TRUE STORIES OF GREAT AMERICANS 
 
 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO DALLAS 
 ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED 
 
 LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN C(5. OF CANADA, 
 
 I* TOONTO 
 
 LTD. 
 
 * TOONTO 
 
 *, 
 
. . 
 
 n V, 
 
 
THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 BY 
 
 FRANCIS ROLT-WHEELER 
 *> // 
 
 "THE U.S. SERVICE SERIES," "THE SCIENCE-HISTORY 
 OF THE UNIVERSE," ETC. 
 
 gotfc 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1915 "%, 
 
 All rights reserve* 
 

 COPYRIGHT, 1915, 
 BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1915- 
 
 Nnrtocott 
 
 J. S. Gushing Co. Berwick & Smith Co. 
 Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THERE is a great deal of satisfaction in writing a 
 biography of a man who is not yet dead. Thomas 
 Alva Edison is alive, very much so, and it is hoped 
 that some measure of his vitality vibrates in these 
 pages. To him, to his friends, and to former bi- 
 ographers especially Messrs. Dyer & Martin, 
 Francis A. Jones, W. K. L. & A. Dickson, and 
 two anonymous writers the author of this book 
 acknowledges his indebtedness. 
 
 A personality such as that of Edison lends itself 
 to many presentments. To use a simile, it is a 
 gem on which many facets may be cut. This 
 biography of "the Wizard," however, has one 
 end in view to show Edison as a Great Ameri- 
 can. That his life is a splendid stimulus to every 
 American boy and girl, to every American man 
 and woman, is the writer's belief, and to fling 
 before the youth of the United States the heroic 
 figure of America's greatest inventor in its most 
 clarion appeal is the aim and purpose of 
 
 THE AUTHOR. 
 
 333697 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 " WHY DON'T You KNOW ? " 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 THE "CANDY BUTCHER" 18 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 THE SAD END OF PAUL PRY 35 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 THE CRACK " LIGHTNING-SLINGER " . . . 51 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 "NEVER WATCH THE CLOCK!" .... 68 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 BUILDING A PHANTOM TELEGRAPH . . . .81 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 THE GREAT TELEPHONE WAR 93 
 
 vii 
 
viii CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 PAGE 
 
 OUTRIVALING ALADDIN'S LAMP 108 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 THE POWER BEHIND THE BULB . . . .125 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 MAKING A SHRINE FOR SPEECH . . . .137 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 "MOVIES," AND THE STORAGE BATTERY . . .157 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 MASTER OF MEN AND PATRIOT 176 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 THOMAS A. EDISON. Photograph and autograph 
 
 Frontispiece 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 EDISON AS A "CANDY BUTCHER" .... 24 
 NEWSPAPER PRINTED ON A MOVING TRAIN . . 50 
 THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE ELECTRIC LIGHT . .no 
 WHAT MAKES A PHONOGRAPH SING .... 146 
 THE KEEN-EARED "DEAF" INVENTOR . . .184 
 
THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 "WHY DON'T You KNOW?" 
 
 IN every period of the world's history, there 
 are men who become the great characters of the 
 times in which they lived. Nearly always this 
 is due to the fact that the talents they possessed, 
 and the kind of work they did, was particularly 
 well fitted to the great public needs of their time. 
 
 Thomas Alva Edison is the typical American. 
 From boyhood to ripest manhood he has been 
 keen to see an opportunity, and quick to turn 
 that opportunity to a practical use. His genius 
 is peculiar because it is so American. It is not 
 as a scientist that Edison is great, it is not even 
 as an inventor, it is as the master of the practical 
 use of everything he touches that he appears a 
 giant mind of modern times. When, in the sum- 
 mer of 1915, Edison was made Chairman of the 
 Board of Civilian Inventors, as an aid to the 
 
2* ' THOMAS -ALVA EDISON 
 
 national defense of the United States in war as 
 well as peace, it was America's tribute to a great 
 American, rather than merely a progressive na- 
 tion's recognition of an able inventor. 
 
 Not every boy can be an inventor, not every 
 life can follow the type of work that has distin- 
 guished Edison, but every boy and girl can be as 
 American. It is a mistake to think of "The 
 Wizard of Menlo Park" his nickname for many 
 years as though a list of his inventions told the 
 story. Edison and his inventions is merely a 
 record of a painstaking advance in science ; Edison 
 through his inventions is the story of a life of ex- 
 citement and adventure. 
 
 It is not exaggeration to say that more wonderful 
 feats have been done in Edison's laboratory than 
 are told of the genie of the "Arabian Nights" ; it 
 is a modest statement to say that no giant was 
 ever so powerful* as* the Giant of Electricity that 
 Edison has fought to tame ; and the stories of his 
 quest in the farthest corners of the earth for 
 threads of carbon for his lamp, or new kinds of 
 wax for his phonograph records, cannot be sur- 
 passed by the narratives of any explorer. 
 
 Alone among the inventors of the world, Edison 
 has always set before himself the ideal of making 
 his inventions useful to the people. Speaking of 
 
"WHY DON'T YOU KNOW?" 3 
 
 some interesting experiments that he had aban- 
 doned, on one occasion, Edison said : 
 
 "I could have worked it out all right, if I'd 
 taken time enough, but what was the use? It 
 wouldn't have been good for anything! " 
 
 Everything has contributed to make Edison a 
 real American. His work is the expression of 
 the man. He is not in the least European, neither 
 in his way of thinking, nor in his methods of work. 
 He is just good, plain, solid American. He can't 
 help it, he was born that way. 
 
 Just exactly the same things that have brought 
 the United States to the top among the nations 
 of the world have made Edison what he is to-day. 
 He is self-made and proud of it. He has built 
 his career step by step. He has always had a huge 
 desire for accomplishment and an enormous capac- 
 ity for work. He knows how to organize no one 
 better and not only can he use the skill of others, 
 but he knows how to stimulate them to their best 
 endeavor. 
 
 At the same time, the imaginative side of his 
 work must not be forgotten, in looking at the 
 practical results. It is in the times of nations 
 when "old men dream dreams and young men 
 see visions" that great things are born. Edison's 
 gaze is always upward and forward. As child, 
 
4 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 as boy, and as man, he has always held fast to 
 the belief that "to-morrow is a new day." 
 
 Much of this determination to get ahead and 
 of this directness in pressing toward the goal 
 is inherited. In his forbears Edison was for- 
 tunate. Both his father and grandfather showed 
 the same independence of thought and unflinching 
 belief in their own opinions. When they thought 
 they were right, they went ahead and they 
 usually thought themselves right. Sometimes 
 'events proved them to be wrong, but, undaunted, 
 they started along a new line and went ahead 
 still. Indeed, the United States owes the honor 
 of counting Thomas A. Edison as one of her 
 sons to the love of liberty which burned in the 
 breast of his father. 
 
 Samuel Edison, the inventor's father, was 
 thoroughly intolerant of injustice. Anything that 
 he thought unjust, simply set him wild. There 
 are half-a-dozen stories afloat which show how 
 quickly he stepped forward when any question 
 of principle was involved. In addition to this, 
 Samuel Edison inherited from his grandfather 
 a scrupulous sense of honor. 
 
 It is to be remembered that the inventor's great- 
 grandfather Thomas Edison was a prominent 
 bank officer and financier in New York during the 
 
"WHY DON'T YOU KNOW?" 5 
 
 Revolutionary War. He was held in high regard 
 as a standard of probity ; so much so, that his is 
 the only signature in the archives for authenticat- 
 ing the genuineness of the Continental currency. 
 
 Old Tom Edison was a hot Tory. In spite of 
 that, after Independence had been established, 
 and the " Original Thirteen Colonies" were colonies 
 no longer, the New York financiers were anxious 
 for him to continue under the new regime. Old 
 Tom Edison refused. Carrying out his principles, 
 he went to Canada, where the British government 
 made him a gift of a large tract of land in recogni- 
 tion of his loyalty and his services. 
 
 The next rebellion in which the Edison family 
 took a part was the Papineau rebellion. Samuel 
 Edison was a strong believer in the rights of the 
 people, and was with the " constitutionalists" as 
 against the "royalists" in the union of Upper and 
 Lower Canada. Indeed, he felt so strongly on 
 this point that he scornfully refused to live any 
 longer on land that had been given to his father 
 by the crown, repudiated the gift with stern in- 
 dependence, and kept a hotel at Bayfield. When 
 rebellion actually broke out in 1837, under the 
 French-Canadian, Louis J. Papineau, Samuel Edi- 
 son took arms, joined the insurgents, and rose 
 to the command of Captain. The rebellion failed, 
 
6 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 and Captain Edison, as one of the rebel leaders, 
 was hunted for, with a price on his head. 
 
 The sturdy lover of liberty wasted no time, 
 but made tracks for the St. Clair River. He 
 did not dare show his face at any railroad stations 
 and he feared that getting a horse might attract 
 attention. Whereupon, being over six feet in 
 height, and with a gaunt, muscular frame, he 
 determined to walk to the Land of Freedom. 
 Stopping only once for a three-hour sleep, Samuel 
 Edison walked the hundred and eighty-two miles 
 that lay between him and safety. These powers 
 of endurance were a part of Samuel Edison's 
 heritage to his gifted son. 
 
 A little incident which occurred at the time 
 of the beginning of the Civil War shows the sturdi- 
 ness of the Edison stock. When recruits were 
 called for, Samuel Edison was sixty-five years 
 of age, too old for service. But he was not too 
 old to advise, and he took the greatest interest 
 in the "boys" who were going to the front in the 
 Union Army. One day it chanced that a friendly 
 jumping contest was begun in a regiment of newly 
 drafted recruits stationed at Fort Gratiot, 
 Michigan; they were husky young fellows, most 
 of them, but the old veteran of the Papineau Re- 
 bellion out- jumped them all. He lived to the ripe 
 
"WHY DON'T YOU KNOW?" 7 
 
 age of ninety-seven years. Indeed, long life 
 is hereditary in the Edison family, the inventor's 
 grandfather having lived one hundred and three 
 years, while his great-grandfather lived to be one 
 hundred and two years of age. 
 
 Having decided to live in the United States, for 
 Canada was far too hot to hold him, Samuel 
 Edison finally settled down in Milan, Ohio, a 
 small town where he thought there was little 
 likelihood of his being traced by the Dominion 
 authorities. Finding matters peaceful enough, 
 he decided to let rebellions alone and to make 
 his home there. A few years later he married 
 a young Canadian school-teacher whom he had 
 known prior to the Papineau outbreak, and brought 
 her to his home in Milan. 
 
 'It seems strange now, if one visits that sleepy 
 little Ohio village, to realize that it was the birth- 
 place of so vigorous and world-shaking a per- 
 sonality as Thomas A. Edison. It is, perhaps, 
 even more difficult to realize that this dozing 
 rural crossways was, at the time of Edison's birth, 
 a busy commercial center.^ 
 
 The little town has had an eventful history. 
 Seventy years ago, before the railroads had reached 
 that part of the country, it became necessary to 
 find an outlet for the great quantities of grain to 
 
8 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 be shipped to eastern points from the vast wheat 
 and corn fields of Central and Northern Ohio. 
 The Huron River, emptying into Lake Erie, 
 could only be navigated for a few miles above its 
 mouth, and so a landing was made about three 
 miles below the little village of Milan. A number 
 of warehouses were built there, and Lockwood 
 Landing showed every indication of becoming a 
 prosperous market. 
 
 The people of Milan, however, were wide- 
 awake and progressive, and a project was broached 
 by some of the merchants to build a canal from 
 Lockwood Landing to Milan. As this would 
 bring navigation right to the village and carry 
 prosperity with it, the plan was approved at 
 once. In this progressive movement, Samuel 
 Edison played a leading part. A great deal was 
 thought of his judgment, and his personality was 
 so forceful as easily to win others to his way of 
 thinking. In his ability to enlist capital in the 
 canal project is a foreshadowing of his son's ex- 
 traordinary talents in securing financial backing 
 for his operations. 
 
 When Thomas A. Edison was born, February 1 1 , 
 1847, the little town had become a center of in- 
 dustrial activity, and the young lad's earliest 
 recollections were those of a thriving market 
 
"WHY DON'T YOU KNOW?" 9 
 
 town with a dozen big warehouses on the bank 
 of the canal. All day long, wagonloads of wheat 
 and other grain poured into the place, some drawn 
 by horses, but more of them by the ox teams which 
 at that time did most of the farm hauling of the 
 west. Indeed, so well did the town thrive, and 
 so important a factor did the canal become, that 
 shipbuilding actually became a prominent in- 
 dustry, and several vessels, including six revenue 
 cutters, were launched in the waters of the canal. 
 Where is that, canal now? Not only is it no 
 longer used, but, actually, it is not. It does not 
 exist. Wander now through Milan, the small 
 sleepy place, and you shall search in vain for 
 the grain warehouses, you shall look in vain for 
 the long lines of ox-drawn wagons, you shall listen 
 in vain for the cracking of the whips and the 
 "gee" and "haw" of the impatient drivers, you 
 shall even look in vain for the canal. Perhaps, 
 if you search diligently and secure the guidance 
 of "the oldest inhabitant," he will point out to 
 you a slight depression in the ground which may 
 be traced for a few miles as the bed of the old 
 channel, but that is all. Brief was the span of 
 Milan's fame as a commercial center, but she has 
 secured a far more enduring reputation as the 
 birthplace of her great son, Thomas A. Edison. 
 
io THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 Not that Milan was particularly conscious of 
 the greatness of the boy. Far from it. Indeed, 
 he was a particularly aggravating youngster in 
 many regards. Every properly organized boy 
 and girl asks questions for that matter, any 
 child who does not ask questions ought to have 
 a dose of curiosity squirted into him some way, 
 but Edison was simply a terror ! Just as soon 
 as he was able to talk, he plunged into a steady 
 stream of "Why?" to everything. Some of 
 these queries his father could answer, a still larger 
 proportion of them could be solved by his mother, 
 but the youngster's mind was too fertile and his 
 curiosity too overwhelming for any one to keep 
 up with it to the end. Sooner or later, the grown-up 
 who was the victim of this remorseless questioning 
 would have to fall back on the stock answer : 
 
 "I don't know." 
 
 "Well," the determined child would reply, 
 ruffling up his hair in the way that has been a 
 characteristic ever since he could reach up to his 
 hair to ruffle it, "why don't you know?" 
 
 Just as soon as he was able to toddle, the young 
 lad found his way down to the shipbuilding yards. 
 He got terribly in the way of the workmen, and 
 it used to be said, laughingly, that whenever the 
 boy came down, it saved time to have one of the 
 
"WHY DON'T YOU KNOW?" n 
 
 men detailed to answer his questions. In spite 
 of this, however, 'Al' was well liked, and no 
 matter how much he bothered them, there were 
 always some men who were ready to give him 
 the answers which he really wanted. 
 
 So persistent was the questioning, however, 
 and so inquisitively particular were some of his 
 queries, that the workmen used to think them 
 foolish. He asked questions about their work 
 which they themselves could not answer. What 
 could be more- absurd, they thought? Not a 
 single man in all the yards ever grasped the fact 
 that the small urchin's queries showed that he 
 was thinking into causes, while they were satisfied 
 merely to do the things that they had learned while 
 in their apprenticeships. 
 
 An example showing how early the experimental 
 desire displayed itself in Edison is the incident of 
 the goose. Having pestered his mother with 
 questions as to what goose eggs were, and what 
 was in them, and where they came from, and 
 how they were made, and if they were all made 
 that way, and why the goose made them that 
 way, and why they were all that shape, and what 
 would happen if they were not that shape, and a 
 hundred more such queries, he reached at last the 
 question : 
 
12 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 "Why does the goose squat on the eggs, 
 Mother?" 
 
 "To keep them warm," was the reply. 
 
 "And why does she keep them warm?" 
 
 "To hatch them, dear." 
 
 "What's hatching?" 
 
 "That means that the little geese come out; 
 they are born that way, you know." 
 
 "And does keeping the eggs warm make the 
 little geese come?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 That was enough for Edison. He reasoned 
 that he was bigger than the goose, therefore he 
 had more warmth, therefore if he sat on the eggs 
 the little geese would come quicker. He sat on 
 them. The reasoning seemed sound, even if the 
 results showed that it must have been fallacious. 
 One thing is sure that particular batch of 
 eggs did not hatch out. 
 
 Grown-ups do not always follow the workings 
 of a child's mind, and incidents such as his sitting 
 on the goose's eggs led some of the neighbors to 
 the conclusion that the boy was a softy. Even 
 those who were most kindly disposed to him were 
 inclined to take the view of his detractors when 
 they themselves became the object of one of these 
 bombardments of questions, always ending up 
 
"WHY DON'T YOU KNOW?" 13 
 
 with the invariable evasion "I don't know," 
 and its terrible and pitiless query of rebuke - 
 "Why don't you know?" 
 
 The "hired girl" of the Edison household, for 
 many years one of the boy's sturdiest admirers, 
 lost a great deal of her enthusiasm and was forced 
 to adopt a policy of "watchful waiting" whenever 
 the lad was around, by reason of one of his experi- 
 ments upon her. He was not five years old at 
 the time and he had settled it to his satisfaction 
 that the only reason why birds could fly and human 
 beings couldn't, was because they didn't eat the 
 same things. So he worked up a weird concoction 
 (in which worms figured largely) and insisted on 
 the hired girl drinking some of it. She did. She 
 didn't fly, but the boy's father did for the 
 nearest doctor. 
 
 The story is a childish one, of course, but after 
 all is said and done, the principle is not greatly un- 
 like one which was successfully followed in Edison's 
 later years, one, indeed, which has added to the art 
 of medicine a valuable treatment for gout. 
 
 "What's the trouble?" asked Edison of a friend 
 one day, on meeting him in the street and noting 
 the swellings of his finger joints. 
 
 "I don't know exactly- ' the sufferer began, 
 when Edison struck in with the eternal question. 
 
14 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 "Why don't you know? Don't the doctors 
 know?" 
 
 "They don't agree," the other replied. "But 
 most of them seem to think it's gout." 
 
 "Well, what's gout?" 
 
 "Deposit of uric acid in the joints, I'm told," 
 answered the sick man. 
 
 "Why don't they take it out of the joints, 
 then?" 
 
 "They don't know how." 
 
 This was like a red rag to a bull. 
 
 "Why don't they know how?" stormed Edison, 
 indignantly. 
 
 "Because uric acid is insoluble." 
 
 "I don't believe it," the world-famous experi- 
 menter replied. 
 
 On his return to his laboratory, he started 
 immediately to find out whether it were true or 
 not that uric acid was insoluble. He set out an 
 array of test tubes a couple of hundred of 
 them, at least and filled them all about a quarter 
 full of every different chemical he possessed. 
 Into each he dropped a few uric acid crystals. 
 Two days later he found that the crystals had 
 dissolved in two of the chemicals. The inventor 
 was justified, experiment had again blazed the 
 way, and now one of these very chemicals (hydrate 
 
"WHY DON'T YOU KNOW?" 15 
 
 of tetra-ethyl ammonium) is widely used in the 
 treatment of gout and other diseases. 
 
 Edison's "Why don't they know?" therefore, 
 in this case has helped to ease the pain of thou- 
 sands of people. As the history of his inventions 
 unfolds itself, it will be seen how he made use of 
 the ideas of others. Where they had stuck, where 
 they had come to an " I don't know! " point, Edison 
 put his persistent query and finally worked out 
 an answer. 
 
 In Milan, no pne was sufficiently foresighted 
 to see in the boy's exploits the prophecy of the 
 powers of the man. He would have been the 
 last boy that the wiseacres would have picked 
 out as destined to bring the greatest honor to the 
 town. It often happens that way. No one is 
 wise enough to tell all about the future flower by 
 looking at the seed. 
 
 "I was always a careless boy," said Edison in 
 one of his rare personal interviews, "and with a 
 mother of different mental caliber I should prob- 
 ably have turned out badly. But her firmness, 
 her sweetness, her goodness, were potent powers 
 to keep me in the right path. I remember I 
 used never to be able to get along at school. I 
 don't know now what it was, but I was always 
 at the foot of the class. I used to feel that the 
 
1 6 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 teachers never sympathized with me and that 
 my father thought that I was stupid, and at 
 last I almost decided that I must really be a 
 dunce. My mother was always kind, always 
 sympathetic, and she never misunderstood or 
 misjudged me. But I was afraid to tell her all 
 my difficulties at school, for fear she too might 
 lose her confidence in me. 
 
 "One day I overheard the teacher tell the in- 
 spector that I was 'addled' and it would not be 
 worth while keeping me in school any longer. 
 I was so hurt by this last straw that I burst out 
 crying and went home and told my mother about 
 it. Then I found out what a good thing a good 
 mother is. She came out as my strong defender. 
 Mother love was aroused, mother pride wounded 
 to the quick. She brought me back to the school 
 and angrily told the teacher that he didn't know 
 what he was talking about, that I had more brains 
 than he himself, and a lot more talk like that. 
 In fact, she was the most enthusiastic champion 
 a boy ever had, and I determined right then 
 that I would be worthy of her and show her that 
 her confidence was not misplaced." 
 
 Edison's active brain and his habit of taking 
 the most direct road of testing everything he 
 came across, got him into scrapes many a time 
 
"WHY DON'T YOU KNOW?" 17 
 
 after this. Indeed, he would be likely to admit 
 that it did, still. But Edison has possessed the 
 faculty of finding friends who believe in him 
 through thick and thin. Valuable and trusted 
 friends though they have been, Edison to this 
 day declares that his best backer was his mother. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE "CANDY BUTCHER" 
 
 IT is a good illustration of Edison's ability to 
 make the most out of every opportunity that came 
 his way, to see how he utilized for his own ad- 
 vancement the very force which caused the down- 
 fall of his native town. 
 
 After having dug the canal, the capitalists of 
 Milan so highly esteemed their cleverness that 
 when, a few years later, the Lake Shore railroad 
 company approached them with regard to fran- 
 chise and other arrangements for running the 
 road to Milan, the citizens declared that they 
 were content with their water transportation and 
 would stand by that. As a result, the railroad 
 was surveyed through Norwalk and Wakeman, 
 and the trade of Milan first dwindled, then de- 
 parted absolutely. 
 
 Before trade collapsed too far, Samuel Edison, 
 who was " forehanded" and understood the value 
 of being in the van of progress, decided to move. 
 After careful investigation of conditions in the 
 
 18 
 
THE " CANDY BUTCHER " 19 
 
 neighboring towns, he decided to settle in Port 
 Huron, Michigan, a place of considerable com- 
 mercial activity. A roomy house, with a large 
 apple and pear orchard, was purchased, quite in 
 the country, yet within easy walking distance of 
 the town. 
 
 The view was magnificent, so fine, indeed, that 
 Samuel Edison built a rickety wooden tower 
 about eighty feet high, commanding the St. Clair 
 River and Lake Huron. The combined disad- 
 vantages of the insecurity of the structure and 
 the ten cents fee rendered visitors to the observa- 
 tory few and far between, but the boy spent a 
 great deal of his spare time on the summit, and 
 learned astronomy with the aid of an old telescope 
 which was lent him by his father. 
 
 The education of the boy was left entirely in 
 the hands of his mother. Her early training as a 
 teacher stood her in good stead, and she conducted 
 the morning lessons for her son with the same 
 punctuality and rigid observance of rule which 
 she had used in her classes in the public schools. 
 
 Thomas Alva, or "Al," as he was always called, 
 was as satisfactory a private pupil as he had been 
 an unsatisfactory one in a class with other boys. 
 He was serious, of tremendous application, and 
 had a marvelously retentive memory for things 
 
20 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 which really interested him. If they did not 
 well, he wouldn't learn and he couldn't remember. 
 
 This remains one of Edison's greatest weak- 
 nesses. The gaps in his knowledge are as un- 
 expected and surprising as is the extent of his 
 information. Mathematics is his bane, and he 
 has very little use for it. When he was building 
 the first great central station for the electric light- 
 ing of New York, he was always in conflict over 
 figures. 
 
 "In all that central station work," he said, 
 many years after, "the great bugbears I had to 
 contend with were the mathematicians. I found, 
 after a while, that I could guess a good deal closer 
 than they could figure, so I went on guessing. " 
 
 Some one asked him how it was that his dynamos 
 generally came up to the required power when 
 they were built by "guesswork," and he replied, 
 with a smile, 
 
 "Well, I happened to be a pretty good guesser !" 
 
 Then, in order to show how mathematics may 
 prove more difficult and troublesome than "guess- 
 work," the inventor told the story how he had 
 beaten the mathematicians at their own game. 
 When he perfected the ordinary pear-shaped glass 
 bulb for incandescent electric lights, he wanted 
 to find out the exact cubic contents. He gave the 
 
THE " CANDY BUTCHER " 21 
 
 problem to several eminent mathematicians and 
 they figured it out. Their answers all differed, 
 though only slightly. 
 
 " You're all wrong," said Edison, "and I'll 
 show you." 
 
 He had made a series of tin cubes, each one a 
 trifle smaller than the other. He filled a bulb 
 with water and poured it first into one cube, then 
 another, until he found the one that held exactly 
 the same quantity of water as the bulb. Figuring 
 the cubic contents of a cube, of course, was easy. 
 
 This is only one side of the story. The other 
 is the evidence that Edison is just as much forced 
 to depend on mathematics as any other man, 
 only he has some one else do it for him, When 
 he was on the witness stand, describing some 
 experiments that he had made for the State of 
 New York with regard to electrocution, he stated 
 that the temperature of a tube of water the height 
 of a man would rise eight degrees Centigrade 
 under the application of a certain current of elec- 
 tricity. The lawyer, in cross-examination, asked 
 the inventor how many degrees that meant on 
 the Fahrenheit scale. ^ & ' < -f c i 
 
 "I don't know," Edison replied. 
 
 "You don't know !" exclaimed the lawyer in sur- 
 prise. "Well, surely you could compute it for us ? " 
 
22 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 "I don't compute such things," was the reply. 
 
 "How do you find out, then?" queried the 
 lawyer, sharply. 
 
 "I ask somebody." 
 
 "Whom do you ask?" 
 
 "Oh, I have men to do such things," the in- 
 ventor answered, stifling a yawn. And, on re- 
 quest, he called on A. E. Kennelly, afterwards 
 President of the Institute of Electrical Engineers, 
 who was his head mathematician at the time. 
 
 The incident is worth remembering, for it shows 
 clearly that unless Edison had possessed the 
 money to employ Mr. Kennelly, his work would 
 have suffered from his lack of knowledge of mathe- 
 matics. No boy can say to himself, "Edison 
 isn't a mathematician, I don't need to be." Igno- 
 rance of any subject is never a matter for boast. 
 
 It was this very ability to do some things and 
 apparent inability to do others that crippled 
 Edison in school. Under any less unusual cir- 
 cumstances than the home tuition plan, it would 
 have crippled him seriously. But, being allowed 
 to go his own way to a certain extent, he sprang 
 ahead in his studies like a prairie fire in the autumn 
 after a dry spell. At the age of nine he had read, 
 and read thoroughly, half a dozen of the big his- 
 tories, such as Hume's "England," and Gibbon's 
 
THE " CANDY BUTCHER " 23 
 
 "Rome"; and he had painfully endeavored to 
 digest and remember the whole of the "Penny 
 Encyclopaedia." Also, he had managed to secure 
 a number of works on scientific subjects, and be- 
 fore he was ten years old, was conversant with 
 practically everything that had been done in 
 electricity up to that time. 
 
 The first three years of the boy's life in Port 
 Huron were given over almost exclusively to 
 reading. He tried to read the Public Library 
 through from beginning to end, until the librarian, 
 noticing the lad's lack of systematic choice in 
 his subjects, gave him some practical advice. 
 During this period he kept up with almost every 
 electrical discovery being made. Edison was 
 fortunate in the time of his birth, for his aptitude 
 and genius for things electrical came at the same 
 time as the development of that science. 
 
 In spite of the interest of the subject itself, 
 however, there is more than a shrewd suspicion 
 that Edison's intense interest in electricity was 
 partly due to the fact that every one answered, 
 "I don't know," when he tried to find out what 
 electricity really was, and he set himself to dis- 
 cover "why they don't know." 
 
 When about eleven years old, young "Al" 
 Edison determined to try and help in meeting the 
 
24 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 family expenses. Practical as always, the boy 
 was more interested in results than in means, and 
 cared less about the character of the work than 
 about the profits. Naturally, his mind ran to 
 selling papers, since that is the first avenue for a 
 boy. But, with that judgment of practical issues 
 which has ever since been so large a factor in 
 Edison's development, before beginning work he 
 figured up how much money he would make in 
 proportion to the amount of time spent. He de- 
 cided that selling news-sheets through the streets 
 did not bring profit enough. Entirely on his own 
 account, he applied to the Grand Trunk Railroad 
 for the privilege of selling newspapers, books, 
 magazines, fruits and candies on the trains be- 
 tween Port Huron and Detroit. 
 
