cian by chance, but it is the sober fact that to this pre-eminent
and brilliant leader in electrical achievement escape into the chemical
domain still has the aspect of a delightful truant holiday. One of
the earliest stories about his boyhood relates to the incident when
he induced a lad employed in the family to swallow a large quantity of
Seidlitz powders in the belief that the gases generated would enable
him to fly. The agonies of the victim attracted attention, and Edison's
mother marked her displeasure by an application of the switch kept
behind the old Seth Thomas "grandfather clock." The disastrous result
of this experiment did not discourage Edison at all, as he attributed
failure to the lad rather than to the motive power. In the cellar of
the Edison homestead young Alva soon accumulated a chemical outfit,
constituting the first in a long series of laboratories. The word
"laboratory" had always been associated with alchemists in the past,
but as with "filament" this untutored stripling applied an iconoclastic
practicability to it long before he realized the significance of the
new departure. Goethe, in his legend of Faust, shows the traditional
or conventional philosopher in his laboratory, an aged, tottering,
gray-bearded investigator, who only becomes youthful upon diabolical
intervention, and would stay senile without it. In the Edison laboratory
no such weird transformation has been necessary, for the philosopher
had youth, fiery energy, and a grimly practical determination that would
submit to no denial of the goal of something of real benefit to mankind.
Edison and Faust are indeed the extremes of philosophic thought and
accomplishment.

The home at Port Huron thus saw the first Edison laboratory. The boy
began experimenting when he was about ten or eleven years of age. He got
a copy of Parker's School Philosophy, an elementary book on physics, and
about every experiment in it he tried. Young Alva, or "Al," as he was
called, thus early displayed his great passion for chemistry, and in
the cellar of the house he collected no fewer than two hundred bottles,
gleaned in baskets from all parts of the town. These were arranged
carefully on shelves and all labelled "Poison," so that no one else
would handle or disturb them. They contained the chemicals with which
he was constantly experimenting. To others this diversion was both
mysterious and meaningless, but he had soon become familiar with all
the chemicals