Edison, His Life and Inventions
The Age Of Electricity
THE year 1847 marked a period of great territorial acquisition by the American people,
with incalculable additions to their actual and potential wealth. By the rational
compromise with England in the dispute over the Oregon region, President Polk had
secured during 1846, for undisturbed settlement, three hundred thousand square miles of
forest, fertile land, and fisheries, including the whole fair Columbia Valley. Our active
"policy of the Pacific" dated from that hour. With swift and clinching succession came
the melodramatic Mexican War, and February, 1848, saw another vast territory south of
Oregon and west of the Rocky Mountains added by treaty to the United States. Thus in
about eighteen months there had been pieced into the national domain for quick
development and exploitation a region as large as the entire Union of Thirteen States at
the close of the War of Independence. Moreover, within its boundaries was embraced all
the great American gold-field, just on the eve of discovery, for Marshall had detected the
shining particles in the mill-race at the foot of the Sierra Nevada nine days before Mexico
signed away her rights in California and in all the vague, remote hinterland facing
Cathayward.
Equally momentous were the times in Europe, where the attempt to secure opportunities
of expansion as well as larger liberty for the individual took quite different form. The old
absolutist system of government was fast breaking up, and ancient thrones were tottering.
The red lava of deep revolutionary fires oozed up through many glowing cracks in the
political crust, and all the social strata were shaken. That the wild outbursts of
insurrection midway in the fifth decade failed and died away was not surprising, for the
superincumbent deposits of tradition and convention were thick. But the retrospect
indicates that many reforms and political changes were accomplished, although the
process involved the exile of not a few ardent spirits to America, to become leading
statesmen, inventors, journalists, and financiers. In 1847, too, Russia began her
tremendous march eastward into Central Asia, just as France was solidifying her first
gains on the littoral of northern Africa. In England the fierce fervor of the Chartist
movement, with its violent rhetoric as to the rights of man, was sobering down and
passing pervasively into numerous practical schemes for social and political amelioration,
constituting in their entirety a most profound change throughout every part of the national
life.
Into such times Thomas Alva Edison was born, and his relations to them and to the
events of the past sixty years are the subject of this narrative. Aside from the personal
interest that attaches to the picturesque career, so typically American, there is a broader
aspect in which the work of the "Franklin of the Nineteenth Century" touches the welfare
and progress of the race. It is difficult at any time to determine the effect of any single
invention, and the investigation becomes more difficult where inventions of the first class
have been crowded upon 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 manpower.
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
de- spoiled 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 daily comfort could be secured with it. But the
little battery with its metal plates in a weak solution proved a perennial reservoir of
electrical energy, safe and controllable, from which supplies could be drawn at will. That
which was wild had become domesticated; regular crops took the place of haphazard
gleanings from brake or prairie; the possibility of electrical starvation was forever left
behind.
Immediately new processes of inestimable value revealed themselves; new methods were
suggested. Almost all the electrical arts now employed made their beginnings in the next
twenty-five years, and while the more extensive of them depend to-day on the dynamo
for electrical energy, some of the most important still remain in loyal allegiance to the
older source. The battery itself soon underwent modifications, and new types were
evolved--the storage, the double-fluid, and the dry. Various analogies next pointed to the
use of heat, and the thermoelectric cell emerged, embodying the application of flame to
the junction of two different metals. Davy, of the safety-lamp, threw a volume of current
across the gap between two sticks of charcoal, and the voltaic arc, forerunner of electric
lighting, shed its bright beams upon a dazzled world. The decomposition of water by
electrolytic action was recognized and made the basis of communicating at a distance
even before the days of the electromagnet. The ties that bind electricity and magnetism in
twinship of relation and interaction were detected, and Faraday's work in induction gave
the world at once the dynamo and the motor. "Hitch your wagon to a star," said Emerson.
To all the coal-fields and all the waterfalls Faraday had directly hitched the wheels of
industry. Not only was it now possible to convert mechanical energy into electricity
cheaply and in illimitable quantities, but electricity at once showed its ubiquitous
availability as a motive power. Boats were propelled by it, cars were hauled, and even
papers printed. Electroplating became an art, and telegraphy sprang into active being on
both sides of the Atlantic.
At the time Edison was born, in 1847, telegraphy, upon which he was to leave so
indelible an imprint, had barely struggled into acceptance by the public. In England,
Wheatstone and Cooke had introduced a ponderous magnetic needle telegraph. In
America, in 1840, Morse had taken out his first patent on an electromagnetic telegraph,
the principle of which is dominating in the art to this day. Four years later the memorable
message "What hath God wrought!" was sent by young Miss Ellsworth over his circuits,
and incredulous Washington was advised by wire of the action of the Democratic
Convention in Baltimore in nominating Polk. By 1847 circuits had been strung between
Washington and New York, under private enterprise, the Government having declined to
buy the Morse system for $100,000. Everything was crude and primitive. The poles were
two hundred feet apart and could barely hold up a wash-line. The slim, bare, copper wire
snapped on the least provocation, and the circuit was "down" for thirty-six days in the
first six months. The little glass-knob insulators made seductive targets for ignorant
sportsmen. Attempts to insulate the line wire were limited to coating it with tar or
smearing it with wax for the benefit of all the bees in the neighborhood. The farthest
western reach of the telegraph lines in 1847 was Pittsburg, with three- ply iron wire
mounted on square glass insulators with a little wooden pentroof for protection. In that
office, where Andrew Carnegie was a messenger boy, the magnets in use to receive the
signals sent with the aid of powerful nitric-acid batteries weighed as much as seventyfive
pounds apiece. But the business was fortunately small at the outset, until the new
device, patronized chiefly by lottery-men, had proved its utility. Then came the great
outburst of activity. Within a score of years telegraph wires covered the whole occupied
country with a network, and the first great electrical industry was a pronounced success,
yielding to its pioneers the first great harvest of electrical fortunes. It had been a sharp
struggle for bare existence, during which such a man as the founder of Cornell University
had been glad to get breakfast in New York with a quarter-dollar picked up on Broadway.
