THE ELECTRIC RAILWAY
EDISON had no sooner designed his dynamo in 1879 than he adopted the
same form of machine for use as a motor. The two are shown in the
Scientific American of October 18, 1879, and are alike, except that
the dynamo is vertical and the motor lies in a horizontal position,
the article remarking: "Its construction differs but slightly from the
electric generator." This was but an evidence of his early appreciation
of the importance of electricity as a motive power; but it will probably
surprise many people to know that he was the inventor of an electric
motor before he perfected his incandescent lamp. His interest in the
subject went back to his connection with General Lefferts in the days of
the evolution of the stock ticker. While Edison was carrying on his shop
at Newark, New Jersey, there was considerable excitement in electrical
circles over the Payne motor, in regard to the alleged performance of
which Governor Cornell of New York and other wealthy capitalists were
quite enthusiastic. Payne had a shop in Newark, and in one small room
was the motor, weighing perhaps six hundred pounds. It was of circular
form, incased in iron, with the ends of several small magnets sticking
through the floor. A pulley and belt, connected to a circular saw larger
than the motor, permitted large logs of oak timber to be sawed with ease
with the use of two small cells of battery. Edison's friend, General
Lefferts, had become excited and was determined to invest a large sum
of money in the motor company, but knowing Edison's intimate familiarity
with all electrical subjects he was wise enough to ask his young expert
to go and see the motor with him. At an appointed hour Edison went to
the office of the motor company and found there the venerable Professor
Morse, Governor Cornell, General Lefferts, and many others who had been
invited to witness a performance of the motor. They all proceeded to the
room where the motor was at work. Payne put a wire in the binding-post
of the battery, the motor started, and an assistant began sawing a heavy
oak log. It worked beautifully, and so great was the power developed,
apparently, from the small battery, that Morse exclaimed: "I am thankful
that I have lived to see this day." But Edison kept a close watch on the
motor. The results were so foreign to his experience that he knew there
was a trick in it. He soon discovered it. While holding his hand on the
frame of the motor he noticed a tremble coincident with the exhaust of
an engine across the alleyway, and he then knew that the power came from
the engine by a belt under the floor, shifted on and off by a magnet,
the other magnets being a blind. He whispered to the General to put
his hand on the frame of the motor, watch the exhaust, and note the
coincident tremor. The General did so, and in about fifteen seconds he
said: "Well, Edison, I must go now. This thing is a fraud." And thus
he saved his money, although others not so shrewdly advised were easily
persuaded to invest by such a demonstration.
A few years later, in 1878, Edison went to Wyoming with a group of
astronomers, to test his tasimeter during an eclipse of the sun, and
saw the land white to harvest. He noticed the long hauls to market or
elevator that the farmers had to make with their loads of grain at great
expense, and conceived the idea that as ordinary steam-railroad service
was too costly, light electric railways might be constructed that could
be operated automatically over simple tracks, the propelling motors
being controlled at various points. Cheap to build and cheap to
maintain, such roads would be a great boon to the newer farming regions
of the West, where the highways were still of the crudest character, and
where transportation was the gravest difficulty with which the settlers
had to contend. The plan seems to have haunted him, and he had no
sooner worked out a generator and motor that owing to their low internal
resistance could be operated efficiently, than he turned his hand to the
practical trial of such a railroad, applicable to both the haulage of
freight and the transportation of passengers. Early in 1880, when the
tremendous rush of work involved in the invention of the incandescent
lamp intermitted a little, he began the construction of a stretch of
track close to the Menlo Park laboratory, and at the same time built an
electric locomotive to operate over it.
