unloading a carload of freight there.

"These blows on his ears were the cause of the inventor's life-long
deafness. But there never was a gamer sport than Thomas A. Edison. Once,
long after this, he saw the labor of years and the outlay of at least
two million dollars at the seashore washed away in a single night by a
sudden storm. He only laughed and said that was 'spilt milk, not worth
crying over.' Disappointments of that sort were 'the fortunes of war' or
'all for the best' to him. The injury so unjustly inflicted on him by
that irate conductor was not a defect to him. Many years afterwards he
said:

"'This deafness has been of great advantage to me in various ways. When
in a telegraph office I could hear only the instrument directly on the
table at which I sat, and, unlike the other operators, I was not
bothered by the other instruments.

"'Again, in experimenting on the telephone, I had to improve the
transmitter so that I could hear it. This made the telephone commercial,
as the magneto telephone receiver of Bell was too weak to be used as a
transmitter commercially.'

"It was the same with the phonograph. The great defect of that
instrument was the rendering of the overtones in music and the hissing
consonants in speech. Edison worked over one year, twenty hours a day,
Sundays and all, to get the word 'specie' perfectly recorded and
reproduced on the phonograph. When this was done, he knew that
everything else could be done,--which was a fact.

"'Again,' Edison resumed, 'my nerves have been preserved intact.