g paid in. He was vice-president, electrician,
treasurer, and man of all work, and was to get fifty dollars a week
whenever the condition of the company warranted it.

One small room was both business office and laboratory. He earned a little
money by building motors, and this enabled him, in 1886, to begin a series
of experiments with motors of twelve horse-power. Officials from the
Manhattan Elevated were interested in the trials, and one day Jay Gould
came to see the new motors that could drive a truck along sixty feet of
track.

The day Gould visited him, Sprague resolved to test the motor to the
utmost. In suddenly reversing the current, an excess blew out the
safety-catch, causing a big noise and a blinding flash of light. Gould
gazed a moment, then hurried from the room and never came back.

Sprague was somewhat discouraged, but his confidence came back when
Superintendent Chinnock, of the Pearl Street Edison station, offered him
thirty thousand dollars for a one-sixth interest in the company. The offer
was refused, though at the time Sprague did not have money enough to pay a
month's board.

"Well," said the surprised Chinnock, "you're a fool!"

A few days later a successful trial was made before Cyrus W. Field, and
Chinnock came back with an offer of twenty-five thousand dollars for a
one-twelfth share. This was accepted, and later another twelfth was sold
for a slightly higher price. The motors used in these experiments were the
forerunners of the thousands now used on the trolley systems all over the
world.

The first big public exhibition was given in August, 1887, and the New
York _Sun_ said next day:

They tried an electric car on Fourth Avenue yesterday. It
created an amount of surprise and consternation from
Thirty-Second Street to One Hundred and Seventeenth Street
that was something like that caused by the first steamboat
on the Hudson. Small boys yelled "Dynamite!" and "Rats!" and
similar appreciative remarks until they were hoarse. Newly
appointed policemen debated arresting it, but went no
further. The car horses which were met on the other track
kicked, without exception, as was natural, over an invention
which threatens to relegate them to the sausage factory.

All that happened only nineteen years ago. To-day the trolley-lines of the
country employ more than seventy thousand men.

The same year Sprague's company got the contract for the building