ded of Palissy's
recklessness, when in his efforts to make the enamel melt on his pottery
he used the very furniture of his home for firewood.

Mr. Edison remarks the fact that there was very little difference
between the telegraph of that time and of to-day, except the general use
of the old Morse register with the dots and dashes recorded by indenting
paper strips that could be read and checked later at leisure if
necessary. He says: "The telegraph men couldn't explain how it worked,
and I was always trying to get them to do so. I think they couldn't. I
remember the best explanation I got was from an old Scotch line repairer
employed by the Montreal Telegraph Company, which operated the railroad
wires. He said that if you had a dog like a dachshund, long enough to
reach from Edinburgh to London, if you pulled his tail in Edinburgh he
would bark in London. I could understand that, but I never could get
it through me what went through the dog or over the wire." To-day
Mr. Edison is just as unable to solve the inner mystery of electrical
transmission. Nor is he alone. At the banquet given to celebrate his
jubilee in 1896 as professor at Glasgow University, Lord Kelvin, the
greatest physicist of our time, admitted with tears in his eyes and the
note of tragedy in his voice, that when it came to explaining the
nature of electricity, he knew just as little as when he had begun as
a student, and felt almost as though his life had been wasted while he
tried to grapple with the great mystery of physics.

Another episode of this period is curious in its revelation of the
tenacity with which Edison has always held to some of his oldest
possessions with a sense of personal attachment. "While working
at Stratford Junction," he says, "I was told by one of the freight
conductors that in the freight-house at Goodrich there were several
boxes of old broken-up batteries. I went there and found over eighty
cells of the well-known Grove nitric-acid battery. The operator there,
who was also agent, when asked by me if I could have the electrodes of
each cell, made of sheet platinum, gave his permission readily, thinking
they were of tin. I removed them all, amounting to several ounces.
Platinum even in those days was very expensive, costing several dollars
an ounce, and I owned only three small strips. I was overjoyed at this
acquisition, and those very strips and the reworked scrap are used to
this day in my laboratory over forty years l