the rule may
perhaps be met in Edison, though all depends on the point of view. All
his life he has had a great deal to do with finance and commerce, and
as one looks at the magnitude of the vast industries he has helped to
create, it would not be at all unreasonable to expect him to be among
the multi-millionaires. That he is not is due to the absence of certain
qualities, the lack of which Edison is himself the first to admit.
Those qualities may not be amiable, but great wealth is hardly ever
accumulated without them. If he had not been so intent on inventing he
would have made more of his great opportunities for getting rich. If
this utter detachment from any love of money for its own sake has not
already been illustrated in some of the incidents narrated, one or two
stories are available to emphasize the point. They do not involve any
want of the higher business acumen that goes to the proper conduct of
affairs. It was said of Gladstone that he was the greatest Chancellor of
the Exchequer England ever saw, but that as a retail merchant he would
soon have ruined himself by his bookkeeping.

Edison confesses that he has never made a cent out of his patents in
electric light and power--in fact, that they have been an expense
to him, and thus a free gift to the world. [18] This was true of the
European patents as well as the American. "I endeavored to sell my
lighting patents in different countries of Europe, and made a contract
with a couple of men. On account of their poor business capacity and
lack of practicality, they conveyed under the patents all rights to
different corporations but in such a way and with such confused wording
of the contracts that I never got a cent. One of the companies
started was the German Edison, now the great Allgemeine Elektricitaets
Gesellschaft. The English company I never got anything for, because a
lawyer had originally advised Drexel, Morgan & Co. as to the signing of
a certain document, and said it was all right for me to sign. I signed,
and I never got a cent because there was a clause in it which prevented
me from ever getting anything." A certain easy-going belief in human
nature, and even a certain carelessness of attitude toward business
affairs, are here revealed. We have already pointed out two instances
where in his dealings with the Western Union Company he stipulated that
payments of $6000 per year for seventeen years were to be made instead
of $100,000 in cash, evidently