of the other Edison
industries at Orange, they represent in the aggregate a comfortable and
encouraging business.

In this brief outline review of the flourishing and extensive commercial
enterprises centred around the Orange laboratory, the facts, it is
believed, contain a complete refutation of the idea that an inventor
cannot be a business man. They also bear abundant evidence of the
compatibility of these two widely divergent gifts existing, even to a
high degree, in the same person. A striking example of the correctness
of this proposition is afforded in the present case, when it is borne in
mind that these various industries above described (whose annual sales
run into many millions of dollars) owe not only their very creation
(except the Bates machine) and existence to Edison's inventive
originality and commercial initiative, but also their continued growth
and prosperity to his incessant activities in dealing with their
multifarious business problems. In publishing a portrait of Edison this
year, one of the popular magazines placed under it this caption: "Were
the Age called upon to pay Thomas A. Edison all it owes to him, the Age
would have to make an assignment." The present chapter will have
thrown some light on the idiosyncrasies of Edison as financier and as
manufacturer, and will have shown that while the claim thus suggested
may be quite good, it will certainly never be pressed or collected.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE VALUE OF EDISON'S INVENTIONS TO THE WORLD

IF the world were to take an account of stock, so to speak, and proceed
in orderly fashion to marshal its tangible assets in relation to
dollars and cents, the natural resources of our globe, from centre to
circumference, would head the list. Next would come inventors, whose
value to the world as an asset could be readily estimated from an
increase of its wealth resulting from the actual transformations of
these resources into items of convenience and comfort through the
exercise of their inventive ingenuity.

Inventors of practical devices may be broadly divided into two
classes--first, those who may be said to have made two blades of grass
grow where only one grew before; and, second, great inventors, who have
made grass grow plentifully on hitherto unproductive ground. The vast
majority of practical inventors belong to and remain in the first of
these divisions, but there have been, and probably always will be, a
less number who, by reason of