WITH EDISON IN HIS LABORATORY.

Press, Volume XLV, Issue 7139, 29 August 1888, Page 6

WITH EDISON IN HIS LABORATORY.

•- "I want to have 25,000 men working in J factories on tny inventions right here.') Thomas Alva Edison said this the other day as he stood outside his laboratory to a reporter of the New York Morning Journal. Edison has been a professional inventor for ten or twelve years, has pnt thousands and thousands of men at work on his inventions, and goes on broadening hia own knowledge, absorbing science after science, looking keenly after the practical side of everything, and has secured as a result for nimsell a goodly store of wealth. He has an interest in all the later inventions which he has given to the worlft. His present home cost him a qnar. ter of a million. His laboratory and the stock of things he put in it cost him nearly £50,000. His pay-roll for experiments alone is £500 a week. These figures begin to give you some measure of his gigantic energy, his unconsciously stupendous courage. Every day Is a battle with forty problems in science, abstract or api plied, and every night finds him planning a fresh campaign. MACHINE SHOPS AND EXPERIMENTAL ROOMS. Then there is a big machine shop on this lower floor, lOOft. long, filled with machinery passive enough to build a gunboat, and beyond this, in the exten* slon, are the steam engines, aggregating over 300 horae-power, and dynamos capable of furnishing an electric current strong enough to kill a man in an infinitesimal part of a second, or of any other character to suit any experimentary upstairs. Upstairs there is a smaller machine shop, on the second floor, for work of precision ; a carpenter's shop on the third floor and about twenty smaller rooms, in which all rranner of experiments are conducted. "It keeps mc pretty busy," he says, "to find work for a hundred men, , ' And still he says so in that off-hand, easy way which leads the listener to believe that it isn't a very serious matter after all"Sometimes it's rather wearying to stop and clear the path for a man who comes to you and says that this or that thing won't work. It's like writing for a funny paper when you're melancholy." Now and then Edison goes a-hunting for a month, or takes an absolute rest for a short time; that is, he does so if he doesn't get so busy over a phonograph or some other in. vention that he cannot think of leaving it. But the work of the laboratory doesn't stop. It goes right on, and if ideas are wanted Edison draws upon a series of some twenty-five memorandum and scrap books for ideas stored away for future development; things to be attended to when there is time, or when nothing of greater importance is in hand. And this reserve stock of thought will keep the big laboratory busy for months, if necessary. BDIBON'S ASSISTANTS. In one workshop in which Edison develops his inventions, he has forty experimenters thirty or more mechanics and labourers, and a score or so of young men, some of whom are simply clerks, and others who can scarely be classed other wise than as students. He has in all nearly a hundred men to assist him. HOW THE PLACE IS KEPT IN OPERATION. The question arises the more forcibly after an inspection of the laboratory, How can one man possibly keep such a force of men busy in experimental work alone ? Very few men could. The more one sees of the establishment and its recognized head the stronger becomes the conviction that Edison is a wonderful fellow. He is continually at work. Hβ lives in a splendid house just over the hill in the park, a few minutes away from the laboratory—that ie to say, he sleeps there when he sleeps at all, and he eats there. He rises at about 8. 30 in the morning, breakfasts with his charming young wife, and starts for the laboratory. He goes to each experimenter in turn inspects his work and gives him some memoranda of instructions concerning the particular thing on which he is busyOne man i 9 instructed to hunt up all the information—all the facts bearing on a certain phenomenon in electricity, for instance. Another must take a rough sketch or a rough model, and make from it the bit of mechanism required; reduce the thing to precision, in fact. Another Is required to see if there will be some suggested result if some sort of force or element is manipulated in a certain specified way. And so the details of experiments, the manual labour, the work of precision, are carried out. This first round of instruction takes up a good share of the forenoon. During the day Edison visits each experimenter several times, making the rounds of the laboratory about three times, all the while making mental memoranda of the progress of work. FROM LUNCH TO DINNER. If he doesn't get to thinking so hard that he forgets it, he goes to lunch at noon or half-past twelve o'clock, and returns to the laboratory in an hour. At six o'clock or thereabouts he returns to his home to dinner and —to rest and recreation? Yes, perhaps as he under stands the words. *'I go home to dinner at about six," said Edison to a friend the other day. " I have my dinner and then I sit down in front of my open fire," he continued, and his face shone with pleasure in anticipation of the "recreation he was to take in a few hours. "I sit down in front of my open fire and I have my swinging bookcase, filled with all the special scientific works that I want at my side, and I sib and read," and the wonderful man's face plainly showed the " solid comfbrt" there was even in the thought of it —" and read until is time to retire."