give us a
couple of weeks to catch up. So when the men went out they appointed a
committee to meet us; but for two weeks they could not find us, so they
became somewhat more anxious than we were. Finally they said they would
like to go back. We said all right, and back they went. It was quite a
novelty to the men not to be able to find us when they wanted to; and
they didn't relish it at all.

"What with these troubles and the lack of room, we decided to find
a factory elsewhere, and decided to try the locomotive works up at
Schenectady. It seems that the people there had had a falling out among
themselves, and one of the directors had started opposition works; but
before he had completed all the buildings and put in machinery some
compromise was made, and the works were for sale. We bought them very
reasonably and moved everything there. These works were owned by me and
my assistants until sold to the Edison General Electric Company. At one
time we employed several thousand men; and since then the works have
been greatly expanded.

"At these new works our orders were far in excess of our capital to
handle the business, and both Mr. Insull and I were afraid we might get
into trouble for lack of money. Mr. Insull was then my business manager,
running the whole thing; and, therefore, when Mr. Henry Villard and his
syndicate offered to buy us out, we concluded it was better to be
sure than be sorry; so we sold out for a large sum. Villard was a very
aggressive man with big ideas, but I could never quite understand him.
He had no sense of humor. I remember one time we were going up on the
Hudson River boat to inspect the works, and with us was Mr. Henderson,
our chief engineer, who was certainly the best raconteur of funny
stories I ever knew. We sat at the tail-end of the boat, and he started
in to tell funny stories. Villard could not see a single point, and
scarcely laughed at all; and Henderson became so disconcerted he had to
give it up. It was the same way with Gould. In the early telegraph days
I remember going with him to see Mackay in 'The Impecunious Country
Editor.' It was very funny, full of amusing and absurd situations; but
Gould never smiled once."

The formation of the Edison General Electric Company involved the
consolidation of the immediate Edison manufacturing interests in
electric light and power, with a capitalization of $12,000,000, now a
relatively modest sum; but in those days the amount was larg