This early shop affords an illustration of the manner in which Edison
has made a deep impression on the personnel of the electrical arts. At
a single bench there worked three men since rich or prominent. One
was Sigmund Bergmann, for a time partner with Edison in his lighting
developments in the United States, and now head and principal owner
of electrical works in Berlin employing ten thousand men. The next
man adjacent was John Kruesi, afterward engineer of the great General
Electric Works at Schenectady. A third was Schuckert, who left the bench
to settle up his father's little estate at Nuremberg, stayed there and
founded electrical factories, which became the third largest in Germany,
their proprietor dying very wealthy. "I gave them a good training as
to working hours and hustling," says their quondam master; and this is
equally true as applied to many scores of others working in companies
bearing the Edison name or organized under Edison patents. It is
curiously significant in this connection that of the twenty-one
presidents of the national society, the American Institute of Electrical
Engineers, founded in 1884, eight have been intimately associated with
Edison--namely, Norvin Green and F. L. Pope, as business colleagues of
the days of which we now write; while Messrs. Frank J. Sprague, T. C.
Martin, A. E. Kennelly, S. S. Wheeler, John W. Lieb, Jr., and Louis A.
Ferguson have all been at one time or another in the Edison employ. The
remark was once made that if a famous American teacher sat at one end
of a log and a student at the other end, the elements of a successful
university were present. It is equally true that in Edison and the many
men who have graduated from his stern school of endeavor, America has
had its foremost seat of electrical engineering.