"Yes."
"Are you sure?"
"Well, you needn't pay me if I don't."
And thus Mr. Ott went to work and accomplished the results desired. Two weeks afterward Edison put him in charge of the shop. From that day to this, Mr. Ott has remained a member of Mr. Edison's staff.
Examples without number could be given of Edison's inexhaustible fund of ideas, but one must suffice by way of example. In the progress of the ore-concentrating work one of the engineers submitted three sketches of a machine for some special work. They were not satisfactory. He remarked that it was too bad there was no other way to do the work. Edison said, "Do you mean to say that these drawings represent the only way to do this work?" The reply was, "I certainly do." Edison said nothing, but two days afterward brought in his own sketches showing forty-eight other ways of accomplishing the result, and laid them on the engineer's desk without a word. One of these ideas, with slight changes, was afterward adopted.
This chapter could be continued to great length, but must now be closed in the hope that in the foregoing pages the reader may have caught an adequate glance of Mr. Edison at work.
XXIV
EDISON'S LABORATORY AT ORANGE
If Longfellow's youth "Who through an Alpine village passed" had been Edison, the word upon his banner would probably not have been "Excelsior" but "Experiment." This seems to be the watchword of his life, and is well illustrated by a remark made to Mr. Mason, the superintendent of the cement works: "You must experiment all the time; if you don't the other fellow will, and then he will get ahead of you."