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THE year 1847 marked a period of great
territorial acquisition by the American people,
with incalculable additions to their actual and
potential wealth. By the rational compromise
with England in the dispute over the Oregon
region, President Polk had secured during
1846, for undisturbed settlement, three
hundred thousand square miles of forest, fertile
land, and fisheries, including the whole fair
Columbia Valley. Our active "policy of the
Pacific" dated from that hour. With swift and
clinching succession came the melodramatic
Mexican War, and February, 1848, saw
another vast territory south of Oregon and west
of the Rocky Mountains added by treaty to the
United States. Thus in about eighteen months
there had been pieced into the national domain
for quick development and exploitation a region
as large as the entire Union of Thirteen
States at the close of the War of
Independence. Moreover, within its boundaries
was embraced all the great American
gold-field, just on the eve of discovery, for
Marshall had detected the shining particles in
the mill-race at the foot of the Sierra Nevada
nine days before Mexico signed away her rights
in California and in all the vague, remote
hinterland facing Cathayward.
Equally momentous were the times in Europe,
where the attempt to secure opportunities of
expansion as well as larger liberty for the
individual took quite different form. The old
absolutist system of government was fast breaking
up, and ancient thrones were tottering. The
red lava of deep revolutionary fires oozed up
through many glowing cracks in the political
crust, and all the social strata were shaken.
That the wild outbursts of insurrection midway
in the fifth decade failed and died away was not
surprising, for the superincumbent deposits of
tradition and convention were thick. But the
retrospect indicates that many reforms and
political changes were accomplished, although
the process involved the exile of not a few
ardent spirits to America, to become leading
statesmen, inventors, journalists, and
financiers. In 1847, too, Russia began
her tremendous march eastward into Central
Asia, just as France was solidifying her first
gains on the littoral of northern Africa. In
England the fierce fervor of the Chartist
movement, with its violent rhetoric as to the
rights of man, was sobering down and passing
pervasively into numerous practical schemes for
social and political amelioration, constituting
in their entirety a most profound change
throughout every part of the national life.
Into such times Thomas Alva Edison was born,
and his relations to them and to the events of
the past sixty years are the subject of this
narrative. Aside from the personal interest
that attaches to the picturesque career, so
typically American, there is a broader aspect
in which the work of the "Franklin of the
Nineteenth Century" touches the welfare and
progress of the race. It is difficult at any
time to determine the effect of any single
invention, and the investigation becomes more
difficult where inventions of the first class
have been crowded upon each other in rapid and
bewildering succession. But it will be admitted
that in Edison one deals with a central figure
of the great age that saw the invention and
introduction in practical form of the telegraph,
the submarine cable, the telephone, the
electric light, the electric railway, the
electric trolley-car, the storage battery, the
electric motor, the phonograph, the wireless
telegraph; and that the influence of these on
the world's affairs has not been excelled at any
time by that of any other corresponding advances
in the arts and sciences. These pages deal with
Edison's share in the great work of the last
half century in abridging distance,
communicating intelligence, lessening toil,
improving illumination, recording forever the
human voice; and on behalf of inventive genius
it may be urged that its beneficent results and
gifts to mankind compare with any to be credited
to statesman, warrior, or creative writer of
the same period.
Viewed from the standpoint of inventive
progress, the first half of the nineteenth
century had passed very profitably when Edison
appeared--every year marked by some notable
achievement in the arts and sciences, with
promise of its early and abundant fruition in
commerce and industry. There had been exactly
four decades of steam navigation on American
waters. Railways were growing at the rate of
nearly one thousand miles annually. Gas had
become familiar as a means of illumination in
large cities. Looms and tools and
printing-presses were everywhere being liberated
from the slow toil of man-power. The first
photographs had been taken. Chloroform,
nitrous oxide gas, and ether had been placed at
the service of the physician in saving life, and
the revolver, guncotton, and nitroglycerine
added to the agencies for slaughter. New
metals, chemicals, and elements had become
available in large numbers, gases had been
liquefied and solidified, and the range of
useful heat and cold indefinitely extended. The
safety-lamp had been given to the miner, the
caisson to the bridge- builder, the
anti-friction metal to the mechanic for
bearings. It was already known how to vulcanize
rubber, and how to galvanize iron. The
application of machinery in the harvest-field
had begun with the embryonic reaper, while both
the bicycle and the automobile were heralded in
primitive prototypes. The gigantic expansion of
the iron and steel industry was foreshadowed in
the change from wood to coal in the smelting
furnaces. The sewing-machine had brought with
it, like the friction match, one of the most
profound influences in modifying domestic life,
and making it different from that of all
preceding time.
Even in 1847 few of these things had lost
their novelty, most of them were in the earlier
stages of development. But it is when we turn
to electricity that the rich virgin condition of
an illimitable new kingdom of discovery is seen.
Perhaps the word "utilization" or
"application" is better than discovery, for
then, as now, an endless wealth of phenomena
noted by experimenters from Gilbert to Franklin
and Faraday awaited the invention that could
alone render them useful to mankind. The
eighteenth century, keenly curious and
ceaselessly active in this fascinating field of
investigation, had not, after all, left much
of a legacy in either principles or appliances.
