The Social Side Of Edison -3

The Social Side Of Edison -3

 A very interesting period, on the social side, was the visit paid by Edison and his family

to Europe in 1889, when he had made a splendid exhibit of his inventions and apparatus

at the great Paris Centennial Exposition of that year, to the extreme delight of the French,

who welcomed him with open arms. The political sentiments that the Exposition

celebrated were not such as to find general sympathy in monarchical Europe, so that the

"crowned heads" were conspicuous by their absence. It was not, of course, by way of

theatrical antithesis that Edison appeared in Paris at such a time. But the contrast was

none the less striking and effective. It was felt that, after all, that which the great

exposition exemplified at its best --the triumph of genius over matter, over ignorance,

over superstition--met with its due recognition when Edison came to participate, and to

felicitate a noble nation that could show so much in the victories of civilization and the

arts, despite its long trials and its long struggle for liberty. It is no exaggeration to say that

Edison was greeted with the enthusiastic homage of the whole French people. They could

find no praise warm enough for the man who had "organized the echoes" and "tamed the

lightning," and whose career was so picturesque with eventful and romantic development.

In fact, for weeks together it seemed as though no Parisian paper was considered

complete and up to date without an article on Edison. The exuberant wit and fancy of the

feuilletonists seized upon his various inventions evolving from them others of the most

extraordinary nature with which to bedazzle and bewilder the reader. At the close of the

Exposition Edison was created a Commander of the Legion of Honor. His own exhibit,

made at a personal expense of over $100,000, covered several thousand square feet in the

vast Machinery Hall, and was centred around a huge Edison lamp built of myriads of

smaller lamps of the ordinary size. The great attraction, however, was the display of the

perfected phonograph. Several instruments were provided, and every day, all day long,

while the Exposition lasted, queues of eager visitors from every quarter of the globe were

waiting to hear the little machine talk and sing and reproduce their own voices. Never

before was such a collection of the languages of the world made. It was the first linguistic

concourse since Babel times. We must let Edison tell the story of some of his

experiences:

"At the Universal Exposition at Paris, in 1889, I made a personal exhibit covering about

an acre. As I had no intention of offering to sell anything I was showing, and was pushing

no companies, the whole exhibition was made for honor, and without any hope of profit.

But the Paris newspapers came around and wanted pay for notices of it, which we

promptly refused; whereupon there was rather a stormy time for a while, but nothing was

published about it.

"While at the Exposition I visited the Opera-House. The President of France lent me his

private box. The Opera-House was one of the first to be lighted by the incandescent lamp,

and the managers took great pleasure in showing me down through the labyrinth

containing the wiring, dynamos, etc. When I came into the box, the orchestra played the

`Star-Spangled Banner,' and all the people in the house arose; whereupon I was very

much embarrassed. After I had been an hour at the play, the manager came around and

asked me to go underneath the stage, as they were putting on a ballet of 300 girls, the

finest ballet in Europe. It seems there is a little hole on the stage with a hood over it, in

which the prompter sits when opera is given. In this instance it was not occupied, and I

was given the position in the prompter's seat, and saw the whole ballet at close range.

"The city of Paris gave me a dinner at the new Hotel de Ville, which was also lighted

with the Edison system. They had a very fine installation of machinery. As I could not

understand or speak a word of French, I went to see our minister, Mr. Whitelaw Reid, and

got him to send a deputy to answer for me, which he did, with my grateful thanks. Then

the telephone company gave me a dinner, and the engineers of France; and I attended the

dinner celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of photography. Then they

sent to Reid my decoration, and they tried to put a sash on me, but I could not stand for

that. My wife had me wear the little red button, but when I saw Americans coming I

would slip it out of my lapel, as I thought they would jolly me for wearing it."

Nor was this all. Edison naturally met many of the celebrities of France: "I visited the

Eiffel Tower at the invitation of Eiffel. We went to the top, where there was an extension

and a small place in which was Eiffel's private office. In this was a piano. When my wife

and I arrived at the top, we found that Gounod, the composer, was there. We stayed a

couple of hours, and Gounod sang and played for us. We spent a day at Meudon, an old

palace given by the government to Jansen, the astronomer. He occupied three rooms, and

there were 300. He had the grand dining-room for his laboratory. He showed me a

gyroscope he had got up which made the incredible number of 4000 revolutions in a

second. A modification of this was afterward used on the French Atlantic lines for

making an artificial horizon to take observations for position at sea. In connection with

this a gentleman came to me a number of years afterward, and I got out a part of some

plans for him. He wanted to make a gigantic gyroscope weighing several tons, to be run

by an electric motor and put on a sailing ship. He wanted this gyroscope to keep a

platform perfectly horizontal, no matter how rough the sea was. Upon this platform he

was going to mount a telescope to observe an eclipse off the Gold Coast of Africa. But

for some reason it was never completed.