Edison told him repair the
old machines and prohibited the purchase new ones."
His appeals fell deaf ears. The equipment of
the West Orange laboratory had once been the envy other the
research institutions, but was the other way around. Its numbers had grown from few hundred
men the nineteenth century thousands the twentieth. tried persuade Edison to
buy more modern machinery for the machine shops, arguing that
the lab should "the last word high class machine shops. In
1900 there were about 3,000 men, and the time the World
War there were about 8,000. While
industrial research laboratories and AT&T spent freely on
new scientific equipment, Constable had continually petition
the management for new machines. 63
.
The focus the West Orange complex and the lab had
turned "steady output manufactured articles" and Edison
claimed have dept which men are employed perfect
inventions.XII-32
Newark and New York. a
result Edison's parsimony, visitors the Edison National
Historic Site can view the same machine tools first installed
in the lab 1887. Around the factories, rough and
ready community had sprung up, with bars and boarding houses. Long gone were the days experiments into
pyro-magnetic generators and flying machines.
Weekend nights were punctuated the drunken rowdiness the
workers." Instead, trained engineers examined the
performance and cost the hair the brushes sold with
62
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