WITH MR. EDISON.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 11686, 22 June 1901, Page 1 (Supplement)

WITH MR. EDISON.

20TH CENTURY MAX OX 20TH CENTURY AFFAIRS. Mr. Edison does not often take a holiday, but he decided to spend one with me.

After a short railway run from New Voile i I was at Orange, where one of the inventor's i small, swift motor car.-; was waiting to take i me to the groat man. Before 1 had time to | compare Orange with it-- very similar i suburbs on the outskirts of London, 1 was j shaking hands with a genius whose capacity i for wearing "a shocking bad. hat" is only I equalled by that of Mr. Rhodes. j

Mr. Edison is large-made, of middle height, considerably older than Ids photographs, very deaf, and with that peculiar complexion one finds in monks and prisoners, and those who do not see much 01 the light of day. THE WORKROOM AND Till' -MAN. The hall in which the world's greatest inventor is a lame and lofty library with a gallery round it, furnished with main thousands of books, maps, diagrams, and some models of his inventions. In one corner ] saw the remains of a minute lunch. Mr. Edison take.- very little food, and but little exercise, though he has a surprising store of fun, vivacity, and initiative. If he could be induced to write a book, it is safe to say it would not only be one of the most interesting, but one of the funniest. Yfe laughed heartily over the story, which has been told many times, of how he sold the invention of the tape telegraph machine, for which he expected to get a few pounds, for many thousands, insisting, in his boyish ignorance of pecuniary mutters, on receiving the money into banknotes, which were so bulky as to monopolise all his pockets.

Mr. Edison is of mixed .Scotch and Dutch descent, and his knowledge of British uß'airs is very considerable. Indeed, one leaves him with the impression so often left on one's mind by the world's great men. "How on earth does he manage to find time to keep it all up'''' NOT A COMFORTER TO ENGLAND. Frankly, his criticisms are not optimistic with regard to the English Engineering and mechanical outlook, unless, as he says, we shortly and sharply reform ourselves. We have among us, as he pointed out, some of the greatest minds (of Lord Kelvin he spoke with much enthusiasm), but we are either too self-satisfied to learn, or the national character has undergone some great change from the time when we spread the world with railways, submarine cables, and steamships, lie compared the growth of the telephone in England and in his own country, pointing out to me that lie introduced the telephone almost simultaneously in England and in America, coming over to England himself for that purpose ; and I was reminded, though not by him, of the fact that in the course of the evidence in the Parliamentary inquiry into the telephone question, one of our leading electritians, who still continues to voice his sentiments on these matters, expressed his opinion that the telephone would never succeed in England, because we had such a superabundance of messenger boys!

"At this moment." Mr. Edison remarked, "my efforts are concentrated on self-propel-led carriages, what you call motor-cars." It is not easy to induce Mr. Edison to talk about his own work; but he showed me his electric storage-battery, which will probably do away with tramways, and will enable anyone to carry in a small space a rapidlyehavged set of accumulators of comparatively light weight at an infinitesimal cost. Mr. Edison has celebrated the commencement of the twentieth century with this invention. ENGLAND IS IILINDLY CONSERVATIVE. "The, motor-car," he remarked, "ought to have been British. You first invented it the thirties. You have made only second to those of France, you have hundreds and thousands of skilled mechanics in your midst; but," he said, "you have lost the trade by the same kind of stupid legislation and prejudice that has put you last in many departments of the electrical field." I pointed out that we were a horse-loving and horse-breeding people. "Well," remarked Mr. Edison, "you import hundreds of thousands of our horses every year, and it is evidence of the love of a horse to compel him to drag vast weights tip hills and condemn him to the heavy truckage (cartage) of your cities No, sir, your opposition to the motor ear is like your opposition to the electric light, electric trams, and the telephone. In this case it is most serious, because, as you may have seen from our tit}- of New York, automobiles are rapidly showing that they must inevitably supersede the horse for all kinds of town and country traction. Why, sir, do your people realise, that the daily horse traffic of the city of London is at least twice that of the energy expended on the whole traction of the London and North-Western Railway Company, that the traffic of NewYork is greater every day than that of the New York Central Railway? Does it requite much imagination to sec that the construction and use of self-propelled carriages is to be one of the biggest businesses in the world. ' WHAT THE I'HONOURAI'H liRiNGS IN. At the moment Mr. Edison, having completed his electric storage-battery, and his work on the motorcar, is going ahead with the construction of his phonographs, from which he is deriving a personal income of some £70.000 a year.

I should imagine that the inventor cares little for money. Hail he retained the whole of his inventions, his wealth would have equalled that of the Steel Trust, with the fortunes of Mr. Rockefeller. the Vanderbilts, and the Rothschilds into the bargain, and a large margin over. Yet, though we may see the work of his brain in almost every civilised country, though he is the inventor of scores ot contrivances which are not associated with him, in addition to those for which he is famous, he is not wealthy in a country where a mere £70,000 a year is little better than pauperism. His newest large-size phonograph is very perfect. It has lost almost all the nut-meg-grater tone that made it so irritating, and lie has managed to produce it by the most beautiful labour-saving contrivance I have, ever seen. Nothing is more depressing and puzzling to an Englishman than to stand before some comparatively small American machine, a machine that seems to think as it works, and witness that machine doing neatly, cheaply, and with mathematical accuracy the work that in the Old Country is done by scores of human hands: and it is appalling to think of the stupidity of British employers and workmen who imagine that such machines do av. ay with human labour.

A number of Mr. Edison's people are English, find high up in most American factories you find an Englishman who left Home either because lie was not content with the monotonous dead-level of wages thrust upon him by the trade union, or with the lack of opportunity given him by the employer. WIZARDRY". Mr. Edison took me round his model room, filled with scores of great contrivances, at which he works from time to time. He showed me what 1 might call his "Library of Material," from which he can in a moment obtain a specimen of almost every kind of substance in the world, a department necessary for his multitudinous experiments. "Name anything," he said, "and I will produce it at once," and so I named a diamond, a piece of beeswax, a piece of the skin of a civet cat, a specimen of esparto grass, some quicksilver, arsenic, sea water, and specimens of various English woods. The odd collection was before me in a moment.

Mr. Edison is in many ways a great admirer of our country, its men and women, its books, its scenery, and its domestic life. He has the greatest reverence for the mighty engineers of our past: but he believes that we are a nation of Rip van Winkles still asleep.—J. 8.., in the Daily Mail,