THOMAS EDISON

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 21, 25 January 1936, Page 25

THOMAS EDISON

MANY GREAT INVEN-

TIONS

A THOUSAND PATENTS

Whose life is the typical life of the last hundred years—the life that is most rich in expressing their interests and achievements and the qualities they fostered? If the question were put to the vote there would be much support for Edison, remarks the "Times Literary Supplement" reviewer of "Edison: His Life, His Work, His Genius," by William Adams Simonds. He was an inventor, and in the century of the development of machines invention decided great issues. He was of his period in that his bent was towards the practical and commercial. He was of the age of liberalism in being a self-made man; among the adjectives applied to him by Mr. Simonds is "untutored"; and it is incontestable that his passage ■to success was smoothed neither by birth nor privilege. His country was the United States—which, being at the time of his birth a country in the making, offered the more scope to a man of initiative. In 1847, when the infant Edison opened his eyes for the first time, America was a land of pioneers who wrested their living from the fields and forests. The Ohio frontier was his birthplace; in the rough environment of a Michigan lumber town he spent the days of his youth. About the time he came to manhood people began to seek a living from industrial pursuits, and he, more than any other individual of his time, opened vast new arenas of employment to them. He lived until 1931, but a span of 84 years is inadequate to suggest his output of energy. Four hours' sleep sufficed for him, though he allowed the average person six. His recreation was a change of work. We have him grumbling,' "I lose a day," when compelled by pain to rest his eyes after exposing them for seven hours to the glare of his refractory lamp. But the failure of experiments did not depress him. A long series of them elicited this confession of faith and indication of method: "Somewhere in God Almighty's workshop is a dense woody growth, with fibres almost geometrically parallel and with practically no pith, from which we can make the kind of filament the world needs."

Wisecracks of this kind and his lavish expenditure of time, money, and labour on investigations which led only to the negative discovery that "several thousand things won't work," may suggests not, indeed, that he was Ihc charlatan that he was termed by some of his many competitors in scientific research and commerce, but that as an inquiry agent he compared with the intuitive amateur of the detective story as does the Scotland Yard man who, with great resources at his disposal, obtains results by the process of mechanical elimination. In them we have his power of self-application. His success has been attributed to it and to the mathematical proportion of reward—called by his detractors "luck" —that' goes with--the taking of many chances. But the verdict that it was due to pertinacity as distinct from vision, though he himself might have accepted it, will not abide scrutiny. Subsequently his common sense led him to avail himself of the services of specialists, but we find more' than once that it was that which solved problems that baffled -■engineer..- and mathematician. "Let me show you how to do it," said Edison when rows of figures and sheets of foolscap had failed to disclose to one of them the cubical content o£ a bulb. "He poured water into the bulb. 'Now measure the water, and you'll have the answer.'". It is beyond the scope of this review to follow Mr. Simonds in discussing Edison's inventions—or, rather some few of them—in detail. He took out in his lifetime more than a thousand patents. By the public he is primarily associated with the incandescent lamp; but in the end-paper, on which some of his contrivances are illustrated, that is but No. 7 among twenty-four. Titles such as phonograph, microphone, motion picture camera, dynamic loud speaker, wireless telegraph, will indicate the range of his adaptations of the electrical and mechanical forces which his generation was "learning to control. His versatility and vitality were such that at the age of seventy he contributed forty inventions to the Navy Department, harassed by problems of warfare at sea, and received from it the only Distinguished Service Medal it awarded to a civilian.

At the end of his record Mr. Simonds gives a chapter to the international homage done to Edison on the fiftieth anniversary of the invention of his lamp. Finance, politics, science, industry, the arts, and the. stage were represented by their foremost men. Edison completed his speech of acknowledgment, but it overtaxed his strength. His work was done. It is to be noted that its ending coincided with the collapse of the economic structure with which it had been identified.