THE TWO THOUSAND HORSE-POWER GENERATOR AT THE INTRAMURAL RAILWAY POWER STATION. The jet nozzles rise through glass partitions, below which are the search lights in the chamber under the fountain. An Edison tower of light in one shape or another has been at several expositions in years past. This year, in enlarged form, it occupies the centre of the Electricity Building. The exhibits in the Electricity Building itself are along the line of the regular manufactures of the numerous companies in the business, and are, therefore, not of such great interest to the electrician who comes in every-day contact with the apparatus as are the previously-described feat ures. COMPARED WITH THE CENTENNIAL EXHIBIT. As said before, the Columbian Exposition so far surpasses in size all previous attempts that a comparison on that basis is out of the question. We may, however, compare the state of the art as shown at present with that shown at the Centennial in 1876, as being the last one held in this country, and with the Paris Exposition in 1889, as the last important one in the world. The telegraph was in operation. There was nothing there to indicate the transmission of immense powers by electricity, which is the great feature of its recent development, save one or two small dynamos. Since 1889 there have been no revolutionizing changes in electrical methods of distribu tion. At that time the electric railway had already become popular. The "alternating system" of incandescent lighting, the one now generally used for supplying light to anything but very limited areas, had come into use. The changes of the past four years have been along the line of a great increase in the use of electric light and power, and a steady improvement in the quality of machinery and apparatus. Much of the apparatus in use four years ago is antiquated to-day, for no other reason than that it is not substantial, enough in construction. The increased demand for current for different purposes has led to a great increase in the size of engines and generating machinery, and this increase is nowhere better illustrated than at the World's Fair. Large machines are more economical than small ones, and efficiency demanded an increase in size. It will be nothing strange if in the next few years the ponderous masses of iron and copper revolving in the Exposition power plants will be surpassed in size. The electrical exhibit as it stands at present may be taken not only as an indication of what has been done in the last few years, but as a prophecy as to the direction of progress for a few years hence. In other words, electricity at the World's Fair is slightly in advance of electricity in commercial practice. IN 1. THOMAS A. EDISON, GREATEST OF INVENTORS. BY CHARLES D. LANIER. IN this World's Fair year, we may be forgiven an excess of national self-consciousness which leads us to ask where we stand among the peoples of the earth; to cast about for the significance of this young cis-Atlantic civilization. The answer is writ large over the length and breadth of the continent in our huge railway systems, containing more than half the track mileage of the entire world; in the telegraph lines beside them; in the network of wires over and under our great cities; in the trans-oceanic cables with which, a quarter of a century ago, we brought the Old World within speaking distance of the New, and in the strange machines-telephones, phonographs, dynamos-which have revolutionized our industries and which will certainly revolutionize our whole society. In short, we are a nation of mechanics and inventors. This will clearly be our meaning to the historical students of a thousand years hence, as we say to-day that Greece bequeathed art to the World and Rome's heritage was law. AN AGE OF ELECTRICITY AND EDISON IS ITS PROPHET. But half a century ago one might have felt secure in asserting that the great engineering triumphs of the age had come through the application of steam. And now, already, the more subtle agency of electricity has thrown the work of Watt and Stephenson and Fulton from the category of marvels and bids fair to supersede it altogether. Steam came but to prepare the way for the ever-present, all-powerful "fluid," and we are being ushered into an age of electricity. Curiously enough, there is among us an unassuming citizen who sums up in his personality and achievements this genius of the race, who is, one might almost say, to America what Cæsar was to Rome. If one were to ask what individual best symbolized this industrial regeneration for which we, as a nation will stand, it would be marvelously easy to answer, Thomas Alva Edison. The precocious selfreliance and restless energy of the New World; its brilliant defiance of traditions; the immediate adaptation of means to ends; and, above all, the distinctive inventive faculty reached in him their apogee. The mere mass of this extraordinary man's work gives in itself a striking idea of the force which he exerts in our material progress. Up