"PATIENCE AND PERSEVERANCE"

Half a century ago, an unknown inventor made a strange machine called the phonograph, and an amazed world of horse-cars and gas-lights heard itself speak. At once, this world acclaimed him the Great Wizard, and through ensuing years it watched with Elizabethan enthusiasm for his magical machines as one after another they emerged from Menlo Park. Either outright or in part, he gave to the seventies the telephone microphone, the phonograph, and the incandescent electric light; to the eighties, the trolley car and the dynamo; and to the 'nineties, the cinema. With the turn of the century he did not stop, though the rise of other inventors obscured the master of them all.

He had his own method; practice, not theory. No dilettante, he plunged into a project with sleeves rolled, working almost without rest for days and nights together until he made the lamp filament glow, until he made the phonograph talk. "Genius is nine-tenths perspiration," he believed.

To what an extent the present world owes its color and character to Thomas Alva Edison, the press of the world will bear witness today. He will be praised as a benefactor of all mankind, as one of the greatest of all Americans.