the surface. Over this some tinfoil was to
be placed and he gave it to an assistant to construct. Edison had but
little faith that it would work, but he said he wanted to get up a
machine that would 'talk back.' The assistant thought it was ridiculous
to expect such a thing, but he went ahead and followed the directions
given him. Edison has told of this:

"'When it was finished and the foil was put on, I shouted a verse of
"Mary had a little lamb" into the crude little machine. Then I adjusted
the reproducer, which when he began to operate it, proceeded to grind
out--

"'Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went,
The lamb was sure to go'

"with the very quality and tones of my voice! We were never so taken back
in our lives. All hands were called in to witness the phenomenon and,
recovering from their astonishment, the boys joined hands and danced
around me, singing and shouting in their excitement. Then each yelled
something at the machine--bits of slang or slurs--and it made them roar
to hear that funny little contraption 'sass back!'

"Edison has always had a saving sense of humor. Though such a driver for
work--sometimes twenty hours a day seemed too short and they often
worked all of twenty-four,--there was not unfrequently a jolly,
prank-playing relaxation among the employees in the laboratory. If some
fellow fell asleep and began snoring the others would get a record of it
and play it later for the culprit or they would fix up a 'squawkophone'
to outdo his racket. Most amusing was Edison's means of taking a short
nap by curling up in an ordinary roll-top desk, and then turning over
without falling out.

"Everybody knows Edison really invented the telephone--that is, he made
it work perfectly and brought it to the greatest commercial value, so
that a billion men, women and children are using it in nearly all the
languages and dialects in the civilized world. But he was very careful
to give Dr. Alexander Graham Bell credit for his original work on this
great invention.

"When a friend on the other side of the Atlantic wired that the English
had offered 'thirty thousand' for the rights to one of Edison's
improvements to the telephone for that country, it was promptly
accepted. When the draft came the inventor found, much to his surprise,
that it was for thirty thousand _pounds_--nearly one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars.

"The phonograph or talking machine