The mind can not conceive what man will do in the
Twentieth Century with his chained lightning.
—Thomas A. Edison
 
Some years ago, a law was passed out in Ohio, making any man ineligible to act as a magistrate who had not studied law and been duly admitted to the bar. Men who had not studied law were deemed lacking in the sense of justice. This law was designed purely for one man—Samuel M. Jones of Toledo. Was ever a Jones so honored before?

In Athens, of old, a law was once passed declaring that every man, either of whose parents was an alien, was not a citizen and therefore ineligible to hold office.

This law was aimed at the head of one man—Themistocles.

"And so you are an alien?" was the taunting remark flung at the mother of Themistocles.

And the Greek matron proudly answered, "Yes, I am an alien—but my son is Themistocles."

Down at Lilly Dale the other day, a woman told me that she had talked with the mother of Edison, and the spirit-voice had said: "It is true I was a Canadian schoolteacher, and this at a time when very few women taught, but I am the mother of him you call Thomas A. Edison. I studied and read and wrote and in degree I educated myself. I had great ambition—I thirsted to know, to do, to become. But I was hampered and chained in an uncongenial atmosphere. My body struggled with its bonds, so that I grew weak, worried, sick, and died, leaving my boy to struggle his way alone. My only regret at death was the thought that I was leaving my boy. I thought that through my marriage I had killed my career—sacrificed myself. But my boy became heir to all my hunger for knowledge, and he has accomplished what I dimly dreamed. He has made plain what I only guessed. From my position here I have whispered secrets to him that only the freed spirits knew. I once thought my life was a failure, but now I know that the word \'failure\' is a term used only by foolish mortals. In the universal sense there is no such thing as failure."

Just here it seems to me that some one once said that we get no mind without brain. But we had here the brain of the medium, otherwise this alleged message from the spirit realm would not be ours. So we will not now tarry to discuss psychic phenomena, but go on to other things. But the woman from Lilly Dale said something, just the same.

Edison was born at the little village of Milan, Ohio, which lies six miles from Norwalk on the road between Cleveland and Toledo.

On the breaking out of the Civil War the boy was fourteen years old. His parents had moved to Sarnia, Canada, and then across to Port Huron.

Young Edison used to ride up and down from Detroit on the passenger-boats and sell newspapers. His standing with the Detroit "Free Press," backed up by his good-cheer and readiness to help the passengers with their babies and bundles, gave him free passage on all railroads and steamboat-lines.

There was a public library at Detroit where any one could read, but books could not be taken away.

All Edison\'s spare time was spent at the library, which to him was a gold-mine. All his mother\'s books had been sold, stolen or given away.

And ahoy there, all you folks who have books! Do you not know what books are to a child hungry for truth, that has no books?

Of course you do not!

Books to a boy like young Edison are treasures-trove, in which is stored the learning of all great and good and wise who have ever lived.

And the boy has to read, and read for a decade, in order to find that books are not much after all.

When Edison saw the inside of that library and was told he could read any or all of the books, he said, "If you please, Mister, I\'ll begin here." And he tackled the first shelf, mentally deciding that he would go through the books ten feet at a time.

A little later he bought at an auction fifty volumes of the "North American Review," and moving the books up to his home at Port Huron proceeded to read them.

The war was on—papers sold for ten cents each and business was good.

Edison was making money—and saving it. He only plunged on books.

Over at Mount Clemens, at the Springs, folks congregated, and there young Edison took weekly trips selling papers.

On one such visit he rescued the little son of the station-agent from in front of a moving train. In gratitude, the man took the boy to his house and told him he must make it his home while in Mount Clemens; and then after supper the youngster went down to the station; and what was more, the station-agent took him in behind the ticket-window, where the telegraph-instrument clicked off dots and dashes on a long strip of paper.

Edison looked on with open mouth.

"Would you like to become a telegraph-operator?" asked the agent.

"Sure!" was the reply.

Already the boy had read up on the subject in his library of the "North American Review," and he really knew the history of the thing better than did the agent.

Edison was now a newsboy on the Grand Trunk, and he arranged his route so as to spend every other night at Mount Clemens.

In a few months he could handle the key about as well as the station-agent.

