Ted Leinhart
speaker
251 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Ted Leinhart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
no when i have fully decided that a result is worth getting i go ahead on it and make trial after trial until it comes i have always kept continued mr edison strictly within the limits of commercially useful inventions i have never had any time to put on electrical wonders
valuable simply as novelties to catch the popular fancy and he named in distinction some noted electricians who had made their reputations through the pyrotechnics of the profession he hates a telephone what makes you work i asked with real curiosity
what impels you to this constant tireless struggle you have shown that you care comparatively nothing for the money it makes and you have no particular enthusiasm in the attending fame i like it he answered after a moment of puzzled expression and then he repeated his reply several times
as if mine was a proposition that had not occurred to him before i like it i don't know any other reason you know some people like to collect stamps anything i have begun is always on my mind and i am not easy while away from it until it is finished and then i hate it hate it i asked struck by his emphatic tones yes he affirmed
when it is all done and is a success i can't bear the sight of it i haven't used a telephone in ten years and i would go out of my way any day to miss an incandescent light the inventor versus the patent pirate
mr edison waxes eloquent and righteously indignant over the treatment which the inventor is only too apt to receive he thinks that it is flying in the face of providence to patent an important discovery for a race of professional sharks has arisen to dispute
with absolute disregard of facts priority of claim to valuable patents the better known the patentee the more liable are they to swarm about with suborned witnesses
he maintains that this works great injustice to the honest parties to a suit and that there is no protection in patents at all however i am glad to see that bradstreet rates your credit at three million dollars i remarked it did not come from my inventions he said quickly i never made money as a professional inventor what property i own has been accumulated since i began to do business and manufacture the machines in my own shop
that is the only hope of the inventor he will starve if he depends on his patents those who have been associated with mr edison add that he has been fleeced by unscrupulous lawyers and patent sharks so unmercifully that it is only to be wondered he has any faith left in mankind
this is surely a national shame when one remembers that his earnings have always been valued by him only as a means of furnishing laboratories to give the world newer and more wonderful mechanical servants and there is partial comfort in the thought that the great inventor has finally been able to surround himself
first at newark then at menlo park and now at orange with all the most elaborate paraphernalia of his magic with the most delicate and powerful instruments alike since mr edison has begun to pose as a capitalist he has broadened the borders of his phylacteries by considerable investments in the new jersey lands containing magnetic iron ore and has now quite a mining property not far from his workshop
he will practically found a new industry if his experiments in ore separating succeed, an attempt for new methods that will so reduce the work of extracting the ore from the dirt and stones as to bring on a paying basis numbers of mines that are now on the wrong side of the margin of profit.
near by in the orange mountains he has a pretty home presided over by a charming wife his second and three children of whom the oldest boy is beginning an apprenticeship in his father's work the estimate of a twenty years associate
Perhaps no one is in a position to give a truer estimate of the inventor as he appears beyond the threshold of his laboratory than Mr. Edward H. Johnson, who was associated with him in the disillusioning atmosphere of business for twenty years.
Mr. Johnson himself is a type of American which is a necessary complement to creative genius such as Edison's.
he has shown a masterly ability to comprehend the intricate problems of organizing and conducting the great companies by whose agency inventions such as the incandescent light and the phonograph could be brought to the people all over america
a work than which affairs of state themselves call for scarcely less breadth of view talent for combination and executive force he characterizes edison as genial and even frolicsome with a temperament which might even be called boyish
in the whole course of our connection says mr johnson and notwithstanding the many strains on his temper and the injustices which he suffered from unscrupulous business antagonists we have never had but one difference that was based on a pure misunderstanding and has long since died a natural death my association with him has been of the greatest profit and pleasure to me
our active friendship will end only with the death of one of us though our business relations have ceased in the course of the natural ramification of the electric light and power industries with which i became more intimately identified than did his other laboratory associates
he is a reluctant lion though mr edison is social in his nature even to the point of jollity he is thoroughly averse to the formulas of a conventional society can we expect men who work twenty hours a day to cultivate the more elaborate graces
Showing 141–160 of 251 · page 8 of 13
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