GREAT INVENTOR DEAD.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 21007, 19 October 1931, Page 8

GREAT INVENTOR DEAD.

THOMAS A. EDISON. FAMILY AT THE BEDSIDE. CAUSE OF FINAL COLLAPSE. STATEMENT BY PHYSICIAN. By Telegraph—Press Association— Copyright. (Received October 18. 10.55 p.m.) NEW YORK, Oct. 18. The death of the famous inventor Mr. Thomas A. Edison occurred at 3.24 a.m. to-day at West Orange, New Jersey. He • yas 84 years of age; The inventor's wife and six children, his personal physician and two nurses were at the bedside when the end came. Dr. Hubert S. Howe says Mr. Edison s collapse was traceable directly to the curtailment of his diet to relieve gastric ulcers. Also he was suffering from diabetes, Bright's , disease and uremic poisoning.

REMARKABLE CABEEE. STRUGGLES AS A YOUTH. SOME NOTABLE INVENTIONS. Thomas Alva Edison was born in February, 1847, /at Milan, Ohio. On his father's side he came of a Dutch family which emigrated to the United States in 1737. The failure of his father's business forced him to start earning his own living when he was seven. For several years ho travelled every day on the trains between Port Huron and Detroit, selling papers and refreshments. Later he set up in the luggage van which he used during his journeys a small printing press on which he produced a weekly railway journal, t-he contents of which he himself prepared, and it attained a .circulation of 400. The lad also fixed up a laboratory in th© van. Unfortunately, the chemicals started a fire and the blows of the angry conductor on the side of his head made Edison deaf for the rest of his life. It was a stroke of luck that-introduced him to telegraphy and got him a job as an operator. He saved the life of the son of a station agent who, in return, taught, him .telegraphy. Later he went to Indianapolis, where he brought out his first invention, the •'automatic repeater," which made it pos-

sible to transfer a message to another circuit without the intervention of a telegraphist. After serving in Cincinnati, Memphis, Louisville and New Orleans, he went, in 1868, to Boston, where he secured a more responsible position in the telegraph office. In his spare time in a small room, which he fitted up as a laboratory, he carried out electrical experiments in the course of which he perfected various inventions, including an apparatus which .obviated the waste of time in counting the votes in Parliamentary divisions. £3OOO For an Early Invention. Of greater importance was his system of duplex telegraphy, which he later developed so that four and even six messages could be sent over the same .wire simultaneously. Though this problem had been solved in Europe over a decade earlier, Edison s invention was made quite independently. From Boston he went to New York. While he was applying for a job something went wrong with the transmitter in a .telegraph office. Edison at once put it right and was made engineer in charge of the plant. For the Gold Indicator Company, of which he was made manager, he . invented a special telegraph apparatus for printing stock quotations, for which be asked £IOOO, and got the surprise of his life when he was given £BOOO for y it. Being now possessed of some capital, he erected a laboratory and factory at Newark, New Jersey, for experiments and the manufacture ol his patents, at the same time retaining his post with the Gold Indicator Company. After severing his connection with it he set up a laboratory at Menlo Park, New lYork. Many Epoch-making Devices. Edison's 10 years there embraced the period of his most important inventions, among which were the automatic telegraph transmitter, enabling messages to be sent at great speed; the telautograph, which reproduces in facsimile at the receiving station what the sender writes at the transmitting station; many improvements in apparatus; the electro-motograph, used most successfully id connection with telephones, a hygroscope for measuring the degree of moisture in the air; the phonograph (1877), and an improvement thereon (1888); a megaphone for magnifying otherwise inaudible sounds so that they can be heard; and the cinematograph. which his improvements made practicable. In addition he worked at adapting electricity to the propulsion of vehicles, building an experimental railway on his land, which was such a success that the Electric Railway Company was formed in 1283. The first public electric lino was opened at the Chicago Exposition in 1893 and in 33 days carried 28,000 passengers. The First Talking Pictures. In 1887 Edison set up a much larger laboratory at Orange, where he made, various improvements in the cinematograph. This institution, where lit-, was still working in 1927, was divided into several sections, one of them devoted to the application of electricity to mining. More' recently Edison succeeded in producing a /very light accumulator of high capacity for propelling vehicles, notably luggage trucks in stations. In 1913 lie showed the first talking pictures, obtained by synchronising the phonograph and the film. In 1916 he devised a portable searchlight of great power fed by a storage battery. As regards the telephone, he had been anticipated by A. G. Bell, but after some fruitless controversies they came together and Edison was able to introduce improvements which made it a practicable proposition.

Tlie inventor was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1915, and in the same year was appointed president of the United States Naval Construction Board. Edison wait a tremendous worker. For 60 years he d'.d not have more than four hours' sleep a day on the average. By the time 113 was 78 he liad taken out 1150 patents, and in 1927 he was still busy, though he was stone-deaf, and all communicat:.ons had to be made to him in writing. His latest scheme was to find a method by which rubber could be grown in America as an annual crop, so that within a ysar of war breaking out the United States could be independent of outside supplies. He was convinced that a war of all Europe against the United States was bound to come, and that the first result would be the cessation of the rubber supplies. The inventor's best-known saying was: "Genius is 1 per cent, inspiration and 99 per cent, perspiration." He calculated that the average man would have to live to be 135 to get through as much work as he had accomplished, thanks to his 16 or 18 hours a day. At Dearborn, Michigan, on October 21, 1929, the President, Mr. Hoover, paid a tribute to Mr. T. A. Edison on the 50th anniversary of his development of the incandescent electric lamp, which was also the occasion of the dedication of the Edison Institute of Technology, a gift from Mr. Henry Ford. Never content with existing methods, but full of a restless desire to find a better way, and with a keen eye for the needs and requirements of the world, Mr. Edison slowed himself a great improver rather tihan a great originator. Some of his wartime inventions were: The devicis for detecting submarines by sound fro::n a moving vessel; that for turning a ship at right angles; collision mats for minimising loss from torpedo attack; methods of camouflaging vessels; cbstruction of torpedoes with nets; the underwater searchlight; oleum cloud-shell ;3; high-speed signalling with searchlights; water-penetrating projectiles. „ , On October 20, 1928, when a Congressional Medal of Honour was presented to him in his laboratory by Mr. A W. Mi lion, Secretary to the Treasury, Mr. Edison said bis original electric lamp was still in the museum at South Kensington, b at that would remain there, as it was a priisent from him. The Biitish Charge d'Affaires, Mr. Ronald Ci.mpbell, returned to Mr. Edison the first gramophone he made, which he had lent to the Kensington Museum in 18S8.