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the prevailing methods of extracting iron from earth and rock, and which would do it so much cheaper than those processes as to command the market. Of course I refer to magnetic iron ore. Some of the New Jersey mountains contain practically inexhaustible stores of this magnetic ore, but it has been expensive to mine. I was able to secure mining options upon nearly all these properties, and then I began the campaign of developing an ore-concentrator which would make these deposits profitably available. This iron is unlike any other iron ore. It takes four tons of the ore to produce one ton of pure iron, and yet I saw, some years ago, that if some method of extracting this ore could be devised, and the mines controlled, an enormously profitable business would be developed, and yet a cheaper iron ore--cheaper in its first cost--would be put upon the market. I worked very hard upon this problem, and in one sense successfully, for I have been able by my methods to extract this magnetic ore at comparatively small cost, and deliver from my mills pure iron bricklets. Yet I have not been satisfied with the methods; and some months ago I decided to abandon the old methods and to undertake to do this work by an entirely new system. I had some ten important details to master before I could get a perfect machine, and I have already mastered eight of them. Only two remain to be solved; and when this work is complete, I shall have, I think, a plant and mining privileges which will outrank the incandescent lamp as a commercial venture, certainly so far as I am myself concerned. Whatever the profits are, I shall myself control them, as I have taken no capitalists in with me in this scheme."

Mr. Edison was asked if he was willing to be more explicit respecting this invention, but he declined to be, further than to say: "When the machinery is done as I expect to develop it, it will be capable of handling twenty thousand tons of ore a day with two shifts of men, five in a shift. That is to say, ten workmen, working twenty hours a day in the aggregate, will be able to take this ore, crush it, reduce the iron to cement-like proportions, extract it from the rock and earth, and make it into bricklets of pure iron, and do it so cheaply that it will command the market for magnetic iron."

Mr. Edison, in speaking of this campaign, referred to it as though it was practically finished; and it was evident in the conversation that already his mind turns to a new campaign, which he will take up as soon as his iron-ore concentrator is complete and its work can be left to competent subordinates.

He was asked if he would be willing to say what he had in mind for the next campaign, and he replied: "Well, I think as soon as the ore concentrating business is developed and can take care of itself, I shall turn my attention to one of the greatest problems that I have ever thought of solving, and that is, the direct control of the energy which is stored up in coal, so that it may be employed without waste and at a very small margin of cost. Ninety per cent. of the energy that exists in coal is now lost in converting it into power. It goes off in heat through the chimneys of boiler-rooms. You perceive it when you step into a room where there is a furnace and boiler; it is also greatly wasted in the development of the latent heat which is created by the change from water to steam. Now that is an awful waste, and even a child can see that if this wastage can be saved, it will result in vastly cheapening the cost of everything which is manufactured by electric or steam power. In fact, it will vastly cheapen the cost of all the necessaries and luxuries of life, and I suppose the results would be of mightier influence upon civilization than the development of the steam-engine and electricity have been. It will, in fact, do away with steam-engines and boilers, and make the use of steam power as much of a tradition as the stage-coach now is.

"It would enable an ocean steamship of twenty thousand horse-power to cross the ocean faster than any of the crack vessels now do, and require the burning of only two hundred and fifty tons of coal instead of three thousand, which are now required; so that, of course, the charges for freight and passenger fares would be greatly reduced. It would enormously lessen the cost of manufacturing and of traffic. It would develop the electric current directly from coal, so that the cost of steam-engines and boilers would be eliminated. I have thought of this problem very much, and I have already my theory of the experiments, or some of them, which may be necessary to develop this direct use of all the power that is stored in coal. I can only say now, that the coal would be put into a receptacle, the agencies then applied which would develop its energy and save it all, and through this energy electric power of any degree desired could be furnished. Yes, it can be done; I am sure of that. Some of the details I have already mastered, I think; at least, I am sure that I know the way to go to work to master them. I believe that I shall make this my next campaign. It may be years before it is finished, and it may not be a very long time."

