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The whole problem of indoor lighting was to be solved by one of America's most famous inventors. The antecedents of Thomas Alva Edison in America may be traced back to the time when Franklin was beginning his career as a printer in Philadelphia. The first American Edisons appear to have come from Holland about 1730 and settled on the Passaic River in New Jersey.
He knew, too, that America had reared the empire of business on close knit and efficient organisation. He did what Andrew Carnegie or any other captain of capital would do. He called together the Schwabs, the Edisons, the Garys and the Westinghouses of the Kingdom and made them his work fellows. From every corner of the Empire he drafted brains and experience.
This is a far higher and more promising type of humanity, from the judicious intermixture of whose best elements we are apt to get our Stephensons, our Arkwrights, our Telfords, and our Edisons.
"In invention, there may be some improvements on old and present devices, but there will be no more Edisons, no more Marconis. In medicine, we are about at the top of the mountain. In literature, the creative and fundamental things have all been done. There will be no more Shakespeares, no Miltons, no Dantes, no Goethes. Even Hugo is dead. From now on books will be mere second-hand talk.
In all this the Edisons shared on equal terms. Thus, contrary to the stories that have been so widely published, the Edisons, while not rich by any means, were in comfortable circumstances, with a well-stocked farm and large orchard to draw upon also for sustenance. Samuel Edison, on moving to Port Huron, became a dealer in grain and feed, and gave attention to that business for many years.
Each Helmholtz of the future will give rise to a thousand Edisons. Exact knowledge must precede any form of applications. The reward of pure science will be, in the future as in the past, of its own kind, not fame nor money, but the joy of finding truth. To this joy no favor of fortune can add. The student of nature in all the ages has taken the vow of poverty.
The text from Ecclesiastes, "God made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions," has been used to discourage any budding Edisons of the spiritual realm. Dear old Alexander Cruden inserted in his Concordance a delicious definition of invention as here used: "Inventions: New ways of making one's self more wise and happy than God made us."
If you learn the law, for example, understand that the way to acquire the art of practising law is to practise it, and not merely watch somebody else practise it. Suppose every young man with a scientific mind had declined to make any experiment because there were abler scientists than he: how many Pasteurs and Finsens and Marconis and Edisons and Bells would the world have had?
The ancestral Edisons who came over from Holland, as nearly as can be determined, in 1730, were descendants of extensive millers on the Zuyder Zee, and took up patents of land along the Passaic River, New Jersey, close to the home that Mr. Edison established in the Orange Mountains a hundred and sixty years later.
No serious objections were raised by his family, for the distance from Port Huron was not great, and Stratford was near Bayfield, the old home from which the Edisons had come, so that there were doubtless friends or even relatives in the vicinity. This was in 1863. Mr.
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