t only a great pioneer
electrical manufacturer, but one of the founders of the wire-drawing and
brass-working industry, Edison said: "Wallace was one of the earliest
pioneers in electrical matters in this country. He has done a great deal
of good work, for which others have received the credit; and the
work which he did in the early days of electric lighting others
have benefited by largely, and he has been crowded to one side and
forgotten." Associated in all this work with Wallace at Ansonia was
Prof. Moses G. Farmer, famous for the introduction of the fire-alarm
system; as the discoverer of the self-exciting principle of the modern
dynamo; as a pioneer experimenter in the electric-railway field; as a
telegraph engineer, and as a lecturer on mines and explosives to
naval classes at Newport. During 1858, Farmer, who, like Edison, was a
ceaseless investigator, had made a series of studies upon the production
of light by electricity, and had even invented an automatic regulator
by which a number of platinum lamps in multiple arc could be kept at
uniform voltage for any length of time. In July, 1859, he lit up one of
the rooms of his house at Salem, Massachusetts, every evening with such
lamps, using in them small pieces of platinum and iridium wire, which
were made to incandesce by means of current from primary batteries.
Farmer was not one of the party that memorable day in September, but his
work was known through his intimate connection with Wallace, and there
is no doubt that reference was made to it. Such work had not led
very far, the "lamps" were hopelessly short-lived, and everything was
obviously experimental; but it was all helpful and suggestive to one
whose open mind refused no hint from any quarter.

At the commencement of his new attempts, Edison returned to his
experiments with carbon as an incandescent burner for a lamp, and made
a very large number of trials, all in vacuo. Not only were the ordinary
strip paper carbons tried again, but tissue-paper coated with tar and
lampblack was rolled into thin sticks, like knitting-needles, carbonized
and raised to incandescence in vacuo. Edison also tried hard carbon,
wood carbons, and almost every conceivable variety of paper carbon in
like manner. With the best vacuum that he could then get by means of the
ordinary air-pump, the carbons would last, at the most, only from ten to
fifteen minutes in a state of incandescence. Such results were evidently
not of commer