News and citizen. [volume] (Morrisville, Vt. ;) 1881-current, 1890-01-09
THOMAS A. EDISON.

TT 4
THOMAS A. EDISON.
The Geographic business fairly echoes
with anecdotes of Tom Edison. His
history, his sayings, his doings, his
odd ways and his wondrous expert
ness are among the traditions of the
craft. They will tell you, in hundreds
of offices the country over, how he
was discharged from the office in Mem
phis because manager concluded he
was crazy and was not a fit man to be
trusted with the company's business.
The story of his walking into the
Boston office arrayed in linen buster,
asking for a job, being set to receive
from the heavy-laden New York wire
and putting the sender to blush, is one
of the stock yarns told by operators of
all ages. The telegraph operator glories
in Edison as a fellow and in some
measure appropriates a share of the
| great mans greatness. They consider
him indisputable proof that some good
can come out of Nazareth. He has
''got there" He can dictate terms to
the biggest, latest, most robust cor
poration on earth, and his brain is a
mine which no combination of capital
lists can open against his will, and the
wealth of which he can carry away to
eternity with him if he pleases.
EDISON AS HE Is.
1want to make pen picture of Edi-
son as he appears at the age of forty
five, in the rich prime of his years and
at the zenith of his accomplishment.
He is most attractive just at this hour,
with his great triumphs all behind him,
and yet standing, as he says, merely at
the threshold of electrical invention.
To do it have made trip or two to
the photographic laboratories, mile
or so from Orange, in the Democratic
and apple-Jacksonian State of Jersey.
1t is two years since Edison and the
Edison interests took Judgement at
what is known as Llewellyn Park, but
now the personality of the wizard is
over the neighborhood like the legend
airy "cloud by day and pillar of fire by
night"
Without meaning to do it, maybe
without knowing it, he broods over
the vicinity like a small Electrometor
Buddha. In the surroundings of his
laboratory is an air of mystery. The
incomprehensibility of something or
other obtrudes upon every one. The
neighbors look reverently at the big
brick buildings, in respect to the Jug
Cling and necromancy that are taking
place within.
There is an intimation of brains in
the air, and the visitors estimate of
himself is sadly dwarfed by the sense
of nearness to genius. But the folk
who have lived for year or two I'M
der the shadow of the wizard don't
fear him in the least. They find him
a wholesouled, frank, outspoken man,
cast in the common mould, who minds
his own business and is no crank at
all, is CHEEKY to every one he meets,
hasn't swelled head, and says what
he has to say in language they can
understand.
HIS LABORATORY.
The laboratory is a big red brick
building or group of buildings three
stories high, with blank, hooking
windows, from which come strange
sounds, bursts OF fitful music and wild
cries, until the listener is quite con-
WINGED that nature is undergoing the
inquisition up there, sure enough.
The entrances are shut from the street
by long fence with pickets of enor-
nous height and breadth.
When you have stood long enough
before the white-paled fence you press
button at the gate, and boy who is
sadly in need of little electricity
saunters out to admit you. You wait
in an enormous library full of scien-
tific books, written in divers tongues.
But to get to the Wizard is like rum
ling blockade. He is immured some
where up in the labrynth, and, besides
passing the guards, you must thread
many mazes amongst instruments of
strange design, of glass, of gutta per-
cha, of all the metals, before you find
him.
Here in these great buildings of brick
is EdisOn's life. Here, more and more,
his ambitions are centring. The lab
oratories were erected for work upon
the photograph, which has been and is
the darling of his heart. And save
when some business or social duty-of
the latter he acknowledges few-calls
him away, here you may find him at
almost any hour.
He is strange figure, in his long
frock of checked gingham, which but
tons close at the chin and reaches to
the heels. 1t is nothing more nor less
than mans Mother Hubbard, which
Edison pulls on when at work to pro-
tect his neat suit of broadcloth from
dust and acids and oils and edged tools.
A big head, with struggling hair, Just
turning gray, and a big face that has" a
queer something more than Yankee
shrewdness in it, looms above this pc
culiar garment with strange effect.
Edison in his working gown is sight
to laugh at, until you remember that it
is Edison. Still there is nothing of the
rapt genius about him to repel the Wis
itor or impress him with a sense of his
own littleness. Edison is bluff and
hearty, and his enormous mouth grins
as easily as can be. He speaks in a
loud tone and scolds his assistants in a
brusque way for their idleness, when
they know he doesn't mean it.
IN ROBUST HEALTH.
The lean telegraph operator has
grown fat in these latter years, not so
much upon high living as upon high
thinking and for lack of bodily ex-
ercise. He has the action and vitality
of a robust, healthy man. Heis broad
of shoulder and deep of chest, but
there is pallor about his face, caused,
beyond question, by prolonged con-
finement within doors. His nose is the
color centre, as well as the geometrical
centre of his face, but its ruddiness is
not an alcoholic growth. There never
was an eye just like Edison's. 1t is of
cold color, that strict critic might call