“Everybody knows Edison really invented the telephone—­that is, he made it work perfectly and brought it to the greatest commercial value, so that a billion men, women and children are using it in nearly all the languages and dialects in the civilized world.  But he was very careful to give Dr. Alexander Graham Bell credit for his original work on this great invention.

“When a friend on the other side of the Atlantic wired that the English had offered ‘thirty thousand’ for the rights to one of Edison’s improvements to the telephone for that country, it was promptly accepted.  When the draft came the inventor found, much to his surprise, that it was for thirty thousand pounds—­nearly one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

“The phonograph or talking machine has been considered one of Edison’s greatest inventions, but it does not compare in importance and value with the electric incandescent burner light.  This required many thousands of experiments and tests to get a filament that would burn long enough in a vacuum to make the light sufficiently cheap to compete with petroleum or gas.  During all the years that he was experimenting on different metals and materials for the electric light which was yet to be, in a literal sense, the light of the world, he had men hunting in all countries for exactly the right material out of which the carbon filament now in use is made.  Thousands of kinds of wood, bamboo and other vegetable substances were tried.  The staff made over fifty thousand experiments in all for this one purpose.  This illustrates the art and necessity of taking pains, one of Mr. Edison’s greatest characteristics.  The story of producing electric light would fill a big volume.

“When the proper filament was discovered and applied there was great rejoicing in the laboratory and a regular orgy of playing pranks and fun.

“The philosophers say we measure time by the succession of ideas.  If this is true the time must have been longer and seemed shorter in Edison’s laboratories than anywhere else.  The great inventor seldom carried a watch and seemed not to like to have clocks about.

“Soon after he was married, the story went the rounds of the press that within an hour or two after the ceremony, Edison became so engrossed with an invention that he forgot that it was his wedding day.  Edison has declared this story to be untrue.

“‘That’s just one of the kind of yarns,’ said the inventor laughing, ’that the reporters have to make up when they run short of news.  It was the invention of an imaginative chap who knows I’m a little absent-minded.  I never forgot that I was married.

“’But there was an incident that may have given a little color to such a story.  On our wedding day a lot of stock tickers were returned to the factory and were said to need overhauling.

“’About an hour after the ceremony I was reminded of those tickers and when we got to our new home, I told my wife about them, adding that I would like to walk down to the factory a little while and see if the boys had found out what was the matter.