SIXTY YEARS OF AN INVENTOR'S LIFE.

Otago Witness, Issue 2808, 8 January 1908, Page 79

SIXTY YEARS OF AN INVENTOR'S LIFE.

ANECDOTES JJfD- STORIES ABOUT ;..* .?p.. EDIjSON. i T .. , . '/,s;ffcihais_been estimated that if .everything ; tbafchas even been written and published ! about Thomas Alva Edison were collected and republished in book form , if would makeOa'j library of a thousand volume. But there is always room for" anothei lwok<.abotit Mr Edison if it is goocl/an^ tfie fewest, "Thomas Alya Edison,: Six;ts Ye'aSk'of an Inventor's die," by Mr F. A. Jones, is perhaps, one., of the best. v ,'lfc;iBilgr.,n.o means an exhaustive 1 'Life,'* Bu|^3^>li§ striking facts of Mr Edison's wonderful* career are put before us with a wealth/'xif anecdote and % conscientious striving after reality not easy of achievement in this case, where so many apocryphal stories had crept. -into being, and must be recognised and scotched before th« author could give us a faithful presentment of the man. as he is. It is' a fascinating book, and will, no doubt, be very succesjThomas Edison -was born ia 1847 it Milan, Ohio, whither his father had fled nine years previously after taking part in the.Papineau rebellion in Canada. The elder Edison wa6 a- Canadian, a substantial man, owning land which he had received .fromi-fhe Government as ,a gift, but as a result pi, his political errors his land was forfeited, and, to save himself from arrest, 1 lie walked 182 miles without" sleep, show-

fng powers of endurance which his son inherited. Edieoii was not jonsidered a "bright" boy, but lie had ideas of his own, and at 11 year* old he won his mother over to hia suggestion that h« should gc to work to assist th« family exchequer. H« "possessed opinions then very s'-mi-ku- W I,ho*» he holde, today — tliat it does tot matter what you do so long as th* york 1* hone** mm! btiagi in casn. And.

therefore, he decided that for the time being he might do worse than sell newspapers." — Set the Mail Train on Fire. — He applied for and obtained the privilege of selling newspapers and candies on the trains of the Grand Turk railway between Port Huron and Detroit. On the mail train, near the precious mails, was an unused compartment, which the boy soon ' fitted un us a private printing office and

chemical laboratory, and on Saturday he obtained the help -of a friend to sell the papers and the candies while he experimented in his laboratory and printed his own paper, the Weekly Herald, out of which this enterpidsing lad of 15 made a clear profit of somethinig like £9 a month. But that was not to last. One day Edison's ' helper, young- Maisonville, was busily engaged in" the frojil car selling papers and candies, while Edison was in the baggage van, engaged in one of his many experiments, when the train ran over a 'bit of rough 'foad ; there was a heavy lurch, and a, bottle of phosphorus fell to the floor of the car and burst into . flame. The woodwork caught fire, and Edison was finding considerable difficulty in stemming the progress of the fire when Alexander Stevenson, the conductor, made his appearance.

"Stevenson wa.= a Scotchman, an elderly man, with iron-grey hair, a rubicund face, and an accent that would have been strong even in the heart -of Midlothian. Moreover, he had a temper which may best bo described as 'hasty.' He didn't waste any time talking while the fire was in progress-, but quickly-"* fetching some buckets of wateT soon had the flames extinguished. Then he let out a flood of eloquence which sounded like a chapter from a Scott novel, and when the train arrived a few minutes later at Mount Clemens station he .pitched the young inventor -on to the t)lattorm, and hurled aner him the type and printing press, the telegraph apparatus, the bottles of chemicals, and, in fact, the entire contente of the laboratory. Then he signalled the train to proceed, and left the future inventor forlornly standing among the ruins of h;s most cherished possessions." Later on, with a friend, Edison started another little sheet, "Paul Pry," which came to an end when a local personage was so annoyed at a certain "personal" reflecting somewhat upon himself that on meeting Edison he -wasted no time telling him what h© thought of his paper, but, seizing him by the coat collar and a certain baggy portion of his pants, threw him into ..the canal.

While a newsboy on the railroad, Edison became interested in electricity, and as a reward for saving a little child's life was taught by an expert telegraphist how to become »n operator.

He obtained_ a post as night operator at a local station, and in -the day pursued scientific- investigation in a little workshop at home. Naturally, at night he was tired, slept on "duty, and was nearly reported. He would not give up his day work, however, and wanting to keep his post at night invented a little instrument which every half-hour automatically sent a signal to the train despatcher, who had agreed not to report the lad if he sent this signal and thus proved that he was awake. The instrument worked wonderfully, and Edison went to sleep, being awakened whenever a train was due by his alarm clock.