Edison's Pedigree
THOMAS ALVA EDISON was born at Milan Ohio, February 11, 1847. The State that
rivals Virginia as a "Mother of Presidents" has evidently other titles to distinction of the
same nature. For picturesque detail it would not be easy to find any story excelling that of
the Edison family before it reached the Western Reserve. The story epitomizes American
idealism, restlessness, freedom of individual opinion, and ready adjustment to the
surrounding conditions of pioneer life. 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. They landed at Elizabethport, New Jersey, and first settled near
Caldwell in that State, where some graves of the family may still be found. President
Cleveland was born in that quiet hamlet. It is a curious fact that in the Edison family the
pronunciation of the name has always been with the long "e" sound, as it would naturally
be in the Dutch language. The family prospered and must have enjoyed public
confidence, for we find the name of Thomas Edison, as a bank official on Manhattan
Island, signed to Continental currency in 1778. According to the family records this
Edison, great- grandfather of Thomas Alva, reached the extreme old age of 104 years.
But all was not well, and, as has happened so often before, the politics of father and son
were violently different. The Loyalist movement that took to Nova Scotia so many
Americans after the War of Independence carried with it John, the son of this stalwart
Continental. Thus it came about that Samuel Edison, son of John, was born at Digby,
Nova Scotia, in 1804. Seven years later John Edison who, as a Loyalist or United Empire
emigrant, had become entitled under the laws of Canada to a grant of six hundred acres of
land, moved westward to take possession of this property. He made his way through the
State of New York in wagons drawn by oxen to the remote and primitive township of
Bayfield, in Upper Canada, on Lake Huron. Although the journey occurred in balmy
June, it was necessarily attended with difficulty and privation; but the new home was
situated in good farming country, and once again this interesting nomadic family settled
down.
John Edison moved from Bayfield to Vienna, Ontario, on the northern bank of Lake Erie.
Mr. Edison supplies an interesting reminiscence of the old man and his environment in
those early Canadian days. "When I was five years old I was taken by my father and
mother on a visit to Vienna. We were driven by carriage from Milan, Ohio, to a railroad,
then to a port on Lake Erie, thence by a canal-boat in a tow of several to Port Burwell, in
Canada, across the lake, and from there we drove to Vienna, a short distance away. I
remember my grandfather perfectly as he appeared, at 102 years of age, when he died. In
the middle of the day he sat under a large tree in front of the house facing a well-travelled
road. His head was covered completely with a large quantity of very white hair, and he
chewed tobacco incessantly, nodding to friends as they passed by. He used a very large
cane, and walked from the chair to the house, resenting any assistance. I viewed him from
a distance, and could never get very close to him. I remember some large pipes, and
especially a molasses jug, a trunk, and several other things that came from Holland."
John Edison was long-lived, like his father, and reached the ripe old age of 102, leaving
his son Samuel charged with the care of the family destinies, but with no great burden of
wealth. Little is known of the early manhood of this father of T. A. Edison until we find
him keeping a hotel at Vienna, marrying a school-teacher there (Miss Nancy Elliott, in
1828), and taking a lively share in the troublous politics of the time. He was six feet in
height, of great bodily vigor, and of such personal dominance of character that he became
a captain of the insurgent forces rallying under the banners of Papineau and Mackenzie.
The opening years of Queen Victoria's reign witnessed a belated effort in Canada to
emphasize the principle that there should not be taxation without representation; and this
descendant of those who had left the United States from disapproval of such a doctrine,
flung himself headlong into its support.
It has been said of Earl Durham, who pacified Canada at this time and established the
present system of government, that he made a country and marred a career. But the
immediate measures of repression enforced before a liberal policy was adopted were
sharp and severe, and Samuel Edison also found his own career marred on Canadian soil
as one result of the Durham administration. Exile to Bermuda with other insurgents was
not so attractive as the perils of a flight to the United States. A very hurried departure was
effected in secret from the scene of trouble, and there are romantic traditions of his
thrilling journey of one hundred and eighty-two miles toward safety, made almost
entirely without food or sleep, through a wild country infested with Indians of unfriendly
disposition. Thus was the Edison family repatriated by a picturesque political episode,
and the great inventor given a birthplace on American soil, just as was Benjamin Franklin
when his father came from England to Boston. Samuel Edison left behind him, however,
in Canada, several brothers, all of whom lived to the age of ninety or more, and from
whom there are descendants in the region.
After some desultory wanderings for a year or two along the shores of Lake Erie, among
the prosperous towns then springing up, the family, with its Canadian home forfeited, and
in quest of another resting-place, came to Milan, Ohio, in 1842. That pretty little village
offered at the moment many attractions as a possible Chicago. The railroad system of
Ohio was still in the future, but the Western Reserve had already become a vast wheatfield,
and huge quantities of grain from the central and northern counties sought shipment
to Eastern ports. The Huron River, emptying into Lake Erie, was navigable within a few
miles of the village, and provided an admirable outlet. Large granaries were established,
and proved so successful that local capital was tempted into the project of making a towpath
canal from Lockwood Landing all the way to Milan itself. The quaint old Moravian
mission and quondam Indian settlement of one hundred inhabitants found itself of a
sudden one of the great grain ports of the world, and bidding fair to rival Russian Odessa.
