still more persistency." One of his foremen relates that once in Newark
when his printing telegraph suddenly refused to work, he locked himself
into his laboratory, declaring that he would not come out till the
trouble was found. It took him sixty hours, during which time his only
food consisted of crackers and cheese eaten at the bench; then he went
to bed and slept twenty hours at a stretch. At another time, during the
height of the first electric-light excitement, all the lamps he had
burning in Menlo Park, about eighty in all, suddenly went out, one after
another, without apparent cause. Everything had gone well for nearly a
month and the great success of the experiment had been published to the
world. If the lamps, with their carbon filaments of charred paper would
burn for a month there seemed to be no reason why they should not burn
for a year, and Edison was stunned by the catastrophe. The trouble was
evidently in the lamps themselves, for new lamps burned well. Then began
the most exciting and most exhaustive series of experiments ever
undertaken by an American physicist. For five days Edison remained day
and night at the laboratory, sleeping only when his assistants took his
place at whatever was going on. The difficulties in the way of
experimenting with the incandescent lamp are enormous because the light
only burns when in a vacuum. The instant the glass is broken, out it
goes. Edison's eyes grew weak studying the brilliant glow of the carbon
filament. At the end of the five days he took to his bed, worn out with
excitement and sick with disappointment. During the last two days and
nights he ate nothing. He could not sleep, for the moment he left the
laboratory and closed his eyes some new test suggested itself. Neither
was there much sleep for his faithful force. Ordinarily one of the most
considerate of men, he seemed quite surprised when rest and refreshments
were sometimes suggested as in order after fifteen hours' incessant
work. The trouble was finally discovered to be one that time alone could
have proved. The air was not sufficiently exhausted from the lamps. To
add to the discomfiture of the inventor, a professor of physics in one
of the well-known colleges declared in a newspaper article widely
circulated that the Edison lamp would never last long enough to pay for
itself.
"I'll make a statue of that man," said Edison to me one day when he was
still groping in the dark for the secret of his temporary defeat, "and
I'll illuminate it brilliantly with Edison lamps and inscribe it: 'This
is the man who said the Edison lamp would not burn.'"
To go back to Edison, shaking his bottle in the sunlight, his brown
study gave way to a pleasant smile of welcome when I had made my
business known. "Take a look at these filings," he said, making room for
me at the bench. "See how curiously they settle when I shake the bottle
up. In alcohol they behave one way, but in oil in this way. Isn't that
the most curious thing you ever saw--better than a play at one of your
city theatres, eh?" and he chuckled to himself as he shook them up
again.
"What I want to know," he went on, more to himself than to me, "is what
they mean by it, and I'm going to find out." To me the interesting
spectacle was Edison tossing up his bottle and watching the filings
settle, and not the curious behavior of the filings.
When he put the bottle by, with a deep sigh, he took me over the whole
place, pointing out with particular pride the apparatus for making the
paper carbons for the lamps, and the new forms of Sprengel mercury pumps
that did better work in extracting air from the lamps than any yet
devised.
Looking back to that first visit to Edison, the first of perhaps a score
that I have had occasion to make him in the last fifteen years, what
impressed me most was the immensity of the field in which he takes an
interest. Ask Edison what he thinks will be the next step in the
development of the sewing-machine, or the telescope, the microscope, the
steam-engine, the electric-motor, the reaping-machine, or any device by
which man accomplishes much work in little time, and invariably it will
be found that he has some novel ideas upon the subject, perhaps fanciful
in the extreme, but practical enough to show that he has pondered the
matter. He shares the opinion of the gentleman who insists that whatever
is is wrong, but only to this extent: that whatever is might be better.
Authority means nothing to him; he must test for himself. For instance,
it is well known that he rejects the Newtonian theory in part and holds
that motion is an inherent property of matter; that it pushes, finding
its way in the direction of least resistance, and is not pulled or
attracted. "It seems to me," he said once, "that every atom is possessed
by a certain amount of primitive intelligence. Look at the thousand
ways in which atoms of hydrogen combine with those of other elements,
forming the most diverse substances. Do you mean to say that they do
this without intelligence? Atoms in harmonious and useful relation
assume beautiful or interesting shapes and colors, or give forth a
pleasant perfume, as if expressing their satisfaction. In sickness,
death, decomposition, or filth the disagreement of the component atoms
immediately makes itself felt by bad odors." It is partly due to this
belief in the sensibility of atoms that Edison attributes his faith in
an intelligent Creator.
