-Caveat Lector- from: http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/prometh1.htm <A HREF="http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/prometh1.htm">American Prometheus -*The American System</A> --[1b]-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Imperial Counterattack The European anti-republican aristocracy recoiled in shock and dismay at the possibility of American methods transforming the world, possibly ridding the world of oligarchs. Boston writers such as Henry Adams and the Transcendentalists, expressing their preference for earlier centuries, their revulsion at "crass materialism," put a gentle face on the Europeans' ugly hostility science, reason and rising living standards. The Americans would have to be stopped. A construction company named Credit Mobilier was set up in 1864 to expedite the building of the government-financed Union Pacific Railway. The chief organizer of this company was a very strange individual named George Francis Train, supposedly acting as an agent of Union Pacific Vice President T. C. Durant. The principal stockholder in Credit Mobilier was the banking firm of Levi Morton and Bliss. In the midst of the post-Civil War construction boom, "reformers" began circulating stories of corrupt acts between Credit Mobilier and the U.S. Congress. In 1872 the scandal resulted in a congressional inquiry. Some congressmen were censured, others, especially pro-development men such as James G. Blaine, were tarred with the corruption brush but exhonerated. From that point on government officials feared doing anything whatsoever on behalf of railroads and related industrialism. The reader may jujdge for himself if the notorious Credit Mobilier was deliberately concocted to brake the progress of American expansion, if he is given certain facts about the main players. We reproduce here a highly favorable biographical sketch of George Francis Train, who organized Credsit Mobilier: "...born in Boston ... 1829.... entered the counting house of Enoch Train & Co., shipping merchants of Boston, and at the age of twenty one he was placed in charge of a branch house in Liverpool....[In 1854 he] established in Melbourne, Australia, the house of George F. Train & Co., meanwhile visiting all parts of the orient [at this time the opium trade was the principal joint business of Boston and British merchants in the Far East].... During the celebrated Beecher-Tilton trial [in London during the U.S. Civil War he wrote attacks] defamatory of ...the church and society, and was imprisoned in the Tombs for six months for indecent writing, being finally released on the ground of harmless lunacy. At the time of organizing the Union Pacific Railroad Co., he remarked to D'Israeli, the Prime Minister of England, 'You go to India by your Suez Canal; I'll go home, build a railway across the continent, and beat you to the goal'. "True to his word, he broke ground at Omaha, Neb., for that vast enterprise, and rode in the first train on the complete railway....[Despite] foreclsure proceedings [against his Nebraska property]...his title was established...on the ground that, as he had been declared insane by another court, his property could not pass from him except at the instance of a legal guardian. Having been adjudged insane, however, he could not take legal occupancy of the property.... He never shakes hands, and for years he spoke to no adult, save from the lecture platform...[He was] promionent in the organization of the Credit Mobilier and Credit Forcier schemes...Lately he has written all his communications in what he terms 'psychic verse,' a style which is unique.... Always an agitator and orator, he is credited with having been one of the prime instigators of the Paris Commune of 1871...Mr Train died in ... 1904."[12] Meanwhile the principal owner of Credit Mobilier, who escaped with a reputation (among Anglophile historians) as spotless as the robotic Mr. Train, was the banking firm of Levi Morton and Bliss. The London office of Morton Bliss was headed by Sir John Rose, otherwise a representative of the British Foreign Office. In 1871 Sir John negotiated with the U.S.A. over American claims to damages for having had the U.S. merchant fleet sunk by British-built warships during the Civil War. Throughout the 1870's, Morton Bliss participated in the British banking syndicate along with Drexel-Morgan, Seligman and Belmont-Rothschild, blackmailing the U.S. government to pay off Civil War bonds in gold or face wholesale dumping of American securities. