ving-room--and the upper floors contain four large
bedrooms, a roomy bath-room, and wide halls. The front porch extends
eight feet, and the back porch three feet. A cellar seven and a half
feet high extends under the whole house, and will contain the boiler,
wash-tubs, and coal-bunker. It is intended that the house shall be built
on lots forty by sixty feet, giving a lawn and a small garden.

It is contemplated that these houses shall be built in industrial
communities, where they can be put up in groups of several hundred. If
erected in this manner, and by an operator buying his materials in large
quantities, Edison believes that these houses can be erected complete,
including heating apparatus and plumbing, for $1200 each. This figure
would also rest on the basis of using in the mixture the gravel
excavated on the site. Comment has been made by persons of artistic
taste on the monotony of a cluster of houses exactly alike in
appearance, but this criticism has been anticipated, and the molds are
so made as to be capable of permutations of arrangement. Thus it will
be possible to introduce almost endless changes in the style of house by
variation of the same set of molds.

For more than forty years Edison was avowedly an inventor for purely
commercial purposes; but within the last two years he decided to retire
from that field so far as new inventions were concerned, and to devote
himself to scientific research and experiment in the leisure hours
that might remain after continuing to improve his existing devices.
But although the poured cement house was planned during the commercial
period, the spirit in which it was conceived arose out of an earnest
desire to place within the reach of the wage-earner an opportunity to
better his physical, pecuniary, and mental conditions in so far as that
could be done through the medium of hygienic and beautiful homes at
moderate rentals. From the first Edison has declared that it was not
his intention to benefit pecuniarily through the exploitation of this
project. Having actually demonstrated the practicability and feasibility
of his plans, he will allow responsible concerns to carry them into
practice under such limitations as may be necessary to sustain the basic
object, but without any payment to him except for the actual expense
incurred. The hypercritical may cavil and say that, as a manufacturer of
cement, Edison will be benefited. True, but as ANY good Portland cement
can be