a desire everywhere on the
part of everybody to see and hear the phonograph. A small commercial
organization was formed to build and exploit the apparatus, and the
shops at Menlo Park laboratory were assisted by the little Bergmann shop
in New York. Offices were taken for the new enterprise at 203 Broadway,
where the Mail and Express building now stands, and where, in a
general way, under the auspices of a talented dwarf, C. A. Cheever, the
embryonic phonograph and the crude telephone shared rooms and expenses.
Gardiner G. Hubbard, father-in-law of Alex. Graham Bell, was one of the
stockholders in the Phonograph Company, which paid Edison $10,000 cash
and a 20 per cent. royalty. This curious partnership was maintained for
some time, even when the Bell Telephone offices were removed to Reade
Street, New York, whither the phonograph went also; and was perhaps
explained by the fact that just then the ability of the phonograph as
a money-maker was much more easily demonstrated than was that of
the telephone, still in its short range magneto stage and awaiting
development with the aid of the carbon transmitter.

The earning capacity of the phonograph then, as largely now, lay in its
exhibition qualities. The royalties from Boston, ever intellectually
awake and ready for something new, ran as high as $1800 a week. In New
York there was a ceaseless demand for it, and with the aid of Hilbourne
L. Roosevelt, a famous organ builder, and uncle of ex-President
Roosevelt, concerts were given at which the phonograph was "featured."
To manage this novel show business the services of James Redpath were
called into requisition with great success. Redpath, famous as a friend
and biographer of John Brown, as a Civil War correspondent, and as
founder of the celebrated Redpath Lyceum Bureau in Boston, divided
the country into territories, each section being leased for exhibition
purposes on a basis of a percentage of the "gate money." To 203
Broadway from all over the Union flocked a swarm of showmen, cranks, and
particularly of old operators, who, the seedier they were in appearance,
the more insistent they were that "Tom" should give them, for the sake
of "Auld lang syne," this chance to make a fortune for him and for
themselves. At the top of the building was a floor on which these
novices were graduated in the use and care of the machine, and then,
with an equipment of tinfoil and other supplies, they were sent out on
the road. It was a