to a few days ago the government had granted Edison no less than seven hundred and twenty patents, while he had in addition one hundred and fifty applications on file. And this during a working period that has not yet brought him within many years of the grand climacteric, and much of it accomplished in the face of discouraging financial obstacles. reverses so serious as to make it necessary that he should become a wage-earner at an unusually early age and that the family should move from his birthplace to Michigan. Only four years later the boy was reading Newton's "Principia" with the entirely logical result of becoming deeply and permanently disgusted with pure mathematics. Indeed, he seems to have displayed all the due precocity of genius, one of his notable feats about this time being an attempt to read through the entire Free Library of Detroit! NEWSBOY, EDITOR AND CHEMIST AT FIFTEEN. Nor was he by any means a youthful bookworm and dreamer. The distinctly practical bent of his character was shown in his operations as newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railway-especially in the brilliant coup by which in 1869 he bought up on "futures" a thousand copies of the Detroit Free Press containing important war news, and, gaining a little time on his rivals, sold the entire batch like hot cakes, so that the price reached twenty-five cents a paper before the end of his route. It was at this period, too, that he was posing as editor of the Grand Trunk Herald, a weekly periodical of very modest proportions issued from the train on which he traveled. He had also begun to dabble in chemistry and fitted up to that end a small itinerant laboratory. During the progress of some occult experiments in this workshop certain complications ensued in which a jolted and broken bottle of sulphuric acid attracted the attention of the conductor. He, who had been long-suffering in the matter of unearthly odors, promptly ejected the young devotee and all his works. This incident would have been only amusing had it not been rendered deplorable from the lasting deafness which resulted from a box on the ear, administered by the irate conductor in the course of the young scientist's hegira. Edison transferred the laboratory to his father's cellar, and diligently studied telegraphy, establishing a line between his home and a boy partner's with the help of an old river cable, sundry lengths of stove pipe wire and glass bottle insulators. A HEROIC TUITION FEE. Dramatic situations appear I have characteristic promptness and originality Edison mounted a locomotive and tooted a telegraphic message again and again across the river until the Americans understood and answered in kind. AMONG THE TRAMP TELEGRAPHERS. For the next few years Edison was successively in charge of important wires in Memphis, Cincinnati, New Orleans and Louisville. He lived in the free and easy atmosphere of the tramp operators—a boon companion with them, yet absolutely refusing to join in the dissipations to which they were professionally addicted. He has always been a total abstainer and a singularly moderate man in everything but work, for which he is a perfect glutton. Many are the stories current of the timely aid given his rollicking colleagues when their potations had led them into trouble. It was their custom, when a spree was on the tapis, to make him the custodian of those funds which they felt obliged to save. On a more than usually hilarious occasion one of them returned rather the worst for the wear and knocked the treasurer down on his refusal to deliver the trust money; the other depositors, we are glad to say, gave the ungentlemanly tippler a sound thrashing. But, though Edison could be trusted with his colleagues' money, my own ideas, and I take my stand upon them, you know A man who does at every turn of this man's that is always charged with eccentricity, life, though temperamentally inconsistency, and that kind of Thing. he would be the last to seek NOT A PRIG BY ANY MEANS. There was a saving human quality of error in the boy to amply redeem him from the colorless perfection of the story-book model. One is almost glad to hear that he was not by any means a paragon as an operator, and that he played tricks on the company by inventing a device which would automatically send in the signal to show he was awake at his post, what time he comfortably snored in the corner. Some such boyish mischief soon sent him in disgrace over the line to Canada. The heavy winter had cut off telegraphic connections and all other means of communication between the place in which he was sojourning and the American town of Sarnier. With EDISON'S HANDWRITING. 