e, and
the combination caused a great deal of newspaper comment as to such
a coinage of brain power. The next step came with the creation of the
great General Electric Company of to-day, a combination of the Edison,
Thomson-Houston, and Brush lighting interests in manufacture, which
to this day maintains the ever-growing plants at Harrison, Lynn, and
Schenectady, and there employs from twenty to twenty-five thousand
people.

CHAPTER XVI

THE FIRST EDISON CENTRAL STATION

A NOTED inventor once said at the end of a lifetime of fighting to
defend his rights, that he found there were three stages in all great
inventions: the first, in which people said the thing could not be done;
the second, in which they said anybody could do it; and the third,
in which they said it had always been done by everybody. In his
central-station work Edison has had very much this kind of experience;
for while many of his opponents came to acknowledge the novelty and
utility of his plans, and gave him unstinted praise, there are doubtless
others who to this day profess to look upon him merely as an adapter.
How different the view of so eminent a scientist as Lord Kelvin was,
may be appreciated from his remark when in later years, in reply to the
question why some one else did not invent so obvious and simple a thing
as the Feeder System, he said: "The only answer I can think of is that
no one else was Edison."

Undaunted by the attitude of doubt and the predictions of impossibility,
Edison had pushed on until he was now able to realize all his ideas as
to the establishment of a central station in the work that culminated
in New York City in 1882. After he had conceived the broad plan, his
ambition was to create the initial plant on Manhattan Island, where it
would be convenient of access for watching its operation, and where the
demonstration of its practicability would have influence in financial
circles. The first intention was to cover a district extending from
Canal Street on the north to Wall Street on the south; but Edison
soon realized that this territory was too extensive for the initial
experiment, and he decided finally upon the district included between
Wall, Nassau, Spruce, and Ferry streets, Peck Slip and the East River,
an area nearly a square mile in extent. One of the preliminary steps
taken to enable him to figure on such a station and system was to have
men go through this district on various days and note the number o