used, and no restrictions as to source of supply are enforced,
he, or rather his company, will be merely one of many possible
purveyors.

This invention is practically a gift to the workingmen of the world
and their families. The net result will be that those who care to avail
themselves of the privilege may, sooner or later, forsake the
crowded apartment or tenement and be comfortably housed in sanitary,
substantial, and roomy homes fitted with modern conveniences, and
beautified by artistic decorations, with no outlay for insurance or
repairs; no dread of fire, and all at a rental which Edison believes
will be not more, but probably less than, $10 per month in any city
of the United States. While his achievement in its present status will
bring about substantial and immediate benefits to wage-earners, his
thoughts have already travelled some years ahead in the formulation of a
still further beneficial project looking toward the individual ownership
of these houses on a basis startling in its practical possibilities.

CHAPTER XXI

MOTION PICTURES

THE preceding chapters have treated of Edison in various aspects as an
inventor, some of which are familiar to the public, others of which are
believed to be in the nature of a novel revelation, simply because no
one had taken the trouble before to put the facts together. To those
who have perhaps grown weary of seeing Edison's name in articles of
a sensational character, it may sound strange to say that, after all,
justice has not been done to his versatile and many-sided nature; and
that the mere prosaic facts of his actual achievement outrun the wildest
flights of irrelevant journalistic imagination. Edison hates nothing
more than to be dubbed a genius or played up as a "wizard"; but this
fate has dogged him until he has come at last to resign himself to it
with a resentful indignation only to be appreciated when watching
him read the latest full-page Sunday "spread" that develops a casual
conversation into oracular verbosity, and gives to his shrewd surmise
the cast of inspired prophecy.

In other words, Edison's real work has seldom been seriously discussed.
Rather has it been taken as a point of departure into a realm of fancy
and romance, where as a relief from drudgery he is sometimes quite
willing to play the pipe if some one will dance to it. Indeed, the
stories woven around his casual suggestions are tame and vapid alongside
his own essays in fiction, pr