This is a fitting stage at which to review briefly what had been done
in electric traction up to that date. There was absolutely no art, but
there had been a number of sporadic and very interesting experiments
made. The honor of the first attempt of any kind appears to rest with
this country and with Thomas Davenport, a self-trained blacksmith, of
Brandon, Vermont, who made a small model of a circular electric railway
and cars in 1834, and exhibited it the following year in Springfield,
Boston, and other cities. Of course he depended upon batteries for
current, but the fundamental idea was embodied of using the track for
the circuit, one rail being positive and the other negative, and the
motor being placed across or between them in multiple arc to receive
the current. Such are also practically the methods of to-day. The little
model was in good preservation up to the year 1900, when, being shipped
to the Paris Exposition, it was lost, the steamer that carried it
foundering in mid-ocean. The very broad patent taken out by this simple
mechanic, so far ahead of his times, was the first one issued in
America for an electric motor. Davenport was also the first man to apply
electric power to the printing-press, in 1840. In his traction work he
had a close second in Robert Davidson, of Aberdeen, Scotland, who in
1839 operated both a lathe and a small locomotive with the motor he had
invented. His was the credit of first actually carrying passengers--two
at a time, over a rough plank road--while it is said that his was the
first motor to be tried on real tracks, those of the Edinburgh-Glasgow
road, making a speed of four miles an hour.
The curse of this work and of all that succeeded it for a score of years
was the necessity of depending upon chemical batteries for current, the
machine usually being self-contained and hauling the batteries along
with itself, as in the case of the famous Page experiments in April,
1851, when a speed of nineteen miles an hour was attained on the line
of the Washington & Baltimore road. To this unfruitful period belonged,
however, the crude idea of taking the current from a stationary source
of power by means of an overhead contact, which has found its practical
evolution in the modern ubiquitous trolley; although the patent for
this, based on his caveat of 1879, was granted several years later
than that to Stephen D. Field, for the combination of an electric motor
operated by means of a current from a stationary dynamo or source of
electricity conducted through the rails. As a matter of fact, in 1856
and again in 1875, George F. Green, a jobbing machinist, of Kalamazoo,
Michigan, built small cars and tracks to which current was fed from a
distant battery, enough energy being utilized to haul one hundred pounds
of freight or one passenger up and down a "road" two hundred feet long.
All the work prior to the development of the dynamo as a source of
current was sporadic and spasmodic, and cannot be said to have left any
trace on the art, though it offered many suggestions as to operative
methods.
The close of the same decade of the nineteenth century that saw the
electric light brought to perfection, saw also the realization in
practice of all the hopes of fifty years as to electric traction. Both
utilizations depended upon the supply of current now cheaply obtainable
from the dynamo. These arts were indeed twins, feeding at inexhaustible
breasts. In 1879, at the Berlin Exhibition, the distinguished firm of
Siemens, to whose ingenuity and enterprise electrical development owes
so much, installed a road about one-third of a mile in length, over
which the locomotive hauled a train of three small cars at a speed of
about eight miles an hour, carrying some twenty persons every trip.
Current was fed from a dynamo to the motor through a central third rail,
the two outer rails being joined together as the negative or return
circuit. Primitive but essentially successful, this little road made a
profound impression on the minds of many inventors and engineers, and
marked the real beginning of the great new era, which has already seen
electricity applied to the operation of main lines of trunk railways.
But it is not to be supposed that on the part of the public there was
any great amount of faith then discernible; and for some years the
pioneers had great difficulty, especially in this country, in raising
money for their early modest experiments. Of the general conditions at
this moment Frank J. Sprague says in an article in the Century Magazine
of July, 1905, on the creation of the new art: "Edison was perhaps
nearer the verge of great electric-railway possibilities than any other
American. In the face of much adverse criticism he had developed the
essentials of the low-internal-resistance dynamo with high-resistance
field, and many of the essential features of multiple-arc distribution,
and in 1880 he built a small road at his laboratory at Menlo Park."
