Edison, His Life and Inventions | Page 3

each other in rapid and bewildering succession. But it will be admitted
that in Edison one deals with a central figure of the great age that saw
the invention and introduction in practical form of the telegraph, the
submarine cable, the telephone, the electric light, the electric railway,
the electric trolley-car, the storage battery, the electric motor, the
phonograph, the wireless telegraph; and that the influence of these on
the world's affairs has not been excelled at any time by that of any other
corresponding advances in the arts and sciences. These pages deal with
Edison's share in the great work of the last half century in abridging
distance, communicating intelligence, lessening toil, improving
illumination, recording forever the human voice; and on behalf of
inventive genius it may be urged that its beneficent results and gifts to
mankind compare with any to be credited to statesman, warrior, or
creative writer of the same period.
Viewed from the standpoint of inventive progress, the first half of the
nineteenth century had passed very profitably when Edison

appeared--every year marked by some notable achievement in the arts
and sciences, with promise of its early and abundant fruition in
commerce and industry. There had been exactly four decades of steam
navigation on American waters. Railways were growing at the rate of
nearly one thousand miles annually. Gas had become familiar as a
means of illumination in large cities. Looms and tools and
printing-presses were everywhere being liberated from the slow toil of
man-power. The first photographs had been taken. Chloroform, nitrous
oxide gas, and ether had been placed at the service of the physician in
saving life, and the revolver, guncotton, and nitroglycerine added to the
agencies for slaughter. New metals, chemicals, and elements had
become available in large numbers, gases had been liquefied and
solidified, and the range of useful heat and cold indefinitely extended.
The safety-lamp had been given to the miner, the caisson to the
bridge-builder, the anti-friction metal to the mechanic for bearings. It
was already known how to vulcanize rubber, and how to galvanize iron.
The application of machinery in the harvest-field had begun with the
embryonic reaper, while both the bicycle and the automobile were
heralded in primitive prototypes. The gigantic expansion of the iron
and steel industry was foreshadowed in the change from wood to coal
in the smelting furnaces. The sewing-machine had brought with it, like
the friction match, one of the most profound influences in modifying
domestic life, and making it different from that of all preceding time.
Even in 1847 few of these things had lost their novelty, most of them
were in the earlier stages of development. But it is when we turn to
electricity that the rich virgin condition of an illimitable new kingdom
of discovery is seen. Perhaps the word "utilization" or "application" is
better than discovery, for then, as now, an endless wealth of
phenomena noted by experimenters from Gilbert to Franklin and
Faraday awaited the invention that could alone render them useful to
mankind. The eighteenth century, keenly curious and ceaselessly active
in this fascinating field of investigation, had not, after all, left much of
a legacy in either principles or appliances. The lodestone and the
compass; the frictional machine; the Leyden jar; the nature of
conductors and insulators; the identity of electricity and the
thunder-storm flash; the use of lightning-rods; the physiological effects

of an electrical shock--these constituted the bulk of the bequest to
which philosophers were the only heirs. Pregnant with possibilities
were many of the observations that had been recorded. But these few
appliances made up the meagre kit of tools with which the nineteenth
century entered upon its task of acquiring the arts and conveniences
now such an intimate part of "human nature's daily food" that the
average American to-day pays more for his electrical service than he
does for bread.
With the first year of the new century came Volta's invention of the
chemical battery as a means of producing electricity. A well-known
Italian picture represents Volta exhibiting his apparatus before the
young conqueror Napoleon, then ravishing from the Peninsula its
treasure of ancient art and founding an ephemeral empire. At such a
moment this gift of despoiled Italy to the world was a noble revenge,
setting in motion incalculable beneficent forces and agencies. For the
first time man had command of a steady supply of electricity without
toil or effort. The useful results obtainable previously from the current
of a frictional machine were not much greater than those to be derived
from the flight of a rocket. While the frictional appliance is still
employed in medicine, it ranks with the flint axe and the tinder-box in
industrial obsolescence. No art or trade could be founded on it; no
diminution of daily work or increase of