Mr. Edison looks farther ahead than this campaign, for he said: "I think it quite likely that I may try to develop a plan for marine signalling. I have the idea already pretty well formulated in my mind. I should use the well-known principle that water is a more perfect medium for carrying vibrations than air, and should develop instruments which may be carried upon sea-going vessels, by which they can transmit or receive, through an international code of signals, reports within a radius of say ten miles."

Mr. Edison believes that Chicago is to become the London of America early in the next century, while New York will be its Liverpool, and he is of opinion that very likely a ship canal may connect Chicago with tide water, so that it will itself become a great seaport.

There is a common impression that Mr. Edison is an agnostic, but he denies it; and he said, in closing the conversation, "I tell you that no person can be brought into close contact with the mysteries of nature, or make a study of chemistry, without being convinced that behind it all there is supreme intelligence. I am convinced of that, and I think that I could, perhaps I may some time, demonstrate the existence of such intelligence through the operation of these mysterious laws with the certainty of a demonstration in mathematics."

AN INTERVIEW WITH PROFESSOR ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL.

BY CLEVELAND MOFFETT.

Professor Graham Bell is not like some pedantic wise men who talk as if they believed that the end of knowledge in their particular line had been already reached. On the contrary, this distinguished inventor is convinced that the discovery and inventions of the past will seem but trivial things when compared with those which are to come. Nor does he think that the day of man's greater knowledge is so very far distant.

THE AIR-SHIP OF THE NEAR FUTURE.

"I have not the shadow of a doubt"--these are his own words, spoken to me quite recently at Washington--"that the problem of aerial navigation will be solved within ten years. That means an entire revolution in the world's methods of transportation and of making war. I am able to speak with more authority on this subject from the fact of being actively associated with Professor Langley of the Smithsonian Institution in his researches and experiments. I am not at liberty to speak in detail of these experiments, but will say that the calculations of scientific men in regard to the amount of power necessary to maintain an air-ship above the earth have been strangely erroneous; I may say ridiculously so. According to these, Nature would have given the birds and insects a muscular force vastly greater and superior in its qualities to that bestowed upon man. That seems unreasonable in the first place, when one reflects that man is at the head of creation, and we have found practically that such is not the case. The power required to lift and propel an air-ship is very much less than has been supposed; indeed, Professor Langley concludes that when the air-ship has once been lifted above the earth to the proper height, it will be possible to maintain it there with proportionately no greater effort than that expended by hawks and eagles in sailing about with extended wings. The air strata will do the bulk of the lifting, if a small propelling power is provided. Of course, a greater power will be necessary to lift the air-ship originally, and it may be some time before the art of managing an air-ship is discovered; but the final result, I am convinced, will allow men to sail about in the air as easily and as safely as the birds do. I predict that we will see the beginning of this modern miracle by the end of the nineteenth century.

"Of course the air-ship of the future will be constructed without any balloon attachment. The discovery of the balloon undoubtedly retarded the solution of the flying problem for over a hundred years. Ever since the Montgolfiers taught the world how to rise in the air by means of inflated gas-bags, the inventors working at the problem of aerial navigation have been thrown on the wrong track. Scientific men have been wasting their time trying to steer balloons, a thing which in the nature of the case is impossible to any great extent, inasmuch as balloons, being lighter than the resisting air, can never make headway against it. The fundamental principle of aerial navigation is that the air-ship must be heavier than the air. It is only of recent years that men capable of studying the problem seriously have accepted this as an axiom. Electricity in one form or another will undoubtedly be the motive power for air-ships, and every advance in electrical knowledge brings us one step nearer to the day when we shall fly. It would be perfectly possible, to-day, to direct a flying machine by means of pendant electric wires which would transmit the necessary current without increasing the load to be borne. Perhaps a feasible means of propelling such an air-ship would be by a kind of trolley system where the rod would hang down from the car to the stretched wire, instead of extending upward. This is an idea which I would recommend to inventors."

It is most interesting to watch Professor Bell as he talks about the great inventions which he sees with prophetic eye in store for the world. He has the happy faculty of expressing great ideas in simple words, and there is nothing ponderous in his speech. He is as enthusiastic as a school-boy thinking of the kite he will make as big as a barn-door. His black eyes flash, and they seem all the blacker contrasted with his white hair; the words tumble out quickly, and those who have the good fortune to listen are carried away by the magnetism of this great inventor.

