TWENTY HOURS A DAY
“Do you have regular hours, Mr. Edison?” I asked.
“Oh,” he said, “I do not work hard now. I come to the laboratory about eight o’clock every day and go home to tea at six, and then I study or work on some problem until eleven, which is my hour for bed.”
“Fourteen of fifteen hours a day can scarcely be called loafing,” I suggested.
“Well,” he replied, “for fifteen years I have worked on an average of twenty hours a day.”
When he was forty-seven years old, he estimated his true age at eighty-two, since working only eight hours a day would have taken till that time.
Mr. Edison has sometimes worked sixty consecutive hours upon one problem. Then after a long sleep, he was perfectly refreshed and ready for another.