Edison, His Life and Inventions | Page 2

necessary in regard to each group of
inventions. The task of the authors has consisted largely in
summarizing fairly the methods and processes employed by Edison;
and some idea of the difficulties encountered by them in so doing may
be realized from the fact that one brief chapter, for example,--that on
ore milling--covers nine years of most intense application and activity
on the part of the inventor. It is something like exhibiting the
geological eras of the earth in an outline lantern slide, to reduce an
elaborate series of strenuous experiments and a vast variety of
ingenious apparatus to the space of a few hundred words.
A great deal of this narrative is given in Mr. Edison's own language,
from oral or written statements made in reply to questions addressed to
him with the object of securing accuracy. A further large part is based
upon the personal contributions of many loyal associates; and it is
desired here to make grateful acknowledgment to such collaborators as
Messrs. Samuel Insull, E. H. Johnson, F. R. Upton, R. N Dyer, S. B.
Eaton, Francis Jehl, W. S. Andrews, W. J. Jenks, W. J. Hammer, F. J.
Sprague, W. S. Mallory, and C. L. Clarke, and others, without whose
aid the issuance of this book would indeed have been impossible. In
particular, it is desired to acknowledge indebtedness to Mr. W. H.
Meadowcroft not only for substantial aid in the literary part of the work,
but for indefatigable effort to group, classify, and summarize the
boundless material embodied in Edison's note-books and memorabilia
of all kinds now kept at the Orange laboratory. Acknowledgment must
also be made of the courtesy and assistance of Mrs. Edison, and
especially of the loan of many interesting and rare photographs from

her private collection.

EDISON HIS LIFE AND INVENTIONS
CHAPTER I
THE AGE OF ELECTRICITY
THE year 1847 marked a period of great territorial acquisition by the
American people, with incalculable additions to their actual and
potential wealth. By the rational compromise with England in the
dispute over the Oregon region, President Polk had secured during
1846, for undisturbed settlement, three hundred thousand square miles
of forest, fertile land, and fisheries, including the whole fair Columbia
Valley. Our active "policy of the Pacific" dated from that hour. With
swift and clinching succession came the melodramatic Mexican War,
and February, 1848, saw another vast territory south of Oregon and
west of the Rocky Mountains added by treaty to the United States.
Thus in about eighteen months there had been pieced into the national
domain for quick development and exploitation a region as large as the
entire Union of Thirteen States at the close of the War of Independence.
Moreover, within its boundaries was embraced all the great American
gold-field, just on the eve of discovery, for Marshall had detected the
shining particles in the mill-race at the foot of the Sierra Nevada nine
days before Mexico signed away her rights in California and in all the
vague, remote hinterland facing Cathayward.
Equally momentous were the times in Europe, where the attempt to
secure opportunities of expansion as well as larger liberty for the
individual took quite different form. The old absolutist system of
government was fast breaking up, and ancient thrones were tottering.
The red lava of deep revolutionary fires oozed up through many
glowing cracks in the political crust, and all the social strata were
shaken. That the wild outbursts of insurrection midway in the fifth
decade failed and died away was not surprising, for the superincumbent
deposits of tradition and convention were thick. But the retrospect

indicates that many reforms and political changes were accomplished,
although the process involved the exile of not a few ardent spirits to
America, to become leading statesmen, inventors, journalists, and
financiers. In 1847, too, Russia began her tremendous march eastward
into Central Asia, just as France was solidifying her first gains on the
littoral of northern Africa. In England the fierce fervor of the Chartist
movement, with its violent rhetoric as to the rights of man, was
sobering down and passing pervasively into numerous practical
schemes for social and political amelioration, constituting in their
entirety a most profound change throughout every part of the national
life.
Into such times Thomas Alva Edison was born, and his relations to
them and to the events of the past sixty years are the subject of this
narrative. Aside from the personal interest that attaches to the
picturesque career, so typically American, there is a broader aspect in
which the work of the "Franklin of the Nineteenth Century" touches the
welfare and progress of the race. It is difficult at any time to determine
the effect of any single invention, and the investigation becomes more
difficult where inventions of the first class have been crowded upon