The Electric Railway - 8
But down to the moment of the preparation of this biography, Edison has retained an
active interest in transportation problems, and his latest work has been that of reviving
the use of the storage battery for street-car purposes. At one time there were a number of
storage-battery lines and cars in operation in such cities as Washington, New York,
Chicago, and Boston; but the costs of operation and maintenance were found to be
inordinately high as compared with those of the direct-supply methods, and the battery
cars all disappeared. The need for them under many conditions remained, as, for
example, in places in Greater New York where the overhead trolley wires are forbidden
as objectionable, and where the ground is too wet or too often submerged to permit of the
conduit with the slot. Some of the roads in Greater New York have been anxious to
secure such cars, and, as usual, the most resourceful electrical engineer and inventor of
his times has made the effort. A special experimental track has been laid at the Orange
laboratory, and a car equipped with the Edison storage battery and other devices has been
put under severe and extended trial there and in New York.
Menlo Park, in ruin and decay, affords no traces of the early Edison electric-railway
work, but the crude little locomotive built by Charles T. Hughes was rescued from
destruction, and has become the property of the Pratt Institute, of Brooklyn, towhose
thousands of technical students it is a constant example and incentive. It was loaned in
1904 to the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, and by it exhibited as part of
the historical Edison collection at the St. Louis Exposition.
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