Page:The Wreck of a World - Grove - 1890.djvu/27

Rh , and did not extend itself to matters outside his own domain. The celebrated Edison was the first to show what valuable results might be obtained by devoting that singular faculty which may be called adaptiveness to employ itself exclusively in invention. Thousands of valuable hints had been thrown out, hundreds of clever devices patented, which fromfor [sic] one reason or another had never been brought to perfection. To examine the innate possibilities of these inventions, to bring the adaptive talent of the world to bear upon crude and incomplete designs, to combine A's ideas with B's, and adapt both to complete the valuable project bequeathed by C, and finally to concentrate the maximum of inventive ability in their own employment,—such was the grand device of the projector of the Yellow Creek Works. The result more than justified the design. Invention being reduced to a system, and the genius of one inventor no longer working in solitude, but assisting and supplying the deficiencies of every other, mechanical improvement advanced by leaps and bounds.

The speciality of the Yellow Creek Works, in which they were without rivals, was the invention