arly days of my electric light," he says,
"curiosity and interest brought a great many people to Menlo Park to see
it. Some of them did not come with the best of intentions. I remember
the visit of one expert, a well-known electrician, a graduate of Johns
Hopkins University, and who then represented a Baltimore gas company. We
had the lamps exhibited in a large room, and so arranged on a table as
to illustrate the regular layout of circuits for houses and streets.
Sixty of the men employed at the laboratory were used as watchers, each
to keep an eye on a certain section of the exhibit, and see there was
no monkeying with it. This man had a length of insulated No. 10 wire
passing through his sleeves and around his back, so that his hands would
conceal the ends and no one would know he had it. His idea, of course,
was to put this wire across the ends of the supplying circuits, and
short-circuit the whole thing--put it all out of business without being
detected. Then he could report how easily the electric light went out,
and a false impression would be conveyed to the public. He did not know
that we had already worked out the safety-fuse, and that every group
of lights was thus protected independently. He put this jumper slyly in
contact with the wires--and just four lamps went out on the section he
tampered with. The watchers saw him do it, however, and got hold of him
and just led him out of the place with language that made the recording
angels jump for their typewriters."

The other incident is as follows: "Soon after I had got out the
incandescent light I had an interference in the Patent Office with a man
from Wisconsin. He filed an application for a patent and entered into a
conspiracy to 'swear back' of the date of my invention, so as to
deprive me of it. Detectives were put on the case, and we found he was a
'faker,' and we took means to break the thing up. Eugene Lewis, of Eaton
& Lewis, had this in hand for me. Several years later this same man
attempted to defraud a leading firm of manufacturing chemists in New
York, and was sent to State prison. A short time after that a syndicate
took up a man named Goebel and tried to do the same thing, but again our
detective-work was too much for them. This was along the same line as
the attempt of Drawbaugh to deprive Bell of his telephone. Whenever
an invention of large prospective value comes out, these cases always
occur. The lamp patent was sustained in the New York F