“Hate it?” I said.
“Yes,” he affirmed, “when it is all done and is a success, I can’t bear the sight of it. I haven’t used a telephone in ten years, and I would go out of my way any day to miss an incandescent light.”
“You lay down rather severe rules for one who wishes to succeed in life,” I ventured, “working eighteen hours a day.”
“Not at all,” he said. “You do something all day long, don’t you? Every one does. If you get up at seven o’clock and go to bed at eleven, you have put in sixteen good hours, and it is certain with most men that they have been doing something all the time. They have been either walking, or reading, or writing, or thinking. The only trouble is that they do it about a great many things and I do it about one. If they took the time in question and applied it in one direction, to one object, they would succeed. Success is sure to follow such application. The trouble lies in the fact that people do not have an object—one thing to which they stick, letting all else go.”
OPPORTUNITIES FOR FUTURE INVENTORS.
“You believe, of course,” I suggested, “that much remains to be discovered in the realm of electricity?”
“It is the field of fields,” he answered. “We can’t talk of that, but it holds the secret which will reorganize the life of the world.”
“You have discovered much about it,” I said, smiling.
“Yes,” he said, “and yet very little in comparison with the possibilities that appear.”