nd his last dollar on books and scientific paraphernalia. It is
matter of record that he did once buy a new suit for thirty dollars in
Boston, but the following Sunday, while experimenting with acids in his
little workshop, the suit was spoiled. "That is what I get for putting
so much money in a new suit," was the laconic remark of the youth, who
was more than delighted to pick up a complete set of Faraday's works
about the same time. Adams says that when Edison brought home these
books at 4 A.M. he read steadily until breakfast-time, and then he
remarked, enthusiastically: "Adams, I have got so much to do and life is
so short, I am going to hustle." And thereupon he started on a run for
breakfast. Edison himself says: "It was in Boston I bought Faraday's
works. I think I must have tried about everything in those books. His
explanations were simple. He used no mathematics. He was the Master
Experimenter. I don't think there were many copies of Faraday's works
sold in those days. The only people who did anything in electricity were
the telegraphers and the opticians making simple school apparatus to
demonstrate the principles." One of these firms was Palmer & Hall, whose
catalogue of 1850 showed a miniature electric locomotive made by Mr.
Thomas Hall, and exhibited in operation the following year at the
Charitable Mechanics' Fair in Boston. In 1852 Mr. Hall made for a Dr.
A. L. Henderson, of Buffalo, New York, a model line of railroad with
electric-motor engine, telegraph line, and electric railroad signals,
together with a figure operating the signals at each end of the line
automatically. This was in reality the first example of railroad trains
moved by telegraph signals, a practice now so common and universal as
to attract no comment. To show how little some fundamental methods can
change in fifty years, it may be noted that Hall conveyed the current
to his tiny car through forty feet of rail, using the rail as conductor,
just as Edison did more than thirty years later in his historic
experiments for Villard at Menlo Park; and just as a large proportion of
American trolley systems do at this present moment.

It was among such practical, investigating folk as these that Edison was
very much at home. Another notable man of this stamp, with whom Edison
was thrown in contact, was the late Mr. Charles Williams, who, beginning
his career in the electrical field in the forties, was at the height of
activity as a maker of appa