tor. I then put up a long shaft, connecting all the
governors together, and thought this would certainly cure the trouble;
but it didn't. The torsion of the shaft was so great that one governor
still managed to get ahead of the others. Well, it was a serious state
of things, and I worried over it a lot. Finally I went down to Goerck
Street and got a piece of shafting and a tube in which it fitted. I
twisted the shafting one way and the tube the other as far as I could,
and pinned them together. In this way, by straining the whole outfit up
to its elastic limit in opposite directions, the torsion was practically
eliminated, and after that the governors ran together all right."

Edison realized, however, that in commercial practice this was only a
temporary expedient, and that a satisfactory permanence of results could
only be attained with more perfect engines that could be depended upon
for close and simple regulation. The engines that were made part of the
first three "Jumbos" placed in the station were the very best that could
be obtained at the time, and even then had been specially designed and
built for the purpose. Once more quoting Edison on this subject: "About
that time" (when he was trying to run several dynamos in parallel in the
Pearl Street station) "I got hold of Gardiner C. Sims, and he undertook
to build an engine to run at three hundred and fifty revolutions
and give one hundred and seventy-five horse-power. He went back to
Providence and set to work, and brought the engine back with him to the
shop. It worked only a few minutes when it busted. That man sat around
that shop and slept in it for three weeks, until he got his engine right
and made it work the way he wanted it to. When he reached this period
I gave orders for the engine-works to run night and day until we got
enough engines, and when all was ready we started the engines. Then
everything worked all right.... One of these engines that Sims built ran
twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days in the year,
for over a year before it stopped." [12]

[Footnote 12: We quote the following interesting notes of
Mr. Charles L. Clarke on the question of see-sawing, or
"hunting," as it was afterward termed:

"In the Holborn Viaduct station the difficulty of 'hunting' was not
experienced. At the time the 'Jumbos' were first operated in multiple
arc, April 8, 1882, one machine was driven by a Porter-Allen engine,
and the ot