Electric Traction #249477

One special feature the author hopes may be regarded as a merit namely this, that it deals not only with dynamic and constructional principles and details, but also with commercial results and economic conditions. The author holds strongly that technical students should direct their attention much more to this side of technics than is now usual. The physical side is only one half of engineering science; and no technical science will ever be rationally complete, nor will it ever win the full confidence and respect of the practical world, until it rests equally upon the two true bases of physical and economic law which together govern all industry. Since this book deals with European work alone, it is necessary to say that the author has always been among those who have insisted upon the great debt that Europe owes to America in regard to Electric Traction. Although Europe, and not America, is the native home of nearly all original ideas in this department of engineering, still it was in America that the world learnt all its important early practical lessons and gained the great bulk of its first practical experience. The reasons for confining the book to European practice have been twofold. The author labours under a constitutional inability to write about things he has not seen with his own eyes and examined for himself, while he has had very limited opportunity for more than cursory observation of trans-atlantic work. Then, again, the most recent and progressive developments of traction design are to be seen here, and not there. American electric-traction engineering has already become standardized and conservative: its European pupil is still eagerly striving after new and higher things.