Much was done in the direction in the improvement of railroad terminal facilities, and it is difficult to find one steam railroad engineer who would have denied that all the important steam railroads of this country were not to be operated electrically. In other directions the progress of events as to the utilization of electric power was expected to be equally rapid. In every part of the world the power of falling water, nature's perpetual motion machine, which has been going to waste since the world began, is now being converted into electricity and transmitted by wire hundreds of miles to points where it is usefully and economically employed.