If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.—Emerson.
Character is power—is influence; it makes friends, creates funds, draws patronage and support, and opens a sure and easy way to wealth, honor and happiness.—J. Hawes.
To be thrown upon one’s own resources is to be cast into the very lap of fortune.—Franklin.
There is no road to success but through a clear, strong purpose. A purpose underlies character, culture, position, attainment of whatever sort.—T. T. Munger.
Heaven never helps the man who will not act.—Sophocles.
The talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do well, and doing well whatever you do, without a thought of fame.—Longfellow.
The longer I live, the more deeply am I convinced that that which makes the difference between one man and another—between the weak and powerful, the great and insignificant, is energy—invincible determination—a purpose once formed, and then death or victory.—Fowell Buxton.
In the measure in which thou seekest to do thy duty shalt thou know what is in thee. But what is thy duty? The demand of the hour.—Goethe.
A strong, defiant purpose is many-handed, and lays hold of whatever is near that can serve it; it has a magnetic power that draws to itself whatever is kindred.—T. T. Munger.
I
Hard Work: the Secret of a Great Inventor’s Genius.
TO discover the opinion of Thomas A. Edison concerning what makes and constitutes success in life is an easy matter, if one can only discover Mr. Edison. I camped three weeks in the vicinity of Orange, N. J., awaiting the opportunity to come upon the great inventor and voice my questions. It seemed a rather hopeless and discouraging affair until he was really before me; but, truth to say, he is one of the most accessible of men, and only reluctantly allows himself to be hedged in by the pressure of endless affairs. “Mr. Edison is always glad to see any visitor,” said a gentleman who is constantly with him, “except when he is hot on the trail of something he has been working for, and then it is as much as a man’s head is worth to come in on him.” He certainly was not hot on the trail of anything on the morning when, for seemingly the tenth time, I rang at the gate in the fence which surrounds the laboratory on Valley Road, Orange. A young man appeared, who conducted me up the walk to the elegant office and library of the great laboratory. It is a place, this library, not to be passed through without thought, for with a further store of volumes in his home, it contains one of the most costly and well-equipped scientific libraries in the world; the collection of writings on patent laws and patents, for instance, is absolutely exhaustive. It gives, at a glance, an idea of the breadth of the thought and sympathy of this man who grew up with scarcely a common school education.
On the second floor, in one of the offices of the machine-shop, I was asked to wait, while a grimy youth disappeared with my card, which he said he would “slip under the door of Mr. Edison’s office.” “Curious,” I thought; “what a lord this man must be if they dare not even knock at his door!”
Thinking of this and gazing out of the window, I waited until a working man, who had entered softly, came up beside me. He looked with a sort of “Well, what is it?” in his eyes, and quickly it began to come to me that the man in the sooty, oil-stained clothes was Edison himself. The working garb seemed rather incongruous, but there was no mistaking the broad forehead, with its shock of blackish hair streaked with gray. The gray eyes, too, were revelations in the way of alert comprehensiveness.
“Oh!” was all I could get out at the time.
“Want to see me?” he said, smiling in the most youthful and genial way.
“Why—yes, certainly, to be sure,” I stammered.
He looked at me blankly.
“You’ll have to talk louder,” said an assistant who worked in another portion of the room; “he don’t hear well.”
HIS GRANDFATHER WAS A BANKER.
This fact was new to me, but I raised my voice with celerity and piped thereafter in an exceedingly shrill key. After the usual humdrum opening remarks, in which he acknowledged with extreme good nature his age as fifty-five years, and that he was born in Erie county, O., of Dutch parentage, the family having emigrated to America in 1730, the particulars began to grow more interesting. His great-grandfather, I learned, was a banker of high standing in New York; and, when Thomas was but a child of seven years, the family fortune suffered reverses so serious as to make it necessary that he should become a wage-earner at an unusually early age, and that the family should move from his birth-place to Michigan.
“Did you enjoy mathematics as a boy?” I asked.
“Not much,” he replied. “I tried to read Newton’s ‘Principia’ at the age of eleven. That disgusted me with pure mathematics, and I don’t wonder now. I should not have been allowed to take up such serious work.”
“You were anxious to learn?”
“Yes, indeed. I attempted to read through the entire Free Library at Detroit, but other things interfered before I had done.”
“Were you a book-worm and dreamer?” I questioned.
“Not at all,” he answered, using a short, jerky method, as though he were unconsciously checking himself up. “I became a newsboy, and liked the work. Made my first coup as a newsboy.”
“What was it?” I ventured.
“I bought up on ‘futures’ a thousand copies of the ‘Detroit Free Press’ containing important war news—gained a little time on my rivals, and sold the entire batch like hot cakes. The price reached twenty-five cents a copy before the end of the route,” and he laughed. “I ran the ‘Grand Trunk Herald,’ too, at that time—a little paper I issued from the train.”
HIS FIRST EXPERIMENTS.
“When did you begin to be interested in inventions?” I questioned.
“Well,” he said, “I began to dabble in chemistry at that time. I fitted up a small laboratory on the train.”
In reference to this, Mr. Edison subsequently admitted that, during the progress of some occult experiments in this workshop, certain complications ensued in which a jolted and broken bottle of sulphuric acid attracted the attention of the conductor. He, who had been long suffering in the matter of unearthly odors, promptly ejected the young devotee and all his works. This incident would have been only amusing but for its relation to and explanation of his deafness. A box on the ear, administered
