(See front cover)
The father, brethren and children of Electric Light will shortly begin celebrating handsomely its 50th anniversary.
The father, Thomas Alva Edison, will remain at his rubber experiments in Fort Myers, Fla., for the actual anniversary does not come until Oct. 21 and there are many things which Mr. Edison, aged 82, wants to crowd into his remaining years.
The brethren, members of the National Electric Light Association, were beginning last week to assemble in Atlantic City, N. J., for their annual convention and, incidentally, an electrical 75th birthday party for the city.
The children of Light—all U. S. citizens within reach of the beams of an incandescent bulb—will be included in the festivities by electrical galaxies on White Ways from Squeedunk to Broadway.
W. D'Arcy Ryan, who is to General Electric Co.'s light research what the late great Charles Proteus Steinmetz was to its studies in power, is charged with arranging electrical displays all over the U. S. for a summer-long continuation of the festivities.
Broadway was lately threatened with a momentary darkening of all its blazing electrical signs, as a gesture by the sign-owners to compel attention to the difference such signs make in a city's trade, night-life and general atmosphere. On Oct. 21, all the Broadways of the U. S. will be darkened at a concerted moment, and then brightened slowly to a crescendo of light such as they have seen never before. That will be the high moment of the Golden Jubilee. The dimming of the lights will have been signaled by a push-buttom from Inventor Edison seated once more in his old time laboratory, every stone and splinter of which has been moved from Menlo Park, N. J., to Dearborn, Mich.
Beginning next week and lasting all summer and autumn will be an open season for the publication and republication of Edison biography, anecdotes, photographs. Again and again will be told the U. S. folk-legend of the newsboy, born in Milan, Ohio, who built a great fame out of such invisibilities as electrical impulses, sound waves, ether vibrations.
Pending the full blaze of the Golden Jubilee, retrospective minds returned to years between the first spark of Edisonian genius and the visible glow of its social application. Between laboratory and layman stand innumerable middlemen, not the least important of whom are usually a few bankers. Inventor Edison at 35 was by no means financially ignorant. He understood that money, though social rather than "natural," is a force not unlike electricity, with sources and laws of its own. A respecter of such forces, he turned to financial experts in 1882, when it was time to incorporate the first Edison Electric Light Co.