If a handy-book of electricity like this had fallen into the hands of Thomas A. Edison when he was a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railway, or when he was a telegraph operator, he would have devoured it with the utmost eagerness. To be sure, at that time, in the early sixties, all that we knew of electricity and its applications could have been told in a very brief com.

It was an almost unknown field, and the crude form of the telegraph then in use represented its most important application. There were no electric lights; there was no telephone or phonograph; there were no electric motors. Telegraphing, itself, was a slow and difficult process. All the conditions were as far removed as possible from the broad field of applied electricity indicated in this book.

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