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Edison: His Life and Inventions

by Frank Lewis Dyer · English · Gutenberg #820 · 1,589,520 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Edison: His Life and Inventions

Author: Frank Lewis Dyer
        Thomas Commerford Martin


        
Release date: January 21, 2006 [eBook #820]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/820

Credits: Produced by Charles Keller and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EDISON: HIS LIFE AND INVENTIONS ***




Produced by Charles Keller and David Widger





EDISON HIS LIFE AND INVENTIONS

By Frank Lewis Dyer

General Counsel For The Edison Laboratory And Allied Interests

And

Thomas Commerford Martin

Ex-President Of The American Institute Of Electrical Engineers



CONTENTS

     INTRODUCTION
     I.        THE AGE OF ELECTRICITY
     II.       EDISON'S PEDIGREE
     III.      BOYHOOD AT PORT HURON, MICHIGAN
     IV.       THE YOUNG TELEGRAPH OPERATOR
     V.        ARDUOUS YEARS IN THE CENTRAL WEST
     VI.       WORK AND INVENTION IN BOSTON
     VII.      THE STOCK TICKER
     VIII.     AUTOMATIC, DUPLEX, AND QUADRUPLEX TELEGRAPHY
     IX.       THE TELEPHONE, MOTOGRAPH, AND MICROPHONE
     X.        THE PHONOGRAPH
     XI.       THE INVENTION OF THE INCANDESCENT LAMP
     XII.      MEMORIES OF MENLO PARK
     XIII.     A WORLD-HUNT FOR FILAMENT MATERIAL
     XIV.      INVENTING A COMPLETE SYSTEM OF LIGHTING
     XV.       INTRODUCTION OF THE EDISON ELECTRIC LIGHT
     XVI.      THE FIRST EDISON CENTRAL STATION
     XVII.     OTHER EARLY STATIONS--THE METER
     XVIII.    THE ELECTRIC RAILWAY
     XIX.      MAGNETIC ORE MILLING WORK
     XX.       EDISON PORTLAND CEMENT
     XXI.      MOTION PICTURES
     XXII.     THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE EDISON STORAGE BATTERY
     XXIII.    MISCELLANEOUS INVENTIONS
     XXIV.     EDISON'S METHOD IN INVENTING
     XXV.      THE LABORATORY AT ORANGE AND THE STAFF
     XXVI.     EDISON IN COMMERCE AND MANUFACTURE
     XXVII.    THE VALUE OF EDISON'S INVENTIONS TO THE WORLD
     XXVIII.   THE BLACK FLAG
     XXIX.     THE SOCIAL SIDE OF EDISON
     APPENDIX
     LIST OF UNITED STATES PATENTS
     FOREIGN PATENTS
     INDEX



INTRODUCTION

PRIOR to this, no complete, authentic, and authorized record of the work
of Mr. Edison, during an active life, has been given to the world. That
life, if there is anything in heredity, is very far from finished; and
while it continues there will be new achievement.

An insistently expressed desire on the part of the public for a
definitive biography of Edison was the reason for the following pages.
The present authors deem themselves happy in the confidence reposed in
them, and in the constant assistance they have enjoyed from Mr. Edison
while preparing these pages, a great many of which are altogether
his own. This co-operation in no sense relieves the authors of
responsibility as to any of the views or statements of their own that
the book contains. They have realized the extreme reluctance of Mr.
Edison to be made the subject of any biography at all; while he has felt
that, if it must be written, it were best done by the hands of friends
and associates of long standing, whose judgment and discretion he could
trust, and whose intimate knowledge of the facts would save him from
misrepresentation.

The authors of the book are profoundly conscious of the fact that the
extraordinary period of electrical development embraced in it has been
prolific of great men. They have named some of them; but there has
been no idea of setting forth various achievements or of ascribing
distinctive merits. This treatment is devoted to one man whom his
fellow-citizens have chosen to regard as in many ways representative of
the American at his finest flowering in the field of invention during
the nineteenth century.

It is designed in these pages to bring the reader face to face with
Edison; to glance at an interesting childhood and a youthful period
marked by a capacity for doing things, and by an insatiable thirst for
knowledge; then to accompany him into the great creative stretch of
forty years, during which he has done so much. This book shows him
plunged deeply into work for which he has always had an incredible
capacity, reveals the exercise of his unsurpassed inventive ability, his
keen reasoning powers, his tenacious memory, his fertility of resource;
follows him through a series of innumerable experiments, conducted
methodically, reaching out like rays of search-light into all the
regions of science and nature, and finally exhibits him emerging
triumphantly from countless difficulties bearing with him in new arts
the fruits of victorious struggle.

These volumes aim to be a biography rather than a history of
electricity, but they have had to cover so much general ground in
defining the relations and contributions of Edison to the electrical
arts, that they serve to present a picture of the whole development
effected in the last fifty years, the most fruitful that electricity has
known. The effort has been made to avoid technique and abstruse phrases,
but some degree of explanation has been absolutely necessary in regard
to each group of inventions. The task of the authors has consisted
largely in summarizing fairly the methods and processes employed by
Edison; and some idea of the difficulties encountered by them in
so doing may be realized from the fact that one brief chapter, for
example,--that on ore milling--covers nine years of most intense
application and activity on the part of the inventor. It is something
like exhibiting the geological eras of the earth in an outline lantern
slide, to reduce an elaborate series of strenuous experiments and a vast
variety of ingenious apparatus to the space of a few hundred words.

A great deal of this narrative is given in Mr. Edison's own language,
from oral or written statements made in reply to questions addressed to
him with the object of securing accuracy. A further large part is based
upon the personal contributions of many loyal associates; and it is
desired here to make grateful acknowledgment to such collaborators as
Messrs. Samuel Insull, E. H. Johnson, F. R. Upton, R. N Dyer, S. B.
Eaton, Francis Jehl, W. S. Andrews, W. J. Jenks, W. J. Hammer, F. J.
Sprague, W. S. Mallory, and C. L. Clarke, and others, without whose
aid the issuance of this book would indeed have been impossible. In
particular, it is desired to acknowledge indebtedness to Mr. W. H.
Meadowcroft not only for substantial aid in the literary part of the
work, but for indefatigable effort to group, classify, and summarize the
boundless material embodied in Edison's note-books and memorabilia of
all kinds now kept at the Orange laboratory. Acknowledgment must also
be made of the courtesy and assistance of Mrs. Edison, and especially
of the loan of many interesting and rare photographs from her private
collection.




EDISON HIS LIFE AND INVENTIONS




CHAPTER I

THE AGE OF ELECTRICITY

THE year 1847 marked a period of great territorial acquisition by
the American people, with incalculable additions to their actual and
potential wealth. By the rational compromise with England in the dispute
over the Oregon region, President Polk had secured during 1846, for
undisturbed settlement, three hundred thousand square miles of forest,
fertile land, and fisheries, including the whole fair Columbia Valley.
Our active "policy of the Pacific" dated from that hour. With swift and
clinching succession came the melodramatic Mexican War, and February,
1848, saw another vast territory south of Oregon and west of the Rocky
Mountains added by treaty to the United States. Thus in about eighteen
months there had been pieced into the national domain for quick
development and exploitation a region as large as the entire Union
of Thirteen States at the close of the War of Independence. Moreover,
within its boundaries was embraced all the great American gold-field,
just on the eve of discovery, for Marshall had detected the shining
particles in the mill-race at the foot of the Sierra Nevada nine days
before Mexico signed away her rights in California and in all the vague,
remote hinterland facing Cathayward.

Equally momentous were the times in Europe, where the attempt to secure
opportunities of expansion as well as larger liberty for the individual
took quite different form. The old absolutist system of government was
fast breaking up, and ancient thrones were tottering. The red lava of
deep revolutionary fires oozed up through many glowing cracks in the
political crust, and all the social strata were shaken. That the wild
outbursts of insurrection midway in the fifth decade failed and died
away was not surprising, for the superincumbent deposits of tradition
and convention were thick. But the retrospect indicates that many
reforms and political changes were accomplished, although the process
involved the exile of not a few ardent spirits to America, to become
leading statesmen, inventors, journalists, and financiers. In 1847, too,
Russia began her tremendous march eastward into Central Asia, just
as France was solidifying her first gains on the littoral of northern
Africa. In England the fierce fervor of the Chartist movement, with its
violent rhetoric as to the rights of man, was sobering down and passing
pervasively into numerous practical schemes for social and political
amelioration, constituting in their entirety a most profound change
throughout every part of the national life.

Into such times Thomas Alva Edison was born, and his relations to
them and to the events of the past sixty years are the subject of
this narrative. Aside from the personal interest that attaches to the
picturesque career, so typically American, there is a broader aspect in
which the work of the "Franklin of the Nineteenth Century" touches
the welfare and progress of the race. It is difficult at any time to
determine the effect of any single invention, and the investigation
becomes more difficult where inventions of the first class have been
crowded upon each other in rapid and bewildering succession. But it will
be admitted that in Edison one deals with a central figure of the great
age that saw the invention and introduction in practical form of the
telegraph, the submarine cable, the telephone, the electric light, the
electric railway, the electric trolley-car, the storage battery, the
electric motor, the phonograph, the wireless telegraph; and that the
influence of these on the world's affairs has not been excelled at
any time by that of any other corresponding advances in the arts and
sciences. These pages deal with Edison's share in the great work of the
last half century in abridging distance, communicating intelligence,
lessening toil, improving illumination, recording forever the human
voice; and on behalf of inventive genius it may be urged that its
beneficent results and gifts to mankind compare with any to be credited
to statesman, warrior, or creative writer of the same period.

Viewed from the standpoint of inventive progress, the first half of
the nineteenth century had passed very profitably when Edison
appeared--every year marked by some notable achievement in the arts and
sciences, with promise of its early and abundant fruition in commerce
and industry. There had been exactly four decades of steam navigation
on American waters. Railways were growing at the rate of nearly
one thousand miles annually. Gas had become familiar as a means of
illumination in large cities. Looms and tools and printing-presses were
everywhere being liberated from the slow toil of man-power. The first
photographs had been taken. Chloroform, nitrous oxide gas, and ether
had been placed at the service of the physician in saving life, and
the revolver, guncotton, and nitroglycerine added to the agencies for
slaughter. New metals, chemicals, and elements had become available in
large numbers, gases had been liquefied and solidified, and the range
of useful heat and cold indefinitely extended. The safety-lamp had been
given to the miner, the caisson to the bridge-builder, the anti-friction
metal to the mechanic for bearings. It was already known how to
vulcanize rubber, and how to galvanize iron. The application of
machinery in the harvest-field had begun with the embryonic reaper,
while both the bicycle and the automobile were heralded in primitive
prototypes. The gigantic expansion of the iron and steel industry was
foreshadowed in the change from wood to coal in the smelting furnaces.
The sewing-machine had brought with it, like the friction match, one of
the most profound influences in modifying domestic life, and making it
different from that of all preceding time.

Even in 1847 few of these things had lost their novelty, most of them
were in the earlier stages of development. But it is when we turn to
electricity that the rich virgin condition of an illimitable new kingdom
of discovery is seen. Perhaps the word "utilization" or "application" is
better than discovery, for then, as now, an endless wealth of phenomena
noted by experimenters from Gilbert to Franklin and Faraday awaited the
invention that could alone render them useful to mankind. The eighteenth
century, keenly curious and ceaselessly active in this fascinating field
of investigation, had not, after all, left much of a legacy in either
principles or appliances. The lodestone and the compass; the frictional
machine; the Leyden jar; the nature of conductors and insulators;
the identity of electricity and the thunder-storm flash; the use of
lightning-rods; the physiological effects of an electrical shock--these
constituted the bulk of the bequest to which philosophers were the only
heirs. Pregnant with possibilities were many of the observations that
had been recorded. But these few appliances made up the meagre kit
of tools with which the nineteenth century entered upon its task of
acquiring the arts and conveniences now such an intimate part of "human
nature's daily food" that the average American to-day pays more for his
electrical service than he does for bread.

With the first year of the new century came Volta's invention of the
chemical battery as a means of producing electricity. A well-known
Italian picture represents Volta exhibiting his apparatus before the
young conqueror Napoleon, then ravishing from the Peninsula its treasure
of ancient art and founding an ephemeral empire. At such a moment this
gift of despoiled Italy to the world was a noble revenge, setting in
motion incalculable beneficent forces and agencies. For the first
time man had command of a steady supply of electricity without toil or
effort. The useful results obtainable previously from the current of a
frictional machine were not much greater than those to be derived from
the flight of a rocket. While the frictional appliance is still
employed in medicine, it ranks with the flint axe and the tinder-box
in industrial obsolescence. No art or trade could be founded on it; no
diminution of daily work or increase of daily comfort could be secured
with it. But the little battery with its metal plates in a weak
solution proved a perennial reservoir of electrical energy, safe and
controllable, from which supplies could be drawn at will. That which was
wild had become domesticated; regular crops took the place of haphazard
gleanings from brake or prairie; the possibility of electrical
starvation was forever left behind.

