The Birmingham age-herald., 1907-07-12
EDISON PROPHEslES.
Says Day Is Coming When the Air Will
 FertiIze the Depleted Earth.
rom the New York American.

From the New York American.
 Thomas A. Edison gave to the Amer ican the other day the first interview since his announcement on his sixtieth bithday last February that he had quit the career of money-making inventor for that of a scientist.
 For the rest of his life, he says, he intends to devote all his attention to scientific problems without thought of whether or not their solution would bring financial gain.
 Though the Wizard guarded as a secret the particular task on which he is at present expending his thought and energy, he otherwise spoke freely of his work. He discussed many of the myseries into which he was delv- 1 ing, and prophesied that even though he might fail of solution, he firmly be- lieyed others would triumph where he 1 had failed.
 Mir Edison, for example. made the l prediction that before long science would enable the farmer to enrich his i lands by means of nitrogen from the air.
 "The element necessary for making land fertile," he said lis nitrogen, which exists in almost inexhaustible quantities in the atmosphere. Until recently, however, the utilization of atmospheric nitrogen was regarded as merely a laboratory demonstration. Business men said it could never be obtained cheap enough to sell to the farmer as fertilizer.
 But the day is just about to dawn when the air will be made to give it's nitrogen to the earth and to make it yield more abundant harvests and fat ter herds of cattle. In Norway a plant has been established which has been conducted with such good results that I expect to see atmospheric fertilizer on the market in this country within the next ten years.
 That such product will soon be imperatively necessary there is no doubt. Every shipload of wheat and corn which goes abroad leaves the United States so much poorer, not in gold. but in nitrogen
 "Sir William Crookes, when he was president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, prophe- sled that in another quarter of cen tury the earth would be drained of nitrogen to such a degree that there would be famine in many parts of the world. He may have taken too dis couraging a view of the subject, but nevertheless his statement had a true basis of fact
 "At the present time the bulk of the worlds supply of nitrogen comes from the saltpetre beds of South America, but these are being dug up so fast it will not be very long before they will be exhausted
 Another scientific discovery which I expect to see before die" continued the man whose own inventions have done so much to revolutionize modern life, 'is the direct generation of elec- tricity from coal. This has already been achieved in an experimental way. l have heard of several men who have done it. I myself have generated an electrical current by burning carbon and Chilean saltpetre together in an electrolite, although at an expense which made the process commercial impossibility.
 Imagine what will be the conse- quences. Then locomotives will oe thrown into the scrap heap. All trains will be run by electricity. No longer will coal be laboriously transported to the cities. but there will be great power plants established at the mouths Of the mines, from which the electric ity will be sent out over the county by wire.
 "There will be no horses on the streets, no stables, no flies. Wagons will be propelled by electricity, for it will be so cheap that it can be used by the humblest tenement dweller.
 Ships will no longer be driven by steam. Electricity will be their motive power And then it will be possible to cross the Atlantic in three days
 "At the present time nine-tenths of power obtained from coal is lost by the use of boilers, wheels and dyna- mos. With the direct generation of the electrical current, therefore, the world will have ten times more energy than now"