EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

[I] MEETING EDISON

I first met Mr. Thomas A. Edison on the eleventh of August, 1896. That date

means much to me. I think that I first saw him a year before. I had become chief engineer

of the Detroit Edison Company. He was returning from his father's funeral at Port Huron

and he walked past the plant, which was next door to the Hotel Cadillac where he had

spent the night. I saw him with a group of men—at least, someone told me that Mr.

Edison was in the group, but they passed so quickly that I am by no means sure that I saw

the right man.

Our first actual meeting was at a dinner at the old Manhattan Beach Hotel at

Manhattan Beach, which is just a few miles from Coney Island. We were holding an

Edison Convention—an annual event to which came the chief engineers and managers of

the various Edison plants in order to exchange experiences. I went with Mr. Alexander

Dow, the president of the Detroit Edison Company.

The dinner table was oval, with Mr. Edison at the head. At his right sat Charles

Edgar, president of the Boston Edison Company, and I sat next to him. On the other side

of the table were Samuel Insull, who has since become great in the electrical industry; J.

W. Lieb, Jr., president of the New York Edison Company; John Van Vleeck, the chief

engineer of the New York Company; John L. Beggs, and a number of others of whom my

recollection is not so certain.

During the afternoon session the convention had given itself up largely to

discussing the new field that was opening for electricity in the charging of storage

batteries for vehicles. The central station men saw in the electric carriage, the horseless

carriage that every one had been looking for. They predicted that the cabs and carriages

would soon be on the streets by the thousands and would require much attention in the

way of recharged batteries and the like, and of course that meant enormous revenues. At

dinner the talk continued until Alexander Dow, pointing across the table to me, said:

"There's a young fellow who has made a gas car." Then he went on to tell how he

had heard something going pop, pop, pop below his office window and had looked out

and seen a small carriage without any horses, and my wife and little boy sitting in it; that

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

then I came out of the plant, got into the seat, and the thing moved off—pop, pop,

popping all the way while everyone stopped to look.

Someone at the table asked me how I had made my carriage go, and I started to

tell, speaking fairly loudly so that those across the table could hear me, for they all

stopped talking to listen. Mr. Edison caught some of it and put his hand to his ear to hear

better, for even then he was decidedly deaf.

Mr. Lieb saw Mr. Edison trying to hear and motioned to me to pull up a chair

from another table and sit beside Mr. Edison and speak up so that all of them could hear.

I got up, but just then Mr. Edgar offered to change places with me, putting me next to Mr.

Edison. He began to ask me questions which showed that he had already made a study of

the gas engine.

"Is it a four-cycle engine?" he asked. I told him that it was, and he nodded

approval. Then he wanted to know if I exploded the gas in the cylinder by electricity and.

whether I did it by a contact or by a spark—for that was before spark plugs had been

invented.

I told him that it was a make-and-break contact that was bumped apart by the

piston, and I drew a diagram for him of the whole contact arrangement which I had on

my first car—the one that Mr. Dow had seen. But I said that on the second car, on which

I was then working, I had made what we today would call a spark plug—it was really an

insulating plug with a make-and-break mechanism—using washers of mica. I drew that

too.

He said that a spark would give a much surer ignition and a contact. He asked me

no end of details and I sketched everything for him, for I have always found that I could

convey an idea quicker by sketching than by just describing it. When I had finished, he

brought his fist down on the table with a bang and said:

"Young man, that's the thing; you have it. Keep at it. Electric cars must keep near

to power stations. The storage battery is too heavy. Steam cars won't do either, for they

have to have a boiler and fire. Your car is self-contained—carries its own power plant—

no fire, no boiler, no smoke and no steam. You have the thing. Keep at it."

That bang on the table was worth worlds to me. No man up to then had given me

any encouragement. I had hoped that I was headed right, sometimes I knew that I was,

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

sometimes I only wondered if I was, but here all at once and out of a clear sky the

greatest inventive genius in the world had given me a complete approval. The man who

knew most about electricity in the world had said that for the purpose my gas motor was

better than any electric motor could be—it could go long distances, he said, and there

would be stations to supply the cars with hydrocarbon. That was the first time I ever

heard this term for liquid fuel. And this at a time when all the electrical engineers took it

as an established fact that there could be nothing new and worth while that did not run by

electricity! It was to be the universal power. Of course their expectation could not be

fully realized because electricity is not a prime mover.

It was wholly characteristic of Mr. Edison to have the broader vision and to know

that, while the uses of electrical power could be extended almost indefinitely in some

directions, there were others in which it could be at the best only a makeshift. Not the

least among the many remarkable qualities of the Edison mind is its ability constantly to

maintain a perspective. He never has any blind enthusiasms.

An inventor frequently wastes his time and his money trying to extend his

invention to uses for which it is not at all suitable. Edison has never done this. He rides

no hobbies. He views each problem that comes up as a thing of itself, to be solved in

exactly the right way. His approach is no more that of an electrician than that of a

chemist. His knowledge is so nearly universal that he cannot be classed as an electrician

or a chemist—in fact, Mr. Edison cannot be classified. He knows instinctively what

things can be used for and what they cannot be used for.

The dinner was on the third day of the convention. Edison was already, to my

mind, the greatest man in the world, and of course I wanted to talk more with him about

my motor, but equally of course I could not go to him. However, Edison had not

forgotten our conversation, and one of his friends or associates named W. E. Gilmore

said to me:

"Come on; Edison wants to talk with you. He used to live in Michigan not far

from Detroit." We talked that day when the convention broke up, and he had me ride up

to New York with him. There was an open car on the train and Edison made for it. He

always likes to ride in the open, and on our automobile trips invariably rides in an open

car in the front seat beside the chauffeur.

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

I thought he would continue his conversation about the gas motor. But he did not.

My impression is that we had a little discussion as to the relative merits of gears and of a

chain for transmitting the power from the motor to the wheels.

On my first car I had used a chain, but on the second I was trying out a gear.

Bicycles were then going through the same stage of experimenting and at least one had

been brought out with a gear instead of a chain.

We talked mostly of the difficulties of obtaining the right kind of materials and

supplies in the working-out of new inventions. For instance, I told him that for my first

car I could find no suitable tires and had to use bicycle tires, and he told me something of

the trouble which he had met in finding suitable bulbs for the incandescent light and how

he had to have them blown himself—but of this later.

The pioneers in every art may plan perfectly but always their first products must

be compromises, for they can never obtain the right materials. The electrical industries

and the automobile industries have each created a long line of special materials which are

now so taken for granted that few realize what it meant to start these industries with the

means and the workmanship available.

What Mr. Edison preferred to talk about that third day was Michigan and his early

life there. His inventions seemed of secondary interest to him. It so happened that

Pingree, the picturesque mayor of Detroit and later governor of Michigan, was then

talking about abolishing capital and so on, in the general fashion of that period, and was,

on account of his position and solid character, making a good deal of stir. Mr. Edison

lives in a world of his own but he knows exactly what is going on in the rest of the world.

This anti-capital talk irritated him.

"How do they expect to get anything without capital?" he remarked. It seemed to

me a sensible remark. Capital is not everything, but still you cannot start anything

without capital.

Mr. Edison a few years before this had passed through a difficult experience when

he was in the midst of extending his electric-light system throughout the country, and he

saw plainly that footless agitation against capital could only delay progress.

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

For without capital the plants could not be built and hence the benefits of the

distribution of electricity, both for lighting and for power, would be delayed and thus

people, while they might grow poorer, could not grow more prosperous.

It is impossible to say now, after so many years, whether Mr. Edison then gave

me his views on capital, but he has since frequently talked to me on the subject. He

knows full well the evils that can attend private capital, but, whatever the evils of private

capital, he considers them vastly less than the evils which follow the misuse of public

capital.

Often he has said, in effect, that, although with private capital a few may benefit

unduly, yet the whole public benefits, for at least something gets done and, since the

enterprise must stand on its own feet, the public eventually has to be served. But with

public capital nothing much necessarily has to be done and as a rule nothing much is

done; a few insiders may benefit, but the public gets no benefit at all.

He takes the strictly practical view—which he has carried through all his work—

that results and results alone count. He has often declared to me that it was a great

mistake ever to have even the postal service run by the Government and that any firstclass

private corporation could give better service at lower rates and still turn a

comfortable profit, while the Government, try as it will, has usually incurred a heavy

deficit.

Mr. Edison is not in the least what is called a "stand-patter," but also he is not a

reformer in the obstructive sense of that word. He is always trying for perfection, but he

does not believe that, while waiting for perfection, one should no nothing at all. He

knows entirely too much about the impossibility of achieving absolute mechanical

perfection to sit around waiting for the coming of absolute human perfection.

However, I do not know how much of this he then told me and how much he has

told me in later years when we have so often discussed these and a thousand other

subjects. I was in a hurry to get home and go ahead with the work on my second

automobile. The first thing I did when I reached Detroit was to tell my wife what Mr.

Edison had said, and I wound up by saying:

"You are not going to see very much of me until I am through with this car."

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

That was my second car. My job with the electric-light company was only a

means to an end. A man comes into this world, I believe, with accumulated experiences

which make his mind into a certain sort of career. My first car was a part of that

experience and it had run. From it I learned some facts which I was putting into my

second car. From that second car I learned some facts which I put into a third car. The

process is still going on and will go on as long as I live.

In building my second car, to repeat, I knew that I was right, but sometimes I

wondered a little whether I might not be wasting my time. I should have gone on without

the commendation of Edison, but with his approval I went on at least twice as fast as I

should have otherwise. I was doubly assured by him, for he removed all doubt about the

possibility of wasting time. To Edison must be given some of the credit for hastening the

realization of the automobile as we know it today—with an internal-combustion engine.

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

[II] A BOYHOOD IDEAL

It just so happened that the Edison who came into my life in this remarkable way

had been my ideal since boyhood. I first heard of him in a way that impressed me during

1879 or '80 when the invention and quick adoption of his incandescent light made him a

world figure and filled the newspapers with articles about him. I had just left home to

work in a machine shop and was only seventeen. I admired the inventions of the man and

also the man himself, but what hit my mind hardest was his gift for hard, continuous

work. And now that I have known him personally for thirty-four years it is still his

capacity for hard working and hard thinking that stands out in my mind above everything

else.

For, when all is said and done, the ability to work means more than anything else.

Mr. Edison has a wonderfully imaginative mind and also a most remarkable memory. Yet

all of his talents would never have brought anything big into the world had he not had

within him that driving force which pushes him on continuously and regardless of

everything until he has finished that which he started out to do. He will not recognize

even the possibility of defeat. He believes that unflinching, unremitting work will

accomplish anything. It was this genius for hard work that fired me as a lad and made Mr.

Edison my hero, and all these years of knowing him have only strengthened the hold that

he had gained on me long before I ever met him.

I often think how pleasant an experience has befallen me, in that my boyhood's

hero became my later manhood's friend. It is a circumstance that in the nature of things

cannot occur very often.

After that first meeting in 1896, I saw him again two or three years later in his

laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, where he had moved from Menlo Park. I had the

thought of finding a storage battery which would give enough power to enable us to

combine a starter and a generator in one motor unit, as well as provide all the other

electrical needs of an automobile.

As I began to explain to him what I wanted, I reached for a sheet of paper and so

did he. In an instant we found ourselves talking with drawings instead of with words. We

both noticed it at the same moment and began to laugh. Edison said:

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

"We both work the same way."

He settled my problem by saying that the generator and starter would always have

to be separate units, and a quarter-century of automobile experience has confirmed that

early judgment.

But that meeting drew me closer to Mr. Edison as a sort of touchstone of

inspiration. With the years I have grown to know him better and better. We have camped

together many times—and one gets to know a man while camping. I have a place next to

his at Fort Myers, Florida, where he had established himself in the late eighties, just so

that his work in the winter would not be interrupted by the climate and also to get away

from the interruptions of his business interests.

