Science: Wizard of Menlo

One day last week, a large boulder obstructed traffic on the Lincoln Highway at Menlo Park, between New Brunswick and Metuchen, N. J. The boulder was not directly on the cement, nor did it lean menacingly over it. Motorists could have passed by comfortably, save that before the boulder, ranged in rows upon the highway, were some 600 chairs of the folding variety used for church sociables, political meetings and open-air exercises.

Upon the chairs sat notables, upon a platform more notables. Across the boulder rippled two U. S. flags, behind which, fixed in the stone, a bronze tablet mutely announced: “On this site-1876-1882-Thomas Alva Edison began his work of service for the world. . . . This tablet is placed by the Edison Pioneers. . . .”

Near Mr. and Mrs. Edison on the platform was John W. Lieb of the New York Edison Co. He dedicated the tablet and presented it to Governor George S. Silzer of New Jersey as a state monument, the latter accepting after Mrs. Edison had unveiled it. President John G. Hibben of Princeton then perorated, with interruptions by a rumbling freight train and a youthful Edisonian who leapt to the fore to declare he would never go to college.*Samuel Insull terminated the speechmaking.

Mr. Insull, when he came to this country from England in 1881, became the private secretary of Mr. Edison.

Today he is a living example of the revolution which Mr. Edison has made possible in modern living -for he is President of the Commonwealth Edison Co., which furnishes all of Chicago’s electric light, master of a great group of public utilities in the West -many of them grown up out of Mr. Edison’s inventions -President of the Chicago Civic Opera Company and in general a magnate of the Middle West. He, with others-aids and witnesses of wholesale changes wrought by Edison inventions-did honor to the inventor.’ Through it all a big white head nodded modest appreciation, a pair of bright blue eyes twinkled with pleasure.

To the assemblage, no recital of Inventor Edison’s history was needful. Too well known was the story of the Ohio youth inept at books, fond of dabbling with chemicals, both greengrocer and publisher in his teens, boxed on the ears (and deafened for life) by a furious conductor because a stick of phosphorus started a fire in the mail car in which he traveled with his printing office and chemicals (he was selling magazines on trains at the time and had a laboratory in one end of the mail car), and later of the young telegraph operator with the itch for invention.

The accomplishments of his life speak for him:

Improvements for the telegraph and for Dr. Bell’s telephone of 1875; the electric pen or telescribe, and the mimeograph; the megaphone; an instantaneous vote-recording machine which Congress rejected because “one of the greatest weapons in the hands of a minority to prevent bad legislation . . . is the roll-call”; the microtasimeter, for detecting slight changes of temperature; the world’s first “talking-machine”; carbon filaments for incandescent electric light bulbs; the “Edison effect,” an electric valve; the motion-picture camera ; metal filaments for bulbs; the taximeter ; an electric street car and numerous minor contrivances that have brought the number of U.S. patents in his name to over 1,000.

During the War, he enlisted his mechanical ingenuity as Chairman of the Naval Consulting Board; his chemical knowledge by producing, in large quantities, carbolic acid and other substances essential to the drug and dye industries, for which the U.S. had been dependent upon Germany.

From Ohio, where he had been born, the scene of his early life, his first experiments and his days as a telegraph operator, Mr. Edison removed to Newark, N.J., in 1873; then to Menlo Park, later to Orange, N.J., where his home and large factories now are. Outside “the old man’s” office, a placard advises visitors that he is so busy that he finds it “impossible to grant any personal interviews.” Within, an absorbed, absentminded, gracious, tireless, cheerful individual carries on his work, with the calm open-mindedness of a scientist, from one day to the next of his 79th year. Well might his motto be the one which is the heritage of the Princes of Wales-“Ich dien” (I serve).

Works. With but three of his inventions, “the Wizard of Menlo Park” has modified human life more extensively than any man of his time. Most recent figures, for the U.S. alone :

ELECTRIC LIGHTING

Number of customers 13,400,000 Number of employees 300,000 Incandescent lamps per customer 37.85 Residences wired 10,500,000 PHONOGRAPHS Number of phonographs manufactured per year 981,635 Number of records 98,104,279 Wage earners in the industry 23,505 CINEMA Feet of film made per month 65,000,000 Miles of film made per year (over) 150,000 Cinema houses in the U.S -17,836 Proportion of U.S. population estimated as attending cinemas regularly 68.2%

-Inventor Edison, no college graduate, frequently deprecates the value of a college education. -In the world there are approximately 47,000 cinema houses.