[Illustration]
It is hard to say into what field of inquiry Edison has not dipped. He
told me once that whenever he travelled he carried a note-book with him,
in which he jotted down suggestions for experiments to be made. Railway
journeys, at a time when Edison was a constant traveller, were
productive of much material of this kind, for the inventor never sleeps
when travelling, and his brain works, going over, even in a doze, the
thousand and one aspects of his work, and evolving theories to be
dismissed almost as soon as evolved. His mind, when at rest, reviews his
day's work almost automatically, just as a chess player's brain will,
after an exciting game, go over every situation in a half dream-like
condition and evolve new solutions. He has great respect for even what
appear to be the most inconsequential observations, provided they are
made by a competent person, and a large force in his splendid
laboratory at Orange is always employed in studies that appear to the
outsider to be aimless; for instance, the action of chemicals upon
various substances or upon each other. Strips of ivory in a certain oil
become transparent in six weeks. A globule of mercury in water takes
various shapes for the opposite poles of the electric-battery upon the
addition of a little potassium. There is no present use for the
knowledge of such facts, but it is recorded in voluminous note-books,
and some day the connecting-link in the chain of an invaluable discovery
may here be found.
My next visit to Menlo Park was a few months later, when I found Edison
in bed sick with disappointment. The lamps had again taken to antics for
which no remedy or explanation could be discovered. There was an air of
desolation over the place. The laboratory was cold and comfortless. Upon
every side were signs of strict economy. Most of the assistants were
young men glad to work for little or nothing. For the last month Edison
had been working in the direction of a general improvement of all parts
of the lamp instead of devoting himself to one feature. Expert
glass-blowers were brought to Menlo Park, the air-pumps were made more
perfect, new substances were tried for carbons. All this had taken time,
during which outsiders freely predicted failure. The stock in the
enterprise fell to such a price that it was hard to raise money for the
maintenance of the laboratory. It was argued, and with some truth, as I
have had occasion to remark, that Edison had really discovered nothing
new; he had attempted to do what a dozen famous men had tried before him
and he had failed. The quotations of New York gas stocks rose again.
The next time I visited the laboratory, a few days later, Edison was up
again and talking cheerfully. But he had grown five years older in five
months. "I shall succeed," he said to me, "but it may take me longer
than I at first supposed. Everything is so new that each step is in the
dark; I have to make the dynamos, the lamps, the conductors, and attend
to a thousand details that the world never hears of. At the same time I
have to think about the expense of my work. That galls me. My one
ambition is to be able to work without regard to the expense. What I
mean is, that if I want to give up a whole month of my time and that of
my whole establishment to finding out why one form of a carbon filament
is slightly better than another, I can do it without having to think of
the cost. My greatest luxury would be a laboratory more perfect than any
we have in this country. I want a splendid collection of material--every
chemical, every metal, every substance in fact that may be of use to me,
and I hardly know what may not be of use. I want all this right at hand,
within a few feet of my own house. Give me these advantages and I shall
gladly devote fifteen hours a day to solid work. I want none of the rich
man's usual toys, no matter how rich I may become. I want no horses or
yachts--have no time for them. I want a perfect workshop."
In the last twelve years Edison has seen his dream fulfilled. His
electric light has not displaced gas, by any means, but it has been the
foundation of a business large enough to make the inventor sufficiently
rich to build the finest laboratory in the world, in the most curious
room of which are to be found the three hundred models of machinery and
apparatus of various kinds devised by Edison in the last twenty years
and made by himself or under his eye. He is still a gaunt fellow, with a
slight stoop, a clean-shaven face, and a low voice. His hands are still
soiled with acids, his clothes are shabby, and there is always a cigar
in his mouth.
[Illustration: The Home of Thomas A. Edison.]
[Illustration: Edison's Laboratory.]
