Mr. Edison was once asked to send a phonographic cylinder to a fair. He
sent this reply:
"You ask me to send you a phonographic cylinder and to say a few words to
the audience. I do not think the audience would take any interest in dry
scientific subjects, but perhaps they might be interested in a little
story that a man sent me on a phonographic cylinder the other day from San
Francisco. In the year 1873 a man from Massachusetts came to California
with a chronic liver complaint. He searched all over the coast for a
mineral spring to cure the disease, and finally he found, down in the San
Joaquin valley, a spring the waters of which almost instantly cured him.
He therefore started a sanitarium, and people all over the world came and
were quickly cured. Last year this man died, and so powerful had been the
action of the waters that they had to take his liver out and kill it with
a club.--EDISON."--_Woman's Home Companion._