Immediately new processes of inestimable value revealed themselves; new
methods were suggested. Almost all the electrical arts now employed
made their beginnings in the next twenty-five years, and while the more
extensive of them depend to-day on the dynamo for electrical energy,
some of the most important still remain in loyal allegiance to the older
source. The battery itself soon underwent modifications, and new types
were evolved--the storage, the double-fluid, and the dry. Various
analogies next pointed to the use of heat, and the thermoelectric cell
emerged, embodying the application of flame to the junction of two
different metals. Davy, of the safety-lamp, threw a volume of current
across the gap between two sticks of charcoal, and the voltaic arc,
forerunner of electric lighting, shed its bright beams upon a dazzled
world. The decomposition of water by electrolytic action was recognized
and made the basis of communicating at a distance even before the days
of the electromagnet. The ties that bind electricity and magnetism in
twinship of relation and interaction were detected, and Faraday's work
in induction gave the world at once the dynamo and the motor. "Hitch
your wagon to a star," said Emerson. To all the coal-fields and all the
waterfalls Faraday had directly hitched the wheels of industry. Not
only was it now possible to convert mechanical energy into electricity
cheaply and in illimitable quantities, but electricity at once showed
its ubiquitous availability as a motive power. Boats were propelled by
it, cars were hauled, and even papers printed. Electroplating became
an art, and telegraphy sprang into active being on both sides of the
Atlantic.

At the time Edison was born, in 1847, telegraphy, upon which he was to
leave so indelible an imprint, had barely struggled into acceptance by
the public. In England, Wheatstone and Cooke had introduced a ponderous
magnetic needle telegraph. In America, in 1840, Morse had taken out his
first patent on an electromagnetic telegraph, the principle of which
is dominating in the art to this day. Four years later the memorable
message "What hath God wrought!" was sent by young Miss Ellsworth over
his circuits, and incredulous Washington was advised by wire of the
action of the Democratic Convention in Baltimore in nominating Polk.
By 1847 circuits had been strung between Washington and New York, under
private enterprise, the Government having declined to buy the Morse
system for $100,000. Everything was crude and primitive. The poles were
two hundred feet apart and could barely hold up a wash-line. The slim,
bare, copper wire snapped on the least provocation, and the circuit
was "down" for thirty-six days in the first six months. The little
glass-knob insulators made seductive targets for ignorant sportsmen.
Attempts to insulate the line wire were limited to coating it with
tar or smearing it with wax for the benefit of all the bees in the
neighborhood. The farthest western reach of the telegraph lines in
1847 was Pittsburg, with three-ply iron wire mounted on square glass
insulators with a little wooden pentroof for protection. In that office,
where Andrew Carnegie was a messenger boy, the magnets in use to receive
the signals sent with the aid of powerful nitric-acid batteries weighed
as much as seventy-five pounds apiece. But the business was fortunately
small at the outset, until the new device, patronized chiefly by
lottery-men, had proved its utility. Then came the great outburst of
activity. Within a score of years telegraph wires covered the whole
occupied country with a network, and the first great electrical industry
was a pronounced success, yielding to its pioneers the first great
harvest of electrical fortunes. It had been a sharp struggle for bare
existence, during which such a man as the founder of Cornell University
had been glad to get breakfast in New York with a quarter-dollar picked
up on Broadway.



CHAPTER II

EDISON'S PEDIGREE

THOMAS ALVA EDISON was born at Milan Ohio, February 11, 1847. The State
that rivals Virginia as a "Mother of Presidents" has evidently other
titles to distinction of the same nature. For picturesque detail it
would not be easy to find any story excelling that of the Edison family
before it reached the Western Reserve. The story epitomizes American
idealism, restlessness, freedom of individual opinion, and ready
adjustment to the surrounding conditions of pioneer life. The ancestral
Edisons who came over from Holland, as nearly as can be determined, in
1730, were descendants of extensive millers on the Zuyder Zee, and took
up patents of land along the Passaic River, New Jersey, close to the
home that Mr. Edison established in the Orange Mountains a hundred and
sixty years later. They landed at Elizabethport, New Jersey, and first
settled near Caldwell in that State, where some graves of the family may
still be found. President Cleveland was born in that quiet hamlet. It is
a curious fact that in the Edison family the pronunciation of the name
has always been with the long "e" sound, as it would naturally be in
the Dutch language. The family prospered and must have enjoyed public
confidence, for we find the name of Thomas Edison, as a bank official on
Manhattan Island, signed to Continental currency in 1778. According
to the family records this Edison, great-grandfather of Thomas Alva,
reached the extreme old age of 104 years. But all was not well, and,
as has happened so often before, the politics of father and son were
violently different. The Loyalist movement that took to Nova Scotia so
many Americans after the War of Independence carried with it John, the
son of this stalwart Continental. Thus it came about that Samuel Edison,
son of John, was born at Digby, Nova Scotia, in 1804. Seven years later
John Edison who, as a Loyalist or United Empire emigrant, had become
entitled under the laws of Canada to a grant of six hundred acres of
land, moved westward to take possession of this property. He made his
way through the State of New York in wagons drawn by oxen to the remote
and primitive township of Bayfield, in Upper Canada, on Lake Huron.
Although the journey occurred in balmy June, it was necessarily attended
with difficulty and privation; but the new home was situated in good
farming country, and once again this interesting nomadic family settled
down.

John Edison moved from Bayfield to Vienna, Ontario, on the northern bank
of Lake Erie. Mr. Edison supplies an interesting reminiscence of the old
man and his environment in those early Canadian days. "When I was five
years old I was taken by my father and mother on a visit to Vienna. We
were driven by carriage from Milan, Ohio, to a railroad, then to a
port on Lake Erie, thence by a canal-boat in a tow of several to Port
Burwell, in Canada, across the lake, and from there we drove to Vienna,
a short distance away. I remember my grandfather perfectly as he
appeared, at 102 years of age, when he died. In the middle of the day
he sat under a large tree in front of the house facing a well-travelled
road. His head was covered completely with a large quantity of very
white hair, and he chewed tobacco incessantly, nodding to friends as
they passed by. He used a very large cane, and walked from the chair to
the house, resenting any assistance. I viewed him from a distance, and
could never get very close to him. I remember some large pipes, and
especially a molasses jug, a trunk, and several other things that came
from Holland."

John Edison was long-lived, like his father, and reached the ripe old
age of 102, leaving his son Samuel charged with the care of the family
destinies, but with no great burden of wealth. Little is known of the
early manhood of this father of T. A. Edison until we find him keeping a
hotel at Vienna, marrying a school-teacher there (Miss Nancy Elliott, in
1828), and taking a lively share in the troublous politics of the time.
He was six feet in height, of great bodily vigor, and of such personal
dominance of character that he became a captain of the insurgent forces
rallying under the banners of Papineau and Mackenzie. The opening
years of Queen Victoria's reign witnessed a belated effort in Canada
to emphasize the principle that there should not be taxation without
representation; and this descendant of those who had left the United
States from disapproval of such a doctrine, flung himself headlong into
its support.

It has been said of Earl Durham, who pacified Canada at this time and
established the present system of government, that he made a country
and marred a career. But the immediate measures of repression enforced
before a liberal policy was adopted were sharp and severe, and Samuel
Edison also found his own career marred on Canadian soil as one result
of the Durham administration. Exile to Bermuda with other insurgents was
not so attractive as the perils of a flight to the United States. A very
hurried departure was effected in secret from the scene of trouble, and
there are romantic traditions of his thrilling journey of one hundred
and eighty-two miles toward safety, made almost entirely without food
or sleep, through a wild country infested with Indians of unfriendly
disposition. Thus was the Edison family repatriated by a picturesque
political episode, and the great inventor given a birthplace on American
soil, just as was Benjamin Franklin when his father came from England
to Boston. Samuel Edison left behind him, however, in Canada, several
brothers, all of whom lived to the age of ninety or more, and from whom
there are descendants in the region.

After some desultory wanderings for a year or two along the shores of
Lake Erie, among the prosperous towns then springing up, the family,
with its Canadian home forfeited, and in quest of another resting-place,
came to Milan, Ohio, in 1842. That pretty little village offered at the
moment many attractions as a possible Chicago. The railroad system of
Ohio was still in the future, but the Western Reserve had already become
a vast wheat-field, and huge quantities of grain from the central and
northern counties sought shipment to Eastern ports. The Huron River,
emptying into Lake Erie, was navigable within a few miles of the
village, and provided an admirable outlet. Large granaries were
established, and proved so successful that local capital was tempted
into the project of making a tow-path canal from Lockwood Landing all
the way to Milan itself. The quaint old Moravian mission and quondam
Indian settlement of one hundred inhabitants found itself of a sudden
one of the great grain ports of the world, and bidding fair to rival
Russian Odessa. A number of grain warehouses, or primitive elevators,
were built along the bank of the canal, and the produce of the region
poured in immediately, arriving in wagons drawn by four or six horses
with loads of a hundred bushels. No fewer than six hundred wagons came
clattering in, and as many as twenty sail vessels were loaded with
thirty-five thousand bushels of grain, during a single day. The canal
was capable of being navigated by craft of from two hundred to two
hundred and fifty tons burden, and the demand for such vessels soon
led to the development of a brisk ship-building industry, for which
the abundant forests of the region supplied the necessary lumber. An
evidence of the activity in this direction is furnished by the fact that
six revenue cutters were launched at this port in these brisk days of
its prime.

Samuel Edison, versatile, buoyant of temper, and ever optimistic, would
thus appear to have pitched his tent with shrewd judgment. There was
plenty of occupation ready to his hand, and more than one enterprise
received his attention; but he devoted his energies chiefly to the
making of shingles, for which there was a large demand locally and along
the lake. Canadian lumber was used principally in this industry. The
wood was imported in "bolts" or pieces three feet long. A bolt made two
shingles; it was sawn asunder by hand, then split and shaved. None but
first-class timber was used, and such shingles outlasted far those made
by machinery with their cross-grain cut. A house in Milan, on which some
of those shingles were put in 1844, was still in excellent condition
forty-two years later. Samuel Edison did well at this occupation, and
employed several men, but there were other outlets from time to time for
his business activity and speculative disposition.

Edison's mother was an attractive and highly educated woman, whose
influence upon his disposition and intellect has been profound and
lasting. She was born in Chenango County, New York, in 1810, and was the
daughter of the Rev. John Elliott, a Baptist minister and descendant of
an old Revolutionary soldier, Capt. Ebenezer Elliott, of Scotch descent.
The old captain was a fine and picturesque type. He fought all through
the long War of Independence--seven years--and then appears to have
settled down at Stonington, Connecticut. There, at any rate, he found
his wife, "grandmother Elliott," who was Mercy Peckham, daughter of a
Scotch Quaker. Then came the residence in New York State, with final
removal to Vienna, for the old soldier, while drawing his pension at
Buffalo, lived in the little Canadian town, and there died, over 100
years old. The family was evidently one of considerable culture and deep
religious feeling, for two of Mrs. Edison's uncles and two brothers were
also in the same Baptist ministry. As a young woman she became a teacher
in the public high school at Vienna, and thus met her husband, who was
residing there. The family never consisted of more than three children,
two boys and a girl. A trace of the Canadian environment is seen in the
fact that Edison's elder brother was named William Pitt, after the
great English statesman. Both his brother and the sister exhibited
considerable ability. William Pitt Edison as a youth was so clever with
his pencil that it was proposed to send him to Paris as an art student.
In later life he was manager of the local street railway lines at Port
Huron, Michigan, in which he was heavily interested. He also owned a
good farm near that town, and during the ill-health at the close of
his life, when compelled to spend much of the time indoors, he devoted
himself almost entirely to sketching. It has been noted by intimate
observers of Thomas A. Edison that in discussing any project or new idea
his first impulse is to take up any piece of paper available and make
drawings of it. His voluminous note-books are a mass of sketches.
Mrs-Tannie Edison Bailey, the sister, had, on the other hand, a great
deal of literary ability, and spent much of her time in writing.

The great inventor, whose iron endurance and stern will have enabled him
to wear down all his associates by work sustained through arduous days
and sleepless nights, was not at all strong as a child, and was of
fragile appearance. He had an abnormally large but well-shaped head, and
it is said that the local doctors feared he might have brain trouble.
In fact, on account of his assumed delicacy, he was not allowed to go to
school for some years, and even when he did attend for a short time
the results were not encouraging--his mother being hotly indignant upon
hearing that the teacher had spoken of him to an inspector as "addled."
The youth was, indeed, fortunate far beyond the ordinary in having a
mother at once loving, well-informed, and ambitious, capable herself,
from her experience as a teacher, of undertaking and giving him an
education better than could be secured in the local schools of the day.
Certain it is that under this simple regime studious habits were formed
and a taste for literature developed that have lasted to this day. If
ever there was a man who tore the heart out of books it is Edison, and
what has once been read by him is never forgotten if useful or worthy of
submission to the test of experiment.

But even thus early the stronger love of mechanical processes and of
probing natural forces manifested itself. Edison has said that he
never saw a statement in any book as to such things that he did not
involuntarily challenge, and wish to demonstrate as either right or
wrong. As a mere child the busy scenes of the canal and the grain
warehouses were of consuming interest, but the work in the ship-building
yards had an irresistible fascination. His questions were so ceaseless
and innumerable that the penetrating curiosity of an unusually strong
mind was regarded as deficiency in powers of comprehension, and the
father himself, a man of no mean ingenuity and ability, reports that
the child, although capable of reducing him to exhaustion by endless
inquiries, was often spoken of as rather wanting in ordinary acumen.
This apparent dulness is, however, a quite common incident to youthful
genius.

