eat deal of money and energy in bellowing and
throwing up dirt in the effort to destroy the hated enemy. This was not
long nor universally the spirit shown; and to-day in hundreds of cities
the electric and gas properties are united under the one management,
which does not find it impossible to push in a friendly and progressive
way the use of both illuminants. The most conspicuous example of this
identity of interest is given in New York itself.

So much for the early opposition, of which there was plenty. But it may
be questioned whether inertia is not equally to be dreaded with active
ill-will. Nothing is more difficult in the world than to get a good many
hundreds of thousands or millions of people to do something they have
never done before. A very real difficulty in the introduction of his
lamp and lighting system by Edison lay in the absolute ignorance of
the public at large, not only as to its merits, but as to the very
appearance of the light, Some few thousand people had gone out to Menlo
Park, and had there seen the lamps in operation at the laboratory or
on the hillsides, but they were an insignificant proportion of the
inhabitants of the United States. Of course, a great many accounts
were written and read, but while genuine interest was aroused it was
necessarily apathetic. A newspaper description or a magazine article
may be admirably complete in itself, with illustrations, but until some
personal experience is had of the thing described it does not convey
a perfect mental picture, nor can it always make the desire active and
insistent. Generally, people wait to have the new thing brought to them;
and hence, as in the case of the Edison light, an educational campaign
of a practical nature is a fundamental condition of success.

Another serious difficulty confronting Edison and his associates
was that nowhere in the world were there to be purchased any of the
appliances necessary for the use of the lighting system. Edison had
resolved from the very first that the initial central station embodying
his various ideas should be installed in New York City, where he could
superintend the installation personally, and then watch the operation.
Plans to that end were now rapidly maturing; but there would be needed
among many other things--every one of them new and novel--dynamos,
switchboards, regulators, pressure and current indicators, fixtures
in great variety, incandescent lamps, meters, sockets, small switches