It was this same automatic recorder, the idea embodied in it, that by thought and logical deduction afterwards produced that wonderful automaton, the phonograph. He rigged a hasty instrument that was based upon the idea that if the indentations made in a slip of paper could be made to repeat the ticking sound of the instrument, similar indentations made by a point on a diaphragm that was moved by the _voice_ might be made to repeat the voice. His rude first instrument gave back a sound vaguely resembling the single word first shouted into it and supposed to be indented on a slip of paper, and this was enough to stimulate further effort. He finally made drawings and took them to a machinist whom he knew, afterwards one of his assistants, who laughed at the idea but made the model. Previously he bet a friend a barrel of apples that he could do it. When the model was finished he arranged a piece of tin foil and talked into it, and when it gave back a distinct sound the machinist was frightened, and Edison won his barrel of apples, "which," he says, "I was very glad to get." The "Wizard" is a man evidently pertaining to the class of human eccentrics who excite the interest of their fellow-men "to see what they will do next," but without any idea of the final value of that which may come by what seems to them to be mere unbalanced oddity. Such people are invariably misunderstood until they succeed. When he invented the automatic repeating telegraph he was discharged, and walked from Decatur to Nashville, 150 miles, with only a dollar or two as his entire possessions. With a pass thence to Louisville, he and a friend arrived at that place in a snowstorm, and clad in linen "dusters." This does not seem scientific or professor-like, but it has not hindered; possibly it has immensely helped. It reminds one of the Franklinic episodes when remembered in connection with future scientific renown and the court of France.