EDISON AT EIGHTY.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20022, 12 February 1927, Page 10

EDISON AT EIGHTY.

Though it may be with some reservations concerning a. lack of respect towards the principle of the eight-hour day or the 44-hour week, patrons of the picture theatres should ponder with some degree of pleasure the cabled reference to Thomas Alva Edison, at eighty, working in his laboratory for twelve hours daily, and still engaged in making more of the discoveries which have caused him to be christened a wizard. Edison's dealings in magic—the magic of electricity—have been productive of changes which have almost transformed the world, at least to outward seeming. His life-story is an illustration of the manner in which great happenings sometimes spring from small events. Young Edison began life by selling newspapers on the railway, and his inventiveness led him to publish the first paper ever printed on a train. The daughter of a station master was saved from imminent death by Edison's prompt presence of mind allied to an inherent agility. In return, the grateful father instructed Edison in the elements of telegraphy, and in so doing set the young man's feet on the path of fame and success. That road eventually led by various stages to the discovery of the gramophone and the kinematograph, and it is interesting to reflect that but for Edison's preliminary investigations, those two important additions to the amenities of every-day life might be nonexistent. Nor does this exhaust the list of the benefactions which the wizard's active brain has conferred upon civilisation. He has been a pioneer along many lines directed to the improvement of machinery and the saving of labour. He has expressly declared in favour of a machine age, and he looks for man's increasing freedom from existent disabilities in so far as he learns to substitute machinery for his own muscles. In this direction Edison still seeks to perfect more of the thousands of patents that have been taken out in his name. It is an instructive spectacle, that of this octogenarian, still young and still labouring to make this existence more tolerable for mankind through the solution of the problems of science and through the adaptation of the results for use every day. Edison has only one peer in the sphere' of inventions. It is scarcely too much to say that between them Edison and Marconi have not only transformed the face of the modern world, but in so doing have limned faintly the capabilities of the human intellect.