The Edison laboratory deserves a chapter by itself. In 1886 Edison
bought a fine villa in Llewellyn Park at a cost of $150,000. He took the
house as it stood, with all its luxurious fittings, rather to please his
wife than himself; a corner of the laboratory would suit him quite as
well. Right outside the gates of the park and within view of the house,
he bought ten acres of land and began his laboratory. Two handsome
structures of brick, each 60 feet wide, 100 feet long, and four stories
high, accommodate the machine-shop, library, lecture-room, experimental
workshops, assistants' rooms and store-rooms. The boiler-house and
dynamo-rooms are outside the main buildings. Also, in a separate room,
the floor of which consists of immense blocks of stone, are the delicate
instruments of precision used in testing electric currents. The
instruments in this one room, twenty feet square, cost $18,000 to make
and to import from Europe. Upon first entering the main building, the
visitor finds what is apparently a busy factory of some sort, with long
rows of machinery, from steam-hammers to diamond-lathes. Everywhere
workmen are busy at their tasks, and Edison has good reason to be proud
of his laboratory force, for it consists of the picked workmen of the
country. Whenever he finds in one of the Edison factories in Newark,
New York, Schenectady, or elsewhere a particularly expert and
intelligent man, he has him transferred to the Orange laboratory, where,
at increased pay for shorter hours, the man not only finds life
pleasanter, but has a chance of learning and becoming somebody. The
whole place hums with the rattle of machinery and glows with electric
light. There are eighty assistants, who have charge of the various
departments. The most expert iron-workers, glass-blowers, wood-turners,
metal-spinners, screw-makers, chemists, and machinists in the country
are to be found here. A rough drawing of the most complicated model is
all they require to work from.
The store-rooms contain all the material needed. Four store-keepers are
employed to keep the supplies, valued at $100,000, in order and ready
for use at a moment's notice. Each article is put down in a catalogue
which shows the shelf or bottle where it may be found. Every known
metal, every chemical known to science, every kind of glass, stone,
earth, wood, fibre, paper, skin, cloth, is to be found there. In making
up the chemical collection an assistant was kept at work for weeks going
through the three most exhaustive works on chemistry in English, French,
and German, making a note of every substance mentioned, and this list
constituted the order for chemicals, an order, by the way, which it
required seven months to fill. In the glass department, for instance,
there is every known kind of glass, from plates two inches thick to the
finest, film, and if anything else in the way of glass is needed, the
glass-workers are there to make it. This stupendous collection of
material, filling one floor, is intended to guard against annoying
delays that might occur at critical times for want of some rare
material. In 1885, when working upon an apparatus for getting a current
of electricity directly from heat--the thermo-electric
generator--Edison's work was brought to a standstill for want of a few
pounds of nickel, an article not then to be found in any quantity in
this country. The store-room was organized to avert such delays. The
library is the only part of the main building that shows any attempt at
decoration. It is a superb room, 60 feet by 40, with a height of 25
feet. Galleries run around the second story. At one end is a monumental
fireplace, and in the centre of the hall a fine group of palms and
ferns. The room is finished in oiled hard wood and lighted by
electricity. Fine rugs cover the floors. The shelves contain nothing but
scientific works and the files of the forty-six scientific periodicals
in English, French, and German to which Edison subscribes. They are
indexed by a librarian as soon as received, so that Edison can see at a
glance what they contain concerning the special fields in which he is
interested.
Nothing in this big establishment, often employing more than one hundred
persons, is made for sale. It is wholly devoted to experimental work and
tests. Its expenses, said to be more than $150,000 a year, are paid by
the commercial companies in which Edison is interested, he, on his
part, giving them the benefit of any improvements made. Thus in one room
hundreds of incandescent electric lamps burn night and day the year
through. Each lamp is specially marked and when it burns out more
quickly than the average, or lasts longer, a special study is made as to
the contributing causes. It may seem impossible that the suggestions of
one man can keep busy a big workshop upon experiments the year round,
but Edison says that the temptation is always to increase the force.
When it is remembered that the list of Edison's patents reaches to seven
hundred and forty, and that on the electric light alone he has worked
out several hundred theories, the wonder ceases. Ten minutes' work with
a pencil may sketch an apparatus that a dozen men cannot finish inside
of a fortnight.
