My Husband, Edison

In its previous issues, The Woman's Voice presented delightful talks by certain ladies of Lebanese high society about their husbands; and it is well that it should present the opinions of some Western ladies of their hard-working husbands. Here is Mrs. Edison, wife of the great American inventor, speaking of her husband:

The works my husband performed are distinguished by being works of visible aspect and tangible effect. The electric lamp, the phonograph, the moving-picture apparatus — these, and a hundred inventions like them, are the living, palpable witness to his towering genius.

I am well aware — like all people in every corner of the world — of the value of these works his genius devised; but when I look at them with the eye of the wife who was, for forty-six years, the person closest to him, I see that this genius was not the first of his gifts: it comes in the second rank, after his personal qualities and virtues. Truly, it is hard for a woman to esteem and revere a man — whatever his genius and his glory — if at home he is a coarse person, or a dull one, or a trivial one, or a selfish one.

If I were asked, 'What thing in your husband had the strongest effect upon you?' I should find it hard to hit on an answer that convinced and satisfied me. But the thoughts that would then pass through my mind would in no case be about his inventions and scientific discoveries. I would think rather that my husband was a generous man, open-hearted, wide in understanding, with a merry, jesting, gentle spirit. And I remember that in his fatherhood he was neither a man of science nor a captain of industry, but his children's friend.

I would think of all this; yet one quality still stands out in my memory, fifteen years after his death: that he was the most impatient and restless of men — and the most patient and enduring of them!

He had no patience with 'time'; he plundered it. He worked hard and without pause, as though he wished to work more than sixty minutes in the hour and more than twenty-four hours in the day. He hated to have the solution of a scientific problem escape him and cost him a single week to no purpose — though he would spend months, and sometimes years, before finding his way to one of science's secrets. But this spirit, so cramped by time and so hating its loss, did not keep him from being long-suffering and beautifully patient with those who lived with him.

I shall always remember him as husband and father...
and only after that shall I remember him as scientist and inventor.