Ekctropolis
MHE Berlin Municipal Electric Light Company is the most exciting thing I have ever seen, as thrilling as a murder, as beautiftd as a glimpse of fairyland. It is, indeed, both murder and mystery. It is the dramatic curtain of the first act of the industrial revolution. We all know the beginnings of the drama, the high hopes, disillusionments, mob-scenes, intrigues, counter-plots. Now comes the promise of release from toil. What is to follow no one can foretell exactly, but as I viewed these engines that provide light and power for two million people with practically no human labour, the fingers of destiny seemed to twitch aside a veil, revealing Siva dancing on the body of her spouse, mind triumphing over matter.
These foreshadowings of the conquest of sweat and misery by gods of steel have long existed in print and in the minds of idealists. Now' they have begun to take shape and being. Giant power plants arise every- where andthe web of their lines will soon cover England as well as Europe. This• German- installation cost nearly 13;000,000 tO build; Wand it drinks up half the Spree (raising -the riVer temperature by 36° F.) in order to cobl its huge turbines.
Men speak casually of developing two hundred thousand horse-power nowadays. Yet such an assemblage of living beasts has never been under the control of man, unless it was Genghiz Khan. Its mechanical equivalent, however, is almost a commonplace in industry. But what is new, Or at any rate newer, is that the machines are so fool-proof, tireless, and self-adjusting that in a few years they might 'easily administer themselves and dispense with Man, like the mechanical woman of Metropolis: Brain- power of superlative quality Went into their Conception, but hardly any is needed in their operation. One skilled man does the work of a hundred, twenty years ago.
Next to London, Berlin is the greatest city in Europe, yet Only fifty men are required to light the streets , and Nimes Of half the city, and of these fifty only three are skilled workers. The others merely watch, with oil-cans and cotton-waste.
We enter a moving lift, working in endless progression throughout the day, and reach the top floor. The pave- ment here- is all grids. Under our feet are other similar storeys, and far. down the white flare of furnaces. Light and air reaches every part of the gleaming building, which seems to seethe with life, though its energies are unseen. Outside there is a gallery giving on to a charming view of the Spree. A Municipal Swimming-bath is in the middle distance, Berlin on the horizon. Here we are on the rim of its midnight sun. A workman in white overalls strolls about watching the ventilators. There is no one else.
We descend by a circular stairway to see the control room. An illuminated chart here, about twice as tall as a man, on which the pressure at which the boilers are actually working is marked by a white arrow on one gauge, while the preSsure at which they should be maintained- aintained to to give the necessary power to light Berlin at that par- ticular moment is shown in red on another gauge, juxta- posed. The Controller, a cool young man in drill, sits at a desk provided with a telephone and a vase of mar- guerites: he watches the red indicator and the white arrow. When they are level all is well. If they separate, he rings down to the boiler room for more or less pressure, It is quite simple, when you come to think of it.
Let us go down to the boiler room. What a blessed change one finds in these furnaces of the new age, com- pared to stifling hells of only a decade ago ! I have sometimes worked a shift in a stokehold in the Red Sea, and I know what they were like, with their choking dust and weary coal-boys. Every five minutes one drinks a quart of barley water, but even so the astonished and insulted skin demands more. Grimed stokers lie naked, panting, on the hatches. Sometimes one goes mad and jumps overboard. Many travellers will remember such incidents. Three men have so lost their lives when I have been travelling. That is ,changed, or changing now. Power is our servant and takes less toll of sweating flesh. These furnace doors are neat enamelled apertures about a foot square. When open you see the livid glare of coal dust blown through pneumatic tubes. Shut, they might be the door of an ice box. Suppose now that, a few thousand hausfraus desire to dry their hair or use their electric mangle, or that a hundred thousand workers return to a section of the 'City, font on their slippers and switch on the light. The 'red indicator signals the increased demand. Our friend in the cool suit sees that the head of steam in No. 3 boiler is ten tons below requirements. "Let there be light," he says And there is light, for an attendant turns a nickel-plated wheel.
Leaving the furnaces, we go now into the generating room, where six black-cowled whales (each of these turbines is as large as sixteen railway engines) seem frozen in meditation on an ocean-bed of concrete. But not whales, perhaps, but rather the silkworms of a nightmare, spinning webs of light, in the secrecy of their cocoons. You see nothing and nobody. All moving parts arc hidden under inches of steel. One attendant there is, indeed, but at the moment he is at the back of one of the huge creatures at the far end of the hall, feeding it oil. All you hear is a soft, wide breath like a breeze on a great expanse of sea. Colossal energies are being born and educated here for the service of man. Jove sells us his thunderbolts at so much per kilowatt-hour.
High-tension cables lead through the floor to another building, which is 150 yards long and three storeys high. Not one solitary human being walks here, except for a daily tour of inspection. It is the distributing station. If the voltage generated were to run riot, it could destroy a thousand men in the. twinkling of an eye. It would be possible, of course, for us to enter, for the powers of the place are bridled well, but our watches would go wrong, perplexed by the forces that hold dominion there. Nothing that Mr. Wells has written, no fantasy of M. Claude Farrere, is as strange . as this reality. Here is the New Revelation being written in steel and ferro- concrete, based on the old truths, indeed, but inter- preted to modem needs and powers, both immeasurably greater than they were two thousand years ago.
F. YEATS-BROWN.
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