DEAF INVENTOR

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21236, 7 August 1934, Page 16

DEAF INVENTOR

T. A. EDISON'S WORK LIFE OF EXPERIMENTING When Thomas Alva Edison died on October 18, 1931, in his eighty-fifth year, the total of the money invested hi his inventions and improvements in ihe United States alone was

J3,500,000,000 dollars, and this represented employment for more than a million and a quarter persons. From 1H69 to 1910 he registered 1328 separate patents and 1239 foreign patents. These were some of the facts and (inures supplied to the Canterbury Advertising Club at its luncheon yesterday by Mr I. S. Gardiner. Mr J. Stout presided. Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, m 1347, said Mr Gardiner, the same year in which President von Hindenburg was born and seven years after New Zealand was made a British colony. T-fis ancestors were Dutch, and his lather, Simon Edison, settled at Milan and there made shingles for roofs. This proved a profitable business and he had a large trade. The young Edison was very observant, and Mr Gardiner told how, when he had been missing for the whole day, his father found him sitting on a nest of eggs.

In 1854 Samuel Edison moved to J-ort Huron, on the lake of the same '■ name, and became a grain and timber ! merchant. The boy was sent to school for three months, but this was not a Kiicces. His mother had been a school - ■ mistress and took his education in hand.

A Travelling Laboratory

Edison soon became fired with, the .passion of having his own laboratory, : and this he constructed in the cellar :of his home. To get sufficient money i lor this he became a newsboy, and from 7 in the morning till 9 at ' night he sold papers on the Grand (Trunk Railway, which ran from Port i Huron to Detroit. Contrary to the 1 usually-accepted belief, his father was quite well to do at this time While has was working on the railiVray he found that there was an i empty carriage, and set up his own [travelling laboratory in it. Unfortunately the way was rough, his bottle., were upset, and one containing phosphorus dropped on tiio floor. The carriage was ablaze by the time the train ; reached the next station. The mani m charge threw Edison and his bottles '< out and boxed his ears. From that -moment Edison was practically stone 'deaf. When he was 16 he was hanging .■round the railway stations looking for : employment, and on one occasion ■rescued a station agents child from f'xieath. In gratitude the agent taught |him Morse, and, as he already knew Ithe alphabet, in four months he hart Bully mastered the code. An appointrment on the Grand Trunk Railway soon followed, and he was sent to '■work at a country station.

I] Dismissed from Railway f, - He was experimenting during the riav and as he needed sleep at night 'then he was required to send through every hour, lie rigged up a which he attached to the clock and which sent the messages away regularly. The authorities found that he never answered when called up at n"ght, and when the true facts were .discovered he lost his position For the next five years he toured -the country as a telegraph :«and invented a system of hh, own 101 ■Caking down messages, and reached £ Srdl by dealing with 90 telegrams ' "in 50 minutes. . The knowledge of electricity at the -time was not great and breakdowns S£e frequent. After he had finished his wanderings he arrived at Boston ■and made his first real patent, a \ otc recorder, which was rejected. The Civil War found the United States gambling in gold, and when he repaired a price indicator the president of the Western Union offered him 40,000 dollars for his inventions. .From thai time he was never again short of money. His first duty then was to make ''stock tickers," which printed the price of stock on tape. In New York there were 500 of these machines. which used 65,000 miles of tape annually. From that ho went into telegraph work and improved the 3ine between New York and Washington so that it would handle 1000 words » minute.

Telegraphs and Telephones

One of the more important of his experiments about this time was his system of duplex telegraphy, which he Hater devoloped so that lour and even Six messages could be sent over the same wire simultaneously. His improvements to the typewriter were patented and sold to Remington. The first telephone of a sort was indented in Frankfurt in 1860, and the first American improvement was in 1874 by Elisha Gray of Chicago. Edison was set to try to find •how to make the power sufficient over to long distance, and he introduced the Jearbon button and two series of curIrents which sot over the difficulty. In 1878 Edison tackled electric light, Jtt'hich had originated with Sir Humphrey Davy's arc light of 1810. Edi'son spent 40,000 dollars on cxperijments which lasted for 13 months, itend he said afterwards that he did rnot once make a discovery. His fust, Samp was made of a carbonised thread Vi a vacuum, and though he found [that the red hair of the beard of one f)f his assistants gave an auburn tint fo the light, the best results came from *arbonised bamboo. His workmen tested 6000 species in their hunt for (Jhe best form. A good bit of bam'ooo •(would last for 40 hours. , A Failure His first magnetic ore separator was {» failure as no sooner had he constructed, it in New Jersey than a tcrxiflc gale blew all the sand away, and ihis building was useless. In another jpart of New Jersey he erected an •enormous plant and his theory worked Wo well that the sand came through fc>3 per cent. pure. The origin of the motion picture fcamera came when a man called Newbridge tried to take a photograph of ti racehorse in action. His idea wis tto stretch strings across the track and attach them to different cameras. Edison soon realised that these pictures Vould have to be taken with the one Hens. He invented and designed a jcamera and with the help of Eastman evolved the celluloid film. He originated the gramophone and ! titer perfected it, and with this knowedge produced a talking picture as esrly as 1012. During the great war he perfected 42 inventions for the United States tavy. and was appointed president of .. e United States Naval Construction Board.