Liberator of Mules

No name to conjure with is Frank Julian Sprague's, yet last week the foremost electrical engineers of the land and scores of other celebrities gathered in Manhattan to do him honor on his 75th birthday. They called him the "father of modern electric traction" (both horizontal and vertical). Listening quizzically, he beamed behind his mustache, half closed his keen old eyes.

Engineer Sprague was never a man for titles or labels. In 1889 he sold his Sprague Electric Railway & Motor Co. to Thomas Alva Edison. Forthwith his name was wiped from the rolling stock of 113 U. S. and foreign electric railways and from all items of construction, equipment and control, Edison's name being substituted. Later he sold his electric elevator company to Otis Elevator Co. Electric traction had many other fathers --including Siemens Co. in Germany, Stephen D. Field, Charles J. Van Depoele, Leo Daft--but Frank Julian Sprague first conceived the idea of a car moving freely between two contact planes, the terminals of a constant potential generating system.

After graduating from U. S. Naval Academy and serving briefly in the Navy, Engineer Sprague spent a year with Thomas Edison, then formed his own company, got a contract in 1887 to install an electric railway in Richmond, Va. Said he later: "I believed in myself and staked a fortune. All hands worked with a vengeance. . . . The morning we tried the first trolley up the steepest grade, it crept up the 10% slope slowly, steadily, wobbling here & there. After an eternity it reached the crest and the men cheered. Our company went into a receivership in the end but. . . contracts poured in from all over the world." In New Orleans, at a mass meeting demanding electric instead of mule railways, posters read: "Lincoln set the Negroes free. Sprague has set the Mule free."

When Engineer Sprague tried to get Jay Gould to electrify Manhattan's steam-powered elevated lines, a fuse blew out. scared Financier Gould out of all interest in electric cars.

Fixed always on a "shipshape job," Engineer Sprague has always found it best to take his own orders. He has long specialized on multiple control systems for railways, which have been universally adopted on electrical elevated & subway lines. Working in his Canal Street, Manhattan laboratories on the top floor of an eight-story building from 9 a. m. to 10 p. m. daily, he has completed an auxiliary train control to take charge if the engineer makes a mistake, as though "God were in the cab with the engineer."

Born in Milford, Conn., reared by a school teacher aunt, young Sprague was so poor he wore knickerbockers cut out of his aunt's old skirts. Last week the presidents of the twelve largest engineering and electrical societies, three Eastern universities and nearly 40 industrial corporations, did him honor.

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