On May 13th of the year named this interesting road went into operation
as the result of hard and hurried work of preparation during the spring
months. The first track was about a third of a mile in length, starting
from the shops, following a country road, passing around a hill at the
rear and curving home, in the general form of the letter "U." The rails
were very light. Charles T. Hughes, who went with Edison in 1879,
and was in charge of much of the work, states that they were "second"
street-car rails, insulated with tar canvas paper and things of that
sort--"asphalt." They were spiked down on ordinary sleepers laid upon
the natural grade, and the gauge was about three feet six inches. At one
point the grade dropped some sixty feet in a distance of three hundred,
and the curves were of recklessly short radius. The dynamos supplying
current to the road were originally two of the standard size "Z"
machines then being made at the laboratory, popularly known throughout
the Edison ranks as "Longwaisted Mary Anns," and the circuits from these
were carried out to the rails by underground conductors. They were not
large--about twelve horse-power each--generating seventy-five amperes
of current at one hundred and ten volts, so that not quite twenty-five
horse-power of electrical energy was available for propulsion.
The locomotive built while the roadbed was getting ready was a
four-wheeled iron truck, an ordinary flat dump-car about six feet long
and four feet wide, upon which was mounted a "Z" dynamo used as a motor,
so that it had a capacity of about twelve horsepower. This machine was
laid on its side, with the armature end coming out at the front of the
locomotive, and the motive power was applied to the driving-axle by a
cumbersome series of friction pulleys. Each wheel of the locomotive had
a metal rim and a centre web of wood or papier-mache, and the current
picked up by one set of wheels was carried through contact brushes and
a brass hub to the motor; the circuit back to the track, or other rail,
being closed through the other wheels in a similar manner. The motor had
its field-magnet circuit in permanent connection as a shunt across the
rails, protected by a crude bare copper-wire safety-catch. A switch in
the armature circuit enabled the motorman to reverse the direction of
travel by reversing the current flow through the armature coils.
Things went fairly well for a time on that memorable Thursday afternoon,
when all the laboratory force made high holiday and scrambled for
foothold on the locomotive for a trip; but the friction gearing was
not equal to the sudden strain put upon it during one run and went to
pieces. Some years later, also, Daft again tried friction gear in his
historical experiments on the Manhattan Elevated road, but the results
were attended with no greater success. The next resort of Edison was to
belts, the armature shafting belted to a countershaft on the locomotive
frame, and the countershaft belted to a pulley on the car-axle. The
lever which threw the former friction gear into adjustment was made to
operate an idler pulley for tightening the axle-belt. When the motor
was started, the armature was brought up to full revolution and then the
belt was tightened on the car-axle, compelling motion of the locomotive.
But the belts were liable to slip a great deal in the process, and the
chafing of the belts charred them badly. If that did not happen, and if
the belt was made taut suddenly, the armature burned out--which it
did with disconcerting frequency. The next step was to use a number of
resistance-boxes in series with the armature, so that the locomotive
could start with those in circuit, and then the motorman could bring it
up to speed gradually by cutting one box out after the other. To stop
the locomotive, the armature circuit was opened by the main switch,
stopping the flow of current, and then brakes were applied by long
levers. Matters generally and the motors in particular went much better,
even if the locomotive was so freely festooned with resistance-boxes
all of perceptible weight and occupying much of the limited space. These
details show forcibly and typically the painful steps of advance that
every inventor in this new field had to make in the effort to reach not
alone commercial practicability, but mechanical feasibility. It was all
empirical enough; but that was the only way open even to the highest
talent.
Smugglers landing laces and silks have been known to wind them around
their bodies, as being less ostentatious than carrying them in a trunk.
Edison thought his resistance-boxes an equally superfluous display, and
therefore ingeniously wound some copper resistance wire around one of
the legs of the motor field magnet, where it was out of the way, served
as a useful extra field coil in starting up the motor, and dismissed
most of the boxes back to the laboratory--a few being retained under the
seat for chance emergencies. Like the boxes, this coil was in series
with the armature, and subject to plugging in and out at will by the
motorman. Thus equipped, the locomotive was found quite satisfactory,
and long did yeoman service. It was given three cars to pull, one an
open awning-car with two park benches placed back to back; one a flat
freight-car, and one box-car dubbed the "Pullman," with which Edison
illustrated a system of electric braking. Although work had been begun
so early in the year, and the road had been operating since May, it was
not until July that Edison executed any application for patents on his
"electromagnetic railway engine," or his ingenious braking system. Every
inventor knows how largely his fate lies in the hands of a competent and
alert patent attorney, in both the preparation and the prosecution
of his case; and Mr. Sprague is justified in observing in his Century
article: "The paucity of controlling claims obtained in these early
patents is remarkable." It is notorious that Edison did not then enjoy
the skilful aid in safeguarding his ideas that he commanded later.