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ A Different Kind of Catholic Now we shall digress momentarily, to introduce the next participant in the imperial counterattack. There was in Philadelphia an important alternative, in the wide spectrum of what has passed for Roman Catholicism, to the tradition of Mathew Carey. It was the Catholicism of the Orders (some of them really predating Christianity, such as the Benedictines), as represented by the Drexels. Francis Martin Drexel was born in 1792 in the town of Dornbirn, province of Vorarlberg, in the western finger of Austria that borders on Germany, Lichtenstein and Switzerland. His father, a merchant, was an officer of the unsuccessful Tyrolese revolt against Napoleon's occupation of Austria in 1809. Drexel traveled into Switzerland and worked as a house and wagon painter. From Switzerland, as his base for five years, Drexel slipped into Paris, the enemy capital, for at least one several weeks visit. Upon the downfall of Napoleon late in 1814, Drexel returned to Austria. Francis Martin Drexel immediately painted a life-size portrait depicting the Hapsburg Emperor Francis kneeling in prayer together with Czar Alexander after their victory over Napoleon. This masterpiece was hung in a triumphal arch over the town, through which the Emperor rode. Drexel was presented to his beloved Emperor, who supposedly conversed with him about his painting abilities. Drexel left Austria for good the following February, 1815, and travelled to the United States, landing in Philadelphia-the very headquarters of the evil and dangerous republicans. He had left Austria just after the world was informed that America's second war with England was over. Now the New World would be challenged by the Holy Alliance of the Hapsburgs and the Russian Czar, with Britain playing its own anti-republican game in tandem. Francis M. Drexel established himself as a portrait painter in Philadelphia. In an autobiographical fragment, he complains that around 1824 he was the object of an organized libel campaign which destroyed his reputation. It appears that the attorney for his opponent, in the court case which resulted, was William John Duane, son of the William Duane who championed the freedom of Spanish America. (This younger Duane would several years later be appointed Treasury Secretary by President Andr�w Jackson, but would be fired after refusing to withdraw the government's deposits from the Bank of the United States.) All his friends being now suspicious of him -- in what particular way he does not specify -- Drexel was forced to depart the scene. He took ship to South America, where he travelled from 1826 to 1830 as a "portrait painter" for an astonishing variety of diplomatic, political, military and commercial dignitaries, including perhaps the entirety of the British Empire's agents on that continent. He managed to send $12,545 back to Philadelphia during this period. At one point Drexel was arrested in Peru on suspicion of being "the spy who spoke German and posed as an artist." Drexel was back in Philadelphia from 1830 to 1835, with little visible means of support. He then travelled in Mexico, during the Texas independence struggle, returning to Philadelphia in 1837. The Bank of the United States having been closed, there was a terrible financial panic that year ... and it was curiously enough precisely at this point that Herr Francis M. Drexel, our Austrian house painter-cum-intelligence officer, opened up his banking house. With its quite apparent foreign backing Drexel and Company prospered greatly, taking advantage of the wild gyrations of banknote values now that there was no longer any national U.S. currency. Enormous profits were made by Drexel during the 1857 panic, by identical methods. Francis M. Drexel died in 1863, run over by a Pennsylvania Railroad train; his sons Anthony J. Drexel and Joseph Drexel took over the family firm. The following year Anthony Drexel bought the Philadelphia Public Ledger newspaper. Early in 1871 Anthony Drexel met in London with his close ally, British banker Junius S. Morgan. They prepared a final strategy for the destruction of the Philadelphia republican industrialists. In May, 1871, Drexel invited J.S. Morgan's son John Pierpont Morgan, then stationed in New York, to visit him in Philadelphia.13 The new firm of "Drexel, Morgan & Co." was established-Drexel bought the corner of Broad and Wall Streets in New York and built there what became known as the House of Morgan. The new firm went to war right away. Jay Cooke's Northern Pacific Railroad operations had been slowed by congressional timidity in the face of the Credit Mobilier Scandal. Cooke's contracted bond salesmen in Europe-the houses of Rothschild, Baring and his own partner Hugh McCulloch-had somehow failed to sell any of his large denomination railroad bonds. Now Drexel's Philadelphia Ledger began shamelessly and relentlessly blasting Cooke as a bankrupt, as a bad investment risk. Drexel's campaign struck its target with explosive effect. Jay Cooke & Co. folded and closed its doors on Sept. 18, 1873. Within two days the Northern Pacific and most other American railroad construction halted. The new steel mills shut down, banks collapsed, stocks crashed. In this Panic of 1873, the Philadelphia industrialists were totally removed from the transcontinental railroad business. The overall pace of development in the American economy was never again to be recaptured. The goals of thick settlement along the western routes of transcontinental railroads were changed by the men who took over the lines. This is how the British Newcomen Society de- scribes what happened with the Drexel, Morgan firm during this dramatic transitional period: "By 1873, Drexel, Morgan & Co. achieved a major position in the distribution of U.S. Government