,
underground conductors, junction-boxes, service-boxes, manhole-boxes,
connectors, and even specially made wire. Now, not one of these
miscellaneous things was in existence; not an outsider was sufficiently
informed about such devices to make them on order, except perhaps the
special wire. Edison therefore started first of all a lamp factory in
one of the buildings at Menlo Park, equipped it with novel machinery and
apparatus, and began to instruct men, boys, and girls, as they could be
enlisted, in the absolutely new art, putting Mr. Upton in charge.

With regard to the conditions attendant upon the manufacture of the
lamps, Edison says: "When we first started the electric light we had to
have a factory for manufacturing lamps. As the Edison Light Company
did not seem disposed to go into manufacturing, we started a small
lamp factory at Menlo Park with what money I could raise from my other
inventions and royalties, and some assistance. The lamps at that time
were costing about $1.25 each to make, so I said to the company: 'If you
will give me a contract during the life of the patents, I will make all
the lamps required by the company and deliver them for forty cents.' The
company jumped at the chance of this offer, and a contract was drawn
up. We then bought at a receiver's sale at Harrison, New Jersey, a very
large brick factory building which had been used as an oil-cloth works.
We got it at a great bargain, and only paid a small sum down, and
the balance on mortgage. We moved the lamp works from Menlo Park to
Harrison. The first year the lamps cost us about $1.10 each. We sold
them for forty cents; but there were only about twenty or thirty
thousand of them. The next year they cost us about seventy cents, and we
sold them for forty. There were a good many, and we lost more money the
second year than the first. The third year I succeeded in getting up
machinery and in changing the processes, until it got down so that they
cost somewhere around fifty cents. I still sold them for forty cents,
and lost more money that year than any other, because the sales were
increasing rapidly. The fourth year I got it down to thirty-seven cents,
and I made all the money up in one year that I had lost previously. I
finally got it down to twenty-two cents, and sold them for forty cents;
and they were made by the million. Whereupon the Wall Street people
thought it was a very lucrative business, so they concluded they would
like to h