Nothing in this big establishment, often employing more than one hundred persons, is made for sale. It is wholly devoted to experimental work and tests. Its expenses, said to be more than $150,000 a year, are paid by the commercial companies in which Edison is interested, he, on his part, giving them the benefit of any improvements made. Thus in one room hundreds of incandescent electric lamps burn night and day the year through. Each lamp is specially marked and when it burns out more quickly than the average, or lasts longer, a special study is made as to the contributing causes. It may seem impossible that the suggestions of one man can keep busy a big workshop upon experiments the year round, but Edison says that the temptation is always to increase the force. When it is remembered that the list of Edison's patents reaches to seven hundred and forty, and that on the electric light alone he has worked out several hundred theories, the wonder ceases. Ten minutes' work with a pencil may sketch an apparatus that a dozen men cannot finish inside of a fortnight.
When the new Orange laboratory was finished and Edison found himself with time and means at his disposal, his first thought was to take up his phonograph. The history of the great hopes built upon the phonograph and the bitter disappointment that followed is too familiar to need repetition here. As may be imagined, Edison is most keenly bent upon tightening the loose screw that has prevented it from doing all that its friends predicted for it. He still works at other problems, but chiefly as relaxation. He rests from inventing one thing by inventing something else.
Library at Edison's Laboratory.
One day recently, when I found him less confident than usual as to the triumph of the phonograph in the near future, he said: "There are some difficulties about the problem that seem insurmountable. I go on smoothly until at a certain point I run my head against a stone wall; I cannot get under, over, or around it. After butting my head against that wall until it aches, I go back to the beginning again. It is absurd to say that because I can see no possible solution of the problem to-day, that I may not see one to-morrow. The very fact that this century has accomplished so much in the way of invention, makes it more than probable that the next century will do far greater things. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves if we are content to fold our hands and say that the telegraph, telephone, steam-engine, dynamo, and camera having been invented, the field has been exhausted. These inventions are so many wonderful tools with which we ought to accomplish far greater wonders. Unless the coming generations are particularly lazy, the world ought to possess in 1993 a dozen marvels of the usefulness of the steam-engine and dynamo. The next step in advance will perhaps be the discovery of a method for transforming heat directly into electricity. That will revolutionize modern life by making heat, power, and light almost as cheap as air. Inventors are already feeling their way toward this wonder. I have gone far enough on that road to know that there are several stone walls ahead. But the problem is one of the most fascinating in view."