ing. The first invention that he tried to sell was an electric vote recorder. It made voting faster and more accurate. But no one wanted to buy it. Today it is used in many states to record votes of legislators. (Allen pg. 45) He moved to New York City in the summer of 1869. He had no money. A friend let him sleep in a basement office below Wall Street. Edison spent a lot of time studying the stock market ticker. That was the machine that gave information about stock market prices. It was a spin-off of the Morse telegraph device. Once, Edison fixed a broken stock ticker so well that that the owners hired him to build a better one. Within a year he made the Edison Universal Stock Printer. Edison sold the rights for the stock ticker. He thought he might get paid around $4,000 for it. He got $40,000! With all this money, Edison started a business in Newark, New Jersey. He built stock tickers and high-speed printing telegraphs. At this shop he improved on the typewriter. Until Edison improved it, you could write faster than you could type. Edison was a poor financial manager. In his late 20's, he began to have money problems. After six years at his workshop in Newark, New Jersey, Edison asked his father to help build a new "invention factory". Edison built his new science laboratory at the village of Menlo Park, NJ. Now he and his two business partners could devote their full attention to inventing. Edison promised that he would build a small invention every ten days and a big invention every six months! He also said he would "take orders" for inventions. Abbott Pg. 3 They moved into the new building in March 1876. His first invention was an improvement on the telephone. Before Edison's improvement, people had to shout when they used the telephone. The new lab had around 60 workers. It didn't matter to Edison what a person's background was. If he thought someone had talent, that was enough. Edison achieved his greatest successes in this lab...
