(Born 1847)
[Illustration: Thomas Alva Edison.]
As someone has called Leonardo da Vinci "the great Italian Yankee,"
because of his multifarious and ingenious suggestions in the world
of material things, so our own Edison may be called "the Yankee
Leonardo," for, with a curiosity ranging over the whole world of
nature, equal to that of the Italian, and with a fecundity of
invention no less bewildering, he unites, like Leonardo, an
imaginative and poetical vein that lifts his devices into the domain
of Art.
Yet Edison is in no respect a graceful or romantic figure such as
Leonardo was. He reminds us rather, by the weird and cosmic nature
of his speculations and inventions, of some one of the beings
created by the Norse mythologists: a nineteenth century gnome,
rough, shaggy, uncouth, wholly absorbed in his search among the
secrets of nature, and, while working always for the good of
mankind, dwelling in a world apart, and with neither time nor
inclination to mix in human affairs.
Thomas Alva Edison was born at Milan, Erie County, O., February 11,
1847. He started in life hampered by poverty, by want of teaching
and training, without friends outside his own home circle to
encourage him in pushing his fortunes, and with small opportunity,
in the little village where his lot had been cast, for bettering his
condition. On his father's side he came of sturdy Dutch stock: the
old man, who was still living in 1879 at the age of seventy-four,
reckoned among his immediate ancestors one who lived to be one
hundred and two years old, and another who reached one hundred and
three. He would appear to have been, like pioneers in general,
ready, if not obliged, to turn his hand to any employment that might
yield a living, that must be scanty at the best; and we read of him
as in turn a tailor, a nurseryman, a dealer, first in grain and then
in lumber, and an agent for the sale of farm-lands. He seems to have
been unable to do much for his boy beyond teaching him to read and
write, stimulating his taste for reading by paying him small sums of
money for every book he read through; he had no need to insist that
the reading should be done thoroughly, for it was the boy's way to
do thoroughly everything he undertook. His mother, also, helped
Thomas in learning: she was of Scotch extraction; but, though her
parents were from the old country, she herself was born in
Massachusetts, where for a time she had been a school-teacher. This,
then, with the exception of two months at the village school, was
the limit of young Edison's education--to use the conventional
term. The world was now to take him in hand, and show what it could
do with material so unpromising.
Before he was twelve years old, the boy had found a place as newsboy
on the Grand Trunk Line running to Detroit. In the intervals between
his raids upon the helpless passengers with his newspapers,
periodicals, novels, and candies, he kept up the habit of reading,
and by practice acquired a remarkably clear and finished
handwriting. His next step was to secure the sole right of selling
newspapers on the train, and he soon had four boys under him to
assist him in the work. Having then bought a lot of old type from
some printing-office, he rigged up a rude frame in one of the
baggage-cars that served as a lumber-room, and then proceeded to set
up and print a newspaper which he called the _Grand Trunk Herald_,
and sold with the other newspapers. As he had no press, he was
obliged to take off the impressions by rubbing the paper on the
inked type with his hands. In some way, a copy of this newspaper
found its way to the _London Times_, and the editor spoke of it as
the only newspaper in the world printed on a moving train. During
the fighting at Pittsburgh Landing in 1862, Edison printed off
abstracts of the telegraphic news, and posted them up at the small
country stations, thus rendering a great service to the people
anxiously waiting for news from the field. The terminus of his train
was Detroit, and here, for the first time, he had access to a
library. In his enthusiasm at finding himself in virtual possession
of such a treasure, he determined, then and there, to read the whole
library through, as it stood, using his time between trains.
Beginning at one shelf he read fifteen feet in a line, going through
each book solidly from cover to cover. In this first bout, among
other books, he read Newton's "Principia," Ure's "Scientific
Dictionary," and Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy."
All this time, by hints and suggestions, Nature had been pushing the
youth toward the field he was finally to occupy almost by right of
eminent domain. As yet, telegraphy was in its infancy, and the
powers of electricity only beginning to be known. Edison had from
the first been interested in the workings of the telegraph line
along the railroad, and had made some experiments with a rude line
of his own, connecting his father's home at Port Huron--a village to
which the family had some time before removed from Milan--with the
house of a neighbor. To do this, he had to make a battery out of
odds and ends, old bottles, stove-pipe wire, and nails made out of
zinc contributed by his youthful friends, who in their zeal cut
pieces out of the zinc mats under their mothers' stoves. He had no
one to teach him telegraphy, but an accident--if accidents there
be--was unexpectedly to put him in the way of learning its secrets.
The child of the station-master was in danger from a moving train;
young Edison snatched it up and saved its life at the risk of his
own, and the grateful father rewarded him by teaching him what he
knew of telegraphy.
Armed with this rudimentary knowledge, and with what, in addition, he
had learned by practice, Edison passed the next few years of his life
in moving about over the country, seeking employment less, it would
appear, for the sake of employment than for the opportunity of
increasing his practical knowledge of the art that was to swallow up,
in his mind, all the other arts. But he seems to have succeeded almost
in spite of himself. He was so eager in his chase after knowledge that
he was continually tripping himself up. While still at his trade of
newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railroad, he had come across, at Detroit
probably, a copy of Fresenius' "Qualitative Analysis" and had become
so much interested in chemistry, that alongside his printing-press he
had fitted up a small laboratory with a chance-medley apparatus for
experiments, and one day a bottle of phosphorus was upset, and the car
taking fire was only saved by the energy of the conductor, who
promptly pitched the whole apparatus, with the printing-press to boot,
out at the door, and then gave the young Fresenius-Franklin a
thrashing. Later we hear of him, in the course of his wanderings, set
to watch a telegraph-machine in the absence of the operator, and to
prove that he was on guard he was to send the word six over the line
every half-hour. Not to be interrupted in the book he was reading, he
contrived a device that did the work automatically. In another office
he kept back messages while he was contriving a way to send them more
quickly! Disappearing from this office, he appears again in another,
this time in Memphis, Tenn. But his interest in solving the problem of
duplicate transmission proved so absorbing that he continually
neglected his duties, and on the occasion of a change of officers he
was dismissed as a useless member of the staff. At Louisville he
upsets a carboy of sulphuric acid which ruins the handsome furniture
of a broker's office on the floor below, and again finds himself
adrift in an unappreciative world. Yet he had proved himself, in spite
of all drawbacks, an adept of uncommon skill in telegraphy; and so
widespread in scientific circles was his reputation, that he was sent
for to Boston to take charge of the main New York wire. The impression
made by the records of his life at this time is, that he looked upon
all these employments merely as so many opportunities for earning his
bread while pursuing his beloved experiments, and that the
bread-earning was the least important part of the affair. No doubt, he
always meant to do his duty, but the ecstasy of invention and the
thirst for discovery carried him out of himself and made him often
oblivious of sublunary things. While in Boston he still kept up his
experiments and perfected his duplex telegraph, but it was not brought
into successful operation until 1872.
In 1871 he came to New York, and having attracted the attention of
the Stock Exchange by some ingenious suggestions put forth while
busied in repairing the machine that recorded quotations, he was
made Superintendent of the Gold and Stock Company, and brought out
his invention of the printing-telegraph, by which the fluctuations
of the stock-market in any part of the country are instantly
recorded on narrow strips of paper.
[Illustration: Thomas A. Edison--The Wizard of Menlo Park.]
The immediate success of this invention, and the great demand for
the machines, led him to establish a workshop for their manufacture
in Newark, N. J. But soon the need of still more space, and the
desire for freedom from interruption while at his work, obliged him
to give up Newark, and he found new quarters at Menlo Park, N. J.--a
bare plot of barren acres destitute of natural attraction of any
kind, unless it be--what to Edison indeed is a great charm--an
uninterrupted view of the sky; a place virtually unknown before he
planted there the rude buildings that house his wonderful
inventions; yet now a place known to scientific men all over the
world; the Mecca of many a mind seeking to wrest from Nature her
dearest secrets.
No doubt, many of the inventions that have made Edison famous must
be ascribed in their conception and ripening' to various periods of
his life, but to the popular mind they are all associated with the
wizard's present home, from whence for several years the bulletins
of inventions--playful, useful, necessary, revolutionary--often as
simple in their mechanism as they are astonishing in their results,
have been given to a delighted world. Some of Edison's inventions
have a character at present of little more than picturesque
playfulness, such as the Phonograph, perhaps the most remarkable of
these minor inventions; the Aerophone, by which sounds are amplified
without loss of distinctness; the Megaphone, an instrument which,
inserted in the ear, so magnifies sounds that faint whispers may be
heard a thousand feet; the Phonometer, for measuring the force of
the soundwaves caused by the human voice; the Microtasimeter, for
measuring small variations in temperature. This has been tested for
so small a variation as 1/24000 of a degree Fahrenheit, and in 1878
was used to detect the presence of heat in the sun's corona. The
most familiar of these lesser inventions is the Phonograph by which
sounds are made self-recording and capable of being repeated. While
this curious invention--almost childish in its simplicity--is as yet
little more than a plaything, and has proved of small utility, it
makes, nevertheless, a strong appeal to the imagination when we
reflect that by its aid the voice of any human being may be
transmitted to ages far in the future, and its living tones be heard
long after he who uttered them has returned to the dust.
But, while these inventions have the charm that invests "the
fairy-tales of science," the world-wide fame of Edison rests upon
greater gifts to the world; the various improvements he has made in
the telegraph, and the perfection to which he has brought the
electric light. The invention of the telephone, by which persons are
enabled to converse with one another at very long distances, and by
which concerts, operas, and orations or sermons in one city can be
heard by an audience assembled in another, is one of the most
remarkable of Edison's achievements, and one the usefulness of which
in various directions it is easy to foresee. The idea of the
transmission of messages in opposite directions by the same wire was
one that had early occurred to Edison, but he was long in reducing
it to practice. The secret once discovered, however, he rapidly
progressed until he had brought out the sextuple telegraph, where we
believe the ability of the instrument rests at present.
The inventor next turned his mind to the study of the electric lamp,
in which he saw great possibilities. He believed that he could
produce a light that should be cheaper than gas, and also purer,
more steady, and more to be depended on. He rejected the principle
of the Voltaic arc involved in the Brush patent then in use, by
which the electric current was passed through a strip of platinum or
other metal that requires a high temperature to melt, because in
practice it was found that in fact, owing to the difficulty of
regulating the flow of the electric current, the medium did often
melt. He therefore sought for a medium that should be practically
indestructible, and believed that it would be found in pure carbon
enclosed in a vacuum. After many trials with one and another
substance, he at length found that by employing slender strips of
card-board reduced by intense heat to carbon, connecting them with
the wires leading from the machine, and enclosing them in glass
bulbs from which the air had been extracted, the desired result
could be produced. The next step to accomplish was the division of
the light, so that any number of lamps could be supplied by the same
pair of wires--a condition absolutely necessary if the invention
were to be of practical utility as applied to the lighting of
factories, public buildings, or private households, where-ever, in
short, many lights are needed. This was finally accomplished, and in
December, 1879, an exhibition was given at Menlo Park of a complete
system of lighting. This first demonstration of the possibility of
light-division created a great interest in scientific circles all
over the world, especially as scientific experts had testified
before the British House of Commons that the feat was impossible.
The Edison incandescent burner is now in use in every city, town,
and hamlet in this country, and it would seem as if it must of
necessity before long drive the costly, unhealthy, and dangerous
coal-gas out of use for illuminating purposes, although we believe a
wide field of usefulness lies before the coal-gas as a substitute
for coal in our kitchens.
Thomas Edison has received few public honors from his countrymen;
but the nature of his work has been such as to make his name a
household word throughout his native country; and not only by the
admiration excited by his genius--for it deserves no less a
name--but by the practical, every-day benefits he has conferred, he
has earned a place in the good-will and esteem of his fellows such
as seldom falls to the lot of man.
[Signature: Clarence Cook.]