Introduction Of The Edison Electric Light - 13
"At these new works our orders were far in excess of our capital to handle the business,
and both Mr. Insull and I were afraid we might get into trouble for lack of money. Mr.
Insull was then my business manager, running the whole thing; and, therefore, when Mr.
Henry Villard and his syndicate offered to buy us out, we concluded it was better to be
sure than be sorry; so we sold out for a large sum. Villard was a very aggressive man
with big ideas, but I could never quite understand him. He had no sense of humor. I
remember one time we were going up on the Hudson River boat to inspect the works, and
with us was Mr. Henderson, our chief engineer, who was certainly the best raconteur of
funny stories I ever knew. We sat at the tail-end of the boat, and he started in to tell funny
stories. Villard could not see a single point, and scarcely laughed at all; and Henderson
became so disconcerted he had to give it up. It was the same way with Gould. In the early
telegraph days I remember going with him to see Mackay in "The Impecunious Country
Editor." It was very funny, full of amusing and absurd situations; but Gould never smiled
once."
The formation of the Edison General Electric Company involved the consolidation of the
immediate Edison manufacturing interests in electric light and power, with a
capitalization of $12,000,000, now a relatively modest sum; but in those days the amount
was large, and the combination caused a great deal of newspaper comment as to such a
coinage of brain power. The next step came with the creation of the great General
Electric Company of to-day, a combination of the Edison, Thomson-Houston, and Brush
lighting interests in manufacture, which to this day maintains the ever-growing plants at
Harrison, Lynn, and Schenectady, and there employs from twenty to twenty-five
thousand people.
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