BOY AND MAN

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 95, 19 October 1931, Page 7

BOY AND MAN

ALWAYS AN INVENTOR

ROMANTIC CAREER

For this generation there can never be another name to rival that of Edison, the Admirable Crichton of Invention. He was a relic of an age of turmoil, an ago so long ago that it has passed boyond passionate contemplation. When he was born Newman had seceded from the Church of England only two years before, joint stock banking was a youngster a decade or so old, the repeal of the com laws and the free trade triumph in Britain was a matter of twelve months? history. Peel was "in the saddle," Thomas Henry Huxley, a young man of 21, was recently congratulating himself on having'graduated at Charing Cross Hospital, Darwin's "Origin of Species" was not to be published for another twelve years, and George Eliot, a woman of 28, counted the translation of Strauss'« "Leben Jesu" her only major work. Edison was born in the circumstancesof the traditional American boy, which is to say that his home was the frontier town of Milan, Ohio, a prosperous and growing settlement surrounded by the great wheatflelds of the Middle West. Canal transportation was the hope of Milan, and Edison was to see "prairie ■ schooners" bound for California and the quest for gold, both remote things in those days of the 'fifties, for Edison was born in 1847. It was at this time that he began to experiment with pieces of timber which he got from the sawmills of Milan. His tiiiy figure with its large skull was known to the lumbermen, and before Edison was six years old he knew these lumbermen's songs.

HIS VICTORY.

Ho was a remarkable boy: when, his father, ever restless, moved to' another town and discovered alarm at the mental activity of his son it was determined that the boy should not be sent to school to meet all manner of harm. Learning would lead to reading, and reading would lead to all manner of unknown evils. But the boy triumphed. He learned his letters from the shop signs in the street, and before he was 12 he had rushed through Hume, Sears, Bobert Burton,, and the "Decline and Tall of the Roman Empire." At this ago ho began to turn his thoughts to flying. Plainly,this was a matter of lifting matter by. use of gases, and Thomas persuaded the trusting Michael Oates to drink a quantity of seidlitz powders in the expectation of seeing him rise in the air! The disappointment was extreme when Michael was merely eick instead. Such ingenuity meant a speculative mind, and Edison might have expected parental approval. In place of this, he had the customary beginning of conflict with parental authority. Incessant rebukes and thrashings came to him, and when at last he was given permission to experiment and filled a cellar with strange apparatus he went to work as a newsboy to gain the money which was to finance the quest of knowledge. He sold train passengers "something to read," and it was in these days that he met with the accident that made him I deaf. Becoming editor. of "the first newspaper ever printed on a train,' he installed a hand-printing press in_one of the cars for the run between Port Huron, his home, and Detroit, and with this gained some fame. When he was not printing Ms paper, the "Weekly Herald," which attracted the attention of the London "Times," Edison, now a boy of 15, was experimenting in his moving laboratory. One day the tram swung round a curve, a stick of phos-. phorus shot to the floor, and the car was in flames. A passing baggage man, •hurrying a pail of water to the spot, paused long enough to give the boy a hearty box on the ear. It was a fateful blow.

HAND OF CHANCE,

At the nest station Edison, laboratory, and printing Jtrees were bundled off the train amidst the ruins of his hopes. Here chance intervened, for he Bayed the life of a little boy who was in peril from a passing: train. The little boy was the son of'a station. agent, who, in his gratitude, offered to instruct young Edison in telegraphy. Before long the boy was a qualified operator, and was sent to Stratford Junction in Canada. In his deafness, now confirmed, he found advantage. It enabled him to shut out the world, so he said. .' '' ■ -n Ho continued to experiment. Tor years ho had followed, every lino of inquiry that suggested, itself to him in mechanics or chemistry. Now he found that between study and work there was little time for sleep. He overcame this with.an alarm clock, set to wake him before tho arrival of each train, and when this was discovered, and he was ordered to report every half-hour, he hitched the clock to the instrument so that the signal was sent automatically. He loft his work to explore tho Middle West and the Mississippi Valley, and everywhere he ranked as a first-class operator, though still a, boy. • , About this time he began to work tor the Western Union Company at Boston, having been advised to go there because ho appeared simply unable "to keep any job for long. In Boston he developed his first patented invention, an automatic vote-recorder. With this ha went to Washington, where ho found that the machine was the last thing that tho politicians wanted. Returning to Boston, he began to tinker with the existing "ticker" machines for stock quotations, and then, without money, without friends, without prospects, he went to New York,. a young man of 22. Soon he developed an improvement on existing devices which he offered to Western Union. Ho wanted 5000 dollars for it, and not a penny less (though privately he was determined to take 3000). An offer of 40,000 dollars left him speechless. Tho grand career had begun.

MANY FIELDS.

The catalogue of Edison's achievements since that day, 62 years ago, demands too much. Ho had taken out 1033 patents up to April, 1928. He dovised duplex, quadruplcx, and automatic tolograph systems, and incidentally tho electric pen, which developed into. the mimeograph for the multiplication of typewriting. . His invention in 1577-S of ft microphone ia

which coraprcsacd lamp-black buttons were used to obtain the necessary variable resistance In the circuit marked a real advance in telephony and aided materially in bringing the Bell telephone system into practical use. Most modem inventions result from the work of many minds, but when Edison applied, in 1877, for a "phonograph or speaking machine" patent the United States Patent Office could discover no previous record of the kind. The original model was a cylinder covered with tinfoil and turned by a handerank, though later Edison developed a motor-driven machine with cylindrical wax records, which speedily became popular. Later he invented the disc form with a diamond point for reproducing music, and also developed a machine for taking office dictation. In 1879 he succeeded in making an incandescent lamp in which a loop of carbonised cotton glowed in a vacuum for 40 hours. Tho following decade he devoted to researches into and exploitation of methods for the generation and distribution of electric light, heat, and power, including underground mains, a j three-wire system, improved dynamos and motors,_antt an electric railway. From 1891 to 1900 ho worked chiefly on the magnetic method of concentrating iron ores, and from 1900 to 1910 on the development of a new kind of storage battery. In 1891 he applied for a patent on a "kinetoscopie camera" for. taking motion pictures on a frand of film, to be viewed by peeping into a box, and later projecting them on a, screen. In 1875 he described an unknown "etherie force" which manifested itself by sparks passing between, carbon points, at.a distance from an.interrupted current. During the World War he investigated 42 separates subjects and prepared voluminous reports for the United States Government. At 35 ho succeeded in establishing the first electric light station for New York, and he was in the trenches himself, to see that they were properly dug. He founded his famous establishment at Menlo Park at the age of 29, and worked there 18 hours a day, and for the last 50 years he has laboured there, always busy, always adventuring.