eautiful accident. Kruesi got up, his face bleeding and a good
deal shaken; and I shall never forget the expression of voice and face
in which he said, with some foreign accent: 'Oh! yes, pairfeckly safe.'
Fortunately no other hurts were suffered, and in a few minutes we had
the train on the track and running again."

All this rough-and-ready dealing with grades and curves was not mere
horse-play, but had a serious purpose underlying it, every trip having
its record as to some feature of defect or improvement. One particular
set of experiments relating to such work was made on behalf of visitors
from South America, and were doubtless the first tests of the kind made
for that continent, where now many fine electric street and interurban
railway systems are in operation. Mr. Edison himself supplies the
following data: "During the electric-railway experiments at Menlo Park,
we had a short spur of track up one of the steep gullies. The experiment
came about in this way. Bogota, the capital of Columbia, is reached on
muleback--or was--from Honda on the headwaters of the Magdalena River.
There were parties who wanted to know if transportation over the mule
route could not be done by electricity. They said the grades were
excessive, and it would cost too much to do it with steam locomotives,
even if they could climb the grades. I said: 'Well, it can't be much
more than 45 per cent.; we will try that first. If it will do that it
will do anything else.' I started at 45 per cent. I got up an electric
locomotive with a grip on the rail by which it went up the 45 per cent.
grade. Then they said the curves were very short. I put the curves in.
We started the locomotive with nobody on it, and got up to twenty miles
an hour, taking those curves of very short radius; but it was weeks
before we could prevent it from running off. We had to bank the tracks
up to an angle of thirty degrees before we could turn the curve and stay
on. These Spanish parties were perfectly satisfied we could put in
an electric railway from Honda to Bogota successfully, and then they
disappeared. I have never seen them since. As usual, I paid for the
experiment."

In the spring of 1883 the Electric Railway Company of America was
incorporated in the State of New York with a capital of $2,000,000 to
develop the patents and inventions of Edison and Stephen D. Field,
to the latter of whom the practical work of active development was
confided, and in June of the sa