Some Rail Pictures from POPULAR ELECTRICITY 1908

I recently added a large number of cover images from the early tech magazine POPULAR ELECTRICITY to the MagazineArt.org site. Most of these were scanned for the site by Doug Bell at JPL, but I found that the Internet Archive has a complete run of the bound volumes, brought over from Google's book scanning project. You can find them easily at the Archive; good luck (and a dime for good measure) trying to find them in Google's appallingly bad indexing system.

The scans aren't great, but how else are you going to find these old magazines (unless you're Doug Bell)? I did some cleanup in Photoshop, and here are a few, with some more to come. Captions are from the original magazine appearance; filenames list issue and page number. As usual, click to see larger versions (larger dimension 1000 pixels).

The Great Sea Serpent of the Garden of Acclimatation

From the December 22, 1900 issue of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT, reprinted from La Nature.

"Ophion," designed by Walter Stenning and manufactured in Paris, seems more like a ride from a theme park than a true electric railroad, but a full-scale electric garden railroad is OK by me. The train is over a hundred feet in length, and 6.5 feet in diameter. Powered by batteries (or, as they say, "accumulators"). Click the pictures to download larger versions.

The second picture seems to show it floating on a single rail, but this is probably draftsman's error.

Thanks to Steve Davis for the original magazine scan showing these pictures.