bonds, a field that previously had practically been dominated by the Philadelphia banking firm of Jay Cooke. This was accomplished by working closely with Levi Morton's firm in New York, which was allied with the Rothschilds abroad. After Cooke was forced into bankruptcy by the Panic of 1873, the Drexel-Morgan firm held an unrivaled position in this field of finance. Morgan, within a few years of his admission as a partner, had become the dominant member of the firm. To the United States Treasury, he could now offer distribution facilities of demonstrated effectiveness represented by a combination of Drexel-Morgan capital, the machinery of J.S. Morgan & Co. in London, and Drexel Harjes & Co. in Paris, and he could also offer international distribution through Levi Morton and the Rothschild firm. "Foreign connections continued to be the cornerstone of Drexel-Morgan success and were to remain of major importance for many years to come, as long as Europe continued to provide capital for financing American development "[!] This account goes on to portray Drexel-Morgan as the great reorganizer of almost all American railways, ending "opportunism" and "chaos." The Drexel family had another great interest, in accordance with their Hapsburg orientation: they lavishly sponsored the establishment of the anti-industrial Benedictine order throughout the American midwest and among the Indians. Continuous financial warfare, culminating in the Drexel-Morgan induced Panic of 1873, destroyed the great Philadelphia organizing muscle of American industrial development. The Pennsylvania Railroad men were expelled from the board of the Union Pacific, and lost the Kansas Pacific and the Texas Pacific railroads as well. J. Edgar Thomson died under tremendous strain in 1874. The PRR thenceforth "knew its place," while Morgan and his allies took over and eventually dismantled the U.S. rail system. But three projects of the Philadelphia republicans survived the Panic and the 1870s foreign seizure of American credit facilities. The significance of these projects would reach to all future generations. The first was the inventive career of Thomas Edison. The second was the steelmaking of Andr�w Carnegie, which began in earnest at the very bottom of the depression of 1873. The third was the spectacular, bloody campaign of General William J. Palmer, Matias Romero, Carnegie, and their political ally James G. Blaine, to tie the development of the U.S.A. to that of Mexico and other hemispheric republics. General Palmer had sent his assistant Edward H. Johnson back from Colorado in 1871, to supervise the work of the new Automatic Telegraph Company, founded by Palmer and Josiah Reill, the Kansas Pacific treasurer. Johnson hired 24-year-old reputed genius Thomas Alva Edison, to improve or replace the telegraph equipment with which the Automatic hoped to compete against Western Union. The Palmer group learned a bitter lesson in 1873; through Edward H. Johnson in particular, the backing and guidance they would provide to Edison was to prove decisive. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Who Was Edison? The father of Thomas Edison, innkeeper Samuel Edison, Jr., was indicted for high treason against the British Crown, in absentia. In two and a half days, Sam Edison had run more than 80 miles through the forest, pursued by dogs and royal soldiers. He escaped from his native town of Vienna, Ontario, Canada, to safety across the U.S. border. Now Sam Edison and other "rebel leaders" were ordered to give themselves up to the colonial authorities for trial, to be executed or exiled to Tasmania. But Sam stayed in the Detroit area for some time, early in 1838, working with the Canadian republican movement across the border. Canadian patriots in predominantly French-speaking Quebec, known then as Lower Canada, and English-speaking Ontario, known as Upper Canada, had demanded self-rule from the British government. The Speaker of the Assembly in Lower Canada, Louis Joseph Papineau, had defined the aims of the movement in Ninety-Two Resolutions sent as a petition to King William IV in 1834: break up the oligarchy of speculative landholders who stopped impoverished Canadians from owning land; secure the rights of the Canadians to republican institutions as the United States had won them. [14] Papineau was a Roman Catholic in the mold of the Lafayette international movement, as was Mexico's Benito Juarez-he held that Christianity must be the moral bedrock of the state, and, not contradictorily, that priests must have no political power. Lord John Russell, Bertrand Russell's grandfather, had answered the Ninety-Two Resolutions with Ten Resolutions on behalf of the British government -- the Canadians, said Russell, had no rights; they were, after all, subjects. Papineau's demands were echoed by republican parliamentarian William Lyon Mackenzie in Upper Canada. Despite British tactics of pitting the Canadian co- lonials against each other on language and religious lines, republicanism had developed strongly in the two sections. Canadian patriots looked to nationhood, independent or in combination with the U.S.A. But agent provocateurs thrust themselves forward. Staged riots and military clashes gave the new Queen Victoria's forces pretexts for attacking the unprepared, unarmed republicans, arresting their leaders and executing many. Papineau and Mackensie fled to the United States. Sam Edison had been a patriot political leader in Ontario, who was training and drilling a citizen militia when the 1837 Rebellion broke out on British terms. Sam moved on from Michigan to Milan, Ohio, where his son Thomas Alva Edison was born in 1847. Sam, skilled in several lines of mechanical labor, introduced his son to the power of machines, and taught him to read serious literature. Sam's favorite historical figure was Tom Paine, General George Washington's pamphleteer in the American Revolution. Reading with his father, Thomas Edison made Tom Paine a sort of model for his own life-for Paine was an inventor as well as a statesman, an engineer who built America's first iron bridges. In recent decades only one "sympathetic" biography of Thomas Edison has appeared, written by Matthew Josephson, otherwise the author of The Robber Barons. Josephson, a socialist with a preference for aristocratic Anglo financiers like J.P. Morgan who could impose "order" on "disorderly" capitalism, lies ruthlessly about political questions. He reiterates, without a shred of evidence, that Thomas Edison hated his father, that his father had no influence over him. Josephson says "several years after" Thomas Edison's marriage on Dee. 25, 1871, Edison "happened to write" to his father asking him to come to New Jersey to live with Thomas and his wife. But on at least two occasions less than a month after this marriage, Jan. 6 and 14, 1872, Samuel Edison signed as a witness for some of Thomas's early inventions. [15] Sam Edison lived until 1896, to the age of 92, remaining sharply political all his life. He worked with Thomas Edison in many capacities into the 1890s, through the most important period of the inventor's life. Sam despised Wall Street, as did his son. Josephson, an expert in American financial history, deliberately misidentifies the Philadelphia-based owners of the Automatic Telegraph Company as agents "of the sinister Jay Gould" -- a Wall Street high-roller who was at war with Palmer and his associates. Other Edison biographies are worse, painstakingly separating the inventor from any particular social outlook or purpose. A celebrated recent book entitled a Streak of Luck 16 portrays him as a kook, whose success was due in great measure to luck. The author does however briefly mention the "anti-Wall Street" Philadelphia financial group. Edison's contract with General Palmer's Automatic Telegraph Company gave him the wherewithal to work, and to bargain with their richer competitor Western Union for occasional other work without being owned by them. Western Union bought inventions only in order to silence a potential challenge to their communications monopoly, and suppressed or deployed them as necessary. The basic technical problem was that only one message at a time could be sent across a single set of very expensive poles and wire. Edison's first great assignment was to perfect a system whereby two, and then several messages could go simultaneously over the same wire. To develop his "quadruplex," Thomas Edison explored from scratch the geometry of electric current. His inventiveness began with his questions-what kind of work was nature prepared to do to transform itself on our behalf? When the Automatic Telegraph Company gave him $40,000, Edison spent it in a flash for experimental equipment, and for books on all previous experiments in automatic telegraphy and automatic mechanisms. Edward Johnson described him sitting "with a pile of chemical books that were five feet high when laid one upon another. He had ordered them from New York, London and Paris. He studied them night and day. He ate at his desk and slept in a chair. In six weeks he had gone through the books, written a volume of abstracts, made two thousand experiments ... and produced a solution, the only one that could do the thing he wanted." [17] Hardly "luck"! Financier Jay Gould bought out and took over the Automatic Telegraph Company in 1873-after Edison had done the magnificent work to create the quadruplex. Western Union and Gould's Automatic then pulled Edison back and forth. But Edward H. Johnson stayed by his side, as Edison's chosen executive versus the Wall Street sharks, and General Palmer's agent in England, Col. George Gouraud, represented Edison as well. Here are a few capsule portraits of the sharks, who were rapidly taking over the entire U.S. economy. �Jay Gould's telegraph executive, Thomas T. Eckert: He was placed by Secretary of War Stanton in charge of the Union telegraph office, some time after that office was started by Andr�w Carnegie. On April 14,1865, President Lincoln, finding him- self short of protection for his planned visit to the theater that night, asked Stanton to give him the burly Eckert as a bodyguard. Stanton said no, he would need Eckert for telegraph business; this, it has been demonstrated, [17] was not in fact true. Lincoln, not satisfied, went to Thomas Eckert himself and asked