EDISON DECIDES FROM HIS GRAVE

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 87, 9 October 1937, Page 27

EDISON DECIDES FROM HIS GRAVE

Thomas A. Edison, • five t years after his passing, made a decision which kept one of his largest manufacturing plants from shutting down, says the "Christian Science Monitor." The plant was the battery division of Thomas A. Edison, Inc. Nickel had been discovered in £8000 worth of Swedish iron, used to make the negative "active materials'' for alkaline batteries. This is an unusually pure form of iron and no more was available at the time in this country. A staff conference was called to consider whether the nickel impurity ruined the iron for battery manufacture "How,would you like to have Thomas A. Edison make the decision?" asked one of the conferees, George E. Stringfellow, vice-president and general manager of the Dattery division. The staff looked surprised. "I'm not sure," Mr. Stringfellow added, "but I think it can be done." Then he told them his story. In 1926, while Mr. Edison was the active consultant for the battery company, Mr. Stringfellow proposed: "Mr. Edison, would you be willing to arrange to continue as consultant after you have passed 6n?" "You are crazy," said Mr. Edison. "It might work," Mr. Stringfellow replied. "You invented this battery. In your head there i? information about it that no one else has. Will you let the staff give you written questions about the battery, every Satur-

day afternoon before you go home? You could bring the answers in writing to work on Monday morning." Edison agreed. Over weekends he pencilled answers to lists to typewritten questions. Eighty-seven questions were asked and answered in two years. They were mostly academic. They were bits of information not available as a rule in research records. [ They were filed away In a black, loose-leaf book. The book remained in the files. It was forgotten by nearly everyone except Mr. Stringfellow. He brought it out for the staff conference. No one knew whether it would contain the nickel question; but it did. "If there is nickel in iron," Mr. Stringfellow had written, "does it adversely affect the life of the cell (in the battery)?" "No harm," Mr. Edison had written. The conference accepted this decision. It turned out to be the correct one. Subsequent investigation showed that improved methods of chemical analysis had probably detected the presence in iron of small amounts of nickel that had previously escaped notice. Mr. Edison spent ten years perfecting this battery. His men today say it took more time than any other of his inventions, and is one the public scarcely heard about. They say that in making it Edison asked himself thousands of questions and worked out the answers in his. laboratory.