The daily newspapers and technical journals lost no time in bringing the
road to public attention, and the New York Herald of June 25th was swift
to suggest that here was the locomotive that would be "most pleasing to
the average New Yorker, whose head has ached with noise, whose eyes have
been filled with dust, or whose clothes have been ruined with oil." A
couple of days later, the Daily Graphic illustrated and described
the road and published a sketch of a one-hundred-horse-power electric
locomotive for the use of the Pennsylvania Railroad between Perth Amboy
and Rahway. Visitors, of course, were numerous, including many curious,
sceptical railroad managers, few if any of whom except Villard could
see the slightest use for the new motive power. There is, perhaps,
some excuse for such indifference. No men in the world have more new
inventions brought to them than railroad managers, and this was the
rankest kind of novelty. It was not, indeed, until a year later, in
May, 1881, that the first regular road collecting fares was put in
operation--a little stretch of one and a half miles from Berlin to
Lichterfelde, with one miniature motorcar. Edison was in reality doing
some heavy electric-railway engineering, his apparatus full of ideas,
suggestions, prophecies; but to the operators of long trunk lines it
must have seemed utterly insignificant and "excellent fooling."
Speaking of this situation, Mr. Edison says: "One day Frank Thomson,
the President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, came out to see the electric
light and the electric railway in operation. The latter was then about
a mile long. He rode on it. At that time I was getting out plans to
make an electric locomotive of three hundred horse-power with six-foot
drivers, with the idea of showing people that they could dispense with
their steam locomotives. Mr. Thomson made the objection that it was
impracticable, and that it would be impossible to supplant steam. His
great experience and standing threw a wet blanket on my hopes. But
I thought he might perhaps be mistaken, as there had been many such
instances on record. I continued to work on the plans, and about three
years later I started to build the locomotive at the works at Goerck
Street, and had it about finished when I was switched off on some other
work. One of the reasons why I felt the electric railway to be eminently
practical was that Henry Villard, the President of the Northern Pacific,
said that one of the greatest things that could be done would be to
build right-angle feeders into the wheat-fields of Dakota and bring in
the wheat to the main lines, as the farmers then had to draw it from
forty to eighty miles. There was a point where it would not pay to
raise it at all; and large areas of the country were thus of no value.
I conceived the idea of building a very light railroad of narrow gauge,
and had got all the data as to the winds on the plains, and found that
it would be possible with very large windmills to supply enough power to
drive those wheat trains."
Among others who visited the little road at this juncture were persons
interested in the Manhattan Elevated system of New York, on which
experiments were repeatedly tried later, but which was not destined
to adopt a method so obviously well suited to all the conditions until
after many successful demonstrations had been made on elevated roads
elsewhere. It must be admitted that Mr. Edison was not very profoundly
impressed with the desire entertained in that quarter to utilize any
improvement, for he remarks: "When the Elevated Railroad in New York, up
Sixth Avenue, was started there was a great clamor about the noise, and
injunctions were threatened. The management engaged me to make a report
on the cause of the noise. I constructed an instrument that would record
the sound, and set out to make a preliminary report, but I found that
they never intended to do anything but let the people complain."
It was upon the co-operation of Villard that Edison fell back, and an
agreement was entered into between them on September 14, 1881, which
provided that the latter would "build two and a half miles of electric
railway at Menlo Park, equipped with three cars, two locomotives, one
for freight, and one for passengers, capacity of latter sixty miles an
hour. Capacity freight engine, ten tons net freight; cost of handling
a ton of freight per mile per horse-power to be less than ordinary
locomotive.... If experiments are successful, Villard to pay actual
outlay in experiments, and to treat with the Light Company for the
installation of at least fifty miles of electric railroad in the wheat
regions." Mr. Edison is authority for the statement that Mr. Villard
advanced between $35,000 and $40,000, and that the work done was very
satisfactory; but it did not end at that time in any practical results,
as the Northern Pacific went into the hands of a receiver, and Mr.