The constructive tendencies of this child of whom his father said once
that he had never had any boyhood days in the ordinary sense, were early
noted in his fondness for building little plank roads out of the debris
of the yards and mills. His extraordinarily retentive memory was shown
in his easy acquisition of all the songs of the lumber gangs and canal
men before he was five years old. One incident tells how he was found
one day in the village square copying laboriously the signs of the
stores. A highly characteristic event at the age of six is described by
his sister. He had noted a goose sitting on her eggs and the result. One
day soon after, he was missing. By-and-by, after an anxious search, his
father found him sitting in a nest he had made in the barn, filled with
goose-eggs and hens' eggs he had collected, trying to hatch them out.

One of Mr. Edison's most vivid recollections goes back to 1850, when as
a child three of four years old he saw camped in front of his home six
covered wagons, "prairie schooners," and witnessed their departure for
California. The great excitement over the gold discoveries was thus felt
in Milan, and these wagons, laden with all the worldly possessions of
their owners, were watched out of sight on their long journey by this
fascinated urchin, whose own discoveries in later years were to tempt
many other argonauts into the auriferous realms of electricity.

Another vivid memory of this period concerns his first realization
of the grim mystery of death. He went off one day with the son of
the wealthiest man in the town to bathe in the creek. Soon after they
entered the water the other boy disappeared. Young Edison waited around
the spot for half an hour or more, and then, as it was growing dark,
went home puzzled and lonely, but silent as to the occurrence. About two
hours afterward, when the missing boy was being searched for, a man came
to the Edison home to make anxious inquiry of the companion with whom
he had last been seen. Edison told all the circumstances with a painful
sense of being in some way implicated. The creek was at once dragged,
and then the body was recovered.

Edison had himself more than one narrow escape. Of course he fell in the
canal and was nearly drowned; few boys in Milan worth their salt omitted
that performance. On another occasion he encountered a more novel peril
by falling into the pile of wheat in a grain elevator and being almost
smothered. Holding the end of a skate-strap for another lad to shorten
with an axe, he lost the top of a finger. Fire also had its perils. He
built a fire in a barn, but the flames spread so rapidly that, although
he escaped himself, the barn was wholly destroyed, and he was publicly
whipped in the village square as a warning to other youths. Equally well
remembered is a dangerous encounter with a ram that attacked him while
he was busily engaged digging out a bumblebee's nest near an orchard
fence. The animal knocked him against the fence, and was about to butt
him again when he managed to drop over on the safe side and escape. He
was badly hurt and bruised, and no small quantity of arnica was needed
for his wounds.

Meantime little Milan had reached the zenith of its prosperity, and all
of a sudden had been deprived of its flourishing grain trade by the new
Columbus, Sandusky & Hocking Railroad; in fact, the short canal was one
of the last efforts of its kind in this country to compete with the
new means of transportation. The bell of the locomotive was everywhere
ringing the death-knell of effective water haulage, with such dire
results that, in 1880, of the 4468 miles of American freight canal, that
had cost $214,000,000, no fewer than 1893 miles had been abandoned,
and of the remaining 2575 miles quite a large proportion was not paying
expenses. The short Milan canal suffered with the rest, and to-day
lies well-nigh obliterated, hidden in part by vegetable gardens, a mere
grass-grown depression at the foot of the winding, shallow valley. Other
railroads also prevented any further competition by the canal, for a
branch of the Wheeling & Lake Erie now passes through the village, while
the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern runs a few miles to the south.

The owners of the canal soon had occasion to regret that they had
disdained the overtures of enterprising railroad promoters desirous
of reaching the village, and the consequences of commercial isolation
rapidly made themselves felt. It soon became evident to Samuel Edison
and his wife that the cozy brick home on the bluff must be given up
and the struggle with fortune resumed elsewhere. They were well-to-do,
however, and removing, in 1854, to Port Huron, Michigan, occupied a
large colonial house standing in the middle of an old Government fort
reservation of ten acres overlooking the wide expanse of the St. Clair
River just after it leaves Lake Huron. It was in many ways an ideal
homestead, toward which the family has always felt the strongest
attachment, but the association with Milan has never wholly ceased. The
old house in which Edison was born is still occupied (in 1910) by Mr.
S. O. Edison, a half-brother of Edison's father, and a man of marked
inventive ability. He was once prominent in the iron-furnace industry of
Ohio, and was for a time associated in the iron trade with the father
of the late President McKinley. Among his inventions may be mentioned a
machine for making fuel from wheat straw, and a smoke-consuming device.

This birthplace of Edison remains the plain, substantial little brick
house it was originally: one-storied, with rooms finished on the attic
floor. Being built on the hillside, its basement opens into the rear
yard. It was at first heated by means of open coal grates, which may not
have been altogether adequate in severe winters, owing to the altitude
and the north-eastern exposure, but a large furnace is one of the more
modern changes. Milan itself is not materially unlike the smaller Ohio
towns of its own time or those of later creation, but the venerable
appearance of the big elm-trees that fringe the trim lawns tells of its
age. It is, indeed, an extremely neat, snug little place, with well-kept
homes, mostly of frame construction, and flagged streets crossing
each other at right angles. There are no poor--at least, everybody is
apparently well-to-do. While a leisurely atmosphere pervades the
town, few idlers are seen. Some of the residents are engaged in local
business; some are occupied in farming and grape culture; others are
employed in the iron-works near-by, at Norwalk. The stores and places
of public resort are gathered about the square, where there is plenty
of room for hitching when the Saturday trading is done at that point,
at which periods the fitful bustle recalls the old wheat days when young
Edison ran with curiosity among the six and eight horse teams that had
brought in grain. This square is still covered with fine primeval forest
trees, and has at its centre a handsome soldiers' monument of the Civil
War, to which four paved walks converge. It is an altogether pleasant
and unpretentious town, which cherishes with no small amount of pride
its association with the name of Thomas Alva Edison.

In view of Edison's Dutch descent, it is rather singular to find him
with the name of Alva, for the Spanish Duke of Alva was notoriously the
worst tyrant ever known to the Low Countries, and his evil deeds occupy
many stirring pages in Motley's famous history. As a matter of fact,
Edison was named after Capt. Alva Bradley, an old friend of his father,
and a celebrated ship-owner on the Lakes. Captain Bradley died a few
years ago in wealth, while his old associate, with equal ability for
making money, was never able long to keep it (differing again from the
Revolutionary New York banker from whom his son's other name, "Thomas,"
was taken).



CHAPTER III

BOYHOOD AT PORT HURON, MICHIGAN

THE new home found by the Edison family at Port Huron, where Alva spent
his brief boyhood before he became a telegraph operator and roamed the
whole middle West of that period, was unfortunately destroyed by fire
just after the close of the Civil War. A smaller but perhaps more
comfortable home was then built by Edison's father on some property he
had bought at the near-by village of Gratiot, and there his mother spent
the remainder of her life in confirmed invalidism, dying in 1871. Hence
the pictures and postal cards sold largely to souvenir-hunters as the
Port Huron home do not actually show that in or around which the events
now referred to took place.

It has been a romance of popular biographers, based upon the fact that
Edison began his career as a newsboy, to assume that these earlier years
were spent in poverty and privation, as indeed they usually are by the
"newsies" who swarm and shout their papers in our large cities. While
it seems a pity to destroy this erroneous idea, suggestive of a heroic
climb from the depths to the heights, nothing could be further from the
truth. Socially the Edison family stood high in Port Huron at a time
when there was relatively more wealth and general activity than to-day.
The town in its pristine prime was a great lumber centre, and hummed
with the industry of numerous sawmills. An incredible quantity of
lumber was made there yearly until the forests near-by vanished and the
industry with them. The wealth of the community, invested largely in
this business and in allied transportation companies, was accumulated
rapidly and as freely spent during those days of prosperity in St. Clair
County, bringing with it a high standard of domestic comfort. In all
this the Edisons shared on equal terms.

Thus, contrary to the stories that have been so widely published, the
Edisons, while not rich by any means, were in comfortable circumstances,
with a well-stocked farm and large orchard to draw upon also for
sustenance. Samuel Edison, on moving to Port Huron, became a dealer in
grain and feed, and gave attention to that business for many years. But
he was also active in the lumber industry in the Saginaw district and
several other things. It was difficult for a man of such mercurial,
restless temperament to stay constant to any one occupation; in fact,
had he been less visionary he would have been more prosperous, but might
not have had a son so gifted with insight and imagination. One instance
of the optimistic vagaries which led him incessantly to spend time and
money on projects that would not have appealed to a man less sanguine
was the construction on his property of a wooden observation tower over
a hundred feet high, the top of which was reached toilsomely by winding
stairs, after the payment of twenty-five cents. It is true that the
tower commanded a pretty view by land and water, but Colonel Sellers
himself might have projected this enterprise as a possible source of
steady income. At first few visitors panted up the long flights of steps
to the breezy platform. During the first two months Edison's father
took in three dollars, and felt extremely blue over the prospect, and
to young Edison and his relatives were left the lonely pleasures of the
lookout and the enjoyment of the telescope with which it was equipped.
But one fine day there came an excursion from an inland town to see the
lake. They picnicked in the grove, and six hundred of them went up
the tower. After that the railroad company began to advertise these
excursions, and the receipts each year paid for the observatory.

It might be thought that, immersed in business and preoccupied with
schemes of this character, Mr. Edison was to blame for the neglect of
his son's education. But that was not the case. The conditions were
peculiar. It was at the Port Huron public school that Edison received
all the regular scholastic instruction he ever enjoyed--just three
months. He might have spent the full term there, but, as already noted,
his teacher had found him "addled." He was always, according to his own
recollection, at the foot of the class, and had come almost to regard
himself as a dunce, while his father entertained vague anxieties as to
his stupidity. The truth of the matter seems to be that Mrs. Edison, a
teacher of uncommon ability and force, held no very high opinion of
the average public-school methods and results, and was both eager to
undertake the instruction of her son and ambitious for the future of
a boy whom she knew from pedagogic experience to be receptive and
thoughtful to a very unusual degree. With her he found study easy and
pleasant. The quality of culture in that simple but refined home, as
well as the intellectual character of this youth without schooling, may
be inferred from the fact that before he had reached the age of twelve
he had read, with his mother's help, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, Hume's History of England, Sears' History of the World,
Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and the Dictionary of Sciences; and had
even attempted to struggle through Newton's Principia, whose mathematics
were decidedly beyond both teacher and student. Besides, Edison, like
Faraday, was never a mathematician, and has had little personal use
for arithmetic beyond that which is called "mental." He said once to a
friend: "I can always hire some mathematicians, but they can't hire me."
His father, by-the-way, always encouraged these literary tastes, and
paid him a small sum for each new book mastered. It will be noted that
fiction makes no showing in the list; but it was not altogether
excluded from the home library, and Edison has all his life enjoyed
it, particularly the works of such writers as Victor Hugo, after whom,
because of his enthusiastic admiration--possibly also because of his
imagination--he was nicknamed by his fellow-operators, "Victor Hugo
Edison."

Electricity at that moment could have no allure for a youthful mind.
Crude telegraphy represented what was known of it practically, and about
that the books read by young Edison were not redundantly informational.
Even had that not been so, the inclinations of the boy barely ten years
old were toward chemistry, and fifty years later there is seen no change
of predilection. It sounds like heresy to say that Edison became an
electrician by chance, but it is the sober fact that to this pre-eminent
and brilliant leader in electrical achievement escape into the chemical
domain still has the aspect of a delightful truant holiday. One of
the earliest stories about his boyhood relates to the incident when
he induced a lad employed in the family to swallow a large quantity of
Seidlitz powders in the belief that the gases generated would enable
him to fly. The agonies of the victim attracted attention, and Edison's
mother marked her displeasure by an application of the switch kept
behind the old Seth Thomas "grandfather clock." The disastrous result
of this experiment did not discourage Edison at all, as he attributed
failure to the lad rather than to the motive power. In the cellar of
the Edison homestead young Alva soon accumulated a chemical outfit,
constituting the first in a long series of laboratories. The word
"laboratory" had always been associated with alchemists in the past,
but as with "filament" this untutored stripling applied an iconoclastic
practicability to it long before he realized the significance of the
new departure. Goethe, in his legend of Faust, shows the traditional
or conventional philosopher in his laboratory, an aged, tottering,
gray-bearded investigator, who only becomes youthful upon diabolical
intervention, and would stay senile without it. In the Edison laboratory
no such weird transformation has been necessary, for the philosopher
had youth, fiery energy, and a grimly practical determination that would
submit to no denial of the goal of something of real benefit to mankind.
Edison and Faust are indeed the extremes of philosophic thought and
accomplishment.

The home at Port Huron thus saw the first Edison laboratory. The boy
began experimenting when he was about ten or eleven years of age. He got
a copy of Parker's School Philosophy, an elementary book on physics, and
about every experiment in it he tried. Young Alva, or "Al," as he was
called, thus early displayed his great passion for chemistry, and in
the cellar of the house he collected no fewer than two hundred bottles,
gleaned in baskets from all parts of the town. These were arranged
carefully on shelves and all labelled "Poison," so that no one else
would handle or disturb them. They contained the chemicals with which
he was constantly experimenting. To others this diversion was both
mysterious and meaningless, but he had soon become familiar with all
the chemicals obtainable at the local drug stores, and had tested to
his satisfaction many of the statements encountered in his scientific
reading. Edison has said that sometimes he has wondered how it was
he did not become an analytical chemist instead of concentrating on
electricity, for which he had at first no great inclination.

