engine, the first of which went to Paris and
London, while the next were installed in the old Pearl Street station
of the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York, just south of
Fulton Street, on the west side of the street. Edison devoted a great
deal of his time to the engineering work in connection with the laying
out of the first incandescent electric-lighting system in New York.
Apparently at that time--between the end of 1881 and spring of 1882--the
most serious work was the manufacture and installation of underground
conductors in this territory. These conductors were manufactured by
the Electric Tube Company, which Edison controlled in a shop at 65
Washington Street, run by John Kruesi. Half-round copper conductors were
used, kept in place relatively to each other and in the tube, first of
all by a heavy piece of cardboard, and later on by a rope; and then put
in a twenty-foot iron pipe; and a combination of asphaltum and linseed
oil was forced into the pipe for the insulation. I remember as a
coincidence that the building was only twenty feet wide. These lengths
of conductors were twenty feet six inches long, as the half-round
coppers extended three inches beyond the drag-ends of the lengths of
pipe; and in one of the operations we used to take the length of tubing
out of the window in order to turn it around. I was elected secretary of
the Electric Tube Company, and was expected to look after its finance;
and it was in this position that my long intimacy with John Kruesi
started."

At this juncture a large part of the correspondence referred very
naturally to electric lighting, embodying requests for all kinds of
information, catalogues, prices, terms, etc.; and all these letters were
turned over to the lighting company by Edison for attention. The company
was soon swamped with propositions for sale of territorial rights and
with other negotiations, and some of these were accompanied by the offer
of very large sums of money. It was the beginning of the electric-light
furor which soon rose to sensational heights. Had the company accepted
the cash offers from various localities, it could have gathered several
millions of dollars at once into its treasury; but this was not at
all in accord with Mr. Edison's idea, which was to prove by actual
experience the commercial value of the system, and then to license
central-station companies in large cities and towns, the parent company
taking a percentage of the