Brought out in
association with Mr. Prescott, it was adopted by the Western Union
Telegraph Company, and, later, by the British Post Office. The
President of the Western Union reported that it had saved the Company
500,000 dollars a year in the construction of new lines. Edison also
improved the Bain chemical telegraph, until it attained an incredible
speed. Bain had left it capable of recording 200 words a minute; but
Edison, by dint of searching a pile of books ordered from New York,
Paris, and London, making copious notes, and trying innumerable
experiments, while eating at his desk and sleeping in his chair,
ultimately prepared a solution which enabled it to register over 1000
words a minute. It was exhibited at the Philadelphia Centenial
Exhibition in 1876, where it astonished Sir William Thomson.
In 1876, Edison sold his factory at Newark, and retired to Menlo Park,
a sequestered spot near Metuchin, on the Pennsylvania Railroad, and
about twenty-four miles from New York. Here on some rising ground he
built a wooden tenement, two stories high, and furnished it as a
workshop and laboratory. His own residence and the cottages of his
servants completed the little colony.
The basement of the main building was occupied by his office, a choice
library, a cabinet replete with instruments of precision, and a large
airy workshop, provided with lathes and steam power, where his workmen
shaped his ideas into wood and metal.
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