"CAPITALISING" EDISON.

Auckland Star, Volume LIV, Issue 213, 8 September 1923, Page 11

"CAPITALISING" EDISON.

INDUSTRIES HE HAS FOUNDED. An enterprising statistician has made a compilation of the capitalised value of various industries founded upon inventions by Thomas A. Edison, or inventions upon which he has made important improvements. These include the cinematograph, the telephone, the electric railway, electric fixtures, supplies and machines, the telegraph, phonograph, cement, and wireless telegraph. Tha industries in America, based on these inventions, are capitalised at 15,099,000 dollars, and employ 1,500,000: persons. It is all the development of 46 years. Mr. Edison was born in 1847. He "patented his first invention in 1808— an electric vote counter. In 1870 his first profitable invention, an improved device for reporting stock market quotations, brought him 40,000 dollars. Seven years later he completed the modern' telephone transmitter and the phonograph. Since that time he has taken out 1500 patents in America and abroad. During the war he produced 40 devices for use in naval warfare, which he handed over to the Government without charge. These were put in use or were ready for use when the war ended. The invention of the moving picture camera— Edison called it the kinetograph—occurred in 1885. and was only a device for taking 40 photographs a eecoud on a tape of film. At present the moving picture industry in America alone is capitalised at 1.250.000,000 dollars. Edison's phonograph and wireless inventions remained forgotten for years. In his application in 1885 for a patent on his radio appliance he predicted many of the modern developments in this method of communication. The patent was granted in ISfll. Marconi discovered some of the principles underlying radio communication in independent research, and in 1003 Edison sold his patent to the Itnlian inventor. Mr. Edison is still a very active man, and can be found every day at his desk or in his laboratories at Orange, New Jersey. He i≤ in charge of several large factories, employing many thousands of men. all producing many of the devices he has invented. He works as many us 10 hours a day. and haa surrounded himself with a large group of young technicians and engineers, whom he selects by an unugual method of examination, covering virtually the complete field of human knowledge. He has two eons, who work with him in hie laboratories.