The daily newspapers and technical journals lost no time in bringing the road to public attention, and the New York Herald of June 25th was swift to suggest that here was the locomotive that would be "most pleasing to the average New Yorker, whose head has ached with noise, whose eyes have been filled with dust, or whose clothes have been ruined with oil." A couple of days later, the Daily Graphic illustrated and described the road and published a sketch of a one-hundred-horse-power electric locomotive for the use of the Pennsylvania Railroad between Perth Amboy and Rahway. Visitors, of course, were numerous, including many curious, sceptical railroad managers, few if any of whom except Villard could see the slightest use for the new motive power. There is, perhaps, some excuse for such indifference. No men in the world have more new inventions brought to them than railroad managers, and this was the rankest kind of novelty. It was not, indeed, until a year later, in May, 1881, that the first regular road collecting fares was put in operation--a little stretch of one and a half miles from Berlin to Lichterfelde, with one miniature motorcar. Edison was in reality doing some heavy electric-railway engineering, his apparatus full of ideas, suggestions, prophecies; but to the operators of long trunk lines it must have seemed utterly insignificant and "excellent fooling." Speaking of this situation, Mr. Edison says: "One day Frank Thomson, the President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, came out to see the electric light and the electric railway in operation. The latter was then about a mile long. He rode on it. At that time I was getting out plans to make an electric locomotive of three hundred horse-power with six-foot drivers, with the idea of showing people that they could dispense with their steam locomotives. Mr. Thomson made the objection that it was impracticable, and that it would be impossible to supplant steam. His great experience and standing threw a wet blanket on my hopes. But I thought he might perhaps be mistaken, as there had been many such instances on record. I continued to work on the plans, and about three years later I started to build the locomotive at the works at Goerck Street, and had it about finished when I was switched off on some other work. One of the reasons why I felt the electric railway to be eminently practical was that Henry Villard, the President of the Northern Pacific, said that one of the greatest things that could be done would be to build right-angle feeders into the wheat-fields of Dakota and bring in the wheat to the main lines, as the farmers then had to draw it from forty to eighty miles. There was a point where it would not pay to raise it at all; and large areas of the country were thus of no value. I conceived the idea of building a very light railroad of narrow gauge, and had got all the data as to the winds on the plains, and found that