One night, however, the train despatcher took it into his head to walk down to Edison's office, where he examined the ingenious little instrument while the boy slept. Then he "igot - busy," and, arousing him with no gentle hands, declared that he was done with him, and the same day t-he Port Huron operator was looking for another job.

— Nearly in Prison. —

"From Port Huron Edison went to Sarnia, where he remained some months as telegraph operator at the railroad station. And here again he got into a scrape which might have landed him in the State prison. While experimenting, he allowed a train to pass by his station when he should have stopped it, as there was another train immediately ahead. ' The instant it had flashed by Edison realised the seriousness of the affair, and, in a fever, ran down the line, shouting as he went, and fervently praying that he might be in time to avert an accident. This, of course, was an insane hope, and a terrible calamity would have occurred had not the en,gine-drivers heard each other's whistles in time to realise their danger an dthus prevent a rear-end collision. Edison was so relieved at the outcome of his carelessness that when he was summoned before the manager of the line he was almost light-hearted. But when he learned that there was a probability of his being prosecuted for his neglect of duty he packed his belongings' and returned to Port Huron."

JNot long afterwards he perfected his first invention, a vote-recording machine which could not be "manipulated." It was carefully examined at Washington by the chairman of committees, who said,

"Young man, it works all right and couldn't be better. With an instrument like that it would be difficult to monkey with the vote if you wanted to. But it won't do. In fact, it's the last thing on earth that we want here. Filibustering and delay in the counting of the votes are often the only means we have for defeating bad legislation. So though I admire your genius and the spirit which prompted you to invent so excellent a machine, we shan't require it here. Take the thing away."

—"It Was Good After All.—

Disappointed, he went home and made some gun-cotton from his own formula. "He had been working; for weeks on something," says an office friend, "but we never ventured to ask him what it was. He would not have told us if we had. One day I heard him say, 'I don't think it's any good,' and he laid something in a metal case and put it on the mantel, back of the stove. It lay there for weeks until they started a fire, and then there was an explosion which blew the front of the stove out. We all rushed from the room, Edison leading the bunch, and all he said was : 'Well, it was good after all.' So I suppose the cause of the explosion was his home-made gun-cotton."

His first success as an inventor came in connection with improvements in the "tickers" that are now co familiar a feature in stockbrokers' offices. Fot these improvements he obtained £8000. For the now familiar quadrujplex, which

