"One of the innumerable contact springs had broken off and had fallen down between the two gear wheels and stopped the instrument; but it was not very noticeable. As I went out to tell the man in charge what the matter was, George Laws, the inventor of the system, appeared on the scene, the most excited person I had seen. He demanded of the man the cause of the trouble, but the man was speechless. I ventured to say that I knew what the trouble was, and he said, 'Fix it! Fix it! Be quick!' I removed the spring and set the contact wheels at zero; and the line, battery, and inspecting men scattered through the financial district to set the instruments. In about two hours, things were working again. Mr. Laws came to ask my name and what I was doing. I told him and he asked me to come to his private office the following day. He asked me a great many questions about the instruments and his system, and I showed him how he could simplify things generally. He then requested that I should come next day. On arrival, he stated at once that he had decided to put me in charge of the whole plant, and that my salary would be three hundred dollars a month." "This was such a violent jump from anything I had ever seen before, that it rather paralyzed me for a while. I thought it was too much to be lasting; but I determined to try and live up to that salary if twenty hours a day of hard work would do it." It is needless to say that he made good in the biggest and best sense of the word. It was at this time that Mr. Edison, now twenty-one years of age, invented an electric stock ticker for which he received forty thousand dollars. Always desiring to devote his entire time to inventive work, he now saw that with the aid of his forty thousand dollars it was possible to do so. Accordingly, a little later we see him constructing a laboratory one hundred feet long at Menlo Park, a little station twenty-five miles from Newark, New Jersey. Here for years, in company with his assistants, he has made inventions that have revolutionized the world. Finally, in 1886, his business had so seriously outgrown his quarters that he built his present laboratories at Orange, New Jersey. These laboratories are now housed in two beautiful, four story brick buildings each sixty feet wide by one hundred feet long. In addition to these laboratories there are Edison factories located in various sections of the country. Though now seventy years of age, he is devoting all his time and the time of his laboratory force in solving the great problems connected with the present war. * * * * * "_A tool is but the extension of a man's hand, and a machine is but a complete tool. And he that invents a machine augments the power of a man and the well being of mankind._" --HENRY WARD BEECHER. [Illustration: ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL Inventor of the Telephone] ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL