Arizona republican., 1903-05-06

Dul ne prefers HOW the policy or con- cealment. and operates more and more under a regime of trade SC e.rets" To his way of thinking, the American pa,- ent system is the best in the world, but 1t does not safeguard the inventor as 1t ought. The cost of patent litigation is tremendous; the delays are frightfuI: and often by the time a favorable de cision is won, he has effected some radical improvement that renders earlier ideas useless. A few years ago. sitting with some friends in his private library at Llewellyn Park, on the Or ange mountains of New Jersey, he made a calculation of the royalties fairly due on a prime invention then under trial in the courts. The amount was three million dollars. The case has been won, but up to this time neither Mir. Edison nor his plaintiff con pany has ever received a cent of that money; and neither of them will ever get n cent. One need hardly wonder, then. that a man who has been obtaining . patent every fortnight for over thirty years should slacken, influenced by the logic of such facts, and be bit pesst- mistic nowadays as to the inestimable value of mere sheets of parchment with
 
 a red seal.
 But the tide of invention flows a. strongly as ever in the Edison laboTa- tory, and while its master may not. as of old. crowd a volcanic lifetime of ex- plosive discovery into continuous sleep less vigils of forty-eight or seventy two hours. he is just as facile, fertile, and resourceful as of yore. No inven- tor was ever more sklful in gaining the support of capital; none was ever more successful in keeping the enthu- siasm of his associates up to white heat. An Edison man" remains an Edison man to the end of the chapter, and is proud of the stamp left upon his career or his personality by the great spirit with whom trials and triumpns have been shared It is a curious fact often overlooked in Edisons life that he has always been surrounded by z willing host of cO-workers, put has all ways held easily his leadership among them. This is by no means true of other inventors and workers; and thus may be explained his frequent sue cesses and rare failures. Some power full thinkers, whether from instinctiye distrust or unavowed jealousy, en- deavor to hammer out their conceptions in lonely struggle. and names could be mentioned here of electrical inventors whose curse seems to be this sterile seclusion. In Edison's case, the sunny, kindly temperament of the man makes for friendship: and the readiness to use anything that lies handy as means of attaining tine goal, compels him to employ talent as freely as he does raw material.
 And he could keep a whole army busy. There never was an inventor who had more irons in the fire. It Is the fault of frail human nature that they are not all kept hot at once. With brief fallow seasons, he has been at It, hammer and tongs, planning and scheming and perfecting. ever since he was a gaunt. lank telegraph operator rowing the west and marking his course by the stains of his battery solu- tions A great many first-class invent ors are sharply concentrated along one line. Edison is. if anything. spread out too thin. His keen curiosity, alert mind and undying discontent with things as he finds them, drive him into a dozen lines of investigation at once. Just at the present moment, for ex- ample, the public has a notion that he is simply striving to perfect new storage battery about which so much has been said. He is; but like the Jap anese juggler. he is also balancing half q dozen other little affairs in the air, and giving them the delft spin or kick at the moment when they might drop. Besides the battery. there are the ce- pa where g score of new ideas and devices arc being licked into shape, and cement turned out meantime. sundry im- movements have lately been made In the phonograph. Over in Europe hIs magnetic ore crushing inventions are being applied on big scale to replen- ish the supply from the exhausted iron beds of England. Half dozen new things are going forward in electrical experimentation at Orange; and cheap CT, better metres are among them. Nor has the earlier interest in recondlte phenomena been lost; while aside rom work of his own, MT. Edison has, 1t Is said, placed his own ripe genius and weighty experience back of the Marconi wireless telegraph enterprises.
 AS to the new storage battery, there is little to add that people who care about such matters do not already know. Familiar forms of battery are of lead, to which the objections are usually made of great weight smau storage capacity per pound of active material, and rapid deterioration. Edl- son has brought out battery with sheet-steel jar, thin perforated sheei- steel plates or clements, an alkaline solution, and active materials or iron oxide and nickel interinixed wl'h graphite carried In tiny briquettes Tn the windows of the steel plates. Since the battery was first brought out, the rates of charging and discharging its current have been doubled. the weight has been considerably reduced, and other improvements have been effected. For automobile operation, it has al ready had encouraging tests.-Harpers Weekly.