He improved the telegraph so that six messages could be sent at once over the same wire. He made improvements in electric and other motor cars, as well as in the telephone. He also made a delicate instrument to measure the heat of the stars, which he called the tasimeter. Out of more than fourteen hundred different inventions, any one of which would have made him famous, the best known are the incandescent electric light, the phonograph and the moving-picture machine.
Thomas A. Edison is the greatest inventor that ever lived. He has done more for the world’s wealth, comfort, and happiness than any other man save, perhaps, Dr. Benjamin Franklin. Yet he is one of the most modest of men. When he was invited to a dinner at which several distinguished men wished to pay him some of the high honors due him, he said:
“I would not sit and listen to an hour of such talk for a hundred thousand dollars!”
When asked how he gained his great success, Mr. Edison replied:
“By not looking at the clock.”
THE GREATEST AMERICANS
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, THE BOY WHO WAS DILIGENT IN BUSINESS
WHEN Benjamin Franklin was a little boy he lived in Boston, where his father was a maker of soap and candles. Little Ben was only ten years old when his father took him out of school and set him at work in his shop. Dipping candles all day long is hard, disagreeable work and Ben, who loved books, often wished that he was back in school. His uncle Benjamin sometimes tried to cheer the lad at his tiresome toil by telling him: “It is not so much what you do in life as how you do it.”
One day Ben’s uncle brought a Bible into the smoky soapfat room and read from it: “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings.”
Ben Franklin was a thoughtful boy. While he was bending over the little vat of hot tallow all that long day, he could not help thinking of what his uncle had read to him. Half smothered by the burning grease he whispered to himself: “ ‘Stand before kings?’ I’m so tired, and my back is so lame when night comes that I can hardly stand at all!”