Mrs. Edison occasionally sends meals down for the Wizard when he is on the trail of a thought and does not want to take time to go home.

One day the dinner arrived when Edison was just putting salt on the tail of an idea.  There was no time to eat, but it occurred to the inventor that if he would just quit thinking for ten minutes and sleep, he could awaken with enough brain-power to throw the lariat successfully.  So he just leaned back, put his feet in the other chair and went to sleep.

The General Manager came in and saw the dinner on the table and Edison sleeping, so he just sat down and began to eat the dinner.  He ate it all, and tiptoed out.

Edison slept twenty minutes, awoke, looked at the empty dishes, pulled down his vest, took out his regular after-dinner cigar, lighted it and smoked away in sweet satisfaction, fully believing that he had had his dinner; and even after the General Manager had come in and offered to bet him a dollar he hadn’t, he was still of the same mind.

This spirit of sly joking fills the place, set afloat by the master himself.  Edison dearly loves a joke, and will quit work any time to hear one.  It is the five minutes’ sleep and the good laugh that keep his brain from becoming a hotbox—­he gets his rest!

“When do you take your vacation, Mr. Edison?” a lady asked him.

“Election night every November,” was the reply.  And this is literally true, for on that night there is a special wire run into the Orange Clubhouse, and Edison takes the key and sits there until daylight taking the returns, writing them out carefully in that copperplate Western Union hand.  He is as careful about his handwriting now as if he were writing out train-orders.

“If I wanted to live a hundred years I would use neither tobacco nor coffee,” said Edison as we sat at lunch.  “But you see I’d rather get a little really good work done than live long and do nothing to speak of.  And so I spur what I am pleased to call my mind, at times with coffee and a good cigar—­just pass the matches, thank you!  Some day some fellow will invent a way of concentrating and storing up sunshine to use instead of this old, absurd Prometheus scheme of fire.  I’ll do the trick myself if some one else doesn’t get at it.  Why, that is all there is about my work in electricity—­you know, I never claimed to have invented electricity—­that is a campaign lie—­nail it!”

“Sunshine is spread out thin and so is electricity.  Perhaps they are the same, but we will take that up later.  Now the trick was, you see, to concentrate the juice and liberate it as you needed it.  The old-fashioned way inaugurated by Jove, of letting it off in a clap of thunder, is dangerous, disconcerting and wasteful.  It doesn’t fetch up anywhere.  My task was to subdivide the current and use it in a great number of little lights, and to do this I had to store it.  And we haven’t really found out how to store it yet and let it off real easy-like and cheap.  Why, we have just begun to commence to get ready to find out about electricity.  This scheme of combustion to get power makes me sick to think of—­it is so wasteful.  It is just the old, foolish Prometheus idea, and the father of Prometheus was a baboon.”