"What do you mean, Uncle? Who is the Wizard?"
"The most wonderful man in America, Dora. His name is Thomas Alva Edison, and he lives in Menlo Park, New Jersey, not far from where I teach. I know him a little. He is the man who, I think, best represents the scientific spirit of the nineteenth century. He's an inventor, but a systematic one. He doesn't trust to chance."
"What has he invented, Uncle? I don't think I ever heard of him."
"I fancy not, Dora. So far his work has been largely improvements on inventions already made. Just now, as I said, he is experimenting to find a way of lighting buildings by electricity. He will succeed, I know; and I shall wait for his electric light. I expect, though, to wait a number of years yet, for even though he should discover the secret within a few months, no one can supply the necessary apparatus. It will take years, I'm sure, before electric lighting is cheap enough to be common."
"How did you get acquainted with such a wonderful man, Uncle?"
"I knew him first when I was getting ready for college. Like you, I had my own way to pay; and I learned to be a telegraph operator. The summer before I entered Harvard I had a place in the Boston office of the Western Union Telegraph Company. Mr. Edison was a young man too, and he came to work in the office while I was there.
"The night he came we tried to play a joke on him, but the joke was decidedly on ourselves. Edison wore an old linen duster, and looked so much like a country boy that we thought he couldn't know much about taking messages. So we arranged with a skillful New York operator to send a long message faster and faster, and we saw to it that the new boy had to take it. To our surprise, he proved the fastest operator we had ever known and very carelessly and easily handled the quick dots and dashes. The joke was on the New York operator, too, for after a while Edison signaled, 'Say, young man, why don't you change off and send with your other foot?'
"An operator like that didn't stay long in the office. He went to New York, and almost at once got a position at three hundred dollars a month because he was bright enough to repair a stock-indicator in a broker's office. Soon afterward he improved the indicator so much that the president of the company gave him forty thousand dollars for his new idea.
"Next he proved his value to the telegraph company again by locating a break in the wire between New York and Albany. The president of the Western Union had promised to consider any invention Edison might make if the young man would find the trouble on the line in two days. Edison was not two hours in locating the break; and ever after that the Western Union people were glad enough to be told of all his new ideas."