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Charles Batchelor pulling a passenger coach with an experimental electric locomotive.

   
Experimental electric railroad at Menlo Park, 13 May 1880.

Edison experimented with several uses of the electric motor. Here he and members of the laboratory staff test a small railway engine on a circular track of about 1½ miles at Menlo Park. In Germany similar ideas were being pursued by Werner Siemens. The first practical system was designed by Frank Sprague for a street railway in Richmond, VA, in 1887.
 

SI negative #80-16528
 
 

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The Challenge of Success
Before Forty
Changes At Forty
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The New Technical World
Fame And Its Distractions
Edison In His Eighties