THE VALUE OF AN EDISON.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLIII, Issue 139, 10 June 1909, Page 6

THE VALUE OF AN EDISON.

What is the money value of Edison's inventions "to the world ? Electric lighting owes its adoption to the perifecting of the Edison-Swan incandescent lamp. There are to-day in the United States over 40,000,000 of these lamps connected with 5000 central stations, with capital obligations of a billion dollars. The gross earnings of these stations amount to I about 225 million dollars yearly. Private plants account for 25,000,000 more lamps, and represent about five hundred million dollars of capital invested. Forty great, factories for making the lamps represent about twenty-five million dollars capital. It was Edison who, by almost superhuman pertinacity, laid the foundations of all this—his lamp was not made until almost every possibility had been exhausted by the method of trial and error. Edison, again, was the first man to,devise, construct and operate a practicable electric railroad. This was the'starting point for electric traction, and, although its development is the work of many inventors, we can put down to Mr Edison's account the beginning of the 68,636 electric cars owned by American companies working 38,812 miles of track, and haying a capitalisation of over four billion dollars. Bell invented the telephone, but Edison made it a practical success, and his inventions may be found in every one of the 7,000,000 telephones in the I United States. His invention of the quadruplex telegraph has been estimated to.have saved the State twenty i million dollars in line construction. The phonograph companies of Orange, N.J., employ 3600 people, and have a pay-roll of two million and a-quarter dollars. More than a million and aquarter phonogiaphs have been sold in the last 20 years, and for them have been made 97,845,000 records — this is the most appalling of Edison's achievements. . Turning to the cinematograph, Edison's firm has made 13,100 machines, and millions of feet of film; this is only a fractional part of the industry, for 10,000 moving picture shows are operating in the United States at the present time. The Edison cement corporation in five years has become the fourth largest producer in the United States, the present rate of .production being 2,500,000 barrels a year. Huxley once said that a Faraday was cheap at • £100,000. The world has moved since then. Mr Edison's brain is worth its weight in radium!