'Middlemarch' he was himself in a chronic state of penury, since he devoted every cent, regardless of future needs, to scientific books and materials for experiments. Nor was he in any great favor with his employers; they wanted operators, not inventors, so they-not unreasonably-said. THE LOUISVILLE PRESS GIVES HIM A STATE DINNER. At one time he was in such straits that a necessary journey from Memphis to Louisville had to be performed on foot. At the Louisville station he was offered excellent chances to put his extraordinary skill to use. He had perfected a style of handwriting which would allow him to take from the wire in very legible long hand forty-seven, and even fifty-four words a minute. As he was but a moderately rapid sender, he invented an automatic help which enabled him to record the matter at leisure and send it off as fast as was needed. Of this Louisville stay, one of his biographers says: "True to his dominant instincts, he was not long in gathering around him a laboratory, printing office and machine shop. He took press reports during his whole stay, including on one occasion the Presidential message and veto of the District of Columbia by Andrew Johnson, and this at one sitting, from 3.30 p.m. to 4.30 a.m. He then paragraphed the matter received over the wires, so that each printer had exactly three lines, thus enabling a column to be set up in two or three minutes' time. For this he was allowed all the exchanges he desired, and the Louisville press gave him a state dinner." EDISON ASTONISHES THE EASTERN OPERATORS. In 1868, Edison attracted much attention by a device utilizing one submarine cable for two circuits. It won him a position in the Franklin telegraph office of Boston. He came East with no ready money, and in a rather dilapidated condition. His colleagues were tempted by his "hayseed" appearance to "salt” him, as professional slang terms the process of giving a receiver matter faster than he can record it. For this purpose the new man was assigned to a wire manipulated by a New York operator famous for his speed. But there was no fun at all. Notwithstanding the fact that the New Yorker was "in the game" and was doing his most speedy "clip," Edison wrote out the long message accurately, and when he realized the situation, was soon firing taunts over the wire at the sender's slowness. HIS FIRST PATENT. IT WORKED TOO WELL. A year later Edison received his first patent-a machine for recording votes, and designed to be used in the State Legislature. It was an ingenious device, by which the votes were clearly printed and shown on a roll of paper by a small machine attached to the desk of each member. The invention was never used, and Mr. Edison tells with a comical twinkle in his eyes how amazed he was to hear, on presenting it to the authorities, that such an innovation was out of the question; that the better it worked the more impossible it would be, for its use would destroy the most precious right of the minority-that of fillibustering. The inventor thinks, however, that he received quite the worth of his trouble in the lesson taught him to make sure of the practical need of and demand for a machine before spending his energies on it. ASTRAY IN THE STREETS OF NEW YORK. In this same year, Edison came to New York friendless and in debt on account of the expenses of his experiments. For several weeks he wandered about the town with actual hunger staring him in the face. It was a time of great financial excitement, and with that strange quality of opportunism which one would think had been woven into his destiny, he entered the establishment of the Law Gold Reporting Company just as their entire plant had shut down on account of an accident in the machinery that could not be located. The heads of the firm were anxious and excited to the last degree, and a crowd of the Wall street fraternity waited about for the news which came not. The shabby stranger put his finger on the difficulty at once and was given lucrative em ployment. In the rush of the metropolis a man finds his true level without delay, especially when his talents are of so practical and brilliant a nature as were this young telegrapher's. It would be an absurdity to imagine an Edison hidden in New York. Within a short time he was presented with a check for $40,000, as his share of a single invention-an improved stock printer. From this time a national reputation was assured him. He was, too, now engaged on the du plex and quadruplex systems, which were almost to inaugurate a new era in telegraphy. WORKING TWENTY HOURS DAILY FOR FIFTEEN YEARS. I come to the laboratory about eight o'clock every day and go home to tea at six, and then I study or work on some problem until eleven, which is my hour for bed." "Fourteen or fifteen hours a day can scarcely be called loafing," I suggested. "Well,” he replied, "for fifteen years I have worked on an average twenty hours a day." That astonishing brain has been known to puzzle for sixty successive hours over a refractory problem, its owner dropping quietly off into a long sleep when the job was done, to awake perfectly refreshed and ready for another siege. Mr. Dickson, a neighbor and familiar, gives an anecdote told by Edison which well illustrates his untiring energy and phenomenal endurIn describing his Boston experience Edison ance. |