 " Everything comes to him who, hustling, 
 waits," said Edison once, and this adage applied 
 to his boyhood. While his application was on 
 file, he turned to the selling of papers in the streets. 
 He found, as he had expected, that the few nickels 
 he gained were a poor compensation for the amount 
 of work involved. He was more successful than 
 the other boys, however, owing to the fact that he 
 read the papers carefully during the pauses be- 
 tween the selling of his wares, and accordingly 
 often was able to catch the attention of a possible 
 
By special permission of Harper and Brothers, publishers of Dyer and Martin's 
 "Life of Edison," and Meadowcroft's "Boy's Life of Edison," copyrighted 1910. 
 1911, by Harper and Brothers. 
 
 EDISON AS A "CANDY BUTCHER" 
 
THE "CANDY BUTCHER" 25 
 
 customer by his references to 'the topics of the 
 day, while the other " newsies" were content with 
 the stereotyped cry of "P-i-per, Ev-en-in' pi-per !" 
 At last his application was granted, and the boy 
 began his duties as a trainboy or "candy butcher," 
 in the slang of that time. 
 
 The day was a long and hard one. Young 
 Edison had to be aboard the train a little after 
 6.30 A.M. to arrange his wares before the train 
 started, which was at 7 o'clock. Detroit was 
 reached at 10 A.M., and the remainder of the morn- 
 ing and the afternoon was spent in buying goods 
 to sell on the train. Though extremely quiet 
 and always preoccupied, the boy had the faculty 
 of causing people to like him. His self-confidence 
 and boyish dignity always won respect. 
 
 As a consequence he became very well known 
 in Detroit, and the fruit vendors, the stationery 
 stores and the candy shops regarded him as a 
 favored customer. He was always keen to take 
 advantage of sales, also, and many a small item 
 found its way into his stock to be sold at a fair 
 advance on the investment. The return trip was 
 begun at 4.30 P.M. and it was seldom earlier 
 than 8 o'clock when the train reached Port Huron, 
 and verging to 9 o'clock in the evening when the 
 boy reached home for supper. 
 
26 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 Young Edison had a good business head, and with- 
 in a year of his first entering the railroad work, he 
 had two assistants, as well as the privilege on an- 
 other train. His profits were from $12 to $20 a 
 day. 
 
 These were the times of the Civil War. News- 
 papers were not merely read with interest, they 
 were snatched at with eagerness. Most boys 
 would have been well satisfied with the demand 
 that existed. Not so "Al" Edison. He saw no 
 reason why he could not sell twice, three times as 
 many more. Selling papers was his business. 
 Very well. He would raise that business to the 
 highest point of efficiency. 
 
 He made friends with one of the compositors 
 on the Detroit Free Press and used this acquaint- 
 anceship to such good effect that he gained access 
 to the proofs. By reading these, he was able to 
 know nearly every item in the paper before it 
 was printed, a fact which aided him greatly in sell- 
 ing his papers. On the train he had no more time 
 than was necessary to sell them. 
 
 Several times the keen lad noticed that when 
 there was war news of an especially interesting char- 
 acter, his papers would sell like hot cakes, and un- 
 less he were careful, there would be none left for his 
 regular customers at the end of the trip. This set 
 
THE." CANDY BUTCHER " 27 
 
 him thinking, and in a business deal that he him- 
 self has never rivaled since, he determined upon a 
 plan. 
 
 A few days later occurred the great two days' 
 battle of Shiloh, won by the Union Army, but in 
 which the loss of life by both armies was very 
 severe. His friend in the Detroit Free Press office 
 showed him a proof containing the news. The boy, 
 who had been following the campaign closely, saw 
 the strategic value of this victory and also saw its 
 news value. He perceived that the time had 
 come. 
 
 Hurrying to the station, he ran as fast as he 
 could to the telegraph office, and told the operator, 
 who was his friend, all about the battle. Then he 
 continued, making the following offer : 
 
 ' 'If you will wire to each of the principal sta- 
 tions on the road, where that train stops, and ask 
 the station master to chalk on the black bulletin 
 board used for showing time of arriving and 
 departing trains the news of the battle and 
 the number of lives lost, I'll give you Harper's 
 Weekly, Harper's Monthly and a daily, free, for six 
 months." 
 
 The operator agreed at once to the proposal. 
 
 Back to the office of the Free Press went 
 Edison. 
 
28 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 "Please, I want a thousand papers instead of 
 three hundred," he said to the delivery clerk, 
 "and I'll pay you to-morrow." 
 
 The clerk, who was not permitted to sell papers 
 on trust, refused him. 
 
 Feeling desperate, and determined not to lose 
 the opportunity that had been made by the tele- 
 graph operator's willingness, the boy decided on 
 a bold stroke. He went to the editorial rooms and 
 asked to see the editor. At first he was refused 
 admittance, but his manner was so positive and 
 his statement that his business was important 
 seemed so assured, that he was admitted to an 
 office where two men were talking. 
 
 No sooner had he stated in short, crisp sentences 
 what he had done, and how he had opened a new 
 avenue for the extended sale of the paper, than 
 one of the men, with a short laugh, leaned forward, 
 wrote a few words on a scrap of paper and handed 
 it to Edison. This was Wilbur F. Storey, after- 
 wards founder of the Chicago Times. 
 
 "Take this down," he said. "I wish you luck. 
 Hope you come out on the right end." 
 
 Edison thanked him, got his thousand papers, 
 hired another boy to help him carry the pile to 
 the train, and, as it pulled out, set to work folding 
 them. The remainder of the story may be told 
 
THE "CANDY BUTCHER" 29 
 
 in Edison's own words, quoted mainly from Dick- 
 son's "Life of Edison." 
 
 "At Utica, the first station out from Detroit, 
 and about twelve miles distant, I usually sold 
 two papers, our customary charge being five cents 
 each. As we approached the station on this day, 
 I put my head out to look forward, and thought 
 I saw an excursion party. I had half a dozen 
 papers in my hand. As we came nearer, and the 
 people caught sight of me, they commenced to 
 gesticulate and shout, and it suddenly occurred 
 to me that they wanted papers. I rushed back 
 into the car, grabbed an armful, and when I got 
 upon the platform, I sold forty. 
 
 "Mount Clemens was the next station. When 
 it came in sight, I thought there was a riot. The 
 platform was crowded with a howling mob, and 
 when the tones became intelligible, I realized 
 that they were after news of Pittsburg Landing 
 (Battle of Shiloh), so I raised the price of papers to 
 ten cents and sold a hundred and fifty where I 
 had never before disposed of more than a dozen. 
 
 "As other stations were reached, these scenes 
 were repeated, but the climax came when we got 
 to Port Huron. There the town is quite a long 
 ways from the station, so it had been my habit 
 to jump from the train about a quarter of a mile 
 
30 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 from the depot. I'd paid a little Dutch kid to 
 haul several loads of sand to that point, and the 
 engineers always knew I was going to jump and 
 slowed down a bit. Still, I was quite an expert. 
 I heaved off my bundle of papers and jumped. 
 Shouldering the bundle I started for the city, as 
 usual being met by the Dutch boy. 
 
 "We'd hardly got half way to the town when I 
 met a crowd hurrying toward the station. I 
 thought I knew what they were after, so I stopped 
 in front of a church, where a prayer-meeting was 
 just closing, raised the price to twenty-five cents 
 a copy and commenced to take in a young fortune. 
 Almost at the same moment the prayer-meeting 
 came to an end, the members came rushing out, 
 and if the way coin was produced is any indication, 
 the deacons must have forgotten to pass the plate 
 at that meeting." 
 
 Edison's biggest haul, however, was one day when 
 he encountered a group of young Southerners 
 who had come up North on some special business, 
 but were having no end of a lark at the same time. 
 Young Edison was carrying his basket of nuts 
 and apples through the car. Luck had been bad 
 so far, he hadn't made a single sale in the smoking 
 car, and even in the general car which used to 
 be called the " ladies' car " the first few seats had 
 
THE "CANDY BUTCHER" 31 
 
 been profitless. As the boy came down to the seat 
 where these young chaps were sitting, one of them 
 suddenly grabbed the basket and threw the con- 
 tents out of the window. 
 
 For a moment the boy was too surprised to 
 speak, then the Southerner politely handed back 
 the basket, and speaking over his shoulder said 
 to an aged negro sitting behind, evidently an old 
 slave, 
 
 "Nicodemus, give this young gentleman a 
 dollah!" 
 
 The darky grinned, and unlocking a large iron- 
 bound box which was before him on the seat, full 
 of money and valuables, took out a dollar and gave 
 it to the boy. Distinctly surprised and not under- 
 standing the matter at all, young Edison grabbed 
 the dollar and hurried away with the empty 
 basket. After all, he had made a good profit on 
 the basketful of fruit. Quickly he filled up his 
 basket again and started down the aisles of 
 the train. This time he piled his basket with 
 prize packages. Only one purchase was made. 
 Presently he reached the point hi the train where 
 the Southerners were sitting. He stopped and 
 was about to speak when one of them said, 
 
 "Excuse me, suh," grabbed the basket again 
 and sent the prize packages out of the window in 
 
32 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 the same way that the peanuts and apples had 
 gone. Everybody laughed except the Southern- 
 ers, who never cracked a smile through the whole 
 performance. This time Edison said, 
 
 "Look here, Mister, do you know how much 
 those were worth?" 
 
 "No, suh," he answered, "how much?" 
 
 " There were just forty," the train-boy replied, 
 "except for one that I sold in the smoking car." 
 
 "Nicodemus," said the other, "count out the 
 money for the boy." 
 
 Again Edison trudged away with the empty 
 basket and the filled pocketbook. He hustled 
 back as quickly as he could with the morning 
 papers. The passengers had caught the spirit 
 of the thing and they laughed in anticipation as 
 soon as the boy came in the car. It didn't cost 
 them anything, and the sport certainly relieved 
 the tedium of the journey. Naturally, none of 
 them bought any papers. 
 
 As soon as the boy came within reach of the 
 Southerners, one of the party, a different chap 
 this time, yanked the bundle from the lad's arm 
 and threw them out of the window after the other 
 things. This time Edison laughed. 
 
 "Settle with Nicodemus," the Southerner com- 
 mented in an offhand manner, and Nicodemus 
 
THE "CANDY BUTCHER" 33 
 
 handed out the necessary money with the gravity 
 of a judge. 
 
 Then Edison decided to get into the game him- 
 self. He went into the baggage car and hunted 
 up every paper available, over a hundred of them 
 being returns from the day before, which he was 
 going to turn in at the end of the day's trip. It 
 made a huge pile, almost all that the boy could 
 do to stagger under. When he reached the door 
 of the car and shouted "Pi-per" in the accepted 
 manner, the passengers guffawed in expectation. 
 The Southerners didn't like to back down, be- 
 cause they knew every one in the car was watching 
 them and they were trying to show off. So they 
 didn't hesitate a second, but just hefted the entire 
 lot between them and spread them over the land- 
 scape. 
 
 "Look yah, suh," said the elder of the party, as 
 soon as Nicodemus had arranged the necessary 
 financial end of the situation, "have yo' anything 
 else on board?" 
 
 "Nothing except my basket and my box," the 
 lad replied. 
 
 "Well, bring those, too." 
 
 The box was too big for Edison to carry, but he 
 "up-ended" it and dragged it down the aisle of 
 the car to where the three young bloods sat. The 
 
34 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 basket followed the same route as the other things, 
 and Nicodemus chucked the box off the rear plat- 
 form. 
 
 "Have you nothing mo' to sell?" one of them 
 then asked. 
 
 "I would have brought in the smoking car 
 stove, if it hadn't been alight," Edison was used 
 to quote himself when telling this story, " but 
 I had to say that there really was nothing more." 
 
 "Well, then," said the other, "Nicodemus, yo' 
 can throw this boy out of the window." 
 
 There was a howl of laughter from the other 
 passengers, and as Nicodemus got up with the 
 evident intention of carrying out his master's 
 orders to the letter, Edison got out of that car as 
 quickly as he ever did anything in his life. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE SAD END OF PAUL PRY 
 
 THE occupation of a " candy butcher," however 
 profitable, could not be expected to engage more 
 than a small share of so active a mind as that of 
 young Edison. The ''mixed" train, on which 
 his work lay, consisted of a baggage car, a smoking 
 car and a general car. The baggage car was 
 divided into three compartments one for bag- 
 gage, one for United States Mail, and one for ex- 
 press matter. This last section was never used, 
 and it was in this that the lad kept his supplies. 
 
 One of the stores from which the boy bought 
 a large part of his wares was kept by J. A. Roys, 
 who carried books, magazines, stationery and 
 notions. It was largely owing to a chance pur- 
 chase of a printing-press that Edison branched 
 into the next period of his career, that of editor 
 and newspaper proprietor. 
 
 "I sold Edison that famous printing-press," 
 Mr. Roys is quoted by F. A. Jones as having said, 
 "and I have sometimes wondered what became of 
 
 35 
 
36 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 it. I got it from the tenant of a house I owned, 
 who couldn't pay his rent. To reimburse me, he 
 turned over the printing-press. 
 
 " Young Edison, who was a good boy and a 
 favorite of mine, bought goods of me and had the 
 run of the store. He saw the press, and I suppose 
 the idea of publishing a paper of his own immedi- 
 ately occurred to him, for he would catch on to 
 anything new like lightning. He examined the 
 machine, got me to show him exactly how it 
 worked, and finally bought it from me for a small 
 sum. 
 
 "Afterwards I saw many copies of the paper 
 he printed, and for several years kept some as 
 curiosities, but they got torn up or lost, and now 
 I don't believe there is one to be had unless he 
 owns it himself. [This was a shrewd guess, for 
 Edison does own the only known copy in exist- 
 ence.] He was a smart youngster and I always 
 prophesied great things of him." 
 
 As the same baggage car was always on the 
 train, Edison moved his printing-press into it. 
 Through his friends on the Detroit Free Press, for a 
 very small sum he bought a lot of old type, much 
 of which had been "pied," and a few battered 
 "stock" cuts were thrown in, for good measure. 
 He had learned to set type, and two weeks after 
 
THE SAD END OF PAUL PRY 37 
 
 the purchase of the printing-press, appeared the 
 first copy of The Weekly Herald, written, set up, 
 printed, published and sold by the fourteen-year- 
 old boy. 
 
 The Weekly Herald was a local paper and claimed 
 to be nothing else, and, as was natural in the only 
 paper in the world up to that time printed and 
 published on a moving train, railroad matters 
 claimed a good share of the editor's attention. 
 The boy side of Edison, however, appears in his 
 biggest "news item," which, headed "DIDN'T 
 SUCCEED," ran in exactly the following manner : 
 
 "A Gentleman by the name of Watkins, agent for the 
 Hayitan government, recently tried to swindle the Grand 
 Trunk Railway company of sixty-seven dollars the price 
 of a valise he claimed to have lost at Sarnia, and he was well 
 night successful in the undertaking. 
 
 "But, by the indominatable perseverance and energy of 
 Mr. W. Smith, detective of the company, the case was 
 cleared up in a very different style. It seems that the 
 would be gentleman while crossing the river on the ferry 
 boat, took the check off of his valise, and carried the valise 
 in his hand, not forgetting to put the check in his pocket, 
 the baggageman missed the baggage after leaving Port 
 Huron, while looking over his book to see if he had every 
 thing with him, but to his great surprise found he had lost 
 one piece, he telegraphed back stateing so, but no baggage 
 could be found. It was therefore given into the hands of 
 Mr. Smith, to look after, in the meantime Mr. Watkins 
 
38 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 wrote a letter to Mr. Tubman Agent at Detroit, asking to 
 be satisfied for the loss he had sustained in consequence, 
 and referring Mr. Tubman to Mr. A. W. Howard, Esq., 
 of Detroit, and the Hon. Messrs. Brown and Wilson of 
 Toronto for reference. We hardly know how such men are 
 taken in with such traveling villians, but such is the case, 
 meantime Mr. Smith, cleared up the whole mystery by 
 finding the lost valice in his possession and the Haytian 
 agent offered to pay ten dollars for the trouble he had put 
 the company to, and to have the matter hushed up, 
 
 "Not so, we feel that the villian should have his name 
 posted up in the various R.R. in the country, and then he 
 will be able to travel in his true colors." 
 
 The same indignation against an unjust claim 
 which made his father stand out against injustice, 
 forty-five years before, shows clearly in this article. 
 It shows, too, that understanding of the value of 
 personalities which is one of Edison's great charms. 
 The inventor is very human and a very good friend. 
 
 The Weekly Herald was a great success. Its 
 biggest "sworn circulation" was about seven 
 hundred copies, of which nearly five hundred were 
 subscriptions. The paper attracted the attention 
 of the famous English engineer, Robert Stephenson, 
 who ordered a thousand copies for himself, for 
 distribution in railway circles all over the world. 
 Even the London Times, the real old " Thunderer " 
 as it was in those days, famous in both hemispheres 
 
THE SAD END OF PAUL PRY 39 
 
 as the stiffest and most conservative journal ever 
 known, unbent sufficiently to notice the little 
 paper and even quoted from its columns. Finan- 
 cially, also, it was a success, and netted its four- 
 teen-year-old proprietor an income of about forty- 
 five dollars a month. 
 
 With his work as train-boy and his weekly paper, 
 one would have imagined Edison's energies to be 
 fully occupied. This was not the case. As soon 
 as the novelty of getting out the Herald began to 
 pall, and it became a matter partly of drudgery, the 
 lad's eager brain sought a new object of interest. 
 This he found in chemistry and in electricity. The 
 success of his ventures in telegraphing war news 
 ahead had made Edison acquainted with the possi- 
 bilities of the telegraph, and one of his firm ambi- 
 tions was to become a telegraph operator. But 
 as of old, his interest was stimulated by the mys- 
 tery of electricity. To every deadlock came his 
 invariable query, "Why don't they know?" 
 
 Always eager to find out for himself, young Edi- 
 son added to his little workshop in the express 
 section of the baggage car, self-made telegraph 
 instruments of a crude sort, batteries and chemi- 
 cals. Little by little the collection grew, until 
 it became a jumble of things. The conductor of 
 the train, a clean-cut, duty-loving Scotchman, 
 
40 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 named Alexander Stevenson, had never been favor- 
 ably disposed to the transformation of part of the 
 baggage car into a combined printing-shop and 
 laboratory. 
 
 Although he did not approve of it, Conductor 
 Stevenson was fair. As long as the train-boy did 
 his work, and his printing-press and chemicals did 
 not interfere with the running of the train, he was 
 willing enough to give the lad a chance to educate 
 himself. The conductor belonged to the old school, 
 and, besides, had a temper as quick as his Scotch 
 accent was strong. 
 
 One unhappy day, when the train was running 
 over a rough bit of road, a phosphorus bottle, 
 which had been jolted from its place, fell to the 
 floor and broke, bursting into flame as it did so. 
 The woodwork caught fire and the floor began to 
 blaze. 
 
 The conductor wasted no time. Without a 
 word, he snatched at the fire buckets, and by 
 prompt work, put out the fire in a few minutes. 
 While the blaze lasted, the matter was too seri- 
 ous for speech, but the instant that the danger was 
 over, the peppery Scotchman turned on the boy, 
 cuffed him on the side of the head, and soundly 
 berated him for imperiling the lives of passengers 
 on his train. 
 
 
THE SAD END OF PAUL PRY 41 
 
 As the engine was then slowing up at Mt. Clem- 
 ens, the conductor emphasized his remarks by 
 throwing out on the platform all the boy's belong- 
 ings, including the printing-press, which he toppled 
 out as though it were a trunk, breaking it to pieces. 
 Chemicals, batteries, instruments everything 
 went into the same heap. Only the basket of 
 supplies, which belonged to the official work of 
 "candy butcher," remained. Dazed, as much by 
 sorrow over the destruction of his cherished labora- 
 tory as by the box on the ears he had received, 
 young Edison stood on the platform at Mt. 
 Clemens and watched his scientific home disap- 
 pearing in the distance. 
 
 A great deal has been written about this inci- 
 dent, and the conductor has been sharply criticized, 
 especially as there is more than a suspicion that 
 the great inventor's deafness was caused by this 
 box on the ear, but it is difficult to see that Steven- 
 son could have done anything else than he did. 
 He was the conductor in charge of the train and 
 the safety of passengers was his first considera- 
 tion; when he found that a boy of fourteen was 
 endangering a train for which he was responsible, 
 he could do nothing less than remove the danger. 
 One may sympathize with young Edison, " standing 
 forlornly among the ruins of his most cherished 
 
42 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 possessions," but the inventor was in the wrong. 
 The baggage car of a moving train is not the place 
 for explosive or inflammable chemicals, and his 
 punishment was, as he has since admitted, " com- 
 ing to him." 
 
 No grudge appears to have been borne by either 
 Edison or the conductor. The boy resumed his 
 work as "candy butcher" on the train next day, 
 and no mention was made of the incident. The 
 conductor felt that he had done his duty and he 
 forbore to "rub it in." Edison felt that Steven- 
 son could at least have waited until the train 
 reached Port Huron and given him a chance to 
 take away his belongings without damage, but he 
 had too much pride to ask for any renewal of the 
 baggage car privilege. 
 
 Going to his father, "Al" made a clean breast 
 of the whole affair, and begged for the use of a small 
 unused room near the roof of the house as a work- 
 shop. The evidence that fire was to be feared made 
 his father refuse him, but the boy compromised 
 by promising not to store anything inflammable. 
 So Edison fitted up another small workshop, where 
 he continued to print The Weekly Herald and to 
 make experiments. 
 
 Mt. Clemens was destined to be a second turning 
 point in the boy's fortunes. The station agent, 
 
THE SAD END OF PAUL PRY 43 
 
 Mr. J. U. Mackenzie, had witnessed the ignomin- 
 ious expulsion from the baggage car and his sym- 
 pathies had been with the boy. This had increased 
 the friendship between the two, when the event 
 happened which made Mackenzie the boy's sworn 
 ally. The account of this event which seems to 
 fit in best with the known facts is the one given by 
 Mr. Mackenzie himself, and quoted by W. K. L. 
 Dickson. 
 
 "Edison, or 'Al,' as he was then called," said 
 Mr. Mackenzie, "was at this time the newsboy 
 of the mixed train, running from Port Huron to 
 Detroit, and returning daily, Sundays excepted. 
 He was at this period well on the road to success, 
 and made it a point to leave at least one dollar 
 of each day's earnings with his mother before 
 starting on the following morning. Al had en- 
 deared himself to the station agents, operators 
 and their families all along the line. As the mixed 
 train did the way freight work and the shunting 
 at Mt. Clemens, it usually consumed not less 
 than thirty minutes in doing it, during which 
 time Al secured new patrons for his wares, or 
 played with my little two-and-a-half year old 
 boy, Jimmy, of whom he seemed very fond. 
 
 "It was at 9 : 30 on a lovely summer morning. 
 The mixed train had arrived, leaving its passenger 
 
44 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 and baggage car standing on the main track at 
 the north end of the station platform, the pin 
 having been pulled between the baggage and first 
 box car. The train, of some twelve or fifteen 
 freight cars, had pulled ahead and had backed in 
 upon the freight house siding, had then taken out a 
 box car (containing ten tons of handle material for 
 Jackson State Prison), and had pushed it with 
 sufficient momentum to reach the baggage car 
 without a brakeman controlling it. 
 
 "Al, happening to turn at this moment, noticed 
 little Jimmy on the main track, throwing pebbles 
 over his head in the sunshine, utterly unconscious 
 of the danger he was in. Al dashed his papers 
 and his cap on the platform and plunged to the 
 rescue, risking his own life to save his little friend, 
 and throwing the child and himself out of the way 
 of the approaching box car. They both landed face 
 down in sharp, fresh gravel ballast with such force 
 that, when rescued, their appearance was somewhat 
 alarming. Examination, however, proved the in- 
 juries to be only skin deep. 
 
 "Tommy Sutherland, the train baggageman, 
 who was an eyewitness, told me that had Al been 
 a second later he would have lost a foot or been 
 killed, as the wheel of the car struck the heel of 
 his boot. I was in the ticket office, and hearing 
 
THE SAD END OF PAUL PRY 45 
 
 a shriek, ran out, in time to see the train hands 
 carrying the two boys to the platform." 
 
 The next time they met, which was a couple of 
 days later, Mackenzie, who was not rich and who 
 had been racking his brains to try and think of some 
 way in which he could show his gratitude, offered 
 to teach the boy telegraphy. Edison jumped at the 
 chance, and twice a day, when the train stopped at 
 Mt. Clemens and was detained there, the lad prac- 
 tised Morse with his friend Mackenzie. A few times, 
 Sutherland, the baggage man, offered to bring the 
 evening papers as far as Mt. Clemens, and then Al 
 was able to give almost the whole day to telegraphy, 
 leaving the train on its up-trip at 9.30 and board- 
 ing it again on the down-trip in the evening. 
 
 At the end of a couple of weeks, Edison deserted 
 his instructor for several days, going through to 
 Detroit. On his return, he displayed a set of 
 telegraph instruments he had made with his own 
 hands in the gun shop of Fisher & Long. In his 
 own characteristic way, he had gone into the shop 
 and asked if he might have the use of a bench and 
 tools for a few days, his friend J. A. Roys vouching 
 for him, and telling the gun shop proprietor the 
 story of the printing-press. 
 
 This early period of Edison's life is a wonderful 
 tribute to the willingness of people to help. If a 
 
46 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 boy is in dead earnest and can convince others that 
 he is worth while, he will find thousands ready to 
 help him. The half-hearted desire gets nowhere. 
 Thousands of "newsies" might want to sell more 
 papers, but it took an Edison to induce an editor 
 to give him a thousand copies on trust, and to show 
 that he had reason to suppose he could dispose of 
 them. Lots of boys have set type for fun, but 
 Edison was the first and almost the only per- 
 son to print a regular weekly newspaper on a mov- 
 ing train. Any number of lads might like the 
 privilege of using a gunsmith's bench and tools, but 
 it was the definiteness of purpose in Edison that 
 got him what he wanted. But whether it be the 
 Grand Trunk and the earnest application for the 
 "candy butcher" job, Storey and the thousand 
 papers, Roys and the printing-press, the composi- 
 tors and the proofs, the gunsmith and the bench, 
 or Mackenzie and the telegraph key, the one fact 
 stands out that the right sort of boy can generally 
 get the help he needs, if he needs it badly enough 
 and goes after it hard. 
 
 The change of the publication offices of the 
 Weekly Herald from the baggage car to the lad's 
 workshop in the home resulted disastrously. As 
 young Edison was so little at home, he found it 
 almost impossible to get the paper set up, and he 
 
THE SAD END OF PAUL PRY 47 
 
 entered into an arrangement with the "printer's 
 devil' ' of the Port Huron Commercial that he should 
 set up the matter that Edison brought him, run off 
 the paper and take a certain- share of the profits. 
 
 The plan was working well but the new partner, 
 not knowing anything about the railroad end of 
 things, constantly disagreed with Edison about 
 the items. Also, being even younger, and lacking 
 the balance of the real editor, he was anxious for 
 personal items of a funnier kind. He persuaded 
 young Edison that a sheet of this kind could have 
 a large local sale, as well as hold the subscribers 
 already listed, and the Weekly Herald gave place 
 to Paul Pry. 
 
 The few remaining numbers of Paul Pry show 
 that the influence of the new partner was a great 
 gain to Edison, so far as printing was concerned. 
 The paper was more interestingly written, also. 
 This was the pitfall into which it fell. Like many 
 other would-be great writers, the editors of Paul 
 Pry tried to be funny. But as the keeper of an 
 isolated lighthouse once pathetically remarked of 
 his partner "a funny man needs lots of room!" 
 You can't be funny in a local paper, for some one 
 is going to be hurt. 
 
 After the little journal had been running for a 
 few weeks, an indignant subscriber appeared at 
 
48 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 the office and asked for the editor-in-chief. He 
 had been lampooned in the Paul Pry and wanted 
 satisfaction. As he was about six feet high, and 
 broad in proportion-, Edison's boy partner was 
 glad to be able to say that the editor was out. 
 Unfortunately, subscriber and editor chanced to 
 meet, an hour later, close to the St. Clair River. 
 Whereupon the subscriber took the editor by his 
 collar and his waist and heaved him, neck and 
 crop, into the water. Edison swam to shore, and, 
 wet, but otherwise undisturbed, discontinued the 
 publication of Paul Pry and bade good-by to 
 journalism forever. 
 
 Although Edison has at various times suffered 
 at the hands of newspaper men, he has a very high 
 regard for the American press as a whole. 
 
 " Looking over the whole country," he is quoted 
 by F. A. Jones as saying, "I have come to 
 the conclusion that the greatest factor in our 
 progress has been the newspaper press. When 
 one wants to do a thing the newspapers take it up. 
 Everybody reads the newspapers, everybody knows 
 the situation, and we all act together." 
 
 On another occasion he said : 
 
 " To let the world know through type who and 
 what and where you are, and what you have that 
 this great world wants, is the secret of success, and 
 
THE SAD END OF PAUL PRY 49 
 
 the printing-press is its mightiest machine to that 
 end." 
 
