"Edison" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a purpose who have been laughed at are many in the history of the world. From Romulus and the builders of the walls of Jerusalem to Columbus, ridicule makes a long record, and the world does not seem to grow wiser by its mistakes. Even Edison, in our own day, was ridiculed, when a youth, for his abstractions, and his efforts were ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... electric way. We boast that we have made electricity our slave, but the slave whom we do not understand is our master. And before we know him we shall be transformed. Mr. Edison proposes to send us over the country at the rate of one hundred miles an hour. This pleases us, because we fancy we shall save time, and because we are taught that the chief object in life is to "get there" quickly. We really ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... registering telephone conversations, dictation, anything of the sort you wish. It was invented by Valdemar Poulsen, the Danish Edison. This is one of his new wire machines. The record is made by a new process, localized charges of magnetism on this wire. It is as permanent as the wire itself. There is only one thing that can destroy them—rubbing over the wire with ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... the Western Union awoke from its indifference. Even this tiny nibbling at its business must be stopped. It took action quickly and organized the "American Speaking-Telephone Company," with $300,000 capital, and with three electrical inventors, Edison, Gray, and Dolbear, on its staff. With all the bulk of its great wealth and prestige, it swept down upon Bell and his little bodyguard. It trampled upon Bell's patent with as little concern as an elephant can have when he tramples ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... cannot but echo De Quincey and Wagner in regretting that there has been no shorthand method of taking down and preserving these wonderful improvisations of the great masters. Future generations will be more favored, if Mr. Edison's improved phonograph fulfils the promises made of it. For by simply placing one of these instruments near the piano it will be possible hereafter to preserve every note and every accent and shade of expression, and reproduce ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... cylinder off the instrument into which he had inserted the telephone receiver. "I thought it might be and I have preserved the voice. This is what is known as the telescribe—a recent invention of Edison which records on a specially prepared phonograph cylinder all that is said—both ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... confidently expected that the new Spanish law on patents would draw the attention of American inventors toward this country, that to-day offers a wide field for every new practical invention, but I am sorry to see that, with the exception of Edison and a few others, the Americans have not yet availed themselves of the easy facility for taking patents for Spain, where new inventions and new industries are now eagerly accepted and adopted. And while the Americans ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... the question. Any one who has the slightest knowledge of motoring would know it to be impossible, even if the Pirate had devised a storage battery which would knock Edison's latest invention into a cocked hat. But supposing he had achieved the feat, remember that, according to the newspaper reports, he was at Plymouth yesterday at dusk, near Salisbury at eleven the ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... questionable taste to include in the list one whose religion, as to family life, was rather scandalous. More to the point was the citation of various Americans who had sprung from humble beginnings: Lincoln, Johnson, Grant, Garfield, Edison. It is true that there was not, apparently, a gentleman's servant among them; they were rail-splitters, boatmen, tailors, artisans of sorts, but the ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... been attacked from above and from below. But the short answer lies in the teachings of history. The hope of a Watt or an Edison lay in the men who chipped flint to perfection. The seed of democracy lay in a perfected despotism. The hope of to-morrow lies in the development of the instruments of to-day. The prospect of advance lies in maintaining those conditions which have stimulated ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... bed shook his head indifferently. "Me, I'm taking the fast cure. I been reading that we all eat too much, anyhow. What's the use of stuffing—gets yore system all clogged up. Now, take Edison—he don't eat but a handful of rice ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... on the lamp together and it is almost finished. We are keeping the construction of it a secret because we want to spring it on Anderson, the foreman. I haven't told you about him. He is all up on electricity, knows as much about it as Edison, at least he almost says so at times, and he really does know a lot, but he is the one teacher in the whole bunch I don't like. There is a manner about him that makes you feel he has on a dress suit and a stovepipe hat all the time. I heard the other day he is related to the Van ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... the physical; therefore most of the time they dismiss consideration of the spiritual as being outside of their province. Of course many persons would disagree with this last statement. The genius of an Edison, they assert, is precisely like the genius of a poet. But if this were true, we should be moved by the mechanism of a phonograph just as we are moved by a poem, and we are not. We may be amazed by the invention, and still find our thoughts tied to the physical world. It is not the instrument, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... venture to refer to two judgments, which may be read with interest even by the unprofessional, as vigorous pieces of argument and lucid summaries of fact. One is the case (1880) of the 'Attorney-General v. the Edison Telephone Company,'[191] in which the question arose whether a telephonic message was a telegram. If so, the Company were infringing the act which gave to the Post Office the monopoly of transmitting telegrams. It was argued that the telephone transmitted the voice itself, not a mere signal. ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... of the old Edison phonographs which worked with a pedal, and looked very much like a sewing-machine, and we took them to the laboratory, allowed one of them to talk into it, and then set the machine to repeating what had ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... he said he could send a message over the wire. He let 'em laugh, but we have the telegraph. Folks laughed at Edison, when he said he could take the human voice—or any other sound—and fix it on a wax cylinder or a hard-rubber plate—but he did it, and we have the phonograph. And folks laughed at Santos Dumont, ...
