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In order to view this proof accurately, the Overprint Preview Option must be checked in Acrobat Professional or Adobe Reader. Please contact your Customer Service Representative if you have questions about ἀnding the option. Job Name: -- /330792t XII. THE MAN AT MANHATTAN BEACH Young fellow here has made a gas car. -ALEX Dow ) 104. The Edison staff. On July 1, 1896, less than a month after Henry first chucka-chucked around town, Alex Dow left his post as manager of the city's Public Lighting plant (where Ford had vainly applied for work) and took over the management of the Edison operation in Detroit . This picture was probably taken soon after Dow came. Dow is in the center, with full droopdrawers mustache, Henry to the right in work ;acket, and ;ust behind Henry, his friend, Ward Noble. We cannot be quite sure of the others. Dow was a straight-thinking, no-nonsense businessman, full of the general righteousness of electricity. He was a firm friend to Henry, but he took a dim view of any gas-engine experiments that Ford conducted within the Edison plant. "Out," said Dow. The impression we get-and this sounds very much like Henry-is that Ford had gradually expanded his bench-with-a-vise, for the repair of Edison machinery, to become a sort of personal shop, adjunct both to the little basement shop across the street, and to the Bagley Avenue workshop. He had everything set up so he could putter away on automotive problems wherever he was. No young man can possibly draw from Henry's career any moral lessons about being to work on time, keeping regular hours, or such nonsense-Henry was free as a bird and did his own work on the company premises and on company time. Dow's real worry seems to have been that Henry would blow the place up, for gasoline was much feared as a mysterious and tricky fluid; for example , when little Edsel Ford once playfully took the cap off a can of gasoline, Jim Bishop 81 grabbed him in horror, expecting an immediate explosion. 105. Henry goes to a convention, 1896. Dow's letter is evidence of Ford's stature; the only delegates from Detroit were Dow himself, Ford, and the company attorney, Hoyt Post. 106. Hoyt Post of the firm of Wilkinson, Post and Oxtoby, Attorneys at Law. 107. Proceedings of the Convention. As can be seen, Dow was a member of the Executive Committee of the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies and gave one of the chief papers before the delegates, among whom was Thomas A. Edison himself. One other name may ring a bell, although not qUite the bell of nostalgia: Samuel Insull, Edison's onetime secretary, was elected as the new president of the associationInsull , who would become a multimillionaire, a buyer of art masterpieces, a patron of the Chicago Opera; who would pyramid huge utility holding companies into the gigantic structure that collapsed in the crash of 1929; and who, fleeing the wrath of stockholders and government , would die in plush exile in France in 1938. Another great man also present (as we shall see) but not listed here, was Charles P. Steinmetz, a hunchback, already on his painwracked way as an even greater genius in electricity than Edison. The list of the Detroit delegation appears seven lines from the bottom. 108. The Oriental Hotel at Manhattan Beach, New York City. This picture gives a lively sense of the time: summer 1896. The monster spread of the building, the enormous sweep of the veranda stretching infinitely, the turrets, the acres of striped awnings, the whole Chinese birds'-nest effect, the captain's walks atop it all-this is late Victorian America on the eastern sea coast. Note particularly the style and shape of the lamp-posts: they were a clue in identifying the following pictures. When these first prints were carefully made in the Archives they were studied with equal parts of excitement and bafHement: here was Henry, here was Thomas Edison, on the same roll of film. But the pictures did not check out with the much-photographed meetings between the two, from around 1911 on through In order to view this proof accurately, the Overprint Preview Option must be checked in Acrobat Professional or Adobe Reader. Please contact your Customer Service Representative if you have questions about ἀnding the option. Job Name: -- /330792t mm. peCK. Prnh!eni. 111. r;.. Barstow, Esq. DaM' Sir, of this...

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