Villard's ability to help was hopelessly crippled. The directors of the
Edison Electric Light Company could not be induced to have anything
to do with the electric railway, and Mr. Insull states that the money
advanced was treated by Mr. Edison as a personal loan and repaid to
Mr. Villard, for whom he had a high admiration and a strong feeling
of attachment. Mr. Insull says: "Among the financial men whose close
personal friendship Edison enjoyed, I would mention Henry Villard, who,
I think, had a higher appreciation of the possibilities of the Edison
system than probably any other man of his time in Wall Street. He
dropped out of the business at the time of the consolidation of the
Thomson-Houston Company with the Edison General Electric Company; but
from the earliest days of the business, when it was in its experimental
period, when the Edison light and power system was but an idea, down
to the day of his death, Henry Villard continued a strong supporter not
only with his influence, but with his money. He was the first capitalist
to back individually Edison's experiments in electric railways."
In speaking of his relationships with Mr. Villard at this time, Edison
says: "When Villard was all broken down, and in a stupor caused by his
disasters in connection with the Northern Pacific, Mrs. Villard sent for
me to come and cheer him up. It was very difficult to rouse him from his
despair and apathy, but I talked about the electric light to him, and
its development, and told him that it would help him win it all back and
put him in his former position. Villard made his great rally; he made
money out of the electric light; and he got back control of the Northern
Pacific. Under no circumstances can a hustler be kept down. If he is
only square, he is bound to get back on his feet. Villard has often been
blamed and severely criticised, but he was not the only one to blame.
His engineers had spent $20,000,000 too much in building the road, and
it was not his fault if he found himself short of money, and at that
time unable to raise any more."
Villard maintained his intelligent interest in electric-railway
development, with regard to which Edison remarks: "At one time Mr.
Villard got the idea that he would run the mountain division of the
Northern Pacific Railroad by electricity. He asked me if it could be
done. I said: 'Certainly, it is too easy for me to undertake; let some
one else do it.' He said: 'I want you to tackle the problem,' and
he insisted on it. So I got up a scheme of a third rail and shoe and
erected it in my yard here in Orange. When I got it all ready, he had
all his division engineers come on to New York, and they came over here.
I showed them my plans, and the unanimous decision of the engineers was
that it was absolutely and utterly impracticable. That system is on the
New York Central now, and was also used on the New Haven road in its
first work with electricity."
At this point it may be well to cite some other statements of Edison as
to kindred work, with which he has not usually been associated in the
public mind. "In the same manner I had worked out for the Manhattan
Elevated Railroad a system of electric trains, and had the control of
each car centred at one place--multiple control. This was afterward
worked out and made practical by Frank Sprague. I got up a slot contact
for street railways, and have a patent on it--a sliding contact in a
slot. Edward Lauterbach was connected with the Third Avenue Railroad in
New York--as counsel--and I told him he was making a horrible mistake
putting in the cable. I told him to let the cable stand still and send
electricity through it, and he would not have to move hundreds of tons
of metal all the time. He would rue the day when he put the cable in."
It cannot be denied that the prophecy was fulfilled, for the cable was
the beginning of the frightful financial collapse of the system, and was
torn out in a few years to make way for the triumphant "trolley in the
slot."
Incidental glimpses of this work are both amusing and interesting.
Hughes, who was working on the experimental road with Mr. Edison,
tells the following story: "Villard sent J. C. Henderson, one of his
mechanical engineers, to see the road when it was in operation, and we
went down one day--Edison, Henderson, and I--and went on the locomotive.
Edison ran it, and just after we started there was a trestle sixty feet
long and seven feet deep, and Edison put on all the power. When we went
over it we must have been going forty miles an hour, and I could see the
perspiration come out on Henderson. After we got over the trestle and
started on down the track, Henderson said: 'When we go back I will walk.
