n trade, why
should he not have his laboratory there also? So his stock of batteries,
chemicals and other 'calamity' grew apace.

"One day, after several weeks of happiness in his moving laboratory, he
was 'dead to the world' in an experiment. Suddenly the car gave a lurch
and jolted the bottle of phosphorus off its shelf. It broke, flamed up,
set fire to the floor and endangered the whole train. While the boy was
frantically fighting the fire, the Scotch conductor, red-headed and
wrathy, rushed in and helped him to put it out.

"By this time they were stopping at Mt. Clemens, where the indignant
Scotchman boxed the boy's ears and put him out also. Then the man threw
the lad's bottles, apparatus and batteries after him, as if they were
unloading a carload of freight there.

"These blows on his ears were the cause of the inventor's life-long
deafness. But there never was a gamer sport than Thomas A. Edison. Once,
long after this, he saw the labor of years and the outlay of at least
two million dollars at the seashore washed away in a single night by a
sudden storm. He only laughed and said that was 'spilt milk, not worth
crying over.' Disappointments of that sort were 'the fortunes of war' or
'all for the best' to him. The injury so unjustly inflicted on him by
that irate conductor was not a defect to him. Many years afterwards he
said:

"'This deafness has been of great advantage to me in various ways. When
in a telegraph office I could hear only the instrument directly on the
table at which I sat, and, unlike the other operators, I was not
bothered by the other instruments.

"'Again, in experimenting on the telephone, I had to improve the
transmitter so that I could hear it. This made the telephone commercial,
as the magneto telephone receiver of Bell was too weak to be used as a
transmitter commercially.'

"It was the same with the phonograph. The great defect of that
instrument was the rendering of the overtones in music and the hissing
consonants in speech. Edison worked over one year, twenty hours a day,
Sundays and all, to get the word 'specie' perfectly recorded and
reproduced on the phonograph. When this was done, he knew that
everything else could be done,--which was a fact.

"'Again,' Edison resumed, 'my nerves have been preserved intact.
Broadway is as quiet to me as a country village is to a person with
normal hearing.'"

The talk suddenly ceased. Then another voice announced from out of the
horn: