But to return to our story. Just before Christmas in 1880 the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York was organized, and a license was issued to it for the use of the Edison patents on Manhattan Island. The work for the new station now commenced in real earnest. A double building at 255 and 257 Pearl Street was purchased, and the inside of one half was taken out and a strong steel structure was erected inside the walls. Work on the maps and plans for the underground network of conductors was continued at Menlo Park. Mr. Edison started his factories for making dynamos, lamps, underground conductors, sockets, switches, meters, and other details. Thus, the wheels of industry were humming merrily in preparation for the installation of the system. Every detail received Edison's personal care and consideration. He had plenty of competent men, but he deemed nothing too small or insignificant for his attention in this important undertaking. In the fall of 1881 the laying of the underground conductors was begun and pushed forward with frantic energy. Here again Edison left nothing to chance. Although he had a thousand things to occupy his mind he also superintended this work. He did not stand around and give orders, but worked with the men in the trenches day and night helping to lay tubes, filling up junction boxes, and taking part in all the infinite detail. He would work till he felt the need of a little rest. Then he would go off to the station building in Pearl Street, throw an overcoat on a pile of iron tubes, lie down and sleep a few hours, rising to resume work with the first gang. It is worth pausing just a moment to glance at this man taking a fitful rest on a pile of iron pipe in a dingy building. His name is on the tip of the world's tongue. Distinguished scientists from every part of Europe seek him eagerly. He has just been decorated and awarded high honors by the French government. He is the inventor of wonderful new apparatus and the exploiter of novel and successful arts. The magic of his achievements and the rumors of what is being done have caused a wild drop in gas securities and a sensational rise in his own electric-light stock from one hundred dollars to thirty-five hundred a share. Yet these things do not at all affect his slumber or his democratic simplicity, for in that, as in everything else, he is attending strictly to business, "doing the thing that is next to him." The laying of the underground conductors was interrupted by frost in the winter of 1881, but in the following spring the work was renewed with great energy until there had been laid over eighty thousand feet. In the mean time the buildings of the district were being wired for lamps, and the machine-works had been busy on the building of three of the "Jumbo" dynamos for the station. These were larger than the great dynamo that had been sent to Paris.