Summary

"Tom Edison's Shaggy Dog" portrays a story of a stranger in the park telling Harold Bullard a story of his childhood and how he hasn't worked since the age of nine. The stranger sets the date back to 1879 when the stranger thought a wizard moved next to him when he was a boy. The stranger tells Bullard that the wizard next door was Thomas Edison. Bullard being amazed at this story considering he thought Thomas Edison, creator of the lightbulb, was one of the greatest inventors to ever live, but the stranger just shrugged and didn't think much of it. The stranger just thought of Edison as any ordinary guy. The stranger continues the story on how Edison has this huge secret that he told the stranger he could never tell, even though he did, he told Bullard. This secret was a contraption that he called an Intelligence Analyzer. Edison's intelligence was marked on the machine in red marker, when the boy put it on he was far below Edison. Now, before the boy met Edison he was great friends with Edison's dog, Sparky, and the boy thought very highly of Sparky, so when he was done putting on the Analyzer, he asked Edison if they could put it on Sparky, as a joke, but when they put it on Sparky, the needle flew past Edison's mark which meant that Sparky's intelligence level must be higher than Edison's. This then goes into the story on how Sparky helped Edison with electricity and the light bulb, and that it was really Sparky who came up with the idea, Sparky, a dog, said to used carbonized cotten to create it. In Vonnegut's story he is telling us that a dog was talking to human beings maybe through words or some kind of sign language to help create one of the greatest inventions of all time.