about midnight
John put five hundred dollars ' worth of books into the new house -- sets of books , which strangely enough he forced himself to wade through laboriously , and thus he cultivated a habit of reading that always remained with him . In those days the books with cracked backs in his library were Emerson , Browning , and Tennyson . And after a hard day 's work he would come home to his poets and his piano . He thought out the whole plan of the Barclay Economy Car Door Strip about midnight , sitting in his night clothes at the piano after reading `` Abt Vogler , '' and the central idea for the address on the `` Practical Transcendentalist , '' which he delivered at the opening of the state university the next year , came to him one winter night after he had tried to compose a clanging march as an air to fit Emerson 's `` The Sphinx . '' After almost a quarter of a century that address became the first chapter of Barclay 's famous book , which created such ribaldry in the newspapers , entitled `` The Obligations of Wealth . '' It was in 1879 that Barclay patented his Economy Door Strip , and put it in his grain cars . It saved loss of grain in shipping , and Barclay , being on terms of business intimacy with the railroad men , sold the Economy Strip to the railroads to use on every car of grain or flour he shipped .