The Future of Electricity. EDISON TALKS.

Progress, Volume I, Issue 6, 2 April 1906, Page 133

The Future of Electricity. EDISON TALKS.

" More than a quarter of a century ago I built about three miles of an electric railway at my place at Menlo Park. It was a good electric railway and worked well. I supposed, of course, that it would appeal to men. Well, Henry Villard came over to visit me, and I showed him the railway. * I explained its advantages over the horse-car system. It was better from every point of view." " I offered to sell that electric railway and all my patents and rights of every kind for exactly the amount of money it had cost me to produce it — just 42,000 dollars." " Mr. Villard got a lot of capitalists together, some of the brainiest and most experienced men in Wall street, and I explained the thing to them and they talked it all over very carefully and very solemnly, and then they refused to touch it in any shape or form on the ground that there was nothing in the idea of an electric railway — absolutely no future for it." " Well, that staggered me for a while. I seemed to have lost every cent. I had spent m the experiment. I could not make any impression on those men " " Yet, look round you to-day ! Look all over the country ! Look all over the world and find me a country m which there are not electric railways. Electric railways have been among the great developers of modern civilisation. They have transformed the centres of human population. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in them, hundreds of thousands of men are engaged in operating them. And only twenty-five years ago a body of picked, bright, American capitalists could see nothing in the idea, although it had been developed to a practical, physical demonstration right here m New Jersey." " Electricity will take the place of horses. It will solve the vehicle traffic problem m cities. My new electric storage battery itself will make electricity cheaper than horses."