Thomas Edison partnered with community leaders and the City of Brockton to allow Brockton to become an experimental laboratory producing a number of innovations. He supervised construction of the first power station in Brockton and he threw the switch that gave Brockton the world's first three-wire underground electric transmission system. This model was replicated in over five hundred cities nation wide. The city also became one of the first in the world to use incandescent and arc lamps for street lighting and one of the first with an electric trolley line with electric lights. The region was also home to the first industrial park, the first assembly-line operation, the first tack cutting machine, the first electrically operated fire station and the first theatre in the world to be electrically lighted, which was the envy of the entertainment world at the time. The baseball glove and the toll house cookie were also invented in the region and the nation's first department store Santa Claus appeared in a Brockton department store in 1890.