A number of grain warehouses, or primitive elevators, were built along the bank of the
canal, and the produce of the region poured in immediately, arriving in wagons drawn by
four or six horses with loads of a hundred bushels. No fewer than six hundred wagons
came clattering in, and as many as twenty sail vessels were loaded with thirty-five
thousand bushels of grain, during a single day. The canal was capable of being navigated
by craft of from two hundred to two hundred and fifty tons burden, and the demand for
such vessels soon led to the development of a brisk ship-building industry, for which the
abundant forests of the region supplied the necessary lumber. An evidence of the activity
in this direction is furnished by the fact that six revenue cutters were launched at this port
in these brisk days of its prime.
Samuel Edison, versatile, buoyant of temper, and ever optimistic, would thus appear to
have pitched his tent with shrewd judgment. There was plenty of occupation ready to his
hand, and more than one enterprise received his attention; but he devoted his energies
chiefly to the making of shingles, for which there was a large demand locally and along
the lake. Canadian lumber was used principally in this industry. The wood was imported
in "bolts" or pieces three feet long. A bolt made two shingles; it was sawn asunder by
hand, then split and shaved. None but first-class timber was used, and such shingles
outlasted far those made by machinery with their cross-grain cut. A house in Milan, on
which some of those shingles were put in 1844, was still in excellent condition forty-two
years later. Samuel Edison did well at this occupation, and employed several men, but
there were other outlets from time to time for his business activity and speculative
disposition.
Edison's mother was an attractive and highly educated woman, whose influence upon his
disposition and intellect has been profound and lasting. She was born in Chenango
County, New York, in 1810, and was the daughter of the Rev. John Elliott, a Baptist
minister and descendant of an old Revolutionary soldier, Capt. Ebenezer Elliott, of
Scotch descent. The old captain was a fine and picturesque type. He fought all through
the long War of Independence --seven years--and then appears to have settled down at
Stonington, Connecticut. There, at any rate, he found his wife, "grandmother Elliott,"
who was Mercy Peckham, daughter of a Scotch Quaker. Then came the residence in New
York State, with final removal to Vienna, for the old soldier, while drawing his pension at
Buffalo, lived in the little Canadian town, and there died, over 100 years old. The family
was evidently one of considerable culture and deep religious feeling, for two of Mrs.
Edison's uncles and two brothers were also in the same Baptist ministry. As a young
woman she became a teacher in the public high school at Vienna, and thus met her
husband, who was residing there. The family never consisted of more than three children,
two boys and a girl. A trace of the Canadian environment is seen in the fact that Edison's
elder brother was named William Pitt, after the great English statesman. Both his brother
and the sister exhibited considerable ability. William Pitt Edison as a youth was so clever
with his pencil that it was proposed to send him to Paris as an art student. In later life he
was manager of the local street railway lines at Port Huron, Michigan, in which he was
heavily interested. He also owned a good farm near that town, and during the ill-health at
the close of his life, when compelled to spend much of the time indoors, he devoted
himself almost entirely to sketching. It has been noted by intimate observers of Thomas
A. Edison that in discussing any project or new idea his first impulse is to take up any
piece of paper available and make drawings of it. His voluminous note-books are a mass
of sketches. Mrs-Tannie Edison Bailey, the sister, had, on the other hand, a great deal of
literary ability, and spent much of her time in writing.
The great inventor, whose iron endurance and stern will have enabled him to wear down
all his associates by work sustained through arduous days and sleepless nights, was not at
all strong as a child, and was of fragile appearance. He had an abnormally large but wellshaped
head, and it is said that the local doctors feared he might have brain trouble. In
fact, on account of his assumed delicacy, he was not allowed to go to school for some
years, and even when he did attend for a short time the results were not encouraging--his
mother being hotly indignant upon hearing that the teacher had spoken of him to an
inspector as "addled." The youth was, indeed, fortunate far beyond the ordinary in having
a mother at once loving, well-informed, and ambitious, capable herself, from her
experience as a teacher, of undertaking and giving him an education better than could be
secured in the local schools of the day. Certain it is that under this simple regime studious
habits were formed and a taste for literature developed that have lasted to this day. If ever
there was a man who tore the heart out of books it is Edison, and what has once been read
by him is never forgotten if useful or worthy of submission to the test of experiment.
But even thus early the stronger love of mechanical processes and of probing natural
forces manifested itself. Edison has said that he never saw a statement in any book as to
such things that he did not involuntarily challenge, and wish to demonstrate as either
right or wrong. As a mere child the busy scenes of the canal and the grain warehouses
were of consuming interest, but the work in the ship-building yards had an irresistible
fascination. His questions were so ceaseless and innumerable that the penetrating
curiosity of an unusually strong mind was regarded as deficiency in powers of
comprehension, and the father himself, a man of no mean ingenuity and ability, reports
that the child, although capable of reducing him to exhaustion by endless inquiries, was
often spoken of as rather wanting in ordinary acumen. This apparent dulness is, however,
a quite common incident to youthful genius.
The constructive tendencies of this child of whom his father said once that he had never
had any boyhood days in the ordinary sense, were early noted in his fondness for building
little plank roads out of the debris of the yards and mills. His extraordinarily retentive
memory was shown in his easy acquisition of all the songs of the lumber gangs and canal
men before he was five years old. One incident tells how he was found one day in the
village square copying laboriously the signs of the stores. A highly characteristic event at
the age of six is described by his sister. He had noted a goose sitting on her eggs and the
result. One day soon after, he was missing. By-and-by, after an anxious search, his father
found him sitting in a nest he had made in the barn, filled with goose-eggs and hens' eggs
he had collected, trying to hatch them out.
