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The conductor, who had suffered long and patiently, now ejected the youthful enthusiast; and, it is said, accompanied the expulsion with a resounding box upon the ear. This did not dampen Edison's ardor, in the least. He passed through one dramatic situation after another, mastering each and all; but his advancement was due to patient, persevering work.
As the reader will obtain a fuller comprehension of this idea, and of Edison's methods, by concrete illustration rather than by generalization, the authors have thought it well to select at random two typical instances of specific investigations out of the thousands that are scattered through the notebooks.
Edison's immense resources and unrivaled equipment had enabled him to make the models whose powers had been so satisfactorily shown. But to multiply these upon a war scale was not only beyond the resources of any individual hardly a nation on the globe in the period of its greatest prosperity could have undertaken such a work. All the nations, then, must now conjoin.
Edison's thoughts had been dwelling on the telephone; he knew that a metal tympanum was capable of vibrating with all the delicacies of speech, and it occurred to him that if these vibrations could be impressed on a yielding material, as the Morse signals were embossed upon the paper, the indentations would reproduce the speech, just as the furrows of the paper reproduced the Morse signals.
It had merely enjoyed the delights of anxious anticipation, and the perilous pleasure of backing Edison's experiments. Now active exploitation was required. Dr.
Edison's ore-separation work has been already fully described, but the story would hardly be complete without a reference to similar work in gold extraction, dating back to the Menlo Park days: "I got up a method," says Edison, "of separating placer gold by a dry process, in which I could work economically ore as lean as five cents of gold to the cubic yard.
If the authors were asked, after having written the foregoing pages, to explain here the reason for Edison's success, based upon their observations so far made, they would first answer that he combines with a vigorous and normal physical structure a mind capable of clear and logical thinking, and an imagination of unusual activity. But this would by no means offer a complete explanation.
During Edison's immature years, when he was flitting about from place to place as a telegraph operator, his experimentation was of a desultory, hand-to-mouth character, although it was always notable for originality, as expressed in a number of minor useful devices produced during this period.
Edison's problem in educating the public was rather difficult, for while his low-pressure, direct-current system has always been absolutely without danger to life, there has also been the undeniable fact that escaping electricity might cause a fire just as a leaky water-pipe can flood a house.
The foregoing extracts are unavoidably lengthy, but, viewed in the light of facts, serve to illustrate most clearly that Edison's conceptions and work were far and away ahead of the comprehension of his contemporaries in the art, and that his achievements in the line of efficient dynamo design and construction were indeed truly fundamental and revolutionary in character.
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