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Show Problem Was Easy for Edison i Wizard Quickly Told New York Commission Com-mission Just How Electric Current Cur-rent Wires Could Be Placed Underground. When New York city, back In the ate eighties, passed an ordinance forbidding for-bidding the stringing of telegraph and telephone wires overhead r.nd ordering order-ing the miles of wires already overhead over-head to be placed underground a commission com-mission was appointed to take charge of the work of burying them. A member mem-ber of this commission was the late Jacob Hess, at one time very prominent promi-nent as a Republican organization leader in New York, and one of the group of very energet!? young men who were trained in politics by Chester Ches-ter A. Arthur when he was a power in New York cky politics. "The most impressive evidence I ever had of Edison's genius I received when I was a member of what I believe be-lieve was the first authoritative body to deal with the problem of laying a city's wires underground," said Mr. Hess to me a few years before his death. "And, by the way, our work as a commission was closely followed by municipal authorities throughout the United States and also by some of the leading municipal experts of Europe. "Well, when we started out we knew that It wouldn't do just to place the wires in trenches and let It go at that; anybody knows that wires so placed would not work and would soon be destroyed. So we had authority au-thority to spend money to make experiments ex-periments in order to get at least one satisfactory system of burying the wires, and to enter Into contracts with inventors of satisfactory systems. One of our first moves, therefore, was to advertise our needs. "You can't Imagine the number of Inventions that were brought to our attention they simply were legion, as the saying is. Most of them were worthless on their face, and we were asked by their inventors all sorts of prices, ranging from a few dollars away up into the thousands. One of the best of the inventions, as we thought, was so expensive that its cost alone made its use prohibitive. "One day, after we had been struggling strug-gling with the problem for weeks, and were as far away from solving it apparently ap-parently as when we first tackled It, it was suggested that we call on Thomas Thom-as A. Edison and ask him to invpnt something that we could use, or, at least, give us a suggestion that' we could have worked out. We wrote him, and he invited us to visit him at his laboratory in New Jersey. K "Presenting ourselves before him at the appointed time, we found him wearing an old linen duster and a much battered strrw hat. As we stated the object of our call a queer little smile passed over his features. Finally, he said: 'I suppose you have had all sorts of inventions offered to you?' "We nodded acquiescence. " 'Well,' he said, 'chuck 'em all out. Most of them are no good, and, besides, be-sides, you don't need any invention.' "We looked surprised and Edison was clearly amused at our astonishment. astonish-ment. Then he proceeded to elucidate. 'All you have to do, gentlemen. Is to insulate your wues, draw them through the cheapest thing on earth, lead pipes, run your pipes through channels or galleries under the street, and you've got the whole thing done.' '"luere he was telling us in that simple, off-hand way how tj do the thing we had spent the best part of a year puzzling over; for none of us doubted that he had solved the problem, prob-lem, and afterward the experiments which we conducted proved conclusively con-clusively that he had. ''Before we left Edison we asked him what his bill was for the advice he had given us. ."'Not a cent,' he replied. 'Do you suppose I'd stick you for so simple a thing as that' "And yet," concluded Mr. Hess, "the plan that Edison gave us off-hand ani free gratis for nothing is the one now universally employed when wires ar, to be placed underground." (Copyright. 1910. by E. J. Edwards.) |