 Time, as has so often been said, has its curious 
 revenges. The editor of the Paul Pry has often 
 been repaid in kind by humorous stories about him- 
 self that have been annoying. One of the most 
 amusing of these, and one which must have given 
 huge joy to the angry subscriber of the little Port 
 Huron sheet if he lived long enough to see it, was 
 the fake story of the patent shirt, first published 
 about the, time of the success of the phonograph. 
 
 "I laugh at the story now," said the inventor, 
 once, talking about it, "but at the time I didn't 
 think it so amusing. One of the ' boys' [news- 
 paper men] came down here one day, and not being 
 able to see me or to get any startling information 
 from any of my associates, he went home, probably 
 feeling somewhat aggrieved, and wrote up a story 
 of his own invention. 
 
 "He declared, in a very lucid and descriptive 
 way I've got to admit that the story was well 
 written that I was shortly bringing out a new 
 and very ingenious shirt which would last the ordi- 
 nary man twelve months, or longer, if he were 
 economical. The front of the shirt, he declared, 
 was made up of 365 excessively thin layers of a 
 fibrous material supposed only to be known to 
 
50 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 me and one other of my associates. All that the 
 wearer had to do when he put the garment on, 
 each morning, was to tear off one of the layers, when 
 the front would shine forth in all its pristine spot- 
 lessness and he would practically have a new shirt. 
 Oh, it was a good yarn ! 
 
 "The writer went on to say that I wore one of 
 these shirts myself and that I considered the inven- 
 tion the biggest thing I had yet accomplished. 
 
 "Well, it seemed to be too good a story to let 
 go. It was copied into a couple of hundred papers 
 in the States, and from there went broadcast all 
 over the world. Every race of people, from China- 
 men to South Africans, seemed desirous of getting 
 these shirts. Letters began to pour in, many of 
 them containing drafts and checks. All these had 
 to be returned. At first I gave orders that a polite 
 form of reply should be sent. But we were getting 
 swamped, and I wouldn't spend thousands of dol- 
 lars on postage. Then agents began to pester us. 
 
 "I guess for more than a year these orders for 
 'Edison Patent Shirts' poured in, until at last the 
 public began to realize that it had been hoaxed, 
 and turned its attention to something else. But 
 if I could have got hold of the young man who 
 wrote it up, I guess he wouldn't have wanted a shirt 
 or anything else on his back for several weeks !" 
 

CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE CRACK " LIGHTNING-SLINGER " 
 
 "Dox; dash, dot, dot; dot, dot; dot, dot, dot; 
 dot, (space), dot; dash, dot." 
 
 After all the years, this combination of tele- 
 graphic symbols spells to the old-time operator the 
 name of one of the most famous men that ever 
 clicked Morse over a key. Young Edison, seiz- 
 ing the advantage that had been given him by 
 his friend the station agent at Mt. Clemens, soon 
 became sufficiently expert to feel that he could 
 fill a night operator's place. He had friends all 
 along the line, and when the post of night operator 
 became vacant in Port Huron, his home town, 
 young Edison had little difficulty in securing the 
 place, at a salary of twenty-five dollars a month. 
 
 So far as money was concerned, this was a dis- 
 tinct drop for "Al" Edison, but he felt that in 
 it there was more opportunity than in his work 
 as "candy butcher." His father, also, was doing 
 well, so that his earnings were not needed by the 
 family. As night operator, his duties were very 
 
 Si 
 
52 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 light, merely to record the passing of trains. 
 Accordingly, Edison spent all day in his workshop 
 at home, experimenting on things telegraphic and 
 chemical. He could not be persuaded to sleep in 
 the daytime, and consequently, when he came on 
 duty, was always heavy and drowsy. The result 
 was that the work was thoroughly unsatisfactory, 
 and he would have been dismissed a dozen times 
 over if the train dispatcher had not known him 
 for years and liked him well. 
 
 After one particularly bad example of neglect, 
 Edison got into such a pickle that he realized his 
 job depended upon more care. He bought an 
 alarm clock with a rattle like the roll of musketry, 
 and a tin pan, set the clock for two minutes before 
 the time of the arrival of the next train, put the 
 clock on the upturned tin pan and went to sleep. 
 When the alarm woke him it would almost 
 have wakened a deaf mute ! he sent his message, 
 set his clock for the next train and went to sleep 
 again. 
 
 This worked well for a few nights, for the trains 
 were usually on time, but a couple of weeks later 
 one of the trains was late and set back the whole 
 schedule. Edison, who happened to be particularly 
 sleepy that night, paid no attention to the train, 
 but as soon as the alarm roused him, he reported 
 
THE CRACK "LIGHTNING-SLINGER" 53 
 
 that the train had passed and went to sleep again. 
 At the usual time for the next train he did the 
 same thing, and so on through the whole night. 
 
 Then a storm broke ! The train dispatcher sent 
 for him and pointed out the danger to life that was 
 caused by his neglect. He showed the boy the 
 heinousness of sleeping while on duty. Then 
 and here was his mistake instead of putting 
 the boy on honor, he made it imperative for him 
 to signal the letter 'A', or "dot, dash" every half 
 hour. Edison was entirely satisfied with the plan, 
 and being eager to keep his position, agreed to 
 send the message regularly. 
 
 The very next night the plan was instituted, and, 
 so far as the dispatcher was concerned, it worked 
 admirably, for it was impossible for Edison to get 
 a satisfactory nap in the intervals. The boy was 
 less satisfied, for he could see that he would have 
 to give up his experimenting during the day or else 
 lose his job. When he reported for duty the next 
 evening, his face wore that expression of satisfied 
 innocence which an office boy carries when on his 
 way to the baseball diamond to attend "his 
 grandmother's funeral." 
 
 As soon as the office was clear and Edison was 
 alone, he opened a small box which he had brought 
 down to the station and took out some coils of 
 
54 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 wire, a couple of wooden pegs, and a few tools. 
 He busied himself for an hour or so, connected to 
 the sending-key of the telegraph and to the clock 
 the small instrument he had made, and then leaned 
 back in his chair to watch the outcome when the 
 half-hour was reached. At the half-hour, exactly, 
 a little wooden lever fell, sending an exact imita- 
 tion of the Morse "dot, dash" and immediately 
 afterwards another lever fell and closed the circuit. 
 
 Edison's smile grew broader, but he waited for 
 the next half-hour cycle. When, at that time, 
 the little instrument again performed its duties 
 successfully, his smile broadened until it couldn't 
 get any broader, and, so smiling, he fell asleep and 
 slept the sleep of the ingenious, if not of the just. 
 
 So exact was this mechanical watcher that 
 Edison's reputation was being reestablished and 
 the train dispatcher took great credit to himself 
 for having designed a plan which was teaching 
 the young operator the value of punctuality and 
 attention to detail. Even the ingenuity of an 
 Edison, however, cannot forever take the place of 
 attention to duty. It happened that one night, 
 while the dispatcher was making his rounds, he 
 found himself only one station away from Port 
 Huron, and after getting the usual signal from 
 Edison, it occurred to him to call up the operator 
 
THE CRACK "LIGHTNING-SLINGER" 55 
 
 and have a chat. He threw open the key and 
 called. There was no reply. For ten minutes 
 he called the station, at first expectantly, then 
 angrily, and at last with alarm, for he began to feel 
 sure that something dreadful must have hap- 
 pened. At last he gave up the key, and boarding 
 a hand-car, he started off for the next station as 
 hard as he could pump. 
 
 On reaching Port Huron he hurried across the 
 platform and glanced fearfully through the office 
 window, half-expecting to find Edison unconscious 
 on the floor. Instead, a peaceful scene met his 
 eyes. The telegraph operator, entirely uncon- 
 scious of scrutiny, was lying across two chairs 
 with a pillow and a coverlet and all the evidences 
 of a regular sleeping arrangement. The train 
 dispatcher was about to burst into the room when 
 it occurred to him to wait and see what new scheme 
 the boy had invented for being wakened at the half- 
 hour interval. 
 
 But when the hands of the clock pointed to the 
 required hour, Edison continued to sleep as peace- 
 fully as before and the alarm clock made no sound. 
 Puzzled beyond words, the dispatcher watched 
 for a moment or two longer; then, in a way that 
 seemed like magic, a lever operated by a small 
 instrument on the table opened the circuit, the 
 
56 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 instrument "got busy" and sent the required 
 "dot, dash" over the wire. Another lever closed 
 the circuit, and lo and behold! there was the me- 
 chanical evidence that the operator had been awake 
 and on the job, while the train dispatcher stood by 
 the window and watched the "operator" sleeping 
 profoundly. 
 
 In record time Edison was yanked up and stood 
 on his feet, while the dispatcher poured into his 
 half-awakened ears a harangue which brought the 
 young inventor to his senses with a jump. Lan- 
 guage was picturesque on western railroads in 
 those days, and Edison had no difficulty in under- 
 standing that he was out of a job and that the 
 quicker he cleared out of that office the better ! 
 He did, only trying to justify himself with the state- 
 ment that nothing serious had occurred as a result 
 of his sleeping to justify his dismissal. 
 
 His next offense, however, was more serious, 
 and to this day Edison himself speaks of it a little 
 shamefacedly. After having been dismissed from 
 Port Huron, the young fellow was out of work for 
 some weeks, but finally secured a position in Sarnia, 
 Ontario, a Canadian point, also on the Grand 
 Trunk Railroad. This was a day position, and 
 consequently there was not the same opportunity 
 to shirk work. But no routine, no matter how 
 
THE CRACK "LIGHTNING-SLINGER" 57 
 
 close or detailed, sufficed to interest Edison for 
 long; his mind craved the grappling with new 
 problems. Accordingly, even at his work, he 
 usually had a sheet of paper and pencil beside 
 him on which he would work out problems which 
 he desired to submit to experiment at a more propi- 
 tious time. 
 
 On one of these occasions, while extremely 
 interested in a question which afterwards he made 
 useful in his quadruplex telegraph invention, he 
 allowed a train which he had been ordered to stop, 
 to run through his station. As this was definite 
 negligence, the seriousness of the matter flashed 
 on Edison the second that the train had passed, 
 and he rushed out on the platform in a vain hope 
 to attract attention. It was, of course, too late, 
 and the boy ran down the line with his ears strained 
 and his heart almost bursting from his ribs, every 
 second fearing to hear the crash of an awful acci- 
 dent. Fortunately the locomotive engineers heard 
 each others' whistles and the accident was averted 
 by a narrow margin. 
 
 Edison was at once summoned to the office of 
 the general manager, W. J. Spicer, a man noted for 
 his severity. 
 
 "Young man," said Mr. Spicer, "this offense of 
 yours is a very serious one, and I think I shall 
 
58 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 make an example of you. I can send you to the 
 penitentiary far five years and " 
 
 "Just at this minute," continued Edison when 
 telling the story, "two English swells came in and 
 Mr. Spicer rose to greet them. They engaged him 
 in conversation and I seized the chance to slip 
 quietly out of the door. I headed for the freight 
 depot where I found a freight train about to start 
 for Sarnia. I knew the conductor, told him I'd 
 been up to Toronto on a holiday excursion, and 
 asked him to run me back to my station. He 
 agreed. I stayed on that freight train right 
 through, but my pulse didn't get down to normal 
 while I was in Canada, until the ferryboat between 
 Sarnia and Port Huron landed me in the United 
 States." 
 
 At Port Huron he applied for a job to the Western 
 Union Company and they took him on. He was 
 there only a few months, however, leaving because 
 of a dispute with the manager over a bonus which 
 was to have been given for " taking " an important 
 presidential message to Congress. 
 
 Hearing that the, post of night operator at 
 Stratford, Ontario, was vacant, he applied for the 
 position and secured it without delay. The pay, 
 however, was but twenty-five dollars a month, 
 scarcely enough to live on, and Edison decided 
 
THE CRACK "LIGHTNING-SLINGER" 59 
 
 that it was not worth his while to stay there, the 
 more so as he had no conveniences for his private 
 experiments. He threw up the position and started 
 off for Indianapolis, where it was possible to secure 
 more important posts. He stopped the superin- 
 tendent of the Western Union Company in the 
 street and asked for an interview. The latter, 
 Mr. John F. Wallick, favorably impressed, told 
 him to come in the next morning. Edison did 
 so, and answered the questions that were asked him 
 so promptly, and with such an evident understand- 
 ing of the principles of * telegraphy , that he was 
 given a position in the Union Station at once. 
 Here the pay was fair, and the work heavy. Being 
 only routine, however, it did not suit Edison, and 
 he petitioned for the " press wire." In this, how- 
 ever, he was unable to make good, and a few months 
 later he was suspended for delay on the wire and 
 transferred to Cincinnati. 
 
 Frequently, in later years, Edison has expressed 
 his good fortune that the work of a telegraph 
 operator should have been the line he took up 
 when it was necessary for him to earn his living 
 during the years best fitted for acquiring knowledge. 
 He has since told the story of the happenings in the 
 telegraph office in Cincinnati on one of the most 
 dramatic nights in American history. 
 
60 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 "One night/' he is quoted by W. K. L. Dickson 
 as having said, "I noticed an immense crowd 
 gathering outside a newspaper office across the 
 street. I called the attention of the other opera- 
 tors to the crowd, and growing curious, we sent 
 a messenger boy to find out the cause of the excite- 
 ment. He came back in a hurry, dashed up the 
 stairs two steps at a time, and just as he reached 
 the door of the office, shouted, 
 
 1(1 Lincoln's been shot!' 
 
 "We had expected some local news, but just as 
 soon as we realized that 'this dispatch must have 
 come through our office, we glanced from one to 
 the other to see who had taken the news and kept 
 so quiet about it. All faces were blank and every 
 man said he had not taken a word about the shoot- 
 ing. 
 
 "'Look over your files,' said the boss to the 
 man handling the press stuff. 
 
 "For a few minutes we waited in suspense, and 
 then the man held up a sheet of 'flimsy' containing 
 a short account of the assassination of the Presi- 
 dent. The operator had worked so mechanically 
 that he had handled the news without the slight- 
 est perception of its significance. I think," Edison 
 concluded, "that I must have often been thinking 
 up problems while I was at work, although, before 
 
THE CRACK "LIGHTNING-SLINGER" 6 1 
 
 I quit, I was able to 'take' any stuff they liked to 
 send along." 
 
 The suspension from the office at Indianapolis 
 was a great shock to Edison's pride, for he realized 
 that it was not due to his mind being occupied 
 with other things, but solely to the fact that there 
 were more rapid operators than himself. He 
 buckled down to his work in earnest, and 
 " subbed" for the night men every chance he got, 
 once in a while managing to get a chance for an 
 hour or so on the "press wire" during a slack 
 period of the night. This was the cause of his 
 promotion. 
 
 Coming down to "sub" one night, he found the 
 entire night staff off on a spree, and peeling off his 
 coat, the youth took the press report as best he 
 could, working alone until morning. The very 
 next day his salary was nearly doubled and he 
 was given the Louisville wire, one of the best in 
 the office. Fortunately for Edison, the "sender" 
 at the Louisville end was one of the best in the 
 country and at the same time both smooth and 
 patient. This made things easy for Edison, and 
 he soon got up speed enough to be able to handle 
 the "press wire" with comparative ease. 
 
 The manager of the Cincinnati office, however, 
 was somewhat of a stickler for appearance, and 
 
62 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 nothing could make Edison careful. He spent 
 all his money on books and appliances, and he 
 spent nearly all his spare time in reading, with the 
 result that one day he again found himself out of 
 a position. By this time, however, he was one of 
 the fastest operators the Western Union had on 
 its payroll and one who was the despair of his 
 rivals because of the ease with which he was able 
 to "take" or "transmit." Francis A. Jones, in 
 his biographical appreciation of Edison, quotes a 
 Tennessee man who was an operator in the West- 
 ern Union office at Memphis at the time the future 
 Wizard applied for a job. 
 
 "He came walking into the office one morning," 
 ^ says this anonymous writer, "looking like a veri- 
 table hayseed. He wore a hickory shirt, a pair 
 of butternut pants tucked into the tops of boots 
 which looked too large for him and which, evi- 
 dently, were guiltless of blacking. 
 
 " 'Where's the boss ? ' was his query as he glanced 
 around the office. 
 
 "No one replied at once, and he repeated the 
 question. 
 
 "The manager asked what he could do for him, 
 and the future great one proceeded to strike him 
 for a job. Business was rushing and the office 
 was two men short, so almost any kind of a light- 
 
THE CRACK "LIGHTNING-SLINGER" 63 
 
 ning-slinger was welcome. He was assigned to a 
 desk for a trial and a fusillade of winks went the 
 rounds of the room, for the new arrival had been 
 put on the St. Louis wire, the hardest in the office. 
 At the end of the line was an operator who was 
 chain lightning and knew it. 
 
 " Edison had hardly got seated before St. Louis 
 called. The newcomer responded, and St. Louis 
 started on a long report which he pumped in like 
 a house afire. Edison threw his leg over the arm 
 of the chair, leisurely transferred a wad of spruce 
 gum from his pocket to his mouth, took up a pen, 
 examined it critically, and started in about fifty 
 words behind. He didn't stay there long, though. 
 St. Louis let out another link of speed and still 
 another, and the instrument on Edison's table 
 hummed like an old-style Singer sewing machine. 
 Every man in the office left his desk and gathered 
 around the jay to see what he was doing with that 
 electric cyclone. 
 
 "Well, sir, he was right on the word and taking 
 it down in the prettiest copper-plate hand you 
 ever saw, even crossing his *tV and dotting his 
 Ts' and punctuating with as much care as a 
 man editing telegraph for rat printers. St. Louis 
 got tired by and by and began to slow down. Then 
 Edison opened the key and said : 
 
64 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 "'St. Louis! Hello, there! Change off, and 
 send with the other foot ! ' 
 
 "Well, sir, that broke St. Louis all up. He had 
 been rawhiding Memphis for a long time, and we 
 were terribly sore. To have a man in our office 
 who could walk all over him made us feel like a man 
 whose horse had won the Derby. We took him 
 out and gave him a dinner, but we never really 
 succeeded in getting the look of the slick operator 
 into him." 
 
 The Memphis office was full of a wild crowd, and 
 after a particularly riotous night, the manager 
 came in and dismissed several of them, including 
 Edison, though he had taken little part in the fun. 
 He was without funds, and he actually tramped 
 all the way to Nashville and then to Louisville 
 before he found another job. Realizing that to get 
 the full benefit of his skill in telegraphy he must 
 write as rapidly as any one could send, the young 
 fellow developed a highly artistic " back-hand " 
 which he could do at a speed of fifty words a 
 minute, or as fast as a Morse operator could send. 
 As this was before the days of typewriters, this 
 last ability was the crowning cap of his efficiency.- 
 
 Experiments, as ever, were his bane. As he 
 spent on apparatus all that he could earn, Edison 
 begrudged buying sulphuric acid, which he needed 
 
THE CRACK "LIGHTNING-SLINGER" 65 
 
 for his tests, when there was a lot of it in the office 
 where he worked. One night, while he was en- 
 gaged in filling one of his own vials with acid 
 from the general stock, the carboy tipped over 
 and fell on the floor. The acid ran through the 
 floor and the ceiling of a richly furnished directors' 
 room of a bank, doing great damage. Edison 
 was immediately discharged, both because of the 
 damage and because he was not expected to help 
 himself to office supplies. 
 
 His good judgment in spending time in develop- 
 ing his handwriting now showed itself. Having 
 written to a friend in Boston, by name Milton 
 Adams, to see if there was any chance for a job, 
 Adams showed the letter to Mr. G. F. Milliken. 
 The curious handwriting immediately attracted 
 the manager's attention, and on learning from 
 Adams that Edison could write that hand as 
 rapidly as an operator could send, he was told to 
 write to his friend and he would be given a chance. 
 
 Edison strolled in, looking as untidy as ever, 
 but Milliken was a man of judgment, the very 
 first to recognize in the young telegraph operator 
 the spark of genius, and he overlooked many things 
 which would have been cause for dismissal in 
 another man. He was hardly ever on time, and 
 often would arrive at the office half an hour or 
 
66 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 even an hour late, owing to his intense concentra- 
 tion on some problem which he had been attack- 
 ing that day in his little workshop. But the days 
 of his life as a telegraph operator were drawing 
 to a close, for the spirit of the inventor possessed 
 him more and more, and, when he left Boston 
 after a couple of years under Milliken, he had 
 handled the key for the last time but one. 
 
 Twenty-six years later, at the Electrical Exhibi- 
 tion held at New York, when Edison's name was 
 honored throughout the United States, he was 
 asked to receive the message to be sent around 
 the world by Chauncey M. Depew. In order to 
 test his ability, he stepped into the telegraph room. 
 As the familiar clatter and click of the instruments 
 struck his ears, he tossed up his head. 
 
 " Sounds good," he remarked. "Good man at 
 the other end?" he queried as he sat down and 
 reached over for some telegraph blanks. 
 
 "Pretty fair," answered the manager. 
 
 Click click beg'an the instrument, and Edi- 
 son half wheeled round in his chair to nod approval. 
 
 "Good Morse," he said, "very easy to read. 
 I doubt if I can put it down the way I used to, 
 though." 
 
 He struck a match and proceeded to light one 
 of his big cigars, writing steadily with the other 
 
THE CRACK "LIGHTNING-SLINGER" 67 
 
 hand. He took the screed down without a flaw 
 and with apparent ease, and then, to test his send- 
 ing ability, turned loose on the man at the other 
 end, repeating the message. 
 
 " I think I could receive or send if I lived to be a 
 thousand," said the inventor, leaning back in his 
 chair. "I don't believe a man would ever forget 
 it. It read just like copperplate, but it kept me 
 scratching to get it down." 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 "NEVER WATCH THE CLOCK!" 
 
 IT is undeniably true that Edison's career as an 
 inventor began while he was still a tiny toddler 
 has not the story of the goose's eggs been told ? 
 but a turning point in his career is marked by the 
 granting of his first patent. It is characteristic 
 that this should be a device of value to the state. 
 Just as, at the height of his career, Edison was 
 willing to give his counsel to the national defense 
 of the United States in a military fashion, so, in 
 his youth, he wished to make his inventiveness 
 of service to political and legislative life. Both 
 bespeak the patriot. 
 
 This first patent of the great inventor's was a 
 vote-recording machine. Edison, on the press 
 wire, had taken many an account of an election or 
 an important vote in Congress, and he knew how 
 awkwardly this was done and with how many 
 delays. 
 
 The "vote-recorder" was a complete system, 
 arranged so that it might be attached to a switch 
 
 68 
 
"NEVER WATCH THE CLOCK!" 69 
 
 on the desk of every member- of a legislative body. 
 When a question came up for vote, the member, 
 by moving the switch either to the right or the 
 left, could register his vote on the machine at the 
 clerk's desk. The paper on which the vote was 
 recorded was chemically prepared, and when the 
 member moved the switch and closed the circuit, 
 an iron roller passed over the paper, under which 
 was the type signifying the member's name. 
 Whenever the type came in contact with the chemi- 
 cally prepared paper, it turned it a dark brown, 
 thus practically printing the name on the roll of 
 paper. An indicator registered the number of 
 votes "for" and "against," thus insuring accuracy, 
 giving a permanent record, and counting the votes 
 instantaneously. 
 
 Edison took a trip to Washington and showed 
 the recorder to several Congressmen who were 
 on important committees. One of the most 
 prominent, after examining the machine closely, 
 said to him, 
 
 "Young man, so far as I can tell, that's a mighty 
 ingenious little instrument you've got there and 
 it seems to work well. You couldn't monkey 
 with a thing like that if you wanted to. That's 
 what's the trouble with it. If everything was 
 on the square, and no one was trying to put any- 
 
70 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 thing over, that machine would be a big help and 
 save a lot of time. But it won't do." 
 
 "Why not?" asked Edison, naturally enough. 
 
 "Because there's got to be a chance to filibuster 
 and delay, sometimes. Quite often a piece of 
 bad legislation comes up unexpectedly, and if 
 the men who want it could railroad it through, 
 there'd be no chance of setting things right again. 
 That machine of yours is just about the last thing 
 we want here. You've got the right idea for an 
 ideal state but this isn't idealism, this is politics. 
 Take the thing away." 
 
 "It broke me all up," said Edison, when he 
 told the story afterwards, "because I knew the 
 machine was a good one and I had counted on its 
 bringing me in some money. But that was a 
 good solid lesson to me. Right there and then 
 I said to myself that I wouldn't ever put in time 
 trying to invent something that wouldn't sell, or, 
 at least, that wasn't of general good to the com- 
 munity. And, except for a few things which 
 just happened into my mind ' scratches ' I call 
 them I have pretty well kept that vow." 
 
 Up to this time, it must be admitted, Edison 
 had not "found himself." Nothing saved him 
 but the fact that telegraph operators were scarce 
 in that time of the rapid extension of the telegraph, 
 
"NEVER WATCH THE CLOCK!" 71 
 
 for, though a good operator, he was a poor em- 
 ployee. Milliken's confidence in him, however, 
 encouraged his ambitions as an inventor, and 
 though F. L. Pope, patent adviser of the Western 
 Union Company, after a trial, decided that his 
 duplex system was still far from perfect, he had 
 held out hopes. 
 
 At this point Edison took the bull by the horns. 
 Not with any return of his shiftless and wandering 
 habits, but with a definite objective point, he re- 
 signed his position in Boston and came to New 
 York. Sink or swim, he was going to make the 
 world see the value of his ideas. He had no 
 money scarcely enough to pay two weeks' 
 board, and the " inventing business" is one that 
 takes a lot of capital. 
 
 At last, at long last, Fortune smiled directly 
 upon him. The wheel of Chance swung his way. 
 Walking along Wall Street one morning, he entered 
 the head office of the Law Gold Recorder. The 
 Recorder which was the father of the stock 
 ticker was an electrical device which regis- 
 tered the fluctuation in the price of gold, in much 
 the same way that the stock ticker to-day regis- 
 ters the rise and fall of the prices of stocks. It 
 was much mor^ primitive in its make, but it 
 worked. 
 
72 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 On this particular morning, the office was in 
 an uproar. There had been a general breakdown 
 of the system, a matter of fairly frequent oc- 
 currence gold was dear, minutes were flying 
 fast and excitement was high. Mr. Law was 
 standing by the broken-down machine with half 
 a dozen of his most expert workmen, all trying 
 to locate the trouble. 
 
 Suddenly Edison, who had been watching 
 closely, piped up. 
 
 "I don't see any particular trouble there." 
 
 "Why?" asked Law quickly. 
 
 "I think I can fix it up, right away," the young 
 electrician said modestly. 
 
 "Jump in and see what you can do," was the 
 immediate answer. 
 
 Edison walked forward with one hand in his 
 pocket, the other holding a small pair of tweezers. 
 Without even troubling to take his left hand out 
 of his pocket, he removed a loose contact spring 
 which had become displaced and which had fallen 
 between the wheels. Instantly the instruments 
 worked as readily as before. 
 
 For a minute or two, Law watched young 
 Edison. 
 
 "Clever machine, that," he said, to draw him 
 into conversation. 
 
"NEVER WATCH THE CLOCK!" 73 
 
 "Ye-es," the inventor answered dubiously. 
 
 ''Don't you think so?" 
 
 "In some ways," was the deliberate answer. 
 
 "Can you improve on it?" 
 
 "I haven't thought about it at all," came the 
 modest reply, "but there's nearly always a way 
 to better every machine." 
 
 The head of the concern looked him over. 
 
 "Come into the office," he said; "if you have 
 any ideas about the ticker, I'd like to hear them." 
 
 The interview was brief and bewildering to Mr. 
 Law. In his slow and deliberate way, young 
 Edison laid out all the advantages and disad- 
 vantages of the principles of the system. 
 
 "When did you examine the instruments?" 
 queried the head of the concern. 
 
 "I haven't had a chance to examine them yet," 
 was the answer, "I could see that much while 
 the other chaps were trying to fix it." 
 
 "I really ought to have some one to manage the 
 service and see that it doesn't get out of gear so 
 much," said Mr. Law. "Will you take the job? 
 I can't pay more than three hundred dollars a 
 month." 
 
 At the time this seemed fabulous riches to 
 Edison, and nothing but his natural gravity and 
 impassiveness kept him from showing his surprise, 
 
74 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 but he accepted the position in what he felt to 
 be the offhand way that was required. 
 
 In spite of the fact that he was manager of the 
 service, however, the gold ticker broke down 
 again and again. Edison was always able to 
 attend to it instantly, and in consequence the 
 customers were kept satisfied. Edison was not. 
 In his judgment, a piece of electrical machinery 
 was not satisfactory until it was at least ninety 
 per cent perfect. He set aside his duplex tele- 
 graph plans to work on improvements in the 
 ticker. 
 
 As some of these came into force, the Law Gold 
 Recorder and another firm consolidated, and 
 Edison, for a little while, was not quite sure where 
 he was going to land. He soon took a similar 
 position of electrician with the Gold and Stock 
 Telegraph Company, whose president, General 
 Marshall Lefferts, gave him every opportunity 
 for developing his ideas. In the next couple of 
 years Edison patented a host of stock printers 
 or " tickers," one of which, with slight improve- 
 ments, is the stock and news ticker of to-day. 
 
