Ford Explodes An Edison Story.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19270, 6 January 1931, Page 6

Ford Explodes An Edison Story.

It was not poverty which led Edison when between twelve and thirteen to get a job as newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railway between Port Huron and Detroit, but a desire to obtain the wherewithal to carry on his chemical experiments, says Mr Henrv Ford, the motor-car magnate, in his book, recently published in New York, “ Edison as I Know Him.” This he did by setting up a little laboratory in the baggage car of the train. One day he dropped a stick of phosphorous. That started a blaze and the train conductor came in while Edison was trying to put it out.

The story has always been that the conductor boxed the boy’s ears so furiously as to injure the drums and that it was from this ear-boxing that Edison’s deafness dates It is true (says Henry Ford) that the conductor did find the fire and that he ordered Edison and his laboratory out at the next station, but the ear-boxing never happened. Mr Ford gives Edison’s own story as to how the deafness probably originated: “ I was delayed in waiting on some of my newspaper customers,” Edison told Mr Ford, “ and the train started ahead. I ran after it and caught the rear step, nearly out of wind and hardly able to lift myself up, for the steps in those days were high. A trainman reached over and grabbed me by the ears, and as he pulled me up I felt something in my ears crack and right after that I began to get deaf. The ear-boxing incident never happened. If it was that man who injured my hearing, he did it while saving my life.” Once Edison and Henry Ford were calling on Luther Burbank in California when the naturalist asked them to sign his guest book. “This book,” says Mr Ford, “had a column for signature, another for home address, another for occupation and a final one entitled ‘lnterested in.* In the final column Edison wrote without an instant’s hesitation: ‘ Everything.’ “ That explains Mr Edison,” adds Mr Ford. “He is literally interested in everything.” Mr Ford doesn’t tell us what he himself wrote in that last column. It might well have been: “ Edison.”