— Tom Swift and his Photo Telephone • Victor Appleton
... resources of Mr. Edison to amuse he returned for his valise. And then down Broadway he gallivanted, culling the sights with his eager blue eyes. But still and evermore Broadway rejected him with curt glances and sardonic smiles. He was the oldest of the "gags" that the city must endure. He ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... Sage, "you seem a bit behind yourself. Listen! 'Mr. EDISON is prosecuting an experiment designed to catch and record the sounds made in the sun's photosphere when solar spots are formed by eruptions beneath the surface.' Have you not read the ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various
... one of the latest of the inventions of the Wizard of West Orange—Edison," he resumed. "It is, as you perhaps have already guessed, the latest product of this genius of sound and sight, the kinetophone, the machine that combines moving ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... this homage paid to Veorda, I cannot believe that she is more illustrious than the present living wizard of our world, the notable Edison. ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... studied in an energetic and intellectual way. The variations of humanity from righteousness must be deeply understood. Look at Booker T. Washington, or at Jacob A. Riis! What daring, what indefatigable toil, what insight, patience, and swerveless hope have been put into their task! Edison is said to have spent six months hissing S into his phonograph to make it repeat that letter, and many days he worked seventeen hours a day. Have many ministers ever bent themselves in this way to solve ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... artesian water. Of its use in irrigation, we have already spoken. In the production of electricity it is coming to be of the greatest importance, making possible the most stupendous works of modern times. Such is the undertaking of the Edison Electric Company in bringing down to Los Angeles, over many miles of the roughest country, power from the Kern River, tapping the tumultuous stream far up in the Sierras. The taking of the necessary machinery to those heights was ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... concluded for him. "Edison is an inventive genius, and Ford is a business genius. Genius hasn't anything to do with schools. The colleges, however, could have made both Ford and Edison bigger men, though they couldn't have made them ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... luck," Stern remarked, as he stood looking at this huge piece of fortune with the girl. "Just a kindly freak of fate, that Van Amburg should have bought one of Edison's first sets ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... reply to a request, addressed to "the most illustrious children of the century," for their opinion as to what name will be given to it by an impartial posterity—the century of Comte, of Darwin or Renan, of Edison, Pasteur, or Gladstone. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... When Edison invented the incandescent light and reproduced the human voice in the phonograph he pulled aside the veil of secrecy and ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... putting a dozen books back in a row after a cyclonic visit by a lady with ermine trimmings. He looked out of the window full of the most distressing thoughts—of the early novels of H. G. Wells, of the boot of Genesis, of how Thomas Edison had said that in thirty years there would be no dwelling-houses upon the island, but only a vast and turbulent bazaar; and then he set the last book right side up, turned—and Caroline walked coolly ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Edison in describing his repeated efforts to make the phonograph reproduce a sibilant sound, says, "From eighteen to twenty hours a day for the last seven months I have worked on this single word 'specia.' I said into the phonograph 'specia, specia, specia;' but the instrument ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... Conditions—Expenses at Harvard; European Wages; India as a Wheat Producer; Increase of Insanity; Temperance; Flamboyant Animalism Transcendental Hash Just Criticism Progress of discovery and Improvement—Autotelegraphy; Edison's Phonograph; Type-setting Eclipsed; Printing in Colors; Steam Wagon; Fruit Preserving; Napoleon's Manuscript; Peace; Capital Punishment; Antarctic Explorations; The Desert shall Blossom as the Rose Life and Death—Marvellous Examples Outlines of Anthropology (continued) ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... anything. If we are marched a thousand miles or twenty yards, it is all the same. The private soldier is a machine that has no right to know anything. He is a machine that moves without any volition of his own. If Edison could invent a wooden man that could walk and load and shoot, then you would have a good sample of the private soldier, and it would have this advantage—the private soldier eats and the wooden man ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... inevitably combine into a third—that all men should produce full shares of the good things of life. But the plain fact is that they cannot—that no amount of opportunity or appliances will enable the average day laborer to produce what Mr. Edison or Mr. Hill or even the average deviser of work and guide of labor does. Then even ideal ethics cannot say in this actual world: Let both have the same. That would simply be Robin Hood ethics: rob the man who produces ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... three doors that I've coaxed into shuttin', I've solved the mystery of what happens to a window-weight when the sash-cord breaks, and I've rigged up two drop-lights without gettin' myself electrocuted or askin' any advice from Mr. Edison. ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... it is possible both to see and to photograph the invisible. Shortly after Roentgen's discovery, Edison, with that wonderful power of finding practical applications for nearly all discoveries, had invented the fluoroscope,—a screen covered with a peculiar chemical substance that becomes luminous when exposed to the Roentgen ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... Ferber, Katharine Gerould, Fannie Hurst and Mary W. Freeman are represented by spare sheaves. Again, a number of new and promising writers have not quite attained sureness of touch; although that they are acquiring it is manifest in the work of Ben Ames Williams, Edison Marshall, Frances Wood, Samuel Derieux, John Russell, Beatrice Ravenel and Myra Sawhill. Too frequently, there is "no story": a series of episodes however charmingly strung out is not a story; a sketch, however clever or humorous, ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... application to telephones. For theatrical purposes the same battery may be employed during the whole performance, instead of four or five batteries. Their durability is considerable; three elements will work continuously, night and day, Edison's carbon microphones for more than four months without ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... balance, the telephone probe, and the gramophone. During the war he designed a "submarine chaser" capable of traveling under water at a speed of over seventy miles an hour, and he has made important experiments in the field of aeronautics and in other arts and sciences. The mother of Thomas Alva Edison (b. 1847), it may here be mentioned, was of Scottish parentage (Elliott). The originator of the duplex system in the manufacture of railroad tickets was William Harrison Campbell (1846-1906), of Scottish parentage. William Malcolm (1823-90), also of Scottish ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black
... Burbank's grafting deeds Marconi's stunts, whose genius speeds A message on a wireless tack And makes of space a jumping-jack? Where now does Edison hold sway? ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... at the Cowles company's works was, until recently, 330 amperes, driven by an electromotive force of 110 volts and supplied by two Edison dynamos; but the company has now added a large Brush machine that has a current of 560 amperes and 52 volts electromotive force. We shall, on another occasion, give some particulars of experiments in the reduction of refractory ores by the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... Edison was the one who invented this system of taking in succession very rapidly a great number of pictures of moving objects. We hope that Dr. Elmendorf will be successful, for we will then be able to see these interesting scenes; and if by a clever use of the phonograph or graphophone ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 2, No. 23, June 9, 1898 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... consumers of platinum are the electricians, particularly the incandescent light companies. I supply the platinum wire for both the Edison and the Maxim companies, and the quantity they require so constantly increases that the demand threatens to exceed the supply of the metal. Sheets of platinum are bought by chemists, who have them converted into ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... is not only a wonderful profession, with the activities of its followers of utmost importance, but also it is a profession the individual work