ted from each other and connected with the main battery.
They were so placed that when a rat passed over them the fore feet on
the one plate and the hind feet on the other completed the circuit and
the rat departed this life, electrocuted."

Shortly after Edison's arrival at Cincinnati came the close of the Civil
War and the assassination of President Lincoln. It was natural that
telegraphers should take an intense interest in the general struggle,
for not only did they handle all the news relating to it, but many of
them were at one time or another personal participants. For example, one
of the operators in the Cincinnati office was George Ellsworth, who was
telegrapher for Morgan, the famous Southern Guerrilla, and was with him
when he made his raid into Ohio and was captured near the Pennsylvania
line. Ellsworth himself made a narrow escape by swimming the Ohio
River with the aid of an army mule. Yet we can well appreciate the
unimpressionable way in which some of the men did their work, from an
anecdote that Mr. Edison tells of that awful night of Friday, April 14,
1865: "I noticed," he says, "an immense crowd gathering in the street
outside a newspaper office. I called the attention of the other
operators to the crowd, and we sent a messenger boy to find the cause
of the excitement. He returned in a few minutes and shouted 'Lincoln's
shot.' Instinctively the operators looked from one face to another to
see which man had received the news. All the faces were blank, and every
man said he had not taken a word about the shooting. 'Look over your
files,' said the boss to the man handling the press stuff. For a few
moments we waited in suspense, and then the man held up a sheet of
paper containing a short account of the shooting of the President. The
operator had worked so mechanically that he had handled the news without
the slightest knowledge of its significance." Mr. Adams says that at the
time the city was en fete on account of the close of the war, the name
of the assassin was received by telegraph, and it was noted with a
thrill of horror that it was that of a brother of Edwin Booth and of
Junius Brutus Booth--the latter of whom was then playing at the old
National Theatre. Booth was hurried away into seclusion, and the next
morning the city that had been so gay over night with bunting was draped
with mourning.

Edison's diversions in Cincinnati were chiefly those already observed.
He read a great deal, but spent