line and the
electric car, no room is left for them. They are not needed. The cow
and the pig have gone, and the horse is still more undesirable. A higher
public ideal of health and cleanliness is working toward such banishment
very swiftly; and then we shall have decent streets, instead of stables
made out of strips of cobblestones bordered by sidewalks. The worst
use of money is to make a fine thoroughfare, and then turn it over to
horses. Besides that, the change will put the humane societies out of
business. Many people now charge their own batteries because of lack of
facilities; but I believe central stations will find in this work very
soon the largest part of their load. The New York Edison Company, or
the Chicago Edison Company, should have as much current going out for
storage batteries as for power motors; and it will be so some near day."

CHAPTER XXIII

MISCELLANEOUS INVENTIONS

IT has been the endeavor in this narrative to group Edison's inventions
and patents so that his work in the different fields can be studied
independently and separately. The history of his career has therefore
fallen naturally into a series of chapters, each aiming to describe some
particular development or art; and, in a way, the plan has been helpful
to the writers while probably useful to the readers. It happens,
however, that the process has left a vast mass of discovery and
invention wholly untouched, and relegates to a concluding brief chapter
some of the most interesting episodes of a fruitful life. Any one who
will turn to the list of Edison patents at the end of the book will find
a large number of things of which not even casual mention has been made,
but which at the time occupied no small amount of the inventor's time
and attention, and many of which are now part and parcel of modern
civilization. Edison has, indeed, touched nothing that he did not in
some way improve. As Thoreau said: "The laws of the Universe are not
indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive," and
there never was any one more sensitive to the defects of every art and
appliance, nor any one more active in applying the law of evolution.
It is perhaps this many-sidedness of Edison that has impressed the
multitude, and that in the "popular vote" taken a couple of years ago
by the New York Herald placed his name at the head of the list of ten
greatest living Americans. It is curious and pertinent to note that a
similar plebiscite