THE LIBRARY
is a place not to be passed through without thought, for, with a further store of volumes in his home, it contains one of the most costly and well-equipped scientific libraries in the world; the collection of writings on patent laws and patents, for instance, is absolutely exhaustive. It gives, at a glance, an idea of the breadth of thought and sympathy of this man who grew up with scarcely a common school education.
On the second floor, in one of the offices of the machine shop, I was asked to wait, while a grimy youth disappeared with my card, which he said he would “slip under the door of Mr. Edison’s office.”
“Curious,” I thought; “what a lord this man must be if they dare not even knock at his door!”
Thinking of this and gazing out the window, I waited until a working man, who had entered softly, came up beside me. He looked with a sort of “Well, what is it?” in his eyes, and quickly it began to come to me that the man in the sooty, oil-stained clothes was Edison himself. The working garb seemed rather incongruous, but there was no mistaking the broad forehead, with its shock of blackish hair streaked with gray. The gray eyes, too, were revelations in the way of alert comprehensiveness.
“Oh!” was all I could get out at the time.
“Want to see me?” he said, smiling in the most youthful and genial way.
“Why,—yes, certainly, to be sure,” I stammered.
He looked at me blankly.
“You’ll have to talk louder,” said an assistant who worked in another portion of the room; “he don’t hear well.”
This fact was new to me, but I raised my voice with celerity, and piped thereafter in an exceedingly shrill key. After the usual humdrum opening remarks, in which he acknowledged his age as fifty-two years, and that he was born in Erie county, O., of Dutch parentage, the family having emigrated to America in 1730, the particulars began to grow more interesting.
His great-grandfather, I learned, was a banker of high standing in New York; and, when Thomas was but a child of seven years, the family fortune suffered reverses so serious as to make it necessary that he should become a wage-earner at an unusually early age, and that the family should move from his birth-place to Michigan.
“Did you enjoy mathematics as a boy?” I asked.
“Not much,” he replied. “I tried to read Newton’s ‘Principia,’ at the age of eleven. That disgusted me with pure mathematics, and I don’t wonder now. I should not have been allowed to take up such serious work.”
“You were anxious to learn?”
“Yes, indeed, I attempted to read through the entire Free Library at Detroit, but other things interfered before I had done.”