Poor fellow! life was very dark to him then. His invention had been stolen by others, who were making fortunes out of it while he was in need of bread. Friends lent him money and he brought suit against these robbers, but it took six years to win his rights in the courts. In the end he grew rich and gained great honor from his invention.
There has been no man more talked of in our time than Thomas A. Edison. All of you must have heard of him. He went into business when he was only twelve years old, selling newspapers and other things on the cars, and he was so bright and did so well that he was able to send his parents five hundred dollars a year. When he was sixteen he saved the child of a station-master from being run over by a locomotive, and the father was so grateful that he taught him how to telegraph. He was so quick in his work that he become one of the best telegraph operators in the United States.
After he grew up Edison began to invent. He worked out a plan by which he could send two messages at once over one wire. He kept at this till he could send sixteen messages over a wire, eight one way and eight the other. He made money out of his inventions, but the telegraph companies made much more. Instead of sending fifty or sixty words a minute, he showed them how they could send several thousand words a minute.
Then he began experimenting with the electric light. He did not invent this, but he made great improvements in it. The electric light could be made, but it could not be controlled and used before Edison taught people how to keep it in its little glass bulb. How brilliantly the streets, the stores, and many of the houses are now lit up by electricity. All from Edison's wonderful discoveries.
Then there was the telephone, or talking telegraph, which many of you may have used yourselves. That was not known before 1876; but people now wonder how they ever got along without it. It is certainly very wonderful, when you have to speak with somebody a mile or a hundred miles away, to ring him up and talk with him over the telephone wire as easily as if you were talking with some one in the next room. The telephone, as I suppose you know, works by electricity. It is only another form of the telegraph. The telephone was not invented by Edison, but by another American named Alexander Bell. But Edison improved it. He added the "transmitter," which is used in all telephones, and is very important indeed. So we must give credit first to Bell and second to Edison for the telephone.
Edison's most wonderful invention is the phonograph. This word means "sound writer." One of you may talk with a little machine, and the sound of your voice will make marks on a little roll of gelatine or tinfoil within. Then when the machine is set going you may hear your own voice coming back to you. Or by the use of a great trumpet called a megaphone, it may be heard all over a large room.
The wonderful thing is that the sound of a man's voice may be heard long after he is dead. If they had possessed the phonograph in old times we might be able to hear Shakespeare or Julius Cæsar speaking to-day. Very likely many persons who live a hundred or two hundred years from now may hear Edison's voice coming out of one of his own machines. Does not this seem like magic?
In every way this is a wonderful age of invention. Look at the trolley car, shooting along without any one being able to see what makes it move. Look at the wheels whirling and lights flashing and stoves heating from electric power. Steam was the most powerful thing which man knew a century ago. Electricity has taken its place as the most powerful and marvelous thing we know to-day. More wonderful than anything I have said is the power we now have of telegraphing without wires, and of telephoning in the same way. Thus men can now stand on the shore and talk with their friends hundreds of miles away on the broad sea.
Such are some of the inventions which have been made in recent times. If you ask for more I might name the steam plow, and the typewriter, and the printing machine, and the bicycle, and the automobile, and the air-ship, and a hundred others. But they are too many for me to say anything about, so I shall have to stop right here.