that it
will change. It might perhaps have been altogether better for Edison,
from the financial standpoint, if he had not identified himself so
completely with one kind of current, but that made no difference to him,
as it was a matter of conviction; and Edison's convictions are granitic.
Moreover, this controversy over the two currents, alternating and
direct, which has become historical in the field of electricity--and
is something like the "irrepressible conflict" we heard of years ago
in national affairs--illustrates another aspect of Edison's character.
Broad as the prairies and free in thought as the winds that sweep them,
he is idiosyncratically opposed to loose and wasteful methods, to plans
of empire that neglect the poor at the gate. Everything he has done has
been aimed at the conservation of energy, the contraction of space,
the intensification of culture. Burbank and his tribe represent in the
vegetable world, Edison in the mechanical. Not only has he developed
distinctly new species, but he has elucidated the intensive art of
getting $1200 out of an electrical acre instead of $12--a manured
market-garden inside London and a ten-bushel exhausted wheat farm
outside Lawrence, Kansas, being the antipodes of productivity--yet very
far short of exemplifying the difference of electrical yield between an
acre of territory in Edison's "first New York district" and an acre in
some small town.

Edison's lighting work furnished an excellent basis--in fact, the only
one--for the development of the alternating current now so generally
employed in central-station work in America; and in the McGraw
Electrical Directory of April, 1909, no fewer than 4164 stations out of
5780 reported its use. When the alternating current was introduced for
practical purposes it was not needed for arc lighting, the circuit for
which, from a single dynamo, would often be twenty or thirty miles
in length, its current having a pressure of not less than five or six
thousand volts. For some years it was not found feasible to operate
motors on alternating-current circuits, and that reason was often
urged against it seriously. It could not be used for electroplating
or deposition, nor could it charge storage batteries, all of which are
easily within the ability of the direct current. But when it came to be
a question of lighting a scattered suburb, a group of dwellings on the
outskirts, a remote country residence or a farm-house, the alternating