Deprived of the use of a large part of her cellar, tiring of the "mess"
always to be found there, and somewhat fearful of results, his mother
once told the boy to clear everything out and restore order. The thought
of losing all his possessions was the cause of so much ardent distress
that his mother relented, but insisted that he must get a lock and key,
and keep the embryonic laboratory closed up all the time except when he
was there. This was done. From such work came an early familiarity with
the nature of electrical batteries and the production of current from
them. Apparently the greater part of his spare time was spent in the
cellar, for he did not share to any extent in the sports of the boys of
the neighborhood, his chum and chief companion, Michael Oates, being a
lad of Dutch origin, many years older, who did chores around the
house, and who could be recruited as a general utility Friday for the
experiments of this young explorer--such as that with the Seidlitz
powders.

Such pursuits as these consumed the scant pocket-money of the boy very
rapidly. He was not in regular attendance at school, and had read all
the books within reach. It was thus he turned newsboy, overcoming the
reluctance of his parents, particularly that of his mother, by pointing
out that he could by this means earn all he wanted for his experiments
and get fresh reading in the shape of papers and magazines free of
charge. Besides, his leisure hours in Detroit he would be able to spend
at the public library. He applied (in 1859) for the privilege of selling
newspapers on the trains of the Grand Trunk Railroad, between Port Huron
and Detroit, and obtained the concession after a short delay, during
which he made an essay in his task of selling newspapers.

Edison had, as a fact, already had some commercial experience from the
age of eleven. The ten acres of the reservation offered an excellent
opportunity for truck-farming, and the versatile head of the family
could not avoid trying his luck in this branch of work. A large "market
garden" was laid out, in which Edison worked pretty steadily with the
help of the Dutch boy, Michael Oates--he of the flying experiment. These
boys had a horse and small wagon intrusted to them, and every morning in
the season they would load up with onions, lettuce, peas, etc., and go
through the town.

As much as $600 was turned over to Mrs. Edison in one year from this
source. The boy was indefatigable but not altogether charmed with
agriculture. "After a while I tired of this work, as hoeing corn in
a hot sun is unattractive, and I did not wonder that it had built up
cities. Soon the Grand Trunk Railroad was extended from Toronto to Port
Huron, at the foot of Lake Huron, and thence to Detroit, at about the
same time the War of the Rebellion broke out. By a great amount of
persistence I got permission from my mother to go on the local train
as a newsboy. The local train from Port Huron to Detroit, a distance of
sixty-three miles, left at 7 A.M. and arrived again at 9.30 P.M. After
being on the train for several months, I started two stores in Port
Huron--one for periodicals, and the other for vegetables, butter, and
berries in the season. These were attended by two boys who shared in the
profits. The periodical store I soon closed, as the boy in charge could
not be trusted. The vegetable store I kept up for nearly a year. After
the railroad had been opened a short time, they put on an express which
left Detroit in the morning and returned in the evening. I received
permission to put a newsboy on this train. Connected with this train was
a car, one part for baggage and the other part for U. S. mail, but for
a long time it was not used. Every morning I had two large baskets of
vegetables from the Detroit market loaded in the mail-car and sent to
Port Huron, where the boy would take them to the store. They were much
better than those grown locally, and sold readily. I never was asked to
pay freight, and to this day cannot explain why, except that I was so
small and industrious, and the nerve to appropriate a U. S. mail-car to
do a free freight business was so monumental. However, I kept this up
for a long time, and in addition bought butter from the farmers along
the line, and an immense amount of blackberries in the season. I bought
wholesale and at a low price, and permitted the wives of the engineers
and trainmen to have the benefit of the discount. After a while there
was a daily immigrant train put on. This train generally had from seven
to ten coaches filled always with Norwegians, all bound for Iowa and
Minnesota. On these trains I employed a boy who sold bread, tobacco, and
stick candy. As the war progressed the daily newspaper sales became very
profitable, and I gave up the vegetable store."

The hours of this occupation were long, but the work was not
particularly heavy, and Edison soon found opportunity for his favorite
avocation--chemical experimentation. His train left Port Huron at 7
A.M., and made its southward trip to Detroit in about three hours. This
gave a stay in that city from 10 A.M. until the late afternoon, when the
train left, arriving at Port Huron about 9.30 P.M. The train was made up
of three coaches--baggage, smoking, and ordinary passenger or "ladies."
The baggage-car was divided into three compartments--one for trunks and
packages, one for the mail, and one for smoking. In those days no use
was made of the smoking-compartment, as there was no ventilation, and it
was turned over to young Edison, who not only kept papers there and his
stock of goods as a "candy butcher," but soon had it equipped with an
extraordinary variety of apparatus. There was plenty of leisure on the
two daily runs, even for an industrious boy, and thus he found time
to transfer his laboratory from the cellar and re-establish it on the
train.

His earnings were also excellent--so good, in fact, that eight or ten
dollars a day were often taken in, and one dollar went every day to his
mother. Thus supporting himself, he felt entitled to spend any other
profit left over on chemicals and apparatus. And spent it was, for with
access to Detroit and its large stores, where he bought his supplies,
and to the public library, where he could quench his thirst for
technical information, Edison gave up all his spare time and money to
chemistry. Surely the country could have presented at that moment no
more striking example of the passionate pursuit of knowledge under
difficulties than this newsboy, barely fourteen years of age, with his
jars and test-tubes installed on a railway baggage-car.

Nor did this amazing equipment stop at batteries and bottles. The same
little space a few feet square was soon converted by this precocious
youth into a newspaper office. The outbreak of the Civil War gave a
great stimulus to the demand for all newspapers, noticing which he
became ambitious to publish a local journal of his own, devoted to the
news of that section of the Grand Trunk road. A small printing-press
that had been used for hotel bills of fare was picked up in Detroit,
and type was also bought, some of it being placed on the train so that
composition could go on in spells of leisure. To one so mechanical in
his tastes as Edison, it was quite easy to learn the rudiments of the
printing art, and thus the Weekly Herald came into existence, of which
he was compositor, pressman, editor, publisher, and newsdealer. Only one
or two copies of this journal are now discoverable, but its appearance
can be judged from the reduced facsimile here shown. The thing was
indeed well done as the work of a youth shown by the date to be less
than fifteen years old. The literary style is good, there are only a few
trivial slips in spelling, and the appreciation is keen of what would be
interesting news and gossip. The price was three cents a copy, or eight
cents a month for regular subscribers, and the circulation ran up to
over four hundred copies an issue. This was by no means the result of
mere public curiosity, but attested the value of the sheet as a genuine
newspaper, to which many persons in the railroad service along the
line were willing contributors. Indeed, with the aid of the railway
telegraph, Edison was often able to print late news of importance, of
local origin, that the distant regular papers like those of Detroit,
which he handled as a newsboy, could not get. It is no wonder that this
clever little sheet received the approval and patronage of the English
engineer Stephenson when inspecting the Grand Trunk system, and was
noted by no less distinguished a contemporary than the London Times as
the first newspaper in the world to be printed on a train in motion.
The youthful proprietor sometimes cleared as much as twenty to thirty
dollars a month from this unique journalistic enterprise.

But all this extra work required attention, and Edison solved the
difficulty of attending also to the newsboy business by the employment
of a young friend, whom he trained and treated liberally as an
understudy. There was often plenty of work for both in the early days
of the war, when the news of battle caused intense excitement and large
sales of papers. Edison, with native shrewdness already so strikingly
displayed, would telegraph the station agents and get them to bulletin
the event of the day at the front, so that when each station was reached
there were eager purchasers waiting. He recalls in particular the
sensation caused by the great battle of Shiloh, or Pittsburg Landing,
in April, 1862, in which both Grant and Sherman were engaged, in which
Johnston died, and in which there was a ghastly total of 25,000 killed
and wounded.

In describing his enterprising action that day, Edison says that when
he reached Detroit the bulletin-boards of the newspaper offices were
surrounded with dense crowds, which read awestricken the news that there
were 60,000 killed and wounded, and that the result was uncertain. "I
knew that if the same excitement was attained at the various small towns
along the road, and especially at Port Huron, the sale of papers would
be great. I then conceived the idea of telegraphing the news ahead, went
to the operator in the depot, and by giving him Harper's Weekly and
some other papers for three months, he agreed to telegraph to all the
stations the matter on the bulletin-board. I hurriedly copied it, and he
sent it, requesting the agents to display it on the blackboards used for
stating the arrival and departure of trains. I decided that instead of
the usual one hundred papers I could sell one thousand; but not having
sufficient money to purchase that number, I determined in my desperation
to see the editor himself and get credit. The great paper at that time
was the Detroit Free Press. I walked into the office marked 'Editorial'
and told a young man that I wanted to see the editor on important
business--important to me, anyway, I was taken into an office where
there were two men, and I stated what I had done about telegraphing, and
that I wanted a thousand papers, but only had money for three hundred,
and I wanted credit. One of the men refused it, but the other told the
first spokesman to let me have them. This man, I afterward learned, was
Wilbur F. Storey, who subsequently founded the Chicago Times, and became
celebrated in the newspaper world. By the aid of another boy I lugged
the papers to the train and started folding them. The first station,
called Utica, was a small one where I generally sold two papers. I saw
a crowd ahead on the platform, and thought it some excursion, but
the moment I landed there was a rush for me; then I realized that the
telegraph was a great invention. I sold thirty-five papers there. The
next station was Mount Clemens, now a watering-place, but then a town of
about one thousand. I usually sold six to eight papers there. I decided
that if I found a corresponding crowd there, the only thing to do to
correct my lack of judgment in not getting more papers was to raise
the price from five cents to ten. The crowd was there, and I raised the
price. At the various towns there were corresponding crowds. It had
been my practice at Port Huron to jump from the train at a point
about one-fourth of a mile from the station, where the train generally
slackened speed. I had drawn several loads of sand to this point to jump
on, and had become quite expert. The little Dutch boy with the horse met
me at this point. When the wagon approached the outskirts of the town
I was met by a large crowd. I then yelled: 'Twenty-five cents apiece,
gentlemen! I haven't enough to go around!' I sold all out, and made what
to me then was an immense sum of money."

Such episodes as this added materially to his income, but did not
necessarily increase his savings, for he was then, as now, an utter
spendthrift so long as some new apparatus or supplies for experiment
could be had. In fact, the laboratory on wheels soon became crowded
with such equipment, most costly chemicals were bought on the instalment
plan, and Fresenius' Qualitative Analysis served as a basis for
ceaseless testing and study. George Pullman, who then had a small shop
at Detroit and was working on his sleeping-car, made Edison a lot of
wooden apparatus for his chemicals, to the boy's delight. Unfortunately
a sudden change came, fraught with disaster. The train, running one day
at thirty miles an hour over a piece of poorly laid track, was thrown
suddenly out of the perpendicular with a violent lurch, and, before
Edison could catch it, a stick of phosphorus was jarred from its shelf,
fell to the floor, and burst into flame. The car took fire, and the boy,
in dismay, was still trying to quench the blaze when the conductor, a
quick-tempered Scotchman, who acted also as baggage-master, hastened to
the scene with water and saved his car. On the arrival at Mount Clemens
station, its next stop, Edison and his entire outfit, laboratory,
printing-plant, and all, were promptly ejected by the enraged conductor,
and the train then moved off, leaving him on the platform, tearful and
indignant in the midst of his beloved but ruined possessions. It was
lynch law of a kind; but in view of the responsibility, this action of
the conductor lay well within his rights and duties.

It was through this incident that Edison acquired the deafness that
has persisted all through his life, a severe box on the ears from the
scorched and angry conductor being the direct cause of the infirmity.
Although this deafness would be regarded as a great affliction by most
people, and has brought in its train other serious baubles, Mr. Edison
has always regarded it philosophically, and said about it recently:
"This deafness has been of great advantage to me in various ways. When
in a telegraph office, I could only hear the instrument directly on the
table at which I sat, and unlike the other operators, I was not bothered
by the other instruments. Again, in experimenting on the telephone,
I had to improve the transmitter so I could hear it. This made the
telephone commercial, as the magneto telephone receiver of Bell was too
weak to be used as a transmitter commercially. It was the same with the
phonograph. The great defect of that instrument was the rendering of the
overtones in music, and the hissing consonants in speech. I worked over
one year, twenty hours a day, Sundays and all, to get the word 'specie'
perfectly recorded and reproduced on the phonograph. When this was done
I knew that everything else could be done which was a fact. Again,
my nerves have been preserved intact. Broadway is as quiet to me as a
country village is to a person with normal hearing."

