Centennial Awards, Brooks Insulator

Centennial Awards to the Western Electric

Manufacturing Co.

THE following are extracts from the judges' awards on some of the more important exhibits made by the Western Electric Manufacturing Company of Chicago, at the Centennial Exhibition. The distinguished scientist mid electrician, Sir William Thomson, was the judge and made the awards.

Gray's Printing Telegraph. — "This instrument is suited for use in places of business, public offices and private houses, being worked with ease and accuracy by persons not practiced in telegraphy and without special capacity for acquiring skill * * *. The arrangements for working contacts and automatic adjustment are well designed for convenience and security in ordinary, and the general design and workmanship of the instruments good."

Electric Railway Safely Signals. — (These are the signals of the Electric Railway Signal Co. of New York, of which the W. E. M'f'g Co. are the general Western Agents.) "By a well designed system of electric connecnections [sic] connections in a circuit completed through the rails of the road and the axles of the carriages, an alarm signal or safety signal, as the case may be, is sounded or exhibited, or both sounded and exhibited, when a train is upon a certain section of the line in the neighborhood of the signal station. An award is deserved on account of usefulness of the object proposed and the promise of practical success which the details of the method illustrated by the model exhibited justify."

The Brooks Insulator. — "From the mode in which it is incased in iron and supported, has great strength, and is particularly safe from damage from missiles, or from any strain which it can receive from the strongest telegraph wires. Its insulating quality in rain and fogs is greatly superior to that of almost all other forms of insulators used for telegraph wires in any part of the world. In respect to combining the two qualities of great strength and high insulation, it is, so far as I know, superior to any other insulator."

Needle Annunciators, Mercurial Fire Alarms and Electric Bells. — "Excellence or design and workmanship. The fire alarm exhibited acts by the expansion of mercury in a hermetically sealed glass vessel, producing metallic connection between two platinum wires."