When the new Orange laboratory was finished and Edison found himself
with time and means at his disposal, his first thought was to take up
his phonograph. The history of the great hopes built upon the phonograph
and the bitter disappointment that followed is too familiar to need
repetition here. As may be imagined, Edison is most keenly bent upon
tightening the loose screw that has prevented it from doing all that its
friends predicted for it. He still works at other problems, but chiefly
as relaxation. He rests from inventing one thing by inventing something
else.
[Illustration: Library at Edison's Laboratory.]
One day recently, when I found him less confident than usual as to the
triumph of the phonograph in the near future, he said: "There are some
difficulties about the problem that seem insurmountable. I go on
smoothly until at a certain point I run my head against a stone wall; I
cannot get under, over, or around it. After butting my head against that
wall until it aches, I go back to the beginning again. It is absurd to
say that because I can see no possible solution of the problem to-day,
that I may not see one to-morrow. The very fact that this century has
accomplished so much in the way of invention, makes it more than
probable that the next century will do far greater things. We ought to
be ashamed of ourselves if we are content to fold our hands and say that
the telegraph, telephone, steam-engine, dynamo, and camera having been
invented, the field has been exhausted. These inventions are so many
wonderful tools with which we ought to accomplish far greater wonders.
Unless the coming generations are particularly lazy, the world ought to
possess in 1993 a dozen marvels of the usefulness of the steam-engine
and dynamo. The next step in advance will perhaps be the discovery of a
method for transforming heat directly into electricity. That will
revolutionize modern life by making heat, power, and light almost as
cheap as air. Inventors are already feeling their way toward this
wonder. I have gone far enough on that road to know that there are
several stone walls ahead. But the problem is one of the most
fascinating in view."
X.
ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL.
[Illustration: Professor Bell Sending the First Message, by
Long-distance Telephone, from New York to Chicago.]
Sir Charles Wheatstone, the eminent English electrician, while engaged
in perfecting his system of telegraphy discovered that wires charged
with electricity often carried noises in a curious manner. He made and
exhibited at the Royal Society, in 1840, a clock in which the tick of
another clock miles away was conveyed through a wire. This experiment
appears to have been one of the germs of the telephone. In 1844 Captain
John Taylor, also an Englishman, invented an instrument to which he gave
the name of the telephone, but it had nothing electrical about it. It
was an apparatus for conveying sounds at sea by means of compressed air
forced through trumpets. He could make his telephone heard six miles
away. The first real suggestion of the telephone as we know it comes
from Reis, the German professor of physics at Friedrichsdorf, who in
1860 constructed with a coil of wire, a knitting-needle, the skin of a
German sausage, the bung of a beer-barrel, and a strip of platinum an
instrument which reproduced the sound of the voice by the vibration of
the membrane and sent a series of clicks along an electric wire to an
electro-magnetic receiver at the other end of the wire. The same idea
was taken up in this country by Elisha Gray, Edison, and by Alexander
Graham Bell, who first exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition an
apparatus that transmitted speech by electricity in a fairly
satisfactory manner. The American claimants to the honor of having
invented the telephone include Daniel Drawbaugh, a backwoods genius of
Pennsylvania, who claims to have made and used a practical telephone in
1867-68. A large fortune has been spent in fighting Drawbaugh's claims
against the Bell monopoly, but the courts have finally decided in favor
of the latter. It should be recorded as a matter of justice to Mr. Gray,
that he appears to have solved the problem of conveying speech by
electricity at about the same time as Bell. Both these inventors filed
their caveats upon the telephone upon the same day--February 14, 1876.
It was Bell's good fortune to be the first to make his device
practically effective.
Alexander Graham Bell is not an American by birth. He was born in
Edinburgh, Scotland, on the 1st of March, 1847. His father, Alexander
Melville Bell, was the inventor of the system by which deaf people are
enabled to read speech more or less correctly by observing the motion of
the lips. His mother was the daughter of Samuel Symonds, a surgeon in
the British navy.
