Part 8 (2/2)

Edison never hadin his entire boyhood There is, therefore, nothing trained, ”regular,” technical, about hiht never have heard of hiainst the old system advocated by everybody's father, and especially by the older fathers of the church, and which meant that every man and woman was practically cut by the saeneralalone No rooves of life was constantly sounded Natural aptitude, ”bent,” inclination, were disregarded The enius is only another name for industry,” was constantly quoted and believed

But Edison's mother had been trained, practically, as an instructor of youth He had hints fro He is not an ignorant hly educated one But it is an education he has constructed for himself out of his aptitudes, as all other actual educations have really been When he was ten years old he had read standard works, and at twelve is stated to have struggled, ineffectually perhaps, with Newton's _Principia_ At that age he became a train-boy on the Grand Trunk railroad for the purpose of earning his living; only another way of pioneering and getting as to be got by personal endeavor While in that business he edited and printed a little newspaper; not to please an a, but for profit He was selling papers, and he wanted one of his own to sell because then he would get more out of it in a small way He never afterwards showed any inclination toward journalism, and did not become a reporter or correspondent, or start a rural daily While he was a train-boy, enjoying every opportunity for absorbing a knowledge of huer conductor or a locoraph as a proreat and useful institution, and he resolved to beco Yet before he took this step he was accused of a proclivity toward extraordinary things In the old ”caboose” where he edited, set up, and printed his newspaper he had established a small chemical laboratory, and out of these chemicals there is said to have been jolted one day an accident which caused him some unpopularity with the railroad people He was all the time a business man He e business It took hiraph business under the circu” circuit he began at once to do unusual things with the current and its machines and appliances This is what he tells of his first electrical invention

There was an operator at one end of the circuit as so swift that Edison and his coh to keep up with hiisters--the machines that printed with a steel point the dots and dashes on a paper slip wound off of a reel

These he arranged in such a way that the e written, or indented, on theiven to him by the second instruave to him and his friend tiht an achieveard it as a joke There was no tiency, and the idea must necessarily have been supplemented by a quick mechanical skill

It was this saht and logical deduction afterwards produced that wonderful autoed a hasty instrument that was based upon the idea that if the indentationssound of the instruht be ave back a sound vaguely resele word first shouted into it and supposed to be indented on a slip of paper, and this was enough to stis and took them to a machinist whohed at the idea but made the model Previously he bet a friend a barrel of apples that he could do it When the ed a piece of tin foil and talked into it, and when it gave back a distinct sound the htened, and Edison won his barrel of apples, ”which,” he says, ”I was very glad to get”

The ”Wizard” is ato the class of human eccentrics who excite the interest of their fellow-men ”to see what they will do next,” but without any idea of the final value of that which may come by what seems to them to be mere unbalanced oddity Such people are invariably misunderstood until they succeed When he invented the autoed, and walked from Decatur to Nashville, 150 miles, with only a dollar or two as his entire possessions With a pass thence to Louisville, he and a friend arrived at that place in a snowstorm, and clad in linen ”dusters” This does not seem scientific or professor-like, but it has not hindered; possibly it has immensely helped It reminds one of the Franklinic episodes when remembered in connection with future scientific renown and the court of France

One of the secrets of Edison's great success is the ease hich he concentrates hisand taking up another whenever he wills He even carries on in his ht at the same time The operations of his brain are imitated in his daily conduct, which is direct and sied in themental toil He dresses in a machinist's clothes when thus e accusto as he was so inclined without regard to regularity, orto eat his food fros, chips and tools To relieve strain and take a an and taught hiht and grind out tunes for relaxation He has a working library containing several thousand books He pores over these volu idea, and does so in the midst of his work No man could have made some of his inventions unaided by technical science and a knowledge of the results of the investigations of many others, and it has often been wondered how a man not technically educated could have seemed so well to know There was a ator of re of the inventions of Edison and their value, a dozen of the first class, that would each one have satisfied the ambition or taken the tiraph and the electric pen are minor Then there are the stock printer, the autoraphy, the phono-plex, the ore-ine, the phonograph Solow of his incandescent light, or with one's ear to the tube of the telephone he improved in itswas too small for Franklin, or for the boy who played idly with the lid of his ine of today, or for Hero of Alexandria, who dreamed a thousand years before its time of the power that was to coraph the net was supported upon a pile of books, his signal bell was that hich one calls a servant, and his idea was a mere experiment without result There was a boy Edison needed there then, whose toys reap fortunes and light, and enlighten, the world The electric pen was in its day immensely useful in the business world, because it was the application of the stencil to ordinaryof hundreds of copies upon the stencil idea, and with a printer's roller instead of a brush The raph was the sa upon a tablet that is like a bastard-file, with a steel-pointed stylus

Each slight projection ain

So the ht It is a little thing, smaller than a thread, frail, delicate, sealed in a bulb almost absolutely exhausted of air, smooth without a flaw, of absolutely even caliber from end to end The world was searched for substances out of which to make it, and experiments were endlessly and tediously tried; all for this one little part of a great invention, which, like all other inventions, would be valueless in the want of a single little part

There are hundreds, an unknown number, of inventions in electricity in this country whose authors are unknown, and will never be known to the general public The patent office shows ate Many useful improvements in the telephone alone have come under the eye of every casual reader of the newspapers These are now locked up frotheir substitution for those arrangements now in use

All the principles--the principles that, finally demonstrated, become laws--upon which electrical invention is based, are old It seeht, to have found a new trait, a development, a hitherto unsuspected quality Tesla, in some of his most wonderful experiments, seems almost to have touched the boundaries of an unexplored realm, yet not quite, not yet, and o To play upon those knos--to twist theive them new developments--has been the work of the creators of all the modern electrical miracles

