"'Say, young man, change off and send with the other foot!'
"'This broke the fellow up so that he turned the job over to another operator to finish, to the real discomfiture of the fellows around me.'
"Friend Adams goes on to tell of other happennings at the Hub:
"'One day Edison was more than delighted to pick up a complete set of Faraday's works, bringing them home at 4 A.M. and reading steadily until breakfast time, when he said, with great enthusiasm:
"'Adams, I have got so much to do and life is so short, I am going to hustle!'"
"'Then he started off to breakfast on a dead run.'
"He soon opened a workshop in Boston and began making experiments. It was here that he made a working model of his vote recorder, the first invention he ever patented.
"Edison has told us of this trip to Washington and how he showed that his invention could register the House vote, pro and con, almost instantaneously. The chairman of the committee saw how quickly and perfectly it worked and said to him:
"'Young man, if there is any invention on earth that we don't want down here, it is this. Filibustering on votes is one of the greatest weapons in the hands of a minority to prevent bad legislation, and this instrument would stop that.'
"The youth felt the force of this so much that he decided from that time forth not to try to invent anything unless it would meet a genuine demand,—not from a few, but many people.