It was his success with a device for printing stock quotations upon paper tape that finally induced several New York capitalists to accept Edison's offer to experiment with the incandescent electric light, they to pay the expense of the experiments and share in the inventions if any were made. For the sake of quiet Edison moved out to Menlo Park, a little station on the Pennsylvania road about twenty-five miles beyond Newark, and built a shop twenty-eight feet wide, one hundred feet long, and two stories high. It was here that I first made his acquaintance, in January, 1879, soon after the newspapers had announced that he had solved the problem of the electric light. It may be remembered that gas stock tumbled in price at that time, and there was a rush to sell before the new light should displace gas altogether. One cold day I climbed the hill from the station, and once past the reception-room, in which every new-comer was carefully scrutinized, for inventors are apt to have odds and ends lying about that they do not want seen by everyone, I found myself in a long big work-shop. To anyone accustomed to the orderly appearance of the ideal machine-shop, it presented a curious appearance, for evidently half the machines in it--forges, lathes, furnaces, retorts, etc.--were dismantled for the moment and useless. Half a dozen workmen were busy in an apparently aimless manner. Upstairs, in a room devoted to chemical experiments, I found Edison himself. He is to-day just what he was then. Prosperity has not changed him in the least, except perhaps in one particular. In those days of struggle the inventor was far less affable with visitors than he is to-day. One felt instinctively that he was a man struggling to accomplish some serious task to which he was devoting every waking thought and probably dreaming about it at night. As I strode across the laboratory in the direction indicated by one of the workmen present, a compactly built but not tall man, with rather a boyish, clean-shaven face, prematurely old, was holding a vial of some liquid up to the light. He had on a blouse such as chemists wear, but it was hardly necessary, as his clothes were well stained with acids; his hands were covered with some oil with which his hair was liberally streaked, as he had a habit of wiping his fingers upon his head. "Good clothes are wasted upon me," he once explained to me. "I feel it is wrong to wear any, and I never put on a new suit when I can help it." Edison has been slightly deaf for a number of years, and like all persons of defective hearing, closely watches anyone with whom he talks. His patience with visitors is proverbial, and provided any intelligence is shown, he will plunge into long explanations. As he goes on from point to point, warming up to his subject, he is sometimes quite oblivious to the fact that it is all lost upon his visitor until brought back by some question or comment which shows that he might as well talk Sanskrit. Then he