Saddened but not wholly discouraged, Edison soon reconstituted his
laboratory and printing-office at home, although on the part of the
family there was some fear and objection after this episode, on the
score of fire. But Edison promised not to bring in anything of a
dangerous nature. He did not cease the publication of the Weekly Herald.
On the contrary, he prospered in both his enterprises until persuaded
by the "printer's devil" in the office of the Port Huron Commercial to
change the character of his journal, enlarge it, and issue it under the
name of Paul Pry, a happy designation for this or kindred ventures
in the domain of society journalism. No copies of Paul Pry can now be
found, but it is known that its style was distinctly personal, that
gossip was its specialty, and that no small offence was given to the
people whose peculiarities or peccadilloes were discussed in a frank
and breezy style by the two boys. In one instance the resentment of the
victim of such unsought publicity was so intense he laid hands on Edison
and pitched the startled young editor into the St. Clair River. The name
of this violator of the freedom of the press was thereafter excluded
studiously from the columns of Paul Pry, and the incident may have been
one of those which soon caused the abandonment of the paper. Edison
had great zest in this work, and but for the strong influences in other
directions would probably have continued in the newspaper field, in
which he was, beyond question, the youngest publisher and editor of the
day.

Before leaving this period of his career, it is to be noted that it gave
Edison many favorable opportunities. In Detroit he could spend frequent
hours in the public library, and it is matter of record that he began
his liberal acquaintance with its contents by grappling bravely with a
certain section and trying to read it through consecutively, shelf by
shelf, regardless of subject. In a way this is curiously suggestive
of the earnest, energetic method of "frontal attack" with which the
inventor has since addressed himself to so many problems in the arts and
sciences.

The Grand Trunk Railroad machine-shops at Port Huron were a great
attraction to the boy, who appears to have spent a good deal of his time
there. He who was to have much to do with the evolution of the modern
electric locomotive was fascinated by the mechanism of the steam
locomotive; and whenever he could get the chance Edison rode in the cab
with the engineer of his train. He became thoroughly familiar with the
intricacies of fire-box, boiler, valves, levers, and gears, and liked
nothing better than to handle the locomotive himself during the run.
On one trip, when the engineer lay asleep while his eager substitute
piloted the train, the boiler "primed," and a deluge overwhelmed the
young driver, who stuck to his post till the run and the ordeal were
ended. Possibly this helped to spoil a locomotive engineer, but went
to make a great master of the new motive power. "Steam is half an
Englishman," said Emerson. The temptation is strong to say that workaday
electricity is half an American. Edison's own account of the incident
is very laughable: "The engine was one of a number leased to the Grand
Trunk by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy. It had bright brass bands all
over, the woodwork beautifully painted, and everything highly polished,
which was the custom up to the time old Commodore Vanderbilt stopped
it on his roads. After running about fifteen miles the fireman couldn't
keep his eyes open (this event followed an all-night dance of the
trainmen's fraternal organization), and he agreed to permit me to run
the engine. I took charge, reducing the speed to about twelve miles
an hour, and brought the train of seven cars to her destination at the
Grand Trunk junction safely. But something occurred which was very much
out of the ordinary. I was very much worried about the water, and I
knew that if it got low the boiler was likely to explode. I hadn't gone
twenty miles before black damp mud blew out of the stack and covered
every part of the engine, including myself. I was about to awaken the
fireman to find out the cause of this when it stopped. Then I approached
a station where the fireman always went out to the cowcatcher, opened
the oil-cup on the steam-chest, and poured oil in. I started to carry
out the procedure when, upon opening the oil-cup, the steam rushed out
with a tremendous noise, nearly knocking me off the engine. I succeeded
in closing the oil-cup and got back in the cab, and made up my mind
that she would pull through without oil. I learned afterward that the
engineer always shut off steam when the fireman went out to oil. This
point I failed to notice. My powers of observation were very much
improved after this occurrence. Just before I reached the junction
another outpour of black mud occurred, and the whole engine was a
sight--so much so that when I pulled into the yard everybody turned to
see it, laughing immoderately. I found the reason of the mud was that I
carried so much water it passed over into the stack, and this washed out
all the accumulated soot."

One afternoon about a week before Christmas Edison's train jumped the
track near Utica, a station on the line. Four old Michigan Central
cars with rotten sills collapsed in the ditch and went all to pieces,
distributing figs, raisins, dates, and candies all over the track and
the vicinity. Hating to see so much waste, Edison tried to save all he
could by eating it on the spot, but as a result "our family doctor had
the time of his life with me in this connection."

An absurd incident described by Edison throws a vivid light on the
free-and-easy condition of early railroad travel and on the Southern
extravagance of the time. "In 1860, just before the war broke out there
came to the train one afternoon, in Detroit, two fine-looking young men
accompanied by a colored servant. They bought tickets for Port Huron,
the terminal point for the train. After leaving the junction just
outside of Detroit, I brought in the evening papers. When I came
opposite the two young men, one of them said: 'Boy, what have you got?'
I said: 'Papers.' 'All right.' He took them and threw them out of the
window, and, turning to the colored man, said: 'Nicodemus, pay this
boy.' I told Nicodemus the amount, and he opened a satchel and paid me.
The passengers didn't know what to make of the transaction. I returned
with the illustrated papers and magazines. These were seized and thrown
out of the window, and I was told to get my money of Nicodemus. I then
returned with all the old magazines and novels I had not been able to
sell, thinking perhaps this would be too much for them. I was small and
thin, and the layer reached above my head, and was all I could possibly
carry. I had prepared a list, and knew the amount in case they bit
again. When I opened the door, all the passengers roared with laughter.
I walked right up to the young men. One asked me what I had. I said
'Magazines and novels.' He promptly threw them out of the window,
and Nicodemus settled. Then I came in with cracked hickory nuts, then
pop-corn balls, and, finally, molasses candy. All went out of the
window. I felt like Alexander the Great!--I had no more chance! I had
sold all I had. Finally I put a rope to my trunk, which was about
the size of a carpenter's chest, and started to pull this from the
baggage-car to the passenger-car. It was almost too much for my
strength, but at last I got it in front of those men. I pulled off my
coat, shoes, and hat, and laid them on the chest. Then he asked: 'What
have you got, boy?' I said: 'Everything, sir, that I can spare that is
for sale.' The passengers fairly jumped with laughter. Nicodemus paid me
$27 for this last sale, and threw the whole out of the door in the rear
of the car. These men were from the South, and I have always retained a
soft spot in my heart for a Southern gentleman."

While Edison was a newsboy on the train a request came to him one day
to go to the office of E. B. Ward & Company, at that time the largest
owners of steamboats on the Great Lakes. The captain of their largest
boat had died suddenly, and they wanted a message taken to another
captain who lived about fourteen miles from Ridgeway station on the
railroad. This captain had retired, taken up some lumber land, and had
cleared part of it. Edison was offered $15 by Mr. Ward to go and fetch
him, but as it was a wild country and would be dark, Edison stood out
for $25, so that he could get the companionship of another lad. The
terms were agreed to. Edison arrived at Ridgeway at 8.30 P.M., when it
was raining and as dark as ink. Getting another boy with difficulty to
volunteer, he launched out on his errand in the pitch-black night. The
two boys carried lanterns, but the road was a rough path through dense
forest. The country was wild, and it was a usual occurrence to see deer,
bear, and coon skins nailed up on the sides of houses to dry. Edison had
read about bears, but couldn't remember whether they were day or night
prowlers. The farther they went the more apprehensive they became, and
every stump in the ravished forest looked like a bear. The other lad
proposed seeking safety up a tree, but Edison demurred on the plea that
bears could climb, and that the message must be delivered that night to
enable the captain to catch the morning train. First one lantern went
out, then the other. "We leaned up against a tree and cried. I thought
if I ever got out of that scrape alive I would know more about the
habits of animals and everything else, and be prepared for all kinds of
mischance when I undertook an enterprise. However, the intense darkness
dilated the pupils of our eyes so as to make them very sensitive, and
we could just see at times the outlines of the road. Finally, just as
a faint gleam of daylight arrived, we entered the captain's yard and
delivered the message. In my whole life I never spent such a night of
horror as this, but I got a good lesson."

An amusing incident of this period is told by Edison. "When I was a
boy," he says, "the Prince of Wales, the late King Edward, came to
Canada (1860). Great preparations were made at Sarnia, the Canadian town
opposite Port Huron. About every boy, including myself, went over to
see the affair. The town was draped in flags most profusely, and carpets
were laid on the cross-walks for the prince to walk on. There were
arches, etc. A stand was built raised above the general level, where the
prince was to be received by the mayor. Seeing all these preparations,
my idea of a prince was very high; but when he did arrive I mistook the
Duke of Newcastle for him, the duke being a fine-looking man. I soon saw
that I was mistaken: that the prince was a young stripling, and did
not meet expectations. Several of us expressed our belief that a prince
wasn't much, after all, and said that we were thoroughly disappointed.
For this one boy was whipped. Soon the Canuck boys attacked the Yankee
boys, and we were all badly licked. I, myself, got a black eye. That has
always prejudiced me against that kind of ceremonial and folly." It is
certainly interesting to note that in later years the prince for whom
Edison endured the ignominy of a black eye made generous compensation
in a graceful letter accompanying the gold Albert Medal awarded by the
Royal Society of Arts.

Another incident of the period is as follows: "After selling papers in
Port Huron, which was often not reached until about 9.30 at night, I
seldom got home before 11.00 or 11.30. About half-way home from the
station and the town, and within twenty-five feet of the road in a
dense wood, was a soldiers' graveyard where three hundred soldiers were
buried, due to a cholera epidemic which took place at Fort Gratiot, near
by, many years previously. At first we used to shut our eyes and run the
horse past this graveyard, and if the horse stepped on a twig my heart
would give a violent movement, and it is a wonder that I haven't some
valvular disease of that organ. But soon this running of the horse
became monotonous, and after a while all fears of graveyards absolutely
disappeared from my system. I was in the condition of Sam Houston, the
pioneer and founder of Texas, who, it was said, knew no fear. Houston
lived some distance from the town and generally went home late at night,
having to pass through a dark cypress swamp over a corduroy road. One
night, to test his alleged fearlessness, a man stationed himself behind
a tree and enveloped himself in a sheet. He confronted Houston suddenly,
and Sam stopped and said: 'If you are a man, you can't hurt me. If you
are a ghost, you don't want to hurt me. And if you are the devil, come
home with me; I married your sister!'"

It is not to be inferred, however, from some of the preceding statements
that the boy was of an exclusively studious bent of mind. He had then,
as now, the keen enjoyment of a joke, and no particular aversion to the
practical form. An incident of the time is in point. "After the breaking
out of the war there was a regiment of volunteer soldiers quartered
at Fort Gratiot, the reservation extending to the boundary line of our
house. Nearly every night we would hear a call, such as 'Corporal of
the Guard, No. 1.' This would be repeated from sentry to sentry until it
reached the barracks, when Corporal of the Guard, No. 1, would come and
see what was wanted. I and the little Dutch boy, after returning from
the town after selling our papers, thought we would take a hand at
military affairs. So one night, when it was very dark, I shouted for
Corporal of the Guard, No. 1. The second sentry, thinking it was the
terminal sentry who shouted, repeated it to the third, and so on. This
brought the corporal along the half mile, only to find that he was
fooled. We tried him three nights; but the third night they were
watching, and caught the little Dutch boy, took him to the lock-up at
the fort, and shut him up. They chased me to the house. I rushed for the
cellar. In one small apartment there were two barrels of potatoes and a
third one nearly empty. I poured these remnants into the other barrels,
sat down, and pulled the barrel over my head, bottom up. The soldiers
had awakened my father, and they were searching for me with candles and
lanterns. The corporal was absolutely certain I came into the cellar,
and couldn't see how I could have gotten out, and wanted to know from my
father if there was no secret hiding-place. On assurance of my father,
who said that there was not, he said it was most extraordinary. I was
glad when they left, as I was cramped, and the potatoes were rotten that
had been in the barrel and violently offensive. The next morning I was
found in bed, and received a good switching on the legs from my father,
the first and only one I ever received from him, although my mother kept
a switch behind the old Seth Thomas clock that had the bark worn off.
My mother's ideas and mine differed at times, especially when I got
experimenting and mussed up things. The Dutch boy was released next
morning."



CHAPTER IV

THE YOUNG TELEGRAPH OPERATOR

"WHILE a newsboy on the railroad," says Edison, "I got very much
interested in electricity, probably from visiting telegraph offices with
a chum who had tastes similar to mine." It will also have been noted
that he used the telegraph to get items for his little journal, and to
bulletin his special news of the Civil War along the line. The next step
was natural, and having with his knowledge of chemistry no trouble about
"setting up" his batteries, the difficulties of securing apparatus were
chiefly those connected with the circuits and the instruments. American
youths to-day are given, if of a mechanical turn of mind, to amateur
telegraphy or telephony, but seldom, if ever, have to make any part of
the system constructed. In Edison's boyish days it was quite different,
and telegraphic supplies were hard to obtain. But he and his "chum"
had a line between their homes, built of common stove-pipe wire. The
insulators were bottles set on nails driven into trees and short poles.
The magnet wire was wound with rags for insulation, and pieces of spring
brass were used for keys. With an idea of securing current cheaply,
Edison applied the little that he knew about static electricity,
and actually experimented with cats, which he treated vigorously as
frictional machines until the animals fled in dismay, and Edison had
learned his first great lesson in the relative value of sources of
electrical energy. The line was made to work, however, and additional to
the messages that the boys interchanged, Edison secured practice in an
ingenious manner. His father insisted on 11.30 as proper bedtime, which
left but a short interval after the long day on the train. But each
evening, when the boy went home with a bundle of papers that had
not been sold in the town, his father would sit up reading the
"returnables." Edison, therefore, on some excuse, left the papers
with his friend, but suggested that he could get the news from him by
telegraph, bit by bit. The scheme interested his father, and was
put into effect, the messages being written down and handed over for
perusal. This yielded good practice nightly, lasting until 12 and
1 o'clock, and was maintained for some time until Mr. Edison became
willing that his son should stay up for a reasonable time. The papers
were then brought home again, and the boys amused themselves to their
hearts' content until the line was pulled down by a stray cow wandering
through the orchard. Meantime better instruments had been secured, and
the rudiments of telegraphy had been fairly mastered.

