The next time I visited the laboratory, a few days later, Edison was up again and talking cheerfully. But he had grown five years older in five months. "I shall succeed," he said to me, "but it may take me longer than I at first supposed. Everything is so new that each step is in the dark; I have to make the dynamos, the lamps, the conductors, and attend to a thousand details that the world never hears of. At the same time I have to think about the expense of my work. That galls me. My one ambition is to be able to work without regard to the expense. What I mean is, that if I want to give up a whole month of my time and that of my whole establishment to finding out why one form of a carbon filament is slightly better than another, I can do it without having to think of the cost. My greatest luxury would be a laboratory more perfect than any we have in this country. I want a splendid collection of material—every chemical, every metal, every substance in fact that may be of use to me, and I hardly know what may not be of use. I want all this right at hand, within a few feet of my own house. Give me these advantages and I shall gladly devote fifteen hours a day to solid work. I want none of the rich man's usual toys, no matter how rich I may become. I want no horses or yachts—have no time for them. I want a perfect workshop."
The Home of Thomas A. Edison.
In the last twelve years Edison has seen his dream fulfilled. His electric light has not displaced gas, by any means, but it has been the foundation of a business large enough to make the inventor sufficiently rich to build the finest laboratory in the world, in the most curious room of which are to be found the three hundred models of machinery and apparatus of various kinds devised by Edison in the last twenty years and made by himself or under his eye. He is still a gaunt fellow, with a slight stoop, a clean-shaven face, and a low voice. His hands are still soiled with acids, his clothes are shabby, and there is always a cigar in his mouth.
Edison's Laboratory.
The Edison laboratory deserves a chapter by itself. In 1886 Edison bought a fine villa in Llewellyn Park at a cost of $150,000. He took the house as it stood, with all its luxurious fittings, rather to please his wife than himself; a corner of the laboratory would suit him quite as well. Right outside the gates of the park and within view of the house, he bought ten acres of land and began his laboratory. Two handsome structures of brick, each 60 feet wide, 100 feet long, and four stories high, accommodate the machine-shop, library, lecture-room, experimental workshops, assistants' rooms and store-rooms. The boiler-house and dynamo-rooms are outside the main buildings. Also, in a separate room, the floor of which consists of immense blocks of stone, are the delicate instruments of precision used in testing electric currents. The instruments in this one room, twenty feet square, cost $18,000 to make and to import from Europe. Upon first entering the main building, the visitor finds what is apparently a busy factory of some sort, with long rows of machinery, from steam-hammers to diamond-lathes. Everywhere workmen are busy at their tasks, and Edison has good reason to be proud of his laboratory force, for it consists of the picked workmen of the country. Whenever he finds in one of the Edison factories in Newark, New York, Schenectady, or elsewhere a particularly expert and intelligent man, he has him transferred to the Orange laboratory, where, at increased pay for shorter hours, the man not only finds life pleasanter, but has a chance of learning and becoming somebody. The whole place hums with the rattle of machinery and glows with electric light. There are eighty assistants, who have charge of the various departments. The most expert iron-workers, glass-blowers, wood-turners, metal-spinners, screw-makers, chemists, and machinists in the country are to be found here. A rough drawing of the most complicated model is all they require to work from.
The store-rooms contain all the material needed. Four store-keepers are employed to keep the supplies, valued at $100,000, in order and ready for use at a moment's notice. Each article is put down in a catalogue which shows the shelf or bottle where it may be found. Every known metal, every chemical known to science, every kind of glass, stone, earth, wood, fibre, paper, skin, cloth, is to be found there. In making up the chemical collection an assistant was kept at work for weeks going through the three most exhaustive works on chemistry in English, French, and German, making a note of every substance mentioned, and this list constituted the order for chemicals, an order, by the way, which it required seven months to fill. In the glass department, for instance, there is every known kind of glass, from plates two inches thick to the finest, film, and if anything else in the way of glass is needed, the glass-workers are there to make it. This stupendous collection of material, filling one floor, is intended to guard against annoying delays that might occur at critical times for want of some rare material. In 1885, when working upon an apparatus for getting a current of electricity directly from heat—the thermo-electric generator—Edison's work was brought to a standstill for want of a few pounds of nickel, an article not then to be found in any quantity in this country. The store-room was organized to avert such delays. The library is the only part of the main building that shows any attempt at decoration. It is a superb room, 60 feet by 40, with a height of 25 feet. Galleries run around the second story. At one end is a monumental fireplace, and in the centre of the hall a fine group of palms and ferns. The room is finished in oiled hard wood and lighted by electricity. Fine rugs cover the floors. The shelves contain nothing but scientific works and the files of the forty-six scientific periodicals in English, French, and German to which Edison subscribes. They are indexed by a librarian as soon as received, so that Edison can see at a glance what they contain concerning the special fields in which he is interested.