"From a mere salaried operator to forty thousand dollars in a lump sum
for expert work was quite a jump.
"The forty thousand dollars, however, did not turn Mr. Edison's head as
has been the effect of sudden wealth on many a good-sized but smaller
minded man.
"He used it as a fund to start a plant and hire expert men to experiment
and work out the inventions which came to him so fast in his ceaseless
work and study. He could get along with as little sleep as Napoleon is
said to have required when a mighty battle was on. Edison could lie down
on a settee or table and sleep just as the Little Corporal did even
while cannon were booming all around him.
"There was something Napoleonic, also, about Edison's intensity of
application and his masterfulness in his gigantic undertakings. If
genius is the ability to take great pains, Thomas A. Edison is the
greatest genius in the world to-day--if not in all history.
"Sometimes, as Napoleon did with his chief generals before a decisive
engagement, Edison would shut himself up with his confidential
coworkers. Sometimes he and they would neither eat nor sleep till they
had fought out a problem of greater importance to the world than even
Napoleon's crossing the Alps or the decisive battle of Austerlitz. But,
though he began to work on a large scale, young Edison's financial
facilities were of the crudest and simplest.
"Almost all of his men were on piece-work, and he allowed them to make
good salaries.
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