of whose pioneers, from Watt to Westinghouse and from Eiffel to Edison, ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... acquired insight into the vast possibilities of future science by a personal association with Thomas Alva Edison. During the 1920's and 1930's, he thrilled millions of readers with his vivid tales of space and time. The infinite and the infinitesimal were all parts of his canvas, and past, present, and future, the interplanetary and the extra-dimensional, all made their initial impact ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... "Mr. Edison," he said in a whisper, "don't take advantage of two innocent babes in the wood. Did you ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... Edison, the electrician whose inventions are almost of the quality of miracles, and have given him worldwide celebrity, was born in Milan, Erie County, in 1847, of mixed American and Canadian parentage. His early boyhood was passed in Ohio, but he went later to Michigan, where he began ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... a great electrician; electricity by that time will be a fearful power in the hands of science. Edison with his genius and marvellous discoveries, and others of like gifts, will have perfected the use of this agent in a wonderful degree. Anti-Christ will make use of this power to cower his enemies and bring them in fear-subjection. He will bring fire down from heaven. The two ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... electric light was yet known as a feasible means of lighting (in 1878), the mere rumor of Edison's invention, before it was made public, and long before it became practicable, caused a serious fall in the price of ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... never able with all its works to get the attention of man's thoughts, more than to call it thunder and lightning, and let it pass from his mind from time to time, till brighter ages woke up a Franklin, Edison, Morse and others who heeded its useful lessons enough to make application of its powers for its force and speed. By the results obtained, they and others have used its powers and gotten truths as rewards, that they did not know even existed in or out of electricity ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... give a formula for the creation of a successful vaudeville writer, I would specify: The dramatic genius of a Shakespere, the diplomatic craftiness of a Machiavelli, the explosive energy of a Roosevelt, and the genius-for-long-hours of an Edison: mix in equal proportions, add a dash of Shaw's impudence, all the patience of Job, and keep boiling for a lifetime over ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... is it any wonder that the three young men continued their operations vigorously? Not one of them scarcely wanted to stop long enough to eat and sleep, a la Edison; and as it was now summer vacation time, Paul and Bob were able to be with John all day long in the old exhibition building. Neighboring boys and even older people hung around the open doors to watch operations, but the builders were careful not to let them get close ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... time I pin you down, you sail off into space with prophecy or poetry. If it does conquer the world, the world will not be worth conquering. The one thing worth while is character, and your Socialistic pig-pen cannot produce it. In this herd of swine to which you hope to reduce society an Edison or a Darwin is rewarded with the pay of a hod-carrier. The hod-carrier gets all he's worth now. This instinct for the herd, which you call Solidarity and Brotherhood, is not a prophecy of progress; it is a memory—a memory of the ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... had scientific interest only; it is more than eighty years since it was invented. In America, which in most recent times has become the classical land of the moving picture production, the history may be said to begin with the days of the Chicago Exposition, 1893, when Edison exhibited his kinetoscope. The visitor dropped his nickel into a slot, the little motor started, and for half a minute he saw through the magnifying glass a girl dancing or some street boys fighting. Less than a quarter of a century later twenty ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... such a group was within the scope of the silhouettist's art; he posed them in his little bower, and while he was mounting the picture they took turns, at five kreutzers each, in listening to American tunes played by his Edison phonograph. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... career. It was to be his first stepping stone upward, and it illustrates the point that even though Opportunity may knock at the door—one must be ready for her. That Roberts finally won his larger success was due not so much to his genius as to his industry. Edison says that genius is made up of two per cent inspiration and ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... did get into war someone like Edison would invent something quick, you know, and it would be all over in ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... once or twice on the latest discoveries of John Fiske and Edison, and then gave him up and retired to his seat beside ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... uncle felt as if trouble were coming on him in such a place as this," said he. "It's enough to scare any man. I'll have a row of electric lamps up here inside of six months, and you won't know it again, with a thousand candle-power Swan and Edison right here in front of the ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... often leads to another, and the telephone already has an offspring not less wonderful than itself. It is called the speaking-phonograph. It was invented by Mr. Edison, one of ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... They call him Young Edison around here, and his right name is Archie Graham. His father was an aeronaut who was an expert on airships, got killed in an accident to an aeroplane last year, and left his son some little ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... happen to be literary are entirely too prone to too much long-faced prattle about literature, which, when all is said, is never a controlling factor in anybody's life. The automobile and the telephone, the accomplishments of Mr. Edison and Mr. Burbank, and it would be permissible to add of Mr. Rockefeller, influence nowadays, in one fashion or another, every moment of every living American's existence; whereas had America produced, instead, a second ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... wrist-watch; the Dahomeny tribesman has a safety razor, and a mirror of French plate; the Persian dandy wears shoes and haberdashery made in the United States; old Chinamen up the Yellow River Valley read their Confucius by the light of an Edison Mazda; the steam train wends its way up from Jaffa to Jerusalem; the gasoline power boat chugs its course up the Nile the Pharaohs sailed; and modern surgical methods and instruments are used in the hospitals of Manila and Singapore, Cairo and Cape Town. A rupee spent for thread at ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... labored and completely inaccurate explanations of aurora and "energy, atomic". The author and his contemporaries were like fifteenth century sailors. They had a good idea of their latitude and direction (Ampere, Kirkoff, Maxwell, Gauss, Faraday, Edison, ), but only the vaguest notion of their longitude (nuclear structure, electrons, ions). Altitude (special relativity, quantum theory) was ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... by the distress of mind caused by his continual rebuffs. Meanwhile, the idea was being worked into more practical shape by other persons, Professor Elisha Gray and Professor A.G. Bell, and later by Edison. There is little doubt that Professor Gray's successful experiments considerably antedated those of the others, but Professor Bell was the first to perfect his patent. February 12, 1877, Bell's articulating telephone was tested by experiments at Boston and Salem, Mass., and was found to ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... in getting the "Edison" current incandescent lamps to change in direction at even the highest degree of exhaustion which my pump will produce. The subject requires further investigation, and like other residual phenomena these discrepancies promise a rich harvest of future discoveries ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... either in conception or execution than these signs of gratitude. To judge by them the Virgin would make a dramatist of the first rank; there was not a picture in which the miraculous assistance came a moment too soon, never & hero of our ancient, pre-Edison melodramas appeared more exactly "in the nick of time." The famous portrait of the miraculous being herself, over the high altar, is dimly seen through thick glass. Inside the chapel under the blue and white dome pilgrims were dipping up the "blessed" water from the bubbling well and filling ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... got my breath, "I gotta hand it to you! When it comes to inventin' things, you got Edison lookin' like a backward pupil. Go to it, old kid! If you put this over the way you have just told it to me, you'll own Broadway ...