I have come to know him, I think, rather intimately, and the more I have seen of

him the greater he has appeared to me—both as a servant of humanity and as a man. And

because I think that the man and his work are an example for all time, I have set about the

task of gathering together not only all of the available information concerning him but

also I have been assembling personally and with the aid of others the material facts of his

life-the buildings, the tools, the furniture and the books that he used.

Some of these I am preserving at Dearborn in a museum and school of technology

dedicated to him. The scenes of his greatest work—the laboratory and other buildings

from Menlo Park, where the incandescent lamp was invented, and the laboratory which

he used for forty-five years at Fort Myers, Florida—have been moved piecemeal to a

point hard by the museum, and there erected just as they were when the great work was

done in them. They are there to be preserved—I hope for all time—as the record of the

experience of a very great man and as an inspiration to American youth.

Edison comes of fine, solid American stock. His ancestors, emigrating from

Holland in 1730, took up land along the Passaic River in New Jersey not far from where

Edison has spent most of his life. His father, Samuel Edison, was a man considerably

above the average in general ability, with something of that same distaste that is shown

by his son in keeping an interest in any project or discovery the moment that the chief

difficulties are overcome and the thing is started on its way. His mother was the daughter

of the Reverend John Elliott, a Presbyterian minister.

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

For both of his parents Mr. Edison has a very high respect. They could not

entirely understand him as a boy, nor could anyone else. They did very mightily help him

to help himself, in the strong belief that he knew what he was doing or at least might

some day know. His mother gave him a start in education by her personal teaching and

encouraged him in his reading in those subjects that most interested him. Edison would

have conquered and come through in any event, but he came forward more quickly in his

development because both his parents helped whenever they knew how to help and never

stood in his way just because they did not know how to help.

The family went west to Milan, Ohio, and there on February 11, 1847, Thomas

Alva Edison was born. They lived there until 1854, when they moved to Port Huron,

Michigan.

Edison's recollections go back much further than is usual. One day he and I held a

contest as to who could remember back furthest and he wrote down the following as his

earliest memories:

"First: Creeping to get a Mexican silver dollar given to me by my sister's suitor.

"Second: Held in arms to witness the marriage of my sister to this same young

man.

"Third: Three prairie schooner wagons on the way to California camped near our

house."

This takes his recollection back to 1849-50—when he was between two and three

years old. The best that I could do was to remember my father's taking me to see a song

sparrow's nest when I was three-and-a-half years old. And incidentally that has ever since

been my favorite bird.

Nothing, however, appears to have happened at Milan particularly to impress

Edison. His birthplace there has been exactly preserved and is still occupied by a member

of the family. The house is a plain, solid brick dwelling of a type common to the

country—a single story with the attic rooms finished. It is on a hillside and the basement

opens on a lower level. It is a comfortable enough place.

The Edisons were never actually poor—that is they always had a good house and

enough to eat and to wear. That Edison arose out of dire poverty is only a fiction. His

parents could have provided for any ordinary needs, but the boy later developed such

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

extraordinary needs that no family in average circumstances could have provided for

them. His real life began at Port Huron in a house which has since been destroyed by fire.

At the Port Huron public school Edison had just three months of regular

schooling—and that is all he ever had. For then his mother took him out and taught him

herself. Mrs. Edison, who had been a teacher, saw him for what he was and saved him

from the bad effects of a too great distaste for schools.

He quickly learned to read—and he has been reading ever since. It is hardly

possible to mention any book of major importance on any subject which he has not read.

I found a copy of "Natural and Experimental Philosophy" by Richard Green Parker,

published in 1856, which was the same text-book that I used in school, and this, it turned

out, was the first book on science he had ever read. He wrote on the flyleaf:

"Parker's Philosophy was the first book in science that I read when a boy nine

years old. I picked it out as the first I could understand."

That book had in it about all that was known of science at the time. It covered

everything from steam engines to balloons and also all the chemistry that was known,

together with hundreds of different experiments. It was hardly a book for a boy of nine,

but it was the book that Edison had been looking for. It gave to him his first view of the

world of science. And it seemed that his destiny had formed him for the world of science.

In the course of time he tried nearly every experiment in the book, but first of all he tried

the chemical experiments, for at heart Edison was and still is a chemist.

It was absolutely characteristic of him that he made the experiments instead of

taking them for granted. He has never taken anything for granted; he verifies every

scientific fact for himself just to be sure that it is a fact—and also to find out the "why."

He set up a laboratory in the cellar of his house and every penny he could get went to the

local drug store for chemicals.

He kept up his reading, but soon his need for materials and chemicals for

experimenting became too great for the small amounts of money that a boy could obtain

from his father, and it was this and not the poverty of the family which led him, when

between twelve and thirteen, to get a job as newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railway

between Port Huron and Detroit. He would have had the job earlier if his family had let

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

him. They consented to his taking the place only because it did not involve living away

from home.

Money to Edison has always meant only the wherewithal to make experiments.

He has never in the least cared for money as a thing of itself, but also he is one of the few

pioneers in the world of science who have stood squarely on their own feet and he has

always earned the money to carry on whatever work he found most useful and

interesting.

He set up a little laboratory—as is well known—in the baggage car on the train

where he kept his newspapers and supplies, and the needs of this laboratory soon outran

his earnings, so that he had to look around for further funds. That took him into

publishing a small newspaper—the Weekly Herald—which he printed right on the train.

His original printing press cannot be found, but I discovered one made by the same

manufacturer, which Edison has said is an exact duplicate of the original.

The point, however, is not that young Edison published a newspaper for the first

time on a train or that he was able to get out a first-class sheet at so early an age. The

point is that he had in him so irrepressible an urge to be a scientist that his ingenuity was

quickened in every direction so that he could earn money to carry on his real work.

Of course he did not then know his real work but he did know that he must

discover the properties of matter before he could do anything with it. He was not just a

clever boy with a flair for earning money; he earned money only to an end. His every

penny above bare subsistence went for books or chemicals.

By the time he was fifteen he was well abreast of the total fund of scientific

knowledge of the day. I have a copy of this Weekly Herald and it is a chatty, interesting

paper Edison has always had the ability to put down what he wants to say in a very few

words and with absolute clearness. His thought is always clear and that is why what he

writes is clear.

In the baggage-car laboratory he one day dropped a stick of phosphorus. That

started a blaze and the train conductor came in while Edison was trying to put out the fire.

The story has always been that the conductor boxed the boy's ears so furiously as to

injure the drums and that it is from this ear-boxing that Edison's deafness dates.

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

It is true that the conductor did find the fire and that he ordered Edison and his

laboratory out at the next station, which was Smith's Creek, Michigan, but the ear-boxing

never happened. (The Smith's Creek station, by the way, is now erected brick by brick at

Dearborn. Sixty-seven years after Edison was thrown off, he was escorted from a train at

that same depot by the President of the United States, Herbert Hoover.) There is a doubt

whether it could ever have happened, for Edison, although he had been a weak child, was

already gaining some of the strength and physique which have carried him through the

years. He was not at all a fighter—he regards fighting as time-wasting—but he could take

care of himself and was not at all the sort of person to be cuffed about by anyone. The

deafness began quite differently. He pointed out the spot to me just outside of Fraser,

Michigan.

"I was delayed in waiting on some of my newspaper customers," he told me, "and

the train started ahead. I ran after it and caught the rear step, nearly out of wind and

hardly able to lift myself up, for the steps in those days were high. A trainman reached

over and grabbed me by the ears, and as he pulled me up I felt something in my ears

crack and right after that I began to get deaf. The ear-boxing incident never happened. If

it was that man who injured my hearing, he did it while saving my life."

This may or may not have started Edison's trouble with his ears; his extreme

deafness dates from an operation for mastoiditis some years ago. He has never, contrary

to the usual reports, actually been glad that he was deaf. But he is the kind of man to turn

a physical ill into an advantage.

Instead of mourning the loss of his hearing, he sought to discover whether there

were not some affairs in which a deaf man could be of more use than a man with normal

hearing. He once told me that he personally would be glad to have his hearing restored

but that he thought he was actually of more use to the country because he was deaf. At

another time he said:

"This deafness has been of great advantage to me in various ways. When in a

telegraph office, I could only hear the instrument directly on the table at which I sat, and,

unlike the other operators, I was not bothered by the other instruments. Again, in

experimenting on the telephone, I had to improve the transmitter so I could hear it. This

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

made the telephone commercial, as the magneto telephone receiver of the time was too

weak to be used as a transmitter commercially.

"It was the same with the phonograph. The great defect of that instrument was in

the rendering of the overtones in music, and the hissing consonants in speech. I worked

over one year, twenty hours a day, Sundays and all, to get the word 'specie' perfectly

recorded and reproduced on the phonograph. When this was done I knew that everything

else could be done—which was a fact. Again, my nerves have been preserved intact.

Many disturbing sounds do not reach me at all."

It was purely an accident that started Edison into electricity. His main work as a

boy was in chemistry and, although he was interested in everything and tried out many

experiments in electricity, he had no thought so he has told me, of being other than a

chemist. In his railroad life he was constantly thrown with telegraph operators and they

helped with his newspaper. He saw that they had a good deal of leisure time and he knew

that they were fairly well paid.

He wanted time for experimenting and he wanted money to finance the buying of

chemicals, for as he went further into his subjects the expense became greater and

greater. For these reasons he thought that a telegrapher's job would be better than the

somewhat intricate job he had made for himself as a newsboy. The chance to learn to use

the key came most unexpectedly.

In August, 1862, while at Mount Clemens station, he saw the infant daughter of J.

U. Mackenzie, the station agent, crawling on the tracks in front of a shunted box car. He

made a dash, picked her up and took her to the father. He did not risk his own life and he

was not even grazed by the car, but he did save the child's life. Out of gratitude the father

taught young Edison the elements of telegraphy.

The boy picked it up very quickly and soon was an expert operator—one of the

best, if not the best, in the country and able to send or receive with anyone. The operator's

job, which eventually took him all over the country, was only a means to an end, but it

directed him into electricity and diverted him from first making his name and fame as a

chemist. Rescuing that child from the tracks was the start of that section of Edison's

career which gave us the incandescent light and that whole new system of electrical

power which has brought in modern industry.

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

[III] OUR DEBT TO EDISON

It is the fashion to call this the age of industry. Rather, we should call it the age of

Edison. For he is the founder of modern industry in this country. He has formed for us a

new kind of declaration of independence. The Declaration of Independence stated certain

principles of political liberty. The Edison declaration is not in words. It is in the nature of

a kit of tools, by the use of which each and every person among us has gained a larger

measure of economic liberty than had ever previously been thought possible.

We are only learning to use the tools and the methods that he has given to us.

Already our general prosperity leads the world, and this is due to the fact that we have

had Edison. Nearly every important factor in our prosperity directly or indirectly traces

back to some invention by him. He is not only fundamental in our present prosperity but

he has further discoveries and inventions of which we can avail ourselves when the need

comes.

A great part of what Edison has done is now so much a part of our lives and so

commonplace that we forget we owe it to him. His work has not only created many

millions of new jobs but also—and without qualification—it has made every job more

remunerative. Edison has done more toward abolishing poverty than have all the

reformers and statesmen since the beginning of the world. He has provided man with the

means to help himself.

The work of Edison falls into two great divisions. The first has to do with his

direct contributions of inventions—of tools. The second has to do with his example in

linking science with our everyday life and demonstrating that, through patient,

unremitting testing and trying, any problem may eventually be solved. It is certainly

useless and probably impossible to determine whether his actual accomplishments or the

force of his-example has been the more valuable to us.

