me year an exhibit was made at the
Chicago Railway Exposition, which attracted attention throughout
the country, and did much to stimulate the growing interest in
electric-railway work. With the aid of Messrs. F. B. Rae, C. L. Healy,
and C. O. Mailloux a track and locomotive were constructed for the
company by Mr. Field and put in service in the gallery of the main
exhibition building. The track curved sharply at either end on a radius
of fifty-six feet, and the length was about one-third of a mile. The
locomotive named "The Judge," after Justice Field, an uncle of Stephen
D. Field, took current from a central rail between the two outer rails,
that were the return circuit, the contact being a rubbing wire brush on
each side of the "third rail," answering the same purpose as the contact
shoe of later date. The locomotive weighed three tons, was twelve feet
long, five feet wide, and made a speed of nine miles an hour with a
trailer car for passengers. Starting on June 5th, when the exhibition
closed on June 23d this tiny but typical road had operated for over 118
hours, had made over 446 miles, and had carried 26,805 passengers. After
the exposition closed the outfit was taken during the same year to
the exposition at Louisville, Kentucky, where it was also successful,
carrying a large number of passengers. It deserves note that at Chicago
regular railway tickets were issued to paying passengers, the first ever
employed on American electric railways.

With this modest but brilliant demonstration, to which the illustrious
names of Edison and Field were attached, began the outburst of
excitement over electric railways, very much like the eras of
speculation and exploitation that attended only a few years earlier
the introduction of the telephone and the electric light, but with such
significant results that the capitalization of electric roads in America
is now over $4,000,000,000, or twice as much as that of the other two
arts combined. There was a tremendous rush into the electric-railway
field after 1883, and an outburst of inventive activity that has rarely,
if ever, been equalled. It is remarkable that, except Siemens, no
European achieved fame in this early work, while from America the ideas
and appliances of Edison, Van Depoele, Sprague, Field, Daft, and Short
have been carried and adopted all over the world.

Mr. Edison was consulting electrician for the Electric Railway Company,
but neither a director nor an execu