If there is any more of that kind of running I won't be in it myself.'"
To the correspondence of Grosvenor P. Lowrey we are indebted for a
similar reminiscence, under date of June 5, 1880: "Goddard and I have
spent a part of the day at Menlo, and all is glorious. I have ridden at
forty miles an hour on Mr. Edison's electric railway--and we ran off the
track. I protested at the rate of speed over the sharp curves, designed
to show the power of the engine, but Edison said they had done it often.
Finally, when the last trip was to be taken, I said I did not like
it, but would go along. The train jumped the track on a short curve,
throwing Kruesi, who was driving the engine, with his face down in the
dirt, and another man in a comical somersault through some underbrush.
Edison was off in a minute, jumping and laughing, and declaring it a
most beautiful accident. Kruesi got up, his face bleeding and a good
deal shaken; and I shall never forget the expression of voice and face
in which he said, with some foreign accent: 'Oh! yes, pairfeckly safe.'
Fortunately no other hurts were suffered, and in a few minutes we had
the train on the track and running again."
All this rough-and-ready dealing with grades and curves was not mere
horse-play, but had a serious purpose underlying it, every trip having
its record as to some feature of defect or improvement. One particular
set of experiments relating to such work was made on behalf of visitors
from South America, and were doubtless the first tests of the kind made
for that continent, where now many fine electric street and interurban
railway systems are in operation. Mr. Edison himself supplies the
following data: "During the electric-railway experiments at Menlo Park,
we had a short spur of track up one of the steep gullies. The experiment
came about in this way. Bogota, the capital of Columbia, is reached on
muleback--or was--from Honda on the headwaters of the Magdalena River.
There were parties who wanted to know if transportation over the mule
route could not be done by electricity. They said the grades were
excessive, and it would cost too much to do it with steam locomotives,
even if they could climb the grades. I said: 'Well, it can't be much
more than 45 per cent.; we will try that first. If it will do that it
will do anything else.' I started at 45 per cent. I got up an electric
locomotive with a grip on the rail by which it went up the 45 per cent.
grade. Then they said the curves were very short. I put the curves in.
We started the locomotive with nobody on it, and got up to twenty miles
an hour, taking those curves of very short radius; but it was weeks
before we could prevent it from running off. We had to bank the tracks
up to an angle of thirty degrees before we could turn the curve and stay
on. These Spanish parties were perfectly satisfied we could put in
an electric railway from Honda to Bogota successfully, and then they
disappeared. I have never seen them since. As usual, I paid for the
experiment."
In the spring of 1883 the Electric Railway Company of America was
incorporated in the State of New York with a capital of $2,000,000 to
develop the patents and inventions of Edison and Stephen D. Field,
to the latter of whom the practical work of active development was
confided, and in June of the same year an exhibit was made at the
Chicago Railway Exposition, which attracted attention throughout
the country, and did much to stimulate the growing interest in
electric-railway work. With the aid of Messrs. F. B. Rae, C. L. Healy,
and C. O. Mailloux a track and locomotive were constructed for the
company by Mr. Field and put in service in the gallery of the main
exhibition building. The track curved sharply at either end on a radius
of fifty-six feet, and the length was about one-third of a mile. The
locomotive named "The Judge," after Justice Field, an uncle of Stephen
D. Field, took current from a central rail between the two outer rails,
that were the return circuit, the contact being a rubbing wire brush on
each side of the "third rail," answering the same purpose as the contact
shoe of later date. The locomotive weighed three tons, was twelve feet
long, five feet wide, and made a speed of nine miles an hour with a
trailer car for passengers. Starting on June 5th, when the exhibition
closed on June 23d this tiny but typical road had operated for over 118
hours, had made over 446 miles, and had carried 26,805 passengers. After
the exposition closed the outfit was taken during the same year to
the exposition at Louisville, Kentucky, where it was also successful,
carrying a large number of passengers. It deserves note that at Chicago
regular railway tickets were issued to paying passengers, the first ever
employed on American electric railways.
