y and never came back. I suppose he
thought there was going to be a death. But the broker lived, and left
the next day; and I have never seen him since, either." Edison tells
also of another foolhardy laboratory trick of the same kind: "Some of my
assistants in those days were very green in the business, as I did not
care whether they had had any experience or not. I generally tried to
turn them loose. One day I got a new man, and told him to conduct a
certain experiment. He got a quart of ether and started to boil it over
a naked flame. Of course it caught fire. The flame was about four
feet in diameter and eleven feet high. We had to call out the fire
department; and they came down and put a stream through the window. That
let all the fumes and chemicals out and overcame the firemen; and there
was the devil to pay. Another time we experimented with a tub full of
soapy water, and put hydrogen into it to make large bubbles. One of the
boys, who was washing bottles in the place, had read in some book that
hydrogen was explosive, so he proceeded to blow the tub up. There was
about four inches of soap in the bottom of the tub, fourteen inches
high; and he filled it with soap bubbles up to the brim. Then he took a
bamboo fish-pole, put a piece of paper at the end, and touched it off.
It blew every window out of the place."

Always a shrewd, observant, and kindly critic of character, Edison tells
many anecdotes of the men who gathered around him in various capacities
at that quiet corner of New Jersey--Menlo Park--and later at Orange, in
the Llewellyn Park laboratory; and these serve to supplement the main
narrative by throwing vivid side-lights on the whole scene. Here, for
example, is a picture drawn by Edison of a laboratory interlude--just
a bit Rabelaisian: "When experimenting at Menlo Park we had all the way
from forty to fifty men. They worked all the time. Each man was allowed
from four to six hours' sleep. We had a man who kept tally, and when the
time came for one to sleep, he was notified. At midnight we had lunch
brought in and served at a long table at which the experimenters
sat down. I also had an organ which I procured from Hilbourne
Roosevelt--uncle of the ex-President--and we had a man play this
organ while we ate our lunch. During the summertime, after we had made
something which was successful, I used to engage a brick-sloop at Perth
Amboy and take the whole crowd down to the fishing-banks on the Atlantic