 One day two of the directors of the company 
 stopped Edison in the brokerage room and asked 
 him to come to the office of the president, stating 
 that they wanted to take up with him the ques- 
 
"NEVER WATCH THE CLOCK!" 75 
 
 tion of purchasing the title to his inventions and 
 improvements of the gold ticker. 
 
 "I had made up my mind," Edison has since 
 said, "that five thousand dollars would strike me 
 about right, but I would take almost anything, 
 rather than not sell, as I needed money sorely 
 for further experiments. 
 
 "'Well, Mr. Edison/ General Lefferts said, 
 'how much do you want for your devices?' 
 
 "'I do not know how much they may be worth 
 to you/ I answered. 'Make me an offer/ 
 
 " ' How would forty thousand dollars strike you ? ' 
 
 "I believe you could have knocked me down 
 with a feather, so astonished I was at the sum. 
 But the check was handed over two days later, 
 after I had signed a large, formidable paper, 
 about as intelligible to me as if it were written 
 in Choctaw. In thirty days I had a shop of my 
 own, fully equipped with all I needed, an invest- 
 ment which left me very little of the money I 
 received from the ticker patents." 
 
 A second example of good fortune gave Edison 
 an assured position in the world of invention, 
 and, by a coincidence, it happened in very much 
 the same way as the first. Edison had been in 
 the habit of burning up the road to the office of 
 the president of the Western Union every other 
 
76 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 week or so, for he was absolutely convinced of 
 the value of his telegraphic inventions, and he 
 knew that there was no organization which could 
 take them up with as much profit. Dr. Norvin 
 Green, who was president at that time, had a 
 great respect for age and like many an old- 
 fashioned man believed that discipline was a 
 wholesome corrective for youth. He could not 
 be persuaded that such vast plans as those out- 
 lined by Thomas Edison could be of any value, 
 since they were conceived by so youthful a per- 
 sonage. 
 
 It chanced that on one of these visits, when 
 he actually succeeded in getting into the sanctum 
 of Dr. Green, he found that gentleman in a highly 
 irritated state. Indeed, he was so irascible that 
 he found it necessary to half-apologize for it by 
 stating that the company was unable to get into 
 communication with Albany, their line repairers 
 were all at fault, and that a great deal of im- 
 portant business was being delayed. 
 
 "What's wrong ?" 
 
 "What the Blue Peter should I be sitting here 
 fuming about, if I knew what was wrong ?" re- 
 torted the magnate. "Perhaps, since you think 
 you know such a blame lot about telegraphy, 
 you might undertake to fix the trouble!" 
 
"NEVER WATCH THE CLOCK!" 77 
 
 Edison caught the sarcasm in the tone and it 
 stung him a little. 
 
 "Dr. Green," he said, "all that I'm asking you 
 to do is to give my inventions a fair consideration 
 and an honest trial. If I locate this trouble for 
 you within three hours, will you promise to give 
 my ideas their chance?" 
 
 The president stared at him. 
 
 "Do you really think you can do it?" he in- 
 quired. 
 
 Edison wasted no words. 
 
 "Yes," he answered. 
 
 "Very good, then," said the head of the Western 
 Union. "I'll be as good as my word. If you get 
 us out of this fix within thirty-six hours, I will 
 guarantee that your inventions are put forward 
 and given every consideration that their merits 
 warrant." 
 
 Edison jumped from his chair and made a bee 
 line for the main office. He was known as an 
 expert operator and a good many of the men 
 knew of his improvements on the stock ticker, 
 so that every assistance was afforded him. 
 
 "At the main office," said Edison, when telling 
 the story himself, many years later, "I called up 
 Pittsburg and asked for the best operator there. 
 When I got him, I told him to call up Albany 
 
78 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 and get hold of the best operator in that place 
 to wire down the line toward New York so far as 
 he could and report back as soon as possible. In- 
 side of an hour I received this message : 
 
 U< I can get to within two miles of Poughkeepsie 
 and there is trouble with the wire there.' 
 
 "I hurried back to the office of the president 
 and told him that if he rushed a train to Pough- 
 keepsie, the repair men would find a break two 
 miles on the other side of the station and it could 
 be fixed up that same afternoon. " 
 
 In order to be able to give up routine work on 
 a salary basis and give his whole time to experi- 
 mentation, Edison resigned as manager of the 
 Gold and Stock Indicator, and opened up a fac- 
 tory in Newark, N. J., manufacturing his improved 
 tickers, for which there was a great demand. 
 This was his first definite step into the industriali- 
 zation of his inventions. 
 
 While he was most busily engaged in super- 
 vising the manufacture of these tickers, Edison 
 married his first wife. It was in connection with 
 this marriage that the notorious and incorrect 
 story is told of his having absolutely forgotten 
 the fact of his marriage. 
 
 "It's just one of those yarns the boys have to 
 put up when they're short of news," Edison has 
 
"NEVER WATCH THE CLOCK!" 79 
 
 since stated. Then continuing, he is reported 
 by F. A. Jones as having said: "That annoying 
 story was got up by an imaginative newspaper 
 man who knew that I was a bit absent-minded. 
 I never forgot that I had been married. In fact, 
 I don't believe any man would forget such an 
 event unless he wanted to. But perhaps there 
 was something to account for the story, and I 
 think it must have been this : 
 
 "The day I was married, a consignment of stock 
 tickers had been returned to the factory as being 
 imperfect and I wanted to find out what was wrong. 
 Just about an hour after the marriage ceremony 
 had been performed I thought about those tickers, 
 and as soon as we got home I told my wife about 
 them and said I would like to go down to the 
 factory. She agreed at once and I went down, 
 where I found Bachelor, my assistant, hard at 
 work trying to remedy the defect. We both 
 monkeyed about with them, and finally after an 
 hour or two [the inventor is not famous for his 
 sense of time, and itjmight have been nine or ten 
 hours, as other reports say] we put them to rights 
 and I went home again. 
 
 "As to forgetting that I was married, that's 
 all nonsense, and both I and my wife laughed at 
 the story, though when I began to come across it 
 
8o THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 every other week the tale began to get tedious. 
 It was one of those made-up stories which stick, 
 and I suppose I shall always be spoken of as the 
 man who forgot his wife an hour after he was 
 married." 
 
 Apropos of the inventor's reference to "an hour 
 or two," it is worthy of comment that Edison 
 seldom carries a watch. There is no clock in the 
 chemical laboratory where he works most of the 
 time. The minutes of his day are ticked off by 
 accomplishments, not by the figures of a dial. 
 
 As characteristic a piece of advice as ever was 
 given by the inventor was that which he gave to 
 the son of a well-known English scientist. The 
 proud father, after having introduced the lad, 
 begged the Wizard to say something to the boy 
 which he could remember as having been the most 
 valuable piece of advice given to him in his life. 
 
 Edison, who is modest to the point of con- 
 fusion, utterly disclaimed any power to issue an 
 epigram or piece of sage counsel to the boy at a 
 moment's notice. But the visitor begged so hard 
 that the inventor turned his mind to the philosophy 
 of his actions instead of to the actions themselves. 
 Then, after a moment's thought, he put his hand 
 on the boy's shoulder and with a kindly smile said, 
 
 "My boy, never watch the clock !" 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 BUILDING A PHANTOM TELEGRAPH 
 
 "ELECTRICITY," said a schoolboy once, in an 
 examination on physics, "is that something you 
 can't see and don't know anything about, that 
 will do anything you want without your knowing 
 how it does it." 
 
 In a way, the boy's definition, while it could 
 hardly be called scientific, somewhat represents 
 Edison's own ideas about electricity. He is a 
 kindly natured man and enormously patient, 
 but it is on record that he once delivered himself 
 of a strong opinion about those of his callers who 
 ask. questions about theoretical causes. 
 
 "What I hate," he said, "is when I have tried 
 to explain a little of the wonders of the electric 
 current, to have some young college freshie say, 
 
 "'Well, after all, Mr. Edison, we don't know 
 what electricity really is, do we?" 
 
 To Edison, electricity, like all science, is not so 
 much a matter of knowledge for the sake of knowl- 
 edge, as it is the use of the mysteries of nature for 
 
 G 8l 
 
82 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 the betterment of the human race. The distinction 
 between Franklin and Edison is great. It is the 
 distinction between the prospector and the miner. 
 Franklin went far to determine the relation of 
 electricity to nature; Edison has constructed 
 the path between the electrical forces of nature 
 and the service of man. 
 
 The electric telegraph as a commercial success 
 owes its completion to Samuel F. B. Morse and 
 Chas. Wheats tone, but its power as an agent in 
 the progress of the world is due to Edison. "The 
 Wizard's'' contribution to the telegraph was the 
 invention of the duplex and quadruplex systems, 
 by which one wire can be made to carry two or 
 four messages. This not only increases the com- 
 mercial value of every wire twofold or fourfold, 
 as the case may be, but it also correspondingly 
 reduces the cost of upkeep and repair. 
 
 The value of the duplex and quadruplex systems 
 can best be understood if one thinks of the quad- 
 ruplex system as being a plan by which one wire 
 is made to serve the purpose of four. It is almost 
 as though three phantom or ghostly wires, which 
 have no real existence, were strung parallel to 
 the true wire. The manner in which this is ac- 
 complished is easily understood once the prin- 
 ciples of telegraphy are made clear. 
 
BUILDING A PHANTOM TELEGRAPH 83 
 
 In 1831, Michael Faraday, experimenting on 
 magnetism, discovered that a piece of iron could 
 be made into a magnet by winding a coil of in- 
 sulated wire round it, and passing a current of 
 electricity through the coil. The iron, however, 
 was not permanently magnetized, but was a 
 magnet only so long as the current was flowing 
 through the coils. When the current stopped, 
 the magnetism ceased. This holds true, no matter 
 how quickly or how often the current is put on 
 and off, or, in the usual phrase, no matter how 
 often one may "make" and " break" the cir- 
 cuit. To make or close a circuit is to give a con- 
 tinuous wire through which the current may 
 flow; to break or open a circuit, is to put a gap 
 at some part of the wire, preventing the flow of 
 the current. 
 
 If a metal hammer, or armature, is so arranged 
 that it is held by a spring at a short distance 
 above a soft-iron core wound with insulated wire 
 connected with a galvanic battery, it is obvious 
 that when the current is passing along the wire, 
 making the soft iron a temporary magnet, the 
 metal hammer will be drawn against the iron. 
 As long as the current flows, and the iron remains 
 a magnet, the hammer or armature will remain 
 held by it, in spite of the spring. As soon as the 
 
84 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 current is stopped, and the iron ceases to be a 
 magnet, there is nothing to attract the hammer 
 and it flies back with the pull of the spring. 
 
 As the magnet can be made very powerful by 
 wrapping a large number of coils around it, the 
 hammer can be made to come upon the iron with 
 such force that a sharp "tap" is produced. Then, 
 it is clear that if an alphabet be arranged which 
 is based on the number of "taps," or the time 
 between them, words can be spelt and electricity 
 can convey a message. 
 
 From this point it is easy to see that if a key be 
 so arranged that by pressing a button a circuit 
 will be "made" or "closed," and by releasing it 
 the circuit will be "broken" or "open," an opera- 
 tor using the key at one end of a wire may cause a 
 hammer or armature to give a series of correspond- 
 ing "taps" at the other end of the wire. This 
 button arrangement, which is called the "trans- 
 mitter," may be at any distance from the magnet 
 and hammer, since the passage of electricity is 
 practically instantaneous. 
 
 In actual practice it was found by Morse that 
 the current f eebled in passing over a long stretch 
 of wire, so that it was too weak to make a magnet 
 strong enough to attract a hammer with force 
 enough to make a sufficiently loud "tap." To 
 
BUILDING A PHANTOM TELEGRAPH 85 
 
 avoid this, Morse adopted a system of strengthen- 
 ing the current at certain intervals with "relays." 
 The idea was first advanced by Professor Henry 
 of the Smithsonian, improved by Morse, and per- 
 fected by Edison. 
 
 The importance of the "relay" cannot be over- 
 estimated. If, at a considerable distance, the 
 current becomes too weak to work the tapper, and 
 if the working of the tapper is the crucial point 
 in telegraphy, it follows that the system is de- 
 pendent on some means whereby the weak current, 
 at a long range, can powerfully operate a tapper. 
 This is the purpose of the relay. 
 
 In the relay, the tapper is not on the main 
 circuit, but on a separate powerful local circuit. 
 On this local circuit is a light "make and break" 
 device, to be controlled by the main line. The 
 main line, by this means, does not enter the local 
 station at all, it does not go through it, but it 
 operates either to let the strong local current 
 pass, or not. 
 
 When the main line approaches the local cir- 
 cuit, it goes round a light piece of soft iron. Im- 
 mediately opposite this soft-iron magnet is the 
 break in the local circuit, a light lever being held 
 back by a light spring. When there is a current 
 (from a message) on the main wire, it magnetizes 
 
86 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 the light soft iron, and pulls the lever forward. 
 It is not allowed to reach the magnet as this 
 would draw current from the main line but 
 meets the other point of its own circuit, closing it, 
 sending the current through and operating the 
 tapper. When the main line current stops, the 
 light magnet becomes demagnetized, the lever 
 flies back, breaking the local circuit, and the 
 tapper flies back, operated by its spring. 
 
 As the operator, in a distant town, moves his 
 key up and down, spelling words in the Morse 
 code, thus opening and closing the main line 
 circuit, so does the little lever move, opening and 
 closing the powerful local circuit which works the 
 tapper. Thus the listener hears in loud sharp 
 clicks the message that is beirlg sent from a distant 
 sending station, though the original current it- 
 self never comes upon his wire. 
 
 To use this wire for more than one message at 
 a time was Edison's aim. He was by no means 
 the first. In 1853, Dr. Gintl, an Austrian, in- 
 vented a duplex system, as did Carl Frischen of 
 Hanover. There were various others, especially 
 the "Stearns" and the "Polar" systems. All 
 had some weak point. They had come to the 
 "I don't know" point, and Edison set out to find 
 the "why" of it. He found the reason, overcame 
 
BUILDING A PHANTOM TELEGRAPH 87 
 
 the obstacles that had halted his predecessors, 
 and devised his working system of duplex teleg- 
 raphy. This he patented, and this was the 
 basis of his constant bombardment of the Western 
 Union Telegraph Company. As has been shown, 
 he secured a hearing for his invention, and later 
 sold it to the Western Union. 
 
 By Edison's instrument, two messages can be 
 sent in opposite directions over the same wire at 
 the same time. The attempt to run two trains 
 on a circular track simultaneously in opposite 
 directions would mean sure disaster, but in duplex 
 telegraphy, messages do not conflict. 
 
 The principle on which this system works is, 
 that currents of electricity may be split up and 
 then will follow any number of paths that may be 
 opened to them exactly in proportion to the re- 
 sistance that the wire offers to their passage. 
 This is in much the same way that water, flow- 
 ing through a set of pipes, will fill them in exact 
 proportion to their size. In Edison's apparatus, 
 this principle is so fully carried out that the ap- 
 paratus at each end pays no heed to the move- 
 ments of its own transmitting key, although at 
 the same time it responds to every movement of 
 the key operated at the distant station, no matter 
 how far away. 
 
88 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 Duplex and diplex telegraphy, both of which 
 are included in Edison's system, are developments 
 of the simple electromagnetic principle of the 
 telegraph. It will be remembered that a wire 
 wound round a soft-iron core, transforms that 
 core into a magnet when the current passes through 
 the coil. But if two wires are wound round the 
 coil, in opposite directions to each other, the 
 currents will neutralize and the iron will not be- 
 come magnetized. 
 
 Suppose a wire laid from New York to Phila- 
 delphia. From a battery in New York issues a 
 current which is divided into two wires, wound 
 in opposite directions round a core. One wire 
 is grounded, one is the main line to Philadelphia. 
 The current passes through each wire with equal 
 strength. In one wire the current goes to the 
 ground, through the other it passes on. It is 
 clear that the soft-iron core near New York has 
 not been affected, for the currents neutralized. 
 It is clear also that a similar soft iron core in 
 Philadelphia will be affected, since the current 
 is passing only in one direction. An armature, 
 or hammer, in Philadelphia, therefore, will be 
 made to sound by the operating of a key in New 
 York, although the New York tapper has been 
 unaffected. 
 
BUILDING A PHANTOM TELEGRAPH 89 
 
 If, at the same time, a current is started at 
 Philadelphia, in like fashion (because its currents 
 neutralize) it will not affect the Philadelphia 
 sounder, which is being kept busy from the New 
 York end, but it will also pass along the main 
 line wire to New York, and, since it is a current 
 flowing only in one direction, will circle the coil, 
 magnetize the core, and start the sounder there, 
 Thus New York will be receiving Philadelphia, 
 at the same time that Philadelphia is receiving 
 New York, yet each receiver will be unaffected 
 by the transmitter at its own end. 
 
 About two years later, in 1874, Edison secured 
 a patent for his quadruplex system, easily the 
 most important asset in telegraphy since the work 
 of Morse. In this, the principle is due to the fact 
 that the direction in which the coils are wound 
 around a core determines its polarity, or, in other 
 words, which shall be the positive and which the 
 negative end of the magnet. In working opera- 
 tion, a steel magnet is used. Steel, unlike soft 
 iron, retains its magnetism permanently. As a 
 negative pole will repel and a positive pole will 
 attract, a device which causes the current to flow 
 in opposite directions alternately around a soft- 
 iron core, will alternately repel and attract the 
 permanently magnetized steel. 
 
go THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 By combining instruments that only respond 
 to strength of current with those that respond 
 only to change of current, and by utilizing the 
 duplex plan of using the same wire for currents 
 going in opposite directions, the two systems can 
 be worked from each end. Thus four sending 
 and four receiving operators, or eight in all, may 
 be kept busy on a single wire. 
 
 The actual value of this invention is stupendous. 
 Although Edison sold it to the Western Union for 
 thirty thousand dollars, it has been worth to that 
 company at least thirty million dollars. And 
 even then, Edison made not a single penny profit 
 on it, for he spent all his thirty thousand dollars 
 in perfecting a sextuple telegraph, by which a 
 wire could carry six messages. As an invention 
 it was perfect, but it did not prove a commercial 
 success. 
 
 It was while he was trying in vain to explain the 
 character of the sextuple telegraph to a prominent 
 visitor, through whose royal skull he was unable 
 to make the information penetrate, that Edison 
 gave what he says he considers the easiest, though 
 not the most accurate, illustration of the nature 
 of electricity. 
 
 "Your Royal Highness/' he said, "I think the 
 best explanation of the nature of electricity was 
 
BUILDING A PHANTOM TELEGRAPH 91 
 
 one which I heard an old Scotch line repairer 
 once give to his assistant. 
 
 '"If you had a dog something like a dachshund/ 
 he said, ' only long enough to reach from Edinburgh 
 to London, and you pulled his tail in Edinburgh, 
 he would bark in London." 3 
 
 "That," the inventor went on to say, "is as 
 far as I can get. I can't tell you exactly what 
 goes through the dog or over the wire." 
 
 A successful modification of Gray's harmonic 
 multiplex telegraph, an automatic telegraph and 
 an autographic telegraph, were invented by 
 Edison during the days when his headquarters 
 were at Newark. Indeed, he has always been 
 interested in the autographic telegraph, and 
 threatens yet to return to it and displace the 
 telegraph operator entirely. Perhaps, however, a 
 fellow-feeling for the craft that sustained him 
 through his early years may cause him to forbear. 
 
 It was with reference to his steady and un- 
 remitting work on the quadruplex and sextuplex 
 telegraph that Edison made the famous statement 
 about "genius" which has since passed into a 
 proverb. 
 
 "How can you deny yourself the inspiration of 
 genius, Mr. Edison?" an admirer said one day in 
 the laboratory at Orange, after seeing some of his 
 
92 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 telegraphic inventions. "Surely you don't mean 
 to try and convince me that anybody could have 
 done all this work that you have done and in- 
 vented these incredible marvels?" 
 
 "Well, as to that," said the inventor reflectively, 
 "seems to me I hear of something new done by 
 somebody or other, nearly every day," and he 
 rattled off a string of names that showed how 
 closely he kept in touch with the advances in 
 practical science all over the globe. 
 
 "But the genius!" protested his admirer. 
 "The flash of inspiration!" 
 
 "Oh, I don't know," was the reply, as the 
 "Wizard" turned round and put one fist in his 
 pocket, and rubbed a rough chin with the other 
 chemical-stained hand; "the way I look at it, 
 seems to me that genius is about two per cent in- 
 spiration and ninety-eight per cent perspiration." 
 
 And he went on with his experiment. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 THE GREAT TELEPHONE WAR 
 
 "WHEN I struck the telephone business," 
 Edison said, once, when asked to explain his 
 connection with the improvement of the 'phone, 
 "the Bell people had no transmitter, but were 
 talking into the magneto receiver. You never 
 heard such* a noise and buzzing as there was in 
 that old machine ! I went to work and monkeyed 
 around, and finally struck the notion of a lamp- 
 black button." 
 
 The telephone was almost invented by Charles 
 Bourseul, a Frenchman, in 1854. It is pathetic, 
 in a way, to see how nearly Bourseul attained 
 success, and yet how utterly the one tiny wrong 
 point in his plan rendered the idea useless. What 
 was more, this one mistake led every one else 
 astray, so that it was not until nearly a quarter 
 of a century later that the world received its 
 telephone. Even then, the instrument was of 
 little commercial value until the wizard touch of 
 Edison solved its last difficulty and made it avail- 
 able for general use. 
 
 93 
 
94 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 Bourseul originated the whole telephone idea 
 in the following words : 
 
 "I have asked myself if the spoken word could 
 not be transmitted by electricity; in a word, if 
 what was spoken in Vienna may not be heard 
 in Paris. This thing is practicable in this way: 
 
 " Suppose that a man speaks near a movable 
 disk, sufficiently flexible to lose none of the vibra- 
 tions of the voice; that this disk alternately 
 makes and breaks the connection from a battery; 
 you may have at a distance another disk which 
 will simultaneously execute the same vibrations." 
 
 The italics tell the tale. The reasoning, sound 
 as it seems, is on a false basis. This was proved 
 in 1861 by Philip Reis, a German scientist. 
 
 Reis was the inventor of the word " telephone," 
 just as Edison was the originator of the word 
 " Hello!" in telephone usage. Reis built his 
 " tele-phone," following Bourseul's ideas in every 
 detail. He experimented with it a great deal 
 and succeeded in getting an instrument which 
 could register the waves of sound with extreme 
 accuracy. But it had one fatal and ineradicable 
 fault. It could only give pitch, not tone. 
 
 Thus, for example, G natural on a musical 
 scale and C natural on a musical scale, are differ- 
 ent notes because the number of vibrations differ, 
 
THE GREAT TELEPHONE WAR 95 
 
 the lower note having the fewer number of sound- 
 waves or vibration, and the higher note having a 
 larger number of vibrations. The Reis receiver 
 would record these with absolute faithfulness. 
 But and this was fatal no one could tell 
 whether the note was the product of a flute, a 
 horn, a violin, or the human voice. Moreover, a 
 sound just barely sufficient to break the circuit, 
 produced almost as much effect as a loud trumpet 
 blast. An alphabet of pitch could be devised, 
 so that the Reis system could be used as a sort 
 of telegraphy based on sound, but the modulations 
 of the human voice were beyond it. 
 - Then came one of the most extraordinary coin- 
 cidences hi the whole history of invention. On 
 the very same day, absolutely without knowledge 
 that the other was working on the problem, Professor 
 Elisha Gray and Dr. Alexander Graham Bell filed 
 application in the Patent Office for identically 
 the same (and the true) principle of telephone 
 transmission. A sensational contest followed. It 
 was finally adjudged by the courts that Bell had 
 been two hours ( ! ) earlier, and also that his ap- 
 preciation and understanding of the discovery 
 was slightly more complete than that of Gray. 
 
 "It was left for Bell," says a decision of the 
 Supreme Court of the United States, in 1887, 
 
96 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 " to discover that the failure [of the Reis apparatus] 
 was due not to workmanship, but to the principle 
 which was adopted as the basis of what had to 
 be done. He found that what he called the inter- 
 mittent current one caused by alternately open- 
 ing and closing the circuit could not be made 
 under any circumstances to reproduce the delicate 
 forms of the air vibrations caused by the human 
 voice in articulate speech, but that the true way 
 was to operate on an unbroken current by in- 
 creasing and diminishing its intensity. . . . Such 
 was his discovery, and it was new. Reis never 
 thought of it, and he failed to transmit speech 
 telegraphically. Bell did, and he succeeded. 
 Under such circumstances it is impossible to hold 
 that what Reis did was an anticipation of the 
 discovery of Bell. To follow Reis is to fail, but 
 to follow Bell is to succeed. The difference be- 
 tween the two is just the difference between failure 
 and success. " 
 
 The story of Edison's contribution in com- 
 mercializing the telephone has been told by the 
 inventor himself. 
 
 "In 1876," he said, "I started again to experi- 
 ment for the Western Union and Mr. Orton. 
 This time it was the telephone. Bell invented 
 the first telephone, which consisted of the present 
 
THE GREAT TELEPHONE WAR 97 
 
 receiver, used both as a transmitter and a re- 
 ceiver (the magneto type). It was attempted 
 to introduce it commercially, but it failed on 
 account of its faintness and the extraneous sounds 
 which came in on its wires from different sources. 
 Mr. Orton wanted me to take hold of it and make 
 it commercial. As I had also been working on a 
 telegraph system employing tuning forks, simul- 
 taneously with both Bell and Gray, I was pretty 
 familiar with the subject. I started in, and soon 
 produced the carbon transmitter which is now 
 universally used. 
 
 "Tests were made between New York and 
 Philadelphia, also between New York and Wash- 
 ington, using regular Western Union wires. The 
 noises were so great that not a word could be 
 heard with the Bell receiver when used as a trans- 
 mitter between New York and Newark, N.J. 
 The Western Union then put them on private 
 lines. 
 
 "Mr. Theodore Paskas of Budapest, Hungary, 
 was the first man to suggest a telephone exchange, 
 and, soon after, exchanges were established. . . . 
 The Bell Company, of Boston, also started an 
 exchange and the fight was on, the Western Union 
 pirating the Bell receiver and the Boston company 
 pirating the Western Union transmitter. 
 
98 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 "About this time I wanted to be taken care of. 
 I threw out hints of this desire. Then Mr. Orton 
 sent for me. He had learned that inventors 
 didn't do business by the regular process, and 
 concluded that he would close it right up. He 
 asked me how much I wanted. I had made up 
 my mind that it was certainly worth $25,000 if 
 it ever amounted to anything for central-station 
 work, so that was the sum I had in mind to stick 
 to and get obstinately. Still, it had been an 
 easy job, and only required a few months, and 
 I felt a little shaky and uncertain. So I asked 
 him to make me an offer. He promptly said 
 that he would give me $100,000. 
 
 "'All right/ I said, 'it is yours on one condition, 
 and that is that you do not pay me all at once, 
 but pay me at the rate of $6000 per year for 
 seventeen years' --the life of the patent. He 
 seemed only too pleased to do this and the deal 
 was closed. 
 
 "My ambition was about four times too large 
 for my business capacity, and I knew that I would 
 soon spend this money experimenting if I got it 
 all at once, so I fixed it that I couldn't. I saved 
 seventeen years of worry by this stroke." 
 
 The operation of the carbon transmitter is 
 quite simple. A button-shaped piece of carbon 
 
THE GREAT TELEPHONE WAR 99 
 
 is held by a light spring against the diaphragm 
 into which the telephone message is spoken. 
 This carbon button is placed in circuit with the 
 primary wire of an induction coil, the battery 
 being in the same circuit and the secondary of 
 the induction coil connected to the line. 
 
 When the diaphragm is set in vibration by the 
 sound waves of the voice, a varying pressure is 
 applied to the carbon button. Now a loose con- 
 tact between two pieces of conducting matter has 
 the remarkable property of conducting a current 
 better when the pressure on it increases. Pressure 
 on the carbon button brings the molecules of 
 carbon in closer contact. With every change of 
 the voice, and every different vowel and con- 
 sonantal sound, there is a variance in the move- 
 ments of the diaphragm. This different vibra- 
 tion of the diaphragm means a difference in the 
 pressure on the carbon button, and this again 
 means a difference in the electrical resistance. 
 Thus wide variations of current are produced in 
 the primary, and consequently similar changes 
 in the induced current are set up in the secondary. 
 These induced currents are sent into the line 
 and act on the receiver at the distant station. 
 
 It is almost incredible how little electric power 
 is required to operate a telephone. For example, 
 
ioo THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 the power required to burn one ordinary sixteen- 
 candle-power incandescent carbon electric light 
 bulb for one minute, would send a message from 
 the Earth to the Sun and back again twenty-five 
 times, while the electrical energy required to lift 
 a pound weight a foot high would be sufficient to 
 operate a telephone for 240,000 years. 
 
