"On April 29, 1857, with an electric locomotive on which he had installed a large reciprocating motor developing over 16 horse-power, Professor Page made a trial trip along the track of the Washington and Baltimore Railroad, starting from Washington. In order to obtain current for energization, the motor was equipped with one hundred cells of Grove nitric-acid battery, each having as one element a platinum plate eleven inches square, dipped in the acid. Bladensburg, a distance of about five and one-quarter miles, was reached in thirty-nine minutes, and a maximum speed of nineteen miles an hour was attained; the entire trip to and from Bladensburg occupied one hour and fifty-eight minutes. But many disasters happened to the batteries. Some of the cells cracked wide open, and jolts due to inequalities of track threw the batteries out of working order. These experiments must have been extremely costly, and no little discouragement among people in general attended this failure; but Professor Page was not daunted, and for some years continued his work on electric motors, displaying great ingenuity, but not able, apparently, to give up the reciprocating principle." The invention of the commercial dynamo, shortly after the middle of the nineteenth century, opened the era of practical electric-railway construction on both sides of the Atlantic. The German experimenters, Siemens and Halske, and later the American, Stephen D. Field, paved the way by numerous experiments and discoveries. It was not until about 1880, however, that the idea of using a third rail for transmitting the current was conceived. Hitherto, most of the inventors had attempted to use one rail as a receiving part of the circuit to the motor, the other rail completing the return part of the circuit. And it was several years after the idea of the third rail had germinated before the attempts to utilize one of the traction rails for conveying the current was abandoned. THE EDISON ELECTRIC LOCOMOTIVE In 1880, Mr. Thomas A. Edison, at Menlo Park, New Jersey, perfected a series of electric-railway motors and locomotives that were actually employed in hauling freight and passengers. The following year Mr. Edison made a contract with Mr. Henry Villard, which stipulated that the inventor was to construct an electric railway at least two miles and a half in length, which was to be equipped with two locomotives and three cars, one locomotive for freight and one for passengers, the passenger locomotive to have a capacity of sixty miles an hour. It was agreed that if the experiment with this railway proved successful Mr. Villard was to reimburse Mr. Edison for the actual outlay, and to install at least fifty miles of electric road in the wheat regions of the Northwest.