Meeting Thomas Edison
Fresh out of college, William Hand describes his first encounter with famed inventor Thomas Edison.
You can listen to the entire interview at Hudson River Valley Heritage.
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This story has been condensed and edited from a longer interview.
Interviewee: William Hand
Recorded: 1974
Time Period: 1920
Subjects: Notable Personalities, William Hand, Thomas Edison
Collection: Nyack Library
Credits: Library of Congress, Nyack Library Local History Room and The Rediscover the Nyacks Committee of the Friends of the Nyacks
Produced by: Joseph Barbieri
Funded by: Institute of Museum and Library Services
Some Rights Reserved: This production including audio, text, and images, may be used for educational and research purposes as long as it is not altered in any way and is credited to The Nyack Library Local History Room.
Transcript:
And I saw in the New York Times an advertisement stating that a manufacturer was taking on college men, I followed through with that and found out it was Edison in West Orange. He gave us a test, 350 questions, which took several hours; 34 members of colleges and universities were taking the examination, and each one was taken down and shook hands with the old gentleman in the library, and was the last one. And he said “I see you know your physics, your chemistry, and your mathematics, but you’re a hell of a historian.” He said “This word here, s-k” which ends in “s-k-y,” I recognized it as a Russian word, but I didn’t know anything about it. And I wrote him a story about a Russian prince who murdered his grandmother to get her gold teeth or something of the kind. And he said “You damn fool, that’s a Russian river, you ought to know that!” He said uh, “You graduated in June, where have you been working?” Well, I was there to get a good job, and I didn’t want to tell him the truth, I said I had been working on my father’s estate. Well, he put my paper down and he looked at me, and he said “Looking at you it’s a wonder your old man had an estate!” [Laughs] I was the only one of the 34 that got the job.
