ter would be one-sixteenth
of an inch above the others, and all the letters wanted to wander out of
line. He worked on it till the machine gave fair results. The typewriter
he got into commercial shape is now known as the Remington.

"It is not hard to understand that Mr. Edison invented the American
District Messenger call-box system, which has been superseded by the
telephone, but very few people know when they are eating caramels and
other sticky confectionery that wax or paraffin paper was invented by
Edison. Also the tasimeter, an instrument so delicate that it measures
the heat of the most distant star, Arcturus. One of the few vacations
Mr. Edison allowed himself was when he traveled to the Rocky Mountains
to witness a total eclipse of the sun and experiment on certain stars
with his tasimeter, and this very clearly shows that Mr. Edison is as
much interested in the advancement of science as in matters purely
commercial."

CHAPTER XXV

THE GENIUS OF THE AGE

"I want to tell you something more about the personal side of this great
man," continued the voice from the horn.

"One of the striking things about Thomas Alva Edison is his gameness. In
this respect he has been greater than Napoleon, who was not always a
'good loser,' for he had come to regard himself as bound to win, whether
or no; so when everything went against him, he expressed himself by
kicking against Fate. But when Edison saw the hard work of nine years
which had cost him two million dollars vanish one night in a sudden
storm, he only laughed and said, 'I never took much stock in spilt
milk.'

"When his laboratories were burned or he suffered great reverses, Edison
considered them merely the fortunes of war. In this respect he was most
like General Washington, who, though losing more battles than he gained,
learned to 'snatch victory from the jaws of defeat,' and win immortal
success.

"Some of Edison's discoveries were dramatic and amusing. During his
telephone experiments he learned the power of a diaphragm to take up
sound vibrations, and he had made a little toy that, when you talked
into the funnel, would start a paper man sawing wood. Then he came to
the conclusion that if he could record the movements of the diaphragm
well enough he could cause such records to reproduce the movements
imparted to them by the human voice.

"But in place of using a disk, he got up a small machine with a cylinder
provided with grooves around