om for one hundred, all yelling
that such and such a broker's wire was out of order and to fix it at
once. It was pandemonium, and the man in charge became so excited that
he lost control of all the knowledge he ever had. I went to the
indicator and, having studied it thoroughly, knew where the trouble
ought to be, and found it."

"One of the innumerable contact springs had broken off and had fallen
down between the two gear wheels and stopped the instrument; but it
was not very noticeable. As I went out to tell the man in charge what
the matter was, George Laws, the inventor of the system, appeared on
the scene, the most excited person I had seen. He demanded of the man
the cause of the trouble, but the man was speechless. I ventured to
say that I knew what the trouble was, and he said, 'Fix it! Fix it! Be
quick!' I removed the spring and set the contact wheels at zero; and
the line, battery, and inspecting men scattered through the financial
district to set the instruments. In about two hours, things were
working again. Mr. Laws came to ask my name and what I was doing. I
told him and he asked me to come to his private office the following
day. He asked me a great many questions about the instruments and his
system, and I showed him how he could simplify things generally. He
then requested that I should come next day. On arrival, he stated at
once that he had decided to put me in charge of the whole plant, and
that my salary would be three hundred dollars a month."

"This was such a violent jump from anything I had ever seen before,
that it rather paralyzed me for a while. I thought it was too much to
be lasting; but I determined to try and live up to that salary if
twenty hours a day of hard work would do it."

It is needless to say that he made good in the biggest and best sense
of the word.

It was at this time that Mr. Edison, now twenty-one years of age,
invented an electric stock ticker for which he received forty thousand
dollars.

Always desiring to devote his entire time to inventive work, he now
saw that with the aid of his forty thousand dollars it was possible to
do so. Accordingly, a little later we see him constructing a
laboratory one hundred feet long at Menlo Park, a little station
twenty-five miles from Newark, New Jersey. Here for years, in company
with his assistants, he has made inventions that have revolutionized
the world.

Finally, in 1886, his business had so seriously outgrown his qua