One of Mr. Edison's most vivid recollections goes back to 1850, when as a child three of
four years old he saw camped in front of his home six covered wagons, "prairie
schooners," and witnessed their departure for California. The great excitement over the
gold discoveries was thus felt in Milan, and these wagons, laden with all the worldly
possessions of their owners, were watched out of sight on their long journey by this
fascinated urchin, whose own discoveries in later years were to tempt many other
argonauts into the auriferous realms of electricity.
Another vivid memory of this period concerns his first realization of the grim mystery of
death. He went off one day with the son of the wealthiest man in the town to bathe in the
creek. Soon after they entered the water the other boy disappeared. Young Edison waited
around the spot for half an hour or more, and then, as it was growing dark, went home
puzzled and lonely, but silent as to the occurrence. About two hours afterward, when the
missing boy was being searched for, a man came to the Edison home to make anxious
inquiry of the companion with whom he had last been seen. Edison told all the
circumstances with a painful sense of being in some way implicated. The creek was at
once dragged, and then the body was recovered.
Edison had himself more than one narrow escape. Of course he fell in the canal and was
nearly drowned; few boys in Milan worth their salt omitted that performance. On another
occasion he encountered a more novel peril by falling into the pile of wheat in a grain
elevator and being almost smothered. Holding the end of a skate-strap for another lad to
shorten with an axe, he lost the top of a finger. Fire also had its perils. He built a fire in a
barn, but the flames spread so rapidly that, although he escaped himself, the barn was
wholly destroyed, and he was publicly whipped in the village square as a warning to
other youths. Equally well remembered is a dangerous encounter with a ram that attacked
him while he was busily engaged digging out a bumblebee's nest near an orchard fence.
The animal knocked him against the fence, and was about to butt him again when he
managed to drop over on the safe side and escape. He was badly hurt and bruised, and no
small quantity of arnica was needed for his wounds.
Meantime little Milan had reached the zenith of its prosperity, and all of a sudden had
been deprived of its flourishing grain trade by the new Columbus, Sandusky & Hocking
Railroad; in fact, the short canal was one of the last efforts of its kind in this country to
compete with the new means of transportation. The bell of the locomotive was
everywhere ringing the death-knell of effective water haulage, with such dire results that,
in 1880, of the 4468 miles of American freight canal, that had cost $214,000,000, no
fewer than 1893 miles had been abandoned, and of the remaining 2575 miles quite a large
proportion was not paying expenses. The short Milan canal suffered with the rest, and today
lies well-nigh obliterated, hidden in part by vegetable gardens, a mere grass-grown
depression at the foot of the winding, shallow valley. Other railroads also prevented any
further competition by the canal, for a branch of the Wheeling & Lake Erie now passes
through the village, while the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern runs a few miles to the
south.
The owners of the canal soon had occasion to regret that they had disdained the overtures
of enterprising railroad promoters desirous of reaching the village, and the consequences
of commercial isolation rapidly made themselves felt. It soon became evident to Samuel
Edison and his wife that the cozy brick home on the bluff must be given up and the
struggle with fortune resumed elsewhere. They were well-to-do, however, and removing,
in 1854, to Port Huron, Michigan, occupied a large colonial house standing in the middle
of an old Government fort reservation of ten acres overlooking the wide expanse of the
St. Clair River just after it leaves Lake Huron. It was in many ways an ideal homestead,
toward which the family has always felt the strongest attachment, but the association with
Milan has never wholly ceased. The old house in which Edison was born is still occupied
(in 1910) by Mr. S. O. Edison, a half-brother of Edison's father, and a man of marked
inventive ability. He was once prominent in the iron-furnace industry of Ohio, and was
for a time associated in the iron trade with the father of the late President McKinley.
Among his inventions may be mentioned a machine for making fuel from wheat straw,
and a smoke-consuming device.
This birthplace of Edison remains the plain, substantial little brick house it was
originally: one- storied, with rooms finished on the attic floor. Being built on the hillside,
its basement opens into the rear yard. It was at first heated by means of open coal grates,
which may not have been altogether adequate in severe winters, owing to the altitude and
the north- eastern exposure, but a large furnace is one of the more modern changes. Milan
itself is not materially unlike the smaller Ohio towns of its own time or those of later
creation, but the venerable appearance of the big elm-trees that fringe the trim lawns tells
of its age. It is, indeed, an extremely neat, snug little place, with well-kept homes, mostly
of frame construction, and flagged streets crossing each other at right angles. There are
no poor--at least, everybody is apparently well-to-do. While a leisurely atmosphere
pervades the town, few idlers are seen. Some of the residents are engaged in local
business; some are occupied in farming and grape culture; others are employed in the
iron-works near-by, at Norwalk. The stores and places of public resort are gathered about
the square, where there is plenty of room for hitching when the Saturday trading is done
at that point, at which periods the fitful bustle recalls the old wheat days when young
Edison ran with curiosity among the six and eight horse teams that had brought in grain.
This square is still covered with fine primeval forest trees, and has at its centre a
handsome soldiers' monument of the Civil War, to which four paved walks converge. It is
an altogether pleasant and unpretentious town, which cherishes with no small amount of
pride its association with the name of Thomas Alva Edison.
In view of Edison's Dutch descent, it is rather singular to find him with the name of Alva,
for the Spanish Duke of Alva was notoriously the worst tyrant ever known to the Low
Countries, and his evil deeds occupy many stirring pages in Motley's famous history. As
a matter of fact, Edison was named after Capt. Alva Bradley, an old friend of his father,
and a celebrated ship-owner on the Lakes. Captain Bradley died a few years ago in
wealth, while his old associate, with equal ability for making money, was never able long
to keep it (differing again from the Revolutionary New York banker from whom his son's
other name, "Thomas," was taken).
