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g paid in. He was vice-president, electrician, treasurer, and man of all work, and was to get fifty dollars a week whenever the condition of the company warranted it. One small room was both business office and laboratory. He earned a little money by building motors, and this enabled him, in 1886, to begin a series of experiments with motors of twelve horse-power. Officials from the Manhattan Elevated were interested in the trials, and one day Jay Gould came to see the new motors that could drive a truck along sixty feet of track. The day Gould visited him, Sprague resolved to test the motor to the utmost. In suddenly reversing the current, an excess blew out the safety-catch, causing a big noise and a blinding flash of light. Gould gazed a moment, then hurried from the room and never came back. Sprague was somewhat discouraged, but his confidence came back when Superintendent Chinnock, of the Pearl Street Edison station, offered him thirty thousand dollars for a one-sixth interest in the company. The offer was refused, though at the time Sprague did not have money enough to pay a month's board. "Well," said the surprised Chinnock, "you're a fool!" A few days later a successful trial was made before Cyrus W. Field, and Chinnock came back with an offer of twenty-five thousand dollars for a one-twelfth share. This was accepted, and later another twelfth was sold for a slightly higher price. The motors used in these experiments were the forerunners of the thousands now used on the trolley systems all over the world. The first big public exhibition was given in August, 1887, and the New York _Sun_ said next day: They tried an electric car on Fourth Avenue yesterday. It created an amount of surprise and consternation from Thirty-Second Street to One Hundred and Seventeenth Street that was something like that caused by the first steamboat on the Hudson. Small boys yelled "Dynamite!" and "Rats!" and similar appreciative remarks until they were hoarse. Newly appointed policemen debated arresting it, but went no further. The car horses which were met on the other track kicked, without exception, as was natural, over an invention which threatens to relegate them to the sausage factory. All that happened only nineteen years ago. To-day the trolley-lines of the country employ more than seventy thousand men. The same year Sprague's company got the contract for the building
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