Evening public ledger. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1914-1942, 1918-06-14
THE ELECTRIC CHAIR
Have You Ever Been Fired?

L
"a you prefer the polite phrase custom
airy to self-esteem. resigned from an un.
congenial position? 1t seems that IL you
have never had an Irish raise you have
missed an experience which has helped
many men find themselves and has put
them on the road to ultimate success.
1NHE stiff jolt tha. comes to a man when
L he is asked to find some other channel
for his superlative powers is painful at
first, but II is also the greatest tonic known
In the business world. You may have been
quite unjustly dismissed, or (more likely)
you may have been lying down on your
Job; but in any case the result il like
humping some psychological funny.bone.
IL you have any spine at all you will have
to mobilize it for immediate action.
ONE does not have to study the ways of
~ this world very long before finding that
turning stumbling blocks into stepping
stones is the most useful kind of masonry
known to man. There is probably not a
successful man or woman living who has
not at some time or other had to face what
looked like a complete breakdown of his
or her outfit of tools 1t may come in the
way of broken health. physical disablement
loss Of funds, disloyalty of some associate
or some catastrophe of nature. It may
even come to mankind as a who'll, as this
war has come-an apparent collapse of the
whole fabric of civilization. But human
beings have marvellous ways of gathering
themselves together to face adversely. Both
singly and race they have habit of
seeing il through"
MTE ONCE found an instance OF this truth
w in the life of Thomas A. Edison Gt is
related in his biography written by Dyer
and Martini and we have always remern
bered it,
At FOURTEEN young Edison was work.
"A ing as a newsboy on the Grand Trunk
Railway. The train on which he sold pa
pers ran between Port Huron and Detroit
During the run he had good deal of time
to himself, and finding a section of the
baggage car unused he turned it into an
office and laboratory. He had no official
permission to do so but the good ma.
ture of the train hands, who pleased by
his ingenuity. allowed him to do very much
as he chose. In this baggage car he COM
posed edited and printed a newspaper of
his own. The Weekly Herald. which was
complimented by the London Times as the
first journal in the world to be edited and
printed on a train in motion.
DUT it was the baggage car chemical
- laboratory that got him into trouble.
His shelves became crowded with appara-
tus, and one day when the train was run
ming rapidly over a poorly laid stretch Of
track a stick of phosphorus was Jared
from it's place, fell on the floor and burst
into flames. The car took fire and the boy
in dismay was trying to quench the blaze
when the conductor, a quick-tempered
Scotchman, discovered the accident and
quenched the blaze with water. wher the
next station was reached Edison and his
entire outfit - laboratory, printing plant
and all--were elected by the enraged con-
ductor. He was left on the platform, tear
full and dismayed, among his beloved but
ruined possessions.
TT WAS in this adventure that Edison ac-
L CURED the deafness that has persisted
throughout his life. A box on the ears
from the scorched and angry conductor
was the direct cause of the trouble. This
would be regarded by most of us as great
aflction, but Mr.. Edison has always taken
it with equanimity. He has said:
This deafness has been of great advan-
tage to me in various ways. When in a
telegraph office l could hear only the in
strument directly on the table at which I
sat and, unlike other operators, / was not
bothered by the other instruments. Again,
in experimenting on the telephone I had to
improve the transmitter so I could hear it.
This made the telephone commercial as the
magnetic telephone receiver Of Bell was too
weak to be used as transmitter CONNER
cially 1t was the same with the phono-
graph The great defect of that instru-
ment was the rendering of the overtones
in music and the kissing consonants in
speech / worked more than one year
twenty hours a day, Sundays and all, to
get the word specie perfectly recorded and
reproduced on the phonograph When this
was done knew that everything else could
be done, which was a fact. Again, my
nerves have been preserved intact. Broad
way is as quiet to me as a country village
is to a person with normal hearing"
IF ONLY the Kaiser had been brought
L up as Mr. Edison was, how much hap
pier the world would be today!