contributions. Stephen
D. Field of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, had a patent which the Edison
interests found it necessary to acquire; C. J. Van Depoele and Leo Daft
made important contributions to the trolley system. In Cleveland in
1884 an electric railway on a small scale was opened to the public. But
Sprague's first electric railway, built at Richmond, Virginia, in
1887, as a complete system, is generally hailed as the true pioneer of
electric transportation in the United States. Thereafter the electric
railway spread quickly over the land, obliterating the old horsecars and
greatly enlarging the circumference of the city. Moreover, on the steam
roads, at all the great terminals, and wherever there were tunnels to be
passed through, the old giant steam engine in time yielded place to the
electric motor.

The application of the electric motor to the "vertical railway," or
elevator, made possible the steel skyscraper. The elevator, of course,
is an old device. It was improved and developed in America by Elisha
Graves Otis, an inventor who lived and died before the Civil War and
whose sons afterward erected a great business on foundations laid by
him. The first Otis elevators were moved by steam or hydraulic power.
They were slow, noisy, and difficult of control. After the electric
motor came in; the elevator soon changed its character and adapted
itself to the imperative demands of the towering, skeleton-framed
buildings which were rising in every city.

Edison, already famous as "the Wizard of Menlo Park," established his
factories and laboratories at West Orange, New Jersey, in 1887, whence
he has since sent forth a constant stream of inventions, some new and
startling, others improvements on old devices. The achievements of
several other inventors in the electrical field have been only less
noteworthy than his. The new profession of electrical engineering called
to its service great numbers of able men. Manufacturers of electrical
machinery established research departments and employed inventors. The
times had indeed changed since the day when Morse, as a student at
Yale College, chose art instead of electricity as his calling, because
electricity afforded him no means of livelihood.

From Edison's plant in 1903 came a new type of the storage battery,
which he afterwards improved. The storage battery, as every one knows,
is used in the propulsion of electric vehicles and boats, in the
operation of block-signals,