The hard truth is that anyone could've put the battery in your C 250 cabinet to power the Edison
Electric Automatic Stop (the company
never referred to this mechanism as a "Duncan" anything), at any point during the time period when the Burgess battery was produced. When did they (Burgess) begin producing their own labeled No.6 dry cell, and for how long were they produced? The National Carbon Company began marketing its dry cell in 1896, trademarked with the name "Columbia", and
"...was the first company to successfully manufacture and distribute sealed dry cell batteries on a large scale." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Carbon_Company.
In my mind, there's no reason to believe the Edison co. would've used an outwardly
recognizable competitor's product, especially since the Edison Storage Battery Company produced a wide variety of batteries for a wide variety of tasks, and we all know how territorial T.A.E. was in real life. By 1915 (when Edison was perfecting his version of the device) any patents protecting the dry cell would've presumedly expired, so I'm sure by the time it was introduced on the C 250 (January 1917) any number of battery producing companies could've produced them
for the Edison Co., under any label Edison preferred.
I tend to think the T.A.E. co. would've had their own labelling for such a battery, or maybe there was a subsidiary company producing them? I don't know, that's just my unsubstantiated opinion. Which battery brand name would've been supplied for the E.A.S. is a mystery to me still. Regardless of which battery would have been supplied or recommended by Edison, they had a finite life, and if an owner was dissatisfied with what was supplied, he could easily replace it right from the very beginning.
How long was a No.6 dry cell's useful life with the device fully functioning, and being used on a daily basis? I don't have a clue, that's way above my pay scale. I'd bet that once the owners discovered the machine still functioned perfectly
without a charged battery, they tended to not bother "fixing" the machine. And it wouldn't have been any real difficulty to have a repairman replace the E.A.S. single start/stop lever and solenoid assembly, with the preceding
and subsequent "two-lever" start/stop arrangement. Why bother fiddling with the E.A.S.? I certainly wouldn't have, and actually
don't now, with my E.A.S. equipped C 250.
After all we can look at this device as a failure, as far as the company was concerned. And then there
was that pesky patent infringement lawsuit decision in 1920, in which Edison lost to the original Patent holder of the device, too. To a guy named Raymond Duncan. I wouldn't doubt that the lawsuit was tied up in the courts for several years, and that
may have been the reason why, in 1918, Edison withdrew the device from being supplied in his Phonographs. I haven't discovered that information.
I don't think a new battery supplied for use with the Edison
Electric Automatic Stop would have had a very long life simply because the device can be
very finicky, and my presumption is that owners would've abandoned using them fairly quickly - and goodbye battery. Again, I have no factual information to
know any of this, it's just my gut feeling, and that changes whenever I dream up new scenarios out of hints of information. I also tend to think that most likely the only reason a battery would be contained within any C 250 is because a subsequent owner thought it might be cool to see if he could get the device working again, years after the original owners had abandoned them. Of course there still will be the odd all original machine now and again, but by and large I think those would be
very rare.
Had Edison envisioned using a rechargeable Nickel-Iron battery to power his device? What about one of his "jar" acid Edison-BSCO primary cell batteries? I've never seen any indication that acid was ever present in a C 250 equipped with the E.A.S., but that doesn't eliminate the possibility - there's such a
relatively small number of examples extant that anything's possible I suppose.
Best,
Fran