The mixed train on which Edison was employed as newsboy did the
way-freight work and shunting at the Mount Clemens station, about half
an hour being usually spent in the work. One August morning, in 1862,
while the shunting was in progress, and a laden box-car had been pushed
out of a siding, Edison, who was loitering about the platform, saw the
little son of the station agent, Mr. J. U. Mackenzie, playing with the
gravel on the main track along which the car without a brakeman was
rapidly approaching. Edison dropped his papers and his glazed cap,
and made a dash for the child, whom he picked up and lifted to safety
without a second to spare, as the wheel of the car struck his heel; and
both were cut about the face and hands by the gravel ballast on which
they fell. The two boys were picked up by the train-hands and carried
to the platform, and the grateful father at once offered to teach the
rescuer, whom he knew and liked, the art of train telegraphy and to make
an operator of him. It is needless to say that the proposal was eagerly
accepted.

Edison found time for his new studies by letting one of his friends look
after the newsboy work on the train for part of the trip, reserving
to himself the run between Port Huron and Mount Clemens. That he was
already well qualified as a beginner is evident from the fact that he
had mastered the Morse code of the telegraphic alphabet, and was able
to take to the station a neat little set of instruments he had just
finished with his own hands at a gun-shop in Detroit. This was probably
a unique achievement in itself among railway operators of that day or of
later times. The drill of the student involved chiefly the acquisition
of the special signals employed in railway work, including the numerals
and abbreviations applied to save time. Some of these have passed
into the slang of the day, "73" being well known as a telegrapher's
expression of compliments or good wishes, while "23" is an accident
or death message, and has been given broader popular significance as
a general synonym for "hoodoo." All of this came easily to Edison, who
had, moreover, as his Herald showed, an unusual familiarity with train
movement along that portion of the Grand Trunk road.

Three or four months were spent pleasantly and profitably by the youth
in this course of study, and Edison took to it enthusiastically, giving
it no less than eighteen hours a day. He then put up a little telegraph
line from the station to the village, a distance of about a mile, and
opened an office in a drug store; but the business was naturally very
small. The telegraph operator at Port Huron knowing of his proficiency,
and wanting to get into the United States Military Telegraph Corps,
where the pay in those days of the Civil War was high, succeeded in
convincing his brother-in-law, Mr. M. Walker, that young Edison could
fill the position. Edison was, of course, well acquainted with the
operators along the road and at the southern terminal, and took up his
new duties very easily. The office was located in a jewelry store, where
newspapers and periodicals were also sold. Edison was to be found at the
office both day and night, sleeping there. "I became quite valuable to
Mr. Walker. After working all day I worked at the office nights as well,
for the reason that 'press report' came over one of the wires until 3
A.M., and I would cut in and copy it as well as I could, to become more
rapidly proficient. The goal of the rural telegraph operator was to be
able to take press. Mr. Walker tried to get my father to apprentice me
at $20 per month, but they could not agree. I then applied for a job on
the Grand Trunk Railroad as a railway operator, and was given a place,
nights, at Stratford Junction, Canada." Apparently his friend Mackenzie
helped him in the matter. The position carried a salary of $25 per
month. No serious objections were raised by his family, for the distance
from Port Huron was not great, and Stratford was near Bayfield, the
old home from which the Edisons had come, so that there were doubtless
friends or even relatives in the vicinity. This was in 1863.

Mr. Walker was an observant man, who has since that time installed a
number of waterworks systems and obtained several patents of his own. He
describes the boy of sixteen as engrossed intensely in his experiments
and scientific reading, and somewhat indifferent, for this reason, to
his duties as operator. This office was not particularly busy, taking
from $50 to $75 a month, but even the messages taken in would remain
unsent on the hook while Edison was in the cellar below trying to solve
some chemical problem. The manager would see him studying sometimes
an article in such a paper as the Scientific American, and then
disappearing to buy a few sundries for experiments. Returning from the
drug store with his chemicals, he would not be seen again until required
by his duties, or until he had found out for himself, if possible, in
this offhand manner, whether what he had read was correct or not. When
he had completed his experiment all interest in it was lost, and the
jars and wires would be left to any fate that might befall them. In like
manner Edison would make free use of the watchmaker's tools that lay
on the little table in the front window, and would take the wire pliers
there without much thought as to their value as distinguished from a
lineman's tools. The one idea was to do quickly what he wanted to do;
and the same swift, almost headlong trial of anything that comes to
hand, while the fervor of a new experiment is felt, has been noted
at all stages of the inventor's career. One is reminded of Palissy's
recklessness, when in his efforts to make the enamel melt on his pottery
he used the very furniture of his home for firewood.

Mr. Edison remarks the fact that there was very little difference
between the telegraph of that time and of to-day, except the general use
of the old Morse register with the dots and dashes recorded by indenting
paper strips that could be read and checked later at leisure if
necessary. He says: "The telegraph men couldn't explain how it worked,
and I was always trying to get them to do so. I think they couldn't. I
remember the best explanation I got was from an old Scotch line repairer
employed by the Montreal Telegraph Company, which operated the railroad
wires. He said that if you had a dog like a dachshund, long enough to
reach from Edinburgh to London, if you pulled his tail in Edinburgh he
would bark in London. I could understand that, but I never could get
it through me what went through the dog or over the wire." To-day
Mr. Edison is just as unable to solve the inner mystery of electrical
transmission. Nor is he alone. At the banquet given to celebrate his
jubilee in 1896 as professor at Glasgow University, Lord Kelvin, the
greatest physicist of our time, admitted with tears in his eyes and the
note of tragedy in his voice, that when it came to explaining the
nature of electricity, he knew just as little as when he had begun as
a student, and felt almost as though his life had been wasted while he
tried to grapple with the great mystery of physics.

Another episode of this period is curious in its revelation of the
tenacity with which Edison has always held to some of his oldest
possessions with a sense of personal attachment. "While working
at Stratford Junction," he says, "I was told by one of the freight
conductors that in the freight-house at Goodrich there were several
boxes of old broken-up batteries. I went there and found over eighty
cells of the well-known Grove nitric-acid battery. The operator there,
who was also agent, when asked by me if I could have the electrodes of
each cell, made of sheet platinum, gave his permission readily, thinking
they were of tin. I removed them all, amounting to several ounces.
Platinum even in those days was very expensive, costing several dollars
an ounce, and I owned only three small strips. I was overjoyed at this
acquisition, and those very strips and the reworked scrap are used to
this day in my laboratory over forty years later."

It was at Stratford that Edison's inventiveness was first displayed. The
hours of work of a night operator are usually from 7 P.M. to 7 A.M., and
to insure attention while on duty it is often provided that the operator
every hour, from 9 P.M. until relieved by the day operator, shall send
in the signal "6" to the train dispatcher's office. Edison revelled in
the opportunity for study and experiment given him by his long hours
of freedom in the daytime, but needed sleep, just as any healthy youth
does. Confronted by the necessity of sending in this watchman's signal
as evidence that he was awake and on duty, he constructed a small wheel
with notches on the rim, and attached it to the clock in such a manner
that the night-watchman could start it when the line was quiet, and at
each hour the wheel revolved and sent in accurately the dots required
for "sixing." The invention was a success, the device being, indeed,
similar to that of the modern district messenger box; but it was soon
noticed that, in spite of the regularity of the report, "Sf" could not
be raised even if a train message were sent immediately after. Detection
and a reprimand came in due course, but were not taken very seriously.

A serious occurrence that might have resulted in accident drove him soon
after from Canada, although the youth could hardly be held to blame for
it. Edison says: "This night job just suited me, as I could have the
whole day to myself. I had the faculty of sleeping in a chair any time
for a few minutes at a time. I taught the night-yardman my call, so I
could get half an hour's sleep now and then between trains, and in case
the station was called the watchman would awaken me. One night I got an
order to hold a freight train, and I replied that I would. I rushed out
to find the signalman, but before I could find him and get the signal
set, the train ran past. I ran to the telegraph office, and reported
that I could not hold her. The reply was: 'Hell!' The train dispatcher,
on the strength of my message that I would hold the train, had permitted
another to leave the last station in the opposite direction. There was a
lower station near the junction where the day operator slept. I started
for it on foot. The night was dark, and I fell into a culvert and was
knocked senseless." Owing to the vigilance of the two engineers on
the locomotives, who saw each other approaching on the straight single
track, nothing more dreadful happened than a summons to the thoughtless
operator to appear before the general manager at Toronto. On reaching
the manager's office, his trial for neglect of duty was fortunately
interrupted by the call of two Englishmen; and while their conversation
proceeded, Edison slipped quietly out of the room, hurried to the Grand
Trunk freight depot, found a conductor he knew taking out a freight
train for Sarnia, and was not happy until the ferry-boat from Sarnia had
landed him once more on the Michigan shore. The Grand Trunk still owes
Mr. Edison the wages due him at the time he thus withdrew from its
service, but the claim has never been pressed.

The same winter of 1863-64, while at Port Huron, Edison had a further
opportunity of displaying his ingenuity. An ice-jam had broken the light
telegraph cable laid in the bed of the river across to Sarnia, and thus
communication was interrupted. The river is three-quarters of a mile
wide, and could not be crossed on foot; nor could the cable be repaired.
Edison at once suggested using the steam whistle of the locomotive,
and by manipulating the valve conversed the short and long outbursts of
shrill sound into the Morse code. An operator on the Sarnia shore was
quick enough to catch the significance of the strange whistling, and
messages were thus sent in wireless fashion across the ice-floes in the
river. It is said that such signals were also interchanged by military
telegraphers during the war, and possibly Edison may have heard of
the practice; but be that as it may, he certainly showed ingenuity
and resource in applying such a method to meet the necessity. It is
interesting to note that at this point the Grand Trunk now has its St.
Clair tunnel, through which the trains are hauled under the river-bed by
electric locomotives.

Edison had now begun unconsciously the roaming and drifting that took
him during the next five years all over the Middle States, and that
might well have wrecked the career of any one less persistent
and industrious. It was a period of his life corresponding to the
Wanderjahre of the German artisan, and was an easy way of gratifying a
taste for travel without the risk of privation. To-day there is little
temptation to the telegrapher to go to distant parts of the country on
the chance that he may secure a livelihood at the key. The ranks are
well filled everywhere, and of late years the telegraph as an art or
industry has shown relatively slight expansion, owing chiefly to the
development of telephony. Hence, if vacancies occur, there are plenty of
operators available, and salaries have remained so low as to lead to one
or two formidable and costly strikes that unfortunately took no account
of the economic conditions of demand and supply. But in the days of the
Civil War there was a great dearth of skilful manipulators of the key.
About fifteen hundred of the best operators in the country were at the
front on the Federal side alone, and several hundred more had enlisted.
This created a serious scarcity, and a nomadic operator going to any
telegraphic centre would be sure to find a place open waiting for him.
At the close of the war a majority of those who had been with the two
opposed armies remained at the key under more peaceful surroundings, but
the rapid development of the commercial and railroad systems fostered a
new demand, and then for a time it seemed almost impossible to train
new operators fast enough. In a few years, however, the telephone sprang
into vigorous existence, dating from 1876, drawing off some of the
most adventurous spirits from the telegraph field; and the deterrent
influence of the telephone on the telegraph had made itself felt by
1890. The expiration of the leading Bell telephone patents, five years
later, accentuated even more sharply the check that had been put
on telegraphy, as hundreds and thousands of "independent" telephone
companies were then organized, throwing a vast network of toll lines
over Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and other States, and affording
cheap, instantaneous means of communication without any necessity for
the intervention of an operator.

It will be seen that the times have changed radically since Edison
became a telegrapher, and that in this respect a chapter of electrical
history has been definitely closed. There was a day when the art offered
a distinct career to all of its practitioners, and young men of ambition
and good family were eager to begin even as messenger boys, and were
ready to undergo a severe ordeal of apprenticeship with the belief that
they could ultimately attain positions of responsibility and profit.
At the same time operators have always been shrewd enough to regard the
telegraph as a stepping-stone to other careers in life. A bright fellow
entering the telegraph service to-day finds the experience he may
gain therein valuable, but he soon realizes that there are not enough
good-paying official positions to "go around," so as to give each worthy
man a chance after he has mastered the essentials of the art. He feels,
therefore, that to remain at the key involves either stagnation or
deterioration, and that after, say, twenty-five years of practice he
will have lost ground as compared with friends who started out in other
occupations. The craft of an operator, learned without much difficulty,
is very attractive to a youth, but a position at the key is no place
for a man of mature years. His services, with rare exceptions, grow less
valuable as he advances in age and nervous strain breaks him down. On
the contrary, men engaged in other professions find, as a rule, that
they improve and advance with experience, and that age brings larger
rewards and opportunities.

