In this way Edison invented the electric light and evolved the central station that should provide the current wherever it was needed. At the same time he had worked out countless adjuncts to it, the use of the fine copper thread to serve as a fuse wire and prevent short-circuiting, the meter, consisting of a small glass cell, containing a solution in which two plates of zinc are placed, and which shows how much current is supplied, the weighing voltameter, and other instruments for estimating the current, and improvements on the motors and engines. There was no field remotely connected with electric lighting that he did not enter. Yet as soon as the invention was actually before the world business competitors sprang up on every hand. There was more litigation over this than over any other of Edison’s inventions. “I fought for the lamp for fourteen years,” he said, “and when I finally won my rights there were but three years of the allotted seventeen left for my patent to live. Now it has become the property of anybody and everybody.” [Illustration: EDISON AND THE EARLY PHONOGRAPH] Edison had always wanted a model laboratory, one that should be fitted with the most perfect instruments obtainable, and supplied with all the materials he could possibly require in any of his extraordinary experiments. In 1886 he bought a house in Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, and near the house ten acres of land, on which he built the laboratory of his dreams. Here he had a large force of skilled workmen constantly engaged in developing his ideas, and the expenses were paid by the many commercial companies in which he was interested, and which profited by the improvements he was continually making in their machinery. Many volumes might be written to tell of the “Wizard’s” achievements. There has been no inventor who has covered such a field, and each step he takes opens new and fascinating vistas to his ever-inquiring eyes. Electricity is always his main study, and electricity he expects in time will revolutionize modern life by making heat, power, and light practically as cheap as air. But other subjects have concerned him almost as much. He ranges from new processes for making guns to the supplying of ready-made houses built of cement. Everything interests him, every object tempts him to try his hand at improving on it.