 The principle of the variable resistance of carbon 
 in proportion to pressure was taken advantage 
 of by Edison in his tasimeter. This extraordinary 
 instrument is so delicate that it has been used to 
 register the heat contained in the light of a star, 
 and the warmth of a hand held thirty feet away 
 causes so violent a movement as to whirl the 
 needle to the limit of the dial. 
 
 A bar of some substance, such as vulcanite, 
 which is extremely sensitive to heat, rests upon a 
 metal plate, generally of platinum, which in its 
 turn rests upon a carbon button, itself upon a 
 second plate, of platinum. The carbon and the 
 metal plates are connected in a circuit which in- 
 cludes a battery and a sensitive galvanometer. 
 Thus, even an infinitesimal variation in the length 
 of the rod of vulcanite due to its contraction or 
 expansion, its shortening or lengthening, affects 
 the resistance of the circuit to precisely the same 
 extent, and the galvanometer duly records the 
 
THE GREAT TELEPHONE WAR 101 
 
 change. The same instrument, with a strip of 
 gelatine in place of the hard rubber, is used in 
 determining the character of gases. In other 
 words, it measures a smell. Its principal pur- 
 pose, however, is to measure extraordinarily small 
 degrees of moisture. 
 
 Although there are many forms of microphone, 
 one of which was claimed by Professor Hughes 
 of England to be the first, perhaps the most effi- 
 cient is the Edison microphone, in which carbon 
 is used again, but in which the carbon is in the 
 form of small granules, a loose contact being far 
 more sensitive. With this instrument, the rustling 
 of tissue paper sounds like a hurricane at sea. 
 
 The Edison carbon pressure relay follows the 
 same principle, the poles of an electro-magnet in 
 the local circuit of a telegraph line being hollowed 
 out and filled with powdered carbon. With a 
 weak current the armature is attracted weakly with 
 a feeble click ; with a strong current, the arma- 
 ture will have a strong attraction and a loud click. 
 
 No sooner was an effective commercial tele- 
 phone secured than the inventor was clamorously 
 summoned by the Western Union to help them 
 out of a new hole, and as the resulting invention 
 was later used in telephonic improvement it may 
 well find a place here. 
 
102 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 While Edison was busily engaged in perfecting 
 his telephone, while, indeed, he was taking out 
 patents for the water telephone, the inertia tele- 
 phone, the electrostatic telephone, the voltaic pile 
 telephone and a "musical transmitter," the Page 
 patent, which had lingered on in the Patent 
 Office for years, was issued. This was a black 
 menace to the existing systems of telegraphy. 
 It related to the use of the spring which pulls 
 back the armature lever from the magnet of a 
 telegraph relay or sounder, when the current is 
 cut off. At one swoop this broke in and con- 
 trolled one of the most important features of 
 telegraphy, save for the simple circuits, and these, 
 of course, could not be used for long distances. 
 
 "There was no known way," Edison is quoted 
 by Messrs. Dyer and Martin as having said, 
 " whereby this patent could be evaded, and its 
 possessor would eventually control the use of 
 what is known as the relay and sounder, and 
 this was vital in telegraphy. Gould was pound- 
 ing the Western Union on the Stock Exchange, 
 and being advised by his lawyers that this patent 
 was of great value, he bought it. 
 
 "The moment Mr. Orton heard this he sent 
 for me and explained the situation, and wanted 
 me to go to work immediately and see if I couldn't 
 
THE GREAT TELEPHONE WAR 103 
 
 evade it or discover some other means that could 
 be used in case Gould sustained the patent. It 
 seemed a pretty hard job, because there was no 
 known means of moving a lever at the other end 
 of a telegraph wire except by the use of a magnet. 
 I said I would go to work at it that night. 
 
 "In experimenting some years previously, I 
 had discovered a very peculiar phenomenon. 
 This was that if a piece of metal connected to a 
 battery was rubbed over a moistened piece of 
 chalk resting on a metal connected to the other 
 pole, when the current passed, the friction was 
 greatly diminished. When the current was re- 
 versed, the friction was greatly increased over 
 what it was when no current was passing. 
 
 "Remembering this, I substituted a piece of 
 chalk rotated by a small electric motor for the 
 magnet, and connecting a sounder to a metallic 
 finger resting on the chalk, the combination claim 
 of Page was made worthless. A hitherto unknown 
 means was introduced in the electric art. Two 
 or three of the devices were made and tested by 
 the company's expert. Mr. Orton, after he had 
 me sign the patent application and got it in the 
 Patent Office, wanted to settle for it at once. He 
 asked my price. Again I said, 
 
 "'Make me an offer!' 
 
104 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 "Again he named $100,000. I accepted, provid- 
 ing he would pay it at the rate of $6000 a year 
 for seventeen years. This was done, and thus, 
 with the telephone money, I received $12,000 
 yearly for that period from the Western Union 
 Telegraph Company." 
 
 In order to make this a little clearer, it may 
 be said that the passage of the electric current 
 acts on chalk, as oil. Thus a pad pressed hard 
 against the drum of chalk would be carried for- 
 ward by friction as long as there was no current, 
 the force of the friction being stronger than the 
 weak spring attached to the pad. But, as soon 
 as the current was applied, this had the effect of 
 preventing the friction or making the surfaces 
 seem as though oiled, so that the spring was able 
 to exert its action, thus pulling back the pad, the 
 alternate friction and release "making and break- 
 ing" a circuit with the same effect as the electro- 
 magnetic system, which had previously been the 
 only method known. 
 
 This was a scientific discovery of great moment- 
 It was in no sense an improvement on anything 
 that had been done before, but represented an 
 absolutely new element in electric problems. 
 
 The loud-speaking telephone grew partly out 
 of a difficulty encountered by Edison in his es- 
 
THE GREAT TELEPHONE WAR 105 
 
 tablishment of his telephone in England. A 
 company had been formed, the instruments manu- 
 factured and sent to England under the direction 
 of Colonel Gouraud, and it seemed as though 
 there was likely to be a great success made there. 
 
 But the owners of the Bell patent had no in- 
 tention of allowing the English market to be 
 exploited without their having a finger in the pie. 
 Gouraud cabled to Edison, saying that he was up 
 a tree. He could do nothing unless a new receiver 
 was invented which could in no way be regarded 
 as an infringement of the Bell patent. 
 
 Having determined this new factor of the friction 
 and lubrication by means of the passage of an 
 electric current, Edison was able to use precisely 
 the same principle in the telephone receiver. In 
 the chalk receiver there was no magnet at all, 
 merely a diaphragm of mica and a cylinder of 
 compressed chalk a little larger than the top of a 
 finger. A thin spring extending from the center 
 of the diaphragm rested on the chalk cylinder with 
 a pressure of a little more than five pounds. The 
 sound was extraordinarily clear, but one of its disad- 
 vantages was that the chalk needed to be rotated 
 by hand. The instruments, nevertheless, were ab- 
 solutely efficient, and it was merely a matter of 
 time until an automatic rotator would be perfected. 
 
io6 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 After about a hundred of these machines had 
 been put in operation, the fact was duly impressed 
 upon the Bell people that the Edison company 
 could not be bluffed out, but that an absolutely 
 efficient rival was in the field. Naturally enough 
 they offered terms, the figure cabled being "30,000." 
 Edison accepted, thinking the sum to mean dollars. 
 It was a surprise of the most pleasant kind when 
 the check arrived, being made out for thirty thou- 
 sand pounds sterling. 
 
 j The loud-speaking telephone was a development 
 of the chalk receiver idea. George Bernard Shaw, 
 who in his youth was employed by Edison in 
 the establishment of telephone exchanges in 
 England, described this loud-speaking device as 
 being "a much too ingenious invention, being 
 nothing less than a telephone of such stentorial 
 efficiency, that it bellowed your most private 
 communications all over the house, instead of 
 whispering them with some sort of discretion." 
 
 When first working on the telephone, and again 
 when working on the phonograph, Edison proph- 
 esied that some day there would be a combina- 
 tion of the two. It was his plan to invent an 
 instrument which would record telephone con- 
 versations, so that they might be repeated again, 
 when necessary. For example, if a customer 
 
THE GREAT TELEPHONE WAR 107 
 
 wanted to give an order, instead of the usual 
 "Excuse me, while I get a pencil!" and then the 
 tediousness of writing down the conversation, the 
 machine would simply record the whole con- 
 versation, and the recipient of the message could 
 afterwards go over it, and check off, item by item. 
 The instrument, also, would prevent mistakes, as 
 the record would be permanent. 
 
 This device, forecasted in the seventies, was 
 perfected by Edison in September, 1914. He 
 called it the "telescribe." It is practically a 
 sensitive diaphragm attached to an Edison dic- 
 tating machine (or phonograph recorder) which, 
 when placed in direct contact with a telephone 
 receiver, will make a record on the cylinder. The 
 repetition of the message is merely the reproduc- 
 tion of the cylinder in customary phonographic form. 
 
 With the addition of the "transophone," also 
 perfected in the autumn of 1914, this "telescribe" 
 is made very effective. The "transophone" is 
 a device enabling a stenographer, writing from a 
 dictating machine, to touch an electric button and 
 hear over again the sentence to be written. Thus, 
 nearly forty years after his first prophecy of the 
 combined telephone and phonograph, in his new 
 "telescribe," Edison has brought it to triumphant 
 success. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 OUTRIVALING ALADDIN'S LAMP 
 
 FROM Edison's point of view, his greatest 
 achievement is the perfection of the incandescent 
 electric light. In this, as in so large a number of 
 Edison's wonders, the initial foundation was laid 
 by others. It remained for the " Wizard " to 
 develop these, to do what the others could not or 
 did not do, and to transmute phenomena which 
 were merely of scientific interest into inventions 
 of paramount importance to the world. 
 
 The history of electric lighting antedates Edison 
 by some millions of years. The lightning flash 
 is a case of pure electric lighting and its vividness 
 immediately suggests its usefulness to man if 
 only the amount of current can be subdivided. 
 Electric lighting is the subdivision of electric 
 lightning. The first man to think of harnessing 
 the lightning for the purpose of using it for light- 
 ing purposes was the creator of the idea of electric 
 light. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin may be given the credit for 
 much of the original idea. In his famous experi- 
 
 108 
 
OUTRIVALING ALADDIN'S LAMP 109 
 
 ment, when he sent up a kite bearing a pointed 
 wire into an electrical cloud, and held a metal 
 key near to the silk string by which the kite was 
 flown, thereby securing sparks from it, he showed 
 a perception of the possibilities of subdivision. It 
 was to him, certainly, that the credit is due for 
 having shown that the disruptive and fatal effect 
 of lightning could be modified, so that it would 
 flow smoothly down the kite string. Franklin 
 calmly risked his life to prove this point, and he 
 proved it to his own fame and the lasting benefit 
 of mankind. 
 
 The study of electricity resulted in the realiza- 
 tion of the fact that this force could be generated 
 on earth as well as in the skies. It was evident, 
 therefore, that the lightning flash could be made 
 in the laboratory. As a matter of fact, the electric 
 " spark " that leaps across a gap is this same 
 lightning flash on a smaller basis. The question 
 was how to secure permanence to the sudden 
 illumination. 
 
 Sir Humphry Davy, in 1800, discovered that 
 if a current was established in such a way that it 
 would flow through two conductors, and these 
 conductors were slightly separated, a flash would 
 be emitted. The extreme heat of this flame led 
 Davy to experiment with various noncombustible 
 
no THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 and rarely fusible substances, until he tried carbon. 
 He found that if the current were sufficiently 
 powerful, the flame would continue and the carbon 
 points would become hot, first red-hot, then 
 white-hot. When white-hot they emitted a bril- 
 liant light. 
 
 When the carbon points were separated, the 
 extra potential induced by the self-induction of 
 the circuit was enough to jump across the gap, 
 and a small quantity of the carbon was vaporized. 
 The resistance of carbon vapor to electricity is 
 large, or in other words the friction of the electric 
 current passing through the resisting particles 
 is high, which causes the vapor to be raised to a 
 very high temperature, and to emit a very brilliant 
 light. 
 
 The principal trouble that Davy experienced 
 was that the character of the charcoal he used 
 was not commercially efficacious. He had made 
 his carbons of the charcoal from the wood of the 
 willow. As, in such a light as the Davy arc light, 
 the electric current flowing from the positive to 
 the negative carries away with it a constant stream 
 of carbon particles from the positive electrode 
 (hollowing it out), and deposits them on the 
 negative electrode (bringing it to a point), and 
 as a certain amount of the carbon was vaporized, 
 
OUTRIVALING ALADDIN'S LAMP in 
 
 it was not long until the points would burn away. 
 As they burned away, the distance between nega- 
 tive and positive would grow larger until the 
 gap widened to a point where the current would 
 not leap it, and the light went out. 
 
 Modern arc lighting uses much the same prin- 
 ciple, though the carbons are more durable, pe- 
 troleum coke, gas coke or lampblack being used. 
 The modern arc light is also provided with a 
 mechanism to bring the carbons together to 
 start the current, then to separate them a cer- 
 tain distance apart and maintain them at exactly 
 that distance, irrespective of the rapidity with 
 which they may burn away. 
 
 The idea of the incandescent lamp dates back 
 to the year 1812. But every early effort to secure 
 the brilliant white light by the heating of a con- 
 ductor failed from the same reason namely, 
 that the melting point of the metal conductors 
 was so near the temperature that was required 
 to bring them to a white heat, that a very slight 
 increase in the current immediately destroyed the 
 conductor. 
 
 Among these experimenters, an American, J. W. 
 Starr, takes high rank for being the first to sub- 
 stitute carbon filaments for platinum. Though, 
 years later, Edison was to work on this line and 
 
112 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 bring success where all others had failed, it is not 
 to be forgotten that the original idea of the carbon 
 filament is still the product of a United States 
 inventor, and that the first patent for a carbon 
 filament is recorded in the Patent Office at Wash- 
 ington. When it is remembered what the in- 
 candescent light has done for mankind, how in 
 a word it has enabled man to have daylight 
 for twenty-four hours if he chooses, the work 
 begun by Starr and brought to a successful con- 
 clusion by Edison ranks as one of the most not- 
 able scientific achievements of history. 
 
 Prior to the discovery of the carbon filament, 
 Edison experimented a great deal with metal 
 filaments, particularly platinum. This metal was 
 selected because of its susceptibility of being 
 drawn out into fine wire and because its fusing 
 / or melting point is very high. 
 
 The experiments with platinum wire were 
 brought by Edison to a point nearer perfection 
 than was secured by any other of the dozens of 
 inventors who were working on the problem, 
 both in Europe and the United States. To put 
 the whole series of experiments in a few words, 
 Edison found that platinum wire, heated in a 
 flame of hydrogen, lost weight, and finally was 
 burned away. Next he found that platinum 
 
OUTRIVALING ALADDIN'S LAMP 113 
 
 wire, heated so that it was white-hot or incandes- 
 cent, lost weight, a wire one five-thousandth of 
 an inch in diameter losing three milligrammes 
 in twenty minutes. A wire one twenty-thou- 
 sandth part of an inch in diameter, placed under 
 a glass shade, lost at the same rate, and the sides 
 of the glass were so heavily coated with the deposit 
 that the- glass became opaque and the glowing wire 
 was invisible. This made the burning of pure plati- 
 num wire in the open air a commercial impossibility. 
 At this point Edison started work on the wire 
 itself, experimenting with various alloys of 
 platinum, especially zircon and iridium. Many 
 weary months were spent in a ceaseless series of 
 experiments, all of which tended to the same 
 conclusion failure. Then it was that Edison, 
 carefully studying the loss in weight of all these 
 metals when heated to incandescence, declared 
 his belief that this was due to the "washing action 
 of the air," and that a great deal of the difficulty 
 might be avoided if the light were burned in a 
 vacuum, a glass bulb from which all the air had 
 been exhausted by an air-pump. When the bulb 
 was partly exhausted of air, the platinum wire 
 burned for two hours before the glass blackened, 
 and when the air was exhausted still further, it 
 burned for five hours. 
 
114 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 Finally, to use the inventor's own words, "In 
 a sealed glass bulb, exhausted by a Sprengel 
 pump to a point where a quarter of an inch spark 
 from an induction coil would not pass between 
 points one millimeter apart (for lack of any air 
 as a conductor) was placed a spiral, the connected 
 wires passing through the glass. The spiral was 
 kept at the most dazzling incandescence for hours 
 without the slightest deposit becoming visible." 
 
 So far as securing the light was concerned, 
 Edison had succeeded, and the platinum filament 
 lamp was a success. There was, however, one 
 grave difficulty. This was the all too familiar 
 fact that the melting point of the wire was so 
 slightly above the incandescent point that a very 
 slight increase in the current melted the wire and 
 destroyed the lamp. For some time, thereafter, 
 Edison devoted himself to patents and inventions 
 for the prevention of this undesired sudden in- 
 crease of the current. Of these he pinned his 
 faith to two: a regulating bar which expanded 
 when the current was too strong, its expansion 
 operating a mechanism which cut off the flow of 
 electricity, and a diaphragm acted upon by the 
 expansion of air or gas inclosed in a tube. 
 
 So important, however, had Edison's position 
 in the electrical world become, that just as soon 
 
OUTRIVALING ALADDIN'S LAMP 115 
 
 as the patents covering the platinum lamps and 
 the two forms of regulators were made public, the 
 scientific press of the world took up a discussion 
 of the value of his inventions. It was a unit in 
 declaring that the main weakness of the device 
 lay in the narrow margin between the luminosity 
 of the light and the melting point of the wire, 
 and they pointed out that the adjustments of 
 the regulator would have to be so minute as 
 to render the lamp commercially of doubtful 
 success. 
 
 It was a just criticism, but it had been an- 
 ticipated by Edison. Between the time he had 
 sent in the application to the Patent Office and 
 the day it was given out to the public, the in- 
 ventor had come to the conclusion that pure 
 platinum never could be suitable to the purpose 
 of electric lighting. By the time the discussion 
 was under way, he was already working on the 
 incorporation with platinum of a non-conducting 
 material. This worked admirably for a while. 
 But permanence did not lie in that direction. 
 Another series of experiments followed, with 
 various plans for combining conducting and non- 
 conducting materials. As fast as difficulties ap- 
 peared in these, efforts were made to overcome 
 them by new forms of regulators. At least a 
 
n6 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 score of regulators were invented to fit special 
 needs, and patented, all to be abandoned. 
 
 Thirteen months of never-ceasing investigation, 
 day after day, and often far into the night, had 
 passed. Edison, with that courageous facing of 
 an issue which is so largely part of the secret of 
 his make-up, resolutely came to the conclusion 
 that he was absolutely on the wrong track. He 
 had given his mind to the subject of metals for a 
 year. To the inventor's mind the principle re- 
 mained sound, though the substance was as yet 
 unthought of. 
 
 The clew, though no one but Edison would recog- 
 nize it as a clew, came largely as an accident. Not 
 only would no one but Edison have seen the clew, 
 none but an Edison could have made use of it. 
 In spite of all the many difficulties in the platinum 
 lamp, so profound was public confidence in the 
 " Wizard " that a number of financiers had come 
 together, formed a company, and placed enormous 
 sums of money at the inventor's disposal. It was 
 on these sums that the latter portion of the ex- 
 perimentation was carried out, though all the 
 earlier trials had been done on the inventor's own 
 funds. 
 
 Not exactly despondent, but distinctly down- 
 hearted as he reviewed the past work and its final 
 
OUTRIVALING ALADDIN'S LAMP 117 
 
 unsatisfactory outcome, Edison sat alone in his 
 laboratory one October evening in 1879 and re- 
 viewed in mind every possible known substance 
 in the world which could be substituted for the 
 metal filament. On the table, stained with 
 chemicals, lay a little pile of lampblack mixed 
 with tar with which one of Edison's assistants 
 had been working that day in connection with 
 the carbon telephone transmitter. 
 
 With the unconscious physical motions so often 
 occurring when one is immersed in profound 
 thought, Edison reached out his hand and began 
 rolling a pellet of the mixture between finger and 
 thumb. The tar making it tenacious, the pellet 
 rolled out into a fine thread. Looking down at 
 it idly, Edison was struck by its resemblance to 
 a piece of wire. 
 
 Anything resembling wire, by a natural associa- 
 tion of ideas, reminded him of the filament needed 
 for his lamp. Of late his mind had been turned 
 to threads of non-conducting materials, and like a 
 flash there recurred to him Starr's experiments 
 on a carbon filament. Being carbon, the lamp- 
 black would have a greater resistance than the 
 metal. Could this be a possible solution ? Starr's 
 plans had failed utterly, his carbon plates in a 
 Torricellian vacuum burning out rapidly. 
 
n8 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 Edison, alone, of all men in the world, was in a 
 position to take advantage of the clew. His ex- 
 periments with platinum had all tended toward 
 the production of an almost perfect vacuum bulb, 
 a bulb in which only one-millionth part of an 
 atmosphere was left behind. This bulb, itself, 
 was the result of Edison's inventiveness, as in 
 his platinum researches he had invented and 
 patented several improvements on the Spreckel 
 mercury air-pump. 
 
 A vacuum of such extreme character had never 
 been known before, and a better opportunity to 
 test the properties of a carbon filament had never 
 been before. A thread of the lampblack and tar 
 was inserted in a bulb, the air exhausted, and the 
 current turned on. A good light was the result. 
 But there was always this "but" in those 
 early experiments the carbon soon burnt out. 
 
 Here was a new problem. The carbon had not 
 burnt out, as the metal did, because of any melt- 
 ing ; it must be due to the action of the air. Since 
 the vacuum was almost perfect, the air must be 
 in the lampblack. Edison felt sure that he was 
 on the right track. A carbon filament was needed, 
 but not a filament composed of lampblack and tar. 
 
 Then came the historic three days in electric 
 lighting, ending October 21, 1879. Edison, rapidly 
 
OUTRIVALING ALADDIN'S LAMP 119 
 
 thinking over possible materials to carbonize, 
 realized that cotton was specially prepared and 
 spun to be as strong as possible in proportion to 
 its fineness. He sent a boy out for a spool of 
 cotton. Even Charles Bachelor, his closest as- 
 sociate, pinned little hope to the plan. How 
 could so weak a thing resist the force of a current 
 that would melt the hardest of metals? 
 
 A loop of the thread, about two inches long, was 
 laid in a nickel mold, clamped and placed in a 
 muffle furnace, where it was left for five hours. 
 It was then taken out and allowed to cool. Next, 
 the mold was opened and the carbonized thread 
 taken out. It broke to pieces at the lightest 
 touch. Another piece of cotton was carbonized 
 and it broke the same way. 
 
 For two days and two nights, without rest or 
 sleep, Edison and Bachelor worked on this one 
 experiment alone Two whole spools of thread 
 were used, in two-inch pieces; from this one may 
 realize how many hundreds of disappointments lay 
 in this one heartbreaking series of tests. Only 
 twice in all that time did they succeed in taking 
 from the mold a perfect and unbroken filament, 
 but when they attempted to attach it to the con- 
 ducting wire, it broke. Another, which showed 
 good signs of strength, was shattered when Bachelor 
 
120 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 breathed in its direction. All through the experi- 
 ments, every time either man breathed, he turned 
 his face away from the thread lest the slight cur- 
 rent of air should shatter it. 
 
 Bachelor was extraordinarily deft and delicate 
 with his hands, and a third carbon was made and 
 successfully inserted in the lamp. The air was 
 exhausted and the current turned on. As the 
 current flowed through the carbonized bit of cot- 
 ton thread, it began to glow with a soft light. 
 
 In what was little less than an agony of expecta- 
 tion, Edison and Bachelor watched the thread 
 burn. Second after second, minute after minute 
 passed, and the thin filament glowed on steadily. 
 Little by little the current was increased until 
 there was force sufficient to have melted the plati- 
 num. But the little carbonized cotton thread 
 burned on. It was still burning, when, after his 
 session of three days and nights, Edison went to 
 bed. It was still burning, when, twenty-three 
 hours later, he got up. It burned for forty-five 
 hours. The problem of electric lighting was solved. 
 
 In spite of this success, forty-five hours was too 
 short a time for full commercial satisfaction, and 
 it was at this point that the extraordinarily Ameri- 
 can character of Edison's genius reappeared. He 
 had solved the problem, the invention was achieved. 
 
OUTRIVALING ALADDIN'S LAMP 121 
 
 But the cost of making bulbs of carbonized thread 
 would be so great, their destructibility would be 
 so easy, and the length of time which they burned 
 so short, that while electric lighting was assured, 
 it would be more expensive than gas and therefore 
 could not enter the field as an equal competitor. 
 The scientific solution of the incandescent light 
 problem was the carbon filament in a high vacuum, 
 the commercial problem was the making of a car- 
 bon filament which would be less destructible. 
 
 The next two weeks at the Edison laboratory 
 can only be called an orgy of carbonizing. Every 
 available man was set at work turning into carbon 
 every available material. Straw, hay, wicker, 
 paper, cardboard (which worked very well), 
 splints of every kind of wood, all were called into 
 requisition. No walking-stick or umbrella was 
 safe. It was Edison himself who made the next 
 step. He got hold of an old bamboo fan and 
 carbonized different parts of it. The rim that 
 went round the edge of the fan, when carbonized, 
 proved to make by far the best filament that had 
 yet been tried. 
 
 The inventor took up the question of bamboos. 
 He found that botanists had listed twelve hundred 
 varieties of bamboo, in various parts of the world, 
 many of them in inaccessible jungles and forests. 
 
122 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 It took Edison about one minute to decide that 
 he wanted samples of every kind of bamboo in the 
 world. He sent out half a dozen men to rake 
 every corner of the globe for bamboo. The search 
 cost more than $100,000. 
 
 Nothing is more characteristic of Edison than his 
 persistence in trying everything. The carbon fila- 
 ment is an astonishing example of this. The story 
 of how he sent James Ricalton is worth telling. 
 Ricalton was principal of a school at Maplewood, 
 New Jersey, and was a student of natural history, 
 having written a few scientific papers which showed 
 him to be a keen field observer. Edison sent for 
 him, and without any preliminaries began the 
 interview : 
 
 "I want a man to ransack all the tropical jun- 
 gles of the East to find a better fiber for my lamp ; 
 I expect it to be found in the palm or bamboo 
 family. How would you like that job ? " 
 
 "It would suit me," Ricalton replied. 
 
 "Can you go to-morrow?" 
 
 "Certainly, but I must arrange for a substitute. 
 Maybe I can do that to-night. Can you tell me 
 how long the trip will take?" 
 
 "How can I tell?" responded Edison. "Maybe 
 six months and maybe five years ; no matter how 
 long, find it." 
 
OUTRIVALING ALADDIN'S LAMP 123 
 
 More than a year later Ricalton returned after 
 a trip full of the most amazing experiences. He 
 brought back over a hundred species of bamboo, 
 two of which proved more successful than any so 
 far found. On the day of his return he met Edison 
 in the hall of the laboratory. The inventor recog- 
 nized him, shook hands, and said, 
 
 " Did you find it?" 
 
 " Yes," Ricalton replied. 
 
 "Good!" Edison responded and passed on, 
 troubling himself no further about a great expense 
 and a marvelous effort, which, a few weeks later, 
 was to prove futile and be superseded by a better 
 fiber. 
 
 One of the best samples of bamboo was secured 
 in Japan in 1880 by W. H. Moore, and in 1880 
 an expedition was organized to hunt through the 
 interior of Brazil. Other men went to the West 
 Indies, to British Guiana, Mexico, Ceylon and 
 India. In 1887 Me Go wan led an expedition up 
 the Amazon and secured a fiber still better than 
 anything that had gone before. The mere story 
 of McGowan's adventures is perhaps the most 
 thrilling narrative in the whole history of quests 
 for the sake of science. 
 
 Yet the ideal and perfect bamboo seemed as 
 hard to find as the Fountain of Perpetual Youth, 
 
f 
 
 124 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 or the Golden El Dorado. After these years of 
 search Edison adopted a compound carbon fila- 
 ment, which could be manufactured on a large 
 scale, and which, in its turn, has given place to 
 tungsten filament and nitrogen lights. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE POWER BEHIND THE BULB 
 
 THE perfection of the electric light bulb solved 
 the question of electric lighting, as scientifically 
 considered, and the various improvements that 
 Edison made in the bulb gradually increased its 
 length of life and decreased its cost, so that it 
 became possible to enter the new light as a com- 
 petitor with gas. But here another difficulty 
 was encountered. Gas was an established in- 
 dustry, with its own mains and street franchises. 
 The electric light bulb was only of value when 
 it could be attached to an electric current. If 
 electricity were to supplant gas, or even to supple- 
 ment gas, it was imperative that there should be 
 central electric stations in cities. 
 
 Edison laid the foundation of this by preparing 
 a general illumination of Menlo Park, where his 
 laboratories were at that time. During the early 
 days of January, 1881, a special illumination took 
 place for the edification of the New York Board of 
 Aldermen, who took a special train to the inventor's 
 
 125 
 
126 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 works. It had been so arranged that the party 
 should arrive after dark, and the hundreds of 
 incandescent lamps glowing among the leafless 
 trees was a striking example of the success of the 
 Edison electric light. 
 
