Word: edisonizing
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Thomas Alva Edison, intimate friend of Henry Ford and Harvey Samuel Firestone, spoke last week of another friend: "He was the most remarkable business man I have ever known...
...Inventor Edison referred to was Charles Albert Coffin, who founded the General Electric Co. (1892), who sold new uses for electricity, who in less than half his own lifetime helped considerably to change the character of civilization. Last week, at the age of 81, he died of pneumonia, after four years of retirement from business. By 1883, the year Charles Albert Coffin turned from his profitable manufacturing of shoes at Lynn, Mass., to the manufacturing of electrical equipment, electricity was in little practical use. Samuel Finley Breese Morse (1791-1872) had shown in 1844 that it could be used...
...Coffin negotiated the merger of his Thomson-Houston Electric Co. of Lynn, Mass., with the Edison General Electric Co. of Schenectady, which J. P. Morgan had casually financed to manufacture power machinery. The new General Electric Co. which absorbed them (and, soon after, several other competitive and related firms) covered their entire field. Mr. Coffin, perspicacious of the industry's future, obtained control; made himself president. He was able to do this because he was in many respects as adroit a financier as Mr. Morgan and because Mr. Morgan never had a flair for young industries. Besides...
...compelling electricity to take us to the city. Hereafter we shall simply touch a button and have it take the city out to us." He was the applier of electricity, but, when asked what it was, he said: "I can't tell you. I had to ask Mr. Edison, but he didn't know. He said there were only two things in the world and electricity was the other one. One is matter. The other is this unknown something which makes matter move...
Fired with the enthusiasm of his fetish, mechanics, Thomas Alva Edison recently refused to have his portrait painted on the grounds: "Everything in this world should be done by machinery and measurement," and anything made without the accuracy of mechanism is "not really very good". This was reported last week by Sir John Lavery, fashionable British painter who has done Mrs. Edison...