"Real Labor"

Into the study of Thomas Alva Edison at Llewellyn Park, N. J. last week walked Lieut. Richard T. Aldworth, U. S. A. retired, tall, solemn, redheaded director of Newark Airport. Three hours later he departed with fingers cramped from scribbling 25 pages of answers to the deaf inventor's questions; also with the knowledge that Inventor Edison proposes to attack the problem of flying in dirty weather. As preface to the interview Inventor Edison, who had summoned Lieut. Aldworth, piloted him across the room, read aloud to him the words on a brass plaque hanging on the wall: "There is no expedient a man will not resort to, to avoid the real labor of thinking." Then he added : "The aviation industry might take that as its motto." His questions clearly indicated that Inventor Edison has remained aware of the fundamental problems of flight, has not filled his head with every detail of development. Most serious to him is the danger of landing in fog. Said he : "Radio, at the present time, is a bit too delicate for fog work. It is subject to fluctuations and it may go out of condition. ... I personally prefer to work up something much more simple." The "something simple," it transpired, might be a rocket on which Mr. Edison was already experimenting. He has devised a day-or-night rocket to explode at 4,000 ft. and hoped to adjust the explosion to give an incoming pilot an accurate idea of the airport location and the height of the fogbank. Another line of experimentation, he suggested, might be a sound-signal to the fog-barred pilot, "a distinctive sound . . . which would cut through the noise of the motor and reach the aviator."

When Inventor Edison saw and applauded the Pitcairn-Cierva autogiro at Newark last September many guessed, because it was only his second visit to any airport, that he had little knowledge of aeronautics. But Thomas Edison, like Leonardo da Vinci, attacked the problem of aerodynamics early in his inventive career. About 1880 he devised an airplane engine powered by nitroglycerin. A roll of ordinary ticker-tape, turned into guncotton, was fed between two copper rolls into the cylinder and exploded electrically. But when the engine itself exploded and injured an assistant, Edison abandoned the project. In 1910 he secured a patent for a helicopter type, said to embody a number of tetrahedral (box) kites to be whirled about a vertical axis.

Mr. Edison has never flown but "might try it sometime with an old-timer who would not stunt." For stunting he sees no justification, "can't believe that it is as necessary as it is dangerous. If I had my way it would be barred." Suspicious, he would not even enter the cabin of an amphibian at Newark Airport to examine the controls on the ground.

Sharing her husband's newly-assumed patronage of smoky, foggy, Newark Airport, Mrs. Edison last week christened the first New York-Chicago passenger plane to take off from there (TIME, Dec. 1).

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