— Alex the Great • H. C. Witwer
... and America? Canada may hold her head high in the kindred fields of Science; for who is it who has been making the shares of every Gas Company in every city fall before the mere rumours of his genius but a native Canadian, Mr. Edison, the inventor of the electric light? In another branch of Art her science must also be conceded. In photography it cannot be denied that our people challenge the most able competition. (Applause.) I have heard it stated ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... which today, despite all our advantages, we are profoundly ignorant. Acoustics, for instance, an exact science with the builders of the temples of Karnak, of Luxor, of the Pyramids, is today a mystery to Bell, and Kelvin, and Edison, and Marconi. Again, these old miracle-workers probably understood some practical way of using other forces, and amongst them the forces of light that at present we do not dream of. But of this matter I shall speak later. That Magic Coffer of Queen Tera is probably a magic box in more ways than ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... In Montgomery, Alabama, the mule has already been superseded, and there are fifteen miles of street railways operated by the electric motor. Some satisfactory experiments have been made on the Cambridge Street railway. Edison's latest discoveries in the conversion of heat into electricity are expected to produce important results, dispensing with the intermediate use of steam, and ultimately getting the power ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... that has the gift will get more out of his own brain than another will get through learning. There is many a man without learning will get the better of a college-bred man, and will have better words too. Those that make inventions in these days have the gift, such a man now as Edison, with all he ...
— The Kiltartan History Book • Lady I. A. Gregory
... telecommutator, the aerial coherer relay, and the rest of the technicalities of wireless control of dirigible, self-propelled vessels. They are well known, beginning with pioneers like Wilson and Gardner in England, Roberts in Australia, Wirth and Lirpa in Germany, Gabet in France, and Tesla, Edison, Sims, and the younger ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... Mr. Thomas A. Edison says: "The practical character of the physical apparatus, the clearness of the descriptive matter, and its entire freedom from mathematics, give the work a value in my mind superior to any other work on elementary physics of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... Emerson and Henry D. Thoreau occupied a conspicuous place in literature. At twenty-three James Monroe was a member of the Executive Council, and one year later was elected to Congress; at twenty-four Thomas A. Edison and Richard Jordan Gatling were inventors. At twenty-five John C. Calhoun made the famous speech that gave him a seat in the Legislature, George William Curtis had traversed Italy, Germany, and the Orient and ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... mentioned as eminent instances of ability of this kind. Such minds resemble a liquid on the point of crystallisation. Stirred by a hint, crystals of constructive thought immediately shoot through them. That Mr. Edison possesses this intuitive power in no common measure, is proved by what he has already accomplished. He has the penetration to seize the relationship of facts and principles, and the art to reduce them to novel and concrete combinations. ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... in the building to greatly interest them; great electric lenses used in lighthouses, the Edison electric column—covered with five thousand electric globes—and many other wonderful things; a beautiful scene in the daytime, but far more gorgeous at night, as they readily perceived that it would be; ...
— Elsie at the World's Fair • Martha Finley
... quite so evident in such cases as the following: "Who was Caesar? Who was Homer? Who is Edison? What was the Inquisition? What were the Crusades?" However, one has, in these cases, very closely associated ideas, and these ideas do center about what we have done with these men and events in our thinking. "Caesar was a warrior. Homer was a writer of ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... about Edison?" he asked. "I've got to write a composition about electricity, and I thought I might ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... the Edison Building, looking aimlessly up and down the street as he pulled his long, narrow, brown-gray mustache. Gloom was in his face and hate in his heart—not hate for Dumont alone but hate for all who were what he longed to be, all ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... philosophers as Russell, Alexander, Joad, Croce, Santayana, Dewey, Otto, Montague, Sellars, and the Randalls? The views of an intellectual incompetent, such as Bryan was, are spread widecast, but few know the extent of the scepticism of Edison, Luther Burbank, Albert Einstein, Paul Ehrlich, Ernst Haeckel, Robert Koch, Fridjof Nansen, and Swante Arrhenius. What consolation can the theists derive from the religious views of Shelley, Swinburne, Meredith, ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... the researches of Edison, Lockyer, or Tyndall, nor of Crookes, who has seemingly reached the molecules ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... be a Lincoln, or a Thomas Edison, or a Mark Twain," Sidney Burgoyne added, half-laughing, "and then we'll feel just a little ashamed for having turned him complacently over to a nurse or a boarding school. Of course, it leaves us free to go to the club and hear a paper on the childhood of Napoleon, carefully compiled years after ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... that the rat's mind and the man's mind are the same machine, but of unequal capacities—like yours and Edison's; like the African pygmy's and Homer's; like the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... life, art, and science, a toy prolific of problems and theories. Something fell to be done for a University Cricket Ground Bazaar. 'And the thought struck him,' Mr. Ewing writes to me, 'to exhibit Edison's phonograph, then the very newest scientific marvel. The instrument itself was not to be purchased - I think no specimen had then crossed the Atlantic - but a copy of the TIMES with an account of it was at hand, and by the help of this we made a phonograph which to our great ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the grand idea which to-day we see so perfectly realized. In 1879, when the new Notre Dame was being raised upon the ruins of the old, comparatively little progress had as yet been made in electric lighting. In particular, the great problem of the minute subdivision of the light remained unsolved. Edison had not then begun his experiments, and the incandescent light was not even dreamed of. To employ the arc light around the statue was out of the question, not only because the necessary appliances would detract from ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... parents thought that I would be As great as Edison or greater: For as a boy I made balloons And wondrous kites and toys with clocks And little engines with tracks to run on And telephones of cans and thread. I played the cornet and painted pictures, Modeled in clay and took the part Of the villain in the "Octoroon." ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... inherited the sound constitutions of the men who sat on rustic seats in the gardens of the twenties. The second generation—that's you and me—felt the strain of it more severely: new machines had come in to make life still more complicated: sixpenny telegrams, Bell and Edison, submarine cables, evening papers, perturbations pouring in from all sides incessantly; the suburbs growing, the hubbub increasing, Metropolitan railways, trams, bicycles, innumerable: but natheless we still endured, and presented the world all the same with a third generation. ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... of light by electricity was beautifully elucidated by the weird illumination of the Edison Light Tower in the center of the building, and the Egyptian Temple in its south-eastern portion. Countless incandescent lamps were glowing in all the colors of the rainbow. The luminary effect gave us the impression as if a fiery serpent was meandering along ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... he had merely talked with you to get a record of your voice? Suppose a voice were composed of certain ingredients, certain sounds. Suppose those ingredients could somehow be captured on a sensitized plate of some kind! Edison would have been burned as a sorcerer a few centuries before he invented the wax record. Twenty years ago who would have thought of talking pictures ... voices permanently recorded ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... That which has just been said applies chiefly to things whose price is fixed by beauty. But handicraft gives us many works not pleasing to the eye, yet of the highest skill—a Jacquard loom, a Corliss engine, a Hoe printing press, a Winchester rifle, an Edison dynamo, a Bell telephone. Ruskin may scout the work of machinery, and up to a certain point may take us with him. Let us allow that works of art marked by the artist's own touch—the gates of Paradise by Ghiberti, a shield by Cellini, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... Algebra and Euclid, and took up plane trigonometry; but I devoted most of my time to electricity and magnetism. I constructed various scientific apparatus—a syren, telephones, microphones, an Edison's megaphone, as well as an electrometer, and a machine for covering electric wire with cotton or silk. A friend having lent me a work on artificial memory, I began to study it; but the work led me into nothing but confusion, and I soon found that if I did not give it up, I ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... EDISON, THOMAS ALVA, a celebrated American inventor, born at Milan, Ohio; started life as a newsboy; early displayed his genius and enterprise by producing the first newspaper printed in a railway train; turning his attention to telegraphy, he revolutionised the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Edison is the new Gutenberg. He has invented the new printing. The state that realizes this may lead the soul of America, day ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... and maybe I've got more than most. You've discovered one of the greatest things in history—or invented it, whatever you want to call it. You deserve to go down in history along with Newton, Watt, Roentgen, Edison, Einstein, Fermi, and ...
— By Proxy • Gordon Randall Garrett
... referred to the necessary agitation of the air accompanying any disturbance, such as would of necessity be produced by a vibrating body, and had nothing to do directly with sound. He stated that in the Edison telephone, sound was converted directly into electricity without vibrating any diaphragm at all, as attested to by Edison himself. Speaking of the mobility of the air, he said the particles were free to slip around and not practically be pushed at all, and that ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... which marked the margin of | |the New York victory. The Yankees played just the | |kind of baseball everybody hoped they would and that| |was just a bit better than the best Washington had | |to offer. | | | |A lot of people from the Edison Company who know | |First Baseman Judge of the Washington club well | |enough to call him Joe, presented him with a diamond| |ring. Judge used to play with the Edison team before| |he took to the merry ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... the use of 'bug' to mean an industrial defect was already established in Thomas Edison's time, and a more specific and rather modern use can be found in an electrical handbook from 1896 ("Hawkin's New Catechism of Electricity", Theo. Audel & Co.) which says: "The term 'bug' is used to a limited extent to designate any fault or trouble in the connections or working of electric ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... first Watt or Edison of metallurgy come to make that earliest bronze implement? Well, it seems probable that between the Stone Age and the Bronze Age there intervened everywhere, or nearly everywhere, a very short and transient age of copper. And the reason ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... Cambridge; Professor—now Sir Arthur—Rucker, who has been secretary of the Royal Society and President of the British Association, and is now Principal of the University of London; Professor Thorpe, the chemist and Government analyst, and Dr. Edison. This is not a bad list for so small a club, and one might easily give many other names, in addition, of men who would have been welcomed anywhere for their knowledge and attainments. In the year 1900 the club celebrated its jubilee, and its members can look back with satisfaction ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... Edison announced that he had invented everything which, up to that time, any one else had suggested. He invited all the reporters to Menlo Park, and, after elaborately explaining the merits of a new catarrh ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... 6 and 13, 1926 he writes two articles on "The Yankee and the Chinaman," in which he contrasts the philosophic spirit with the so-called scientific. Like Bishop Barnes in England wanting to analyse the Consecrated Host, Edison was reported in America as having said that he would find out if there was a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... the beauty and mood of historic or pleasantly natural landscapes. In the name of public service, private utility companies in all the Basin States have wide powers of condemnation as emerged to view recently when the Potomac Edison Company proposed to hack out a strip for a new line along a route that included country associated with the campaigning around Antietam Battlefield in the Civil War, without an adequate attempt to ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... little window with reddened eyes. And these eyes, as she afterwards described it, "sprod in her head" at what she saw. For, on the floor, in his favorite attitude, his head propped between his hands, was the hunchback, Jemmy, studying with all the intense appreciation of an Edison, how to construct an airy castle out of certain painted wood-blocks, which strewed the floor; and there, his back turned towards the window, was her arch-enemy, Father Letheby, his right hand raised aloft and dangling an india-rubber baby; ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... popular election two members to represent their society on the board. Results were immediately gratifying. Nominations were forthcoming at once, and in September of 1915 the board, which came popularly to be known as the Inventions Board, met in Washington for organization. Thomas A. Edison was selected by the Secretary of the Navy as chairman of the board, and the other ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... the door swung open according to the hang of it; and when the gust was over the house gave back, and the door swung to—the frame easing just a little in another direction. I suppose it would take Edison to invent a thing like that, that came about by accident. The different strengths and directions of the gusts of wind must have accounted for the variations of the door's movements—and maybe the draught of our ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... for themselves some hero to give the name to their club, or group. We have the Washington, the Columbus, the Anthony Wayne, the Lincoln, and the Edison groups, and one more recently formed, not yet named. It is a significant fact that the children knew and admired Anthony Wayne because they read about him in ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... Scarlattis, Corelli and Tartini and Porpora were alive. Peri, Josquin and Willaert and Lassus were dead, and the church had had its last mass from the most famous citizen of the town of Palestrina. Monteverde was no longer inventing like an Edison; Lulli had gone to France and died; and Rameau and ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... was born in Ohio in 1847. Mr. Edison is the inventor of many improvements in telegraphy, which have been adopted into general use, and are to him the source of a large income. To him, also, we are indebted for the megaphone, microphone, tasimeter, an improvement ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... venomous glance at Barlow). Nonsense. Nothing in it. Mere invention of Barlow's. He's a regular Edison in his own way. ...
