Harold Begbie, a British political journalist who wrote under the pseudonym 'Gentleman with a Duster', became interested through meeting a wounded Royal Flying Corps officer whom Buchman had helped. Begbie asked if he could write a book about Buchman and his friends, who at that time shunned publicity. Buchman agreed provided that the young men remained anonymous and he himself be referred to only by the initials F.B. 'The character of these men, some of them so brilliant in scholarship, others so splendid in athletics, and all of them, without one exception, so modest and so disturbingly honest, was responsible for my reawakened interest,' Begbie wrote. 'It was impossible in their company to doubt any longer that the man who had changed their lives, and had made them also changers of other men's lives, was a person of very considerable importance.'19

He described Buchman as 'a young-looking man of middle life, tall, upright, stoutish, clean-shaven, spectacled, with that mien of scrupulous, shampooed, and almost medical cleanness or freshness' so typical of Americans. 'His carriage and his gestures are distinguished by an invariable alertness. He never droops, he never slouches. You find him in the small hours of the morning with the same quickness of eye and the same athletic erectness of body which seem to bring a breeze into the breakfast-room. Few men so quiet and restrained exhale a spirit of such contagious well-being ... He strikes one on a first meeting as a warm-hearted and very happy man, who can never know what it is to be either physically tired or mentally bored. I am tempted to think that if Mr Pickwick had given birth to a son, and that son had emigrated in boyhood to America, he would have been not unlike this amiable and friendly surgeon of souls.'20

Begbie's book, Life Changers, appeared in 1923 and helped to increase interest in the doings of the mysterious F.B. His identity soon became known and later editions carried his name in full.

In January 1924 he took part in a drawing-room meeting at the home of Thomas Edison, the inventor of the electric lamp, in New Jersey. A nephew of Edison had encountered Buchman's work at Princeton, where he was studying, and the subsequent difference in him had caught Edison's attention. Edison had invited Buchman and Hamilton to visit him. It was a brilliant February night when they arrived at the front door through an avenue of snow. Edison answered their ring himself, stood looking up at the sky, and said to Buchman, 'Is Heaven lit up?'

'Sure,' said Buchman, 'that's been looked after long ago. You don't need to worry about that.'

Once inside, Edison, an agnostic, asked about his nephew's change, and then brought up the subject of divine guidance. 'It is through divine guidance that this miracle has happened to your nephew,' said Buchman.

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