A glimpse at some of young Edison's first methods as a manufacturer is interesting. He says: "Nearly all my men were on piece-work, and I allowed them to make good wages, and never cut until the pay became absurdly high as they got more expert. I kept no books. I had two hooks. All the bills and accounts I owed I jabbed on one hook, and memoranda of all owed to myself I put on the other. When some of the bills fell due, and I couldn't deliver tickers to get a supply of money, I gave a note. When the notes were due a messenger came around from the bank with the note and a protest pinned to it for one dollar and twenty-five cents. Then I would go to New York and get an advance or pay the note if I had the money. This method of giving notes for my accounts and having all notes protested I kept up over two years, yet my credit was fine. Every store I traded with was always glad to furnish goods, perhaps in amazed admiration of my system of doing business, which was certainly new." After a while Edison got a bookkeeper, whose vagaries made him look back with regret on the earlier, primitive method. "The first three months I had him go over the books to find out how much we had made. He reported three thousand dollars. I gave a supper to some of my men to celebrate this, only to be told two days afterward that he had made a mistake, and that we had lost five hundred dollars; and then a few days after that he came to me again and said he was all mixed up, and now found that we had made over seven thousand dollars." Edison changed bookkeepers, but never afterward counted anything real profit until he had paid all his debts and had the profits in the bank. Among the men who have worked with Edison in his various shops from time to time, there have always been those who later have risen to some notable degree of prominence in the electrical arts. This early shop was no exception. At a single bench there worked three men since rich or prominent. One was Sigmund Bergmann, for a time partner with Edison in his lighting developments in the United States, and now head and principal owner of electrical works in Berlin, employing ten thousand men. The next man adjacent was John Kruesi, afterward engineer of the great General Electric Works at Schenectady. A third was Schuckert, who left the bench to settle up his father's little estate at Nuremberg, stayed there and founded electrical factories which became the third largest in Germany, their proprietor dying very wealthy. "I gave them a good training as to working hours and hustling," says Edison. And this is equally true as applied to many scores of others who have worked with him. X A BUSY YOUNG INVENTOR