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78 plied for one year, or the United States for three years, even with the natural increase in demand. Sixteen thousand acres, or twenty-five square miles of land, contain enough iron ore to keep the whole world supplied for seventeen years, allowing, of course, for all natural increase of demand due to the needs of a growing population. These acres would more than supply the United States with iron, even including necessary exports, for the next seventy years; and they contain more than has been mined heretofore in this country since its discovery."

Here was a remarkable condition. Smelting works shutting down for want of iron ore at low prices when billions of tons of it lay idle in a strip of land which in most places was within seventy-five miles of the great iron mills of the Atlantic coast. Mr. Edison saw an opportunity which would enable him, in his own words, "with modern methods and the application of modern science to machinery, to transform a product having no natural value into a product when mined which had a spot value on the car." The idea entailed no child's play in the final carrying out. Unless it could be carried out on a gigantic scale, it practically could not be carried out at all. To make the separation of this finely divided ore from its native rock on a scale equal to the need, the only scale commercially possible, it would be necessary to do the work at the rate of thousands of tons daily. This, at least, was Mr. Edison's judgment, and the comprehensive mind of the man is well shown in the manner in which he planned what has now developed into the most gigantic of enterprises. There was to be no hurry, no half-formed ideas, no untimely announcement of the great work to be done. Every cent which the inventor earned thereafter, and every year of his life, if necessary, were to be utilized in carrying the project to a perfect fulfillment. Discouragements and embarrassments of every nature would very likely be encountered, but these, being part of the history of every great achievement, must be taken quite as a matter of course. For them the end, fully accomplished, would more than compensate.

So while the public perhaps thought Mr. Edison to be resting upon the laurels won by the electric light, the kinetoscope, or the phonograph, his mind was really occupied with a busy little scene on a mountain top in New Jersey. A rude little building had been erected, and in it some trusted employees were engaged in breaking pieces of the rock from the surrounding hills, and, by the use of small electro-mag-