EDISON HONOURED

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 852, 21 December 1929, Page 35

EDISON HONOURED

ELECTRIC LIGHT JUBILEE SCENES IN OLD VILLAGE A pleasant-faced gentleman, old and very deaf, sat in a straight-backed wooden chair as old as himself, In a room of an old wooden house, struggling; hard to keep back his tears ethe gazed In smiling wonder about him at objects and scenes which had been familiar to him in his early manhood. This was Thomas Alva Edison, the ; great inventor, who was a visitor in the very laboratory in which his genius evolved the electric light which 50 years ago was demonstrated to the world for the first time at Menio Park, New Jersey. Mr. Edison was a visitor at Dearborn, Michigan, because the old room which was his laboratory is no longer in New Jersey." It has been moved bodily to Henry Ford’s reconstruction of “an early village,” which the famous motor-car manufacturer has set up on his great estate at Dearborn. Transplanted with the old-time building from Menlo Park, are even the antique boarding-house which 50 years | ago stood near Edison’s laboratory, I and even an ancient tree trunk, with ] its native soil, brought away in many great railway cars. That old wooden chair, on which in his youth Edison had had scant leisure to rest, was, so to speak, a throne to the foot of which a whole world brought its tributes to the inventor, to whom it owes not only the electric light, but many every-day comforts without which civilisation would still be in a comparatively dark age. In Henry Ford’s “early village” are many “period dwellings” brought there from sites which they occupied long ago iu the United States and foreign lands. Silently the venerable Mr. Edison meditated on the wonder of it all, with a far-away look in the eyes dimmed only by a temporary mist. The aged philosopher held back his tears —for he is bright despite his 82 years—while his hosts stood apart in silence, leaving him for a space with his thoughts. But elsewhere an imposing company was assembling to do him honour. j Among them came President Hoover and other eminent Americans, some of them venerable men who had been co-workers with Edison in his youth. There were a dozen men and women who were Thomas Alva Edison’s playmates when he was a boy. Messages came to the inventor from rulers of nations and from the world’s great scientists. Professor Einstein paid his tribute, viva voce, over the radio from Berlin. Dearborn ceremonies themselves — at least the oral part of them —-were sent; out to be heard in all parts of the earth, borne on short, medium, and long radio waves, and on thousands of land wires linked up with 100 broadcasting stations in the United States. This is the largest network ever connected. While this celebration went on Edison’s name was given to avenues and streets at other ceremonies in Central and South American countries, all delighting to honour themselves in honouring one of humanity’s greatest benefactors.