These statements may seem extravagant—as arising out of my own great

admiration for the man. In truth, the statements fall short of the facts. Our prosperity of

today would be impossible were it not for the mobility of our artificial power and the

facility of our communication and transportation. Behind all of these is Edison. Look at

some of his work in brief summary and from the viewpoint of its effects:

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

(1) The invention of the incandescent lamp freed us from the limitations of

daylight and added many active hours to every day. People need more things during the

long electric day than they could need during the short natural day or the somewhat

longer days of the candle, the lamp or the gaslight. None of these forms of artificial

illumination approaches the convenience of the incandescent light. Lengthening the time

in which people might consume naturally increased the volume of consumption and

therefore created more jobs. We gain in wealth not simply by production but by the

production of goods that are consumed. The incandescent light not only increased the

volume of consumption but it gave light to the factories so that production could be

carried on as efficiently at night as by day with a consequent cheapening of production

through the use of less capital equipment.

(2) The incandescent lamp would of itself have been only an interesting toy if

Edison had not taken over the solution of the whole problem and created a new system

for both the generation and the distribution of electricity. He evolved a dynamo which

turned into electricity ninety percent of the applied power instead of the forty percent

which was then the record of the best dynamos. And then, through his invention of what

is called the "three-wire system," he saved nearly two-thirds of the copper which would

have been necessary to distribute the current on the existing two-wire systems. Without

his more efficient dynamo and the great savings he effected in copper, the cost of

electricity to the consumer would have been so great that it could not have been

considered as other than a luxury. He started electricity on its way to being a commodity.

(3) The provision of a whole new system of electric generation emancipated

industry from the leather belt and the line shaft, for it eventually became possible to

provide each tool with its own electric motor. This may seem only a detail of minor

importance. In fact, modern industry could not be carried on with the belt and line shaft

for a number of reasons. The motor enabled machinery to be arranged according to the

sequence of the work, and that alone has probably doubled the efficiency of industry, for

it has cut out a tremendous amount of useless handling and hauling. The belt and shaft

were also very wasteful of power—so wasteful, indeed, that no factory could be really

large, for even the longest line shaft was small according to modern requirements. Also

high-speed tools were impossible under the old conditions—neither the pulleys nor the

15

EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

belts could stand modern speeds. Without high-speed tools and the finer steels which they

brought about, there could be nothing of what we call modern industry. That means that

we could not have the present combination of high wages and low-priced goods. The

present-day low-priced automobile, to mention only one out of thousands of

commodities, would be a high priced luxury article without the aid of the electric motor

in its manufacturing.

Electricity as a servant of general utility began with Edison. No one has as yet

been able to comprehend how far-reaching this use of electricity really is, for it goes

through every phase of our lives. But, in addition, Mr. Edison's inventions and

developments were fundamental to the practical introduction of the telephone and to the

extension of the telegraph as a cheap and general method of communication. He also

made the typewriter a practical office machine and performed the largest single work in

the development of the storage battery.

These inventions, the purport of which I have sketched, have made modern

industry possible. Without them we could not have volume production and without them

we could not have the large corporation, for it depends upon volume production, quick

transport and quick communication. These things have vitally changed all of our lives,

but also and in a different way our lives have been changed by the phonograph and by the

motion picture, and for both of these Edison is primarily responsible. In each he was the

pioneer. He was also a pioneer in radio work, but he did not follow it through because of

other and more pressing matters.

In the field of building and construction he did pioneer work in the processes of

cement making, in the composition and mixing of concrete and in the devising of

methods by which buildings might be constructed by pouring liquid concrete instead of

putting them up brick by brick or block by block. This involved the developing of a

concrete which could be poured without having all the larger solid matter sink to the

bottom, leaving a mass of unequal strength.

He perfected a method of pouring the entirety of a good-sized cottage in a single

mold and by a single operation. But in this, as in many other things, he was ahead of his

time. Many buildings are now being poured in part and eventually we shall see building

revolutionized.

16

EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

For the future he has provided many inventions which we shall work into or

which we may turn to in necessity. Chief among these is his process of extracting iron

from low-grade ore. This he developed and put into operation in New Jersey at a cost to

him of several million dollars. Then came the discovery of the high-grade ores in the

Missabe region. But his process gives us an absolute assurance that at no time shall we

ever suffer from the lack of cheap iron. He has insured to us iron for all time; he can

profitably use ore which would otherwise be worthless on account of the expense of

getting out the small percentage of iron.

Once Edison has fully demonstrated the practical utility of any invention and has

sketched its possible developments, he begins to lose interest and prefers to turn over the

actual development to others and to engage himself with something new. I do not know

of a single one of his inventions, the development and manufacture of which could not

have taken the whole life of any other man.

In fact, the development and elaboration of his inventions is today taking the

entire time of many thousands of men, but fortunately for the country his mind is too

restless and too inquiring to be held to a single subject—once he has overcome all the

difficulties which have baffled everyone else. He finishes his task, puts his product into

actual manufacturing, sketches the eventual development in a peculiarly unerring way,

and then opens up on another subject which has been pressing for his attention.

For instance, as far back as 1878 he wrote down the following possible

applications of the phonograph—which he had just then completed. It will be noted that

some of these applications have already been made and that none of them today seems

extraordinary. But imagine this vision in 1878! Here is the list:

"1. 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. Reproduction of music.

"5. The 'Family Record'—a registry of sayings, reminiscences, et cetera, by

members of a family in their own voices, and of the last words of dying persons.

"6. Music boxes and toys.

17

EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

"7. Clocks that should announce in articulate speech the time for going home,

going to meals, et cetera.

"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 phonograph for convenience in committing to memory.

"l0. Connection with the telephone, so as to make that instrument an auxiliary in

the transmission of permanent and invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of

momentary and fleeting communication."

Of the typewriter, which was brought to him to be improved and perfected, he

said:

"The typewriter proved a difficult thing to make commercial. The alignment of

the letters was awful. One letter would be one-sixteenth of an inch above the others; and

all the letters wanted to wander out of line. I worked on it till the machine gave fair

results. Some were made and used in the office. A few of us were very sanguine that

some day all business letters would be written on a typewriter. The typewriter I got into

commercial shape is now known as the Remington."

18

EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

[IV] THE VALUE OF COMMON SENSE

In another age and time, each of Edison's inventions would have been considered

either as unique scientific discoveries or as scientific toys. The older scientists made their

discoveries as things of themselves and were so far away from the daily workaday world

that they would have lost standing had they even suggested the possibility that their

studies could have any commercial application. Then Edison came along—a greater

scientist than any of them but without being bound by the old scientific traditions. He was

a scientist but also he was a man of extraordinary common sense. It was a new

combination.

Edison thought of science as an aid to mankind and, instead of being a specialist

in any one branch, he reviewed every branch in order to assemble and select the best

ways and means of accomplishing whatever he had in mind to do., He was not an

inventor in the sense that he just thought up certain methods and devices—as I shall

explain in a subsequent chapter. He was a whole experimental laboratory in himself and

definitely ended the distinction between the theoretical man of science and the practical

man of science, so that today we think of scientific discoveries in connection with their

possible present or future application to the needs of man. On the other hand, he took the

old rule-of-thumb methods out of industry and substituted exact scientific knowledge,

while on the other hand he directed scientific research into useful channels.

The scientists of the old school have never considered Edison as one of

themselves, because he did practical things instead of just making and recording

experiments. The engineers have not considered him an engineer because he never

worked on traditional engineering lines. In fact, he is both a scientist and an engineer, and

he established the modern spirit in both science and engineering—which is to say, that

the engineers depend on the scientists and the scientists depend on the engineers.

A considerable portion of his work during a part of his life was in making

practical commercial products out of inventions—such as the typewriter—that were

brought to him. He founded something in the nature of a new school of applied science

and, by reason of this, his own developments, after he had carried them a certain distance

or put them into practice, could be taken up by others and developed in detail.

19

EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

Edison never stopped until he had made a commercial product. Then his interest

ceased, for, although he has been a most distinguished manufacturer, he does not like to

bother with business details. This could not be better illustrated than with the

incandescent lamp. He did not stop with the lamp. He took it as the start of a whole new

system which had to comprehend a great number of points. These he once set down in a

memorandum which is as follows:

"First—To conceive a broad and fundamentally correct method of distributing the

current, satisfactorily in a scientific sense and practical commercially in its efficiency and

economy. This meant a comprehensive plan, analogous to illumination by gas, covering a

network of conductors, all connected together, so that in any given city area the lights

could be fed with electricity from several directions, thus eliminating any interruption

due to disturbance on any particular section.

"Second—To devise an electric lamp that would give about the same amount of

light as a gas jet, which custom had proven to be a suitable and useful unit. This lamp

must possess the quality of requiring only a small investment in the copper conductors

reaching it. Each lamp must be independent of every other lamp. Each and all the lights

must be produced and operated with sufficient economy to compete on a commercial

basis with gas. The lamp must be durable, capable of being easily and safely handled by

the public, and one that would remain capable of burning at full incandescence and

candle power a great length of time.

"Third—To devise means whereby the amount of electrical energy furnished to

each and every customer could be determined, as in the case of gas, and so that this could

be done cheaply and reliably by a meter at the customer's premises.

"Fourth—To elaborate a system or network of conductors capable of being placed

underground or overhead, which would allow of being tapped at any intervals, so that

service wires could be run from the main conductors in the street into each building.

Where these mains go below the surface of the thoroughfare, as in large cities, there must

be protective conduit or pipe for the copper conductors, and these pipes must allow of

being tapped wherever necessary. With these conductors and pipes must also be

furnished manholes, junction boxes, connections, and a host of varied paraphernalia,

insuring perfect general distribution.

20

EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

"Fifth—To devise means for maintaining at all points in an extended area of

distribution a practically even pressure of current, so that all the lamps, wherever located,

near or far away from the central station, should give an equal light at all times,

independent of the number that might be turned on; and safeguarding -the lamps against

rupture by sudden and violent fluctuations of current. There must also be means for thus

regulating at the point where the current was generated the quality of pressure of the

current throughout the whole lighting area, with devices for indicating what such pressure

might actually be at various points in the area.

"Sixth—To design efficient dynamos, such not being in existence at the time, that

would convert economically the steam power of high-speed engines into electrical

energy, together with means for connecting and disconnecting them with the exterior

consumption circuits; means for regulating, equalizing their loads, and adjusting the

number of dynamos to be used according to the fluctuating demands on the central

station. Also the arrangement of complete stations with steam and electric apparatus and

auxiliary devices for insuring their efficient and continuous operation.

"Seventh—To invent safety devices that would prevent the current from

becoming excessive upon any conductors, causing fire or other injury; also to invent

switches for turning the current on and off; lampholders, fixtures (sockets), and the like;

also means and methods for establishing the interior circuits that were to carry current to

chandeliers and fixtures in buildings.

"Eighth—To design commercially efficient motors to operate elevators, printing

presses, lathes, fans, blowers, et cetera, by the current generated in central stations and

distributed through the network of main conductors installed in the city streets. Motors of

this kind were unknown when I formulated my plans."

The above program seems commonplace enough today. We take for granted that

electricity shall be supplied to us with the utmost convenience. But Edison's program

would have been, for anyone else, quite visionary. It was tremendous in its completeness.

His dynamo was exactly contrary to the principles which the electrical science of the day

had laid down.

A large portion of technical opinion held that the chief uses of electricity would

be in the arc light which was then spreading rapidly and, although it was very crude, it

21

EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

was considered almost perfect. The arc light could not be used indoors except in very

large buildings on account of its terrible glare, but the Edison light was not then strong

enough to be used for street lighting. Edison predicted the present municipal lighting

systems. In our digging around his laboratories for Edison relics we have found old street

lamps forty-five years old.

He had not at hand any of the proper materials or supplies to carry out his designs.

That, as I have mentioned, is one of the great difficulties of the pioneer in any art. For his

first installation on a large scale he planned a bigger dynamo than had ever been built and

planned to connect it directly with a steam engine. Up to that time he and all other

dynamo makers had used belts with a number of small units. And he had an enormous

amount of trouble finding anyone to design and build a steam engine to make the speed

he needed.