The Age Of Electricity
THE year 1847 marked a period of great territorial acquisition by the American people,
with incalculable additions to their actual and potential wealth. By the rational
compromise with England in the dispute over the Oregon region, President Polk had
secured during 1846, for undisturbed settlement, three hundred thousand square miles of
forest, fertile land, and fisheries, including the whole fair Columbia Valley. Our active
"policy of the Pacific" dated from that hour. With swift and clinching succession came
the melodramatic Mexican War, and February, 1848, saw another vast territory south of
Oregon and west of the Rocky Mountains added by treaty to the United States. Thus in
about eighteen months there had been pieced into the national domain for quick
development and exploitation a region as large as the entire Union of Thirteen States at
the close of the War of Independence. Moreover, within its boundaries was embraced all
the great American gold-field, just on the eve of discovery, for Marshall had detected the
shining particles in the mill-race at the foot of the Sierra Nevada nine days before Mexico
signed away her rights in California and in all the vague, remote hinterland facing
Cathayward.
Equally momentous were the times in Europe, where the attempt to secure opportunities
of expansion as well as larger liberty for the individual took quite different form. The old
absolutist system of government was fast breaking up, and ancient thrones were tottering.
The red lava of deep revolutionary fires oozed up through many glowing cracks in the
political crust, and all the social strata were shaken. That the wild outbursts of
insurrection midway in the fifth decade failed and died away was not surprising, for the
superincumbent deposits of tradition and convention were thick. But the retrospect
indicates that many reforms and political changes were accomplished, although the
process involved the exile of not a few ardent spirits to America, to become leading
statesmen, inventors, journalists, and financiers. In 1847, too, Russia began her
tremendous march eastward into Central Asia, just as France was solidifying her first
gains on the littoral of northern Africa. In England the fierce fervor of the Chartist
movement, with its violent rhetoric as to the rights of man, was sobering down and
passing pervasively into numerous practical schemes for social and political amelioration,
constituting in their entirety a most profound change throughout every part of the national
life.
Into such times Thomas Alva Edison was born, and his relations to them and to the
events of the past sixty years are the subject of this narrative. Aside from the personal
interest that attaches to the picturesque career, so typically American, there is a broader
aspect in which the work of the "Franklin of the Nineteenth Century" touches the welfare
and progress of the race. It is difficult at any time to determine the effect of any single
invention, and the investigation becomes more difficult where inventions of the first class
have been crowded upon 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 manpower.
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
de- spoiled 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 daily comfort could be secured with it. But the
little battery with its metal plates in a weak solution proved a perennial reservoir of
electrical energy, safe and controllable, from which supplies could be drawn at will. That
which was wild had become domesticated; regular crops took the place of haphazard
gleanings from brake or prairie; the possibility of electrical starvation was forever left
behind.
Immediately new processes of inestimable value revealed themselves; new methods were
suggested. Almost all the electrical arts now employed made their beginnings in the next
twenty-five years, and while the more extensive of them depend to-day on the dynamo
for electrical energy, some of the most important still remain in loyal allegiance to the
older source. The battery itself soon underwent modifications, and new types were
evolved--the storage, the double-fluid, and the dry. Various analogies next pointed to the
use of heat, and the thermoelectric cell emerged, embodying the application of flame to
the junction of two different metals. Davy, of the safety-lamp, threw a volume of current
across the gap between two sticks of charcoal, and the voltaic arc, forerunner of electric
lighting, shed its bright beams upon a dazzled world. The decomposition of water by
electrolytic action was recognized and made the basis of communicating at a distance
even before the days of the electromagnet. The ties that bind electricity and magnetism in
twinship of relation and interaction were detected, and Faraday's work in induction gave
the world at once the dynamo and the motor. "Hitch your wagon to a star," said Emerson.
To all the coal-fields and all the waterfalls Faraday had directly hitched the wheels of
industry. Not only was it now possible to convert mechanical energy into electricity
cheaply and in illimitable quantities, but electricity at once showed its ubiquitous
availability as a motive power. Boats were propelled by it, cars were hauled, and even
papers printed. Electroplating became an art, and telegraphy sprang into active being on
both sides of the Atlantic.
At the time Edison was born, in 1847, telegraphy, upon which he was to leave so
indelible an imprint, had barely struggled into acceptance by the public. In England,
Wheatstone and Cooke had introduced a ponderous magnetic needle telegraph. In
America, in 1840, Morse had taken out his first patent on an electromagnetic telegraph,
the principle of which is dominating in the art to this day. Four years later the memorable
message "What hath God wrought!" was sent by young Miss Ellsworth over his circuits,
and incredulous Washington was advised by wire of the action of the Democratic
Convention in Baltimore in nominating Polk. By 1847 circuits had been strung between
Washington and New York, under private enterprise, the Government having declined to
buy the Morse system for $100,000. Everything was crude and primitive. The poles were
two hundred feet apart and could barely hold up a wash-line. The slim, bare, copper wire
snapped on the least provocation, and the circuit was "down" for thirty-six days in the
first six months. The little glass-knob insulators made seductive targets for ignorant
sportsmen. Attempts to insulate the line wire were limited to coating it with tar or
smearing it with wax for the benefit of all the bees in the neighborhood. The farthest
western reach of the telegraph lines in 1847 was Pittsburg, with three- ply iron wire
mounted on square glass insulators with a little wooden pentroof for protection. In that
office, where Andrew Carnegie was a messenger boy, the magnets in use to receive the
signals sent with the aid of powerful nitric-acid batteries weighed as much as seventyfive
pounds apiece. But the business was fortunately small at the outset, until the new
device, patronized chiefly by lottery-men, had proved its utility. Then came the great
outburst of activity. Within a score of years telegraph wires covered the whole occupied
country with a network, and the first great electrical industry was a pronounced success,
yielding to its pioneers the first great harvest of electrical fortunes. It had been a sharp
struggle for bare existence, during which such a man as the founder of Cornell University
had been glad to get breakfast in New York with a quarter-dollar picked up on Broadway.
