What is this d-mnable material? Perhaps it’s the dust from the dry literary matter I’ve crowded into my noddle lately. Powerful itching of my head, lots of white dry dandruff. A sort of Raphaelized beauty, got into it too deep, mind flew away and I went to sleep again.Īwakened at 8:15 AM. Took Mina as a basis, tried to improve her beauty by discarding and adding certain features borrowed from Daisy and Mamma G. Put all 3 in my mental kaleidoscope to obtain a new combination a la Galton. Turned my back to them and tried to take another dip into oblivion.

My eyes were embarrassed by the sunbeams. Runes has but one “down.”Īwakened at 5:15 AM. For example, where Edison writes “down down to the uttermost depths” (clearly the repetition is intentional) Mr. It is superior to the version in The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Edison, edited by Dagobert Runes. Pagination follows the original book, though its pages were unnumbered. Each page number links to a photograph of that page in the original diary. An underline or dash in place of letters is Edison’s. He also mentions Louise Igoe, another marriageable option though apparently she is more interested in Mina’s brother.Įditing has been confined to correcting a few misspelled words, separating text into paragraphs when a new subject is introduced and adding punctuation where necessary. Gilliland, or “Mamma G” as he calls her in the Diary, introduced him to Mina Miller sometime before the vacation. Some months earlier Edison had asked Gilliland’s wife to introduce him to marriageable girls. Damon now, that is, at the time of the Diary, works for the Bell Telephone Company, which had purchased Edison’s patents on improvements to the telephone. Ezra Gilliland is a friend of Edison’s from his youthful telegraph operator days, when they were known respectively as Damon and Pythias (as in the Roman legend) because of their close friendship. The vacation is mostly at Ezra Gilliland’s rented summer seashore retreat called Woodside Villa, near Winthrop, Massachusetts, on Boston Harbor. He has already invented the phonograph (though not yet developed it commercially) and his light and power distribution system. At this time in his life he is a widower with three children, and looking for a wife. The diary is almost completely unscientific, much of it whimsical or describing the mundane in purposely grandiloquent language. This webpage presents the complete text of the diary transcribed from a facsimile of the original.Įdison was 38 at the time and the vacation was his first sustained break from work in 26 years. Thomas Edison kept a diary while on vacation during the summer of 1885.

The Diary of Thomas Edison << Various and Sundry

Edison bust bank