mall satchel of clothes, three large boxes of
instruments, and a bright fellow-telegrapher named Jack Wright, he took
voyage on the Jumping Java, as she was humorously known, of the Cunard
line. The voyage was rough and the little Java justified her reputation
by jumping all over the ocean. "At the table," says Edison, "there were
never more than ten or twelve people. I wondered at the time how it
could pay to run an ocean steamer with so few people; but when we got
into calm water and could see the green fields, I was astounded to see
the number of people who appeared. There were certainly two or three
hundred. I learned afterward that they were mostly going to the Vienna
Exposition. Only two days could I get on deck, and on one of these a
gentleman had a bad scalp wound from being thrown against the iron wall
of a small smoking-room erected over a freight hatch."

Arrived in London, Edison set up his apparatus at the Telegraph Street
headquarters, and sent his companion to Liverpool with the instruments
for that end. The condition of the test was that he was to send from
Liverpool and receive in London, and to record at the rate of one
thousand words per minute, five hundred words to be sent every half hour
for six hours. Edison was given a wire and batteries to operate with,
but a preliminary test soon showed that he was going to fail. Both wire
and batteries were poor, and one of the men detailed by the authorities
to watch the test remarked quietly, in a friendly way: "You are not
going to have much show. They are going to give you an old Bridgewater
Canal wire that is so poor we don't work it, and a lot of 'sand
batteries' at Liverpool." [4] The situation was rather depressing to
the young American thus encountering, for the first time, the stolid
conservatism and opposition to change that characterizes so much of
official life and methods in Europe. "I thanked him," says Edison, "and
hoped to reciprocate somehow. I knew I was in a hole. I had been staying
at a little hotel in Covent Garden called the Hummums! and got nothing
but roast beef and flounders, and my imagination was getting into a
coma. What I needed was pastry. That night I found a French pastry shop
in High Holborn Street and filled up. My imagination got all right.
Early in the morning I saw Gouraud, stated my case, and asked if he
would stand for the purchase of a powerful battery to send to Liverpool.
He said 'Yes.' I went immediately to Apps on th