The Social Side Of Edison -14

The Social Side Of Edison -14

 Edison at sixty-three has a fine physique, and being free from serious ailments of any

kind, should carry on the traditions of his long-lived ancestors as to a vigorous old age.

His hair has whitened, but is still thick and abundant, and though he uses glasses for

certain work, his gray-blue eyes are as keen and bright and deeply lustrous as ever, with

the direct, searching look in them that they have ever worn. He stands five feet nine and

one-half inches high, weighs one hundred and seventy-five pounds, and has not varied as

to weight in a quarter of a century, although as a young man he was slim to gauntness. He

is very abstemious, hardly ever touching alcohol, caring little for meat, but fond of fruit,

and never averse to a strong cup of coffee or a good cigar. He takes extremely little

exercise, although his good color and quickness of step would suggest to those who do

not know better that he is in the best of training, and one who lives in the open air.

His simplicity as to clothes has already been described. One would be startled to see him

with a bright tie, a loud checked suit, or a fancy waistcoat, and yet there is a curious sense

of fastidiousness about the plain things he delights in. Perhaps he is not wholly

responsible personally for this state of affairs. In conversation Edison is direct, courteous,

ready to discuss a topic with anybody worth talking to, and, in spite of his sore deafness,

an excellent listener. No one ever goes away from Edison in doubt as to what he thinks or

means, but he is ever shy and diffident to a degree if the talk turns on himself rather than

on his work.

If the authors were asked, after having written the foregoing pages, to explain here the

reason for Edison's success, based upon their observations so far made, they would first

answer that he combines with a vigorous and normal physical structure a mind capable of

clear and logical thinking, and an imagination of unusual activity. But this would by no

means offer a complete explanation. There are many men of equal bodily and mental

vigor who have not achieved a tithe of his accomplishment. What other factors are there

to be taken into consideration to explain this phenomenon? First, a stolid, almost

phlegmatic, nervous system which takes absolutely no notice of ennui--a system like that

of a Chinese ivory-carver who works day after day and month after month on a piece of

material no larger than your hand. No better illustration of this characteristic can be found

than in the development of the nickel pocket for the storage battery, an element the size

of a short lead-pencil, on which upward of five years were spent in experiments, costing

over a million dollars, day after day, always apparently with the same tubes but with

small variations carefully tabulated in the note-books. To an ordinary person the mere

sight of such a tube would have been as distasteful, certainly after a week or so, as the

smell of a quail to a man striving to eat one every day for a month, near the end of his

gastronomic ordeal. But to Edison these small perforated steel tubes held out as much of

a fascination at the end of five years as when the search was first begun, and every

morning found him as eager to begin the investigation anew as if the battery was an

absolutely novel problem to which his thoughts had just been directed.