er
doing work for a specific customer or trying to perfect some notion of
his own. If you were a person of ideas, it was an ideal conservatory in
which to foster them."

"Gee! I'd have liked the chance to work in a place like that!" Ted
sighed.

"It would not have been a bad starter, I assure you," agreed Mr. Hazen.
"At that time there were, as I told you, few such shops in the country;
and this one, simple and crude as it was, was one of the largest. There
was another in Chicago which was bigger and perhaps more perfectly
organized; but Williams's shop was about as good as any and certainly
gave its men an excellent all-round education in electrical matters.
Many of them went out later and became leaders in the rapidly growing
world of science and these few historic little shops thus became the
ancestors of our vast electrical plants."

"It seems funny to think it all started from such small beginnings,
doesn't it," mused Laurie thoughtfully.

"It certainly is interesting," Mr. Hazen replied. "And if it interests
us in this far-away time, think what it must have meant to the pioneers
to witness the marvels half a century brought forth and look back over
the trail they had blazed. For it was a golden era of discovery, that
period when the new-born power of electricity made its appearance; and
because Williams's shop was known to be a nursery for ideas, into it
flocked every variety of dreamer. There were those who dreamed
epoch-making dreams and eventually made them come true; and there were
those who merely saw visions too impractical ever to become realities.
To work amid this mecca of minds must have been not only an education
in science but in human nature as well. Every sort of crank who had
gathered a wild notion out of the blue meandered into Williams's shop
in the hope that somebody could be found there who would provide either
the money or the labor to further his particular scheme.

"Now in this shop," went on Mr. Hazen, "there was, as I told you, a
young neophyte by the name of Thomas Watson. Tom had not found his
niche in life. He had tried being a clerk, a bookkeeper, and a
carpenter and none of these several occupations had seemed to fit him.
Then one fortunate day he happened in at Williams's shop and
immediately he knew this was the place where he belonged. He was a boy
of mechanical tastes who had a real genius for tools and machinery. He
was given a chance to turn castings by hand at five dollars