all made; yet evidently but for such
inventions as this such arts could not have come into existence at
all, or else in growing up they would have forced copper to starvation
prices. [11]

[Footnote 11: For description of feeder patent see
Appendix.]

It should be borne in mind that from the outset Edison had determined
upon installing underground conductors as the only permanent and
satisfactory method for the distribution of current from central
stations in cities; and that at Menlo Park he laid out and operated such
a system with about four hundred and twenty-five lamps. The underground
system there was limited to the immediate vicinity of the laboratory and
was somewhat crude, as well as much less complicated than would be the
network of over eighty thousand lineal feet, which he calculated to be
required for the underground circuits in the first district of New York
City. At Menlo Park no effort was made for permanency; no provision
was needed in regard to occasional openings of the street for various
purposes; no new customers were to be connected from time to time to
the mains, and no repairs were within contemplation. In New York the
question of permanency was of paramount importance, and the other
contingencies were sure to arise as well as conditions more easy
to imagine than to forestall. These problems were all attacked in a
resolute, thoroughgoing manner, and one by one solved by the invention
of new and unprecedented devices that were adequate for the purposes of
the time, and which are embodied in apparatus of slight modification in
use up to the present day.

Just what all this means it is hard for the present generation to
imagine. New York and all the other great cities in 1882, and for
some years thereafter, were burdened and darkened by hideous masses
of overhead wires carried on ugly wooden poles along all the main
thoroughfares. One after another rival telegraph and telephone, stock
ticker, burglar-alarm, and other companies had strung their circuits
without any supervision or restriction; and these wires in all
conditions of sag or decay ramified and crisscrossed in every direction,
often hanging broken and loose-ended for months, there being no official
compulsion to remove any dead wire. None of these circuits carried
dangerous currents; but the introduction of the arc light brought an
entirely new menace in the use of pressures that were even worse than
the bully of the West who