NOT TOO OLD AT 80!

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 4, 26 March 1927, Page 17 (Supplement)

NOT TOO OLD AT 80!

Edison Works While the Great World Sleeps

Sitting in New York with electric lights making the room’s night like day and flashing from great signs upon the street outside along which trolleys roar, with the telephone buzzing on the desk, with the receiver of an Ediphone dictating machine held in one hand and a storage battery radio at home, one must think Thomas Alva Edison less as an individual than as an institution—something to be regarded with a certain awe and reverence, as one regards the big trees of California, the Pyramids or Niagara Falls. As a human being, when one is not actually in his company, he seems remote, like Washington. Sitting face to face with him in his laboratory, out at Orange, N.J., one cannot possibly regard him in any of these aspects. There he is a man—the thinker, the energiser—but still a utau, kindly, friendly, utterly unselfish, because he is completely selfforgetful. Edison at 80! Had he failed to produce any of his Sreai inventions he still would be a Personality, because of his astonishes and apparently involuntary Power to stimulate general thought. Untutored in the present lingo of so-called higher education, he has learned life from his own intuitions a od experiences, from newspapers a ud an incredible number of worthwhile books, and from observation of bis fellow-men. “ H you can’t think a thing out yourself.” be said once, in effect, “ get as other people as you can to thinkiug on the subject. Somebody may find some facts that have eluded you a ud through them come to the solution. Who thinks a matter out is of n ° importance whatsoever. The important thing is that the problem should be solved. A study of Mr. Edison’s career indicates that usually he has been curiously practical—up to a point. He admits that he has “ not been more than fair at business.” In fact, if he had been really a good business man he would be to-day one of the richest bien in th«? world, for he has produced toore ideas from which large profit has been made than any other living man. A PARTIAL LIST The whole list would be too long to give here. Quadruplex telegraphy,

an Edison invention, made many mes- | sages go where only one had gone i before. The telephone could not have 1 revolutionised the world without his i carbon transmitter. The service of the phonograph has been and still is incalculable; it has entertained the world, and as the dictating machine it has simplified and lightened the business day for thousands. Then there is the alkaline storage battery —what has it done for motor-cars, for radio, for a thousand other things? Above all, there is the comprehensive system of electric light, heat and power spread over the whole world. This last Mr. Edison recognises as his j most useful achievement.

“ People are valueless unless they are wide awake a good part of the time, and if they do not have good light they cannot, speaking generally, stay wide awake.” he has said. “ Too much sleep, physical or mental, is bad for the human being. •' Too much physical sleep is sheer ! stupidity. What’s the use of lying i comatose until you have to, in the grave? The man who lets his brain | and body sleep too much won’t be wide ■ awake in either phase at all. It’s the number of hours a man is really I awake that counts. LET THERE BE LIGHT “Electric lights. I think, have helped 1 to keep the world awake, both

physically and mentally. I hope so.” Recently a controversy arose as to how much Edison sleeps. Of course it does not really matter, but his associates for fifty years testify that he regularly has worked two daily shifts, and it is of record that he spent five days and nights continuously on the job with no sleep whatever when he was perfecting his wax-cylinder type of phonograph in the summer of 1888. Four or five hours in twenty-four has been his lifelong habit until the last few years. On a European trip Mr. Edison went through Switzerland. At the time the great hydro-electric plants were beginning to fasten themselves upon the Alpine slopes all over the little Swiss Republic. “Gives them light,” he commented. Edison hates sleep. He learned to hate it while ne was a boy. Every day it interrupted him! But it was Huisou who invented the basic device, the motion-picture camera, by means of which motion pictures could be made with one lens and from a single point of view on a continuous film. This camera was the vehicle for the use of motion-picture film as it is used to-day. The projecting machine is, primarily, simply this camera reversed, with a few details added. Thus Edison founded the motion-picture industry. He expects the motion-picture camera and projector eventually to be class-room adjuncts in each school, from the kindergarten grades to the highest technical courses. That films even now are being effectively used in connection with instruction in surgery and many other specialties is to him a source of lively satisfaction.