The Social Side Of Edison -5
While in Paris, Edison had met Sir John Pender, the English "cable king," and had
received an invitation from him to make a visit to his country residence: "Sir John
Pender, the master of the cable system of the world at that time, I met in Paris. I think he
must have lived among a lot of people who were very solemn, because I went out riding
with him in the Bois de Boulogne and started in to tell him American stories. Although
he was a Scotchman he laughed immoderately. He had the faculty of understanding and
quickly seeing the point of the stories; and for three days after I could not get rid of him.
Finally I made him a promise that I would go to his country house at Foot's Cray, near
London. So I went there, and spent two or three days telling him stories.
"While at Foot's Cray, I met some of the backers of Ferranti, then putting up a gigantic
alternating- current dynamo near London to send ten or fifteen thousand volts up into the
main district of the city for electric lighting. I think Pender was interested. At any rate the
people invited to dinner were very much interested, and they questioned me as to what I
thought of the proposition. I said I hadn't any thought about it, and could not give any
opinion until I saw it. So I was taken up to London to see the dynamo in course of
construction and the methods employed; and they insisted I should give them some
expression of my views. While I gave them my opinion, it was reluctantly; I did not want
to do so. I thought that commercially the thing was too ambitious, that Ferranti's ideas
were too big, just then; that he ought to have started a little smaller until he was sure. I
understand that this installation was not commercially successful, as there were a great
many troubles. But Ferranti had good ideas, and he was no small man."
Incidentally it may be noted here that during the same year (1889) the various
manufacturing Edison lighting interests in America were brought together, under the
leadership of Mr. Henry Villard, and consolidated in the Edison General Electric
Company with a capital of no less than $12,000,000 on an eight- per-cent.-dividend basis.
The numerous Edison central stations all over the country represented much more than
that sum, and made a splendid outlet for the product of the factories. A few years later
came the consolidation with the Thomson-Houston interests in the General Electric
Company, which under the brilliant and vigorous management of President C. A. Coffin
has become one of the greatest manufacturing institutions of the country, with an output
of apparatus reaching toward $75,000,000 annually. The net result of both financial
operations was, however, to detach Edison from the special field of invention to which he
had given so many of his most fruitful years; and to close very definitely that chapter of
his life, leaving him free to develop other ideas and interests as set forth in these volumes.
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