Every inventor of mark is a man of native dexterity whose skill has been thoroughly cultivated. Let us observe such a man as he came to an extraordinary triumph. One of the great inventions of all time is the phonograph, giving us as it does accurate records of sound which may be repeated as often as we please. The ideas which issued in the perfected instrument were for years germinating in Mr. Edison’s mind; they took their rise in his recording telegraph. One afternoon Mr. Edison told the story to the late Mr. George Parsons Lathrop, who published it in Harpers’ Magazine for February, 1890:--“I worked a circuit in the daytime at Indianapolis, and got a small salary for doing it. But at night with another operator named Parmley, I used to receive newspaper reports just for the practice. The regular operator, who was given to copious libations, was glad enough to sleep off the effects while we did his work for him as well as we could. I would sit down for ten minutes, and take as much as I could from the instrument, carrying the rest in my memory. Then, while I wrote out, Parmley would serve his turn at taking; and so on. This worked well until they put a new man on at the Cincinnati end. He was one of the quickest despatchers in the business, and we soon found it was hopeless for us to try to keep up with him. Then it was that I worked out my first invention, and necessity was certainly the mother of it. “I got two old Morse registers, and arranged them in such a way that by running a strip of paper through them, the dots and dashes were recorded on it by the first instrument as fast as they were delivered from the Cincinnati end, and were transmitted to us through the other instrument at any desired rate of speed or slowness. They would come in on one instrument at the rate of forty words a minute, and we would grind them out of the other at the rate of twenty-five. Then weren’t we proud! Our copy used to be so clean and beautiful that we hung it up on exhibition; and our manager used to come and gaze at it silently, with a puzzled expression. Then he would depart, shaking his head in a troubled sort of way. He could not understand it; neither could any of the other operators; for we used to drag off my impromptu automatic recorder and hide it when our toil was over. But the crash came when there was a big night’s work--a presidential vote, I think it was--and copy kept pouring in at the top rate of speed, until we fell an hour and a half or two hours behind. The newspapers sent in frantic complaints, an investigation was made, and our little scheme was discovered. We couldn’t use it any more.