Today dynamos are always directly connected with a steam engine or a turbine,

but Edison was so far ahead of his time that the designers of steam engines could not

provide for his needs. They in turn did not have the steels for either the boilers or the

engines.

The Pearl Street plant in New York City, which was the first commercial

installation—the original plant at Menlo Park was only experimental—was one of the

greatest of all engineering jobs. Edison had to design and have made every item,

including switches, fixtures and wires. He established l10 volts as standard and that has

ever since remained standard.

To string electric wires high up on poles along streets was one thing, but to take

wires through a densely populated district and into office buildings was quite another

thing. It must be remembered that there were no precedents; Edison had to know at every

step what he was doing or else he might have been the cause of a great conflagration. As

it was, he carried off every detail successfully—simply because he had tried out every

detail in advance in his laboratory and tested under every possible condition.

He refused to sell his electric-light rights but instead held to leases with the

installations under his supervision so that the light would not get into careless or

incompetent hands. In so doing he turned down offers of millions of dollars that he

22

EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

needed in his affairs, but in the end he had the satisfaction of seeing his invention

properly installed and operated.

For a considerable while he actually managed his business and had an office in

New York. Few things are more irksome to Mr. Edison than office work, yet he stayed

with the job until men had been developed who could take it over.

This developing was in itself a managerial task of no small moment. We met the

same thing when we began to put out automobiles and found that the mechanics

throughout the country did not know how to repair them. We then followed the plan that

Edison had devised so many years before.

He opened a training school for workmen which was probably the first of its kind.

The sessions were at night at his office, which was in a dwelling on lower Fifth Avenue.

He tried to select as students those who already had some experience with telegraphs,

telephones, burglar alarms, and the other simple electrical work of the time. They were

taught the elements and the technique by both blackboard and oral lessons, and also they

received the rudiments of general electrical engineering. Assistants of Mr. Edison

brought in from Menlo Park were the instructors.

The records show that many of these pioneer students and workmen afterwards

became successful contractors or filled important positions as managers or

superintendents of central stations. I came into the field much later and by then a body of

men had already been trained and the school had no longer any reason for existence.

Edison reserved the right to manufacture his incandescent lamps and in so doing

evolved a principle of manufacturing which I have found most valuable. He found that

the lamps were costing one dollar and twenty-five cents each to make. He offered to

make them at forty cents each if the Edison Light Company—which was the power

company—would buy all their requirements from him during the life of the patent. Here,

in his own words, is what happened:

"The first year the lamps cost us about a dollar and ten cents each. We sold them

for forty cents; but there were only about twenty or thirty thousand of them. The next

year they cost us about seventy cents, and we sold them for forty. There were a good

many, and we lost more money the second year than the first.

23

EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

"The third year I succeeded in getting up machinery and in changing the

processes, until it got down so that they cost somewhere around fifty cents. I still sold

them for forty cents, and lost more money that year than any other, because the sales

were increasing rapidly.

"The fourth year I got it down to thirty-seven cents, and I made up all the money

in one year that I had lost previously. I finally got it down to twenty-two cents, and sold

them for forty cents; and they were made by the million. Whereupon the Wall Street

people thought it was a very lucrative business, so they concluded they would like to

have it, and bought us out.

"This is one of the incidents which caused a very great cheapening. When we

started, 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 anyone could seal in a fair

number of parts in a day. The men on this work considered themselves essential to the

plant and became surly. They formed a union and made demands.

"I started in to see if it were not possible to do that operation by machinery. After

feeling around for some days, I got a clue how to do it. I then put men on it I could trust,

and made the preliminary machinery. That seemed to work pretty well. I then made

another machine which did the work nicely. I then made a third machine. Then the union

went out. It has been out ever since."

I have been credited with originating the plan of fixing a sales price on what I

believed the article could be made for and then forcing the costs down through volume

production so that the price would yield a profit. But Edison did exactly that long ago.

In fact there is very little in our industry of today that Edison did not think of and

try out. If we were as yet caught up with all his ideas, we should as a nation be still

further ahead.

24

EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

[V] THE GENIUS OF EDISON

Mr. Edison is a genius but not in the sense that his inventions and discoveries

have been revealed to him in sudden flashes. If he were that, he would not have his

present tremendous importance, for the lessons of his life would not have universal

application. As it is, his methods can be used by anyone: and the fact that they are being

used by so many is one of the reasons for our great industrial progress. The man stands as

a demonstration of what concentration and intelligence can accomplish.

This is not to say that anyone can be an Edison. That would be absurd. I have

never known anyone who could match him in a single one of his outstanding qualities—

in his imagination, his reasoning, his memory, his patience or his capacity for hard work

and hard thought. But everyone has some of these qualities in some degree and nothing is

too small or too large not to be benefited by the application of the Edison methods.

Luther Burbank had many of the Edison qualities and used precisely the same

methods as did Edison—although in a very different line of work. I have been together

with the two men and it was remarkable how easily and how quickly each understood the

other's thought. Each worked patiently by a process of elimination and trusted not at all to

luck. As Mr. Edison once said after visiting Burbank:

"My methods are similar to those followed by Luther Burbank. He plants an acre,

and when this is in bloom he inspects it. He has a sharp eye, and can pick out of

thousands a single plant that has promise of what he wants. From this he gets the seed,

and uses his skill and knowledge in producing from it a number of new plants which, on

development, furnish the means of propagating an improved variety in large quantity. So,

when I am after a chemical result that I have in mind, I may make hundreds or thousands

of experiments out of which there may be one that promises results in the right direction.

This I follow to its legitimate conclusion, discarding the others, and usually get what I am

after. There is no doubt about this being empirical; but when it comes to problems of a

mechanical nature, I want to tell you that all I've ever tackled and solved have been done

by hard, logical thinking."

Burbank chose to investigate in a field where the financial returns were very small

and hence he remained until the end chiefly dependent upon his own personal effort and

25

EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

had very little skilled assistance from anyone. Edison, with a far greater ingenuity in

money-making, pursued lines which held promise of financial reward, so that in a very

short while he was able to organize himself into a research and inventing institution and

make his brains more effective by having conducted under his direction many more

experiments than he could possibly conduct himself.

Edison is in himself a great research institution—probably the greatest in the

world—but he never thinks of himself as a research student, for all that he does is a

means to an end and he considers only his destination as of importance. The journey is

merely something that has to be made.

He stands alone among inventors in having organizing as well as creative ability.

He built up around him a group of men whom he could trust and who knew how to carry

out his orders. This organization did not come all at once. In common with all inventors,

Mr. Edison in his first patented device concentrated on something which he thought was

needed, but which, in fact, was of no use to anyone.

In 1868, he took out a patent for an arrangement that would quickly and

accurately record the vote of a legislative body. He had the impression that Congress in

particular needed his invention so that the time taken in voting might be used for more

valuable purposes. He still laughs about the reception which this, his first child, received

in Washington:

"It was exhibited before a committee that had something to do with the Capitol.

The chairman of the committee, after seeing how quickly and perfectly it worked, said:

'Young man, if there is any invention on earth that we don't want down here, it is this.

One of the greatest weapons in the hands of a minority to prevent bad legislation is

filibustering on votes, and this instrument would prevent it.'

"I saw the truth of this, because as press operator I had taken miles of

Congressional proceedings, and to this day an enormous amount of time is wasted during

each session of the House in foolishly calling the members' names and recording and then

adding their votes, when the whole operation could be done in almost a moment by

merely pressing a particular button at each desk. For filibustering purposes, however, the

present methods are admirable."

26

EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

That cured Edison of inventing things which he thought ought to be wanted.

Thereafter he kept to things he knew were wanted and which would have widespread

application. His first practical inventions had to do with the telegraph, while he was still

an operator. These he simply reasoned out from his immense knowledge of the subject,

testing his reasoning at each point by actual experiment.

That is the way his mind works; as a boy he needed a laboratory to test the truth

of each conclusion that he came across. As a man he had to test every step in every

theory that he evolved. He has never taken anything for granted because, as he has told

me, he very early discovered that even the commonest chemical reactions taught him

things which no one had thought important enough to record.

As soon as he had gained enough money through his work on the telegraph to

give all his thought to invention, he found that he needed assistance, for no matter how

long he worked he could not by himself complete all of the needed experiments—

whether chemical or physical—within any reasonable time. He set up a laboratory in

Newark and shortly a fee of forty thousand dollars given to him for an improvement on

the stock ticker enabled him to start forward with something of an organization.

Thereafter he was always the director of a laboratory and conserved his time by

devoting it to the things where his brain and not his hands alone were needed. It has

always been the fashion of inventors to secrete themselves and attempt to carry on all the

work alone. Edison adopted exactly the opposite method and that is one of the reasons

why he has been able to accomplish so much.

His methods are well illustrated by his story of the invention of the phonograph:

"I was experimenting on an automatic method of recording telegraph messages on

a disk of paper laid on a revolving platen, exactly the same as the disk talking machine of

today. The platen had a spiral groove on its surface, like the disk. Over this was placed a

circular disk of paper; an electromagnet with the embossing point connected to an arm

traveled over the disk; and any signals given through the magnets were embossed on the

disk of paper.

"If this disk was removed from the machine and put on a similar machine

provided with a contact point, the embossed record would cause the signals to be

27

EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

repeated into another wire. The ordinary speed of telegraphic signals is thirty-five to forty

words a minute; but with this machine several hundred words were possible.

"From my experiments on the telephone I knew of the power of a diaphragm to

take up sound vibrations, as I had made a little toy which, when you recited loudly in the

funnel, would work a pawl connected to the diaphragm; and this, engaging a ratchet

wheel, served to give continuous rotation to a pulley. This pulley was connected by a

cord to a little paper toy representing a man sawing wood. Hence, if one shouted: 'Mary

had a little lamb,' etc., the paper man would start sawing wood. I reached the conclusion

that if I could record the movements of the diaphragm properly, I could cause such record

to reproduce the original movements imparted to the diaphragm by the voice, and thus

succeed in recording and reproducing the human voice.

"Instead of using a disk I designed a little machine using a cylinder provided with

grooves around the surface. Over this was to be placed tin foil, which easily received and

recorded the movements of the diaphragm. A sketch was made, and the piece-work price,

eighteen dollars, was marked on the sketch. I was in the habit of marking the price I

would pay on each sketch. If the workman lost, I would pay his regular wages; if he made

more than the wages, he kept it.

"The workman who got the sketch was John Kruesi. I didn't have much faith that

it would work, expecting that I might possibly hear a word or so that would give hope of

a future for the idea. Kruesi, when he had nearly finished it, asked what it was for. I told

him I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it

absurd.

"However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted 'Mary had a little

lamb,' et cetera. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was

never so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things

that worked the first time. Long experience proved that there were great drawbacks found

generally before they could be got commercial; but here was something there was no

doubt of."

That was the beginning of the phonograph. Since the model worked, Edison had

his principle established and from then on its perfecting was a matter of detail, to

discover how best to make each part and also what the part could best be made of. If the

28

EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

first model had not worked, then Edison would have studied it until he thought he knew

why, would have sketched the changes, had them made, and gone on in such fashion until

he found a model which would work. It will be noted that he had discovered the principle

in connection with other experiments and that he sketched his first model out of

experience.

29

EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

[VI] HIS METHODS OF INVENTION

Edison is not a mechanic in the sense that he is skilled with tools; neither is he a

mathematician. He says that he can hire mechanics and mathematicians. He is a chemist.

But while he is not a mechanic, he thoroughly knows all the principles of mechanics and

can design anything.

His procedure is always the same. First he determines his objective—exactly what

he wants to accomplish. He may start to improve some crude device already in existence,

as he did with the telephone, typewriter, dynamo and scores of other bits of apparatus; or

again, there may be nothing in existence to improve. In any case he first gets before him

all that is known on the subject-testing each bit of knowledge as he goes along.

