The phonograph is his achievement, and the practical development of the kinetoscope. He has built electric locomotives and run them, he has made many discoveries in regard to platinum. His better known patents include developments of the electric lamp, the telephone, storage-batteries, ore-milling machinery, typewriters, electric pens, vocal engines, addressing machines, cast-iron furniture, wire-drawing, methods of preserving fruit, moving-picture machines, compressed-air machines, and the manufacture of plate glass. He took out a patent covering wireless telegraphy in 1891, but other matters were then absorbing his attention, and he was quite willing to yield that field to the brilliant Italian, Marconi. He feels no jealousy for other inventors. He knows how vast the field is, and how many paths constantly beckon him. It is doubtless true that the great inventors are born and not made, but many of them seem, nevertheless, to have drifted into the work that gave them fame, or to have hit by chance on their compelling idea. It was not so with Edison. He was beyond any doubt born an inventor. With him to see was to ask the question why, and to ask that question was to start his thoughts on the train that was to bring him to the answer. XV MARCONI AND THE WIRELESS TELEGRAPH 1874- At first sight the wireless telegraph seems the most wonderful of all inventions and discoveries, the one that is least easy to understand, and that most nearly approaches that magic which is above all nature’s laws. Even if we do come to understand it it loses nothing of its wonder, and the last impression is very like the first. We can understand how an electric current travels through a wire, even if we cannot understand electricity, but how that current can travel through limitless space and yet reach its destination strains the imagination. Yet wireless telegraphy is not a matter of the imagination, but of exact, demonstrable science.