Edison's Pedigree
THOMAS ALVA EDISON was born at Milan Ohio, February 11, 1847. The State that
rivals Virginia as a "Mother of Presidents" has evidently other titles to distinction of the
same nature. For picturesque detail it would not be easy to find any story excelling that of
the Edison family before it reached the Western Reserve. The story epitomizes American
idealism, restlessness, freedom of individual opinion, and ready adjustment to the
surrounding conditions of pioneer life. 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. They landed at Elizabethport, New Jersey, and first settled near
Caldwell in that State, where some graves of the family may still be found. President
Cleveland was born in that quiet hamlet. It is a curious fact that in the Edison family the
pronunciation of the name has always been with the long "e" sound, as it would naturally
be in the Dutch language. The family prospered and must have enjoyed public
confidence, for we find the name of Thomas Edison, as a bank official on Manhattan
Island, signed to Continental currency in 1778. According to the family records this
Edison, great- grandfather of Thomas Alva, reached the extreme old age of 104 years.
But all was not well, and, as has happened so often before, the politics of father and son
were violently different. The Loyalist movement that took to Nova Scotia so many
Americans after the War of Independence carried with it John, the son of this stalwart
Continental. Thus it came about that Samuel Edison, son of John, was born at Digby,
Nova Scotia, in 1804. Seven years later John Edison who, as a Loyalist or United Empire
emigrant, had become entitled under the laws of Canada to a grant of six hundred acres of
land, moved westward to take possession of this property. He made his way through the
State of New York in wagons drawn by oxen to the remote and primitive township of
Bayfield, in Upper Canada, on Lake Huron. Although the journey occurred in balmy
June, it was necessarily attended with difficulty and privation; but the new home was
situated in good farming country, and once again this interesting nomadic family settled
down.
John Edison moved from Bayfield to Vienna, Ontario, on the northern bank of Lake Erie.
Mr. Edison supplies an interesting reminiscence of the old man and his environment in
those early Canadian days. "When I was five years old I was taken by my father and
mother on a visit to Vienna. We were driven by carriage from Milan, Ohio, to a railroad,
then to a port on Lake Erie, thence by a canal-boat in a tow of several to Port Burwell, in
Canada, across the lake, and from there we drove to Vienna, a short distance away. I
remember my grandfather perfectly as he appeared, at 102 years of age, when he died. In
the middle of the day he sat under a large tree in front of the house facing a well-travelled
road. His head was covered completely with a large quantity of very white hair, and he
chewed tobacco incessantly, nodding to friends as they passed by. He used a very large
cane, and walked from the chair to the house, resenting any assistance. I viewed him from
a distance, and could never get very close to him. I remember some large pipes, and
especially a molasses jug, a trunk, and several other things that came from Holland."
John Edison was long-lived, like his father, and reached the ripe old age of 102, leaving
his son Samuel charged with the care of the family destinies, but with no great burden of
wealth. Little is known of the early manhood of this father of T. A. Edison until we find
him keeping a hotel at Vienna, marrying a school-teacher there (Miss Nancy Elliott, in
1828), and taking a lively share in the troublous politics of the time. He was six feet in
height, of great bodily vigor, and of such personal dominance of character that he became
a captain of the insurgent forces rallying under the banners of Papineau and Mackenzie.
The opening years of Queen Victoria's reign witnessed a belated effort in Canada to
emphasize the principle that there should not be taxation without representation; and this
descendant of those who had left the United States from disapproval of such a doctrine,
flung himself headlong into its support.
It has been said of Earl Durham, who pacified Canada at this time and established the
present system of government, that he made a country and marred a career. But the
immediate measures of repression enforced before a liberal policy was adopted were
sharp and severe, and Samuel Edison also found his own career marred on Canadian soil
as one result of the Durham administration. Exile to Bermuda with other insurgents was
not so attractive as the perils of a flight to the United States. A very hurried departure was
effected in secret from the scene of trouble, and there are romantic traditions of his
thrilling journey of one hundred and eighty-two miles toward safety, made almost
entirely without food or sleep, through a wild country infested with Indians of unfriendly
disposition. Thus was the Edison family repatriated by a picturesque political episode,
and the great inventor given a birthplace on American soil, just as was Benjamin Franklin
when his father came from England to Boston. Samuel Edison left behind him, however,
in Canada, several brothers, all of whom lived to the age of ninety or more, and from
whom there are descendants in the region.
After some desultory wanderings for a year or two along the shores of Lake Erie, among
the prosperous towns then springing up, the family, with its Canadian home forfeited, and
in quest of another resting-place, came to Milan, Ohio, in 1842. That pretty little village
offered at the moment many attractions as a possible Chicago. The railroad system of
Ohio was still in the future, but the Western Reserve had already become a vast wheatfield,
and huge quantities of grain from the central and northern counties sought shipment
to Eastern ports. The Huron River, emptying into Lake Erie, was navigable within a few
miles of the village, and provided an admirable outlet. Large granaries were established,
and proved so successful that local capital was tempted into the project of making a towpath
canal from Lockwood Landing all the way to Milan itself. The quaint old Moravian
mission and quondam Indian settlement of one hundred inhabitants found itself of a
sudden one of the great grain ports of the world, and bidding fair to rival Russian Odessa.
