Kankakee Valley Post, Volume 1, Number 14, DeMotte, Jasper County, 27 October 1932 — Edison’s Vivid Story Almost Won Believers [ARTICLE]

Edison’s Vivid Story Almost Won Believers

Mr. Edison was keeping us alert (in his laboratory) by telling one good story after another. We were talking about mental concentration, and he brought up a remarkable instance from his own experience. “You know,” he said, “when I was a young fellow I used to be a telegraph operator. I was a pretty fast worker in those days; and to work real fast you gotta keep your mind on just what you’re doin’ and forgit everything else. "Well, one night a number of messages came over the wire, and I received them as fast as they ticked in. All at once I hear the newsboys in the streets hollering an extra and a lot of commotion and excitement going on. I ran out to see what’d happened and I hear, ‘President Lincoln assassinated!' I asked how they’d got the news. A man said: ‘You d—n fool, didn’t you just git the message yourself?’ “True enough, I had received the message a while earlier, but I had never got its meaning. My mind must have been glued pretty fast to my work for me to have missed the meaning of such a message!” He had told the story so vividly that we believed it to be an actual experience.--M. A. Rosanoff in Harper’s Magazine.