With this modest but brilliant demonstration, to which the illustrious
names of Edison and Field were attached, began the outburst of
excitement over electric railways, very much like the eras of
speculation and exploitation that attended only a few years earlier
the introduction of the telephone and the electric light, but with such
significant results that the capitalization of electric roads in America
is now over $4,000,000,000, or twice as much as that of the other two
arts combined. There was a tremendous rush into the electric-railway
field after 1883, and an outburst of inventive activity that has rarely,
if ever, been equalled. It is remarkable that, except Siemens, no
European achieved fame in this early work, while from America the ideas
and appliances of Edison, Van Depoele, Sprague, Field, Daft, and Short
have been carried and adopted all over the world.
Mr. Edison was consulting electrician for the Electric Railway Company,
but neither a director nor an executive officer. Just what the trouble
was as to the internal management of the corporation it is hard to
determine a quarter of a century later; but it was equipped with all
essential elements to dominate an art in which after its first efforts
it remained practically supine and useless, while other interests
forged ahead and reaped both the profit and the glory. Dissensions arose
between the representatives of the Field and Edison interests, and
in April, 1890, the Railway Company assigned its rights to the Edison
patents to the Edison General Electric Company, recently formed by
the consolidation of all the branches of the Edison light, power, and
manufacturing industry under one management. The only patent rights
remaining to the Railway Company were those under three Field patents,
one of which, with controlling claims, was put in suit June, 1890,
against the Jamaica & Brooklyn Road Company, a customer of the Edison
General Electric Company. This was, to say the least, a curious and
anomalous situation. Voluminous records were made by both parties to
the suit, and in the spring of 1894 the case was argued before the
late Judge Townsend, who wrote a long opinion dismissing the bill of
complaint. [15] The student will find therein a very complete and
careful study of the early electric-railway art. After this decision was
rendered, the Electric Railway Company remained for several years in a
moribund condition, and on the last day of 1896 its property was placed
in the hands of a receiver. In February of 1897 the receiver sold the
three Field patents to their original owner, and he in turn sold them to
the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company. The Railway Company
then went into voluntary dissolution, a sad example of failure to seize
the opportunity at the psychological moment, and on the part of the
inventor to secure any adequate return for years of effort and struggle
in founding one of the great arts. Neither of these men was squelched by
such a calamitous result, but if there were not something of bitterness
in their feelings as they survey what has come of their work, they would
not be human.
As a matter of fact, Edison retained a very lively interest in
electric-railway progress long after the pregnant days at Menlo Park,
one of the best evidences of which is an article in the New York
Electrical Engineer of November 18, 1891, which describes some important
and original experiments in the direction of adapting electrical
conditions to the larger cities. The overhead trolley had by that time
begun its victorious career, but there was intense hostility displayed
toward it in many places because of the inevitable increase in the
number of overhead wires, which, carrying, as they did, a current of
high voltage and large quantity, were regarded as a menace to life and
property. Edison has always manifested a strong objection to overhead
wires in cities, and urged placing them underground; and the outcry
against the overhead "deadly" trolley met with his instant sympathy.
His study of the problem brought him to the development of the modern
"substation," although the twists that later evolutions have given the
idea have left it scarcely recognizable.
[Footnote 15: See 61 Fed. Rep. 655.]
Mr. Villard, as President of the Edison General Electric Company,
requested Mr. Edison, as electrician of the company, to devise a
street-railway system which should be applicable to the largest cities
where the use of the trolley would not be permitted, where the slot
conduit system would not be used, and where, in general, the details of
construction should be reduced to the simplest form. The limits imposed
practically were such as to require that the system should not cost more
than a cable road to install. Edison reverted to his ingenious lighting
plan of years earlier, and thus settled on a method by which
current should be conveyed from the power plant at high potential to
motor-generators placed below the ground in close proximity to the
rails. These substations would convert the current received at a
pressure of, say, one thousand volts to one of twenty volts available
between rail and rail, with a corresponding increase in the volume of
the current. With the utilization of heavy currents at low voltage it
became necessary, of course, to devise apparatus which should be able to
pick up with absolute certainty one thousand amperes of current at
this pressure through two inches of mud, if necessary. With his wonted
activity and fertility Edison set about devising such a contact, and
experimented with metal wheels under all conditions of speed and track
conditions. It was several months before he could convey one hundred
amperes by means of such contacts, but he worked out at last a
satisfactory device which was equal to the task. The next point was
to secure a joint between contiguous rails such as would permit of
the passage of several thousand amperes without introducing undue
resistance. This was also accomplished.