About this time the ice had carried out the telegraph-line between Port Huron and Sarnia. The telegraph people were in sore straits. Edison happened along and said to the local operator, "Come out here, Bill, on this switch-engine and we\'ll fix things!" By short snorts of the whistle for dots and long ones for dashes, they soon caught the ear of the operator on the other side. He answered back, "What t\'ell is the matter with you fellows?" And Edison and the other operator roared with laughter, so that the engineer thought their think-boxes needed re-babbitting.

And that scheme of telegraphy with a steam-whistle was Edison\'s first invention.

Instead of going to college Edison started a newspaper—a kind of amateur affair, in which he himself wrote editorials, news-items and advertisements—this when he was seventeen years old.

The best way to become a skilled writer is to write; and if there is a better way to learn than by doing, the world has not yet discovered it.

Also, if there is a finer advantage for a youth who would be a financier than to have a shiftless father, it has not been recorded.

When nineteen, Edison had two thousand dollars in cash—more money than his father had ever seen at any one time.

The Grand Trunk folks found that their ex-trainboy could operate, and so they called on him to help them out, up and down the line. Then the Western union wanted extra good men, and young Edison was given double pay to go to New Orleans, where there was a pitiful dearth of operators, the Southern operators being mostly dead, and Northern men not caring to live in the South.

So Edison traveled North and South and East and West, gathering gear. He had studied the science of telegraphy closely enough to see that it could be improved upon. One message at a time for one wire was absurd—why not two, or four, and why not send messages both ways at once!

It was the general idea then that electricity traveled: Edison knew better—electricity merely rendered the wire sensitive.

Edison was getting a reputation among his associates. He had read everything, and when his key was not busy, there was in his hand a copy of Gibbon\'s "Decline and Fall."

He wrote a hand like copperplate and could "take" as fast as the best could send. And when it came to "sending," he had made the pride of Chicago cry quits.

The Western union had need of a specially good man at Albany while the Legislature was in session, and Edison was sent there. He took the key and never looked at the clock—he cleaned up the stuff. He sat glued to his chair for ten hours, straight.

At one time, the line suddenly became blocked between Albany and New York. The manager was in distress, and after exhausting all known expedients went to Edison. The lanky youth called up a friend of his in Pittsburgh and ordered that New York give the Pittsburgh man the Albany wire. "Feel your way up the river until you find me," were the orders.

Edison started feeling his way down the river.

In twenty minutes he called to the manager, "The break is two miles below Poughkeepsie—I\'ve ordered the section-boss at Poughkeepsie to take a repairer on his handcar and go and fix it!"

Of course, this plain telegraph-operator had no right to order out a section-boss; but nevertheless he did it. He shouldered responsibility like Tom Potter of the C., B. & Q.

Not long after the Albany experience, Edison was in New York, not looking for work as some say, but nosing around Wall Street investigating the "Laws Automatic Ticker." The machine he was looking at suddenly stopped, and this blocked all the tickers on the line. An expert was sent for, but he could not start it.

"I\'ll fix it," said a tall, awkward volunteer, the same which was Edison.

History is not yet clear as to whether Edison had not originally "fixed" it, and Edison so far has not confessed.

And there being no one else to start the machine, Edison was given a chance, and soon the tickers were going again. This gave him an introduction to the stock-ticker folks, and the Western union people he already knew.

This was in Eighteen Hundred Seventy, and Edison was then twenty-three years old.

He studied out how stock-reporting could be bettered and invented a plan which he duly patented, and then laid his scheme before the Western union managers.

A stock company was formed, and young Edison, aged twenty-four, was paid exactly forty thousand dollars for his patent, and retained by the Company as Electrical Adviser at three hundred dollars a month.

In Eighteen Hundred Seventy-four, when he was twenty-seven, he had perfected his duplex telegraph apparatus and had a factory turning out telegraph-instruments and appliances at Newark, New Jersey, where three hundred men were employed.

In Eighteen Hundred Seventy-six, the year of the Centennial Exposition, Edison told the Exposition Managers that if they would wait a year or so he would light their show with electricity.

