 great American sockets. Some say the greatest. It started humbling on the night of February 11th, 1847, in a small red brick house in Mylan, Ohio, the home of the man who ran the town Shingle factory. On that February night, he sat in the parlor of his home. In the bedroom, his wife lay awaiting the birth of her seventh child. That had claimed earlier children. Know that the father's prayers fill the anxious hours until the father inscribed the name of a healthy, husky boy in the family Bible. Humble beginnings but not poor. The Edison children were reared on good food and the good book. They were all good, hard, common sense kids, said the neighbors. Except for young Tom. They called him the curious boy, meaning he had too much curiosity about things. When he was five, they found him sitting on some duck eggs to see if he could hatch them. It was possibly his first experiment. It was not successful. When the family moved to Port Huron, Michigan, the curious boy started school. He exasperated his teacher. The boy is backward, the teacher complained. All he does is ask questions. Nonsense said the boy's mother. I'll teach you myself. And she did. Her method was reading, writing, and arithmetic. And then she simply encouraged him to read, read, read. The more he read, the more his curiosity grew. By the time he was 12, he wanted to know what the whole wide world was about. So he decided to go into business. 1859, the great railroads were beginning to criss-cross America. Any 12-year-old boy would naturally go down to the railroad station to seek his fortune. Tom Edison talked the Grand Trunk Railway into giving him the job of selling candy and newspapers on the daily run from Port Huron to Detroit. He also talked the conductor into giving him a corner of the baggage car. In this corner, he set up a chemical laboratory. His curiosity didn't stop at chemistry. He got interested in printing when he was 14. So he set up his own printing press and started the first newspaper ever published on a railroad train, any time, anywhere. The Weekly Herald, published by A for Al, as he was called, Edison, was only a single sheet affair, but he crammed it with general information and gossip. Local and international news, business facts and figures, vital statistics, philosophy, reason, justice and equity never had weight enough on the face of the earth to govern the councils of man. But at the height of his success as chemist, candy butcher, publisher, philosopher, two accidents occurred. First, he became partially deaf. Deafness drove me to reading. My refuge was the Detroit Public Library. I didn't read a few books. I read the library. And he learned how to operate a telegraph ticker. The second accident occurred when one day his chemical jars broke open and set fire to the baggage car. The conductor put him off the train together with all his chemicals and his curiosity. He was 16 years old now, an unemployed candy butcher and newspaper publisher. But he'd also learned how to send and receive messages over the telegraph ticker. In 1864, he became a wandering telegraph operator, the fastest operator that ever came down the pike, also the most restless. Couldn't stay in one place for long. For four years, he ticked his way across the country, a kind of long haired hobo, always tinkering with wires and things, but gathering no moss, making no money. Now, matter what I may do, I reap nothing but trouble and the blues. It is all I can do to keep the wolf from the door. But he was working harder than he was worrying. And he invented the universal stock ticker, his first major invention. Western Union paid him $40,000 for it. He took the money and invested in a dream. All during the hobo years, he had dreamed of building a laboratory. And finally, in 1876, he settled in the little town of Menlo Park, New Jersey. To his home there, he took his young bride, Mary Stillwell Edison. Close by the house, the main laboratory building was connected to the outside world by telegraph wires. The chemistry lab was the little candy butcher's dream come true. He filled his lab with the best technicians and the best machines money could buy. He was the first man to conceive of an invention factory, a hive of specialists on a belt line. At the top of the line was the old man, as they called him even then, supplying the ideas and the inspiration he announced to the world. I produce a minor invention every month and a major one every six months. It was no idle boast and the invention started pouring out of Menlo Park. To his deafness, he attributed one of his early contributions. When Bell first worked out his telephone idea, I tried it and the sound which came through the instrument was so weak, I couldn't hear it. I started to develop it and kept on until the sounds were audible to me. My improvement, the carbon transmitter, made the telephone possible. The repeating telegraph was a machine which automatically took down telegraph messages for relay at high speed. It consisted of a piece of thick paper which spun around a blunt needle which made dot and dash indentations on the paper. One day Edison was tinkering with the machine. The paper disk started spinning too rapidly and through his deafness, he heard a strange sound. If I could record the action of the point and then send the point over the same surface again, I saw no reason why the thing Crucy, his chief machinist, made the model for a total cost of $18. A group of assistants gathered around the old man's desk. None of them knew what the fantastic looking thing was supposed to do. They stood silently while Edison took a piece of tin foil, inserted a mouthpiece on the contraption and then to everyone's astonishment started reciting these momentous words. Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. I made a bet of 15 cigars that the machine would talk back to me. Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. He won the bet. What should he call it? Telephone, telegraph? He named it the phonograph. It became the sensation of the day and age. The 31-year-old inventor was invited to the White House to demonstrate his machine for President Hayes. Never in the whole history of science and invention had there been anything like this, a machine that talked and the world clamored to listen to it. In restaurants and saloons and penny arcades, the first jukeboxes were installed and while the words and music poured into every ear, the name of Edison was on every tongue. Philosopher of the time said it was the era of the nickel in the sloth machine. He was always bubbling over with new ideas for it, new applications. Hope the little box would be a great educational device, recording the Washington's and Lincoln's for posterity. But what the public wanted from it was entertainment and the great names of the entertainment world hastened to oblige. Rock Moninot, Matzenauer, Anderson Fagan, the whistling artist and as the years went by, they trooped in and out of Edison's recording rooms. The opera singers and the banjo players and the bird imitators and the tellers of jokes and the records poured forth, hundreds of them, thousands, hundreds of thousands, from the needle that scratched the tin foil a million dollar industry was born. Shortly after the world had seen the wizardry of the invention of the phonograph, the Wizard of Menlo Park started a fresh notebook. It was the first of many on a new subject. The object of this invention is to devise an electric lamp which shall admit of being worked in great numbers on one electrical circuit. The invention of the phonograph had been all Edison, but when he turned his luminous curiosity on the problem of making an electric light, he was moving into a field where many others were working. The first thing Edison did was to learn everything he could about the subject. He came to the crux of the problem. One, if you heat certain materials by electricity, they give off light. Two, if you heat these materials in a vacuum, they last much longer. So he told his glass blowers in the invention factory to make him some glass bulbs. This would be his vacuum, in which he would heat something by electricity. Heat what? What would glow with the light that was continuous and bright and easy on the eyes? Now the laboratory became his home. Day, night, time itself meant nothing to him. He tried everything in the search for the proper thing to heat in the vacuum. After trying metals, he started on the world of organic matter. Anything, everything within reach. Human hair, wood, leather, macaroni. Now we know another thing that won't work. That's progress. Finally, one day he took a piece of common cotton thread and placed it in a crucible and baked it in a furnace. Out of the furnace came a thin thread of pure carbon. He attached this filament to electric wires inside the bulb. He pumped the air out of the bulb. He turned on the electric current. This was the light he wanted, but how long would it last? Edison and his assistants gathered around for the famous death watch of October 19th, 1879. They watched the lamp for 10 hours. Give it more juice. 20 hours. More juice. 30. For two days and two nights the lamp burned. Now I knew we had it. He invited the world. A world still lit by candles and gas light to come to Menlo Park to sea. They came. On New Year's Eve, 1879, they came by the train load and they saw. New light to the new world on this New Year's Eve cried the press. The newspapers called it the miracle of the 19th century. Lighting up Menlo Park was only a stunt for New Year's Eve. The real test came when Edison announced that he would illuminate one square mile of the heart of New York City with a new fangled electric light. The bulb, the miracle bulb that gave the miraculous light, was only the beginning. The end component of a thousand component parts. You need rheostats and generators and meters and fuses and sockets and switches and conductors to make it work. The incandescent light was not one but 360 different inventions all welded together. To lay his lines and cables he had to dig down into the bowels of the city. Edison himself supervised every move day and night. In later years he was to say, this was the greatest adventure of my life. To make light, you need power. He took a building on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan and turned it into the first power plant for electric light in the United States. It started with coal furnaces in the basement. The coal made steam. The steam made power. The power turned the generators. From the generators came electricity and the electricity became light, light to the world. But hardly two years after the great triumph, tragedy struck the house of Edison. He tried to lose himself in work but to the great giver of light Menlo Park was full of shadows now. He had to move away away from the place where he had lived for eight happy years. Two years after Mary Edison died he found a haven in West Orange, New Jersey in the lordly house called Glenmont. In the year 1886 he was 39 years old when he married Nina Miller herself the daughter of an inventor. My later courtship was carried down by telegraph. I taught the lady of my heart Morse code and we got along much better than we