thing. She
would speak in French, and Cutting would translate into English. She
stayed there about an hour and a half. Bernhardt gave me two pictures,
painted by herself, which she sent me from Paris."

Reference has already been made to the callers upon Edison; and to give
simply the names of persons of distinction would fill many pages of this
record. Some were mere consumers of time; others were gladly welcomed,
like Lord Kelvin, the greatest physicist of the last century, with whom
Edison was always in friendly communication. "The first time I saw Lord
Kelvin, he came to my laboratory at Menlo Park in 1876." (He
reported most favorably on Edison's automatic telegraph system at the
Philadelphia Exposition of 1876.) "I was then experimenting with sending
eight messages simultaneously over a wire by means of synchronizing
tuning-forks. I would take a wire with similar apparatus at both ends,
and would throw it over on one set of instruments, take it away, and get
it back so quickly that you would not miss it, thereby taking advantage
of the rapidity of electricity to perform operations. On my local wire
I got it to work very nicely. When Sir William Thomson (Kelvin) came in
the room, he was introduced to me, and had a number of friends with him.
He said: 'What have you here?' I told him briefly what it was. He then
turned around, and to my great surprise explained the whole thing to
his friends. Quite a different exhibition was given two weeks later by
another well-known Englishman, also an electrician, who came in with
his friends, and I was trying for two hours to explain it to him and
failed."

After the introduction of the electric light, Edison was more than ever
in demand socially, but he shunned functions like the plague, not
only because of the serious interference with work, but because of his
deafness. Some dinners he had to attend, but a man who ate little and
heard less could derive practically no pleasure from them. "George
Washington Childs was very anxious I should go down to Philadelphia to
dine with him. I seldom went to dinners. He insisted I should go--that
a special car would leave New York. It was for me to meet Mr. Joseph
Chamberlain. We had the private car of Mr. Roberts, President of the
Pennsylvania Railroad. We had one of those celebrated dinners that only
Mr. Childs could give, and I heard speeches from Charles Francis Adams
and different people. When I came back to the depot, Mr. Roberts
w