pensable
adjunct in nearly all modern electric-lighting and electric-railway
systems of any magnitude; and in 1909, in spite of its weight, it had
found adoption in over ten thousand automobiles of the truck, delivery
wagon, pleasure carriage, and runabout types in America.

Edison watched closely all this earlier development for about fifteen
years, not changing his mind as to what he regarded as the incurable
defects of the lead-lead type, but coming gradually to the conclusion
that if a storage battery of some other and better type could be brought
forward, it would fulfil all the early hopes, however extravagant, of
such men as Kelvin (Sir William Thomson), and would become as necessary
and as universal as the incandescent lamp or the electric motor.
The beginning of the present century found him at his point of new
departure.

Generally speaking, non-technical and uninitiated persons have a
tendency to regard an invention as being more or less the ultimate
result of some happy inspiration. And, indeed, there is no doubt that
such may be the fact in some instances; but in most cases the inventor
has intentionally set out to accomplish a definite and desired
result--mostly through the application of the known laws of the art in
which he happens to be working. It is rarely, however, that a man will
start out deliberately, as Edison did, to evolve a radically new type of
such an intricate device as the storage battery, with only a meagre clew
and a vague starting-point.

In view of the successful outcome of the problem which, in 1900, he
undertook to solve, it will be interesting to review his mental attitude
at that period. It has already been noted at the end of a previous
chapter that on closing the magnetic iron-ore concentrating plant
at Edison, New Jersey, he resolved to work on a new type of storage
battery. It was about this time that, in the course of a conversation
with Mr. R. H. Beach, then of the street-railway department of the
General Electric Company, he said: "Beach, I don't think Nature would be
so unkind as to withhold the secret of a GOOD storage battery if a real
earnest hunt for it is made. I'm going to hunt."

Frequently Edison has been asked what he considers the secret of
achievement. To this query he has invariably replied: "Hard work, based
on hard thinking." The laboratory records bear the fullest witness that
he has consistently followed out this prescription to the utmost. The
perfecti