is surrounded with everything that his heart desires. In the
words of a reporter, the place is equally capable of turning out a
'chronometer or a Cunard steamer.' It is probably the finest laboratory
in the world.

In 1889, Edison, accompanied by his second wife, paid a holiday visit
to Europe and the Paris Exhibition. He was received everywhere with the
greatest enthusiasm, and the King of Italy created him a Grand Officer
of the Crown of Italy, with the title of Count. But the phonograph
speaks more for his genius than the voice of the multitude, the electric
light is a better illustration of his energy than the ribbon of an
order, and the finest monument to his pluck, sagacity, and perseverance
is the magnificent laboratory which has been built through his own
efforts at Llewellyn Park. [One of his characteristic sayings may be
quoted here: 'Genius is an exhaustless capacity for work in detail,
which, combined with grit and gumption and love of right, ensures to
every man success and happiness in this world and the next.']

CHAPTER X. DAVID EDWIN HUGHES.

There are some leading electricians who enjoy a reputation based partly
on their own efforts and partly on those of their paid assistants.
Edison, for example, has a large following, who not only work out his
ideas, but suggest, improve, and invent of themselves. The master in
such a case is able to avail himself of their abilities and magnify
his own genius, so to speak. He is not one mind, but the chief of many
minds, and absorbs into himself the glory and the work of a hundred
willing subjects.

Professor Hughes is not one of these. His fame is entirely self-earned.
All that he has accomplished, and he has done great things, has been the
labour of his own hand and brain. He is an artist in invention; working
out his own conceptions in silence and retirement, with the artist's
love and self-absorption. This is but saying that he is a true inventor;
for a mere manufacturer of inventions, who employs others to assist him
in the work, is not an inventor in the old and truest sense.

Genius, they say, makes its own tools, and the adage is strikingly
verified in the case of Professor Hughes, who actually discovered the
microphone in his own drawing-room, and constructed it of toy boxes and
sealing wax. He required neither lathe, laboratory, nor assistant to
give the world this remarkable and priceless instrument.

Having first become known to fame in America,