 One of the features which attracted special 
 attention was the fact that each lamp could be 
 lighted or extinguished independently. Realizing 
 the importance of this visit, and desiring to insure 
 against possible failure, Edison had put in fine 
 copper wire as fuses in various places. It was 
 well that he did so, for one of the aldermen, either 
 as a joke or with ulterior motives, had brought 
 along a piece of heavy wire, hidden up his sleeve. 
 He managed to short-circuit the mains with his 
 wire, and was very much surprised because only 
 three lamps went out. 
 
 A similar occurrence happened when a Balti- 
 more committee was on a trip to report on the 
 light. This time the miscreant was caught by 
 the special watchers that Edison had appointed. 
 When searched, a piece of insulated No. 10 wire 
 was found running up his sleeves and over his 
 shoulders. In this case, four lamps went out. 
 They found that he had an interest in the Balti- 
 more Gas Co. The Baltimoreans were shocked, 
 and the principal effect was to set them against 
 
THE POWER BEHIND THE BULB 127 
 
 the Gas Company and to align them in favor of 
 the electric light. 
 
 The visiting committees from various cities 
 usually returned greatly impressed with the effi- 
 ciency of the system and ready to listen to any 
 reasonable plan that was laid before them dealing 
 with electric light. As Edison had hoped, these 
 trips enabled the men forming the committees to 
 deal with electrical matters with an intelligent 
 understanding. 
 
 When the time came to approach the problem, 
 Edison was ready. Together with his plans for 
 the perfecting of the incandescent bulb itself, his 
 mind had been busy with the still vaster question 
 that of the establishment of a great central 
 station from which consumers might obtain their 
 electric light in the same way that they did their 
 gas. For, after all, the electric light bulb was to an 
 electric system no more than a gas jet is to a gas 
 lighting system. 
 
 Here is an even greater example of the character \ 
 of Edison's work. The commercialization of his v 
 invention in such a way that the world should 
 be benefited was his ambition, the mere scientific 
 satisfaction was not enough for him. 
 
 It must be remembered that electric lighting 
 was something entirely new. Aside from the 
 
128 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 string of lamps that shone down the walk at Menlo 
 Park, there was not another in the world. No 
 factories existed where apparatus could be made, 
 and there were no trained men to supervise, to 
 construct, or to install an electric light system. 
 Indeed, outside the Edison laboratory there was 
 no one who knew anything about electric lighting. 
 Not only did Edison have to make the plant, he 
 actually had to teach everybody everything con- 
 nected with it. 
 
 In typical fashion, the inventor sent for a large 
 insurance map of New York in which every eleva- 
 tor shaft and boiler and housetop and fire-wall was 
 set out. After careful study, he decided that a 
 section of the city which embraced the larger 
 number of the financial and office buildings, and 
 which extended from one river to the other, was 
 the best for his purpose. 
 
 The first point was to find out how much gas 
 was used. Edison hired men to tramp certain 
 beats in that district every hour of the night, 
 counting, on each round, the number of lights 
 burning. Knowing the price of gas and the 
 average consumption per burner, Edison got a 
 rough idea of what the people of that district 
 spent for gas. After a little close figuring, he 
 decided that he could afford to give them elec- 
 
THE POWER BEHIND THE BULB 129 
 
 tricity at a price sufficiently close to gas to 
 warrant him in proceeding. 
 
 But when it came to building the central sta- 
 tion and installing the system, Edison had his 
 hands full. One of his men was put in charge 
 of a factory for making the lamps, another was 
 set to work making tubes, a third got hold of a 
 machine shop and started making the dynamos, 
 while others, again, undertook various needed 
 small parts. Real estate was almost impossible 
 to get, but at last Edison secured a place. It was 
 far too small, and a huge output was needed. The 
 only way out of the difficulty was high-speed 
 engines and there were no high-speed engines 
 in those days. Edison, in the Engineering Review, 
 has told how he overcame the difficulty. 
 
 "I had conceived the idea of a direct-coupled 
 machine and wanted to hitch the dynamo direct 
 to the engine without belting," he wrote. "I 
 could not see why, if a locomotive could run on 
 that speed, a 150 horse-power engine could not 
 be made to run 350 turns a minute. The engine 
 builders, when I asked them about it, held up 
 their hands and said ' Impossible ! ' I didn't think 
 so. I found C. H. Porter and said to him, 
 
 "'Mr. Porter, I want a 150 horse-power engine 
 to run 700 revolutions a minute.' 
 
130 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 "He hummed and hawed a bit and then agreed 
 to build it. After a while, he got it finished and 
 sent it out to the Park. We set the machine up 
 in the old shop, and I had some idea of what might 
 happen. So we tied a chain round the throttle 
 and ran it out through a window into the wood- 
 shed, where we stood to work it. Now the old 
 shop stood on one of those New Jersey shale hills, 
 and every time we opened up the engine and she 
 got to about 300 revolutions, the whole hill shook 
 under her. We shut her off and rebalanced, and 
 tried again, and, after a good deal of trouble, we 
 finally did run up to 700, but you should have seen 
 her run! Why, every time the connecting rod 
 went up, she tried to lift that whole hill with her! 
 After we got through with this business we tamed 
 her down to 350 revolutions (which was all I 
 wanted). . . . We closed a bill with Porter for 
 six engines. 
 
 "While all this was going on in the shop, we 
 had dug ditches and laid mains all around the 
 district. I used to sleep nights on piles of pipes 
 in the station, and I saw every box poured and 
 every connection made on the whole job. I had 
 to ! There was nobody else who could superin- 
 tend it. Finally we got our feeders all down and 
 started to put on an engine and turn over one of 
 
THE POWER BEHIND THE BULB 131 
 
 the machines to see how things were. My heart 
 was in my mouth at first, but everything worked 
 all right and we had more than 500 ohms insula- 
 tion resistance. Then we started another engine 
 and threw them in parallel. 
 
 "Of all the circuses since Adam was born, we 
 had the worst then. One engine would stop, and 
 the other would run up to about a thousand revo- 
 lutions and then they would see-saw. 
 
 "What was the matter? Why, it was these 
 Porter governors ! When the circus commenced, 
 the men who were standing round ran out precipi- 
 tately, and some of them kept running for a block 
 or two. I grabbed the throttle of one engine, 
 and E. H. Johnson, who was the only one present 
 who kept his wits, caught hold of the other and we 
 shut them off. Of course I discovered then that 
 what had happened was that one set was running 
 the other one as a motor. 
 
 "I then put up a long shaft connecting all the 
 governors together, and thought this would cer- 
 tainly cure the trouble, but it didn't. The tor- 
 sion of the shaft was so great that one governor 
 managed still to get ahead of the others. Then 
 I got a piece of shafting and a tube in which it 
 fitted. I twisted the shaft one way and the tube 
 the other, as far as I could, and pinned them 
 
132 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 together. In this way, by straining the whole 
 outfit up to its elastic limit in opposite directions, 
 the torsion was practically eliminated, and after 
 that the governors ran together all right. 
 
 " Somewhere about that time I got hold of 
 Gardiner C. Sims, and he undertook to build an 
 engine to run at 350 revolutions and give 175 
 horse power. He went back to Providence and 
 set to work and brought the engine back with 
 him. It worked, but only for a few minutes, when 
 it busted. That man sat around that shop and 
 slept in it for three weeks until he got his engine 
 right and made it work the way he wanted it to. 
 
 "When he reached this period, I gave orders for 
 the works to run night and day until we got enough 
 engines, and when all was ready, we started the 
 main engine. The date was September 4, 1882, a 
 Saturday night. That was when we first turned 
 the current on to the mains for regular light dis- 
 tribution, and it stayed on for eight years with 
 only one insignificant stoppage. One of these en- 
 gines that Sims built ran twenty-four hours a day 
 for 365 days before it was stopped to give it a rest." 
 
 The first incandescent electric light central 
 station in the world was at Apple ton, Wisconsin, 
 with one dynamo and fifty lights. From that 
 time to the present, the industry has grown to 
 
THE POWER BEHIND THE BULB 133 
 
 such an extent that figures scarcely serve to show 
 its rate of growth. Thirty years after its inven- 
 tion, the investment in the electric lighting plants 
 of the United States was estimated at a billion 
 dollars and that of foreign countries together as 
 three billion dollars. The day is close at hand 
 when half a trillion dollars will be invested in the 
 invention whose perfection can be unhesitatingly 
 ascribed to Edison alone. 
 
 At this point it is well to clear up the old and 
 much disputed question as to the amount of origi- 
 nality and creativeness displayed by Edison in 
 this invention of the electric light, his greatest 
 success. In the first place it must be made clear 
 that Edison does not consider himself as the dis- 
 coverer nor the creator of the incandescent electric 
 light. He does claim, and in this the courts have 
 upheld him, that he alone succeeded in bringing 
 into harmonious application many ideas which 
 had been commercially valueless when separated. 
 
 The electric light bulb was used in 1845 by 
 King, in 1846 by Greener, and by many inventors 
 prior to the patents of Edison. Yet none of these 
 had succeeded in getting an electric bulb with as 
 high a vacuum as Edison. Nor could they have 
 done so, for Edison himself invented many improve- 
 ments to the mercury pump for exhausting the 
 
134 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 bulbs. Edison's work on air-pumps, therefore, 
 was essential to the success of the electric light 
 bulb. In a way, this is the first step. Greener's 
 bulb was true in principle but defective in opera- 
 tion. It could not be made effective except by 
 improvement. Sprengel's pump was true in prin- 
 ciple but not sufficiently exact. Edison improved 
 Sprengel's pump, then directed the improved 
 pump to the old principle of Greener's bulb. Here 
 is no discovery, but true invention, and invention 
 directed exclusively upon the line of efficiency. 
 
 Almost the same condition prevails with regard 
 to the use of the carbon filament. No one would 
 deny, Edison least of all, that Starr and others 
 had used a carbon pencil in a partial vacuum. 
 But though, in the Goebel, the Sawyer-Mann and 
 other cases, the earlier examples of carbon fila- 
 ment lamps were brought up, the fact remained 
 that they had not been made effective. Goebel 
 went so far as to claim that he had even discovered 
 the superiority of bamboo before 1872, but the 
 courts ruled the evidence out as inconclusive. 
 The point again, is not the discovery of the carbon 
 filament, but the inventive development which 
 little by little laid the ghosts of failure and which 
 transformed a toy of the laboratory into a boon 
 to the human race. 
 
THE POWER BEHIND THE BULB 135 
 
 Still further is Edison to be remembered as a 
 master electrical engineer. The story of the 
 electric light is not alone the story of the vacuum 
 bulb and of the carbon filament, it is the story of 
 the Central Station. It is the story of the ma- 
 nipulator of plans to bring daylight into a city's 
 streets. It is the development which enables 
 coal mines to be lighted without the fear of explo- 
 sion. It is the story which has made fire at sea 
 an infrequent occurrence. For Edison, first, last, 
 and all the time, has set before himself the task of 
 utilizing to their greatest capacity the forces he 
 has developed. 
 
 There are few more illuminating things than 
 Edison's own point of view on such matters. To 
 him a discovery is a " scratch"; he always calls 
 it so. Almost any clever man, he is wont to say, 
 might discover something. But to take that 
 "scratch," to see the potentialities that lie within 
 it, to fix upon a distant goal which to others seems 
 beyond attainment, and to work persistently, 
 patiently, untiringly for that goal, overcoming 
 every obstacle by working first in this direction, 
 then in that, this, to him, is invention. 
 
 Edison's "twelve-million dollar brain" is a 
 phrase that became popular when the four leading 
 Edison companies were consolidated into one con- 
 
136 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 cern, known as the General Electric Company, 
 with a capitalization of twelve million dollars. 
 As a matter of fact, the inventions that have pro- 
 ceeded from Edison have been worth vastly more 
 than twelve million dollars to the world. 
 
 Yet, when the entire question of electric light- 
 ing is analyzed, it is clear that two forces and two 
 forces alone have contributed to Edison's success. 
 Each of these is within the reach of almost every 
 intelligent boy. These are the perception of 
 values, and hard work. It is of no use to perceive 
 the value of doing a thing unless one works hard 
 at it, and it is of no use working hard at a thing 
 unless it is worth the doing. 
 
 This test can be applied universally to Edison's 
 work. There is no case on record in his whole life 
 when he devoted his time to an object that lacked 
 practical usefulness, and there is no one thing 
 which he deems to be of immediate practical need 
 on which he has not worked hard. He has not 
 always succeeded, but that is merely to say that he 
 is not infallible. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 MAKING A SHRINE FOR SPEECH 
 
 WHILE the electric light is undoubtedly Edi- 
 son's greatest gift to mankind, his most unique 
 one is the phonograph. The earlier claimants 
 to the proud title of " Father of the Telephone " 
 were two Frenchmen, Edouard-Leon Scott de 
 Martinville, who in 1857 invented a "phonauto- 
 graph," and Charles Cros, who in 1877 invented 
 an instrument which his friend the Abbe Leblanc 
 called creating the word the " phonograph." 
 
 Scott's device was of the crudest, though he 
 succeeded in causing his phonautograph to render 
 back faint sounds from the blast of two huge 
 organ pipes, three feet from the instrument. 
 But Cros' phonograph was far more scientific. 
 Its main, and utter, difference from Edison's 
 invention was that instead of depending on inden- 
 tations in a soft substance which might be hard- 
 ened, it was based on the wavings of a line which 
 an index finger would make if attached to a dia- 
 phragm caused to vibrate by the sound-waves of 
 the voice. 
 
 137 
 
138 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 As compared with these two early ideas, Edi- 
 son's is entirely original. This invention of his 
 was born with him absolutely. He is the dis- 
 coverer as well as the inventor, and to his constant 
 work in its improvement, the phonograph has 
 come to be the almost perfect instrument of to-day. 
 
 The phonograph was not due to any happy acci- 
 dent. It was not even a quick idea born from a 
 sudden thought. It came to its inventor as a 
 flash, indeed, but only after long thought along 
 that very line and during experimentation on a 
 line that was closely parallel. 
 
 It is well to emphasize this. Many inventors 
 especially young ones are likely to think of 
 inventions as " lucky ideas that happen to strike 
 it right." There are very few of these in the his- 
 tory of invention. As has been said before, an 
 inventor has got to know his field before he can be 
 sure whether an idea is of any value, and he has 
 to work like a slave to perfect the idea. 
 
 One more point may be made which illustrates 
 Edison's extraordinary genius. It is that he never 
 fritters away time. He never wastes time on 
 something which is merely interesting, as long 
 as there is something of value to be done in per- 
 fecting matters which have already shown them- 
 selves to be of value to mankind. 
 
MAKING A SHRINE FOR SPEECH 139 
 
 " What's the use?" he answered a visitor one 
 day, when his caller was speaking of the vast 
 possibilities as yet unexplored, that occur as sug- 
 gestions here and there in his volumes of " Notion 
 Books." " What's the use?" he repeated. "One 
 lifetime is too short, and I am busy every day 
 improving essential parts of my established in- 
 dustries." 
 
 There are thousands of patents in the Patent 
 Office which would bring fame and fortune to their 
 inventors, if the men who had devised them had 
 given as much time to their application to indus- 
 try as they did to their invention. Not more 
 than one quarter of Edison's life has been spent 
 in actually inventing new devices, the other three- 
 quarters has gone in industrializing them. The 
 value of an invention does not lie in what it is 
 itself, but in what it is made to do. 
 
 In just such a way, the phonograph found its 
 real beginning in the fact that Edison noticed a 
 humming sound coming from a model he had made 
 while experimenting on the automatic telegraph. 
 He paid no especial attention to it at the time, but, 
 like all subsidiary events occurring during experi- 
 ment, it sank into his memory, unconsciously. 
 
 As it so happened, the telephone question became 
 of supreme importance a few days later, and Edi- 
 
140 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 son was unable to proceed with the modification 
 of the automatic telegraph. It was not until 
 years later that, with the telephone puzzles solved, 
 he returned to the automatic telegraph, his desire 
 being to invent a machine which would repeat 
 Morse characters that had been recorded on paper 
 by indentations. The main idea was that this 
 indented paper should pass under a tracing point. 
 This point was connected with an increaser, which 
 multiplied its movements, and this again was 
 connected with a telegraph-sending apparatus. 
 By this means, a message received at a given office 
 could be relayed and transmitted automatically. 
 
 In returning to his manipulation of this machine, 
 Edison found that, when the cylinder carrying 
 the indented paper was turned quickly, it gave 
 out a sort of humming noise. Immediately he 
 remembered a somewhat similar experience on 
 an earlier model. 
 
 Edison, in some ways, is quite hard of hearing, 
 but to other sounds he is extraordinarily susceptible, 
 and one of these is Morse. It seemed to him, 
 then, he since has said, that the humming noise 
 sounded like Morse heard indistinctly. The multi- 
 plication of small sounds to great ones has always 
 been a pet hobby of Edison's, and it occurred to 
 him that this humming could be intensified. Here 
 
MAKING A SHRINE FOR SPEECH 141 
 
 was the second clew, which also registered itself 
 in the inventor's mind, and then lay dormant. 
 
 In Dickson's " Edison," the inventor is quoted 
 as giving the third and the more immediate cause 
 of the direction of his attention to the phonograph. 
 The statement is reported as follows : 
 
 "I was singing to the mouth-piece of a tele- 
 phone," Edison is quoted as saying, "when the 
 vibrations of the voice sent the fine steel point 
 into my finger. That set me thinking. If I 
 could record the actions of the point and send 
 the point over the same surface afterwards, I 
 saw no reason why the thing would not talk. I 
 tried the experiment first on a strip of telegraph 
 paper. I shouted the words 'Hello! Hello!' 
 into the mouthpiece, ran the paper back over the 
 steel point, and heard a faint 'Hello! Hello!' in 
 return. I determined to make a machine that 
 would work accurately, and gave my assistants 
 instructions, telling them what I had discovered. 
 They laughed at me. That's the whole story. The 
 phonograph is the result of the pricking of a finger." 
 
 The statement, as quoted, is interesting and 
 modest, but it conveys an entirely false impres- 
 sion. It suggests a discovery that was more or 
 less of a "fluke." Yet it was nothing of the kind. 
 Edison had been experimenting for years on the 
 
142 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 telephone; he knew as much about sound waves 
 and voice vibrations as he did about electricity, 
 and he had already done some preparatory work 
 on the microphone. The question of voice vibra- 
 tions on a diaphragm was one to which he had 
 given years of thought, and he could instantly tell 
 the amount of vibration that any given vowel or 
 consonantal sound would give to a diaphragm 
 of any given substance. 
 
 When, therefore, Edison attached a diaphragm 
 to the machine in order to record the sounds, and 
 when he spoke against that diaphragm, he was 
 following a clear line of reasoning. When to this 
 diaphragm he attached a mechanism which would 
 multiply the vibration sufficiently to indent a 
 given material, and when he selected paraffined 
 paper as this material, every step was the result 
 of a logical process. 
 
 The inventor sent for Krusei, the best of his 
 early model-makers, gave him a rough sketch of 
 the idea, and told him to make one. It is of in- 
 terest to know that the price Krusei charged was 
 eight dollars and that it took him thirty hours 
 without sleep to build it. At the end of that 
 time he brought the first actual working phono- 
 graph into the world, a clumsy-looking affair, now 
 in the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London. 
 
MAKING A SHRINE FOR SPEECH 143 
 
 Carman, the foreman of the machine shop, was 
 present when Krusei brought in the model. On 
 being told what it was for, he declared it impossible, 
 and bluntly bet Edison a box of cigars that it 
 wouldn't work. With a slow smile, Edison took 
 the bet; then, sliding the model along the table 
 in front of him, he turned the crank slowly, speak- 
 ing into the receiver the first verse of the child- 
 rhyme, "Mary had a little lamb." 
 
 The cylinder was returned to the starting point 
 again and the handle turned once more. Then, 
 very faintly, but still unmistakably, came back, 
 "Ma'y 'ad .. 'it' 'am," with a reminiscent hint 
 of "his Master's voice" in it. This extraordinary 
 success with a first model, this first phonograph in 
 history, was ushered into the world to the accom- 
 paniment of a disgusted remark from the foreman, 
 
 " Well, I guess I've lost again !" 
 
 So far, so good, but when it came to perfecting 
 the phonograph, the difficulties were great. De- 
 veloping, as it did, mainly along the lines of pleas- 
 ure-giving, it was necessary that the phonograph 
 should attain a high standard of perfection. The 
 actual machinery gave little trouble indeed, 
 the phonograph is one of the simplest mechan- 
 isms possible but the records were another 
 matter. 
 
144 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 The tinfoil, although it had served its purpose 
 faithfully and efficiently, proved worthless as a 
 recorder. It did not retain the impression accu- 
 rately, and after being used once or twice, was use- 
 less. Edison turned his attention to some other 
 substance, wax naturally suggesting itself to him 
 as the best. 
 
 The securing of wax for the records was another 
 case similar to that of filaments for the electric 
 light. Edison bought every book that dealt 
 with animal or vegetable fats even in the most 
 remote way and studied them all. He sent for 
 samples of every known fat in the two hemispheres. 
 He set at work the best men in his staff, blending, 
 mixing, and testing hundreds of varieties ; he 
 engaged special chemists; and at last he secured 
 a combination of waxes that answered his purpose. 
 From this, excellent records were made. 
 
 In Dyer & Martin's "Life of Edison," the in- 
 ventor is quoted as giving the story of how the 
 marvel of enshrining the voice was first given to 
 the world. 
 
 "That morning," the account reads, "I took 
 it [the newborn phonograph] over to New York, 
 walked into the office of the Scientific Ameri- 
 can, went up to Mr. Beach's desk, and said I had 
 something to show him. He asked what it was. 
 
MAKING A SHRINE FOR SPEECH 145 
 
 I told him that I had a machine which would record 
 and reproduce the human voice. 
 
 "I opened the package, set up the machine, 
 and recited 'Mary had a little lamb/ etc. Then 
 I reproduced it so that it could be heard all over 
 the room. They kept me at it until the crowd 
 got so great that Mr. Beach was afraid the floor 
 would collapse. 
 
 "The papers, next morning, contained columns 
 about it. None of the writers seemed to under- 
 stand how it was done. I tried to explain it to 
 them, it was so very simple, but the results were 
 so surprising that the reporters made up their 
 minds probably that they never would under- 
 stand it and they didn't. 
 
 " For a long time some people thought there was 
 trickery. One morning at Menlo Park a gentle- 
 man came to the laboratory and asked to see the 
 phonograph. It was Bishop Vincent ... I ex- 
 hibited it, and then he asked if he could speak a 
 few words. I put on a fresh foil (this was in the 
 days when the wax was as yet in the experimental 
 stage) and told him to go ahead. He commenced 
 to recite Biblical names with immense rapidity. On 
 reproducing it, he said, ' I am satisfied now. There 
 isn't a man in the United States but myself who 
 could recite those names with the same rapidity.'" 
 
146 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 But instead of being a piece of claptrap, or 
 even a nine-days'-wonder, the phonograph ad- 
 vanced with giant strides. In Europe it was widely 
 exhibited, men of science and royalty vying with 
 each other in their eagerness to hear the marvel- 
 ous invention. The Paris Exposition of 1889 
 confirmed the triumph of Edison in Europe. 
 Forty thousand people a day flocked to hear the 
 phonograph. Its success was complete. 
 
 Again the situation may be compared to that 
 of the electric light. The perfect phonograph 
 record, like the perfect light, had been secured. 
 But it was costly and it was fragile. Edison, 
 who never lets go a thing until it is put on a prac- 
 tical basis, tried every device, even making the 
 cylinders of thin paper with an eighth of an inch 
 covering of wax. This reduced their cost but 
 increased their fragility, and considerable care had 
 to be taken in handling them. 
 
 The public is not careful, and an article which 
 is to be much used has got to withstand a certain 
 amount of rough usage. Since every kind of wax 
 had been tested, Edison discarded wax and tried 
 stearate of soda. It was the solution of all his 
 difficulties. From that time on, numerous changes 
 have been made in phonograph records, the chemi- 
 cal composition of them has varied from time to 
 
MAKING A SHRINE FOR SPEECH 147 
 
 time, but the principle remains unswervingly the 
 same. 
 
 The principle of the phonograph being early 
 established, Edison turned his attention to the 
 electric light, and for several years little was done 
 on the voice-recorder. Its perfecting and its 
 introduction as a commercial asset, therefore, date 
 after the incandescent light. Though born first, 
 its maturity was delayed. 
 
 One of the main reasons of delay was the pho- 
 nograph's seemingly incurable habit of lisping. 
 Thousands, yes, tens of thousands of records 
 were made of "Mary had a little lamb, lamb, 
 LAMB, LAMB," and not a few of them are deco- 
 rated with such following sentences as, "You 
 gol-swingled beast, can't you say LAMB!" An- 
 other word of which the very walls of the old 
 buildings must have got tired was the word 
 "Spezia," used innumerable times in an effort 
 to educate those early phonographs to distinguish 
 between the two sounds of 's,' and to say a 'p' 
 properly. 
 
 The inventor's conceptions of the various uses 
 to which the phonograph would be put are of 
 considerable interest, as showing the ends he 
 sought and as compared with the actual develop- 
 ment that has occurred in the nearly forty years 
 
148 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 since the first phonograph patent was secured. In 
 the North American Review in 1878, he wrote : 
 
 "Among the many uses to which the phonograph 
 will be applied are the following : 
 
 "i. Letter-writing and all kinds of dictation 
 without the aid of a stenographer. 
 
 "2. Phonographic books which will speak to 
 blind people without effort on their part. 
 
 "3. The teaching of elocution. 
 
 "4. The reproduction of music. 
 
 "5. The Family Record (a registry of sayings, 
 reminiscences, etc., by members of a family, in 
 their own voices), and of the last words of dying 
 persons. 
 
 "6. Music boxes and toys. 
 
 "7. Clocks that should announce, in articulate 
 speech, the time for going home, time for meals, etc. 
 
 "8. The preservation of languages by exact 
 reproduction of the manner of pronouncing. 
 
 "9. Educational purposes, such as preserving 
 the explanations made by a teacher, so that the 
 pupil can refer to them at any moment; and 
 spelling or other lessons placed upon the phono- 
 graph for convenience in committing to memory 
 
 "10. Connection with the telephone, so as to 
 make that instrument an auxiliary in the trans- 
 mission of permanent and invaluable records, 
 
MAKING A SHRINE FOR SPEECH 149 
 
 instead of being the recipient of momentary and 
 fleeting communication." 
 
 The year 1888 was phonograph year. The 
 Patent Office, in that one year alone, granted 
 Edison thirty patents on improvements connected 
 with the phonograph. The wax had been sub- 
 stituted for the foil, a sapphire point had taken 
 the place of the steel pencil, and the reproducing 
 "needles" had become exceedingly fine, globe- 
 pointed devices. 
 
 From the exceedingly fine details required in 
 the phonograph, where indentations one-thou- 
 sandth part of an inch make all the difference 
 between the various tone qualities of a singing 
 voice, Edison's attention turned to matters on a 
 large scale. His next years of effort were given 
 to his great magnetic ore separator. This was 
 an example of a perfect principle, perfectly applied, 
 brought to perfection by Edison, to which he gave 
 five years of constant thought and attention, and 
 which ended in a tremendous monetary loss. To 
 a smaller man, the result would have been nothing 
 less than utter ruin, but Edison's only comment was, 
 
 "Well, the money's all gone, but we had a 
 whale of a good time spending it." 
 
 The origin of Edison's connection with the 
 magnetic ore separator is stated to be the washing 
 
150 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 in of a patch of blackish sand on the seabeach 
 at Quogue, L.I. As it is an unfailing rule of 
 Edison's life never to pass a new thing, and always 
 to bring to his great storehouse every available 
 substance, the " Wizard " filled his pockets with the 
 sand. 
 
 When, a few days later, he returned to the 
 laboratory, thrusting his hand into his pocket, he 
 found the sand, which he promptly emptied out 
 upon the laboratory table. On this table there 
 chanced to be a magnet lying, and as the sand 
 poured near the magnet, a number of the little 
 black grains were attracted to it. Edison at once 
 saw that the magnet separated the magnetic from 
 the non-magnetic particles, and his mind jumped 
 to the possibility of using this in practical milling 
 of low-grade ores, or ores in which the proportion 
 of valuable and magnetic material is small. 
 
 The idea was not precisely new, as, in the seven- 
 teenth century, Gilbert, that extraordinary scien- 
 tist of Queen Elizabeth's court, suggested that 
 the magnet could be used for " separating the pure 
 from the impure, " as he phrased it. But Gilbert's 
 prophecy had nothing to do with Edison's planning. 
 The metallic sand lay before him. Obviously, if 
 ore could be crushed into particles as small as 
 that sand, they could be separated. Or, if the 
 
MAKING A SHRINE FOR SPEECH 151 
 
 magnet were larger and more powerful, the parti- 
 cles need not be quite so small. There was the 
 principle ; the working of it out was only a matter 
 of experiment. 
 