Sometimes he makes the tests himself but usually he states what he wants on a

sheet of yellow paper in his own handwriting and sends it on to an assistant. The

assistants record in notebooks the results of each of their tests and these books are turned

in to Mr. Edison each evening. The notes mean more to Mr. Edison than to anyone else,

for he knows exactly what he is after and the assistant does not always know.

If the experiments do not turn out as he expects, he writes further notes and

suggestions; if the experiments show that they are not worth continuing, then Mr. Edison

takes another line. He is always in control. I have many of the notebooks and penciled

note sheets and some day these will make a whole study in themselves, for they survey a

great section of human knowledge and ought to be compiled for the use of future

generations. For the present they are being placed where they can be used again by young

men.

Mr. Edison almost never gives verbal instructions because he finds it easier and

quicker to write or to draw than to talk and he writes by hand instead of dictating because

he can write with the utmost plainness and in faster time than he can dictate. If there is

anything to be made or an experiment is to be conducted in a certain way, he draws a

diagram in such clear, quick fashion that no further explanation is necessary. The speed

with which Mr. Edison does all this is remarkable. He sketched the model of his first

phonograph in less than five minutes.

30

EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

Thus, although utterly without formality of any kind, there is actually a record of

everything that goes on in the laboratory and Edison has been able, through this ability, to

give rapid and explicit written instructions or drawings, to carry on a number of

important and entirely unrelated investigations at the same time. I have never known him

to be working on only one thing. Even when he was in the midst of his work on the

incandescent lamp, he was carrying forward several other lines of investigation of the

highest importance.

The absolute direction of all these investigations is with him. He is the leader and

no one ever questions his leadership. I believe it is rarely possible for any assistant to get

ahead of him on a suggestion—not because he is unwilling to receive suggestions but

because in his comments on any experiment he invariably covers the point of the subject

so thoroughly that the assistant discovers that his suggestion was only a tiny section of

what Mr. Edison already had in mind.

He does not have to assert leadership. It is simply unquestioned by any man of

real intelligence—and Edison does not for long have near him any person who does not

possess far more than average intelligence. He will not tolerate stupidity or long-winded

explanations.

There is no luck whatsoever in anything that Edison does. He never starts into any

subject without making himself completely familiar with the whole fund of knowledge

that exists on that subject. He does not aimlessly cut and try. He first of all discovers

everything that everyone has done and then repeats all of their experiments to find if they

have drawn the correct deductions from them.

He applies reason based on knowledge to any chemical or mechanical problem.

He regards an experiment simply as an experiment. If he does not get the results that he

planned for, then the experiment has taught him what not to do and gradually, by a

process of elimination, he finds what to do.

The existing knowledge on any subject may give him suggestions, or again it may

simply hasten the process of elimination. If there be no existing knowledge, Mr. Edison

will start experimenting to test his theories of what would be most suitable. For instance,

he is now searching for some common plant which may be grown easily within the

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

borders of the United States and which will give a sufficient yield of rubber to make it a

source of supply for the country in the event of war.

Plants and trees have not, in general, been studied from this angle. Therefore he

unflinchingly, although with a full knowledge of the task ahead of him, began

determining the rubber content of every easily grown plant in the country. He has already

examined more than fifteen thousand and by the time he is through he will have such full

and detailed knowledge that he can at least determine whether or not he is on the right

track.

When he undertook to develop the storage battery, he found that there were no

data at all of the kind that he wanted. Therefore he began experimenting. Each

experiment had a number, but when he got to ten thousand he called that a series and

started with number one again and ran through five of these series before he found what

he wanted. It is to be remembered that each of these experiments was made for a definite

reason and to test out a possibility.

He always takes the whole subject and carries it through. When he had worked

out the incandescent lamp, he applied himself, as has been noted, to designing a whole

system. When he turned to the magnetic separation of iron ore, he did not stop until he

had a complete plant. He did the same thing with cement.

Take iron ore and cement, where the difficulties were not so much in finding the

right process as in adapting the processes to commercial needs:

Edison, while in the midst of the development of his electric-light system, planned

crushing and separating machinery to put into effect the magnetic separation of low-grade

ores on a great scale and at a low cost as the only practical way of supplying the furnaces

with a high quality of iron ore. He held the opinion that it was cheaper to quarry and

concentrate low-grade ore in a big way than to attempt to mine, under adverse

circumstances, limited bodies of high-grade ore.

It is now generally admitted that he was right. The magnetic separation of ore was

not new. But no one had approached the real problem, which was to handle enormous

quantities of materials at a very low cost. He designed a plant that was nearly automatic

and then erected it in New Jersey—spending on it most of the money that he earned from

the incandescent light.

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

The principles of magnetic separation are very simple. If a lump of magnetite be

powdered, then the particles of iron can be separated by a magnet. Edison had the

crushed ore fall in a thin stream past a magnet. The magnetic particles were pulled out of

the straight stream, and being heavy, gravitated inwardly and fell to one side of a

partition, while the non-magnetic debris descended without deviating. Thus a complete

separation was had.

One thinks of Edison as dealing with delicate test tubes. But here he was equally

at home with apparatus running into thousands of tons. In the concentrating plant that he

established, he developed so thoroughly the refining of the crushed ore that after passing

four hundred and eighty magnets the concentrates came out containing ninety-one to

ninety-three percent of iron oxide. And to handle this material he designed and had built a

more complete conveyor system than anyone had ever designed until then.

He got out ores at a low price and conquered the formidable opposition of the iron

trade. But then, as I have mentioned, the Missabe Range deposits were discovered and

with them he could not compete. His methods are still of high reserve utility.

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

[VII] THINGS SMALL AND THINGS GREAT

In cement Edison again tackled quantity production. He held that cement was the

most durable of all building materials. He has often said:

"Wood will rot, stone will chip and crumble, bricks disintegrate, but a cementand-

iron structure is apparently indestructible. Look at some of the old Roman baths.

They are as solid as when they were built."

He saw cement as the coming material and decided to go into its making, since

the magnetic-ore project had given him a fund of experience in the crushing and handling

of bulk materials. As usual, he read up everything of an authoritative nature on the

subject and sent out for information everywhere. This happened, it may be interesting to

note, while he was engaged on his new storage battery.

Having the facts in hand, he placed a large sheet of paper on a drafting table and

started to draw out a plan of the proposed works. After twenty-four hours of continuous

work, he had the full lay-out of the entire plant as it was subsequently installed, and as it

has substantially remained until now. He had never made cement, but if that plant were to

be rebuilt today, no vital change would be necessary. He considered and provided in his

plans for every part from the crusher to the packing house, and that for a plant about half

a mile long, which handles automatically enough raw material to produce two and a

quarter million pounds of finished cement every day in the week.

Contrast work on such a scale with this:

"Toward the latter part of 1875, in the Newark shop, I invented a device for

multiplying copies of letters, which I sold to Mr. A. B. Dick, of Chicago, and in the years

since it has been universally introduced throughout the world. It is called the

'mimeograph.' I also invented devices for making and introduced paraffin paper, now

used for wrapping up candy, et cetera."

Or take this account which he gives of his work on lighting, and notice his

capacity for infinite detailed attention equally to things small as to things great.

"Just at that time (1878) I wanted to take up something new, and Professor Barker

suggested that I go to work and see if I could subdivide the electric light so it could be

got in small units like gas. This was not a new suggestion, because I had made a number

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

of experiments on electric lighting a year before this. They had been laid aside for the

phonograph. I determined to take up the search again and continue it.

"On my return home I started my usual course of collecting every kind of data.

This time it was about gas: I bought all the transactions of the gas-engineering societies,

et cetera, all the back volumes of gas journals, et cetera. Having obtained all the data, and

investigated gas jet distribution in New York by actual observations, I made up my mind

that the problem of the subdivision of the electric current could be solved and made

commercial.

"I realized that an electric lamp to be commercially practical must of necessity

bear a general comparison with a gas jet in at least two points: first, that it must give a

moderate illumination, and, second, that such a lamp must be so devised that each one

could be lighted and extinguished separately and independently of any others. With this

basic idea in mind we resumed our experiments at once.

"The experience gained through my extensive experiments led me to conclude

that the only possible solution of the problem of subdividing the electric light was that the

lamps must have a high resistance and small radiating surface; also that they must be

operated in a multiple-arc system, that is to say, independently of each other.

"I was well acquainted with the properties of carbon and knew that if it could be

produced in the form of a hair-like filament, that such a filament would have relatively

high resistance, and, of course, small radiating surface. But could such a fragile filament

be capable of withstanding mechanical shock and be susceptible of being maintained at a

temperature of over 2,000 degrees for 1,000 hours or more before breaking?

"Again, could this filamentary conductor be supported in a vacuum chamber so

perfectly formed and constructed that during all these hours in which it would be

subjected to various temperatures, not a particle of air could enter to disintegrate the

filament? And not only so, but the lamp, after its design, must not be a mere laboratory

possibility, but a practical commercial article capable of being manufactured at low cost

and large quantity, and capable of long-distance shipment without injury. These and a

multitude of minor considerations—minor, but none the less important—combined to

form a problem of great magnitude.

35

EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

"As already stated, I found that I could not use carbon successfully in my earlier

experiments, because the rods or strips of carbon I then employed, although much larger

than filaments, would not stand, but were consumed in a few minutes under the best

conditions I then had at my command. Now, however, that I had found means of

obtaining and maintaining high vacuum, I immediately went back to carbon, which from

the first I had conceived of as the ideal substance for a burner. My next step proved

conclusively the correctness of my former deductions.

"I decided to test out my theory by the use of a filamentary burner and my old

laboratory notebooks show that on October 21, 1879, after many heartbreaking trials, we

succeeded in carbonizing a piece of cotton sewing thread, bent into horseshoe shape, and

I had it sealed into a glass globe from which I exhausted the air until a vacuum up to onemillionth

of an atmosphere was produced. The lamp was hermetically sealed and then

taken off the vacuum pump and put on the electric current.

"It lighted up and in the first few breathless minutes we measured its resistance

quickly and found that it was 275 ohms-all we wanted. Then we sat down and looked at

that lamp. We wanted to see how long it would burn. The problem was solved—if the

filament would last. We sat and looked, and the lamp continued to burn. The longer it

burned, the more fascinated we were.

"None of us could go to bed, and there was no sleep for any of us for forty hours.

We sat and watched it with anxiety growing into elation. The lamp lasted about forty-five

hours, and I realized that the practical incandescent lamp had been born. I was sure that if

this rather crude experimental lamp would burn forty-five hours, I could make a lamp

that would burn hundreds of hours, and even up to a thousand.

"Up to this time I had spent upwards of forty thousand dollars in my electric-light

experiments, but the result far more than justified the expenditure, for with this lamp I

made the discovery that a filament of carbon, under the condition of high vacuum, was

commercially stable and would stand high temperature without the disintegration and

oxidation that took place in all previous attempts that I knew of for making an

incandescent burner from carbon. Besides, this lamp possessed the characteristics of high

resistance and small radiating surface, permitting economy in the outlay for conductors,

and requiring only a small current for each unit of light—conditions that were absolutely

36

EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

necessary of fulfilment in order to accomplish the subdivision of the electric-light

current.

"With the invention of a practical incandescent lamp I had merely stepped over

the threshold of a complete system. While we kept up a constant series of experiments for

the greater perfection of the lamp, I busied myself in devising the other essential parts of

the system I had conceived. There was no precedent for such a thing, and nowhere in the

world could we purchase these parts.

"It was necessary to invent everything: dynamos, regulators, meters, switches,

fuses, fixtures, underground conductors with their necessary connecting boxes, and a host

of other detail parts, even down to insulating tape. Everything was new and unique. The

only relevant item in the world at that time was copper wire, and even that was not

properly insulated.

"My laboratory was a scene of feverish activity, and we worked incessantly,

regardless of day, night, Sunday or holiday. I had quite a large force and they were a

loyal lot of men as a whole, and worked with vim and enthusiasm. We accomplished a

great deal in a short space of time, and before Christmas of 1879 I had already lighted up

my laboratory and office, my house and several other houses about one-fifth of a mile

from the dynamo plant, and some twenty street lights. The current for these was fed

through underground conductors made and insulated for the purpose."

Any man bringing to any subject only a fraction of the persistence and

intelligence of Edison cannot fail to leave it better than he found it. That is the great

lesson of Edison the investigator—or inventor.

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

[VIII] INTERESTED IN EVERYTHING

One day while Edison and I were calling on Luther Burbank in California, he

asked us to register in his guest book. The book had a column for signature, another for

home address, another for occupation and a final one entitled "Interested in." Edison

signed in a few quick but unhurried motions—he puts down that clear signature, with

each letter plainly separated and a flourish over the top, with far more speed than most

men could make a scrawl. In the final column he wrote without an instant's hesitation:

"Everything."

That explains Mr. Edison. He is literally interested in everything. His habit of

trying out applicants for positions by means of long questionnaires into which enters

nearly everything under the sun is only a method of investigating the character of the

curiosity of the candidate. He dislikes men with single-track minds or single-track

interests.

In his own work he will not have specialists or single-subject men around. He

simply cannot tolerate a man of narrow interests. His own interests in things are today

just as lively as they were more than half a century ago, when as a boy he decided to read

the Detroit Public Library through—shelf by shelf and regardless of subject.

So far as I have ever been able to make out, he is not only interested in everything

but also he is a specialist in everything. Everyone knows that he is a specialist in the

sciences, but I was surprised to discover on the first trip that ever I took with him—and

have continued to be surprised on every subsequent trip, and in fact at every meeting with

him—the extent of his knowledge of birds, of trees and of flowers. Also he is wholly

informed on geology and astronomy.

His knowledge of history and politics is very wide and, although it is not

generally suspected, he has much more than a casual interest in the arts and particularly

in the simplicity of the Greek art and architecture. He has in himself a very fine feeling

for line and form. I have never yet seen a drawing made by him or a model made from

one of his drawings which was not really beautiful in its every detail. His conception of

beauty is bound up with simplicity and not with elaboration. He will not merely decorate.

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

His simple lines are so harmonious as to achieve an effect far more beautiful than would

be possible in any purely decorative effort.

The harmony of his designs, I think, arises from the accuracy of his observations

and the economy of his every effort. The simpler anything is, the better it is. The simplest

design is not only best from the standpoint of utility but also it is always best from the

standpoint of art. I always suspect an ugly or florid design of being somewhere faulty.

And usually it is—the designer has not thought out his problem to the point where he can

express it simply.

Edison could have succeeded in a big way in any line which he chose to follow.

He has never failed in anything which he undertook—even as a boy. For to everything he

has brought a quick imagination and a capacity for unlimited work. Before he was fifteen

years old he had made a success as a farmer, as a merchant and as a newspaper

proprietor. Before he was twelve he was running his father's truck garden and selling the

produce in Port Huron. He did not like the manual labor of farming, or rather he thought

that he could make better use of his time. This is what he did as a boy of twelve:

"Hoeing corn in a hot sun is unattractive. I do not wonder that it has built up

cities. Soon the Grand Trunk Railroad was extended from Toronto to Port Huron, at the

foot of Lake Huron, and thence to Detroit, at about the same time the War of the

Rebellion broke out. By keeping at it, I got permission from my mother to go on the local

train as a newsboy. The local train from Port Huron to Detroit, a distance of sixty-three

miles, left at seven A.M. and arrived back again at nine-thirty P.M.

"After being on the train for several months, I started two stores in Port Huron—

one for periodicals, and the other for vegetables, butter and berries in season. These were

attended by two boys who shared in the profits. The periodical store I soon closed, as the

boy in charge could not be trusted. The vegetable store I kept up for nearly a year.

"After the railroad had been opened a short time, they put on an express which

left Detroit in the morning and returned in the evening. I received permission to put a

newsboy on this train. Connected with this train was a car, one part for baggage and the

other part for mail, but for a long time it was not used. Every morning I had two large

baskets of vegetables from the Detroit market loaded in the mail car and sent to Port

39

EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

ILLUSTRATION 2: HENRY FORD AND THOMAS EDISON

40

EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

Huron, where the boy would take them to the store. They were much better than those

grown locally, and sold readily.

"I never was asked to pay freight, and to this day cannot explain why, except that

I was so small and industrious, and the nerve to appropriate a United States mail car to do

a free freight business was so monumental. I kept this up for a long time and in addition

bought butter from the farmers along the line, and an immense amount of blackberries in

season. I bought wholesale and at a low price, and permitted the wives of the engineers

and trainmen to have a discount.

"After a while there was a daily immigrant train put on. This train generally had

from seven to ten coaches filled always with Norwegians, all bound for Iowa and

Minnesota. On these trains I employed a boy who sold bread, tobacco and stick candy. As

the war progressed, the daily newspaper sales became very profitable, and I gave up the

vegetable store."

An ordinary boy would have taken the ordinary job and filled it, but Edison

simply has to improve any job or anything that he meets. The competitive spirit is very

strong in him—he will not pass up a "dare." It will be noted that even the job of news

butcher became under his direction too big to be handled only by himself and that he

started at once to employ help.

With the Civil War on, Edison took advantage of his position on the train to sell

newspapers ahead of the regular distribution, which was by mail. While in Detroit

waiting for his train to start, he heard that the Battle of Shiloh had been fought with a

heavy list of dead and wounded. He had been selling a hundred newspapers on his regular

trips. He decided to buy a thousand and arranged with his telegraph-operator friends to

post bulletins at each station giving the bare news of the battle. This is what happened:

"The first station, called Utica, was a small one where I generally sold two papers.

I saw a crowd ahead on the platform, and thought it some excursion, but the moment I

landed there was a rush for me. Then I realized that the telegraph was a great invention. I

sold thirty-five papers there.

"The next station was Mount Clemens, now a watering place but then a town of

about one thousand. I usually sold six to eight papers there. I decided that if I found a

large crowd there I would correct my lack of judgment in not getting more papers by

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

raising the price from five cents to ten. The crowd was there, and I raised the price. At the

various towns there were crowds.

"It had been my practice at Port Huron to jump from the train at a point about

one-fourth of a mile from the station, where the train generally slackened speed. I had

drawn several loads of sand to this point to jump on, and had become quite expert. When

I approached the outskirts of the town I was met by a large crowd. I then yelled:

"Twenty-five cents apiece, gentlemen! I haven't enough to go around!' I sold all out, and

made what to me then was an immense sum of money."

And while all this was going on, he was also getting out his own train newspaper,

reading every book he could find and making every chemical and other experiment that

he could gain the wherewithal to make. It was the experiments, I cannot too often repeat,

that explain it all. Edison had no liking for news butchering or for merchandising or, in

fact, for anything but investigating. But he could size up any opportunity in terms of the

money that he needed for his other work.

He has never really lacked for money except when he stopped earning in order to

go forward with work that he considered more important. He never stints his work for

lack of money. For if he finds himself short, he turns for a while to making money. The

mere making of money he regards as an easy affair which is not worth giving much

attention to.

He has the innate capacity to be first-class at anything he does. There has never

been a faster or more accurate telegraph operator than he was. He is just as proud now as

he was so many years ago when the telegraph men in Boston tried to swamp him in his

first important position as an operator. Here is the story which he often tells:

"I entered the main operating room and was introduced to the night manager. The

weather being cold, and being clothed poorly, my peculiar appearance caused much

mirth, and, as I afterward learned, the night operators had consulted together how they

might 'put up a job on the jay from the woolly West.' I was given a pen and assigned to

the New York No. 1 wire.

"After waiting an hour, I was told to come over to a special table and take a

special report for the Boston Herald, the conspirators having arranged to have one of the

fastest senders in New York send the dispatch and 'salt' the new man. I sat down

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

unsuspiciously at the table, and the New York man started slowly. Soon he increased his

speed, to which I easily adapted my pace. This put my rival on his mettle, and he put on

his best powers, which, however, were soon reached.

"At this point I happened to look up, and saw the operators all looking over my

shoulder, with their faces shining with fun and excitement. I knew then that they were

trying to put up a job on me, but kept my own counsel.

"The New York man then commenced to slur over his words, running them

together and sticking the signals. But I had been used to this style of telegraphy in taking

reports, and was not in the least discomfited. Finally, when I thought the fun had gone far

enough, and having about completed the special, I quietly opened the key and remarked,

telegraphically, to my New York friend: 'Say, young man, change off and send with your

other foot.' This broke the New York man all up, and he turned the job over to another

man to finish."

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

[IX] WHEN HE WORKS AND WHEN HE SLEEPS

As I said, Edison keeps abreast of the news of the day, no matter what the press of

his business, for it takes him only a few minutes to get the meat out of the daily

newspaper. He is never out of the world and knows exactly what is going on politically.

In the last Presidential campaign he followed the speeches of the candidates with

great care and it may be noted that in politics he is never a neutral. He always knows

what he is for and what he is against and, if asked, will state his position exactly and

clearly, regardless of who may be offended.

He will not go out of his way to offend anyone, but he will not fail to give his

opinion just because it may not agree with the opinion of someone else. His political

education dates back to the days when he was a telegraph operator and took millions of

words of Congressional proceedings. Then he knew the members of Congress so well

that he could and often had to reconstruct their speeches as they came over the wire. For

instance:

"I took the press job in Louisville. I was a very poor sender, and therefore made

the taking of press reports a specialty. The newspapermen allowed me to come over after

going to press at three A. M. and get all the exchanges I wanted. These I would take

home and lay at the foot of my bed. I never slept more than four or five hours, so that I

would awake at nine or ten and read those papers until dinner time.

"I thus kept posted, and knew about every member of Congress, and what

committees they were on; and all about the topical doings, as well as the prices of

breadstuffs in all the primary markets. I was in a much better position than most operators

to call on my imagination to supply missing words or sentences, which were frequent in

those days of old, rotten wires, badly insulated, especially on stormy nights. Upon such

occasions I had to supply in some cases one-fifth of the whole matter by pure guessing."

It is wholly characteristic that he could fill up these dispatches as they came over

the wire and without any hesitation at all. That is the way Mr. Edison has his information.

He does not have to stop to recall anything which has ever happened in his life, or in fact

anything which he has ever read. It is all at his fingertips.

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

In these last few years when I have been collecting the older things that he used

and assembling and erecting his old buildings, I have often had to ask him the smallest

details about his early arrangements. Instantly he will take a pencil and pad and draw for

me exactly the position of everything in the old days. If a piece of machinery is missing,

he will not only draw what it was like but he will be able to tell me where he bought it

and where I am likely to find another.

He reads everything, including most of the popular books and novels that come

out. He may not go through with a whole book but in a few minutes he will discover

whether or not he wants to read it. And what he reads he knows, and without effort.

From this it might be imagined that Mr. Edison is some sort of working machine.

On the contrary, he is very human and likes to be with people when he is not deeply

engaged in some work. He does not like formality and will very seldom attend public

dinners or anything of the kind. It is very hard to get him to go anywhere, although at one

time he liked the theater. He is an inexhaustible mine of funny stories and he could

occupy a whole afternoon, starting in at China and giving examples of story-telling in

every race and nation and dialect. That gift alone would have marked him as an

extraordinary man.

He does not see many people of the curiosity-seeking and hero-worshiping type,

because he thinks it more important to go on with his work than to chat about nothing. He

usually sees people who really have something to say or some real business.

A deal has been said about Mr. Edison's sleeping habits. He is thought to be a

man who never sleeps. It is true that he does not take a stated amount of sleep each night.

He may sleep four hours or he may sleep nine hours or again he may not sleep at all. He

regulates the amount of his sleep by his need for it.

He has found that when he is intensely interested in anything it is not necessary

for him to go to bed and take a normal amount of sleep. He will go on working until his

intelligence, as he puts it, ceases properly to function. Then he lies down wherever he is

and goes off to sleep.

He has told me that he never dreams. He can go instantly to sleep anywhere and at

any time.

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

As everyone knows, it is not the amount but the quality of sleep that counts, and

Mr. Edison probably gets all the sleep he needs. He has never spoken to me of any

reaction from loss of sleep and I doubt if he has ever had any.

On our camping trips he goes to sleep whenever he feels like it—which is

whenever he is not interested in what is going on. If visitors or the circumstances hold

nothing for him, he goes to sleep in his chair—since there is nothing else to do he feels

that he might as well be resting and storing up energy.

It is the same with his eating. He is a man of powerful frame and of great strength,

but he has never taken any systematic exercise at all because he is not in need of it, being

naturally a very active man who goes into the fresh air a great deal for a man whose work

is mostly inside. Until recently he has eaten when and what he pleased. If he goes to a

dinner, he either takes with him the food that he then fancies or he eats before leaving his

house.

As a young man he ate whatever he had the money to buy, but with the years he

has found what best suits him and to that he sticks. He both smokes and chews tobacco

but he has never used alcohol. His use of tobacco, however, has not reconciled him to the

cigarette, which he abominates. He is not alone in that attitude.

His whole life is arranged on a program of economy of effort—he dislikes doing

anything which it is not necessary for him to do. His sleeping habits grew out of a desire

to economize time. In his early laboratories he always had a clock—but it never had any

works in it! This was simply to show that the place would not be a slave to time as

measured by the clock. So his days are fixed by himself, not by the custom of the clock.

He carries the same thought into his handwriting. In this each letter is separate

and it is the result of experimenting to discover how he could write clearly and quickly

with the least effort.

"I developed this style," he said, "while taking press reports. My wire was

connected to the 'blind' side of a repeater at Cincinnati, so that if I missed a word or

sentence, or if the wire worked badly, I could not break in and get the last words, because

the Cincinnati man had no instrument by which he could hear me. I had to take what

came.

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

"When I got the job, the cable across the Ohio River at Covington, connecting

with the line to Louisville, had a variable leak in it, which caused the strength of the

signaling current to make violent fluctuations. The clatter was bad, but I could read it

with fair ease. When, in addition to this infernal leak, the wires north to Cleveland

worked badly, it required a large amount of imagination to get the sense of what was

being sent.

"An imagination requires an appreciable time for its exercise, and as the stuff was

coming at the rate of thirty-five to forty words a minute, it was very difficult to write

down what was coming and imagine what wasn't coming. Hence it was necessary to

become a very rapid writer and so I started to find the fastest style.

"I found that the vertical style, with each letter separate and without any

flourishes, was the most rapid, and that the smaller the letter the greater the rapidity. As I

took on an average from eight to fifteen columns of news report every day, it did not take

long to perfect my method."

His handwriting today is just as firm and about as fast as it was more than fifty

years ago when first he developed it.

Edison's habits are individual and worked out to suit himself and no one else. But

how about the men who worked with him and who could not conform to his habits? One

of the tests of a man was whether or not he could fit in with Edison's habits of work, and

it is remarkable how many men, keeping the work always in the foreground, have been

able not only to stay with him but so to arrange their own habits as to be able to work

long hours whenever long hours were required. For he never left his men alone to work

through the night; he was always there working with them and doing more than any two

of them. If a man needed sleep, he took it just as Edison took it. I have observed that

while a man is very much interested in a piece of work he needs little sleep. When the

interest lags, then sleep comes.

As I have said, Edison is very human. But he is not soft. He does not believe that

it helps any man to receive charity—but he will help a man to help himself. In a former

chapter I have told how young Edison pulled the baby girl of Mackenzie, the station

master, off the tracks at Mount Clemens and how in return Mackenzie taught him

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

telegraphy. Years passed and Edison became a world figure. Then one day the station

master walked into the laboratory at Menlo Park and said in effect:

"'I am old and I have lost my job and now that you have become a famous man, I

thought you might be able to do something for me. Can you give me a job or get me a

job?"

"I don't just know where there are any jobs," answered Mr. Edison, "but there is a

crowd over there in New York who will give five thousand dollars to anyone who will

invent a fire alarm in which one call box will not interfere with any other on the line.

Why don't you work that out and get the money?"

"I never invented anything," said the station master. "How could I get that

money? I suppose a lot of people are trying for it anyway."

"What difference does that make?" Mr. Edison went on. "You're a telegrapher.

You know as much about electricity as I did when I started. I know I could do this thing

if I had the time, but I am too busy with my other affairs. I will stake you and give you

the use of my laboratory. You can do the rest."

The station master, given a definite target to aim at, went to work. He devised all

the necessary apparatus and won the five thousand dollars. After that he invented a

number of other contrivances and died with a very comfortable fortune.

He stayed around the laboratory until his death, for he was good company. Edison

likes good stories and Mackenzie had an unlimited stock of jokes and stories. He also

took a part in the development of the incandescent lamp—but as a source of supply, not

as an investigator.

"Once after I had carbonized everything possible and impossible under the sun for

lamp filaments, I asked Mackenzie for a handful of his bushy red beard. We had been

trying everything and hair might just do. The beard carbonized well and when the

Edison-Mackenzie hair lamps were brought up to incandescence, they had a splendid

richness in red rays. Oddly enough, a few years later, some inventor actually took out a

patent for making incandescent lamps with carbonized hair for filaments!"

Edison has a quick sense of humor. He always finds a funny side and will

illustrate any point with a story and usually a funny one. He never gets too serious to

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

laugh, and in camp at night around the fire if he gets started on stories he will keep going

until one or two in the morning—for he never notes the passing of time.

He cannot understand a man without a sense of humor. Most of the financiers that

he dealt with in the early days were remarkable for being without any sense of humor at

all. They used him for their purposes and he used them for his purposes.

He takes people as they are and does not blame them for being what they are. He

has had the short end on some financial transactions but only because he was more

interested in getting on with something new than in staying back to make money. I doubt

if he were ever cheated because he did not know what the other fellow was doing. But he

did not care so long as his own work had been well done.

He is wonderfully tolerant—except of bad work.

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

[X] MORE THAN BOOKS WILL TEACH

To find a man who has not been benefited by Edison and who is not in debt to

him, it would be necessary to go deep into the jungle. Wherever civilization exists, there

also is Edison. I hold him to be our greatest American. Also I have purely personal

grounds for some of my feeling toward him.

He was the first man ever to help me. Thus I know from my own experience how

much he can help anyone, and it seemed that there ought to be some way not only to

preserve his memory but also—and this to me is more important—to keep the Edison

inspiration as well as the Edison work as a continuing stimulus to help others. Words will

not do this and neither will statues nor buildings.

The best way that I know to keep the influence of a man alive is to perpetuate the

scenes amidst which he lived and did his most important work. At Menlo Park, in New

Jersey, Mr. Edison invented the phonograph and his whole system of incandescent

lighting; at Fort Myers, in Florida, he perfected the phonograph record and did other

important pieces of work.

Long ago he abandoned Menlo Park, but with the help of Mr. Edison and his

friends we have reestablished Menlo Park at Dearborn, exactly like the first Menlo Park,

even to the trees and shrubs. We have moved to it whatever of the original buildings,

furniture and fittings we could discover, and where we have had to piece out with new

material, that material is exactly the same as the original.

People will be able to see the exact scene out of which came the electric light and

to realize how simply even the greatest things come into being.

We have transplanted the Fort Myers laboratory and also we have found or have

had given to us most of the more important models and drawings and other material

incidents of Mr. Edison's life. These will go into a wing of the Museum and the Edison

Institute of Technology, built to educate to scientific accomplishment and to house a

collection of Americana that has been assembled and which will eventually give a

presentation of every variety of article and implement used in the United States from

Colonial times down to the present. In another section it will have examples of every

form of transmitting motion ever used by man.

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

That, however, is something else. The point is that this entire museum and school

has been dedicated by Mr. Edison. He made his signature in a great block of solid

concrete on which also he' left his footprints as he thrust into it the favorite spade of

Luther Burbank—for Burbank is another man whose work and methods should be

preserved for the inspiration of the coming generation.

The group of buildings in construction flows out from a small central building in

the front and this building is an exact duplicate of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. For

I hold that Edison, through his work, formed a new kind of declaration of independence.

The objects preserved in this museum are steps in our progress toward economic

independence. It seemed fitting, therefore, to reproduce in these surroundings the most

significant structure in this country.

The recreation of Menlo Park has been more than interesting.

In the midst of some trouble with the landlord of his Newark laboratory—which

was only a makeshift anyway—Edison, in 1876, picked out Menlo Park for a new

laboratory—after having surveyed a number of small towns. He wanted a place where

land was cheap, where he could have all the room he needed and where he would not be

disturbed by the noises of a city. That is how Menlo Park came into being.

When Mr. Edison and I finally decided, on a similar plot at Dearborn, to

reconstruct Menlo Park, we went over the ground together with surveyors. We located

the foundations of the more substantial of the original buildings, while Edison picked out

also the spots where the frame buildings had stood. In this manner we drew a complete

set of plans with all the contours and then laid out the grounds at Dearborn precisely after

the original. We took everything but the climate.

The first and most important of the old buildings was the frame laboratory which

Edison built in 1876 and used for ten years. This had gone except for the foundation and

part of the ground floor. Some of the timber had been taken by contractors and put into

other buildings, while some had simply vanished. Edison perfectly remembered the

dimensions of his building and made a sketch for us to work with. We checked his

figures with the foundations and found them, as usual, absolutely accurate. Then we took

out the foundations brick by brick and post by post, numbered them and shipped them to

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

Dearborn. At the same time we followed up the old timber and located parts of it in three

houses. These we bought, took out the timber and then rebuilt them.

One of the old doors we found on a barber shop and the other was on a milliner's

store. We traced various chairs to various parts of the neighborhood and turned up quite a

good deal of the furniture for this and other buildings at Ocean Grove. It is odd how long

strong chairs and pieces of furniture will last and the distances that they travel.

The laboratory, as it now stands at Dearborn, is a two-and-one-half-story building

with two small offices on the first floor—for originally the offices and everything else

were in this one building. The second floor is one clear big room. Francis Jehl, who was

with Edison at this time and is one of three survivors of his assistants in the days when he

made the incandescent lamp, helped to arrange the contents of this building. He says:

"It was on the upper story of this laboratory that the most important experiments

were executed, and where the incandescent lamp was born. This floor consisted of a large

hall containing several long tables, upon which could be found all the various instruments

and scientific and chemical apparatus that the arts at that time could produce. Books lay

promiscuously about, while here and there long lines of bichromate of potash cells could

be seen, together with experimental models of ideas that Edison or his assistants were

engaged upon.

"The side walls were lined with shelves filled with bottles, phials, and other

receptacles containing every imaginable chemical and other material that could be

obtained, while at the end of this hall, and near the organ which stood in the rear, was a

large glass case containing the world's most precious metals in sheet and wire form,

together with very rare and costly chemicals. When evening came on, and the last rays of

the setting sun penetrated through the side windows, this hall looked like a veritable

Faust laboratory.

"On the ground floor we had our testing table, which stood on two large pillars of

brick built deep into the earth in order to get rid of all vibrations on account of the

sensitive instruments that were upon it. There was the Thomson reflecting mirror

galvanometer and electrometer, while near by were the standard cells by which the

galvanometers were adjusted and standardized. This testing table was connected by

means of wires with all parts of the laboratory and machine shop, so that measurements

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

ILLUSTRATION 3: THE SECOND FLOOR OF THE MENLO PARK LABORATORY

53

EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

could be conveniently made from a distance, as in those days we had no portable and

direct reading instruments, such as now exist.

"Opposite this table we installed, later on, our photometrical chamber, which was

constructed on the Bunsen principle. A little way from this table, and separated by a

partition, we had the chemical laboratory with its furnaces and stink chambers. Later on,

another chemical laboratory was installed near the photometer room."

The present building, as we have put it up, is about one-half made of the original

wood and one-half of new wood, but every detail has been exactly reproduced. The

original equipment has disappeared, for Mr. Edison never bothered with anything once he

had finished with it, but we have collected a few pieces of the originals here and there

and have managed to get duplicates of the others. Eimer & Amend of New York, who

furnished the original chemical supplies and apparatus, searched their records and have

been able to send many duplicates. The organ at one end has been exactly reproduced—

the organ on which Mr. Edison used to pick out tunes with one finger while his staff

sang.

It may be that we shall get more of the original stuff, for close by the old

laboratory was a hollow in which stood a cherry tree. Into this hole, about thirty feet in

diameter, the laboratory used to throw its junk and, although the earth had sifted over the

pile and weeds were growing, I suspected that something might be below. We put men to

work and took out twenty-six barrels of discarded paraphernalia and remains of

experiments. This yielded many finds.

It was in this building that both the phonograph and the incandescent light were

brought into the world by Edison and his hard-working crew. They managed to have a

good time as they worked—although their lives centered in the laboratory. To quote Mr.

Jehl again:

"Our lunch always ended with a cigar, and I may mention here that, although

Edison was never fastidious in eating, he always relished a good cigar, and seemed to

find in it consolation and solace. It often happened that, while we were enjoying the

cigars after our midnight supper, one of the boys would start up a tune on the organ and

we would all sing together, or one of the others would give a solo.

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

ILLUSTRATION 4: EDISON LISTENING TO THE PHONOGRAPH

55

EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

"Another of the boys had a voice that sounded like something between the ring of

an old tomato can and a pewter jug. We had one song that he would sing while we roared

with laughter. He was also great in imitating the tin-foil phonograph. When Boehm was

in good humor he would play his zither now and then, and amuse us by singing pretty

German songs.

"On many of these occasions the laboratory was the rendezvous of jolly and

convivial visitors, mostly old friends and acquaintances of Mr. Edison. Some of the office

employees would also drop in once in a while, and as everybody present was always

welcome for the midnight meal, we all enjoyed these gatherings. After a while, when we

were ready to resume work, our visitors would intimate that they were going home to

bed, but we fellows could stay up and work, and they would depart, generally singing

some song like 'Good Night, Ladies.'

"It often happened that when Edison had been working up to three or four o'clock

in the morning, he would lie down on one of the laboratory tables, and with nothing but a

couple of books for a pillow, would fall into a sound sleep. He said it did him more good

than being in a soft bed-that a bed spoils a man.

"Some of the laboratory assistants could be seen now and then sleeping on a table

in the early morning hours. If their snoring became objectionable to those still at work,

the 'calmer' was applied. This machine consisted of a Babbitt's Soap box without a cover.

Upon it was mounted a broad ratchet wheel with a crank, while into the teeth of the wheel

there played a stout, elastic slab of wood. The box would be placed on the table where the

snorer was sleeping and the crank turned rapidly.

"The racket thus produced was something terrible, and the sleeper would jump up

as though a typhoon had struck the laboratory. The irrepressible spirit of humor in the old

days, although somewhat strenuous at times, caused many a moment of hilarity, which

seemed to refresh the boys, and sent them on with their work with renewed vigor."

Two years after building the laboratory, Mr. Edison had to have a machine shop

for the development of his dynamo and other machinery incident to the introduction of

his lighting system. He put up a substantial single-story brick structure and later built an

addition on one end to serve as a power house. In this building the first Edison dynamo

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

was made under the direction of John Kruesi—the man who also made the first

phonograph—and in the added room were placed eight of these dynamos and an exciter.

This was the first Edison central station in the world, and from this station he

lighted the little town for exhibition purposes. The first commercial station was the one

on Pearl Street in New York which has been noted in a previous chapter.

We found a good part of the machine shop intact at Menlo Park and managed to

recover most of the bricks that had been taken away. It was not difficult to identify the

bricks-although they had gone into several other buildings. Our new machine shop, in so

far as the walls and foundations are concerned, is original. We had to put on a new roof.

We have had no luck at all in discovering any of the original machinery except

the boiler; that we found and restored. The steam engine, the dynamos and all the

machinery have gone, but we found the makers of the machinery and the steam engine

and they have furnished duplicates. Mr. Edison still had the plan of the dynamos and we

built new ones according to the old specifications.

All of this machinery is in working order and this power plant furnishes the

electric light for the new village just as it did for the old and with wires and fittings

exactly duplicating the original. We even have several of the old poles and some of the

original fittings. We are able to show everyone just how the first village ever to be lighted

with the incandescent light looked when the current was switched on. That teaches more

than books will teach.

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

[XI] EDISON WILL LIVE

The next most important building is also of brick and, although it is new, we

made it of brick exactly like that used in the original. This was the only show place on the

grounds and was erected in 1878 as a show place—as an office and library. It had to be a

show place because it was here that the capitalists who came to see the light and other

inventions were received.

Everything in this building is new, for nothing at all remains of the old building

except one shutter. Although officially it was Mr. Edison's office, he did not spend much

time there. His place was in the laboratory and Mr. Samuel Insull, who was then assisting

Mr. Edison, has written this description of the conduct of the office and laboratory:

"I never attempted to systematize Edison's business life. His method of work

would upset the system of any office. He was just as likely to be at work in his laboratory

at midnight as at midday. He cared not for the hours of the day or the days of the week. If

he were exhausted he might more likely be asleep in the middle of the day than in the

middle of the night, as most of his work in the way of inventions was done at night. I

used to run his office on as close to business methods as my experience admitted; and I

would get at him whenever it suited his convenience.

"Sometimes he would not go over his mail for days at a time; but other times he

would go regularly to his office in the morning. At other times my engagements used to

be with him to go over his business affairs at Menlo Park at night, if I were occupied in

New York during the day.

"In fact, as a matter of convenience I used more often to get at him at night, as it

left my days free to transact his affairs, and enabled me, probably at a midnight luncheon,

to get a few minutes of his time to look over his correspondence and get his directions as

to what I should do in some particular negotiation or matter of finance. While it was a

matter of suiting Edison's convenience as to when I should transact business with him, it

also suited my own ideas, as it enabled me after getting through my business with him to

enjoy the privilege of watching him at his work, and to learn something about the

technical side of matters.

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"Whatever knowledge I may have of the electric-light and power industry I owe

to the tuition of Edison. He was about the most willing tutor, and I must confess that he

had to be a patient one."

Between the machine shop and the laboratory stood a small wooden building used

as a carpenter shop, and near by was the gasoline plant. Before he brought out the

incandescent lamp, the only illumination came from gasoline gas. This was used later for

heating in the little glassblowing plant for making bulbs—another little wooden building

near the laboratory.

The carpenter shop and the gas house had entirely disappeared, but we managed

to build them over again and also found a complete equipment. The glass plant we have.

It was a frame one-story affair, ten by twenty-seven feet, with a small loft.

It was originally built as a photographic studio, but when Edison had so much

trouble in getting bulbs blown for his first lights he turned this into a glass house and here

one Boehm not only blew bulbs by day and by night but also in his odd moments crept up

into the loft to sleep. He literally lived with his work. When neither working nor sleeping,

he is reported to have been either yodeling or playing the zither—the zither that Mr. Jehl

mentions.

The General Electric Company had this building at their works in Parsippanyhaving

removed it from Menlo Park. And they presented it to us. We have found some of

the original equipment and have duplicated the rest. We have had bulbs actually blown

here by an experienced glass blower using the same sort of equipment that was then used.

Edison had great trouble in finding pure carbon and we have erected a duplicate

of a small building in which lampblack was crudely but carefully manufactured and

pressed into very small cakes, for use in the Edison carbon transmitters of that time. The

night watchman, Alfred Swanson, took care of this curious plant, which consisted of a

battery of petroleum lamps that were forced to burn to the sooting point. Every so often

during the night he would scrape the soot from the chimneys. It was then weighed out

into very small portions, which were pressed into cakes or buttons with a hand press and

shipped to the makers of the telephone transmitters.

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

We have completely reproduced this whole outfit to show the obstacles which the

pioneers had to meet in getting materials. Near by Mr. Edison had an experimental

electric railroad, but this we are not reproducing.

The group would not be complete without one essential building, which did not,

however, belong to Mr. Edison, and that is Sally Jordan's boarding house where the

assistants lived and slept—when they could get away from the laboratory. This was the

first house to be lighted by the incandescent lights.

It is a duplex house and, in all, it contains thirteen rooms and we were fortunate

indeed to find the house standing and well preserved.

We took it down bit by bit—even to the bricks of the chimneys—and the present

house at Dearborn has in it hardly a nail that was not in the old house. We found a good

portion of the original furniture and have reproduced most of the rooms as they originally

were, with the exception of one room and in that I have put some of the furniture from

Mr. Edison's birthplace at Milan, Ohio.

Thus the whole group is complete in every detail—inside and out. And anyone

who wishes will be able to see the surroundings, the tools and even to feel something of

the atmosphere of this place of mighty endeavor. For from out of these buildings came

the carbon transmitter, the phonograph, the incandescent lamp, and the Edison system of

electrical distribution, the commercial dynamo, the electric railway, the megaphone, the

tasimeter, and many other inventions. Here also was continued Edison's earlier work on

the quadruplex, sextuplex, multiplex and automatic telegraphs, and here also he did his

pioneering in wireless telegraphy.

The Fort Myers laboratory does not belong in this group, but in order to have

everything in one spot Mr. Edison turned it over to me in 1928 and I brought it up from

Florida and had it put together again. The building which we have is the original. It was

built in Florida in 1884 by Mr. Edison's father, out of wood cut in Maine. In a way it was

then a portable building, for most of the actual work was done in the north and the parts

were fitted in Florida. Thus reconstructing it was not a difficult task.

It is a single-story affair with a small office at one end. The large room was both

machine shop and laboratory. Around the walls are bottles and chemicals of all kinds and

down the center of the room runs a line of light machinery—two high-speed lathes, a

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EDISON AS I KNOW HIM

screw-cutting machine, a milling machine, a drill press, a grinder and a shaper. All of

these are originals and also we have the original boiler and engine.

In the office we have a low walnut table such as telegraphers used long ago which

I picked up in a railway station at Fraser, Michigan. It may be the same table on which

Edison learned telegraphy. That he does not know, but he does know that he learned on a

table exactly like it. It was in this building that Mr. Edison finally managed to achieve a

phonograph record with the proper "s" sound and here also he began many lines of

investigation which he completed in the northern laboratories.

We have gone somewhat further in the reconstruction of Mr. Edison's life. Some

time ago we bought the railroad station at Smith's Creek on the Grand Trunk Railroad.

This station was built in 1858-59 and it is historic because it was at this very station that

young Edison was dumped off the train with his first little laboratory. The station has

been re-erected on the grounds and, to carry out the whole picture on the occasion of the

jubilee of Mr. Edison's great invention, we obtained an old locomotive such as was used

on the trains that Edison served as a newsboy, and also we found and reconstructed some

of the old passenger cars of the time, including one in which we are exactly recreating his

boyhood train laboratory.

We have throughout this work run down every detail with Mr. Edison and his

associates and I believe that the reproduction is exact. It must be exact, for if this is to be

a recreation of the old scenes then there can be no compromise with accuracy. I want the

imaginations of those who see history thus concretely presented to start with the thing

itself and not to be wasted trying to supply missing parts of the scene.

And if the exhibition teaches only a few boys and girls something of the spirit

which made this country, then the labor will not have been in vain. The American spirit

of endeavor as represented in its fullness by Thomas Alva Edison is the real wealth of the

nation.

THE END