NA TURE 



193 



'•THE WIZARD OF MEXLO PARK:' 



The Life ami Indentions of Tliomas Al7'a Edison. By 

 W. K. L. Dickson and Antonia Dickson. (London : 

 Chatto and Windus, 1894. 



TWV. present rapid increase in the number of 

 places where the Edison Kinetoscope is exhibited, 

 leads one to glance through the account which was 

 published towards the end of last year of the life and 

 adventures of the American inventor. The career of one 

 who started as a newsboy, and who has raised himself to 

 fame and wealth by his quickness of perception, fertility 

 of resource, and general shrewdness, has been too varied 

 and exciting for the authors to succeed in rendering the 

 narrative uninteresting. 



But the pages of rhapsody with which this long quarto 



book is filled, combined with the extremely verbose and 



i.intlilaqucnt style in which it has b3en written, not only 



luler the ms^ming well-nigh unintelligible in many 



|)laces, but give a wholly false notion of Mr. Edison's 



hiractcr. For those who have m2t him must have been 



truck with his somewhat boyish character, his fondness 



I >r a joke, and his objection to black coats, tall hats, and 



I niirility. The Edison of this book would hardly be 



■ ognised as the Edison who, we remember, some years 



_;() could not be induced to put on his coat or shoes to 



eive an English peer, well known to science, who 



li.ippcned to call at Menlo I'ark when the inventor was 



iking his afternoon nap. 



We start, of course, with Edison's pedigree, and wc are 

 'Id that his father, "Samuel Edison, however, was not 

 iiinded to stimulate the waning flames of patriotism by 

 I libation of personal gore." We should have thought the 

 lather of an inventor would have known that gore «as 

 not a good sort of kindling. Then comes a desciiption 

 t^i "callow collegians dragged through an uncongenial 

 1 oursc of study, boarding-school graduates steeped in a 

 weak solution of accomplishments, ephemeral creatures 

 on whose glossy plumage the dews of Parnassus have 

 no power to rest " ; but Edison, on the contrary, "despite 

 his paucity of years," read through " fifteen feet of 

 closely serried volumes." Then we come to an excellent 

 portrait of Edison at fourteen years of age, which strik- 

 ingly resembles the closely shaven Edison of to-day, and 

 shows the same merry twinkle of the eye. 



Faesiiniles are gi\en of pages of Edison's newspaper, 

 the Grand Trunk Herald, started in 1862, the vast 

 number: of blots on which are explained, we suppose, by 

 the fact that this newspaper was regularly composed and 

 printed in a dilapidated freight car attached to a running 

 train. His next venture in the newspaper line, Paul Pry, 

 led to his beingducked bya subscriber, and, as his travelling 

 railway printing establishment and laboratory were burnt, 

 through the constant jolting of the springless car shaking 

 the cork out of a bottle of phosphorus, he turned his 

 attention to the construction of a telegraph line. This 

 was not attended with success, since to produce an 

 lectric current, "Edison secured two Brobdingnagian 

 » ats, with volcanic tempers, attached a wire to their legs, 

 NO. 1339, VOL. S2] 



administered a violent amount of friction to their backs, 

 and breathlessly awaited developments." 



Afterwards he became a real telegraph operator, and 

 when on night duty in the service of the C'.rand Trunk Rail- 

 way of Canada, he was, in common with the other night 

 operators, required to signal the word six every half- 

 hour to show that he was awake. Preferring, however, 

 to wander about the town, he obtained a clock and 

 converted it into an automatic telegraph key. This key, 

 however, would do nothing more than periodically signal 

 the word six, and declined to answer inquiries, so a 

 detective operator was put on the track, and Edison had 

 to make his escape into the United States. 



During the severe winter which followed, the ice broke 

 the telegraph cable under the river which separates Port 

 Huron from the Canadian city of Sarnia, on the opposite 

 bank a mile and a half away, and further rendered all 

 traffic across the river impossible. Communication 

 between the two cities was, however, restored by Edison 

 using the alarm whistle of a locomoti\ e engine to send 

 Morse signals. This power of overcoming difficulties 

 brought him into public notice, and he obtained in 

 succession several good posts as a telegraph operator. 

 His love of fun and of making experiments, however, led 

 him into constant trouble ; but he was rewarded at the' 

 age of seventeen by making his first invention of an 

 instrument for automatically repeating a telegraphic 

 message. 



Edison's electric device for killing cockroaches " is 

 told in the prosaic terms of the nineteenth century," and 

 commences, "Curiosity betrayed our Mother Eve," and so 

 on for many lines. Edison's first patent for a " \'ote 

 Recorder " was not commercially successful, as its employ- 

 ment in the Massachusetts Legislature was found to inter- 

 fere with the power of the House to use ^'■filibustering.'' 

 Then come his Universal Stock Printer and his employ- 

 ment as operator by the Law's Gold Reporting Company. 



During the excitement connected with the operations 

 of the Gould and Fisk ring to make a corner in gold, the 

 stock quotation printer broke down, and Edison gave 

 the very simple explanation that a contact spring had 

 broken and fallen between two cog-wheels in the instru- 

 ment. To describe this, however, the authors require 

 several pages. " Inflamed by the lust of gold " (not 

 Edison, however, for he was very poor at the time and 

 owed 200 dollars), "and reduced to the semblance of 

 insatiate brutes, the great sea of sentient humanity surged 

 around the shrine of its desires," &c. 



Chapter iv. commences with a description of " Edison's 

 storm-tossed craft," and tells how "a steady gale blew 

 from the Blessed Isles, wafting the adventurer into all 

 tempting harbours of successful discovery." We much 

 doubt the value of a wind blowing from an island, 

 whether blest or not, to take a craft into its harbour. 



In 1870 he was developing his automatic telegraph for 

 transmitting a message by the use of a perforated strip of 

 paper, and receiving it in Roman characters at the other 

 end of the telegraph line ; also instruments for auto- 

 matically sending messages, using the Morse code, as in 

 the well-known Whcatstonc's Fast Speed instruments. 



Next came the carbon button and the loud-speaking 

 telephone. No reference is here made to Prof. Hughes 

 microphone, or to the controversy which was carried on 



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