There is scarcely a field in which men work in which the results are not more apparent, yet all we have, and undoubtedly most we shall ever have, of electricity we shall continue to owe to the infant period of the science

It may be truthfully claimed that most of these extraordinary applications of electricity have been made by American inventors

Wherever there is steam, on sea or land, there, intiement, will be found the dynamic current and all its uses The science of explosive destruction has aled, and with a most extraordinary result But one of the factors of this change has been the electric current, a souns, shi+ps or sailing Thewith those of our own navy, is lighted by the electric light, signalled and controlled by the current, and her ponderous guns are loaded, fired, and even _sighted_ by the same e part of her crew are trained to manipulate wires instead of ropes, and her total efficiency is perhaps three tiiroithin ten years from a service encrusted with traditions like barnacles, and that could not have coer merely that, but also an electrical machine, often with machinery as complicated as that of a chronometer and much e piece was even sighted by electricity There is really nothing strange in the stateh it may read like a fairy tale or a metaphor to whoever has never had his attention called to the subject In a small ith the name of its inventor almost unknown except to his messmates, it is one of the most wonderful, and one of the simplest, of the modern miracles As a mere instance of the wide extent of modern ideas of utility, and of the possibilities of application of the laws that were discovered and formulated by those whose names the units of electrical unners may work behind an iron breastwork, and never see the enemy's hull, and yet aim at him with a hundred times the accuracy possible in the day of the _Old Ironsides_ and the _Guerriere_

And first it ely a measure of mere economy A two-million-dollar cruiser is not sailed, or lost, as a ht Ten years ago the way of finding distance, or range, which is the sa, was experimental If a costly shot was fired over the enemy the next one was fired lower, and possibly between the two the rangepositions and range To change this, to either injure an antagonist quickly or get away, the ”range-finder” was invented, as a matter not of business profit, by Lieutenant Bradley A

Fiske, of the U S Navy, in 1889 It has its reason in the fales and one side of a triangle are known, the other sides of the triangle are easily found That is, that it can be deter to it But Fiske's range-finder makes no mathematical calculations, nor requires them to be made, and is automatic A base line perle required The distance of the object to be hit is deterle, and at each of the other angles, at the two ends of the base line, is fixed a spyglass These are directed at the object

So far electricity has had nothing to do with the arrangement, but now it enters as the factor without which the device could have no adaptation As the telescopes are turned to bear upon the target they move upon slides or wires bent into an arc, and these carry an electric current The difference in length of the slide passed over in turning the telescopes upon the object causes a greater or less resistance to the current, precisely as a short wire carries a currentone A contrivance forthat other instruments do of the same class that are used every day, allows of this resistance being measured and read, not now in units of electricity, but _in distance to the apex of the triangle where the target is_; in yards The et as it moves, or as the vessel moves which wishes to hit it And now even the telephone enters into the arrangement Elsewhere in the shi+p another man may stand with the trans sound until the telescopes stop , and at the saraduated scale The instant the sound ceases he reads the range denoted by the index and scale The inforuns; these, of course, being ai to that under the eye of the man at the telephone The plan is not here detailed as technical infor the wide range of electrical applications in fields where possible usefulness would not have been so entleenious electrical appliances for the working of those i forinto their cavernous breeches of shot and shell The uns now do not need to see the eneh the porthole or the e and firing, assisted by machines nearly or quite automatic, and can cant and lay the piece by an index, and fire with an electric lanyard The genius of science has taken the throne vacated by the Goddess of glory The sailor has gone, and the experthave given way to the register, the gauge and the electroer run backward a splinters, and rammed by men stripped to the waist and shrouded in the s muzzles to and fro out of steel caserotesque anirim machinery of naval battle is ht is swayed and tilted by a concealed and silent wire

This strange slave, that toils unmoved in the din of battle, has been reduced to domestic servitude of the plainest character The dereat fair of 1893 leave that service possible in the future without any question

Electrical ovens, models of neatness, convenience and _coolness_, were shown at work They were hted inside with an incandescent laree of temperature was shown by a ther visible There could be no question of too much heat on one side and too little on another, because switches placed at different points allowed of a cutting off, or a turning on, whenever needed

Laundry irons had an insulated pliable connection attached, so that heat was high and constant at the bottom of the iron and not elsewhere There were all the appliances necessary for the broiling of steaks, theof cakes, and the saer a mystery, pervaded it all Woman is also to become an electrician, at least empirically, and in tie and her Amperes as she now does her drafts and dampers and the quality of her fuel

It is a practical fact that chickens are hatched by the thousand by the electrical current, and that men have discovered more than nature knew about the period of incubation, and have reduced it by electricity from twenty-one to nineteen days The proverb about the value of the ti hen has passed into antiquity with all things else in the presence of electrical science

Whenever an American mechanician, a manufacturer or an inventor, is confronted by a difficulty otherwise insolvable he turns to electricity

Its laws and qualities are few They seereat curiosity of modern times is the almost infinite number of applications which these laws and qualities lance fro of chickens and the cooking of chocolate by precisely the same means, silently used in the same way Most of these applications, and all the in Their inventors are largely unknown There is no atteest the possibilities of the near future by a gli, the boy who is ten years old, should easily know more of electrical science than Franklin did There are certain primal laws by which all explanations of all that now is, and most probably of alo, may be readily understood, and these I have endeavored, in this and preceding chapters, to explain