The following passage is from an article entitled “My Most Unforgettable Character” by Charles Edison, published in Reader’s Digest in December 1961. In this excerpt, Charles discusses his father, inventor Thomas Edison.
Shuffling about his laboratory at Menlo Park, N.J., a shock of hair over one side of his forehead, sharp blue eyes sparkling, stains and chemical burns on his wrinkled clothing, Thomas Alva Edison never looked like a man whose inventions had revolutionized the world in less than his lifetime. Certainly he never acted like it. Once when a visiting dignitary asked him whether he had received many medals and awards, he said, “Oh yes, Mom’s got a couple of quarts of them up at the house.” “Mom” was his wife, my mother.
Yet every day, to those of us who were close to him, he demonstrated what a giant among men he was. Great as were his contributions to mankind — he patented a record 1093 inventions in his lifetime — it is not for these I remember him, but for his matchless courage, his imagination and determination, his humility and wit. At times, he was just plain mischievous. ...
At home or at work, Father seemed to have a knack for motivating others. He could and often did give orders, but he preferred to inspire people by his own example. This was one of the secrets of his success. For he was not, as many believe, a scientist who worked in solitude in a laboratory. Once he had marketed his first successful invention — a stock ticker and printer — for $40,000, he began employing chemists, mathematicians, machinists, anyone whose talents he thought might help him solve a knotty problem. Thus he married science to industry with the “team” research concept, which is standard today. ...
Father himself usually worked 18 or more hours a day. “Accomplishing something provides the only real satisfaction in life,” he told us. His widely reported ability to get by with no more than four hours’ sleep — plus an occasional catnap — was no exaggeration. “Sleep,” he maintained, “is like a drug. Take too much at a time and it makes you dopey. You lose time, vitality, and opportunities.”
His successes are well known. In the phonograph, which he invented when he was 30, he captured sound on records; his incandescent bulb lighted the world. He invented the microphone, mimeograph, medical fluoroscope, the nickel-iron-alkaline storage battery, and the movies. He made the inventions of others — the telephone, telegraph, typewriter — commercially practical. He conceived our entire electrical distribution system.
It is sometimes asked, “Didn’t he ever fail?” The answer is yes. Thomas Edison knew failure frequently. His first patent, when he was all but penniless, was for an electric vote- recorder, but maneuver-minded legislators refused to buy it. Once he had his entire fortune tied up in machinery for a magnetic separation process for low-grade iron ore — only to have it made obsolete and uneconomical by the opening of the rich Mesabi Range. But he never hesitated out of fear of failure.
“Shucks,” he told a discouraged co-worker during one trying series of experiments, “we haven’t failed. We now know 1000 things that won’t work, so we’re that much closer to finding what will.”
His attitude toward money (or lack of it) was similar. He considered it as a raw material, like metal, to be used rather than amassed, and so he kept plowing his funds into new projects. Several times he was all but bankrupt. But he refused to let dollar signs govern his actions. ...
Thomas Edison has sometimes been represented as uneducated. Actually he had only six months of formal schooling, but under his mother’s tutelage in Port Huron, Mich[igan], he had read such classics as Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire at the age of eight or nine. After becoming a vendor and newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railroad, he spent whole days in the Detroit Free Library — which he read “from top to bottom.” In our home he always had books and magazines, as well as half a dozen daily newspapers.
Comp. Eng.
From childhood, this man who was to accomplish so much was almost totally deaf. He could hear only the loudest noises and shouts, but this did not bother him. “I haven’t heard a bird sing since I was 12,” he once said. “But rather than a handicap my deafness probably has been beneficial.” He believed it drove him early to reading, enabled him to concentrate and shut him off from small talk.
People asked him why he didn’t invent a hearing aid. Father always replied, “How much have you heard in the last 24 hours that you couldn’t do without?” He followed this up with: “A man who has to shout can never tell a lie.” ...
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Passage II - — Marshall Jon Fisher excerpted from “Memoria ex Machina”
It was a silver Seiko watch with a clasp that folded like a map and snapped shut. The stainless-steel casing was a three-dimensional octagon with distinct edges, too thick and ponderous, it seems now, for a thirteen-year-old. Four hands—hour, minute, second, and alarm—swept around a numberless metallic- blue face. I received it for my bar mitzvah;1 a quarter century later I can, in my mind, fingernail the button just one click to set the alarm hand—not too far, or I’ll change the time—and pull out the other, obliquely positioned button to turn on the alarm. When the hour hand finally overcame the angle between itself and the alarm hand, a soft, deep mechanical buzzing would ensue2—a pleasant hum long since obliterated by hordes of digital beeps. I haven’t seen my watch for twenty years, but I still hear that buzz, feel its vibrations in my wrist. ...
Another machine still lingering in the afterlife: the 1973 Datsun 1200 my dad handed down to me to run into the ground, which I eventually did. A bottom-of- the line economy model, “the Green Machine,” as my friends called it, looked like a vehicle out of Dr. Seuss, but it always started and got forty miles to the gallon—a cause for nostalgia, indeed, in these simmering, gas-guzzling days. I can still see the schematic four-gear diagram on the head of the stick shift and feel the knob—and the worn transmission of the gears—in my right hand. The radio had five black cuboid push-buttons for preset stations: the two on the left each sported the AM in white indentations, and the other three said FM. It took almost the entire ten-minute ride to school for the anemic defogger to rid the windshield of its early-morning dew. One day that teary outward view was replaced, at forty miles an hour, by green. A rusted latch had finally given out, and the wind had opened the hood and slapped it all the way back against the glass. Luckily, the glass didn’t break, and I could see enough through the rust holes to avoid a collision as I braked. Whenever the friend I drove to school was not ready to go, her father would come out and wait with me, looking the Green Machine up and down and shaking his head.
What does it mean that some of my fondest memories are of technology? Have we begun our slide toward the ineluctable3 merging of man and machine? Are Walkman headphones in the ears the first step toward a computer chip implanted in the brain? Or is it merely that inanimate objects, whether Citizen Kane’s wooden [sled] “Rosebud” or my own handheld electronic circuitry, by virtue of their obliviousness to the passage of time, seize our longing? As photographs do, these objects capture particular periods of our lives. The sense memory of turning that clock-radio knob, or shifting that gear stick, fixes the moment in time as well as any photograph. Just as we painstakingly fit photos into our albums or, in the new age, organize them into computer folders and make digital copies for safekeeping, so I hang on to the impression of a stainless-steel wristwatch that once applied a familiar force of weight to my left wrist. ...
