Radio Boys Cronies, page 29 by Wayne Whipple
<< Return to Title Details & Download30
a suit of ermine. Proper stunt, too. Let me put it, Cora; I'll be the court crier. Come on and let's squat on the bank like the rest. Judge, you ought to be the most elevated. Now, then, here's the dope: Did Edison really ever do anything much to help with the war?"
"He did more than any other man," Bill declared promptly. "Positively! Everybody ought to know that. He invented a device so that they could smell a German submarine half a mile away, and they could tell when a torpedo was fired. Another invention turned a ship about with her prow facing the torpedo, so that it would be most likely to go plowing and not hit her, as it would with broadside on. I guess that saved many a ship and it helped to destroy lots of submarines with depth bombs. It got the Germans leery when their old submersibles failed to get in any licks and went out never to come back; it was as big a reason as any why they were so ready to quit. Well, who was right?"
"I was!" announced Cora, gleefully. "Terry just can't see any good in Edison at all. He says he hires people who really make his inventions and he gets the credit for them. He says--"
"I don't suppose it makes much difference what he says; he simply doesn't know what he's talk--"
"You think you know, but do you? You've read a lot of gush that--" Terry began, but Gus interrupted him, almost a new thing for the quiet chap.
"Listen, Terry: get right on this. Don't let a lot of foolish people influence you; people who can't ever see any real good in success and who blame everything on luck and crookedness. And Bill does know."
"Anybody who tries to make Edison out a small potato," declared Bill, addressing the others, rather than the supercilious youth who had maligned his hero, "is simply ignorant of the facts. My father knew a man well who worked for Edison in his laboratory for years. He said that the stories about Edison making use of the inventions of others is all nonsense; it is Edison who has the ideas and who starts his assistants