Memories Of Menlo Park - 9

Memories Of Menlo Park - 9

One notable afternoon was that on which the New York board of aldermen took a special

train out to Menlo Park to see the lighting system with its conductors underground in

operation. The Edison Electric Illuminating Company was applying for a franchise, and

the aldermen, for lack of scientific training and specific practical information, were very

sceptical on the subject--as indeed they might well be. "Mr. Edison demonstrated

personally the details and merits of the system to them. The voltage was increased to a

higher pressure than usual, and all the incandescent lamps at Menlo Park did their best to

win the approbation of the New York City fathers. After Edison had finished exhibiting

all the good points of his system, he conducted his guests upstairs in the laboratory,

where a long table was spread with the best things that one of the most prominent New

York caterers could furnish. The laboratory witnessed high times that night, for all were

in the best of humor, and many a bottle was drained in toasting the health of Edison and

the aldermen." This was one of the extremely rare occasions on which Edison has

addressed an audience; but the stake was worth the effort. The representatives of New

York could with justice drink the health of the young inventor, whose system is one of

the greatest boons the city has ever had conferred upon it.

Among other frequent visitors was Mr, Edison's father, "one of those amiable, patriarchal

characters with a Horace Greeley beard, typical Americans of the old school," who would

sometimes come into the laboratory with his two grandchildren, a little boy and girl

called "Dash" and "Dot." He preferred to sit and watch his brilliant son at work "with an

expression of satisfaction on his face that indicated a sense of happiness and content that

his boy, born in that distant, humble home in Ohio, had risen to fame and brought such

honor upon the name. It was, indeed, a pathetic sight to see a father venerate his son as

the elder Edison did." Not less at home was Mr. Mackenzie, the Mt. Clemens station

agent, the life of whose child Edison had saved when a train newsboy. The old

Scotchman was one of the innocent, chartered libertines of the place, with an unlimited

stock of good jokes and stories, but seldom of any practical use. On one occasion,

however, when everything possible and impossible under the sun was being carbonized

for lamp filaments, he allowed a handful of his bushy red beard to be taken for the

purpose; and his laugh was the loudest when the Edison-Mackenzie hair lamps were

brought up to incandescence--their richness in red rays being slyly attributed to the nature

of the filamentary material! Oddly enough, a few years later, some inventor actually took

out a patent for making incandescent lamps with carbonized hair for filaments!

Yet other visitors again haunted the place, and with the following reminiscence of one of

them, from Mr. Edison himself, this part of the chapter must close: "At Menlo Park one

cold winter night there came into the laboratory a strange man in a most pitiful condition.

He was nearly frozen, and he asked if he might sit by the stove. In a few moments he

asked for the head man, and I was brought forward. He had a head of abnormal size, with

highly intellectual features and a very small and emaciated body. He said he was

suffering very much, and asked if I had any morphine. As I had about everything in

chemistry that could be bought, I told him I had. He requested that I give him some, so I

got the morphine sulphate. He poured out enough to kill two men, when I told him that

we didn't keep a hotel for suicides, and he had better cut the quantity down. He then

bared his legs and arms, and they were literally pitted with scars, due to the use of

hypodermic syringes. He said he had taken it for years, and it required a big dose to have

any effect. I let him go ahead. In a short while he seemed like another man and began to

tell stories, and there were about fifty of us who sat around listening until morning. He

was a man of great intelligence and education. He said he was a Jew, but there was no

distinctive feature to verify this assertion. He continued to stay around until he finished

every combination of morphine with an acid that I had, probably ten ounces all told. Then

he asked if he could have strychnine. I had an ounce of the sulphate. He took enough to

kill a horse, and asserted it had as good an effect as morphine. When this was gone, the

only thing I had left was a chunk of crude opium, perhaps two or three pounds. He

chewed this up and disappeared. I was greatly disappointed, because I would have laid in

another stock of morphine to keep him at the laboratory. About a week afterward he was

found dead in a barn at Perth Amboy."