A number of grain warehouses, or primitive elevators, were built along the bank of the
canal, and the produce of the region poured in immediately, arriving in wagons drawn by
four or six horses with loads of a hundred bushels. No fewer than six hundred wagons
came clattering in, and as many as twenty sail vessels were loaded with thirty-five
thousand bushels of grain, during a single day. The canal was capable of being navigated
by craft of from two hundred to two hundred and fifty tons burden, and the demand for
such vessels soon led to the development of a brisk ship-building industry, for which the
abundant forests of the region supplied the necessary lumber. An evidence of the activity
in this direction is furnished by the fact that six revenue cutters were launched at this port
in these brisk days of its prime.
Samuel Edison, versatile, buoyant of temper, and ever optimistic, would thus appear to
have pitched his tent with shrewd judgment. There was plenty of occupation ready to his
hand, and more than one enterprise received his attention; but he devoted his energies
chiefly to the making of shingles, for which there was a large demand locally and along
the lake. Canadian lumber was used principally in this industry. The wood was imported
in "bolts" or pieces three feet long. A bolt made two shingles; it was sawn asunder by
hand, then split and shaved. None but first-class timber was used, and such shingles
outlasted far those made by machinery with their cross-grain cut. A house in Milan, on
which some of those shingles were put in 1844, was still in excellent condition forty-two
years later. Samuel Edison did well at this occupation, and employed several men, but
there were other outlets from time to time for his business activity and speculative
disposition.
Edison's mother was an attractive and highly educated woman, whose influence upon his
disposition and intellect has been profound and lasting. She was born in Chenango
County, New York, in 1810, and was the daughter of the Rev. John Elliott, a Baptist
minister and descendant of an old Revolutionary soldier, Capt. Ebenezer Elliott, of
Scotch descent. The old captain was a fine and picturesque type. He fought all through
the long War of Independence --seven years--and then appears to have settled down at
Stonington, Connecticut. There, at any rate, he found his wife, "grandmother Elliott,"
who was Mercy Peckham, daughter of a Scotch Quaker. Then came the residence in New
York State, with final removal to Vienna, for the old soldier, while drawing his pension at
Buffalo, lived in the little Canadian town, and there died, over 100 years old. The family
was evidently one of considerable culture and deep religious feeling, for two of Mrs.
Edison's uncles and two brothers were also in the same Baptist ministry. As a young
woman she became a teacher in the public high school at Vienna, and thus met her
husband, who was residing there. The family never consisted of more than three children,
two boys and a girl. A trace of the Canadian environment is seen in the fact that Edison's
elder brother was named William Pitt, after the great English statesman. Both his brother
and the sister exhibited considerable ability. William Pitt Edison as a youth was so clever
with his pencil that it was proposed to send him to Paris as an art student. In later life he
was manager of the local street railway lines at Port Huron, Michigan, in which he was
heavily interested. He also owned a good farm near that town, and during the ill-health at
the close of his life, when compelled to spend much of the time indoors, he devoted
himself almost entirely to sketching. It has been noted by intimate observers of Thomas
A. Edison that in discussing any project or new idea his first impulse is to take up any
piece of paper available and make drawings of it. His voluminous note-books are a mass
of sketches. Mrs-Tannie Edison Bailey, the sister, had, on the other hand, a great deal of
literary ability, and spent much of her time in writing.
The great inventor, whose iron endurance and stern will have enabled him to wear down
all his associates by work sustained through arduous days and sleepless nights, was not at
all strong as a child, and was of fragile appearance. He had an abnormally large but wellshaped
head, and it is said that the local doctors feared he might have brain trouble. In
fact, on account of his assumed delicacy, he was not allowed to go to school for some
years, and even when he did attend for a short time the results were not encouraging--his
mother being hotly indignant upon hearing that the teacher had spoken of him to an
inspector as "addled." The youth was, indeed, fortunate far beyond the ordinary in having
a mother at once loving, well-informed, and ambitious, capable herself, from her
experience as a teacher, of undertaking and giving him an education better than could be
secured in the local schools of the day. Certain it is that under this simple regime studious
habits were formed and a taste for literature developed that have lasted to this day. If ever
there was a man who tore the heart out of books it is Edison, and what has once been read
by him is never forgotten if useful or worthy of submission to the test of experiment.
But even thus early the stronger love of mechanical processes and of probing natural
forces manifested itself. Edison has said that he never saw a statement in any book as to
such things that he did not involuntarily challenge, and wish to demonstrate as either
right or wrong. As a mere child the busy scenes of the canal and the grain warehouses
were of consuming interest, but the work in the ship-building yards had an irresistible
fascination. His questions were so ceaseless and innumerable that the penetrating
curiosity of an unusually strong mind was regarded as deficiency in powers of
comprehension, and the father himself, a man of no mean ingenuity and ability, reports
that the child, although capable of reducing him to exhaustion by endless inquiries, was
often spoken of as rather wanting in ordinary acumen. This apparent dulness is, however,
a quite common incident to youthful genius.
The constructive tendencies of this child of whom his father said once that he had never
had any boyhood days in the ordinary sense, were early noted in his fondness for building
little plank roads out of the debris of the yards and mills. His extraordinarily retentive
memory was shown in his easy acquisition of all the songs of the lumber gangs and canal
men before he was five years old. One incident tells how he was found one day in the
village square copying laboriously the signs of the stores. A highly characteristic event at
the age of six is described by his sister. He had noted a goose sitting on her eggs and the
result. One day soon after, he was missing. By-and-by, after an anxious search, his father
found him sitting in a nest he had made in the barn, filled with goose-eggs and hens' eggs
he had collected, trying to hatch them out.