— The Bicyclers and Three Other Farces • John Kendrick Bangs
... and leaders: Dominica Freedom Party (DFP), (Mary) Eugenia Charles; Labor Party of Dominica (LPD, a leftist-dominated coalition), Michael Douglas; United Workers Party (UWP), Edison James ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the energy is expended is homogeneous, as might be supposed from the mode of manufacture, and as may be ascertained from a microscopical examination, and it is exempt from those variations in composition that are found in carbons of a vegetable nature, like the Edison. Besides, being of relatively large diameter, the lamp is capable of supporting a very ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 492, June 6, 1885 • Various
... may have all the nervous and intellectual capacities of Thomas Edison, or Dr. E. L. Thorndyke. Perhaps he has. But the economic environment in which he is born will give him small opportunity ...
— Women As Sex Vendors - or, Why Women Are Conservative (Being a View of the Economic - Status of Woman) • R. B. Tobias
... beginnin' of time," I scoff. "They laughed at Leonardo da Vinci, Columbus, Edison, a guy named Durante. Even the guy who first sat down at a pianer. We will take what we can git, pal, and then come back and ...
— Operation Earthworm • Joe Archibald
... based upon six years' experience producing motion pictures, Mr. Eustace Hale Ball is, the most capable scenario writer in the business to-day." (Signed) W. F. HADDOCK, Producing Director with Edison, Eclair, All Star, and ...
— You Should Worry Says John Henry • George V. Hobart
... toward those perfected triumphs which give distinction to this century. Electric lighting was well understood, the Jablochkoff and Jamin lamps were then in use, the incandescent and Maxim light, or arc light were employed, and indeed the panic caused by Edison's premature announcement of the solution of the incandescent system of lighting had then preceded by two years, the excellent results of Mr. Swan in England in the same field. Edison's first carbon light and his original phonograph were exhibited toward the end of 1880 in the Patent ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... 1886 Schenectady had been suffering from a long period of stagnation. In that year an official of the Edison Machine Works of N.Y.C. happened to pass through Schenectady and noticed two empty factories, the former Jones Car Works. The Edison Company had been established in N.Y.C. about 1882 by Thomas A. Edison, ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... drills have also undergone very important development and improvement, so that they have become very complicated machines. The ingenuity and inventive skill which were required to make a fire drill which was driven by a bow were as great as the same powers when manifested by an Edison or a Bessemer. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... conduct that have resulted in the success of Peter Cooper, John B. Gough, John G. Whittier, John Wanamaker, Henry M. Stanley, Johns Hopkins, William M. Hunt, Elias Howe, Jr., Alexander H. Stephens, Thomas A. Edison, Dr. W.T.G. Morton and the Rev. John H. Vincent. The sketches are gracefully and interestingly written, and the little volume is in every way ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... widow who owned it to pitch our camp there, though her patch of roasting-ears near by made her hesitate; she had probably had experiences with gypsy parties, and was not impressed in our favor even when I gave her the names of two well-known men in our party. But Edison was not attracted by the widow's open field; the rough, grassy margin of the creek suited him better, and its proximity to the murmuring, eddying, rocky current appealed to us all, albeit it necessitated ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... their exploitation of the world, would have been impossible; that our very alphabet comes from Rome, who owed it to others; that the mathematical foundation of our modern mechanical science—without which neither Newton nor Watt nor Stevenson nor Ericson nor Faraday nor Edison could have been—is the work of Arabs, strengthened by Greeks, protected and enlarged by Italians; that our conceptions of political organization, which have so largely shaped our political science, come mainly from the Scandinavian colonists of a French ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... to mutter something, but Crowley snapped, "Shut up for a minute, I'm talking." He resumed his condescending tone. "Just for example, take a couple of guys who got to the top. Edison in science and Khrushchev in politics. For all practical purposes, neither of them went to school at all. Khrushchev didn't even learn to read until he was twenty-eight ...