SEEING BY ELECTRICITY.

The mention of electricity brought up new possibilities for future discovery, some of them so amazing as to almost pass the bounds of credibility. He said:

"Morse taught the world years ago to write at a distance by electricity; the telephone enables us to talk at a distance by electricity; and now scientists are agreed that there is no theoretical reason why the well-known principles of light should not be applied in the same way that the principles of sound have been applied in the telephone, and thus allow us to see at a distance by electricity. It is some ten years since the scientific papers of the world were greatly exercised over a report that I had filed at the Smithsonian Institution a sealed packet supposed to contain a method of doing this very thing; that is, transmit the vision of persons and things from one point on the earth to another. As a matter of fact, there was no truth in the report, but it resulted in stirring up a dozen scientific men of eminence to come out with statements to the effect that they too had discovered various methods of seeing by electricity. That shows what I know to be the case, that men are working at this great problem in many laboratories, and I firmly believe it will be solved one day.

"Of course, while the principle of seeing by electricity at a distance is precisely that applied in the telephone, yet it will be very much more difficult to construct such an apparatus, owing to the immensely greater rapidity with which the vibrations of light take place when compared with the vibrations of sound. It is merely a question, however, of finding a diaphragm which will be sufficiently sensitive to receive these vibrations and produce the corresponding electrical variations."

THOUGHT TRANSFERENCE BY ELECTRICITY.

After he had spoken of this idea for some time, Professor Bell stopped suddenly, and, with an amused twinkle in his eyes, exclaimed: "But while we are talking of all this, what is to prevent some one from discovering a way of thinking at a distance by electricity?"

Having said this, the genial professor threw himself back and laughed heartily at the amazement his words awakened. Was he joking? Apparently not, for he proceeded seriously to discuss one of the most astounding conceptions that ever entered an inventor's mind. Thinking by electricity! Imagine two persons, one thousand or ten thousand miles apart, placed in communication electrically, in such a way that, without any spoken word, without sounding-board, key, or any bodily movement, the one receives instantly the thoughts of the other, and instantly sends back his own thoughts. The wife in New York knows what is passing in the brain of her husband in Paris. The husband has the same knowledge. What boundless possibilities, to be sure, this arrangement offers for business men, lovers, humorous writers, and the police authorities!

Preposterous as such an idea appears in its first conception, it certainly assumes an increasing plausibility when one listens to Professor Bell's reasoning.

"After all," he says, "what would there be in such a system more mysterious than in the processes of the mind reader? You substitute a wire and batteries for a strange-eyed man in a dress suit, that is all."

The logical basis of Professor Bell's scheme is clear, and its details quite beautiful in their simplicity, when you admit his major premise. That premise is that the human brain is merely a kind of electrical reservoir, and that thinking is nothing more than an electrical disturbance, like the aurora borealis or the sparks from a Holtz machine. The nerves are the wires leading from the central battery in the head. The reasonableness of this assumption is increased when one remembers that electricity may be made to act upon the nerves, even in a lifeless body, so as to produce the same muscular contractions which are produced by the brain force, whatever that may be. We talk of animal magnetism. What if it were the same as any other kind of magnetism? If these two forces are identical in one respect, why may they not be so in all respects? So Professor Bell reasons, and granting that the human brain is merely a store-house of electricity for our bodily needs, of electricity not essentially different from that which we know elsewhere, it must be possible to apply the same electrical laws to the brain as to any other electric apparatus and to get similar results.

"Do you begin to see my idea?" said Professor Bell, growing more and more enthusiastic as he proceeded. Then he gave a rapid outline of what might be a system of thinking by electricity.

Everyone knows, who knows anything about the subject, that an electric current passing inside of a coil of wire induces an electric current in that wire. Now, if the human brain be taken as a battery, then currents are constantly passing from it to various parts of the body, and the head may be considered in a state of constant electrical excitement, the intensity varying with the character of the thought processes. Now, suppose a coil of wire properly prepared in the shape of a helmet, and fitted about the head of one person, with wires attached and connected with a helmet similarly fitted upon the head of another person at any convenient distance. Every electric current in the one human battery must induce a current in the coil around the head, which current must be transmitted to the other coil. This other coil must then, by the reversed process, induce a current in the brain within helmet No. 2, and that person must receive some cerebral sensation. This cerebral sensation might be a thought, and probably would be, if it turns out to be true that brain force is identical with electricity. In that case, the thought of the one person would have produced a thought in the other person, and there is, if we go as far as this, every reason to believe that it would be the same thought. Thus the problem of thinking at a distance by electricity would be solved.