 Unfortunately for the inventor, this was not 
 the sort of thing which could be carried out on 
 a small scale. Innumerable laboratory tests were 
 made, ores were shipped in from all parts of the 
 world, crushers were made with magnets in pro- 
 portion to their size. Certain ores were found 
 more or less refractory, but still all of them could 
 be brought into their proper relations. The 
 laboratory test was conclusive, the problem was 
 solved, and hundreds of millions of tons of metal- 
 liferous rocks, which had been deemed too low- 
 grade for mining, immediately became available. 
 
 Had Edison stopped there, had he taken out 
 patents on his inventions and the ideas for ma- 
 chinery connected with it, he would have been the 
 richer by half a million dollars and the world would 
 have gained almost five years of the inventor's 
 time. But Edison, in his characteristic way, 
 wished to establish his invention as a commercial 
 industry. He had done this with the electric 
 light, he had done this with his duplex telegraph, 
 while other of his inventions he had sold in such 
 a way that they were commercially gainful, and he 
 
152 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 desired to place his magnetic milling on the same 
 basis of advantage. 
 
 With his accustomed concentration, Edison 
 set his mind resolutely to the problem. No ma- 
 chinery existed which contemplated the crushing 
 of the hardest rocks to powder, and the inventor 
 had to plan all these. A few of the devices were 
 machines in general use carried to a finer scale; 
 some were modifications of existing machines; 
 but the string of patents taken out in Edison's 
 name in connection with ore-milling machinery 
 shows to how large an extent his inventive powers 
 were devoted to this end alone. Under his fertile 
 mechanical planning, a marvelous metallurgical 
 plant was built. A big tract of land in Sullivan 
 County was the scene of operations, and around 
 the milling plant grew up a small town of over 
 two hundred houses. All these were modern, 
 equipped with electric light and conveniences 
 strange to so small a place. 
 
 From the inventor's point of view the experi- 
 ment was thoroughly successful. Scarcely an ore 
 of any consequence was found to fail, and in the 
 five years, practically every detail was finished 
 and every obstacle overcome. But Edison was 
 not fortunate in his commercial appeal. Capital 
 did not pledge itself readily to the work, the ship- 
 
MAKING A SHRINE FOR SPEECH 153 
 
 ping facilities to the ore-milling plant were poor, 
 and the organization necessary to extend the new 
 metallurgical system throughout the country would 
 have taken all of Edison's time. It would have 
 made a good life work for most men, but Edison's 
 brain was too multifold for him to remain per- 
 petually at milling. One day he closed down the 
 mine. 
 
 No one lives now at "Edison/' and the miners' 
 cottages still stand there, falling into decay. Many 
 of the buildings are in ruins and the machinery 
 has rusted in the pits where it stood. The proj- 
 ect, as a business venture, was a failure, but in 
 Australia and in Norway, in the Andes and in the 
 Himalayas, are mines where magnetic ore sepa- 
 rators are at work. The "Wizard's" ore works 
 are shut down, but his wizardry continues un- 
 broken. 
 
 There is a very decided hint of the combination 
 of stoicism and the love of work which has de- 
 scended to him from his Dutch ancestry in Edison's 
 comment on the ore-milling work, when years 
 later, telling his reminiscences of that time, he 
 said: 
 
 "I never felt better in my life than during the 
 five years I worked there. Hard work, nothing 
 to divert my thoughts, clear air and simple food 
 
154 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 made my life very pleasant. We learned a great 
 deal. It will be of benefit to some one some time." 
 
 How much of the interpretation of Edison's 
 character lies in that phrase, "We learned a great 
 deal"! To the inventor, then verging toward 
 fifty years of age, the value of five years of pains- 
 taking and arduous toil found sufficient reward in 
 the knowledge that "We learned a great deal." 
 It is the clew to his combined simplicity and 
 greatness. 
 
 Much of the machinery devised by Edison for 
 the purpose of crushing ore into powder is still 
 used by him in his cement works at Stewartsville, 
 New Jersey. The works cover eight hundred 
 acres of ground. 
 
 As a natural sequence to his development of the 
 cement industry, Edison thought of plans whereby 
 concrete might be turned to new uses. Being 
 brought face to face with the high cost of lumber, 
 in connection with the building of one of his 
 plants, he thought of the extension of the use of 
 concrete as a building material. It was a matter 
 to which he returned from time to time, and in 
 odd intervals perfected the plan. It is now pos- 
 sible to "build" an Edison concrete, ten-room 
 house, weather-proof, almost bomb-proof, in four 
 days. A steel mold is made into which the con- 
 
MAKING A SHRINE FOR SPEECH 155 
 
 crete is pumped, allowed to harden, and the mold 
 then removed. The window-frames are made in 
 the same way. Hundreds of these houses have 
 been constructed and have proved satisfactory. 
 
 Allied in some respects to the idea of the mag- 
 netic separation of ores is Edison's invention of the 
 pyro-magnetic motor and the pyro-magnetic gen- 
 erator. Both of these are a modern application 
 of an ancient principle, also mentioned by Gilbert, 
 the ''Father of Magnetism," in the seventeenth 
 century ; namely, the diminution of the magnetic 
 power in iron when hot. As a matter of fact, 
 after iron is heated slightly above the point of 
 'cherry' heat, the magnet has no influence on it 
 whatsoever. 
 
 In Edison's pyro-magnetic motor, a pivoted 
 bar is heated and cooled by turns, being strongly 
 influenced by the magnet when cold, and unaffected 
 when hot, the alternation giving rise to the rotary 
 motion. Upon the same lines was constructed 
 his pyro-magnetic generator, with the end in view 
 of producing electricity from coal. 
 
 Along this latter line of experimentation, Edi- 
 son's mind has been occupied for several years. 
 He regards it as the most important problem of the 
 age. The great inventor has laid aside many 
 commercial ventures, at times, to concentrate 
 
156 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 on this one problem. He has made considerable 
 progress, but not sufficient to justify him in re- 
 vealing his experiments. 
 
 Of the tremendous force hidden in coal, a trifle 
 less than fifteen per cent is used, the remaining 
 eighty-five per cent being wasted. Combustion 
 of coal, especially with the machinery with which 
 it is now used, is, to Edison's economics, wasteful 
 to excess. If electricity could be generated direct 
 from coal, the problem of the world's power would 
 practically be solved, steam would become obso- 
 lete, and electricity would reign supreme. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 "MOVIES," AND THE STORAGE BATTERY 
 
 JUST as the old game of "rounders" is the 
 foundation of the national game of baseball, which 
 fills the thoughts of every American boy and 
 many million American men from spring till fall, 
 so the zoetrope was the forerunner of the moving 
 picture of to-day. But the whole business of 
 "moving pictures" is so large, and requires so 
 many things for its full use, that to no one man 
 can be ascribed its sole origin. It may justly be 
 said, however, that in the ultimate development of 
 the cinematograph and biograph to completeness, 
 Edison's kinetoscope has played an important part. 
 
 To Edison, "king of speed" as he has been called, 
 the development of instantaneous photography 
 afforded an opportunity for investigation and 
 experimentation that appealed tremendously to 
 the imaginative side of his nature. He saw how 
 this could be applied to Plateau's "phenakisto- 
 scope" of 1833, to the improved zoetrope, invented 
 by Raynaud in 1870, which he called the "praxino- 
 
 157 
 
158 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 scope," and especially to Muybridge's "zoopraxi- 
 scope" in 1877. 
 
 Edward Muybridge, an American, was the 
 first to apply photography to the zoetrope idea. 
 In 1877 he placed a series of cameras at regular 
 intervals opposite an inclined white reflecting 
 surface. A fine thread was stretched from the 
 shutter of each camera to the screen, and a horse 
 was trotted in front of the battery of cameras. 
 As he trotted along, he broke each of the threads 
 in turn, and these operated the shutters, giving a 
 series of plates showing the horse's posture at the 
 moment of exposure. To project these, Muy- 
 bridge invented his "zoopraxiscope," in which 
 the positives, fastened to a large revolving disk, 
 were whirled in succession in front of a " magic" 
 lantern. 
 
 It is remarkable that the three men who worked 
 independently on this problem at this time were 
 all naturalists. Just as Muybridge was interested 
 in his " zoopraxiscope," because his hobby was the 
 horse, so Stephen Marey, of France, adopted a 
 somewhat similar device with a "photographic 
 gun" for studying the flight of birds. Demeny, 
 a pupil of his, used the same device for reproducing 
 the movements of a speaker's lips, so that deaf mutes 
 could read " sentences written by photography." 
 
"MOVIES," AND THE STORAGE BATTERY 159 
 
 Anschutz, in Germany, a naturalist of more 
 general range, developed a more improved machine, 
 on the same principle, which he called the "tachy- 
 scope." In this the positives were made right on 
 a glass disk. When this was rotated, each picture, 
 as it came before the opening, was lighted by a 
 spark from a vacuum tube, giving a sharp, clear 
 image. 
 
 The invention of the celluloid film in place of 
 the 'old glass plate made true "moving pictures" 
 possible. The "father" of the craft, without 
 much doubt, was W. Friese-Greene of England, 
 who took out a patent in 1882, nine years before 
 the appearance of the Edison kinetoscope. His 
 machine was quite efficient, his patent called for 
 a long strip of celluloid film, and he publicly ex- 
 hibited moving pictures that had been taken by 
 him. 
 
 In going on to show the part that Edison has 
 played in the development of moving pictures, 
 it is necessary to point out the great difference 
 between this invention and every other on which 
 he has worked. In the phonograph, the sound 
 waves received are continuous, in the moving pic- 
 ture camera and projector the light waves are dis- 
 continuous, or made of a series of pictures thrown 
 on a screen in rapid succession. 
 
160 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 This is only possible because the human eye 
 needs to see a certain scene for a given length of 
 time before it really is perceived. This is known 
 as "persistence of vision." An impression re- 
 ceived by the eye cannot be instantly replaced 
 by another, but will remain for one twenty-fourth 
 part of a second, and will gradually fade out, being 
 quite obliterated, after another twenty-fourth part 
 of a second, or it will persist for one twelfth of a 
 second in all. For example, if we were looking 
 at the piston of an engine at rest, and it darted 
 out and in to the same point of rest, its entire 
 movement being performed in less than the twenty- 
 fourth part of a second, we could not have seen 
 it move at all. A fly's wings beat more rapidly 
 than twenty-four times a second, consequently 
 we never perceive them, we only see a blur. A 
 bird's wings beat less rapidly than this period of 
 persistence of vision, and therefore we can see 
 them flutter. 
 
 If, therefore, pictures can be thrown on a screen 
 in front of the eye so quickly that the change 
 comes in less than this twelfth part of a second, 
 it is impossible for us to see the change. Moving 
 pictures are projected at the rate of a fifteenth of 
 a second. This gives time for the picture to be 
 seen, for the fraction of a second's eclipse between 
 
"MOVIES," AND THE STORAGE BATTERY 161 
 
 one picture and the next, and for the second pic- 
 ture to appear before the impression of the first is 
 gone. As the second picture fits over the first, 
 with an incredibly small change, it appears to the 
 eye as moving. 
 
 With the combined discovery of the gelatine- 
 bromide sensitive preparation, and the celluloid 
 film, it was possible to take pictures with great 
 rapidity. When, late in the eighties, Edison 
 turned his attention to the question of the kineto- 
 scope, he knew nothing whatever about photog- 
 raphy. Even for amusement he had never taken 
 a snapshot, never developed a plate. But no 
 sooner did he get started on the idea of reproducing 
 movement as he had reproduced sound, than he 
 saw that he must master photography if he would 
 succeed. He worked early and late, his fondness 
 for chemistry aiding him greatly in the technicali- 
 ties of sensitive preparations for photographic 
 plates. 
 
 In order to secure absolute efficiency, Edison 
 realized that the pictures would have to be taken 
 exceedingly rapidly, about fifty a second, if they 
 were to seem life-like and if there was to be avoid- 
 ance of jerking when thrown on a screen. This 
 required a camera with an action rapid enough 
 to operate the shutter and to move the film, and 
 
1 62 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 also a film sensitive enough to light to receive a 
 brilliant impression in one fiftieth of a second. 
 
 None of the films in the market were satisfactory 
 to Edison, indeed, none of them could do precisely 
 what he wanted. Accordingly he opened a photo- 
 graphic laboratory, and after a series of experi- 
 ments as costly as they were exhausting, he suc- 
 ceeded in getting films sufficiently rapid for his 
 purpose. 
 
 The details of the mechanism of the taking 
 camera and the projector troubled the inventor 
 but little; fertile expedients always suggested 
 themselves readily to him, and the perfected 
 kinetoscope in 1891 was the result. In his charac- 
 teristic way, Edison thought mainly of the kineto- 
 scope on a larger basis. He saw its value for 
 educational purposes, and its great mission as 
 a recorder of important events. 
 
 In April, 1895, Lumiere in Paris, and Acres in 
 London, produced machines which were practical 
 in every way, yet which had distinct features of 
 their own. The quick French mind saw the 
 possibilities of the cinematograph, as it was there 
 called, and the frugal French mind realized that 
 a vast amount of amusement could be secured for 
 a few sous. With what can be described as 
 nothing less than a whirlwind of approval, the 
 
"MOVIES," AND THE STORAGE BATTERY 163 
 
 moving picture swept through France, and through 
 Italy, a scarcely less rapid development proceed- 
 ing in England meanwhile. 
 
 Edison, thinking more of the perfection of the 
 kinetoscope than merely of making films which 
 would sell, continued his work at Orange,, New 
 Jersey, and patent after patent was filed by him, 
 covering more and ever more improvements on 
 the kinetoscope. It was a race between Europe 
 and America; and when at last the European 
 " movie" companies entered the United States, 
 they found the Edison kinetoscope fully established. 
 
 So huge were the proportions to which the 
 business grew, that Edison, satisfied with his 
 work in laying a sure foundation for the great 
 new art of the photo-drama, kept his studios at 
 work supplying high-class films for the commercial 
 exchanges, and turned to other features of the work. 
 
 The inventor believed for some years indeed 
 still believes that the phonograph and the 
 kinetoscope should be allied. In 1907 he pre- 
 dicted that the time was not far distant when 
 Grand Opera would be given by a combined 
 phonograph and moving picture so completely 
 paralleling actual performance that it would 
 deceive good critics. Many public performances 
 with the "phonocinematograph" were given be- 
 
1 64 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 tween 1910 and 1912, but absolute exactness of 
 register was difficult to obtain. 
 
 There were two main obstacles, or "bugs," as 
 the inventor calls them. The first of these was 
 in the recording, the second in the projecting. 
 In the recording, it was found that the moving 
 picture camera recorded the actions of the per- 
 formers before the sound of their voices reached 
 the phonograph. This was, firstly, because light 
 travels more quickly than sound, and secondly, 
 because the chemical action of light on a sensitive 
 plate is faster than the mechanical action of sound- 
 waves on a diaphragm. 
 
 So when the villain says, "Be mine or you shall 
 die!" stabs the heroine, and jumps over the 
 castle wall, it is disturbing to have him jump over 
 the castle wall before he has said anything to the 
 heroine. What was more, certain vowel sounds 
 registered quickly, others more slowly, so that 
 speeding the phonograph a little ahead of the 
 projector (which was tried) failed to produce the 
 required result. 
 
 The second difficulty was that of making the 
 phonograph reproduction and the moving picture 
 operate in exact harmony. The phonograph had 
 to be on the stage so that the voices might seem 
 to come from the pictured actors, the projector 
 
"MOVIES," AND THE STORAGE BATTERY 165 
 
 had to be at the back of the theater so that the 
 pictures could be projected on the screen. Minor 
 difficulties of synchronization became very real 
 ones when put to rigid test. But these difficulties 
 do not mean that Edison has set the matter aside. 
 Not at all; they await an opportunity of settle- 
 ment, that is all. In the spring of 1915 a young 
 Chicago inventor patented a device which goes 
 far to fill this gap, but which needs yet further 
 improvement to be practicable. 
 
 A large proportion of Edison's early films were 
 industrial, for the inventor believes thoroughly 
 in a proper understanding of commerce and in- 
 dustry. Some of the films in which he took the 
 greatest pride were pictures showing factories in 
 operation, where, from a piece of crude ore, the 
 iron is made, the steel forged and fashioned into 
 a steel rail for a railroad. Or, again, he likes a 
 film where every detail is shown in the blowing 
 of a glass electric light bulb. These films are in 
 high demand. Many factories use them as part 
 of the education of new employees. 
 
 This interest in commerce and things com- 
 mercial has caused Edison to devote his inventive 
 genius at various times to devices for helping the 
 business man. Such was the electric pen, which 
 consisted of a hollow wooden tube, the size and 
 
1 66 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 shape of an ordinary penholder, fitted with a steel 
 shaft. At the head of the shaft was a tiny motor, 
 and the point was a steel needle. When attached 
 to a battery by flexible wires, the needle point 
 vibrated so rapidly that a continuous series of 
 dots was made with the motions of ordinary writing. 
 A stencil was thus made from which any number 
 of copies could be run off. As a wag once said, 
 
 "It works like a man was writing with a wasp, 
 holding the wasp's business end to the paper!" 
 
 The mimeograph, which, as now adopted for 
 use on typewriters, is also to be seen in thousands 
 of business houses ; it is one of Edison's inventions. 
 It has saved many hundreds of thousands of 
 dollars in the issuance of circular letters. 
 
 Of the same character is the dictating machine, 
 a development of the phonograph, which, with 
 its 1914 improvement of the transophone, has 
 already been described. These, however, are 
 classed by Edison among his " lesser inventions/' 
 such as vocal engines, which will saw a hole through 
 a board by the mere force of talking into them ; 
 typewriters, for the "Wizard" was one of the 
 earliest to work on this invaluable asset to the 
 commercial world; methods of preserving fruit; 
 making of plate glass ; details of iron manufacture ; 
 wire-drawing, and a host of other things. 
 
"MOVIES," AND THE STORAGE BATTERY 167 
 
 Edison's connection with electric railroading 
 should be mentioned. The first American electric 
 locomotive was run in April 29, 1857, by Professor 
 C. C. Page, of the Smithsonian Institute, the trip 
 being taken over the tracks of the Washington and 
 Baltimore Railroad. A speed of nineteen miles an 
 hour was attained, the motive power being one 
 hundred cells of Grove nitric-acid battery, each 
 having a platinum plate eleven inches square. 
 The cost, of course, was prohibitive, and while 
 the trial trip succeeded, in a measure, the batteries 
 were reduced to junk-heap material in the less 
 than two hours that the trip consumed. 
 
 The first electric railroad in America, however, 
 certainly the first regularly to carry passengers 
 and freight, was Edison's at Menlo Park. In this 
 railroad, which was about half a mile in extent, 
 the current was furnished from the laboratory, 
 passing into the rails, which were pitched high, 
 and thoroughly insulated from the ground. The 
 current entered one rail, passed up through the 
 wheels of the locomotive which themselves were 
 insulated from the shaft thence to the motor and 
 out to the opposite rail through the other wheel. 
 
 Edison then made a contract with Henry Villard, 
 of the Northern Pacific Railway. This was, that 
 if the inventor could construct a railway at least 
 
1 68 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 two and a half miles in length, equipped with two 
 locomotives and three cars, one of these locomotives 
 to be built for freight haulage and strength, the 
 other for passenger service and speed, and the 
 passenger locomotive could develop sixty miles 
 an hour, then Villard would reimburse Edison 
 for all cost of experiment, and would install the 
 system on parts of his road in the wheat fields of 
 the far Northwest. While the experiments were 
 proceeding, Villard's fortune went to pieces in 
 the Northern Pacific Railway crash. 
 
 Meantime Siemens and Halske, both of Ger- 
 many, had built and equipped electric railroads 
 of a high degree of efficiency, and Stephen D. Field, 
 an American, had conceived the idea of the third 
 rail. Both Siemens and Field attacked Edison's 
 position, claiming infringements of their patents. 
 Siemens' claim was set aside and Edison and Field 
 joined forces, putting into operation an electric 
 railway at the Chicago Railway Exposition. Edi- 
 son was anxious to continue his work along this 
 line, but so many other matters intervened that 
 he was compelled to set that phase of experimen- 
 tation aside. 
 
 This was no time for delays. All over the world, 
 electrical engineers were working on the question 
 of transportation. Van Depoele, a Belgian, and 
 
"MOVIES," AND THE STORAGE BATTERY 169 
 
 Sprague, an ex-lieu tenant of the United States 
 Navy, were to the fore, and long before Edison 
 had time to return to the fray, electric trolleys 
 had become thoroughly established, and electric 
 railroading was well in hand. 
 
 Although so many minds had been working on 
 the transportation problem, especially with the 
 storage battery, they had not been successful. 
 Edison always believed and now has proved 
 that the storage battery could be brought to a 
 high point of efficiency. To F. R. Beach, at the 
 time superintendent of the Street Railway De- 
 partment of the General Electric Company, he 
 once said, plaintively, 
 
 "I don't think Nature would be so unkind as 
 to withhold the secret of a good storage battery, 
 if a real earnest hunt for it was made. I'm going 
 to hunt." 
 
 The hunt took six years. In 1906 the Edison 
 storage battery had reached the point where less 
 than one and one half per cent was imperfect. 
 Yet two years of unceasing work followed before 
 this small amount of imperfection was removed. 
 Time and again statements were made that in 
 the storage battery the "Wizard" was facing a 
 fiasco. The temptation to deny the story was 
 strong, the opportunity to tell what had already 
 
170 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 been achieved was great. Still Edison stuck to 
 his one invariable rule 
 
 "Say nothing till you've got it right !" 
 
 The early storage batteries were successful, save 
 for a small percentage, and thousands of orders 
 came for more batteries. But Edison refused to 
 sell. He felt that a percentage of imperfect 
 batteries, no matter how small, would become 
 cumulative, hurt his reputation, and cripple busi- 
 ness in the perfect battery, when it should be 
 completed. 
 
 The Edison storage battery, among all his in- 
 ventions, is the least empirical. The stiffest hill 
 to climb in the manufacture of a perfect battery 
 was devising the "accumulator," that portion of the 
 battery in which the "juice" is stored. The other 
 difficulty was to get the battery down in weight. 
 
 Edison's manner of attacking the problem was 
 thoroughly typical of all his methods. He began 
 by getting hold of every type of storage cell that 
 had ever been made or thought of, and analyzing 
 the defects. He hoped that some device modify- 
 ing one of these types could serve the purpose. 
 None would. Every single one had a defect so 
 fundamental that Edison came to the conclusion 
 that it was not possible to work along this line. 
 A new ideal had to be made. 
 
"MOVIES," AND THE STORAGE BATTERY 171 
 
 The use of lead, largely because of its weight, 
 was to be avoided. The exclusion of lead sug- 
 gested the setting aside of the acid solution, using 
 an alkaline electrolyte instead. Half a year of 
 patient experimentation with every metal and 
 nearly all metallic compounds known, gradually 
 brought to light the fact that, from the point of 
 view of the theory of the thing, iron and nickel 
 were the metals desired. 
 
 This was the beginning. After over six thousand 
 experiments designed to find out the exact 
 condition of activity of these metals when acted 
 upon by the solution the right processes were 
 gradually evolved. The difficulty lay in the ne- 
 cessity for the development of the two metals to 
 go on at exactly the same rate of speed. Finally, ex- 
 actly the right solution of potash was worked out. 
 
 An Edison cell of the second period of develop- 
 ment consists of steel plates containing oxide of 
 iron and oxide of nickel, immersed in a solution of 
 potash. With the charging of the battery, the 
 iron oxide is reduced to metallic iron and the freed 
 oxygen is absorbed by the nickel oxide. When 
 the battery is discharged, the oxygen absorbed 
 by the nickel passes through the liquid to the 
 metallic iron and oxidizes it back to its original 
 state. 
 
172 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 In the words of F. A. Jones, " the oxygen burns the 
 iron, but instead of getting heat, we get electricity 
 as a substitute. It is a species of internal combus- 
 tion in which the oxygen is stored up in the nickel 
 to burn the iron. There is no other reaction. The 
 simple metallic elements are iron, nickel and steel." 
 
 Edison has gone on perfecting his storage battery, 
 and his inventions on it are numerous. Most of 
 them, however, are along his accustomed line of 
 making the invention commercially practicable. 
 The storage battery problem was solved scien- 
 tifically in 1903. Commercially it is not yet 
 entirely solved. Thus in 1908, a special machine 
 was invented by Edison to make tubes about the 
 size of a lead pencil in which to pack the nickel. 
 
 Still more recently the "nickel flake" was in- 
 vented, and the process is so ingenious that it 
 may well be told. It is obtained by electroplating 
 upon a metallic cylinder alternate layers of copper 
 and nickel, one hundred layers of each. After 
 this is done, the combined sheet is stripped from 
 the cylinder, being then only about the thickness 
 of the edge of a visiting card. It is cut in squares 
 one sixteenth of an inch in size, and then dropped 
 in a bath which dissolves away the copper but 
 leaves the nickel unaffected, so that the plates or 
 flakes of nickel float apart. When dried, these 
 
"MOVIES," AND THE STORAGE BATTERY 173 
 
 flakes of heavy metal are so extraordinarily thin 
 that they will float in the air like the feathered 
 down that comes from a dandelion. 
 
 The accumulator, that bugbear of the storage 
 battery in practical usefulness, was made simple 
 and effective by Edison's discovery of the value 
 of cobalt as the material for the condenser. Co- 
 balt, however, had been found only in small 
 quantities. To Edison's mind this meant nothing. 
 Either cobalt could not be found in large quan- 
 tities, in which case it was useless for him to 
 experiment further with it, for it could not be 
 made commercially profitable, or it could be 
 found. In the latter case, found it had to be! 
 
 In the same way that the inventor had sent 
 men all over the world to find the bamboo which 
 could be used for the carbon filament of the elec- 
 tric light, in the same way that he had set a horde 
 of chemists at work testing wax for the phono- 
 graph cylinder, so to every corner of America did 
 Edison distribute prospectors for cobalt. His 
 determination and his perseverance were fully 
 rewarded. A rich vein of cobalt was discovered 
 on the North Carolina border, running across the 
 mountains into Tennessee. 
 
 With the cell problem solved, and the accu- 
 mulator material in hand, there remained only 
 
174 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 the manufacture of the cells in such a way that 
 they could be depended upon successfully to resist 
 whatever demand would be made upon them by 
 commercial use. For a year and more, Edison 
 storage batteries were put on automobiles under 
 conditions which, in many instances, reduced 
 the machines to little more than scrap iron. Just 
 one of these tests, for example, was sending out 
 six machines, all of different designs and weights, 
 to travel one hundred miles a day for fifty suc- 
 cessive days over the worst roads that could be 
 found. As one of the inspecting engineers said : 
 
 "The worst possible roads were chosen, and 
 when a machine struck a track which was par- 
 ticularly heavy and bad, that track was covered 
 to and fro all day until the hundred miles was 
 accomplished. At the end of the fifty days the 
 machines were little better than wrecks. Many 
 sets of tires were worn out, axles split, and screws 
 wrenched from their sockets, but when we came 
 to examine the batteries we found that in no single 
 instance had the slightest injury been received. 
 The automobiles were fit only for the scrap heap, 
 but the batteries were in perfect condition for 
 another five- thousand-mile trip." 
 
 First, last, and all the time, Edison is an elec- 
 trician. While he does not indulge in any dreams 
 
"MOVIES," AND THE STORAGE BATTERY 175 
 
 of electricity as heralding the millennium, he does 
 believe that it is its mission to make the world 
 better. Speaking of his storage battery, he pointed 
 out that it would gradually mean the exile of all 
 horses from cities, and with the horses would go 
 the flies, and with the flies would be banished a 
 host of diseases. 
 
 A boy, a keen, intelligent boy about fourteen 
 years of age, once was accompanying his father 
 through the works at Orange, listening with ex- 
 traordinary interest to the explanations that were 
 being given by Edison to the elders of the party. 
 When the visitors were ready to go, the " Wizard " 
 
 whose kindliness is as remarkable as his in- 
 genuity turned to the lad and said, 
 
 "What do you think about it all, son?" 
 
 "Well, Mr. Edison," the boy replied, looking 
 at him with admiration, "I think you're an elec- 
 trical machine yourself." 
 
 The inventor looked at the lad quizzically, pull- 
 ing his right eyebrow in the way with which all 
 his friends are familiar, and which usually means 
 that he is thinking over a problem. Then, with 
 a bright smile, he turned and said, 
 
 "From all we seem to know about what life is 
 
 maybe that's so." 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 K 
 
 MASTER OF MEN AND PATRIOT 
 
 IN the winter of 1914, the Orange laboratories, 
 from which had come so many wonderful inven- 
 tions, burned to the ground. In them was much 
 of the result of Edison's life work, thousands of 
 unfinished plans, and scientific annotations for 
 the future. From his home at Llewelyn Park, 
 Edison saw the blaze and came down the long 
 garden walk to the laboratories. 
 
