The human lights of life were caught by the _Sun_ men and transferred to every page of every issue. In 1878 a _Sun_ reporter was sent to Menlo Park, New Jersey, to see how a young inventor there, who had just announced the possibility of an incandescent electric light, worked: Here Mr. Edison dropped his cigar-stump from his mouth, and, turning to Griffin, asked for some chewing-tobacco. The private secretary drew open his drawer and passed out a yellow cake as large as a dinner-plate. The professor tore away a chew, saying: “I am partly indebted to the _Sun_ for this tobacco. It printed an article saying that I chewed poor tobacco. That was so. The Lorillards saw the article and sent me down a box of the best plug that ever went into a man’s mouth. All the workmen have used it, and Grif says there is a marked moral improvement in the men. It seems, however, to have the opposite effect on Grif. You see that he has salted away the last cake for his own use.” Nearly forty years later _Sun_ reporters still went to see Mr. Edison borrow white magic from nature and chewing-tobacco from his employees, and to describe both interesting processes. With Dana’s knowledge of what people wanted to read was mixed a curiosity, sometimes frankly expressed in the _Sun_, as to just why they wanted to read some things a great deal more than other things. It must be remembered that even in the seventies and eighties not everybody read a newspaper every day; some reserved their pennies and their eyes for great climaxes. The _Sun_, a paper which paid much attention to political matters, naturally found its circulation sharply affected by important political happenings. It sold ninety-four thousand extra copies on the morning after the Tilden-Hayes election--two hundred and twenty-two thousand copies, in all, being disposed of before eight o’clock in the morning. In 1875, when the pugilist, John Morrissey, who was supported by the _Sun_ for the State Senate because he was anti-Tammany, defeated Fox, the _Sun_ sold forty-nine thousand extra copies on the day after the election. The assassination of the Czar Alexander II of Russia did not sell an extra paper, but the hanging of Foster, the “car-hook murderer,” sent the sales up seventeen thousand. The deaths of Cornelius Vanderbilt and Alexander T. Stewart had no effect on the _Sun’s_ circulation, the passing of Napoleon III raised it only one thousand for the day, and the death of Pius IX caused only four thousand irregular readers to buy the paper; but the execution of Dolan, a murderer now practically forgotten, sent the sales up ten thousand. The beginning of coercive measures in Ireland by the arrest of Michael Davitt sold no extra papers in a city full of Irishmen, but the Fenian invasion of Canada meant the sale of ten thousand copies more than usual.