All About Inventions and Discoveries
The Romance of modern scientific and mechanical Achievements

92 All About Inventions railway magnates of the day. Being on terms of close friendship with Edison, he prevailed upon the latter to develop his idea. He went so far as to indicate its possible spheres of application in conjunction with steam roads—for the maintenance of railway com- munication through sparsely peopled and undeveloped territories, where it would not pay to lay down steam- operated railways. This railway magnate displayed his confidence in the new idea to such a degree as to undertake the building and equipping of fifty miles of electric railways to serve as feeders to the system over which he had control, provided Edison completed experiments upon a more elaborate scale and attained speeds of sixty miles an hour. In the meantime things began to move in Europe, and, curiously enough, the British were more enterpris- ing in this direction than is generally supposed. Hard on the heels of the demonstration at the Berlin Ex- hibition, a company was organised to build a rail- way six miles long in County Antrim, to be electrically operated. While this project was in hand a small railway one and a half miles in length was laid down between Lichterfelde and Berlin, which was opened to the public, and was thus the first electric line to be brought into service for the benefit of the com- munity. About the same time permission was granted to build a short length of line along the foreshore of Brighton, which was opened to the public in 1883, and this was the first electric railway to be opened in England, the Irish railway preceding it by a few months. Edison, continuing his experiments, built a second locomotive in 1882. This bore a closer resemblance