So much for a curious theory of what might be, if so and so were true; but Professor Bell has not stopped with theories, but has actually begun to put them to the test. Not that he is over-sanguine as to the result, but he believes the experiment worth the making, and that seriously. He has actually had two helmets, such as those described, constructed, and has begun a series of experiments in his laboratory. Thus far, the results have been for the most part negative, but not so much so as to prevent him hoping that more perfect appliances may lead to something more conclusive. It is true that the thought in one brain has produced a sensation in the other, through the two helmets, but what the relation was between the thought and the sensation could not be determined.

MAKING THE DEAF HEAR BY THE USE OF ELECTRICITY.

It is, of course, a fact, that hearing in every instance is merely an illusion of the senses, a sort of tickling of the brain. This tickling of the brain is ordinarily accomplished by the nerve force passing from the third chamber of the ear to the brain itself. If this nerve force is nothing more or less than ordinary electricity, and if science can train electricity to tickle the brain artificially in the same way and at the same points that the nerves from the ear usually do, then the ordinary sensations of hearing must result, whether the person has ears or not. The problem here is to discover the proper way of tickling the brain. The gentlemen who seat themselves in electrocution chairs have their brains tickled in a way which would not be generally satisfactory.

THERE IS DANGER IN SUCH EXPERIMENTS.

In his desire to bring relief to the deaf--and his whole life has been devoted to that object--Professor Bell has begun a series of remarkable experiments in this line. Some time ago, he determined to study the effects produced upon the brain by turning an electric current into it through the side of the head. With this end in view, he arranged a dynamo machine with a feeble current, giving a varying number of interruptions per second, and attached one of the poles to a wet sponge which he placed in one of his ears.

"I risked one of my ears," he said simply, "in making this experiment, but I could not risk them both, so I held the second pole of the machine in my hand and turned on the current."

Fortunately no harm resulted, but immediately Professor Bell experienced the sensation of a pleasant sound whose pitch he was able to vary by increasing or diminishing the number of interruptions in the dynamo machine. His assistant standing beside him could detect no sound at all, so that what Professor Bell heard must have been the effect of the electric current upon his brain. This effect he found could be varied by varying the character of the current. Now he argues that greater variations might be produced in the sounds heard by the brain if the current turned into it were varied in the proper manner. For instance, suppose the current from a long distance telephone to be turned through the head of the deaf mute, a sponge connected with either pole being placed in each ear. Then let some one talk into the telephone in the ordinary way, the infinite variations in the current produced by the voice vibrations being passed into the brain directly. Is it not conceivable that such a variety of brain sensations or tones might then be caused in the head of the deaf mute as to make it possible to establish a system of sound signals, so to speak, which would be the equivalent of ordinary language? Indeed, is it not possible that the deaf mute might actually hear spoken words?

Professor Bell's experiments upon himself have been so encouraging as to make him disposed to try more complete experiments in the same line upon persons who have lost all sense of hearing, and who would doubtless be willing to take the inevitable risk for the sake of the great blessing which a successful issue would bring to them.

We talked a long time about these strange fancies, and finally I said to Professor Bell:

"But on this principle of brain tickling, what is to prevent a blind man from seeing by electricity?"

"I do not know that there is anything to prevent it."

FROM TENNYSON'S "LOCKSLEY HALL".

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm, With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

So I triumph'd ere my passion sweeping thro' me left me dry, Left me with the palsied heart, and left me with the jaundiced eye;

Eye, to which all order festers, all things here are out of joint: Science moves, but slowly slowly, creeping on from point to point:

Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion creeping nigher, Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire.

Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns.

A DAY WITH GLADSTONE

FROM THE MORNING AT HAWARDEN TO THE EVENING AT THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.

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