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om for one hundred, all yelling that such and such a broker's wire was out of order and to fix it at once. It was pandemonium, and the man in charge became so excited that he lost control of all the knowledge he ever had. I went to the indicator and, having studied it thoroughly, knew where the trouble ought to be, and found it." "One of the innumerable contact springs had broken off and had fallen down between the two gear wheels and stopped the instrument; but it was not very noticeable. As I went out to tell the man in charge what the matter was, George Laws, the inventor of the system, appeared on the scene, the most excited person I had seen. He demanded of the man the cause of the trouble, but the man was speechless. I ventured to say that I knew what the trouble was, and he said, 'Fix it! Fix it! Be quick!' I removed the spring and set the contact wheels at zero; and the line, battery, and inspecting men scattered through the financial district to set the instruments. In about two hours, things were working again. Mr. Laws came to ask my name and what I was doing. I told him and he asked me to come to his private office the following day. He asked me a great many questions about the instruments and his system, and I showed him how he could simplify things generally. He then requested that I should come next day. On arrival, he stated at once that he had decided to put me in charge of the whole plant, and that my salary would be three hundred dollars a month." "This was such a violent jump from anything I had ever seen before, that it rather paralyzed me for a while. I thought it was too much to be lasting; but I determined to try and live up to that salary if twenty hours a day of hard work would do it." It is needless to say that he made good in the biggest and best sense of the word. It was at this time that Mr. Edison, now twenty-one years of age, invented an electric stock ticker for which he received forty thousand dollars. Always desiring to devote his entire time to inventive work, he now saw that with the aid of his forty thousand dollars it was possible to do so. Accordingly, a little later we see him constructing a laboratory one hundred feet long at Menlo Park, a little station twenty-five miles from Newark, New Jersey. Here for years, in company with his assistants, he has made inventions that have revolutionized the world. Finally, in 1886, his business had so seriously outgrown his qua
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