The lodestone and the compass; the frictional
machine; the Leyden jar; the nature of
conductors and insulators; the identity of
electricity and the thunder-storm flash; the
use of lightning-rods; the physiological
effects of an electrical shock--these
constituted the bulk of the bequest to which
philosophers were the only heirs. Pregnant with
possibilities were many of the observations that
had been recorded. But these few appliances
made up the meagre kit of tools with which the
nineteenth century entered upon its task of
acquiring the arts and conveniences now such an
intimate part of "human nature's daily food"
that the average American to-day pays more for
his electrical service than he does for bread.
With the first year of the new century came
Volta's invention of the chemical battery as a
means of producing electricity. A well-known
Italian picture represents Volta exhibiting his
apparatus before the young conqueror Napoleon,
then ravishing from the Peninsula its treasure
of ancient art and founding an ephemeral empire.
At such a moment this gift of de- spoiled
Italy to the world was a noble revenge, setting
in motion incalculable beneficent forces and
agencies. For the first time man had command of
a steady supply of electricity without toil or
effort. The useful results obtainable
previously from the current of a frictional
machine were not much greater than those to be
derived from the flight of a rocket. While the
frictional appliance is still employed in
medicine, it ranks with the flint axe and the
tinder-box in industrial obsolescence. No art
or trade could be founded on it; no diminution
of daily work or increase of daily comfort could
be secured with it. But the little battery with
its metal plates in a weak solution proved a
perennial reservoir of electrical energy, safe
and controllable, from which supplies could be
drawn at will. That which was wild had become
domesticated; regular crops took the place of
haphazard gleanings from brake or prairie; the
possibility of electrical starvation was forever
left behind.
Immediately new processes of inestimable value
revealed themselves; new methods were
suggested. Almost all the electrical arts now
employed made their beginnings in the next
twenty-five years, and while the more extensive
of them depend to-day on the dynamo for
electrical energy, some of the most important
still remain in loyal allegiance to the older
source. The battery itself soon underwent
modifications, and new types were evolved--the
storage, the double-fluid, and the dry.
Various analogies next pointed to the use of
heat, and the thermoelectric cell emerged,
embodying the application of flame to the
junction of two different metals. Davy, of the
safety-lamp, threw a volume of current across
the gap between two sticks of charcoal, and the
voltaic arc, forerunner of electric lighting,
shed its bright beams upon a dazzled world. The
decomposition of water by electrolytic action was
recognized and made the basis of communicating at
a distance even before the days of the
electromagnet. The ties that bind electricity
and magnetism in twinship of relation and
interaction were detected, and Faraday's work
in induction gave the world at once the dynamo
and the motor. "Hitch your wagon to a star,"
said Emerson. To all the coal-fields and all
the waterfalls Faraday had directly hitched the
wheels of industry. Not only was it now
possible to convert mechanical energy into
electricity cheaply and in illimitable
quantities, but electricity at once showed its
ubiquitous availability as a motive power.
Boats were propelled by it, cars were hauled,
and even papers printed. Electroplating became
an art, and telegraphy sprang into active being
on both sides of the Atlantic.
At the time Edison was born, in 1847,
telegraphy, upon which he was to leave so
indelible an imprint, had barely struggled into
acceptance by the public. In England,
Wheatstone and Cooke had introduced a ponderous
magnetic needle telegraph. In America, in
1840, Morse had taken out his first patent
on an electromagnetic telegraph, the principle
of which is dominating in the art to this day.
Four years later the memorable message "What
hath God wrought!" was sent by young Miss
Ellsworth over his circuits, and incredulous
Washington was advised by wire of the action of
the Democratic Convention in Baltimore in
nominating Polk. By 1847 circuits had been
strung between Washington and New York, under
private enterprise, the Government having
declined to buy the Morse system for
$100,000. Everything was crude and
primitive. The poles were two hundred feet
apart and could barely hold up a wash-line.
The slim, bare, copper wire snapped on the
least provocation, and the circuit was "down"
for thirty-six days in the first six months.
The little glass-knob insulators made seductive
targets for ignorant sportsmen. Attempts to
insulate the line wire were limited to coating it
with tar or smearing it with wax for the benefit
of all the bees in the neighborhood. The
farthest western reach of the telegraph lines in
1847 was Pittsburg, with three- ply iron
wire mounted on square glass insulators with a
little wooden pentroof for protection. In that
office, where Andrew Carnegie was a messenger
boy, the magnets in use to receive the signals
sent with the aid of powerful nitric-acid
batteries weighed as much as seventy-five pounds
apiece. But the business was fortunately small
at the outset, until the new device, patronized
chiefly by lottery-men, had proved its
utility. Then came the great outburst of
activity. Within a score of years telegraph
wires covered the whole occupied country with a
network, and the first great electrical industry
was a pronounced success, yielding to its
pioneers the first great harvest of electrical
fortunes. It had been a sharp struggle for bare
existence, during which such a man as the
founder of Cornell University had been glad to
get breakfast in New York with a
quarter-dollar picked up on Broadway.
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