nsportation was the gravest difficulty with which the settlers
had to contend. The plan seems to have haunted him, and he had no
sooner worked out a generator and motor that owing to their low internal
resistance could be operated efficiently, than he turned his hand to the
practical trial of such a railroad, applicable to both the haulage of
freight and the transportation of passengers. Early in 1880, when the
tremendous rush of work involved in the invention of the incandescent
lamp intermitted a little, he began the construction of a stretch of
track close to the Menlo Park laboratory, and at the same time built an
electric locomotive to operate over it.

This is a fitting stage at which to review briefly what had been done
in electric traction up to that date. There was absolutely no art, but
there had been a number of sporadic and very interesting experiments
made. The honor of the first attempt of any kind appears to rest with
this country and with Thomas Davenport, a self-trained blacksmith, of
Brandon, Vermont, who made a small model of a circular electric railway
and cars in 1834, and exhibited it the following year in Springfield,
Boston, and other cities. Of course he depended upon batteries for
current, but the fundamental idea was embodied of using the track for
the circuit, one rail being positive and the other negative, and the
motor being placed across or between them in multiple arc to receive
the current. Such are also practically the methods of to-day. The little
model was in good preservation up to the year 1900, when, being shipped
to the Paris Exposition, it was lost, the steamer that carried it
foundering in mid-ocean. The very broad patent taken out by this simple
mechanic, so far ahead of his times, was the first one issued in
America for an electric motor. Davenport was also the first man to apply
electric power to the printing-press, in 1840. In his traction work he
had a close second in Robert Davidson, of Aberdeen, Scotland, who in
1839 operated both a lathe and a small locomotive with the motor he had
invented. His was the credit of first actually carrying passengers--two
at a time, over a rough plank road--while it is said that his was the
first motor to be tried on real tracks, those of the Edinburgh-Glasgow
road, making a speed of four miles an hour.

The curse of this work and of all that succeeded it for a score of years
was the necessity of depending upon chemical batteries for curren