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Newspaper reporters, uninterested in the niceties of patent law, offered high praise to Maxim's work in New York. It had been nearly a year since Edison had unveiled his lamp and promised to install lights in New York, yet he remained in Menlo Park, tinkering with his system. People were growing impatient. Maxim's "name will be remembered long after that of his boastful rival is forgotten," Illustrated Scientific News claimed, and others agreed. "The present stir over the Maxim incandescent light has a better basis than the Edison excitement a year ago," a newspaper reported. Edison "is no more called the 'magician of Menlo Park.'"11

Edison professed not to worry about what he was called or what his electric light rivals were up to. "I put the lights on the Columbia, but what good did it do? It put me back six weeks in the work I am doing here," Edison explained. "I could have done six months ago what Maxim has done, had I desired to make a show." In Menlo Park and on the Columbia, Edison had already installed lighting plants similar to Maxim's in New York. He was working on something big—not a handful of small dynamos running a few hundred lamps but a major system able to power entire city blocks.12

IN PREPARATION FOR the Manhattan system, Edison built a model in Menlo Park. He plotted a grid of imaginary streets in the fields around the laboratory and had his men put up white pine lampposts at fifty-foot intervals. At the top of each pole was a lamp, covered with a fishbowl-shaped globe to protect it from the elements. The 56 posts leaned crookedly, but Edison gave them little thought, because the real work was going on underground. Laborers attacked the earth with plow and shovels, digging trenches and then laying long, shallow wooden boxes into them. Workers laid copper wires into the boxes, then poured tar over the wires. The job was completed by July 1880, and the conductors seemed to work well enough. When it rained, however, the wet ground became a better conductor, and electricity leaked everywhere. The lamps on the poles barely flickered.

Edison sent one of his men into the library to read up on insulation. The state of the art was not advanced, so the Edison workers made it up as they went along. For the next two months the men boiled up batches of noxious compounds, driving everyone else out of the laboratory. Finally, they settled on a mixture of paraffin, beeswax, linseed oil, and Trinidad asphalt. The trenches were dug up and the conductors laid again with the new insulation. The work was delayed by box turtles that, investigating the new smell in the neighborhood, got stuck in the tar and had to be rescued. The system was finally ready for another full test on Tuesday, November 2, which also happened to be the day of a presidential election. Edison, a staunch Republican, gave orders that the lights should be lit only if James Garfield won. He did, and the long rows of lamps glittered atop their poles until after midnight.13

With this successful test, Edison was ready to tackle New York. On December 17, some of the same investors who two years before had formed the Edison Electric Light Company—most notably, the investment bankers of Drexel, Morgan & Company—incorporated a new firm, the Edison Illuminating Company of New York, to finance a Manhattan central station.

Republican though he was, Edison knew that building his system in New York meant fraternizing with New York's Tammany Hall Democrats, so he invited New York's Board of Aldermen out to Menlo Park. On December 21, the politicians chartered a private car on the Pennsylvania Railroad and arrived at Menlo Park about half past five. As the aldermen approached the station, they saw the model light system, parallel strings of stars against the backdrop of a moonless night. After detraining, the aldermen strolled up a brightly lit plank walkway to Edison's office, where the inventor greeted them, his hands still grimy from a laboratory project he had