The list of well-known Americans who have been graduates of the key is
indeed an extraordinary one, and there is no department of our national
life in which they have not distinguished themselves. The contrast,
in this respect, between them and their European colleagues is highly
significant. In Europe the telegraph systems are all under government
management, the operators have strictly limited spheres of promotion,
and at the best the transition from one kind of employment to another is
not made so easily as in the New World. But in the United States we have
seen Rufus Bullock become Governor of Georgia, and Ezra Cornell Governor
of New York. Marshall Jewell was Postmaster-General of President
Grant's Cabinet, and Daniel Lamont was Secretary of State in President
Cleveland's. Gen. T. T. Eckert, past-President of the Western Union
Telegraph Company, was Assistant Secretary of War under President
Lincoln; and Robert J. Wynne, afterward a consul-general, served as
Assistant Postmaster General. A very large proportion of the
presidents and leading officials of the great railroad systems are old
telegraphers, including Messrs. W. C. Brown, President of the New York
Central Railroad, and Marvin Hughitt, President of the Chicago & North
western Railroad. In industrial and financial life there have been
Theodore N. Vail, President of the Bell telephone system; L. C. Weir,
late President of the Adams Express; A. B. Chandler, President of the
Postal Telegraph and Cable Company; Sir W. Van Home, identified with
Canadian development; Robert C. Clowry, President of the Western
Union Telegraph Company; D. H. Bates, Manager of the Baltimore &
Ohio telegraph for Robert Garrett; and Andrew Carnegie, the greatest
ironmaster the world has ever known, as well as its greatest
philanthropist. In journalism there have been leaders like Edward
Rosewater, founder of the Omaha Bee; W. J. Elverson, of the Philadelphia
Press; and Frank A. Munsey, publisher of half a dozen big magazines.
George Kennan has achieved fame in literature, and Guy Carleton and
Harry de Souchet have been successful as dramatists. These are but
typical of hundreds of men who could be named who have risen from
work at the key to become recognized leaders in differing spheres of
activity.

But roving has never been favorable to the formation of steady habits.
The young men who thus floated about the country from one telegraph
office to another were often brilliant operators, noted for speed in
sending and receiving, but they were undisciplined, were without the
restraining influences of home life, and were so highly paid for their
work that they could indulge freely in dissipation if inclined that way.
Subjected to nervous tension for hours together at the key, many of them
unfortunately took to drink, and having ended one engagement in a city
by a debauch that closed the doors of the office to them, would drift
away to the nearest town, and there securing work, would repeat the
performance. At one time, indeed, these men were so numerous and so
much in evidence as to constitute a type that the public was disposed
to accept as representative of the telegraphic fraternity; but as the
conditions creating him ceased to exist, the "tramp operator" also
passed into history. It was, however, among such characters that Edison
was very largely thrown in these early days of aimless drifting, to
learn something perhaps of their nonchalant philosophy of life, sharing
bed and board with them under all kinds of adverse conditions, but
always maintaining a stoic abstemiousness, and never feeling other than
a keen regret at the waste of so much genuine ability and kindliness on
the part of those knights errant of the key whose inevitable fate might
so easily have been his own.

Such a class or group of men can always be presented by an individual
type, and this is assuredly best embodied in Milton F. Adams, one of
Edison's earliest and closest friends, to whom reference will be made in
later chapters, and whose life has been so full of adventurous episodes
that he might well be regarded as the modern Gil Blas. That career is
certainly well worth the telling as "another story," to use the Kipling
phrase. Of him Edison says: "Adams was one of a class of operators never
satisfied to work at any place for any great length of time. He had the
'wanderlust.' After enjoying hospitality in Boston in 1868-69, on the
floor of my hall-bedroom, which was a paradise for the entomologist,
while the boarding-house itself was run on the banting system of flesh
reduction, he came to me one day and said: 'Good-bye, Edison; I have
got sixty cents, and I am going to San Francisco.' And he did go. How, I
never knew personally. I learned afterward that he got a job there, and
then within a week they had a telegraphers' strike. He got a big
torch and sold patent medicine on the streets at night to support the
strikers. Then he went to Peru as partner of a man who had a grizzly
bear which they proposed entering against a bull in the bull-ring in
that city. The grizzly was killed in five minutes, and so the scheme
died. Then Adams crossed the Andes, and started a market-report
bureau in Buenos Ayres. This didn't pay, so he started a restaurant in
Pernambuco, Brazil. There he did very well, but something went wrong
(as it always does to a nomad), so he went to the Transvaal, and ran a
panorama called 'Paradise Lost' in the Kaffir kraals. This didn't pay,
and he became the editor of a newspaper; then went to England to raise
money for a railroad in Cape Colony. Next I heard of him in New York,
having just arrived from Bogota, United States of Colombia, with a power
of attorney and $2000 from a native of that republic, who had applied
for a patent for tightening a belt to prevent it from slipping on a
pulley--a device which he thought a new and great invention, but which
was in use ever since machinery was invented. I gave Adams, then, a
position as salesman for electrical apparatus. This he soon got tired
of, and I lost sight of him." Adams, in speaking of this episode, says
that when he asked for transportation expenses to St. Louis, Edison
pulled out of his pocket a ferry ticket to Hoboken, and said to his
associates: "I'll give him that, and he'll get there all right." This
was in the early days of electric lighting; but down to the present
moment the peregrinations of this versatile genius of the key have never
ceased in one hemisphere or the other, so that as Mr. Adams himself
remarked to the authors in April, 1908: "The life has been somewhat
variegated, but never dull."

The fact remains also that throughout this period Edison, while himself
a very Ishmael, never ceased to study, explore, experiment. Referring
to this beginning of his career, he mentions a curious fact that
throws light on his ceaseless application. "After I became a telegraph
operator," he says, "I practiced for a long time to become a rapid
reader of print, and got so expert I could sense the meaning of a whole
line at once. This faculty, I believe, should be taught in schools, as
it appears to be easily acquired. Then one can read two or three books
in a day, whereas if each word at a time only is sensed, reading is
laborious."



CHAPTER V

ARDUOUS YEARS IN THE CENTRAL WEST

IN 1903, when accepting the position of honorary electrician to the
International Exposition held in St. Louis in 1904, to commemorate the
centenary of the Louisiana Purchase, Mr. Edison spoke in his letter
of the Central West as a "region where as a young telegraph operator I
spent many arduous years before moving East." The term of probation
thus referred to did not end until 1868, and while it lasted Edison's
wanderings carried him from Detroit to New Orleans, and took him, among
other cities, to Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Louisville, and Memphis, some
of which he visited twice in his peregrinations to secure work. From
Canada, after the episodes noted in the last chapter, he went to Adrian,
Michigan, and of what happened there Edison tells a story typical of
his wanderings for several years to come. "After leaving my first job
at Stratford Junction, I got a position as operator on the Lake Shore &
Michigan Southern at Adrian, Michigan, in the division superintendent's
office. As usual, I took the 'night trick,' which most operators
disliked, but which I preferred, as it gave me more leisure to
experiment. I had obtained from the station agent a small room, and had
established a little shop of my own. One day the day operator wanted to
get off, and I was on duty. About 9 o'clock the superintendent handed me
a despatch which he said was very important, and which I must get off at
once. The wire at the time was very busy, and I asked if I should
break in. I got orders to do so, and acting under those orders of the
superintendent, I broke in and tried to send the despatch; but the
other operator would not permit it, and the struggle continued for ten
minutes. Finally I got possession of the wire and sent the message. The
superintendent of telegraph, who then lived in Adrian and went to his
office in Toledo every day, happened that day to be in the Western Union
office up-town--and it was the superintendent I was really struggling
with! In about twenty minutes he arrived livid with rage, and I was
discharged on the spot. I informed him that the general superintendent
had told me to break in and send the despatch, but the general
superintendent then and there repudiated the whole thing. Their families
were socially close, so I was sacrificed. My faith in human nature got a
slight jar."

Edison then went to Toledo and secured a position at Fort Wayne, on the
Pittsburg, Fort Wayne & Chicago Railroad, now leased to the Pennsylvania
system. This was a "day job," and he did not like it. He drifted two
months later to Indianapolis, arriving there in the fall of 1864, when
he was at first assigned to duty at the Union Station at a salary of $75
a month for the Western Union Telegraph Company, whose service he
now entered, and with which he has been destined to maintain highly
important and close relationships throughout a large part of his life.
Superintendent Wallick appears to have treated him generously and to
have loaned him instruments, a kindness that was greatly appreciated,
for twenty years later the inventor called on his old employer, and
together they visited the scene where the borrowed apparatus had been
mounted on a rough board in the depot. Edison did not stay long in
Indianapolis, however, resigning in February, 1865, and proceeding to
Cincinnati. The transfer was possibly due to trouble caused by one of
his early inventions embodying what has been characterized by an expert
as "probably the most simple and ingenious arrangement of connections
for a repeater." His ambition was to take "press report," but finding,
even after considerable practice, that he "broke" frequently, he
adjusted two embossing Morse registers--one to receive the press
matter, and the other to repeat the dots and dashes at a lower speed, so
that the message could be copied leisurely. Hence he could not be rushed
or "broken" in receiving, while he could turn out "copy" that was a
marvel of neatness and clearness. All was well so long as ordinary
conditions prevailed, but when an unusual pressure occurred the little
system fell behind, and the newspapers complained of the slowness with
which reports were delivered to them. It is easy to understand that with
matter received at a rate of forty words per minute and worked off at
twenty-five words per minute a serious congestion or delay would result,
and the newspapers were more anxious for the news than they were for
fine penmanship.

Of this device Mr. Edison remarks: "Together we took press for several
nights, my companion keeping the apparatus in adjustment and I copying.
The regular press operator would go to the theatre or take a nap, only
finishing the report after 1 A.M. One of the newspapers complained of
bad copy toward the end of the report--that, is from 1 to 3 A.M., and
requested that the operator taking the report up to 1 A.M.--which was
ourselves--take it all, as the copy then was perfectly unobjectionable.
This led to an investigation by the manager, and the scheme was
forbidden.

"This instrument, many years afterward, was applied by me for
transferring messages from one wire to any other wire simultaneously,
or after any interval of time. It consisted of a disk of paper, the
indentations being formed in a volute spiral, exactly as in the disk
phonograph to-day. It was this instrument which gave me the idea of the
phonograph while working on the telephone."

Arrived in Cincinnati, where he got employment in the Western Union
commercial telegraph department at a wage of $60 per month, Edison
made the acquaintance of Milton F. Adams, already referred to as facile
princeps the typical telegrapher in all his more sociable and brilliant
aspects. Speaking of that time, Mr. Adams says: "I can well recall when
Edison drifted in to take a job. He was a youth of about eighteen years,
decidedly unprepossessing in dress and rather uncouth in manner. I was
twenty-one, and very dudish. He was quite thin in those days, and his
nose was very prominent, giving a Napoleonic look to his face, although
the curious resemblance did not strike me at the time. The boys did not
take to him cheerfully, and he was lonesome. I sympathized with him, and
we became close companions. As an operator he had no superiors and very
few equals. Most of the time he was monkeying with the batteries and
circuits, and devising things to make the work of telegraphy less
irksome. He also relieved the monotony of office-work by fitting up the
battery circuits to play jokes on his fellow-operators, and to deal with
the vermin that infested the premises. He arranged in the cellar what he
called his 'rat paralyzer,' a very simple contrivance consisting of two
plates insulated from each other and connected with the main battery.
They were so placed that when a rat passed over them the fore feet on
the one plate and the hind feet on the other completed the circuit and
the rat departed this life, electrocuted."

Shortly after Edison's arrival at Cincinnati came the close of the Civil
War and the assassination of President Lincoln. It was natural that
telegraphers should take an intense interest in the general struggle,
for not only did they handle all the news relating to it, but many of
them were at one time or another personal participants. For example, one
of the operators in the Cincinnati office was George Ellsworth, who was
telegrapher for Morgan, the famous Southern Guerrilla, and was with him
when he made his raid into Ohio and was captured near the Pennsylvania
line. Ellsworth himself made a narrow escape by swimming the Ohio
River with the aid of an army mule. Yet we can well appreciate the
unimpressionable way in which some of the men did their work, from an
anecdote that Mr. Edison tells of that awful night of Friday, April 14,
1865: "I noticed," he says, "an immense crowd gathering in the street
outside a newspaper office. I called the attention of the other
operators to the crowd, and we sent a messenger boy to find the cause
of the excitement. He returned in a few minutes and shouted 'Lincoln's
shot.' Instinctively the operators looked from one face to another to
see which man had received the news. All the faces were blank, and every
man said he had not taken a word about the shooting. 'Look over your
files,' said the boss to the man handling the press stuff. For a few
moments we waited in suspense, and then the man held up a sheet of
paper containing a short account of the shooting of the President. The
operator had worked so mechanically that he had handled the news without
the slightest knowledge of its significance." Mr. Adams says that at the
time the city was en fete on account of the close of the war, the name
of the assassin was received by telegraph, and it was noted with a
thrill of horror that it was that of a brother of Edwin Booth and of
Junius Brutus Booth--the latter of whom was then playing at the old
National Theatre. Booth was hurried away into seclusion, and the next
morning the city that had been so gay over night with bunting was draped
with mourning.

