excluded from the home library, and Edison has all his life enjoyed
it, particularly the works of such writers as Victor Hugo, after whom,
because of his enthusiastic admiration--possibly also because of his
imagination--he was nicknamed by his fellow-operators, "Victor Hugo
Edison."

Electricity at that moment could have no allure for a youthful mind.
Crude telegraphy represented what was known of it practically, and about
that the books read by young Edison were not redundantly informational.
Even had that not been so, the inclinations of the boy barely ten years
old were toward chemistry, and fifty years later there is seen no change
of predilection. It sounds like heresy to say that Edison became an
electrician by chance, but it is the sober fact that to this pre-eminent
and brilliant leader in electrical achievement escape into the chemical
domain still has the aspect of a delightful truant holiday. One of
the earliest stories about his boyhood relates to the incident when
he induced a lad employed in the family to swallow a large quantity of
Seidlitz powders in the belief that the gases generated would enable
him to fly. The agonies of the victim attracted attention, and Edison's
mother marked her displeasure by an application of the switch kept
behind the old Seth Thomas "grandfather clock." The disastrous result
of this experiment did not discourage Edison at all, as he attributed
failure to the lad rather than to the motive power. In the cellar of
the Edison homestead young Alva soon accumulated a chemical outfit,
constituting the first in a long series of laboratories. The word
"laboratory" had always been associated with alchemists in the past,
but as with "filament" this untutored stripling applied an iconoclastic
practicability to it long before he realized the significance of the
new departure. Goethe, in his legend of Faust, shows the traditional
or conventional philosopher in his laboratory, an aged, tottering,