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By Root 887 0

gas. As Edison's mathematician, Francis Upton, was to write, "A mistaken idea has been afloat that this new light was intended to be a rival of the sun, rather than what it really is,—a rival of gas." But Edison saw gas as a model as well as a rival. In early installations, he threaded his wires through existing household gas lines and adapted existing gas fixtures for use with his light. He developed a way to determine the cost of electricity per household based on the gas meters of the time, and he envisioned a system, as for gas, linked to adjoining sites all fed by a central station, which meant it would depend on density—a high volume of use in a small area—for its cost-effectiveness.

From the beginning, Edison understood his system to be an urban one, and he—backed by New York money and followed most closely by the New York press—saw New York City as the foremost testing ground for his work: he planned to install his first commercial central lighting system in Manhattan. In clear weather, he could see the city on the horizon, thirty or so miles away from his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he carried out his first electric light experiments. Menlo Park had been a failed real estate venture—no more than a handful of modest houses on a hill and a whistle stop on the Pennsylvania Railroad line—when Edison, feeling cramped and crowded in his Newark laboratory, began looking for a new site. At Menlo Park, he found isolation and plenty of inexpensive land on which to build his compound.

At first glance, you feel a sense of seclusion and of quiet containment when you encounter R. F. Outcault's painting of the laboratory and its surroundings in the winter of 1880–1881. It might be a farm settled into its yearly sleep, for it is laid out nearly the same. The compound, standing squarely in the midst of open fields, is surrounded by a picket fence. A road running alongside disappears into woodlands at the rim of the horizon. The library/office in the foreground resembles a modest two-story clapboard house, and the clapboard laboratory behind it, other than having small porches on each floor, could be an elongated barn. Off to the side is a shed with a ladder propped against it.

But it was, for all its traditional appearance and apparent modesty, the largest private laboratory in the United States. The picture also includes a red brick machine shop with a smokestack at the rear of the site, telegraph poles strung with wires across the near field, and a train parked at the whistle stop on the far side of the road. What went on there was new and bewildering to any outside observer. "When I was a boy," David Trumbull Marshall remembers,

being a boy, and consequently of no account, I was allowed to roam through the Laboratory at Menlo Park.... I remember seeing the tall lean Mr. Lawson firing the furnaces for carbonizing the lamp filaments.... I remember seeing men in the yard outside the Machine Shop ... laboriously winding copper wires with roller bandages and slushing the whole with asphalt.... I remember going into the little blacksmith shop on the south side of the Laboratory inclosure and there finding a blacksmith [who] was making something out of copper and [he] told me that "it was a very particular thing to be done."...I remember the small shed next [to] the blacksmith shop in which there were a number of kerosene lamps burning, the flame turned up purposely so that the flame would smoke and deposit soot.... I remember the day Alfred Moss and I discovered the rubbish heap.... We thought we had struck a gold mine. Pieces of insulated copper wire, pieces of glass tubing, pieces of brass and the other thousand and one things that drop on the floor and are swept up and thrown out.

Within, Edison's "invention factory" was peopled with blacksmiths, electricians, mechanics, machinists, model makers, a glassblower, and a mathematician. "His iron ideas, in tangled shapes, are scattered and piled everywhere; turning lathes are thickly set on the floor and the room is filled with the screech of tortured metal," one