104 WORKMEN AND HEROES THOMAS ALVA EDISON* By Clarence Cook A s (born 1847) s someone has called Leonardo da Vinci " the great Italian Yankee," because of his multifarious and in- genious suggestions in the world of material things, so our own Edison may be called " the Yankee Leonardo," for, with a curiosity ranging over the whole world of nature, equal to that of the Italian, and with a fecundity of inven- tion no less bewildering, he unites, like Leonardo, an im- aginative and poetical vein that lifts his devices into the domain of Art. Yet Edison is in no respect a graceful or romantic fig- ure such as Leonardo was. He reminds us rather, by the weird and cosmic nature of his speculations and inventions, of some one of the beings created by the Norse mythologists : a nineteenth cen- tury gnome, rough, shaggy, uncouth, wholly absorbed in his search among the secrets of nature, and, while working always for the good of mankind, dwell- ing in a world apart, and with neither time nor inclination to mix in human affairs. ' Thomas Alva Edison was born at Milan, Erie County, O., February 11, 1847. He started in life hampered by poverty, by want of teaching and train- ing, without friends outside his own home circle to encourage him in pushing his fortunes, and with small opportunity, in the little village where his lot had been cast, for bettering his condition. On his father's side he came of sturdy Dutch stock : the old man, who was still living in 1879 a t the age of seventy-four, reck- oned among his immediate ancestors one who lived to be one hundred and two years old, and another who reached one hundred and three. He would appear to have been, like pioneers in general, ready, if not obliged, to turn his hand to any employment that might yield a living, that must be scanty at the best ; and we read of him as in turn a tailor, a nurseryman, a dealer, first in grain and then in lumber, and an agent for the sale of farm-lands. He seems to have been un- able to do much for his boy beyond teaching him to read and write, stimulating his taste for reading by paying him small sums of money for every book he read through ; he had no need to insist that the reading should be done thoroughly, for it was the boy's way to do thoroughly everything he undertook. His mother, also, helped Thomas in learning : she was of Scotch extraction ; but, though her parents were from the old country, she herself was born in Massachusetts, where for a time she had been a school-teacher. This, then, with the exception of two months at the village school, was the limit of young Edison's education to use
- Copyright. 1894. hy Selmar Hess.