him point blank to escort him to the theatre. Eckert said no, he would be too busy. That night the unprotected Lincoln was murdered. Stanton, working through the New York Times, immediately launched a furious attack on General William T. Sherman as a "traitor," and cancelled the Lincoln-Sherman plan for a postwar reconciliation with the South. After Gould's telegraph interests were merged with Western Union, Eckert rose to become Chairman of the Board of Western Union. �Tracy Edson, Vice President of Western Union, the man who introduced Edison to that Company and who "handled Edison's case": During the Civil War, Edson was president of the American Bank Note Company. While still executing his prewar contract to print U.S. treasury notes, he printed Confederate banknotes and bonds on the order of Gazaway Bugg Lamar, chief Confederate agent in New York. He was never jailed, and remained a director of American Banknote until 1876, employing as his postwar president Albert Goodall, the personal freemasonic representative of Britain's Prince Edward VII. �"Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, after 1871 the co-controller of Western Union with J.P. Morgan: Vanderbilt's Accessory Transit steamship company equipped and transported soldier of fortune William Walker to Central America in 1855. Walker declared himself dictator of Nicaragua, rein- stated slavery and called for European colonial protection against the United States. When he also stole Vanderbilt's boats, the Commodore subsidized a general war in the region which killed over ten thousand people, overthrowing Walker and recovering his boats. It is probably significant that Augustus Schell was the postwar legal advisor for Vanderbilt's companies, Augustus' brother Richard Schell was the financial adviser, and his other brother Frederic Schell was Vanderbilt's stock broker. Augustus Schell had been the political boss of the secessionist wing of the New York Democratic Party, before and during the Civil War. He was the national chairman of the Breckenridge-secessionist Democrats in 1860. As Collector of the Port of New York in charge of U.S. customs there from 1858 to 1860, Schell oversaw the reopening of the negro slave trade; approximately one hundred slave ships per year embarked from New York for Africa under his protection. Schell was never arrested-he replaced the pro-Union "Boss" Tweed as head of New York City's Democratic Party after a New York Times expose campaign destroyed Tweed. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sound and Light Thomas Edison severed his relations with the Gould-Controlled Automatic Telegraph Company in 1875. The following year, Canadian republican Sam Edison, Jr., aged 72 years, supervised the construction of a new type of laboratory for his son. With Philadelphian Edward Johnson as his chief executive assistant, Thomas Edison occupied his new "invention factory." Alexander Graham Bell, backed by Boston opium czar John Murray Forbes, had invented a toylike telephone device. It was somewhat better than two cans on a string, and could be used with difficulty over a short distance. Edison went to work with his own chosen and trained staff to perfect the telephone. Around 1877 he invented the carbon microphone, and his transmitter translated sound into electrical signals and back again. He had made the telephone practical. Edison now set out to flank the Boston-Wall St.backed Bell Company; Mr. Bell himself had dropped out, having lost interest in inventing after his toy came out. The Edison Telephone Company of Great Britain was created with the help of General Palmer's London agent Col. Gouraud, and Edison's business manager Edward Johnson. With his own factory-based library as a physics and chemistry school, he trained mechanics who would know his devices so thoroughly they could put them together under any conditions. A man applying for a job with Edison was told, "People ask what we pay and how long you have to work. Well, we don't pay anything and you have to work all the time;" the man enthusiatically responded, "I'll take it!" George Bernard Shaw, then aged 23, happened to be hired by the Edison Co. in its race to install British telephones. Shaw wrote with a mixture of awe and fear about the invasion of Edison's technical cadres: "These deluded and romantic men gave me a glimpse of the skilled proletariat of the United States.... They worked with a ferocious energy which was all out of proportion to the result achieved. Indomitably resolved to assert their republican manhood by taking no orders from a tallhatted Englishman [with] his conviction that they were ... inferior and common persons, they insisted on being slave-driven with genuine American oaths by a genuine free and equal American foreman. They utterly despised the artfully slow British workman who did as little for his wages as he possibly could ... [but who] had a deep reverence for anyone whose pocket could be tapped by respectful behavior. They adored Mr. Edison as the greatest man of all time ... in science, art and philo sophy, and execrated Mr. Graham Bell ... as his Satanic adversary.... They were free-souled creatures ... with