One of Mr. Edison's most vivid recollections goes back to 1850, when as a child three of
four years old he saw camped in front of his home six covered wagons, "prairie
schooners," and witnessed their departure for California. The great excitement over the
gold discoveries was thus felt in Milan, and these wagons, laden with all the worldly
possessions of their owners, were watched out of sight on their long journey by this
fascinated urchin, whose own discoveries in later years were to tempt many other
argonauts into the auriferous realms of electricity.
Another vivid memory of this period concerns his first realization of the grim mystery of
death. He went off one day with the son of the wealthiest man in the town to bathe in the
creek. Soon after they entered the water the other boy disappeared. Young Edison waited
around the spot for half an hour or more, and then, as it was growing dark, went home
puzzled and lonely, but silent as to the occurrence. About two hours afterward, when the
missing boy was being searched for, a man came to the Edison home to make anxious
inquiry of the companion with whom he had last been seen. Edison told all the
circumstances with a painful sense of being in some way implicated. The creek was at
once dragged, and then the body was recovered.
Edison had himself more than one narrow escape. Of course he fell in the canal and was
nearly drowned; few boys in Milan worth their salt omitted that performance. On another
occasion he encountered a more novel peril by falling into the pile of wheat in a grain
elevator and being almost smothered. Holding the end of a skate-strap for another lad to
shorten with an axe, he lost the top of a finger. Fire also had its perils. He built a fire in a
barn, but the flames spread so rapidly that, although he escaped himself, the barn was
wholly destroyed, and he was publicly whipped in the village square as a warning to
other youths. Equally well remembered is a dangerous encounter with a ram that attacked
him while he was busily engaged digging out a bumblebee's nest near an orchard fence.
The animal knocked him against the fence, and was about to butt him again when he
managed to drop over on the safe side and escape. He was badly hurt and bruised, and no
small quantity of arnica was needed for his wounds.
Meantime little Milan had reached the zenith of its prosperity, and all of a sudden had
been deprived of its flourishing grain trade by the new Columbus, Sandusky & Hocking
Railroad; in fact, the short canal was one of the last efforts of its kind in this country to
compete with the new means of transportation. The bell of the locomotive was
everywhere ringing the death-knell of effective water haulage, with such dire results that,
in 1880, of the 4468 miles of American freight canal, that had cost $214,000,000, no
fewer than 1893 miles had been abandoned, and of the remaining 2575 miles quite a large
proportion was not paying expenses. The short Milan canal suffered with the rest, and today
lies well-nigh obliterated, hidden in part by vegetable gardens, a mere grass-grown
depression at the foot of the winding, shallow valley. Other railroads also prevented any
further competition by the canal, for a branch of the Wheeling & Lake Erie now passes
through the village, while the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern runs a few miles to the
south.
The owners of the canal soon had occasion to regret that they had disdained the overtures
of enterprising railroad promoters desirous of reaching the village, and the consequences
of commercial isolation rapidly made themselves felt. It soon became evident to Samuel
Edison and his wife that the cozy brick home on the bluff must be given up and the
struggle with fortune resumed elsewhere. They were well-to-do, however, and removing,
in 1854, to Port Huron, Michigan, occupied a large colonial house standing in the middle
of an old Government fort reservation of ten acres overlooking the wide expanse of the
St. Clair River just after it leaves Lake Huron. It was in many ways an ideal homestead,
toward which the family has always felt the strongest attachment, but the association with
Milan has never wholly ceased. The old house in which Edison was born is still occupied
(in 1910) by Mr. S. O. Edison, a half-brother of Edison's father, and a man of marked
inventive ability. He was once prominent in the iron-furnace industry of Ohio, and was
for a time associated in the iron trade with the father of the late President McKinley.
Among his inventions may be mentioned a machine for making fuel from wheat straw,
and a smoke-consuming device.
This birthplace of Edison remains the plain, substantial little brick house it was
originally: one- storied, with rooms finished on the attic floor. Being built on the hillside,
its basement opens into the rear yard. It was at first heated by means of open coal grates,
which may not have been altogether adequate in severe winters, owing to the altitude and
the north- eastern exposure, but a large furnace is one of the more modern changes. Milan
itself is not materially unlike the smaller Ohio towns of its own time or those of later
creation, but the venerable appearance of the big elm-trees that fringe the trim lawns tells
of its age. It is, indeed, an extremely neat, snug little place, with well-kept homes, mostly
of frame construction, and flagged streets crossing each other at right angles. There are
no poor--at least, everybody is apparently well-to-do. While a leisurely atmosphere
pervades the town, few idlers are seen. Some of the residents are engaged in local
business; some are occupied in farming and grape culture; others are employed in the
iron-works near-by, at Norwalk. The stores and places of public resort are gathered about
the square, where there is plenty of room for hitching when the Saturday trading is done
at that point, at which periods the fitful bustle recalls the old wheat days when young
Edison ran with curiosity among the six and eight horse teams that had brought in grain.
This square is still covered with fine primeval forest trees, and has at its centre a
handsome soldiers' monument of the Civil War, to which four paved walks converge. It is
an altogether pleasant and unpretentious town, which cherishes with no small amount of
pride its association with the name of Thomas Alva Edison.
In view of Edison's Dutch descent, it is rather singular to find him with the name of Alva,
for the Spanish Duke of Alva was notoriously the worst tyrant ever known to the Low
Countries, and his evil deeds occupy many stirring pages in Motley's famous history. As
a matter of fact, Edison was named after Capt. Alva Bradley, an old friend of his father,
and a celebrated ship-owner on the Lakes. Captain Bradley died a few years ago in
wealth, while his old associate, with equal ability for making money, was never able long
to keep it (differing again from the Revolutionary New York banker from whom his son's
other name, "Thomas," was taken).
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