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AT last the inventive genius of Edison has discovered a way by which Harvard students can reach Boston in five seconds, instead of half an hour. No longer will we have to wait in Boston for half-past cars. Impudent conductors will trouble us no more. Soon we will not be obliged to give up our seats to ladies entering the car at the railroad-crossing, nor shall we have the pleasure of riding in town seated next to the professor whose recitations we have been cutting for the past week.
It has been computed that Harvard College wastes three hundred hours daily in the horse-cars; think of the time that will be saved!
The popularity of Harvard will increase at once; so "the ferocity" may as well be prepared to receive fifteen hundred in the next Freshman class. In fact, Harvard will boom.
The following telegram was received by me last week: -
NEW YORK, Feb. 28.
To - - - - , Esq., Harvard University.
Sell "Electric Light" stock. I have given it up; it is an impossibility. Have a new invention. Come on immediately.
EDISON.The next morning found me in New York, closeted with Edison. He divulged to me his discovery in these words: "I have often thought how great a pity it is that you students are so inconvenienced by the street-car arrangement, and how much you lose by being so far from the literary air of Boston; so, when I learned that there was no chance of an elevated road to Boston, I decided to tell you of my invention. I propose to put a pneumatic tube underground from Cambridge to Boston.
"Now the Trustees of your University have promised to present me with the old Gymnasium, if I will agree to connect University and the Agassiz Museum with a telephone, and lay down plank walks in the Yard. I have agreed to do this, and so the entrance to the tube will be at the Gymnasium, and the exit at the billiard-room of Parker's. The modus operandi is as follows: You sit inside of the tube on a seat like those of the rowing-machines, a wad is placed at your back, and at a given signal a Yale man kicks the wad, and you are pitched forward at a rate that will bring you to Parker's in five seconds.
"The most difficult part is the stopping. When you reach Parker's you are shot out of the tube at a very rapid rate, and if there were nothing to check your velocity you would be dashed to pieces. This is obviated by having a proctor stand at the tube, not to catch, but only to retard you.
"The walls of the exit room are covered with feather-beds, and after rebounding against these a number of times, your speed slackens enough to allow you to catch hold of a strap and thus stop yourself. Then the man in charge telephones to the man at the Gymnasium to send on the next victim.
"The plan is hardly perfected as yet; but it is so simple, in comparison with my Electric Light, that I have given that idea up."
Edison's "Pneumatic Tube" stock will be placed on the stock-list of the Boston board in a few days. Here is a chance for all Harvard men to enrich themselves.
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