could have with spoken words by tapping our remarks to one another on our hands. Presently I asked her thus if she would marry me. The word yes is an easy one to send by telegraphic signals and she sent it. And here he took his new bride to live. Beyond the fields of Glenmont just down the road he built his new laboratory brick this time the finest invention factory in the world the big brother of Menlo Park. The nerve center of the compound was the old man's rooftop desk in an office that was two stories high crammed with 10,000 scientific volumes. It was his combination office laboratory studio library and bedroom. On a small card he took his famous catnaps. I never found need of more than four or five hours sleep in the 24. People talk of loss of sleep as a calamity. They better call it loss of time vitality opportunity. No matter how hard he worked he could always find time for his children. When they were away he wrote them playful letters to be read in a mirror. On one of their toys the wheel of light now caught his fancy. It occurred to me that it was possible to devise an instrument that should do for the eye what the phonograph did for the year. His first idea was to put a continuous line of tiny photographs on a cylindrical shell just like a photograph record then to rotate the shell and let the eyes look at the photographs through a magnifying glass. It didn't work well enough to suit Edison. Then he thought if he could put a long line of photographs on some sort of strip or tape on something you could roll up. One day he saw an advertisement for a new kind of camera designed by a man named George Eastman. It took pictures on celluloid. Without George Eastman I don't know what the result would have been in the history of the motion picture. He tried to develop a narrow strip of sensitized film that would operate on a roll. Observe says the legend that each picture has a slight change of position as it passes the point of vision. The rapid photograph of these different stages of movement upon a long strap of light sensitive film creates the illusionary spectacle of movable figures. In order to see the figures move you look through the magnifying glass of a peephole machine. Our studio was almost as amazing as the pictures we made in it. It was such an ungainly looking structure when it was done and the boys had so much sport with it that we called it the Black Mariah. In order to make certain of as long a working day as possible we swung the whole building on pivots like an old fashioned river bridge so it could be turned to follow the course of the sun. It was a ghastly proposition for a stranger daring enough to brave its mysteries. But we managed to make pictures there and after all that was the real test. They made pictures there. Fred Ott Sneese the first copyrighted film. May Erwin and John Rice the first movie kiss of an American fireman the first story film. Did you know that one of my first thoughts for the motion picture was to combine it with the phonograph. My plan was to synchronize the camera and phonograph so as to record sounds when the pictures were made and reproduce the two in harmony. Talking pictures. A projector in his office he showed the first home movies. The camera followed on one of his camping trips with his good friends Henry Ford Harvey Firestone and the naturalist John Burroughs. But in the right years of his life he found it good sometimes to rest from the hard job of being a wizard. At his winter home in Fort Myers Florida his family and friends would gather around. What do I think of Einstein's theory. I don't think anything of it because I don't understand it. And he liked to drive around the grounds of Fort Myers in a car given him by an old and grateful friend Henry Ford whose early experiments with a combustion engine Edison had encouraged. And he liked to sit and look at nature. Good day for an angel picnic. They could lunch on the smell of flowers and new moon hay drink the moisture of the air and dance to the hum of the bees. But even in Fort Myers he couldn't sit still for very long. Close by his home he built a small laboratory. His friends Ford and Firestone had presented him with a great challenge. Could he find a domestic source of natural rubber. Best source he reasoned would be something that grows in great abundance. What was more abundant than the flowers of the field around him. He started by testing every plant every flower every leaf every growing thing he could lay his hands on. Thousands of them tested and carefully classified in his notebooks on his neat shelves. Finally he settled on the golden rod as the most practicable source of rubber. Why because it was so plentiful. He worked late into the night on the incredible notion of squeezing rubber out of golden rod. Though the famous cat naps were growing longer he didn't give up until out of the lowly golden rod he actually produced his last legacy to humanity. His desk at the West Orange laboratory is as he left it crammed full of innumerable projects improvements on the old inventions. Plans for many many new inventions. Telephone, telegraph, dynamo. He had taken out the incredible number of 1097 patents in his 84 years of life and still he could envision with youthful fervor. When I look around at the resources of the electrical field today I feel I would be glad to begin again my work as an electrician and inventor and we veterans can only urge upon our successors the younger followers of Franklin and of Kelvin to realize the measure of their opportunities and to rise to the height of their responsibilities in this day of electricity.