— The Common Man • Guy McCord (AKA Dallas McCord Reynolds)
... nature never fail of interest. Stephenson and the locomotive engine, Sir Humphry Davy and the safety lamp, Whitney and the cotton gin, Marconi and the wonders of wireless communication, the Wright brothers and the airplane, Edison and the incandescant light and the motion picture, Luther Burbank and his marvelous work with plants—these are only a few to place near the head ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... rigging up apparatus after apparatus, that he might experiment with the great force first discovered in its primitive form by Benjamin Franklin, and later given to the world in such startling form by Morse and Edison. ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... that the earliest incandescent lamps, as invented by Mr. Edison, had a resistance material composed of carbon, and that such a lamp retained its position as the most efficient small electric illuminant until the recent introduction of metal filament lamps. It is possible that some form of metal may be introduced as the ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... little boy, ain't you? A nice little boy! Here I stall for you for weeks and you didn't even tell me that the old skate was going to have the Thomas A. Edison trimmings with him to-day!" ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... story won the prize, the Committee resorted, as in former years, to the point system, according to which the leader is "The Heart of Little Shikara," by Edison Marshall. To Mr. Marshall, therefore, goes the first prize of $500. In like manner, the second prize, of $250, is awarded to "The Man Who Cursed the Lilies," ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... had many opportunities of studying the theatre side of David Belasco. He has been privileged to hear expressed, by this Edison of our stage, diverse opinions about plays and players of the past, and about insurgent experiments of the immediate hour. He has always found a man quickly responsive to the best memories of the past, an artist naively ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm • David Belasco
... only the cultural institutions, the multiplied industries, the vast wealth of farms (four crops in the year 1915 were valued at $4,770,000,000), mines and forests, but the genius of an Edison, a Burbank, a Goethals, a McDowell, the devotion of a John R. Mott, a Frank Higgins, a Jane Addams and the long honor roll of men and women made great through their service. America also embodies all that was wrought by those early comers who endured ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... can not, of course, pretend to give here all the rules for those who "go afoot" and I can only say that the safest principle for correct behavior in this, as in many social matters, is the now famous reply Thomas Edison once made to the stranger who asked him with what he mixed his paints in order to get such marvellous effects. "One part inspiration," replied the great inventor, "and NINE parts perspiration." In other words, etiquette is ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... rest of the world that needs it. When a scientist like Baldwin, worth millions and with experiment stations of hundreds of acres in most states in the Union, which are coining more millions with their propagation output, steps out and stands shoulder to shoulder with Edison in working to get the United States prepared to feed the world as well as to fend off any of that world that menaces it, the rest of us have got to get up and hustle, some with a musket and some with ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... opinion, proposed to travel the road all the way back to Munn v. Illinois, and deprive courts of the power to void rates simply because they deem the latter to be unreasonable. In a concurring opinion, written earlier in 1939 in Driscoll v. Edison Co., 307 U.S. 104, 122, Justice Frankfurter temporarily adopted a similar position; for therein he declared that "the only relevant function of law * * * [in rate controversies] is to secure observance of those procedural safeguards ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... "As to double-stops—Edison once said that violin music should be written only in double-stops—I practice them playing first the single notes and then the two together, and can recommend this mode of practice from personal experience. Harmonics, where clarity is the most important thing, are mainly ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... off nobody would have thought it was there, and yet to our muffled traveller it must have seemed an Edison lamp of ten thousand candle-power, from the way he drew his coat-collar higher about his face, and from the haste in which he avoided the pavement, and crept along by the wall where the shadows were deepest. In this way he arrived at the Calle de ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... capital going into the business. One of the earliest stations of a really modern type installed on either side of the Atlantic was built by the Berlin Electricity Works. The engineers of that station, while recognizing the high value of the distributing system, went back to Edison's original scheme of a compact direct-connected steam and electric generator, but with dynamos of the multipolar type designed and built by Siemens & Halske, of Berlin, the engines ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... Sir William Thomson, in his address to the Mathematical Section of the British Association at its meeting in Glasgow last year, said: "In the United States Telegraphic Department of the Great Exhibition at Philadelphia, I saw Edison's automatic telegraph delivering 1,015 words in 57 seconds. This was done by the long neglected electro-chemical method of Bain, long ago condemned in England to the helot work of recording from a relay, and turned adrift as needlessly ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... men both close to Edison. One of them is his counsel, and practically shares his daily life; the other is one of his leading electrical experts. It is the personal story of Edison and has been read and revised ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... Abraham Lincoln, the boast and pride of America, the man who made this land too hot for the feet of slaves, came from a log cabin in the Ohio backwoods. So did James A. Garfield. Ulysses Grant came from a tanyard to become the world's greatest general. Thomas A. Edison commenced as a ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... to study and work with Gluck. It is the opportunity of a lifetime. Gluck is to the world of medicine what Edison is to the world of electricity. He is a wizard, a man inspired. You should see him—a little, bent, grizzled, shabby old man who looks at you, and sees you not. It is a ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... in which the electric current was directly employed to vary the amount of friction between two rubbing surfaces was exemplified in Edison's electro-motograph, in which the variations in the strength of a telephonic current caused corresponding variations in friction between a revolving cylinder of moistened chalk and the free end of an adjustable contact arm whose opposite extremity was attached ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... fear manifesting themselves in no uncertain manner, mentally I was cool enough to cope with the visitant, and sufficiently calm and at ease to light the match upon my wrist, perceiving for the first time, with an Edison-like ingenuity, one of the uses to which goose-flesh might be put, and knowing full well that if I tried to light it on the sole of my shoe I should have fallen to the ground, my knees being too shaky to admit ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... came before you. There is still plenty of opportunity for you to become a new Edison, and no science offers the possibilities in this respect as does ...
