at at the Orange plant there are produced at this time
over eight million feet of motion-picture film per year. And Edison's
company is only one of many producers.

Another of the industries at the Orange works is the manufacture of
projecting kinetoscopes, by means of which the motion pictures are
shown. While this of itself is also a business of considerable magnitude
in its aggregate yearly transactions, it calls for no special comment
in regard to commercial production, except to note that a corps of
experimenters is constantly employed refining and perfecting details
of the machine. Its basic features of operation as conceived by Edison
remain unchanged.

On coming to consider the Edison battery enterprises, we must perforce
extend the territorial view to include a special chemical-manufacturing
plant, which is in reality a branch of the laboratory and the Orange
works, although actually situated about three miles away.

Both the primary and the storage battery employ certain chemical
products as essential parts of their elements, and indeed owe their very
existence to the peculiar preparation and quality of such products, as
exemplified by Edison's years of experimentation and research. Hence the
establishment of his own chemical works at Silver Lake, where, under his
personal supervision, the manufacture of these products is carried on
in charge of specially trained experts. At the present writing the
plant covers about seven acres of ground; but there is ample room for
expansion, as Edison, with wise forethought, secured over forty acres of
land, so as to be prepared for developments.

Not only is the Silver Lake works used for the manufacture of the
chemical substances employed in the batteries, but it is the plant at
which the Edison primary battery is wholly assembled and made up for
distribution to customers. This in itself is a business of no small
magnitude, having grown steadily on its merits year by year until it
has now arrived at a point where its sales run into the hundreds of
thousands of cells per annum, furnished largely to the steam railroads
of the country for their signal service.

As to the storage battery, the plant at Silver Lake is responsible only
for the production of the chemical compounds, nickel-hydrate and iron
oxide, which enter into its construction. All the mechanical parts,
the nickel plating, the manufacture of nickel flake, the assembling and
testing, are carried on at the O