In sixtynine the year of Black Friday he started an electrical engineering firm with a man named Pope.
From then on he was on his own, he invented a stock ticker and it sold. He had a machineshop and a laboratory; whenever he thought of a device he tried it out. He made forty thousand dollars out of the Universal Stock Ticker.
He rented a shop in Newark and worked on an automatic telegraph and on devices for sending two and four messages at the same time over the same wire.
In Newark he tinkered with Sholes on the first typewriter, and invented the mimeograph, the carbon rheostat, the microtasimeter and first made paraffin paper.
Something he called etheric force worried him, he puzzled a lot about etheric force but it was Marconi who cashed in on the Hertzian waves. Radio was to smash the ancient universe. Radio was to kill the old Euclidian God, but Edison was never a man to worry about philosophical concepts;
he worked all day and all night tinkering with cogwheels and bits of copperwire and chemicals in bottles, whenever he thought of a device he tried it out. He made things work. He wasn’t a mathematician. I can hire mathematicians but mathematicians can’t hire me, he said.
In eighteen seventysix he moved to Menlo Park where he invented the carbon transmitter that made the telephone a commercial proposition, that made the microphone possible
he worked all day and all night and produced
the phonograph
the incandescent electric lamp
and systems of generation, distribution, regulation and measurement of electric current, sockets, switches, insulators, manholes. Edison worked out the first systems of electric light using the direct current and small unit lamps and the multiple arc that were installed in London Paris New York and Sunbury Pa.,
the threewire system,
the magnetic ore separator,
an electric railway.
He kept them busy at the Patent Office filing patents and caveats.
To find a filament for his electric lamp that would work, that would be a sound commercial proposition he tried all kinds of paper and cloth, thread, fishline, fibre, celluloid, boxwood, cocoanut-shells, spruce, hickory, bay, mapleshavings, rosewood, punk, cork, flax, bamboo and the hair out of a redheaded Scotchman’s beard;
whenever he got a hunch he tried it out.
In eighteen eightyseven he moved to the huge laboratories at West Orange.
He invented rockcrushers and the fluoroscope and the reeled film for movie cameras and the alkaline storage battery and the long kiln for burning out portland cement and the kinetophone that was the first talking movie and the poured cement house that is to furnish cheap artistic identical sanitary homes for workers in the electrical age.
Thomas A. Edison at eightytwo worked sixteen hours a day;
he never worried about mathematics or the social system or generalized philosophical concepts;
in collaboration with Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone who never worried about mathematics or the social system or generalized philosophical concepts;
he worked sixteen hours a day trying to find a substitute for rubber; whenever he read about anything he tried it out; whenever he got a hunch he went to the laboratory and tried it out.
The Camera Eye (25)
those spring nights the streetcarwheels screech grinding in a rattle of loose trucks round the curved tracks of Harvard Square dust hangs in the powdery arclight glare allnight till dawn can’t sleep
haven’t got the nerve to break out of the bellglass
four years under the ethercone breathe deep gently now that’s the way be a good boy one two three four five six get A’s in some courses but don’t be a grind be interested in literature but remain a gentleman don’t be seen with Jews or socialists
and all the pleasant contacts will be useful in Later Life say hello pleasantly to everybody crossing the yard
sit looking out into the twilight of the pleasantest four years of your life
grow cold with culture like a cup of tea forgotten between an incenseburner and a volume of Oscar Wilde cold and not strong like a claret lemonade drunk at a Pop Concert in Symphony Hall
four years I didn’t know you could do what you Michaelangelo wanted say
Marx
to all
the professors with a small Swift break all the Greenoughs in the shooting gallery
but tossed with eyes smarting all the spring night reading The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus and went mad listening to the streetcarwheels screech grinding in a rattle of loose trucks round Harvard Square and the trains crying across the saltmarshes and the rumbling siren of a steamboat leaving dock and the blue peter flying and millworkers marching with a red brass band through the streets of Lawrence Massachusetts
it was like the Magdeburg spheres the pressure outside sustained the vacuum within
and I hadn’t the nerve
to jump up and walk out of doors and tell them all to
go take a flying
Rimbaud
at the moon
Newsreel XVII
an attack by a number of hostile airships developed before midnight. Bombs were dropped somewhat indiscriminately over localities possessing no military importance
RAILROADS WON’T YIELD AN INCH
We shall have to make the passage under conditions not entirely advantageous to us, said Captain Koenig of the Deutschland ninety miles on his way passing Solomon’s Island at 2:30. Every steamer passed blew his whistle in salute.
You make me what I am today
I hope you’re satisfied
You dragged me down and down and down
Until the soul within me died
Sir Roger Casement was hanged in Pentonville Gaol at nine o’clock this morning.
U-BOAT PASSES CAPES UNHINDERED
clad only in kimono girl bathers shock dairy lunch instead of first class cafe on amusement dock heavy losses shown in US crop report Italians cheered as Austrians leave hot rolls in haste to get away giant wall of water rushes down valley professor says Beethoven gives the impression of a juicy steak
PRISON’S MAGIC TURNS CITY JUNK INTO
GOLD MINE
MOON WILL HIDE PLANET SATURN FROM
SIGHT TONIGHT
BROTHERS FIGHT IN DARK
Mac
The rebels took Juarez and Huerta fled and the steamboats to Europe were packed with cientificos making for Paris and Venustiano Carranza was president in Mexico City. Somebody got Mac a pass on the Mexican Central down to the capital. Encarnacion cried when he left and all the anarchists came down to the station to see him off. Mac wanted to join Zapata. He’d picked up a little Spanish from Encarnacion and a vague idea of the politics of the revolution. The train took five days. Five times it was held up while the section hands repaired the track ahead. Occasionally at night bullets came through the windows. Near Caballos a bunch of men on horses rode the whole length of the train waving their big hats and firing as they went. The soldiers in the caboose woke up and returned the fire and the men rode off in a driving dustcloud. The passengers had to duck under the seats when the firing began or lie flat in the aisle. After the attack had been driven off an old woman started to shriek and it was found that a child had been hit through the head. The mother was a stout dark woman in a flowered dress. She went up and down the train with the tiny bloody body wrapped in a shawl asking for a doctor, but anybody could see that the child was dead.