— The Radio Boys' First Wireless - Or Winning the Ferberton Prize • Allen Chapman
... Mr. T. A. EDISON is reported to have invented a machine to record communication with the other world. As a final experiment an attempt is to be made to get into touch with the ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various
... wondered why it is that men should be so fearful of new ventures in social relationships, when I have found them so fertile, so enjoyable. Most of us fear (actually fear) people who differ from ourselves, either up or down the scale. Your Edison pries fearlessly into the intimate secrets of matter; your Marconi employs the mysterious properties of the "jellied ether," but let a man seek to experiment with the laws of that singular electricity which connects ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... lines of an ideal world." It is in no spirit, therefore, of hostility to physical science or her methods that we venture to point out that the term science is not synonymous with experimental research. The most brilliant work of Darwin, Kelvin or Edison in no wise alters the fact that there are more things in heaven and earth than are revealed by their microscopes or decomposed in their crucibles. Mental science, and above all moral or ethical science, have a claim to ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... toy that touched the skirts of life, art and science, a toy prolific of problems and theories. Something fell to be done for a University Cricket-Ground Bazaar. "And the thought struck him," Mr. Ewing writes to me, "to exhibit Edison's phonograph, then the very newest scientific marvel. The instrument itself was not to be purchased—I think no specimen had then crossed the Atlantic,—but a copy of the Times with an account of it was at hand, and by the help of this we made a phonograph which to our great joy ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... receiver, and a current of electricity be passed through it the carbon glowed with an intense light, but on the other hand it became so hot that the glass burst. The light, therefore, was useless, because the lamp burst as soon as it was lighted. Edison hit on the idea that if you made the carbon filament fine enough, you would get rid of the heat and yet have abundance of light. Edison's right to his patent has been contested on this very ground. It has been said that the mere introduction of so small a difference ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... Thomas A. Edison, our greatest inventor, was made deaf when a lad by a surly brakeman, who soundly boxed his ears for some trivial ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... out in life with much less chance than when he starts his "daily" for a living. Yet the man who more than any other is responsible for the industrial regeneration of this continent started in life as a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railway. Thomas Alva Edison was then about fifteen years of age. He had already begun to dabble in chemistry, and had fitted up a small itinerant laboratory. One day, as he was performing some occult experiment, the train rounded a curve, and the bottle of sulphuric acid broke. There followed a series of unearthly ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... Edison boasts of how little sleep he needs, and claims that sometime man will cease to sleep. He says that ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... of the distinguishing features in the American people which I much admire is their earnestness and perseverance. When they decide to take up anything, whether it be an invention or the investigation of a difficult problem, they display indomitable perseverance and patience. Mr. Edison, for example, sleeps, it is said, in his factory and is inaccessible for days when he has a problem to solve, frequently even forgetting food and sleep. I can only compare him to our sage Confucius, who, hearing a charming piece of music which he ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... for Edison, making believe He's invented a clever contrivance for Eve, Who complained that she never ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... we've got the Big Dipper with us we ought to be able to push right through to Berlin," observed one young corporal. "They say Edison's got some new kind of a wrinkle up his sleeve, but believe me, if he's got anything to beat Paul Revere's compass, he's ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... how was such a result to be attained with systems based upon the use of sonorously-vibrating transmitters? He might have been able to solve the problem with the secondary currents of an induction bobbin, as Messrs. Gray, Edison, and others had done; but then he would no longer have been benefited by those amplifications which are furnished by the variations of pressure-derivations in microphones, and this led him to endeavor to increase ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... Mr. McKinley took the oath on a platform erected on the north East Front steps at the Capitol. It was administered by Chief Justice Melville Fuller. The Republican had defeated Democrat William Jennings Bryan on the issue of the gold standard in the currency. Thomas Edison's new motion picture camera captured the events, and his gramophone recorded the address. The inaugural ball was held in the ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... manhood have become wrecks through accepting the advice to try "whisky night-caps." Edison recommends manual labor, instead of going to rest, for aggravated insomnia. He says ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... creator and constructor. Wherever work is done on great lines or life is lived in fields of constant fertility, the imagination is always the central and shaping power. Burke lifted statesmanship to a lofty plane by the use of it; Edison, Tesla, and Roebling in their various ways have shown its magical quality; and more than one man of fortune owes his success more to his imagination than to that practical sagacity which is commonly supposed to be the conjurer ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... he's a prince in good standing in his own land, and he is also an excellent blacksmith." The Lieutenant chuckled a little. "He and his sister have both been touched a good deal by Tolstoian doctrine. Jack is the most wonderful inventor, I think, that is at present on the earth, Edison notwithstanding. Why, he is just now engaged on a scheme by which he can float houses from the mountains here down to New York. Float them— pipe-line them would perhaps be a better term. You know they have pipe-lines to carry petroleum. ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... An electric current meter may be made by giving inclination to the disk, which is for this purpose made exceedingly small and delicate, by means of a heavy magnetic needle deflected by the current. This, like Edison's, is a direction meter; but a meter in which no regard is paid to the direction of the current can be made by help of an iron armature of such a shape that the force with which it is attracted to fill the space between the poles of an electro-magnet ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... back to Earth and started living off his lectures. He came here again three years ago and dropped dead in Edison on the way to some other ruins. Heart failure, they called it, though it was more like the two old farmers who ran themselves to death last month. I saw him when they buried him. His face looked funny, and I think he had those little specks, though I may remember wrong." He grimaced. ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... than Mr. Bartholomew knows," agreed the young fellow. "An electric locomotive with both great speed and great hauling power is what more than one inventor has been aiming at for two or three decades. Ever since Edison and Westinghouse began their experiments, ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Locomotive - or, Two Miles a Minute on the Rails • Victor Appleton
... PICTURES Photographing motion. Edison's Kinetoscope. Lumiere's Cinematographe. Before the camera. The mission of the moving picture. Edison's ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... state: President Crispin Anselm SORHAINDO (since 25 October 1993) head of government: Prime Minister Edison C. JAMES (since 12 June 1995) cabinet : Cabinet appointed by the president on the advice of the prime minister elections: president elected by the House of Assembly for a five-year term; election last held 4 October ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... at the recent invention of an oval, platter-like saucer, large enough to hold with ease a cup, a lettuce or other sandwich, and a dainty trifle of pastry. The thing was needed: the modesty of the anonymous inventor—evidently not Mr. Edison—reveals him one of the large body of occasional and unwilling tea-goers. We, the reluctant and unwilling, are all strangely alike at these functions; and we have all been embarrassed by the old-fashioned saucer. ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren |
