EDISON'S SHIRT.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXIII, Issue 9093, 12 March 1908, Page 7

EDISON'S SHIRT.

One of the liveliest stories in Mr F. A. Jones 1 biography of Edison is concerned with an everlasting shirt. American .iourualists are not always scrupulously exact, and when interviewers have failed to get some good copy out of the inventor they have manufactured some of their own. This was the origin of the shirt story. A newspaper man who had been disappointed of an interveiw with Edison went back to his hotel and wrote np a bogus interview, in which he credited the scientist with the production of a new shirt, designed to last the wearer for a year or longer. The front of shirt, he declared, was made up of three hundred and sixty-five very thin layers of a certain fibrous material —the composition of which was known only to the inventor —and each morning when the wearer put the garment on, all that he hud to do to restore the front to"its pristine spotlessness was to tear oli one of the layers. Thus he would have practically a new shirt. The news, paper man even declared that Edison himself wore one of these shirts, and that he regarded the invention as the biggest thing he iiad yet accomplished. Of course, the story went all over America. Then, in Edison’s words, “everyone seemed to hanker after possessing one of these shirts, and I soon began to receive requests for supplies varying from one to a hundred dozens from all parts of the country. At first I gave orders that a letter should be sent to these would-be buyers of the “Edison shirt’’, informing them that the story was untrue, and that I hadn’t tried my hand at patent clothing yet, but the letters continued to come in such numbers that this soon became impossible. Many of the writers enclosed drafts and cheques, and these, of course, had to he returned.” The story spread from China to Peru, and for a year orders for the “Edison Patent Shirt” poured in from all parts of the world, until the public realised at length that they had been hoaxed. It seems a pity that the story cannot be rounded oil with the observation that Edison took the hint, filled the orders and became a multimillionaire. Apparently, he was too angry on this occasion to see the business possibilities of the incident.