SKETCH OF THOMAS ALVA EDISON. 489 



struction. Mr. Edison's forte is automatic contrivances. He arranged 

 strips of metal around the bottom of the walls in the room, and con- 

 nected them with the opposite poles of a battery, so that when the 

 bugs stepped from one to the other, they closed the circuit and their 

 lives at one operation, and made room for others. 



In Boston Mr. Edison fixed up a small shop and continued his ex- 

 periments, which he put into such practical shape that he saw more 

 money in them than in his salary. He worked out the idea of his 

 duplex telegraph, and went to Rochester in 1870 to test it between 

 that place and Boston. The effort failed, though Mr. Edison says it 

 ought to have succeeded. He then came to New York, scarcely know- 

 ing what to do next. He hung around the office of the Gold Indicator 

 Company, studying their cumbersome apparatus. One day some part 

 of it failed in a time of excitement ; Mr. Edison offered to remedy it ; 

 he was laughed at incredulously ; but the case was desperate, and he 

 was allowed to try. He succeeded ; and the managers, ready to per- 

 ceive the value of such a man, made him superintendent. He intro- 

 duced improved apparatus, invented the gold printer, put up a private 

 line, and finally sold it to the Gold and Stock Company, together with 

 his services, or the privilege of having the first option to buy his tele- 

 graphic inventions. He was now fully launched on a tide of success. 

 To furnish his instruments, he established a factory in Newark, New 

 Jersey, employing three hundred men. As a manufacturer he was not 

 a success. If he had an order for any of his inventions, and, after 

 having made a part or all of them, he invented an improvement, noth- 

 ing would do but he must incorporate it, even though at his own ex- 

 pense. At last, finding that the close attention demanded by his 

 manufacturing business was incompatible with the freedom demanded 

 for invention, he abandoned it, and, two years ago, bought a site for an 

 experiment-shop at Menlo Park, on the Pennsylvania Railroad, twenty- 

 four miles from New York, a mere flag-station, with about a dozen 

 houses, mostly his own and his workmen's. 



On the crown of a knoll, and looking, for all the world, like a coun- 

 try meeting-house, minus the steeple, and with the addition of a porch, 

 is a long two-story white frame building, in the middle of a little lot, 

 surrounded by a white picket-fence. This is Mr. Edison's shop. On 

 the ground-floor, as you enter, is a little front-office, from which a small 

 library is partitioned off. Next is a large square room with glass 

 cases filled with models of his inventions. In the rear of this is the 

 machine-shop, completely equipped, and run with a ten-horse-power en- 

 gine. The upper story occupies the length and breadth of the building, 

 100 X 25 feet, is lighted by windows on every side, and is occupied as 

 a laboratory. The walls are covered with shelves full of bottles con- 

 taining all sorts of chemicals. Scattered through the room are tables 

 covered with electrical instruments, telephones, phonographs, micro- 

 scopes, spectroscopes, etc. In the centre of the room is a rack full 



