Why the color of porcelain insulators should be changed from white to brown.

Greasing a Trolley Wire.

A suggestive fact, involving the value and effect of colors for specific uses, is reported from Belgium. The overhead lines of the telegraph and telephone systems of that country follow in a great many cases unfrequented roads and by-ways where supervision is, naturally, not very close. The destruction of insulators began to be quite a serious matter, and as among the various kinds of insulators employed the white porcelain insulators seemed to have the greatest attraction for the destructive beings who used them as targets for the exercise of their skill with the ballet or the casual stone, experiments were made with porcelain of various colors. A grayish brown was initially decided on, and several hundred insulators, colored in this shade by means of silicate mixed with the enamel on the surface of the porcelain, were ordered, and were sot up alternately with white porcelain insulators. The results of a year's trial showed that out of 102 insulators of each kind (white and colored) on a line of twenty-two kilometers in length, twenty-five ordinary insulators were broken, while only thirteen of the colored ones had been damaged. It was consequently decided that wherever a white insulator was found to have been willfully destroyed a colored one should be set up in its place, and should this in turn be broken a metal-protected one would be substituted.