In 1872 the Bells moved to Canada, and young Alexander Bell became
widely known in Boston as an authority in the teaching of the deaf and
dumb. He first carried to great perfection in this country the art of
enabling the deaf and dumb to enunciate intelligible words and sounds
that they themselves have never heard. Most of his art he acquired from
his father, one of the most expert of teachers in this field. The elder
Bell is still active in his work, constantly devising new methods and
experiments. He lives in Washington with his son and is frequently heard
in lectures in New York and Boston.
In 1873 Alexander Bell began to study the transmission of musical tones
by telegraph. It was in the line of his work with deaf and dumb people
to make sound vibrations visible to the eye. With the phonautograph he
could obtain tracings of such vibrations upon blackened paper by means
of a pencil or stylus attached to a vibrating cord or membrane. He also
succeeded in obtaining tracings upon smoked glass of the vibrations of
the air produced by vowel sounds. He began experimenting with an
apparatus resembling the human ear, and upon the suggestion of Dr.
Clarence J. Blake, the Boston aurist, he tried his work upon a prepared
specimen of the ear itself. Observation upon the vibrations of the
various bones within the ear led him to conceive the idea of vibrating a
piece of iron in front of an electro-magnet.
Mr. Bell was at this time an instructor in phonetics, or the art of
visible speech, in Monroe's School of Oratory in Boston. One of his old
pupils describes him then as a swarthy, foreign-looking personage, more
Italian than English in appearance, with jet-black hair and dark skin.
His manner was earnest and full of conviction. He was an enthusiast in
his work, and only emerged from his habitual diffidence when called upon
to talk upon his studies and views. He was miserably poor and almost
without friends. When he was attacked with muscular rheumatism, in 1873,
his hospital expenses were paid by his employer, and his only visitors
were some of the pupils at the school.
Until the close of 1874, Bell's experiments seemed to promise nothing of
practical value. But in 1875 he began to transmit vibrations between two
armatures, one at each end of a wire. He was much interested at the time
in multiple telegraphy and fancied that something might come of some
such arrangement of many magnetic armatures responding to the vibrations
set up in one.
In November, 1875, he discovered that the vibrations created in a reed
by the voice could be transmitted so as to reproduce words and sounds.
One day in January, 1876, he called a dozen of the pupils at Monroe's
school into his room and exhibited an apparatus by which singing was
more or less satisfactorily transmitted by wire from the cellar of the
building to a room on the fourth floor. The exhibition created a
sensation among the pupils, but, although no attempts were made by Bell
to conceal what he was doing, or how he did it, the noise of his
discovery does not seem to have reached the outside world. With an old
cigar-box, two hundred feet of wire, two magnets from a toy fish-pond,
the first Bell telephone was brought into existence. The apparatus was,
however, not yet the practical telephone as we know it, but it was
sufficient of a curiosity to warrant its exhibition in an improved form
at the Centennial Exhibition, when Sir William Thomson spoke of it as
"perhaps the greatest marvel hitherto achieved by the electric
telegraph."
The next year Bell succeeded in bringing the telephone to the condition
in which it became of immediate practical value. Strange to say, the
public was at first slow to appreciate the great importance of the
invention, and when Bell took it to England, in 1877, he could find no
purchaser for half the European rights at $10,000. In this country,
thanks to the business energy of Professor Gardiner Hubbard, of Harvard,
Bell's father-in-law, the telephone was soon made commercially valuable,
and there are now said to be nearly six hundred thousand telephones in
use in the United States alone.
Professor Bell, as may be imagined, is not idle. His vast fortune has
enabled him to continue costly experiments in aiding deaf and dumb
people, and it will probably be in this field that his next achievement
will be made. Personally, he is a reserved and thoughtful man, wholly
given up to his scientific work. His wife, whom he married in 1876, was
one of his deaf and dumb pupils. It is often said that it was largely
due to his intense desire to soften her misfortune that his experiments
were so exhaustive and finally became so productive in another
direction. His home life in Washington, where he bought, in 1885, the
superb house on Scott Circle known as "Broadhead's Folly," after the man
who built it and ruined himself in so doing, is said to be an ideally
peaceful and happy one, given up to study and efforts to alleviate the
troubles of the deaf and dumb.