applies only to his labor. With the men about him, particularly those who are not very keen, he has no patience whatever. When he is in bad humor, word passes quickly about among the five thousand employes in his big shops that "the old man is on the rampage today", and everyeverybody who can possibly do so keeps away from him. Once, when he was in such a humor, I saw him turn upon an employe, who had forgotten to wind up a phonograph, and vent upon him such wrath as made the delinquent wince visibly. His arguments are fulminations. He pounds the table and shouts angrily. As he is extremely deaf, his opponent—as he insists upon regarding anyone who does not agree with him-must raise his voice to a high pitch, so that what Edison apparently considers a mild debate often resembles the hottest kind of row.

Once he told me that the injury to his ear-drums received in boyhood had, by reason of a certain "damper effect," as he described it, made him particularly sensitive to odd sounds. There were few persons, he declared, who could detect defects in the sounding mechanism of a musical instrument, particularly in the phonograph, so readily as he. He is very fond of music, yet even here he is an anomaly. A friend of mine, a very clever pianist, told me he was once playing for Edison, who seemed to be nodding approvingly. At length the nods ceased and, on looking about, the pianist saw Edison leaning back in his big chair sound asleep. Grieved by this reception of his painstaking performance, my friend stole softly away.

Although Edison justly prides himself upon his musical knowledge and appreciation, as well as upon certain other things, yet he never speaks boastfully of his inventions. One could not trap him into complimenting himself, no matter how determined or subtle the attempt. An associate of his said that the nearest he ever came to such a vaunt was when some one had been going over with him the long list of his inventions. At the end of the recital Edison remarked:

"Well, I have been mixed up in a whole lot of things, haven't I?"

Now let us examine this "whole lot of things," or the most important of them, and try to arrive at some idea of their tremendous significance to modern civilization.

Before he was twenty-five Edison had invented the stock ticker. This machine, introduced in 1868, is still recording every day in every big city in this country the market quotations of stocks, the departures and arrivals of vessels, and many more or less important items of news. As its busy tapes are unreeled, they tell the fate of fortunes to excited readers who receive the intelligence before any newspaper could possibly give it to them. New York alone has over three thousand of these tickers in public and private offices. It seems strange, considering the important part played by the ticker in the commercial world today, that Edison should have had to walk the streets of New York, hungry and looking for a chance to borrow a dollar, while he waited long for a purchaser of this useful invention. When finally he found a man who was willing to buy it and pay him forty thousand dollars for it, the foundation of Edison's fortune was laid. It was a lucky day for civilization when Edison received that forty thousand dollars.

In the early seventies when the pulsing, pushing nation, just recovered from the effects of the civil war, was busying itself in mighty, complex affairs and had need of new agencies to help it on its way, Edison, now with a well-equipped laboratory, was able to come forward and supply many of its greatest wants. He improved his ticker and made many other telegraphic inventions-relays, repeaters. magnets, printing telegraphs, and messenger calls. All of these things have tended to facilitate telegraphic transmission and to cheapen its cost. But greatest of all his inventions in this line was his apparatus for quadruplex and sextuplex telegraphic transmission. This system, besides being of incalculable benefit to mankind in other ways, has saved, first

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good transmitter and receiver. These Edison invented and patented, making long-distance telephony an established fact instead of a dream. Thus Edison became "mixed up," to use his own phrase, in the operations of that wonderful agency of every-day civilized life, the telephone, which in this country now represents an investment of one billion dollars, with a gross annual revenue of over two hundred millions, employing over one hundred and fifty thousand persons and with an annual pay roll of about ninety millions

by the public for his pioneer work and invention in this great field, Edison's contribution to it has been vast. And what a wonderful thing this is to be "mixed up" in! Within thirty years this industry has grown to embrace about fifty thousand miles of track, owned by fifteen thousand companies which employ three hundred thousand men! The different systems represent an investment of five billions of dollars, with annual gross revenues of about six hundred millions and with annual pay rolls of two hundred millions! But although these figures are

stupendous they are by no means all that are involved in electric railway operation. Directly connected with it is the dynamo and motor industry in which over seventy millions are invested and in which forty thousand persons are employed to whom is paid annually about twenty-five millions.

What the trolley and third-rail systems mean to the great mass of mankind, interpreted in terms of utility and convenience, is best realized when the fact is understood that they have made the modern suburb as we know it today, and