Science: Death of a Titan

Thomas Alva Edison died last week. His practical intelligence was a monument in his century. Thousands of obituaries were published. Some facts about Thomas Alva Edison:

> He was born in a brick house at Milan, Ohio, on Feb. 11, 1847.

> At 12, he was a newsboy. At the age when he might have been in college, he was touring most of the U. S., on trains and on foot, restlessly acquiring knowledge.

> He published a unique newspaper on a train, learned telegraphy in two months, got a job with the Western Union, went to Canada in 1864, then to Indianapolis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Memphis.

> In Memphis, he thought up his first invention—a telegraphic repeater. Jealous, the manager of the Memphis office discharged Inventor Edison. Edison, because he had no money, walked back to Louisville (380 mi.).

> Once he planned to sail for South America. When he reached New Orleans, the boat had gone. Edison returned to Cincinnati, there perfected his first patented invention—a chemical voting record machine for the House of Representatives, which Congress never used.

> At 24, he went to Manhattan, secured the backing that enabled him, five years later, to set up his workshop, at Orange, N. J.

> An artist in essentials, Inventor Edison was absentminded, often unkempt, given to laconic epigrams, careless about money. Having accepted “thirty thousand” for a new kind of transmitter bought by a British company, he was astonished at being paid in pounds, not dollars. He afterward received this letter from George Bernard Shaw: “I have the honor, sir, to inform you that you have now destroyed all the privacy in Great Britain.”

> Patience, perseverance were the virtues he most prized. To a youthful job-seeker he said: “Never look at the clock.” Of inventions, he remarked: “You can’t give it to them too fast.”

> Among the things he invented, wholly or partly, were: moving pictures, the phonograph, the carbon telephone transmitter, the microphone, the mimeograph, an alkaline storage battery, the incandescent light (his favorite).

> So great was his prestige that when, in 1917 he became head of an advisory board of civilian inventors to meet conditions of warfare on land and sea, it was confidently expected that he would find a way rendering enemy submarines harmless. Inventor Edison was still pondering ways to combat submarines when the war ended.

> A confirmed agnostic (see p. 22), he confronted death with equanimity tinged by curiosity. His personal physician, Dr. Hubert S. Howe, who with the second Mrs. Edison, was present during his last illness, revealed two utterances which interrupted the coma of Edison’s last days. Said Dr. Howe: “When asked if he believed in immortality, he answered briefly, ‘No.’ A few days before he passed away, he was sitting in his chair apparently enjoying a pleasant dream. Suddenly opening his eyes … his face illuminated with a smile, he said: ‘It is very beautiful over there.’ ”

After his death, while his corpse lay in a bronze, glass-topped coffin over which Edison employes stood guard, tributes to a unique personality, a magnificent and strange intelligence, came from all over the world. Henry Ford and Harvey Samuel Firestone, his closest friends, made plans to attend his funeral at East Orange, N. J. Said Henry Ford: “It has sometimes been said that we live in an industrial age. It might better be said we live in the age of Edison . . . in many ways, the greatest man since the world began. . . .” Said Harvey Firestone: “Mr. Edison, we all know, had the greatest mind of any man in our generation. . . .”

President Hoover sent a note of condolence to Mrs. Mina Edison which said: ”Mr. Edison . . . made the whole world his debtor. I mourn his passing not only as one of the greatest men our nation has produced but as a personal friend. . . .” Pope Pius XI cabled Cardinal Hayes to present his condolences to the inventor’s family. Edison had once sent him a dictating machine, received a letter of thanks and a gold medal.