ers, until the Gold and Stock
Telegraph Company consolidated with the Gold Indicator Company."

CHAPTER XXII

FAME AND FORTUNE

"At twenty-two," the lecturer continued, "while Edison was with the Gold
and Stock Telegraph Company, he often heard Jay Gould and 'Jim' Fisk,
the great Wall Street operators of that day, talk over the money market.
At night he ate his lunches in the coffee-house in Printing House
Square, where he used to meet Henry J. Raymond, founder of _The New York
Times_, Horace Greeley of the _Tribune_ and James Gordon Bennett of the
_Herald_, the greatest trio of journalists in the world. One of the most
memorable remarks made by a frequenter of this night lunch, as recorded
by Mr. Edison was:

"'This is a great place; a plate of cakes, a cup of coffee, and a
Russian bath, all for ten cents!'

"The so-called bath was on account of the heat of the crowded room.

"Mr. Edison tells this story of the terrible panic in Wall Street, in
September, 1869, brought on chiefly by the attempt of Jay Gould and his
associates to corner the gold market:

"'On Black Friday we had a rather exciting time with our indicators. The
Gould and Fisk crowd had cornered the gold and had run up the quotations
faster than the indicator could record them. In the morning it was
quoting 150 premium while Gould's agents were bidding 165 for five
millions or less.

"'There was intense excitement. Broad and other streets in the Wall
Street district were crammed with crazy crowds. In the midst of the
excitement, Speyer, another large operator, became so insane that it
took five men to hold him. I sat on the roof of a Western Union booth
and watched the surging multitudes.

"'A Western Union man I knew came up and said to me: "Shake hands,
Edison. We're all right. We haven't got a cent to lose."'

"After the company with which our young inventor was connected had sold
out its inventions and improvements to the Gold and Stock Telegraph
Company, Mr. Edison produced a machine to print gold quotations instead
of merely indicating them. The attention of the president of the Gold
and Stock Company was attracted to the success of the wonderful young
inventor.

"Edison had produced quite a number of inventions. One of these was the
special ticker which was used many years in other large cities, because
it was so simple that it could be operated by men less expert than the
operators in New York. It was used also on the London