the dynamos that supply them with current.
In this way a factory may be run by the power of a waterfall ever so
many miles distant. The waterfall drives the dynamo, the dynamo sends
its current along wires carried on poles up hill and down dale until
they reach the motor, and the motor drives the machinery of the mill. At
Niagara Falls work of this kind will be done on a very large scale, and
many places round about will be supplied with light and power from the
huge dynamos that are to be placed there.
Perhaps the most beautiful and intelligent of this wonderful family of
"infants" was born eighteen years ago--the telephone. Even when it was
the tiniest kind of an infant, and many men, some of them quite clever
in other lines than prophesying, thought it would never be more than a
puny little creature--a sort of scientific freak--the telephone was the
most wonderful thing of the century. It did something absolutely new. It
took your voice, made an electric current of it, and turned it out at
the other end voice again, with all the little quivers and tones that
each voice has of its own. The telephone, more than any other electrical
invention, made people think that anything is possible with electricity.
It was such a marvellous performance to send the voice along a wire from
one end of a city to another, that when people became a little familiar
with it they were prepared for anything. A famous electrician once
raised a laugh at a dinner by relating in his speech that when a friend
had asked him over the telephone if he recognized his voice, he replied,
"Yes, and I can smell your cigar." But you would not be surprised if you
learned to-morrow that you could see the man at the other end of the
wire, or smell his cigar by electricity, or that a line of flying ships
between New York and London was to start skimming next week.
But it was some little time before people got familiar with the
telephone. At first they did not believe in it, though now they will
believe in anything called electrical. For some time there were few
telephones in use, and the lines were very short. Then the exchange
system was started, and telephony began to grow with leaps and bounds.
In 1874 the telephone, as the saying goes, "was not born nor thought of"
outside of the laboratory of Professor Bell. In 1894, there were 250,000
telephone subscribers in the United States. New York and Chicago each
has 10,000. The number of conversations carried on each day by means of
the telephone--well, you might almost as well try to count the grains of
sand on the sea-shore. Not only has this infant learned to talk a great
deal--and, surprising to say, it speaks all languages with equal ease,
even the hopelessly difficult ones--but it has got amazing lung power.
Its voice reaches in a moment farther than you can travel in a day. When
young, it whispered a distance of a mile or two. At six or eight years
of age it talked clearly with a couple of hundred miles between speaker
and listener. For three years or more people in Boston and New York have
talked with people in Chicago, and to-day they think nothing of that,
and want to talk to San Francisco.
[Illustration: INTERSCHOLASTIC SPORT]
The reform in interscholastic athletics in the middle West seems to be
going forward most satisfactorily. We hear fewer complaints of
semi-professionalism among the school teams, and most of these have no
foundation in fact. It seems clear now that most of the breaches of
amateur spirit that we have had to record heretofore were largely the
result of a lack of knowledge and appreciation of the strictness of the
rules which have to govern amateur sport, rather than of a desire to
defeat the ends and purposes of these regulations.
[Illustration: MADISON, WISCONSIN, HIGH-SCHOOL FOOTBALL TEAM.]
As has been chronicled in this Department, Madison High-School at one
time allowed two players on its football team to take courses at the
university while still attending school. The fact that they attended the
university at all should have disqualified these men; but the
Madisonians did not interpret the rules in that way. Now, however, they
have come to see that this sort of thing involves a principle, and that
it cannot be allowed.
The past season, therefore, so far as I am able to find out, the Madison
High-School team has been made up strictly of students of the school,
and the players have taken up football for the sport of the game, rather
than for the sake of the empty honor of a championship. This
"championship" business is getting to be very much overestimated and
exaggerated, and may eventually do much harm to sport; but this is
another subject, and we shall have to come back to that at another time.
The Madison High-School team had a uniformly successful season this
fall, although, because of its reputed strength on the gridiron, its
managers found some difficulty in securing games with other high-school
teams. The Madisonians were therefore compelled to arrange a number of
games with elevens which might not ordinarily be considered in their
class. For the second time they defeated the St. John's Military Academy
team, the only eleven which has ever defeated Madison H.-S.,--barring
the university team.
The strongest opponents they met were the Minneapolis H.-S. eleven. Five
days after this hard game they played a team which came up from Chicago,
representing the Hyde Park High-School, but I have never been able to
find out what percentage of the members of this eleven ever saw the
inside of a Hyde Park school-room. The managers and players of the team
were not above practising deception either, for some of their men played
against Madison under assumed names.
The Madison newspapers, it seems, had some fault to find with the method
of play indulged in by the Chicagoans, and accused several of them of
slugging. Full-back Trude was one of the men who received a raking over
the coals. A few days later, however, the manager of the Madison
High-School team received a letter from Mr. Trude, saying that the
charges made against him were totally false, for the very simple reason
that he was not in Madison on Thanksgiving day. Who the young man was
who masqueraded as Trude and played full-back for the Hyde Park team I
do not know.