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lieved that two messages could be sent at the same
time over the same wire —a plan which the world
had heartily laughed at. But now, to the astonish-
ment of everybody, he invented the quadruplex
system by which four messages go at once over the
same wire! The world ceased to laugh, and woke
up to the fact that the very troublesome young
experimentor was, as Professor Barker said, “ not
only the greatest inventor of the age, but a dis-
coverer as well;” in fact,-that the Grand Trunk
train-boy was a genius!

When he was twenty-six, a new force came into

his life, a love for an intelligent, sweet-tempered -

girl, Mary Stillwell of Newark. There was no

 

THOMAS A. EDISON.

time for a-wedding journey, only an hour or two
for a quiet ceremony, and then the thinker went
back to his shop to work far into the night. A
friend returning from the Western Union Tele-
graph office in New York, seeing a light in the
laboratory, climbed the stairs. ‘“ Hello!” said he.
“What are you doing here this late? aren’t you
going home?”

“What time is it?” asked Edison, half be-
wildered by the interruption.

“Midnight, easy enough. Come along.”

“T mustgohome then. I was married to-day,” was
the reply of the man as absent-minded as Sir Isaac
Newton, who is said to have stirred the ashes in

LITTLE BIOGRAPHIES.—HOW SUCCESS IS WON.

his pipe with the finger of his lady-love, who re-
fused him in consequence.

Three years later he removed to Menlo Park, a
barren place, twenty-four miles from New York,
where he hoped to work in quiet, which however
was not permitted him ; and he remarked jocularly
to a friend: “I am considering the idea of fixing
a wire connecting with a battery that knocks over
everybody that touches the gate.” And yet, with
a pleasant smile, he gave kindly explanations to
any one really desirous to understand his work.
Sometimes his listeners were intelligent ; sometimes
stupid. ‘Once after he had explained the telephone
most carefully, the visitor said, “ Yes, I compre-
hend perfectly; simple enough. I understand it
all, except how the sound gets out again!”

“You can imagine how I felt.” says Mr. Edison.
“T gave him up.”

At Menlo Park he built a laboratory twenty-eight
feet by one hundred, and filled it with batteries,
magnets, etc., the machinery run by an eighty horse
power engine—the Port Huron basement on a
larger and grander scale.

Here all the world came to see the wonderful
phonograph, the ‘‘ talking machine,’’ into whicha
person can sing or speak, and by turning a handle,
the same tune or words be reproduced ; a blunt steel
pen or stylus is made to press against a sheet of
tin foil by the vibrations of a plate set in motion
by the voice; when the pen is replaced at the end
of the groove which it has traversed, the sound is
given out again. Of this instrument, Edison says:
“‘T have invented a great many machines, but this
is my baby, and I expect it to grow up and support
me in my old age.”’

Here too was the carbon telephone, used in vari-
ous parts of the United States; the tasimeter,
which measures the heat even of the far-away stars ;
the aerophone, by which the sound of the voice is
magnified two hundred and fifty times ; the electric
pen for multiplying copies of letters and drawings,
over sixty thousand now in use in this country: the
automatic telegraph, which permits the transmis-
sion over a single wire of several thousand words
per minute; the incandescent. electric light—all
these inventions and many others were at the great
wonder house at Menlo Park.

The public interest centres now in the electric
light, called Mr. Edison’s ‘‘ crowning discovery.”’
The first method of illumination by electricity was
by the voltaic arc, discovered by Sir Humphrey
Davy; the electric current passing between two
carbon points, In 1862 Faraday introduced the
electric light into a British lighthouse. Thesecond
method was an arch, inside ofa glass globe, brought
to white heat by the friction of an electric current.
Drexel, Morgan and Co., New York bankers, and
some others, put one thousand dollars in Mr.
Edison’s hands, that he might experiment in order
to make the light of practical use. He is said to