f doubled the capacity of a single telegraph wire and made possible the simultaneous transmission, of two messages each way, Edison received £6000, the whole of which he lost ir> trying to invent a wire which would carry six messages. From telegraphy he turned to the telephone, inventing the' carbon transmitter — "a device which made telephony practical," and without which Alexander Bell's invention was useless. "Bell wanted the transmitter, but for a long time Edison ' would not sell. Of Alexander Bell »ye are told that when in great need) of money he offered a tenth interest in his invention to an official in the Patent Office for £20, which was refused. In fifteen years that tenth interest was worth £300,000. Considerable speculation has been indvlged in as to the origin of the expression " Hello '" as applied to telephonic conversation. Mr F. P. Fish, president of the Ameiacan Telephone Company, gives the credit to Edison. " Years ago," says Mr Fish, " when the telephone first came into use people were accustomed to rang a- bell and tihen say ponderously, you there?' 'Are you ready to talk?' Well, "Mr Edison did away with that awkward un-American way of doing things. Ho caught up a receiver one day and yelled into the transmitter one word — a. most satisfactory, capable, soul-satisfy-ing word — ' Hello !' It has gone clean around the world. The Japs use it ; " it is heard in Turkey ; Russia could not do without it, and neither could Patagonia." — The Wizard and bhe Star. — The story of bis electric light patents is. perhaps, the most thrilling in the book. Mr Edison spent nearly £20^000 in the search for a suitable filament. , *. " While he was still experimenting, and scon after he had given the exhibition of his first electric lamps, considerable excitement was caused by a report that what everyone thought was the evening star was really an electric lamp which Edison had sent up attached to an invisible balloon. •" It seems almost incredible, .but by thousands of people the story was believed, and for many nights within a radius of 100 miles faces were turned upward to gaze on the mysterious light. After a time people in other States declared that bhey also could see the wonderful sight. " The newspapers were inundated with letters asking for information as. to how the light was really suspended, and what Mr Edison's object was in sending it up such a 'height. When the papers assured thf public that the wonderful light was nothing but the evening star, at least half the people diid not believe it, and for years afterwards the subject would be revived from time to time by tihe publication of letters in the local press." The first phonograph was made in 30 hours, without rest and with but very little food, by a machanic in the Edison laboratory, to whom Edison had shown a rough sketch of the proposed 1 machine soon after the idea had been worked out. Edison was not slow to have his joke by means of the machine he invented. He hid one of the early phonographs in a guest's room : ; " Just as his friendi was about to get into bed a sepulchral voice exclaimed, ' Eleven o'clock — one hour more !' The visitor sat up for some time in anything but a peaceful frame of mind, but as nothing further happened he composed his nerves and lay down again. But sleep refused to visit his eyelids. i '" He lay awake wondering what the end of the hour was to bring when the midnight chime sounded, and a second voice, dieeper and more sepulchral than the first, ' groaned out, ' Twelve o'clock ; prepare to ! die !' . | '" This was a little too much for the astonished guest, who leaped out of bed, opened the door, and dashed on to the landing, where he was confronted by the inventor, who was holding his sides with ; suppressed laughter." — An Everlasting Shirt. — Following the phonograph came the " Kinetoscope," or moving picture ma- 1 cmne, the magnetic ore separator, and other appliances, but not everything credited to the " Wizard of Orange" has had an actual existence. j '■ It was, for instance, said ,of me in , an American newspaper," says Mr Edison, J '■ that I was shortly bringing out a new and very ingenious shirt which would last , the ordinary man 12 months or longer if he were economical. The front of the shirt was made up of 365 very thin layers j of a certain fibrous material—the composi- | lion of which was known only to the in- j ventor — and each morning that the wearer ! put the garment on, all he had to do to , restore the front to its usual pristine spot- ' lessness was to tear off one of the layers, when he would have practically a new shirt. I " The writer declared that I myself wore , these shirts, and fchat I considered the ' invention the biggest thing I had) yet ac- j complished. Well, the story was pub- , lished in about 500 papers in the States, • and bhe queer part was that so many of the readers believed the statements to ' be true. Everyone seemed to hanker , after possessing one of these shirts, and s I soon began to receive requests for sup- j plies varying from one to 100 dozen from aU parts of the country. Many of the j writers enclosed drafts and cheques, and ; these, of course, had to be returned. Then the story got into the papers of other , countries, and every race of people, from Chinamen to South Africans, all seemedi desirous of getting some of these shirts. Did I want any agents to push the goods? For more than a year orders for the ' Edi- ' son Patent Shirts' poured in, until at last ' the public began to realise that it had been hoaxed and turned its attention to , something else." j Regarding later inventions, we are told in this book that Mr Edison has at last perfected the wonderful storage battery tor motor-care, and ha 6 now laid) aside his work is a commercial inventor, andi is

devoting all his time to what he considers the greatest problem of all — the generation of electricity direct from coal. What of the personal characteristics of this man who has done so much useful work for the world? He can stall .work for 30 hours or. more "without sleep and never suffers from insomnia-.-" v Speaking of sleep .recall s^an interesting story which Mr Edison is iond of relating about a man * ifiio' balled * upon him once asking for work, and in the course of conversation stated that h«*Vas a martyr to insomnia. „ Edison ' »vas- delighted to hear it, and told his visitor that he was just the man he had oeen looking for. As he didn't require any sleep he would be able to work all the longer, and might get busy right away. — His Cure for Insomnia. — " ' So,' says Edison, ' I put him to work on a mercury pump, and kept him at ib night and day. At the end of 60 hours I left him for half an hour, and .vhen I returned there he was, the, pump all broken to pieces, and the man fast asleep on the ruins. He never had an attack of sleeplessness after that.' " Edison- never wears an overcoat, for the simple reason- that it fails lamentably to ' keep out the cold. Much belter, he says, to turn one's attention to the underclothing. This, if properly made, will stick , to the skin and defy" the elements. If it is unreasonably cold Edison will wear a double, set of under-garments, and if a death-dealing blizzard sets in he may put on a third, but he never gives in to the overcoat. "He has strong opinions regarding • diet. He firmly believes that half the ills to which flesh is heir are due to incorrect and excessive eating. He himself is very abstemious, and often dioes not consume a pound of food during the djay. "He believes in change, of food, and declares that Nature requires it, and go when he has been eating meat for any length of time and begins to feel a .little, run down, he turns vegetarian." With regard to smoking, he has never felt any ill effects from the habit, though; at one time he consumed each day 20 of the strongest cigars he could obtain.^