met Chinnock several weeks after, and said: 'How is the
whiskey man getting along?' 'It's all right; he is paying his bill. It
fixes the whiskey and takes the shudder right out of it.' Somebody went
and took out a patent on this idea later.

"In the second year we put the Stock Exchange on the circuits of the
station, but were very fearful that there would be a combination of
heavy demand and a dark day, and that there would be an overloaded
station. We had an index like a steam-gauge, called an ampere-meter, to
indicate the amount of current going out. I was up at 65 Fifth Avenue
one afternoon. A sudden black cloud came up, and I telephoned to
Chinnock and asked him about the load. He said: 'We are up to the
muzzle, and everything is running all right.' By-and-by it became so
thick we could not see across the street. I telephoned again, and felt
something would happen, but fortunately it did not. I said to
Chinnock: 'How is it now?' He replied: 'Everything is red-hot, and the
ampere-meter has made seventeen revolutions.'"

In 1883 no such fittings as "fixture insulators" were known. It was
the common practice to twine the electric wires around the disused
gas-fixtures, fasten them with tape or string, and connect them to
lamp-sockets screwed into attachments under the gas-burners--elaborated
later into what was known as the "combination fixture." As a result
it was no uncommon thing to see bright sparks snapping between the
chandelier and the lighting wires during a sharp thunder-storm. A
startling manifestation of this kind happened at Sunbury, when the vivid
display drove nervous guests of the hotel out into the street, and the
providential storm led Mr. Luther Stieringer to invent the "insulating
joint." This separated the two lighting systems thoroughly, went into
immediate service, and is universally used to-day.

Returning to the more specific subject of pioneer plants of importance,
that at Brockton must be considered for a moment, chiefly for the reason
that the city was the first in the world to possess an Edison station
distributing current through an underground three-wire network of
conductors--the essentially modern contemporaneous practice,
standard twenty-five years later. It was proposed to employ pole-line
construction with overhead wires, and a party of Edison engineers drove
about the town in an open barouche with a blue-print of the circuits and
streets spread out on their knees, to determine how