an air of making old England hum which never left them...." [19] With what the world then acknowledged as the Bell-Edison telephone going to market, Edison asked the question, What if you call someone, and he is not in? The voice must be somehow preserved-the principle of the telephone answering machine. So he invented the phonograph. In December 1877, his Swiss-German machine builder John Kreusi made the device according to the in- ventor's specifications, after immense labor by Edison and his workers. Edison recited "Mary had a little lamb" into the thing, and his very voice came back, prompting a frightened German oath from Kreusi, and startling Edison -- "I was always suspicious of anything that worked perfectly the first time." Edison had been partially deaf since age twelve. But he trained his concentration so that he could hear the entire musical overtone series, and was able to perfect his phonograph. He loved Beethoven and hated Wagner, but in the early days he was actually against using the phonograph for music. Since his instrument could not reproduce a really beautiful sound, he was afraid it would only be used for bad popular entertainment, and preferred its limitation to education and business purposes. As soon as the phonograph was tested successfully, Edison put on a demonstration for members of Congress at the home of James G. Blaine's niece in Washington. Edison's fame now spread quickly throughout the world. Jumping at his opportunity, Edison immediately escalated. He announced to the press that he planned to electrify the major cities, supplying power to heat and light homes and businesses, to run electric elevators and trains, to power industrial machines. None of the processes that he described existed; there was no important manmade electricity except that from batteries. Over the next months, he drove himself and his staff to create the means for industrializing and civilizing the world. It was to be a contest with nature, and with Wall Street, which Edison and the world won. To be continued ------------------------------------------------------------------------ FOOTNOTES 1.Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, translated by Herbert Weir Smith, Harvard University Press, 197j, p. 237-239. 2.Plato, Protagoras, translated by W.K.C. Guthyie, in The Complete Dialogues of Plato, Princeton University Press, 1973, 321 c-e, p. 319. 3.Badeau, Adam, Grant in Peace: From Appomattox to Mount McGregor, A Personal Memoir; Books for Libraries Press,19?? 4.New York Times, editorial, July 2,18 67. 5.New York Times, editorial, Dec. 26, 1860. 6.Lewis, Lloyd, Sherman: Fighting Prophet, Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1932, p. 595-599. Lincoln, Grant and Sherman had met at City Point, Virginia, to plan the peaceful reunion of the seceded states, the first step toward Lincoln's plan for southern railroad and industry building. But Lincoln was murdered almost immediately after this meeting, and the New York-Boston axis worked in tandem with the old southern aristocracy to keep the south rural and backward. 7.Quoted in Fisher, John S., A Builder of the West: The Life of General William Jackson Palmer, The Caxton Printers, Caldwell, Idaho, 1939, D . 46. 8.Colorado Springs Gazette, Sunday, March 14, 1909. 9.Elder, William, "How the Debt May be Paid -- the Wealth, Resources and the Power of the People of the United States," and "How Our National Debt May Be A National Blessing." 10.Quoted in Fisher, p. 200. 11.These are government figures presented in Guetter, Fred J. and McKinley, Albert E., Statistical Tables Relating to The Economic Growth of the United States, McKinley Publishing Co., Philadelphia, 1924. 12.The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, James T. White and Co., New York, 1921. 13.John Pierpont Morgan, then 34 years old, was the maternal grandson and reverencer of poet- preacher John Pierpont, who had been Aaron Burr's employee and family tutor between Burr's killing of Alexander Hamilton and his mercenary war on Louisiana. 14.The 92 Resolutions were reproduced from original documents, without charge and at great speed, by the staff of the Canadian National Archives and Library in Ottawa. Written in English and French, they have apparently never been published, at least not in English. 15.See Thomas Edison's notebooks, on microfilm at the Edison National Historic Site, West Orange, New Jersey. 16.Conot, Robert, A Streak of Luck: The Life & Legend of Thomas Alva Edison, Seaview Books, New York, 1979. 17.Quoted in Josephson, Matthew, Edison, McGraw Hill Book Company, New York, 1959, p. 94. 18.Eisenschiml, Otto, Why Was Lincoln Murdered?, Halcyon House, New York, 1939, p. 32-39. 19.Shaw, George Bernard, The Irrational Knot, preface, quoted in Josephson, Edison, p. 154-55. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Top of PageThe American SystemSite MapOverview Page ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The preceding article is a rough version of the article that appeared in The American Almanac. It is made available here with the permission of The New Federalist Newspaper. 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