 One of his associates, a man in whom Edison 
 put his trust and whom he cared for greatly, 
 seeing his chief standing there, came forward, 
 and in the matter of fact tone with which he 
 would have spoken in the machine-shop, said, 
 
 "What next, Mr. Edison?" 
 
 "I'm thinking," the master replied, "just how 
 I'll rebuild." 
 
 Two days later, when raking through the ashes, 
 it chanced that a photograph of Edison, with 
 the edges charred, was found, but the strong, 
 kindly face was looking out uninjured. 
 
 176 
 
MASTER OF MEN AND PATRIOT 177 
 
 One of the employees, seeing the "old man" 
 as he is always called in the works standing 
 near by, came forward and held it out to Edison. 
 
 "We found this, sir," he said. 
 
 Edison looked at it a moment and smiled, 
 one of his long slow smiles. Then, taking a stub 
 of a carpenter's pencil from his pocket, he wrote 
 between the charred edges and the outline of 
 the head the words, 
 
 "Never touched me !" 
 
 Was ever a more American phrasing of indomi- 
 table purpose ! 
 
 There is no such word as "disaster" in Edison's 
 vocabulary. There is not even the word "failure." 
 One is inevitably reminded of his swift retort to 
 a young assistant who had grown weary of per- 
 petual experiments, thousands of them, which 
 had all ab'ke failed to reach the desired end. 
 
 "It's a shame," said this young fellow, petu- 
 lantly, "that we should have worked all these 
 weeks without getting any results!" 
 
 "Results!" cried Edison, in surprise, "No 
 results? Why, man, I have gotten a lot of re- 
 sults ! I know several thousand things that won't 
 work." 
 
 Difficulties of every sort have been thick in 
 Edison's path. They appear to make very little 
 
178 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 difference. He regards an obstacle in the way of 
 accomplishment very much as he does a "bug," 
 or awkward difficulty, in the working of a piece of 
 machinery. 
 
 The story of the impudent office boy is a good 
 example of this. 
 
 Many and many a year ago, when the electric 
 light bulb had been invented and was first being 
 made, one of the principal difficulties the inventor 
 faced was that of reducing the cost. Gradually he 
 was getting it down to a commercial basis when his 
 plans were checked by a combination of some of 
 the workmen in the shop. He has himself told 
 what happened. 
 
 "One of the incidents," Edison has said, "which 
 led to a very great cheapening, resulted from a 
 little dispute I had. When we started making 
 the bulbs, one of the important processes had to 
 be done by experts. This was the sealing on of 
 the part carrying the filament into the globe, 
 which was rather a delicate operation in those 
 days, and required several months of training 
 before any one could seal in a number of parts 
 per day. 
 
 "When we got to the point where we employed 
 eighty of these experts, they formed a sort of 
 union, and knowing that it was impossible to 
 
MASTER OF MEN AND PATRIOT 179 
 
 manufacture lamps without them, they became 
 very insolent. 
 
 "The son of one of these experts was employed 
 as an office boy, and when he was told to do any- 
 thing, either he would not do it at all, or he would 
 do it grudgingly, giving an impertinent reply. 
 He was ordered to be discharged, and given two 
 weeks' notice. The union notified us that unless 
 the boy was taken back, the whole union would 
 go out. 
 
 "I didn't propose to be bulldozed by eighty 
 men who thought they had a strangle-hold on 
 my process of manufacture, and I started in to 
 see if it were not possible to do that operation by 
 machinery. After feeling round for three days I 
 got a clew to it. Getting men I could trust, I 
 put them at work and made the prelirninary ma- 
 chinery. It worked fairly well. 
 
 "I then made a second machine, and tried a 
 few men who knew nothing about that sort of 
 work on the machine laborers and such. When 
 I found that they could learn in half an hour how 
 to work the machine successfully, I knew I was 
 fixed all right. I then hurried and made thirty 
 of the machines. 
 
 "Up in the top loft we stored those thirty 
 machines, and the night before the office boy was 
 
i8o THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 scheduled to go, we worked in the evening up 
 there, putting in benches, making connections 
 and getting everything ready. The next morn- 
 ing we told the office boy he was fired, gave him 
 his pay, and ordered him to clear out of the place 
 as fast as his legs would carry him. Then the 
 union went out. It has been out ever since." 
 
 In the days of the ore-milling plant, some 
 labor agitators managed to get in among the 
 miners and sent a committee to Edison to formulate 
 certain demands. Edison, who is always courteous, 
 (except when on the rampage, which is seldom) 
 heard them with exemplary patience until one of 
 them incautiously used the word " demands." 
 
 "Demands, eh?" said the inventor. "Go on !" 
 
 The committee stated what they wanted and 
 arbitrarily told Edison that he could have four 
 days in which to decide. 
 
 "I'll do the deciding," he answered^ "and I'll 
 not need any four days about it, either. Go 
 back to Edison [the village] and the reply will 
 be there by the time you are." 
 
 He telegraphed to Superintendent Conly to 
 shut the works down then and there, as the scale 
 of wages was actually higher than elsewhere and 
 the demand was unreasonable. Next morning 
 the men came in a body and begged to be taken 
 
MASTER OF MEN AND PATRIOT 181 
 
 back on the old footing. That was the last strike 
 among Edison's employees. 
 
 It is not because of his discipline, however, but 
 because of his loyalty to his men, that Edison 
 secures his men's loyalty to him. A good ex- 
 ample of this was his support of one of his elec- 
 tricians when the man in question made a mis- 
 statement before a Board of Inquiry. 
 
 On the board, as it chanced, were a couple of 
 keen men who knew a good deal about electricity, 
 and when the young fellow made an error, these 
 two members of the Board tripped him up. He 
 defended himself as best he could, and, to his 
 great relief, Edison, who was present, came to 
 his rescue. The Board waived further discussion 
 because of Edison's authoritative support of his 
 employee. No sooner, however, had the Board 
 left the room than the inventor turned to the 
 young electrician, who had been feeling good 
 over his "victory," and said, 
 
 "Now, see here, you were wrong about that 
 whole affair. I saw that at a glance." 
 
 "I was ? " the other stammered, amazed. " Then 
 why on earth, Mr. Edison, did you indorse me?" 
 
 "Because I wasn't going to let that crowd have 
 the satisfaction of crowing over you if I could 
 help it," was the reply. 
 
1 82 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 Is it small wonder that his associates will stay 
 faithful to the last gasp ? 
 
 In his general handling of men, Edison has the 
 same idea as the Irishman who declared, 
 
 "There's only two ways of putting a pig through 
 a hole in a fence; you can coax him, or you can 
 kick him through. It all depends on the pig. 
 But one or the other works, every time." 
 
 Ninety-nine times out of every hundred, Edison 
 believes in the " coaxing " mode of treatment. 
 But he can be drastic at times, in action as well 
 as in speech. Quite frequently, too, his rebukes 
 have a thoroughly American twang; as, for ex- 
 ample, when he dismissed an assistant who was 
 loafing on the job with the remark, 
 
 "You'd better get out of this. You're too slow 
 for real work. It would take you half an hour 
 to creep out of the field of a microscope.' 7 
 
 It is necessary that Edison should understand 
 the handling of men, for in industries directly 
 attributable to him, not less than quarter of a 
 million men are employed, in the United States 
 and abroad. The laboratory staff, as of old, is 
 kept down to men whom Edison knows personally, 
 almost intimately, and these men, to a greater 
 extent than any one else in the world, know the 
 inventor's inmost thoughts. In his laboratory 
 
MASTER OF MEN AND PATRIOT 183 
 
 he is full of ease and geniality, with a quick humor 
 of his own and an intense appreciation of a good 
 story. He is also a home-loving man, having 
 been twice married, and having a daughter and 
 two sons. 
 
 When, in July, 1915, Edison was appointed as 
 Chairman of the Board of Civilian Inventors, 
 the appointment was felt to be a superb and 
 fitting capstone to his career. At the age of 
 sixty-seven years, he was incomparably the great- 
 est American to whom the nation could turn for 
 wisdom in peace or war. 
 
 If the previous history of Edison is any clew to 
 his future activities, one may premise that now 
 he has done more than invent something himself, 
 he has given a stimulus which has made the United 
 States itself an inventor. He has marshaled the 
 power of sheer brain. For the first time in the 
 history of mankind, he has made a nation realize 
 that its chief military defense lies in intelligence, 
 especially as expressed by science. 
 
 Cromwell said, " Trust in God and keep your 
 powder dry." 
 
 Napoleon said, " God is on the side of the heaviest 
 battalions." 
 
 Edison said, "If you know you're right, there's 
 always a way to win." 
 
1 84 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 There is a certain historical perspective in these 
 three sayings, which range from blind faith and 
 brute courage to analysis and inventiveness. 
 Cromwell's cry is a cry for courage, Napoleon's 
 a cry for force, and Edison's a cry for judgment. 
 
 Now that this master mind of adaptive in- 
 genuity is at the head of the Board which is de- 
 signed to play its part in American affairs, it is 
 timely to remember that Napoleon is peculiarly 
 a favorite of Edison. When the great African 
 explorer, Henry M. Stanley, called once at Menlo 
 Park and spent the evening with Edison, the 
 inventor showed him what was then his latest 
 invention the phonograph. 
 
 Stanley was fascinated with the instrument, 
 but even his admiration for its value in recording 
 the voices of the living could not keep him from 
 unavailing regrets that ancient times had not 
 known the phonograph, and so handed down, on 
 imperishable cylinders, the voices of, the great 
 men and women who have made history. 
 
 Edison agreed, and Stanley, desirous of finding 
 Edison's point of view on the past, said, 
 
 "Mr. Edison, suppose it were possible to ob- 
 tain a phonographic record of one person's voice, 
 some one person who had lived in the past, and 
 no more, whom would you choose?" 
 
THE KEEN-EARED "DEAF" INVENTOR. 
 
 Thomas A. Edison, in his phonograph workshop, listening to one of his 
 new diamond-point machines. 
 
MASTER OF MEN AND PATRIOT 185 
 
 The question was an entirely new one to the 
 inventor. As Stanley recounts the occurrence, 
 Edison closed his eyes, folded his hands across 
 his knees and thought profoundly. There was 
 silence for several minutes. Then Edison, open- 
 ing his eyes again, said with an air of positive 
 certainty in his tone, 
 
 " Napoleon!" 
 
 Both Stanley and Mrs. Stanley, who was present, 
 protested. Stanley, with a natural liking for his 
 own line of exploration, wanted to hear the famous 
 world-challenging laugh of Sir Francis Brake, and 
 Mrs. Stanley expressed a desire to hear blind 
 Homer chanting the Iliad. 
 
 "No," Edison repeated, "Napoleon. It must 
 have been a voice with a curious force behind it. 
 A cylinder would be interesting." 
 
 In the discussion following, he showed a re- 
 markable knowledge of the principles of Napoleonic 
 military strategy, though at what time in his busy 
 life he studied tactics is difficult to place. 
 
 It is significant that Sarah Bernhardt should 
 have thought that in some ways Edison resembled 
 Napoleon. In her " Memoirs," describing a visit of 
 two days spent at the Edison household, she writes : 
 
 "I looked at this man of medium height, with 
 a head slightly too large and a profile full of nobility, 
 
1 86 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 and I thought of Napoleon I. There certainly is a 
 strong physical resemblance between these two 
 men, and I am sure that it is a case where the two 
 brains would be found to be identical." 
 
 One may disagree with Mme. Sarah Bernhardt. 
 Though perhaps one of the greatest tragediennes 
 the world has ever seen, here she shows herself 
 a little at fault in psychology. In one most im- 
 portant particular, Edison and Napoleon are at 
 opposite poles. And, since Edison's appointment 
 as Chairman of the Civilian Inventors, this point 
 is all-important. 
 
 Napoleon was reckless of human life. Edison 
 is extremely sensitive as to its value. 
 
 In Edison is none of the cold aloofness which is 
 supposed to belong to the pure scientist, such, for 
 example, as has given to Mme. Curie the title 
 of "the little gray lady of stone." He himself is 
 vibrant with life, and the human side of his in- 
 ventions is always emphasized. He is a firm believer 
 in the old proverb, "Life is larger than logic." 
 
 One of the most striking examples of this oc- 
 curred when he was asked to assist the State of 
 New York in experimentation for the purpose of 
 establishing electrocution as a means for capital 
 punishment. Edison refused, point blank. 
 
 The governor of New York had appointed a 
 
MASTER OF MEN AND PATRIOT 187 
 
 special commission to investigate the whole ques- 
 tion, and the chairman of this commission had a 
 long conference with the inventor. Finally, Edi- 
 son acceded to his requests that some experiments 
 might be made at Menlo Park, but he made some 
 sweeping stipulations. He would only agree that 
 his works might be used on the condition that the 
 experiments were devoted to rinding out the place 
 and the method of applying the electrodes with 
 the smallest amount of pain. A phrase in one of 
 Edison's letters has often been quoted. Speaking 
 of this question of electrocution, he said, 
 
 "I should be sorry to see electricity put to so 
 bad a use." 
 
 After a long series of experiments made at other 
 places besides Menlo Park, and after a long fight 
 in the courts, the State of New York finally adopted 
 electrocution as the mode of execution. When 
 the date for the first execution was set, and twenty- 
 one scientists were invited to the momentous 
 occasion, Edison alone was absent. In his letter 
 to the Warden of Sing Sing, excusing himself 
 from attendance, the great American inventor 
 said, in memorable words, 
 
 " There are wonderful possibilities in each 
 human soul, and I cannot endorse a method of 
 punishment which destroys its usefulness." 
 
1 88 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 In spite of this, Edison is no " peace-at-any- 
 price" type of man. He has faced too many 
 difficulties in his own life not to know that it is 
 sometimes necessary to fight, and fight hard, to 
 overcome obstacles. He has grimly faced ap- 
 parent defeat for months at a time, only to wear 
 down these enemies of refractory chemicals or 
 machines that "simply wouldn't go," at the last 
 to achieve victory in what had appeared to be a 
 hopeless campaign. 
 
 In addition to this type of mind the most 
 valuable and the most American conceivable 
 Edison is well acquainted with the principles under- 
 lying war machinery. Explosives have always 
 been a matter of particular interest to him. Ever 
 since the day when, as a small boy, he blew out 
 the front of a stove by trying to see what gun- 
 cotton would do when put in a tin can and then 
 placed in the fire, he has been interested in the 
 sudden expansion of substances into gas in 
 other words, in explosions. 
 
 One of the few times when Edison ever was 
 afraid of anything was when he was still a young 
 telegraph operator in Detroit. He had been 
 reading of the power of nitroglycerine and the 
 ease with which it could be made. He and a 
 companion made some. They experimented with 
 
MASTER OF MEN AND PATRIOT 189 
 
 it, fortunately in tiny quantities, and were nearly 
 blown out of the place. 
 
 Then, and only then, did it occur to Edison 
 that he had enough nitroglycerine in that small 
 room to blow up two or three city blocks. The 
 explosive was put in a sarsaparilla bottle and 
 tightly corked. Creeping out stealthily, under 
 cover of night, the two telegraph operators 
 feeling like Guy Fawkes conspirators went to 
 the nearest sewer opening, where, first fastening 
 a string to the neck of the bottle so that it could 
 be lowered without any shock or concussion, they 
 let it down into the sewer. Had it hit violently 
 against the wall of the sewer, the whole section of 
 the street would have gone up in the air and 
 Edison with it. But, fortunately for Detroit, 
 wherever that sarsaparilla bottle may be now, it 
 hasn't exploded yet. 
 
 Even nitroglycerine, however, is a safe and 
 comfortable companion compared to iodide of 
 nitrogen, the explosive power of which is nearly 
 four thousand feet a second. Besides this, Edison 
 has made explosives still more powerful, and still 
 more delicate to handle. Some of these are so 
 unstable that if shouted at, the vibrations of the 
 voice will "send them off" -and possibly the 
 shouter will go off, too ! 
 
igo THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 A story is told of the way in which Edison got 
 rid of a party of ministers who in the early 
 days visited his laboratory. They wouldn't go 
 away. Hints were of no use. The parsons hadn't 
 anything special to do and they stayed and stayed 
 until Edison was nearly wild. After his patience 
 was exhausted, an idea occurred to him. 
 
 " Taking some of the material he had been ex- 
 perimenting with," says F. A. Jones, "he put a 
 drop or two about the room in places where 
 there was no danger of a minister being blown 
 through a window. The visitors watched him 
 with growing interest, apparently felt no uneasiness 
 at his actions, but rather crowded round him the 
 more. 
 
 "Then the inventor took a seat at the bench 
 and continued his investigations. Presently he 
 jumped up with a dramatic 1 1 have it ! ' and 
 knocked a heavy book off the table so that it fell 
 with a crash to the floor. 
 
 "What followed was rather worse than Edison 
 had intended. No windows were broken, but 
 through the deafening explosion which occurred, 
 a number of glass bottles were smashed, an elec- 
 trical apparatus was put out of business, a table 
 was overturned, and the ministers were frightened 
 almost out of their wits. They put their hands 
 
MASTER OF MEN AND PATRIOT 191 
 
 to their heads in evident fear of something worse, 
 and then asked what had happened. 
 
 " Edison took the matter very coolly and ex- 
 plained that such explosions were constantly hap- 
 pening, though he was glad to say they hadn't 
 killed any one since the fall. He hoped there 
 would not be another bust-up that day, but you 
 never could tell. The ministers declared it was 
 all very interesting, but they guessed they'd better 
 be going, and grabbing their hats, they hastily 
 bade the inventor good-by and departed." 
 
 At least a score of explosive devices, entirely 
 new, unknown to any nation in the world, exist 
 in half-developed state in Edison's notebooks. 
 He has not carried them forward to full practical 
 usefulness, owing to his persistent belief that the 
 main purpose of life is to create, not to destroy. 
 
 During the last twenty years, Edison has been 
 besieged by requests from foreign governments, 
 offering hints of great reward if he would turn his 
 attention to the invention of devices for war. 
 To each and all of these the inventor returned a 
 polite, but a decided refusal. 
 
 In the spring of 1895, during one of the many 
 crises of the Venezuelan dispute, there was an 
 epidemic of suggestions as to various means for 
 national defense. As Edison had worked with 
 
1 92 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 W. Scott Sims some time before in the perfection 
 of a submarine torpedo boat operated by elec- 
 tricity, there was a general feeling that he might 
 lend his services. By indirect channels, the in- 
 ventor was approached in the interests of the 
 Navy Department. The exact result of the 
 conference was never disclosed, but Edison con- 
 tinued his work on the perfecting of the phono- 
 graph on which he was engaged at the time 
 and the Navy Department said nothing more. 
 
 The Sims-Edison dirigible submarine torpedo 
 boat was the first of its kind. In this ingenious 
 device, when the torpedo was fired from a land 
 fort or from a battleship, it trailed after it a long 
 electric cable. This was on a drum aboard the 
 torpedo and the line was paid out as the craft 
 proceeded, thus eliminating any dragging of 
 weight through the water. The cable passed 
 through a small hawse pipe at a slight angle to 
 the stern, so that it should have a continuous 
 metal contact. 
 
 Through this line and contact, all the operations 
 of the torpedo could be controlled from the point 
 of its original sending. It could be steered, it 
 could be raised and lowered in the water, its 
 speed could be regulated, and every detail carried 
 out by the several wires in this small cable. The 
 
MASTER OF MEN AND PATRIOT 193 
 
 principle was and is still susceptible of de- 
 velopment into a deadly means of warfare. In 
 this submarine, Edison's part was the long-distance 
 transmission patent, not the actual machine of 
 war. At the time Edison, in an interview, fore- 
 casted the great development of submarines and 
 stated that the nation which paid the most atten- 
 tion to this form of defense was likely to secure 
 control of the seas. 
 
 Another of the inventor's ideas, also partly 
 prophetic but still entirely original, was the "fly- 
 ing torpedo boat." The main difference between 
 Edison's flying torpedo boats and the modern 
 war aeroplanes is, that the Edison craft were small 
 and automatic, not needing an aviator. As he 
 himself suggested, these " birds of destruction" 
 could be sent up in flights of a hundred or more, 
 and a flock of them could drop bombs with a time 
 release on a hostile fleet or an invading army. 
 When asked about the cost, he replied, 
 
 "Well, yes, they might cost a bit. But a flock 
 of 'em couldn't cost as much as one human 
 life." 
 
 On the question of the possible invasion of 
 America, Edison, at the time of the Spanish- 
 American War, was a thorough-paced optimist. 
 When the opinions of military strategists were 
 
194 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 quoted that it would be no great task to capture 
 New York, he answered, 
 
 "It would be more difficult for a fleet of war- 
 ships to enter New York Harbor than it would 
 be for a dozen fishing boats to capture Gibraltar.' 1 
 
 To Edison, characteristically, the value of a 
 human life is almost solely the work-value of that 
 life. He is not greatly concerned about it in any 
 other regard. He has never troubled himself 
 with philosophy or metaphysics. He has strong 
 opinions, but they deal almost entirely with the 
 way in which a man can best live to do a life's 
 worth of work. 
 
 On the question of eating, Edison has clear 
 ideas. He believes in constant changes of food 
 and declares that nature craves variety. " People 
 who eat nothing but rice think nothing but rice," 
 he said once, a little unjustly. He has a poor 
 opinion of "food faddists," but thinks that most 
 persons eat too much, especially of meat. 
 
 He has been quite a heavy smoker, rarely 
 averaging less than five to ten cigars a day, even 
 now that he has "knocked off smoking," but 
 he is a bitter foe to cigarettes. He declares the 
 poison acrolein, which is found in some cigarette 
 papers, "one of the most terrible drugs in its effect 
 on the human body. I really believe it often 
 
MASTER OF MEN AND PATRIOT 195 
 
 makes boys insane. The harm that such a deadly 
 poison, when taken into the system, must inflict 
 upon a growing lad is horrible to contemplate." 
 
 His own capacity for work and his ability to 
 achieve, Edison assigns largely to his power of 
 shaking off worry and to his knack of staying 
 awake as long as he needs to, and going to sleep 
 at a second's notice, if the time to sleep has come. 
 He has also the rare gift of being wakened out of a 
 sleep suddenly and not feeling " grouchy." 
 
 "When he would lie down to take an hour's 
 sleep," wrote one of his assistants, in the old Newark 
 days, ''after working, perhaps, on something for a 
 couple of days or more, and, for some important 
 reason we had to wake him up, and nearly shake 
 the life out of him in doing so [Edison is a profound 
 and heavy sleeper], he never showed any irritability, 
 but would merely tell us to 'go easy' and not 
 'knock all the stuffing out' of him." 
 
 In appearance, at the age of sixty-seven, Edison 
 conveys his character. He looks like a beneficent 
 conqueror. His forehead is high and his features 
 sharp, though the face is round. His eyes, which 
 are blue-gray, have a straight and often humorous 
 glance. His physique is good, and he looks 
 "fit." He dresses like most American business 
 men, the tales of his disregard for appearances 
 
196 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 being exaggerated. People who have met him 
 in his laboratory, and who have commented on 
 "chemical stains on his sleeves" show little know- 
 ledge of laboratories and less of working scientists. 
 The art of dress is to fit the costume to the oc- 
 cupation, and Edison in his laboratory gives the 
 sense of being well kept. Only the superficial 
 observer, inclined to hero-worship, would find 
 anything at which to cavil. 
 
 This foolish popular yarn of Edison's disregard 
 for his personal appearance is of the same character 
 as many of the tales of his absent-mindedness. 
 Like all deep thinkers, he is apt to become im- 
 mersed in thought. This, to people who rarely 
 think, is hardly comprehensible. As a matter of 
 actual fact, however, Edison's mind is agile, and 
 he can pass from one subject to another in his 
 own range with absolute ease. 
 
 It has been said that Edison gives the idea of a 
 beneficent conqueror. In one of the best-poised 
 and most understanding appreciations of the great 
 American that has ever been made (appearing 
 anonymously in the American Magazine), this side 
 of Edison's character is brought out with great 
 force. The tale is there told of the inventor's 
 latest conquest, this time, again, a conquest for 
 the benefit of the whole nation. 
 
MASTER OF MEN AND PATRIOT 197 
 
 In Edison's various activities, especially in the 
 making of phonograph records, he needs approxi- 
 mately a ton and a half of carbolic acid a day. 
 Carbolic acid is a product of distilling coal tar 
 at a certain given high temperature. Ten tons 
 of carbolic acid a week is a large quantity, and 
 anything occurring to cramp the securing of so 
 much material means loss. 
 
 When the European War broke out, there were 
 large supplies of carbolic acid on hand, all over 
 the United States, the manufacturers and whole- 
 salers who imported it from Europe being well 
 stocked. As the war continued, however, this 
 supply began to run short, and in the spring of 
 1915 Edison, among many others, faced a situa- 
 tion which meant curtailment of industry and 
 consequent hardship for American workers. 
 
 "Let's make carbolic acid here, in the United 
 States," suggested Edison to the big drug manu- 
 facturing houses. 
 
 "Can't be done," was the reply. 
 
 "Why can't it be done?-" persisted Edison. 
 
 "American coal has never been used for it." 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "It doesn't yield to the same process as English 
 coal." 
 
 "Have you tried?" 
 
THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 "Every way we know how." 
 
 "Why can't you get carbolic acid out of American 
 coal?" 
 
 "We don't know." 
 
 "Why don't you know?" came the insistent 
 question, and the manufacturers of 1915, like the 
 shipyard carpenters of sixty years before, found 
 themselves silenced. 
 
 Edison went back to his works. 
 
 "Look here, boys," he said, "I can't get hold 
 of enough carbolic acid to run us more than a 
 month. By that time we've got to find out how 
 to make it here. I need it, for one thing, and 
 there's dozens of other industries that need it, as 
 well." 
 
 There followed one of the old orgies of work. 
 For four days Edison was invisible to any one 
 except his laboratory staff. He and they 
 slept around the laboratory building when their 
 eyes glued together for lack of sleep. In the four- 
 day period, the inventor himself lay down but 
 twice, once for five hours and once for seven. 
 
 On the morning of the fifth day the superin- 
 tendent of one of the big mechanical divisions 
 was called to the laboratory. Haggard and worn 
 out, but triumphant, Edison put some plans into 
 his hand. 
 
MASTER OF MEN AND PATRIOT 199 
 
 "I'll give you just three weeks," he said, "to 
 put up this plant, make all the machinery those 
 plans call for, and install it in full running order." 
 
 "All right, Mr. Edison," was the reply. 
 
 The mechanician he would not have been a 
 superintendent under Edison unless he was that 
 sort of a man did not turn a hair, though the 
 job looked almost impossible. 
 
 Before noon of that day, ground was broken for 
 a new building. Men by scores were thrown 
 into the work, laboring three shifts of eight hours 
 a day. Edison and the superintendent of the 
 job worked one shift a day averaging about 
 twenty hours. 
 
 On the seventeenth day the plant was open and 
 in full blast. The product was found to be in 
 every way as good as the English product. Once 
 again the supposedly impossible had been achieved, 
 and through the genius of Edison, the industries 
 which were likely to be crippled may proceed 
 unhindered. A few slight improvements in cheap- 
 ening the price will retain this market for the 
 United States forever. 
 
 It was about ten days after this victory that 
 Edison was interviewed and gave utterance to his 
 ideas on America's relation to the world, whether 
 it be in times of war or in cycles of peace. 
 
200 THOMAS ALVA EDISON 
 
 "There's the real war," he cried, tapping with 
 his finger nail certain substances on the table, 
 which were recognized as raw materials usually 
 imported from Europe and for the lack of which 
 American trade was suffering; "the only war in 
 which humanity has anything permanent at stake. 
 Get into Nature's intrenchments and make her 
 give up ! That's what we must do. We've been 
 depending too much on other people to do it for 
 us, too satisfied to be a nation of assemblers, 
 putting together what we can pick up quickest and 
 cheapest. Now the other people can't give us 
 our material any more, and where are we? 
 
 "Substitutes, substitutes, we've got to find them. 
 Countless no end my head is buzzing with 
 them. 
 
 "It has been too easy for us to import our 
 materials. This European War came along to 
 put us to it and teach us to depend on ourselves. 
 I'm learning how. I've been as bad as the rest 
 of the American manufacturers maybe not 
 quite as bad, but bad enough. I'm learning, 
 though, learning fast." 
 
 Seldom in the history of the world has there 
 been a more stimulating call to arms than this 
 great cry of Edison's. It is a cry to every boy 
 and man in the United States. It is a summons 
 
MASTER OF MEN AND PATRIOT 201 
 
 to a nobler and loftier ideal than has ever been 
 worded before. It is a phrasing of an unparalleled 
 opportunity for greatness. It is the beginning of 
 an era when the rallying call to youth and to man- 
 hood is the welfare of the race, expressed in terms 
 of usefulness, not of dream and fantasy. It is the 
 new chivalry which establishes a new order of 
 knighthood the men who work to make life 
 richer for their fellows. 
 
 And, at the head, blazoning the way to this 
 newer glory, as he has blazoned the way to progress 
 for fifty years and more, stands the great figure of 
 the great American, calling aloud, 
 
 "Come on, boys! I'm learning, I'm learning 
 fast!" 
 
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