He moved to the then secluded spot of Menlo Park to devote himself to experiments, spending an even hundred thousand dollars in equipment as a starter. Results followed fast, and soon we had the incandescent lamp, trolley-car, electric pen and many other inventions. It was on the night of October the Twenty-third, Eighteen Hundred Seventy-nine, that Edison first turned the current through an incandescent burner and got the perfect light. He sat and looked at the soft, mild, beautiful light and laughed a joyous peal of laughter that was heard in the adjoining rooms. "We\'ve got it, boys!" he cried, and the boys, a dozen of them, came tumbling in. Arguments started as to how long it would last. One said an hour. "Twenty-four hours," said Edison. They all vowed they would watch it without sleep until the carbon film was destroyed and the light went out. It lasted just forty hours.

Around Edison grew up a group of great workers—proud to be called "Edison Men"—and some of these went out and made for themselves names and fortunes.

Edison was born in Eighteen Hundred Forty-seven. Consequently, at this writing he is sixty-three years old. He is big and looks awkward, because his dusty-gray clothes do not fit, and he walks with a slight stoop. When he wants clothes he telephones for them. His necktie is worn by the right oblique, his iron-gray hair is combed by the wind. On his cherubic face usually sits a half-quizzical, pleased smile, that fades into a look plaintive and very gentle. The face is that of a man who has borne burdens and known sorrow, of one who has overcome only after mighty effort. I was going to say that Edison looks like a Roman Emperor, but I recall that no Roman Emperor deserves to rank with him—not even Julius C?sar! The face is that of Napoleon at Saint Helena, unsubdued.

The predominant characteristics of the man are his faith, hope, good-cheer and courage. But at all times his humor is apt to be near the surface.

Had Edison been as keen a businessman as Rockefeller, and kept his own in his own hands, he would today be as rich as Rockefeller.

But Edison is worth, oh, say, two million dollars, and that is all any man should be worth—it is all he needs. Yet there are at least a hundred men in the world today, far richer than Edison, who have made their fortunes wholly and solely by appropriating his ideas.

Edison has trusted people, and some of them have taken advantage of his great, big, generous, boyish spirit to do him grievous wrong. But the nearest I ever heard him come to making a complaint was when he said to me, "Fra Elbertus, you never wrote but one really true thing!"

"Well, what was that, Mr. Edison?"

"You said, \'There is one thing worse than to be deceived by men, and that is to distrust them.\' Now people say I have been successful, and so I have, in degree, and it has been through trusting men. There are a few fellows who always know just what I am doing—I confide in them—I explain things to them just to straighten the matter out in my own mind."

But of the men who have used Edison\'s money and ideas, who have made it a life business to study his patents and then use them, evading the law, not a word!

From Eighteen Hundred Seventy to Eighteen Hundred Ninety, Edison secured over nine hundred patents, or at the rate of one patent every ten days. Very few indeed of these patents ever brought him any direct return, and now his plan is to invent and keep the matter a secret in his "family."

"The value of an idea lies in the using of it," he said to me. "You patent a thing and the other fellow starts even with you. Keep it to yourself and you have the machinery going before the other fellow is awake. Patents may protect some things, and still others they only advertise. Up in Buffalo you have a great lawyer who says he can drive a coach and four through any will that was ever made—and I guess he can. All good lawyers know how to break wills and contracts, and there are now specialists who secure goodly fees for busting patents. If you have an idea, go ahead and invent a way to use it and keep your process secret."

The Edison factories at West Orange cover a space of about thirty acres, all fenced in with high pickets and barb-wire. Over two thousand people are employed inside that fence. There are guards at the gates, and the would-be visitor is challenged as if he were an enemy. If you want to see any particular person, you do not go in and see him—he comes to you and you sit in a place like the visitors\' dock at Sing-Sing.

With me it was different: I had a note that made the gates swing wide. However, one gatekeeper scrutinized the note and scrutinized me, and then went back into a maze of buildings for advice. When he came back, the General Manager was with him and was reproving him. In a voice full of defense the County Down watchman said: "Ah, now, and how did I know but that it was a forgery? And anyhow, I\'d never let in a man what looks like that, even if he had an order from Bill Taft."

The Edison factories, all enclosed in the high fence and under guard, include four separate and distinct corporations, each with its own set of offices. Edison himself owns a controlling interest in each corporation, and the rest of the stock is owned by the managers or "family." With his few trusted helpers he is most liberal. Not only do they draw goodly salaries, but they have an interest in the profits that is no small matter.

The secrets of the place are protected by ............