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Page 52
"I must talk with Edison," said the General. "Suppose you go to Baltimore
in the morning, Mr. Langston, with a note from me. It's only forty-five
minutes and--tell Mr. Edison that I will be greatly relieved if he will
return to Washington with you."
I had interviewed Thomas A. Edison on several occasions and gained his
confidence, so that he received me cordially the next morning in
Baltimore and, in deference to General Weaver's desire, agreed to run
down to Washington that afternoon, although he laughed at the idea of any
danger.
As we rode on the train the inventor talked freely of plans for defending
the national capital against General von Mackensen's army which, having
occupied Richmond, was moving up slowly through Virginia. It is a matter
of familiar history now that these plans provided for the use of liquid
chlorine against the invaders, this dangerous substance to be dropped
upon the advancing army from a fleet of powerful aeroplanes. Mr. Edison
seemed hopeful of the outcome.
He questioned me about Lemuel A. Widding and was interested to learn that
Widding was employed at the works of the Victor Talking Machine (Edison's
own invention) in Camden, N. J. His eyes brightened when I told him of
young Lemuel's thrilling act at Wanamaker's Philadelphia store which, as
I now explained, led to the meeting of the two inventors through the
efforts of Miss Ryerson.
"There's something queer about this," mused the famous electrician.
"Widding tells me he submitted his idea to the Navy Department over a
year ago. Think of that! An idea bigger than the submarine!"
"Is it possible?"
"No doubt of it. Widding's invention will change the condition of naval
warfare--it's bound to. I wouldn't give five cents for the German fleet
when we get this thing working. All we need is time.
"Mr. Langston, there are some big surprises ahead for the American people
and for the Germans," continued the inventor. "They say America is as
helpless as Belgium or China. I say nonsense. It's true that we have lost
our fleet and some of our big cities and that the Germans have three
armies on our soil, but the fine old qualities of American grit and
American resourcefulness are still here and we'll use 'em. If we can't
win battles in the old way, we'll find new ways.
"Listen to this, my friend. Have you heard of the Committee of
Twenty-one? No? Very few have. It's a body of rich and patriotic
Americans, big business men, who made up their minds, back in July, that
the government wasn't up to the job of saving this nation. So they
decided to save it themselves by business methods, efficiency methods.
There's a lot of nonsense talked about German efficiency. We'll show them
a few things about American efficiency. What made the United States the
greatest and richest country in the world? Was it German efficiency? What
gave the Standard Oil Company its world supremacy? Was it German
efficiency? It was the American brains of John D. Rockefeller, wasn't
it?"
"Is Mr. Rockefeller one of the Committee of Twenty-one?"
"Of course, he is, and so are Andrew Carnegie, James J. Hill, J. P.
Morgan, John Wanamaker, John H. Fahey, James B. Duke, Henry B. Joy,
Daniel B. Guggenheim, John D. Ryan, J. B. Widener, Emerson McMillin,
Philip D. Armour, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Elihu Root, George W. Perkins,
Asa G. Candler and two or three others, including myself.
"The Germans are getting over the idea that America is as helpless as
Belgium or China. Von Mackensen is going slow, holding back his army
because he doesn't know what we have up our sleeve at the Potomac. As
a matter of fact, we have mighty little except this liquid chlorine
and--well, we're having trouble with the steel containers and with the
releasing device."
"You mean the device that drops the containers from the aeroplanes?"
"That's it. We need time to perfect the thing. We've spread fake reports
about wonderful electric mines that will blow up a brigade, and that
helped some, and we delayed von Mackensen for two weeks south of
Fredericksburg by spreading lines of striped cheese-cloth, miles of it,
along a rugged valley. His aeroplane scouts couldn't make out what that
cheese-cloth was for; they thought it might be some new kind of
electrocution storage battery, so the whole army waited."
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