Objections were naturally made to rails out in the open on the street
surface carrying large currents at a potential of twenty volts. It was
said that vehicles with iron wheels passing over the tracks and spanning
the two rails would short-circuit the current, "chew" themselves up,
and destroy the dynamos generating the current by choking all that
tremendous amount of energy back into them. Edison tackled the objection
squarely and short-circuited his track with such a vehicle, but
succeeded in getting only about two hundred amperes through the wheels,
the low voltage and the insulating properties of the axle-grease being
sufficient to account for such a result. An iron bar was also used,
polished, and with a man standing on it to insure solid contact; but
only one thousand amperes passed through it--i.e., the amount required
by a single car, and, of course, much less than the capacity of the
generators able to operate a system of several hundred cars.
Further interesting experiments showed that the expected large leakage
of current from the rails in wet weather did not materialize. Edison
found that under the worst conditions with a wet and salted track, at a
potential difference of twenty volts between the two rails, the
extreme loss was only two and one-half horse-power. In this respect the
phenomenon followed the same rule as that to which telegraph wires are
subject--namely, that the loss of insulation is greater in damp, murky
weather when the insulators are covered with wet dust than during heavy
rains when the insulators are thoroughly washed by the action of the
water. In like manner a heavy rain-storm cleaned the tracks from
the accumulations due chiefly to the droppings of the horses, which
otherwise served largely to increase the conductivity. Of course, in dry
weather the loss of current was practically nothing, and, under ordinary
conditions, Edison held, his system was in respect to leakage and the
problems of electrolytic attack of the current on adjacent pipes, etc.,
as fully insulated as the standard trolley network of the day. The cost
of his system Mr. Edison placed at from $30,000 to $100,000 per mile of
double track, in accordance with local conditions, and in this respect
comparing very favorably with the cable systems then so much in favor
for heavy traffic. All the arguments that could be urged in support of
this ingenious system are tenable and logical at the present moment; but
the trolley had its way except on a few lines where the conduit-and-shoe
method was adopted; and in the intervening years the volume of traffic
created and handled by electricity in centres of dense population has
brought into existence the modern subway.
But down to the moment of the preparation of this biography, Edison has
retained an active interest in transportation problems, and his latest
work has been that of reviving the use of the storage battery for
street-car purposes. At one time there were a number of storage-battery
lines and cars in operation in such cities as Washington, New York,
Chicago, and Boston; but the costs of operation and maintenance
were found to be inordinately high as compared with those of the
direct-supply methods, and the battery cars all disappeared. The need
for them under many conditions remained, as, for example, in places
in Greater New York where the overhead trolley wires are forbidden as
objectionable, and where the ground is too wet or too often submerged
to permit of the conduit with the slot. Some of the roads in Greater
New York have been anxious to secure such cars, and, as usual, the most
resourceful electrical engineer and inventor of his times has made
the effort. A special experimental track has been laid at the Orange
laboratory, and a car equipped with the Edison storage battery and other
devices has been put under severe and extended trial there and in New
York.
Menlo Park, in ruin and decay, affords no traces of the early Edison
electric-railway work, but the crude little locomotive built by Charles
T. Hughes was rescued from destruction, and has become the property
of the Pratt Institute, of Brooklyn, to whose thousands of technical
students it is a constant example and incentive. It was loaned in 1904
to the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, and by it exhibited
as part of the historical Edison collection at the St. Louis Exposition.