THOMAS EDISON'S ASSISTANT RECALLS WORKING WITH THE GREAT INVENTOR

Matt Fultz, 12; Kia Woodson, 12; Lisa Schubert, 11; Tim Ward, 13

If it wasn't for Robert Halgrim, sneakers couldn't jump, pencils couldn't erase and basketballs couldn't bounce. Children would play ball barefoot and writings would go uncorrected.

Halgrim, under the direction of Thomas Alva Edison, helped invent synthetic rubber, the substance that makes these things possible.

Children's Express interviewed Halgrim by phone at Edison's Winter House Museum in Fort Myers, Fla., where he lives.

Halgrim began working for Edison when he was in high school. Following his public education, he attended Cornell University (in Ithaca, N.Y.), where he studied horticulture. Two years later, Halgrim put his knowledge to work, helping Edison create a formula for synthetic rubber.

Edison required his workers to spend long hours in the laboratory, Halgrim wrote. "When you were working on something, he would say, `You are going to stay there and work on it until you finish it.' Sometimes he would close the door and wouldn't let you go home at night. . . . We'd work from early morning till in the evening. He didn't pay very much; you weren't supposed to be working for money. He said he could hire all the people he wanted to to work for him just for the experience of working with him.

"(Edison) said he didn't hire people with too much education because he said they knew too many ways a thing wouldn't work. Edison said, `You give me a person who is willing to work and he and I will find a way to make it work. It's just a matter of working and finding the key to it.'

"I never really invented anything. Mr. Edison said he was going to do the thinking for the people that worked for him and he just wanted us to do what he told us to."

Although this routine might seem tiresome, Edison made life in the lab fun by playing practical jokes on his employees. Halgrim told us about an incident when Edison invited some men over for a Florida "beef steak" dinner:

"He sent me up on a shelf to get a belt, an old leather belt, and I got it down and he cut it up in strips and sent it across the street to the colored cook and she made it in a country-fried steak. He said he sat there and watched those people try to eat that belting for country fried steak and he got so tickled he had to leave."

Sometimes, though, the motives behind his jokes were serious. "I remember him taking the hands off the clock," Halgrim said. "Edison said time didn't mean anything. He said you worked and you worked and you worked, and when you got tired you rested a little bit and then you went back to work again."

The inspirations for Edison's inventions came as a result of small discoveries.

"Edison said that it's the little things that make the difference, not the big things," Halgrim said. "Edison stepped on a cat's tail one day and the cat hollered out the other end and he thought of what went through that cat, and he said it must be impulses.

"And from that he took a piece of wire and by striking one end of it at various strengths he could send four or five messages over the same wire at one time just by varying the impulses. This is the way he made the quadruple telegraph..

Edison was driven by the demands of the public, Halgrim said. "He said all he wanted out of this world was to make it a happier, more enjoyable and comfortable world for his fellow man to live in . . . He said . . . the phonograph was the most worthwhile thing he ever did and his favorite patent because he said it put music in your home. And he said music, next to religion, has done more to elevate man than anything since the birth of Christ."

Even though Edison is considered one of the most brilliant inventors of our time, Halgrim said none of Edison's inventions was ever done without error.

"Edison used to say that anything you have the mental capacity to conceive, you've got the physical ability to produce. It's just whether you'll apply yourself and work hard enough and sacrifice yourself to produce it. He said there is no such thing as an impossibility. And, he said the failure could only be a finger pulse pointing towards success. He said to follow your mistakes _ learn from them."