In order to be nearer his
new friend Edison boarded with Pope at Elizabeth, New Jersey, for some
time, living "the strenuous life" in the performance of his duties.
Associated with Pope and Ashley, he followed up his work on telegraph
printers with marked success. "While with them I devised a printer
to print gold quotations instead of indicating them. The lines were
started, and the whole was sold out to the Gold & Stock Telegraph
Company. My experimenting was all done in the small shop of a Doctor
Bradley, located near the station of the Pennsylvania Railroad in Jersey
City. Every night I left for Elizabeth on the 1 A.M. train, then walked
half a mile to Mr. Pope's house and up at 6 A.M. for breakfast to catch
the 7 A.M. train. This continued all winter, and many were the occasions
when I was nearly frozen in the Elizabeth walk." This Doctor Bradley
appears to have been the first in this country to make electrical
measurements of precision with the galvanometer, but was an old-school
experimenter who would work for years on an instrument without
commercial value. He was also extremely irascible, and when on one
occasion the connecting wire would not come out of one of the binding
posts of a new and costly galvanometer, he jerked the instrument to
the floor and then jumped on it. He must have been, however, a man of
originality, as evidenced by his attempt to age whiskey by electricity,
an attempt that has often since been made. "The hobby he had at the
time I was there," says Edison, "was the aging of raw whiskey by passing
strong electric currents through it. He had arranged twenty jars with
platinum electrodes held in place by hard rubber. When all was ready, he
filled the cells with whiskey, connected the battery, locked the door of
the small room in which they were placed, and gave positive orders that
no one should enter. He then disappeared for three days. On the second
day we noticed a terrible smell in the shop, as if from some dead
animal. The next day the doctor arrived and, noticing the smell, asked
what was dead. We all thought something had got into his whiskey-room
and died. He opened it and was nearly overcome. The hard rubber he used
was, of course, full of sulphur, and this being attacked by the nascent
hydrogen, had produced sulphuretted hydrogen gas in torrents, displacing
all of the air in the room. Sulphuretted hydrogen is, as is well known,
the gas given off by rotten eggs."

Another glimpse of