HISTORY OF ELECTRICITY IN AMERICA 131 



be willing to strike from the world the use of the magnetic 

 telegraph as a means of communication between different 

 portions of the same country. This great invention is now to 

 be brought into its further, wider, and broader use — the use 

 by the general society of nations, international use, the use 

 of the society of mankind. Its benefits are large — just in 

 proportion to the extent and scope of its operation. They are 

 not merely benefits to the government, but they are benefits 

 to the citizens and subjects of all nations and of all states." 



A list of five hundred patents and more than three him- 

 dred pending applications for patents comprises, according 

 to a recent authorit}^, only a part of the inventions of Thomas 

 A. Edison. Those who have been associated with the wizard 

 of Menlo Park can easily believe that they constitute only 

 a small part. Edison is doubtless the most prolific of invent- 

 ors, — a true genius developed to full flower by rare and won- 

 derful opportunities. Yet here, again, the rational explana- 

 tion supervenes that the master is master because he excels 

 in every kind of equipment for his special work. Du kannst 

 weil du kennst is the secret of the personal element in Edison's 

 success. Though his schooling ended after a two months' 

 term, Edison has always been an insatiable student. At the 

 hearing of the arguments in an important suit against the 

 Edison company, at Pittsburgh, something more than a year 

 ago, it was observed that Edison, who had travelled from his 

 home in New Jersey to be present, spent little time in court, 

 preferring to keep his room and the company of a trunk full 

 of books, which he had carried with him. And this zeal for 

 study is habitual. 



Unlike many school taught men, Edison is not satisfied 

 to stop with the end of the day's lesson. ''I only go a little 

 farther than some of the others," he once said. But that 

 little farther is a vast distance. In the industry of electric 

 lighting by incandescence it meant all the way from a state 

 of mere experiment to a practical and economical system of 

 electric light distribution. And it involved improvements 

 in the djTiamo, in means for subdividing the light, in exhaust 

 apparatus, in the filament to be white heated, and in every 



