e is about my work
in electricity--you know, I never claimed to have invented
electricity--that is a campaign lie--nail it!"

"Sunshine is spread out thin and so is electricity. Perhaps they are the
same, but we will take that up later. Now the trick was, you see, to
concentrate the juice and liberate it as you needed it. The old-fashioned
way inaugurated by Jove, of letting it off in a clap of thunder, is
dangerous, disconcerting and wasteful. It doesn't fetch up anywhere. My
task was to subdivide the current and use it in a great number of little
lights, and to do this I had to store it. And we haven't really found out
how to store it yet and let it off real easy-like and cheap. Why, we have
just begun to commence to get ready to find out about electricity. This
scheme of combustion to get power makes me sick to think of--it is so
wasteful. It is just the old, foolish Prometheus idea, and the father of
Prometheus was a baboon."

"When we learn how to store electricity, we will cease being apes
ourselves; until then we are tailless orangutans. You see, we should
utilize natural forces and thus get all of our power. Sunshine is a form
of energy, and the winds and the tides are manifestations of energy."

"Do we use them? Oh, no! We burn up wood and coal, as renters burn up the
front fence for fuel. We live like squatters, not as if we owned the
property.

"There must surely come a time when heat and power will be stored in
unlimited quantities in every community, all gathered by natural forces.
Electricity ought to be as cheap as oxygen, for it can not be destroyed.

"Now, I am not sure but that my new storage-battery is the thing. I'd
tell you about that, but I don't want to bore you. Of course, I know that
nothing is more interesting to the public than a good lie. You see, I
have been a newspaperman myself--used to run a newspaper--in fact,
Veritas and Old Subscriber once took exception to one of my editorials
and threw me into the Detroit River--that is where I got my little
deafness--what's that? No, I did not say my deftness--I got that in
another way. But about lies, you have heard that one about my smoking
big, black cigars! Well, the story is that the boys in the office used to
steal my cigars, and so I got a cigarmaker to make me up a box that
looked just like my favorite brand, only I had 'em filled with hemp,
horsehair and a touch of asafetida. Then I just left the box where the
boys would be sure to dip