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TWO GREAT SCOUTS
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THOMAS A. EDISON
It was sixty years ago that a
medium-sized ordinary-looking fellow stepped out onto the desk platform
of the business section of Eastman Business College and set down on a
table there prepared for his convenience a little contrivance which
looked like a crude hand-made coffee grinder or toy windmill. We boys
had been assembled in the primary department, a two-foot lower grade
floor - main study room at street level, there to see and listen to the
lecture and demonstration of the new-fangled gadget.
Taking from
his seersucker coat a little crank and a packet of tinfoil, the handle
was attached to the end of a cylinder about three inches long which
projected out of the side of the machine; he then unrolled the foil and
carefully wrapped it around the cylinder.
With some further
manipulation in fixings and attachments, the man faced the audience and
began turning the little crank as he spoke into a mouthpiece held in
his hand.
This ceremony completed, the mouthpiece was detached
and laid to one side. Another slight-of-hand performance with the
mechanism followed. The demonstrator faced the boys saying - "Be quiet
please" - and began turning the little crank again, then the squeaky
thing poured out the very words he had spoken into the mouthpiece a
moment before.
It was Thomas A. Edison, who had come up from New
York to demonstrate to the students of the then famed college at
Poughkeepsie, his latest scientific discovery, - the recording of the
human voice.
A dozen years later, we were entertaining the
neighbors at 42 E. Long Avenue, DuBois, with the music of famed bands
and orchestras, the songs of noted opera stars, and the speeches of our
prominent statesmen and politicians, all rendered in their natural
tones of voice, - as if delivered in person from the same or an
adjoining room; all ground out of a hardened-wax, instead of a foil
covered cylinder, from an oversize trunk through yard-long rubber tubes
like gas hose with ear phones in each ear.
This was the
wonderful "graphophone" - a machine enlarged and improved from the
crude instrument that "Tom" Edison so proudly displayed on a teacher's
desk at old Eastman College in '82.
A short time before his
death, Mr. Edison sent the writer a fine 7X9 photograph of himself, on
the margin of which he wrote his name in a hand, though slightly wavy
from age, is like a steel engraving. It was his token in memory of the
historic event of the first showing of his "talking machine" before an
audience, of which the recipient was the lone survivor.
BR>
LUTHER BURBANK
When
the writer called on the wizard horticulturist at his experimental
gardens in Santa Rosa, California, the great man lay down his shovel
and trowel on the grass beside the path, wiped his hands on his soiled
apron, grasped the young man's extended paw and said:
"Where are you
from?" - and when told that his home was in Pennsylvania, the retort
was immediate, he said: "Must be something wrong with your head when
you stay in Pennsylvania, and might well live in California."
It
was mid-afternoon in a fall month, thirty years ago that the writer
boarded a train in San Francisco to pay respect to the man who had
revolutionized the science of plant growth and horticultural management
- made chestnut trees bear when three years old, bred the spines from
the cactus, and was author of hundreds of other marvelous
accomplishments.
The LUTHER BURBANK SOCIETY had taken over the
supervision of social duties and privileges belonging to the Burbank
house and the experimental gardens, erected fancy fences and gates, and
a sort of Oriental guard house in charge of a "keeper" of records, and
who could decide who might be admitted and who might not enter the
inner sanctum and waste the time of the master in idle curiosity or to
benefit from secretly appropriated notes, seeds, slips and bulbs.
He
presided over the huge guest register in which names and addresses of
the thousands from every corner of the globe, had inscribed their
titles before being admitted. - last signatures being those from a
delegation from Japan, -and previous to them over the page were names
from Germany, Italy, France and South and Central America. Burbank and
his Gardens had become a celebrated International Shrine!
The
Gateman charged that time must be limited to a few minutes but as the
plant wizard led the way along the garden paths and replied to the
running fire of foolish questions asked by the Keystoner, he forgot
that he was under the domination of a self-seeking society of
publisher-promoters nor did he heed the distress signals from the
gateman, that time was up for the Pennsylvanian, and that others of
more note, and likely more profit, were pressing for attention.
Past
bed after bed of tiny sprouts and seedlings among which he had been
working, - each one the subject of a lecture on the progress of growing
something useful from things that had been but useless or worthless
weeds - a tree 5 years old twenty feet high - the chestnut he made to
bear clusters of nuts at three years of age -the sensitive bush which
at a touch, turned its leaves instantly to a wilted state, as if struck
by a flame - then to the corn plot where every stalk bore six to eight
ears of fully mature and perfect 12 inch seed cobs - to the spineless
cactus beds where tons of the best cattle feed was produced in the
broadleaf nourishing forage, hitherto barred from useful purpose
because animals could not eat it on account of the needle-like spikes
or spines with which the luscious pads were protected. Now millions of
of tons of valuable stockfeed could be produced on desert sands, - and
the "rube" from Pennsylvania snapped kodaks of all these wonders - and
as the minutes grew into hours the long walks and talks found them
nearing the home of the great experimenter, - a modern brick house near
the entrance gate. The afternoon was about gone - the waiting crowds
had missed the chance to meet the main attraction, and left, and the
gates were shut.
Before a final handshake, the picture-maker
prepared to turn his camera on the owner's brick house at the rear of a
large palm whose spreading fronds shaded forty feet of lawn; he pleaded
with the great horticulturist to stand out from the shad, but he
declined, saying that he never had pictures taken. But he was not out
of range, and the kodak snapped. With a hearty hand-shake and an
invitation to come again we caught the night train to San Francisco,
gratified with having a real visit with one of the world's great men.
The
picture came out fine; it was enlarged in color, framed and sent to Mr.
Burbank as a souvenir in appreciation of the wonderful afternoon spent
with him. A long letter was followed by a fine autographed portrait of
himself - and a little later by another, - his first portrait taken in
the then new process of color-photography; they hang alongside of his
long-time friend Thomas A. Edison. Certainly they are two of America's
- and the world's greatest scientific scouts.
