The storage battery of an electric vehicle is practically a tank that holds electricity; the electrical energy of the dynamo is transformed into chemical energy in the batteries, which in turn is changed into electrical energy again and used to run the motors.

Electric automobiles are the most simple of all the self-propelled vehicles.  The current stored in the batteries is simply turned off and on the motors, or the pressure reduced by means of resistance which obstructs the flow, and therefore the power, of the current.  To reverse, it is only necessary to change the direction of the current’s flow; and in order to stop, the connection between motor and battery is broken by a switch.

Electricity is the ideal power for automobiles.  Being clean and easily controlled, it seems just the thing; but it is expensive, and sometimes hard to get.  No satisfactory substitute has been found for it, however, in the larger cities, and it may be that creative or “primary” batteries both cheap and effective will be invented and will do away with the one objection to electricity for automobiles.

The astonishing things of to-day are the commonplaces of to-morrow, and so the achievements of automobile builders as here set down may be greatly surpassed by the time this appears in print.

The sensations of the locomotive engineer, who feels his great machine strain forward over the smooth steel rails, are as nothing to the almost numbing sensations of the automobile driver who covered space at the rate of eighty-eight miles an hour on the road between Paris and Madrid:  he felt every inequality in the road, every grade along the way, and each curve, each shadow, was a menace that required the greatest nerve and skill.  Locomotive driving at a hundred miles an hour is but mild exhilaration as compared to the feelings of the motor-car driver who travels at fifty miles an hour on the public highway.

Gigantic motor trucks carrying tons of freight twist in and out through crowded streets, controlled by one man more easily than a driver guides a spirited horse on a country road.

Frail motor bicycles dash round the platter-like curves of cycle tracks at railroad speed, and climb hills while the riders sit at ease with feet on coasters.

An electric motor-car wends the streets of New York every day with thirty-five or forty sightseers on its broad back, while a groom in whipcord blows an incongruous coaching-horn in the rear.

Motor plows, motor ambulances, motor stages, delivery wagons, street-cars without tracks, pleasure vehicles, and even baby carriages, are to be seen everywhere.

In 1845, motor vehicles were forbidden the streets for the sake of the horses; in 1903, the horses are being crowded off by the motor-cars.  The motor is the more economical—­it is the survival of the fittest.

[Illustration:  AN AUTOMOBILE PLOW A form of automobile that can be applied to all sorts of uses on the farm.]