The Laboratory At Orange And The Staff - 1

The Laboratory At Orange And The Staff - 1

A LIVING interrogation-point and a born investigator from childhood, Edison has never
been without a laboratory of some kind for upward of half a century.
In youthful years, as already described in this book, he became ardently interested in
chemistry, and even at the early age of twelve felt the necessity for a special nook of his
own, where he could satisfy his unconvinced mind of the correctness or inaccuracy of
statements and experiments contained in the few technical books then at his command.
Ordinarily he was like other normal lads of his age --full of boyish, hearty enjoyments--
but withal possessed of an unquenchable spirit of inquiry and an insatiable desire for
knowledge. Being blessed with a wise and discerning mother, his aspirations were
encouraged; and he was allowed a corner in her cellar. It is fair to offer tribute here to her
bravery as well as to her wisdom, for at times she was in mortal terror lest the precocious
experimenter below should, in his inexperience, make some awful combination that
would explode and bring down the house in ruins on himself and the rest of the family.
Fortunately no such catastrophe happened, but young Edison worked away in his
embryonic laboratory, satisfying his soul and incidentally depleting his limited pocketmoney
to the vanishing-point. It was, indeed, owing to this latter circumstance that in a
year or two his aspirations necessitated an increase of revenue; and a consequent
determination to earn some money for himself led to his first real commercial enterprise
as "candy butcher" on the Grand Trunk Railroad, already mentioned in a previous
chapter. It has also been related how his precious laboratory was transferred to the train;
how he and it were subsequently expelled; and how it was re-established in his home,
where he continued studies and experiments until the beginning of his career as a
telegraph operator.
The nomadic life of the next few years did not lessen his devotion to study; but it stood
seriously in the way of satisfying the ever-present craving for a laboratory. The lack of
such a place never prevented experimentation, however, as long as he had a dollar in his
pocket and some available "hole in the wall." With the turning of the tide of fortune that
suddenly carried him, in New York in 1869, from poverty to the opulence of $300 a
month, he drew nearer to a realization of his cherished ambition in having money, place,
and some time (stolen from sleep) for more serious experimenting. Thus matters
continued until, at about the age of twenty-two, Edison's inventions had brought him a
relatively large sum of money, and he became a very busy manufacturer, and lessee of a
large shop in Newark, New Jersey.
Now, for the first time since leaving that boyish laboratory in the old home at Port Huron,
Edison had a place of his own to work in, to think in; but no one in any way acquainted
with Newark as a swarming centre of miscellaneous and multitudinous industries would
recommend it as a cloistered retreat for brooding reverie and introspection, favorable to
creative effort. Some people revel in surroundings of hustle and bustle, and find therein
no hindrance to great accomplishment. The electrical genius of Newark is Edward
Weston, who has thriven amid its turmoil and there has developed his beautiful
instruments of precision; just as Brush worked out his arc-lighting system in Cleveland;
or even as Faraday, surrounded by the din and roar of London, laid the intellectual
foundations of the whole modern science of dynamic electricity. But Edison, though deaf,
could not make too hurried a retreat from Newark to Menlo Park, where, as if to justify
his change of base, vital inventions soon came thick and fast, year after year. The story of
Menlo has been told in another chapter, but the point was not emphasized that Edison
then, as later, tried hard to drop manufacturing. He would infinitely rather be philosopher
than producer; but somehow the necessity of manufacturing is constantly thrust back
upon him by a profound--perhaps finical--sense of dissatisfaction with what other people
make for him. The world never saw a man more deeply and desperately convinced that
nothing in it approaches perfection. Edison is the doctrine of evolution incarnate, applied
to mechanics. As to the removal from Newark, he may be allowed to tell his own story: "I
had a shop at Newark in which I manufactured stock tickers and such things. When I
moved to Menlo Park I took out only the machinery that would be necessary for
experimental purposes and left the manufacturing machinery in the place. It consisted of
many milling machines and other tools for duplicating. I rented this to a man who had
formerly been my bookkeeper, and who thought he could make money out of
manufacturing. There was about $10,000 worth of machinery. He was to pay me $2000 a
year for the rent of the machinery and keep it in good order. After I moved to Menlo
Park, I was very busy with the telephone and phonograph, and I paid no attention to this
little arrangement. About three years afterward, it occurred to me that I had not heard at
all from the man who had rented this machinery, so I thought I would go over to Newark
and see how things were going. When I got there, I found that instead of being a machine
shop it was a hotel! I have since been utterly unable to find out what be came of the man
or the machinery." Such incidents tend to justify Edison in his rather cynical remark that
he has always been able to improve machinery much quicker than men. All the way up he
has had discouraging experiences. "One day while I was carrying on my work in Newark,
a Wall Street broker came from the city and said he was tired of the `Street,' and wanted
to go into something real. He said he had plenty of money. He wanted some kind of a job
to keep his mind off Wall Street. So we gave him a job as a `mucker' in chemical
experiments. The second night he was there he could not stand the long hours and fell
asleep on a sofa. One of the boys took a bottle of bromine and opened it under the sofa. It
floated up and produced a violent effect on the mucous membrane. The broker was taken
with such a fit of coughing he burst a blood-vessel, and the man who let the bromine out
got away and never came back. I suppose he thought there was going to be a death. But
the broker lived, and left the next day; and I have never seen him since, either." Edison
tells also of another foolhardy laboratory trick of the same kind: "Some of my assistants
in those days were very green in the business, as I did not care whether they had had any
experience or not. I generally tried to turn them loose. One day I got a new man, and told
him to conduct a certain experiment. He got a quart of ether and started to boil it over a
naked flame. Of course it caught fire. The flame was about four feet in diameter and
eleven feet high. We had to call out the fire department; and they came down and put a
stream through the window. That let all the fumes and chemicals out and overcame the
firemen; and there was the devil to pay. Another time we experimented with a tub full of
soapy water, and put hydrogen into it to make large bubbles. One of the boys, who was
washing bottles in the place, had read in some book that hydrogen was explosive, so he
proceeded to blow the tub up. There was about four inches of soap in the bottom of the
tub, fourteen inches high; and he filled it with soap bubbles up to the brim. Then he took
a bamboo fish-pole, put a piece of paper at the end, and touched it off. It blew every
window out of the place."