Edison's diversions in Cincinnati were chiefly those already observed.
He read a great deal, but spent most of his leisure in experiment. Mr.
Adams remarks: "Edison and I were very fond of tragedy. Forrest and John
McCullough were playing at the National Theatre, and when our capital
was sufficient we would go to see those eminent tragedians alternate in
Othello and Iago. Edison always enjoyed Othello greatly. Aside from an
occasional visit to the Loewen Garden 'over the Rhine,' with a glass of
beer and a few pretzels, consumed while listening to the excellent music
of a German band, the theatre was the sum and substance of our innocent
dissipation."

The Cincinnati office, as a central point, appears to have been
attractive to many of the clever young operators who graduated from it
to positions of larger responsibility. Some of them were conspicuous for
their skill and versatility. Mr. Adams tells this interesting story as
an illustration: "L. C. Weir, or Charlie, as he was known, at that
time agent for the Adams Express Company, had the remarkable ability of
taking messages and copying them twenty-five words behind the sender.
One day he came into the operating-room, and passing a table he heard
Louisville calling Cincinnati. He reached over to the key and answered
the call. My attention was arrested by the fact that he walked off after
responding, and the sender happened to be a good one. Weir coolly asked
for a pen, and when he sat down the sender was just one message ahead
of him with date, address, and signature. Charlie started in, and in a
beautiful, large, round hand copied that message. The sender went right
along, and when he finished with six messages closed his key. When Weir
had done with the last one the sender began to think that after all
there had been no receiver, as Weir did not 'break,' but simply gave
his O. K. He afterward became president of the Adams Express, and was
certainly a wonderful operator." The operating-room referred to was on
the fifth floor of the building with no elevators.

Those were the early days of trade unionism in telegraphy, and the
movement will probably never quite die out in the craft which has always
shown so much solidarity. While Edison was in Cincinnati a delegation
of five union operators went over from Cleveland to form a local branch,
and the occasion was one of great conviviality. Night came, but the
unionists were conspicuous by their absence, although more circuits than
one were intolerant of delay and clamorous for attention---eight local
unionists being away. The Cleveland report wire was in special need, and
Edison, almost alone in the office, devoted himself to it all through
the night and until 3 o'clock the next morning, when he was relieved.

He had previously been getting $80 a month, and had eked this out
by copying plays for the theatre. His rating was that of a "plug" or
inferior operator; but he was determined to lift himself into the class
of first-class operators, and had kept up the practice of going to the
office at night to "copy press," acting willingly as a substitute for
any operator who wanted to get off for a few hours--which often meant
all night. Speaking of this special ordeal, for which he had thus been
unconsciously preparing, Edison says: "My copy looked fine if viewed
as a whole, as I could write a perfectly straight line across the wide
sheet, which was not ruled. There were no flourishes, but the individual
letters would not bear close inspection. When I missed understanding a
word, there was no time to think what it was, so I made an illegible one
to fill in, trusting to the printers to sense it. I knew they could read
anything, although Mr. Bloss, an editor of the Inquirer, made such bad
copy that one of his editorials was pasted up on the notice-board in the
telegraph office with an offer of one dollar to any man who could 'read
twenty consecutive words.' Nobody ever did it. When I got through I
was too nervous to go home, so waited the rest of the night for the day
manager, Mr. Stevens, to see what was to be the outcome of this Union
formation and of my efforts. He was an austere man, and I was afraid of
him. I got the morning papers, which came out at 4 A. M., and the press
report read perfectly, which surprised me greatly. I went to work on
my regular day wire to Portsmouth, Ohio, and there was considerable
excitement, but nothing was said to me, neither did Mr. Stevens examine
the copy on the office hook, which I was watching with great interest.
However, about 3 P. M. he went to the hook, grabbed the bunch and
looked at it as a whole without examining it in detail, for which I
was thankful. Then he jabbed it back on the hook, and I knew I was all
right. He walked over to me, and said: 'Young man, I want you to work
the Louisville wire nights; your salary will be $125.' Thus I got from
the plug classification to that of a 'first-class man.'"

But no sooner was this promotion secured than he started again on his
wanderings southward, while his friend Adams went North, neither
having any difficulty in making the trip. "The boys in those days
had extraordinary facilities for travel. As a usual thing it was only
necessary for them to board a train and tell the conductor they were
operators. Then they would go as far as they liked. The number of
operators was small, and they were in demand everywhere." It was in this
way Edison made his way south as far as Memphis, Tennessee, where the
telegraph service at that time was under military law, although the
operators received $125 a month. Here again Edison began to invent and
improve on existing apparatus, with the result of having once more to
"move on." The story may be told in his own terse language: "I was not
the inventor of the auto repeater, but while in Memphis I worked on
one. Learning that the chief operator, who was a protege of the
superintendent, was trying in some way to put New York and New Orleans
together for the first time since the close of the war, I redoubled my
efforts, and at 2 o'clock one morning I had them speaking to each other.
The office of the Memphis Avalanche was in the same building. The paper
got wind of it and sent messages. A column came out in the morning about
it; but when I went to the office in the afternoon to report for duty I
was discharged with out explanation. The superintendent would not even
give me a pass to Nashville, so I had to pay my fare. I had so little
money left that I nearly starved at Decatur, Alabama, and had to stay
three days before going on north to Nashville. Arrived in that city,
I went to the telegraph office, got money enough to buy a little solid
food, and secured a pass to Louisville. I had a companion with me who
was also out of a job. I arrived at Louisville on a bitterly cold day,
with ice in the gutters. I was wearing a linen duster and was not much
to look at, but got a position at once, working on a press wire. My
travelling companion was less successful on account of his 'record.'
They had a limit even in those days when the telegraph service was so
demoralized."

Some reminiscences of Mr. Edison are of interest as bearing not only
upon the "demoralized" telegraph service, but the conditions from
which the New South had to emerge while working out its salvation. "The
telegraph was still under military control, not having been turned over
to the original owners, the Southern Telegraph Company. In addition to
the regular force, there was an extra force of two or three operators,
and some stranded ones, who were a burden to us, for board was high.
One of these derelicts was a great source of worry to me, personally. He
would come in at all hours and either throw ink around or make a lot
of noise. One night he built a fire in the grate and started to throw
pistol cartridges into the flames. These would explode, and I was twice
hit by the bullets, which left a black-and-blue mark. Another night he
came in and got from some part of the building a lot of stationery with
'Confederate States' printed at the head. He was a fine operator, and
wrote a beautiful hand. He would take a sheet of this paper, write
capital 'A', and then take another sheet and make the 'A' differently;
and so on through the alphabet; each time crumpling the paper up in his
hand and throwing it on the floor. He would keep this up until the room
was filled nearly flush with the table. Then he would quit.

"Everything at that time was 'wide open.' Disorganization reigned
supreme. There was no head to anything. At night myself and a companion
would go over to a gorgeously furnished faro-bank and get our midnight
lunch. Everything was free. There were over twenty keno-rooms running.
One of them that I visited was in a Baptist church, the man with the
wheel being in the pulpit, and the gamblers in the pews.

"While there the manager of the telegraph office was arrested for
something I never understood, and incarcerated in a military prison
about half a mile from the office. The building was in plain sight from
the office, and four stories high. He was kept strictly incommunicado.
One day, thinking he might be confined in a room facing the office, I
put my arm out of the window and kept signalling dots and dashes by the
movement of the arm. I tried this several times for two days. Finally
he noticed it, and putting his arm through the bars of the window he
established communication with me. He thus sent several messages to his
friends, and was afterward set free."

Another curious story told by Edison concerns a fellow-operator on night
duty at Chattanooga Junction, at the time he was at Memphis: "When it
was reported that Hood was marching on Nashville, one night a Jew came
into the office about 11 o'clock in great excitement, having heard the
Hood rumor. He, being a large sutler, wanted to send a message to save
his goods. The operator said it was impossible--that orders had been
given to send no private messages. Then the Jew wanted to bribe my
friend, who steadfastly refused for the reason, as he told the Jew, that
he might be court-martialled and shot. Finally the Jew got up to $800.
The operator swore him to secrecy and sent the message. Now there was
no such order about private messages, and the Jew, finding it out,
complained to Captain Van Duzer, chief of telegraphs, who investigated
the matter, and while he would not discharge the operator, laid him
off indefinitely. Van Duzer was so lenient that if an operator were
discharged, all the operator had to do was to wait three days and then
go and sit on the stoop of Van Duzer's office all day, and he would be
taken back. But Van Duzer swore he would never give in in this case.
He said that if the operator had taken $800 and sent the message at the
regular rate, which was twenty-five cents, it would have been all right,
as the Jew would be punished for trying to bribe a military operator;
but when the operator took the $800 and then sent the message deadhead,
he couldn't stand it, and he would never relent."

A third typical story of this period deals with a cipher message for
Thomas. Mr. Edison narrates it as follows: "When I was an operator in
Cincinnati working the Louisville wire nights for a time, one night a
man over on the Pittsburg wire yelled out: 'D. I. cipher,' which meant
that there was a cipher message from the War Department at Washington
and that it was coming--and he yelled out 'Louisville.' I started
immediately to call up that place. It was just at the change of shift in
the office. I could not get Louisville, and the cipher message began to
come. It was taken by the operator on the other table direct from the
War Department. It was for General Thomas, at Nashville. I called for
about twenty minutes and notified them that I could not get Louisville.
I kept at it for about fifteen minutes longer, and notified them that
there was still no answer from Louisville. They then notified the War
Department that they could not get Louisville. Then we tried to get it
by all kinds of roundabout ways, but in no case could anybody get them
at that office. Soon a message came from the War Department to send
immediately for the manager of the Cincinnati office. He was brought to
the office and several messages were exchanged, the contents of which,
of course, I did not know, but the matter appeared to be very serious,
as they were afraid of General Hood, of the Confederate Army, who was
then attempting to march on Nashville; and it was very important that
this cipher of about twelve hundred words or so should be got through
immediately to General Thomas. I kept on calling up to 12 or 1 o'clock,
but no Louisville. About 1 o'clock the operator at the Indianapolis
office got hold of an operator on a wire which ran from Indianapolis to
Louisville along the railroad, who happened to come into his office. He
arranged with this operator to get a relay of horses, and the message
was sent through Indianapolis to this operator who had engaged horses to
carry the despatches to Louisville and find out the trouble, and get the
despatches through without delay to General Thomas. In those days the
telegraph fraternity was rather demoralized, and the discipline was very
lax. It was found out a couple of days afterward that there were
three night operators at Louisville. One of them had gone over to
Jeffersonville and had fallen off a horse and broken his leg, and was
in a hospital. By a remarkable coincidence another of the men had
been stabbed in a keno-room, and was also in hospital while the third
operator had gone to Cynthiana to see a man hanged and had got left by
the train."

     I think the most important line of
     investigation is the production of
     Electricity direct from carbon.
     Edison

Young Edison remained in Louisville for about two years, quite a long
stay for one with such nomadic instincts. It was there that he perfected
the peculiar vertical style of writing which, beginning with him in
telegraphy, later became so much of a fad with teachers of penmanship
and in the schools. He says of this form of writing, a current example
of which is given above: "I developed this style in Louisville while
taking press reports. My wire was connected to the 'blind' side of a
repeater at Cincinnati, so that if I missed a word or sentence, or if
the wire worked badly, I could not break in and get the last words,
because the Cincinnati man had no instrument by which he could hear me.
I had to take what came. When I got the job, the cable across the
Ohio River at Covington, connecting with the line to Louisville, had a
variable leak in it, which caused the strength of the signalling current
to make violent fluctuations. I obviated this by using several relays,
each with a different adjustment, working several sounders all connected
with one sounding-plate. The clatter was bad, but I could read it with
fair ease. When, in addition to this infernal leak, the wires north to
Cleveland worked badly, it required a large amount of imagination to get
the sense of what was being sent. An imagination requires an appreciable
time for its exercise, and as the stuff was coming at the rate of
thirty-five to forty words a minute, it was very difficult to write down
what was coming and imagine what wasn't coming. Hence it was necessary
to become a very rapid writer, so I started to find the fastest style. I
found that the vertical style, with each letter separate and without
any flourishes, was the most rapid, and that the smaller the letter
the greater the rapidity. As I took on an average from eight to fifteen
columns of news report every day, it did not take long to perfect
this method." Mr. Edison has adhered to this characteristic style of
penmanship down to the present time.

As a matter of fact, the conditions at Louisville at that time were not
much better than they had been at Memphis. The telegraph operating-room
was in a deplorable condition. It was on the second story of a
dilapidated building on the principal street of the city, with the
battery-room in the rear; behind which was the office of the agent of
the Associated Press. The plastering was about one-third gone from the
ceiling. A small stove, used occasionally in the winter, was connected
to the chimney by a tortuous pipe. The office was never cleaned. The
switchboard for manipulating the wires was about thirty-four inches
square. The brass connections on it were black with age and with the
arcing effects of lightning, which, to young Edison, seemed particularly
partial to Louisville. "It would strike on the wires," he says, "with
an explosion like a cannon-shot, making that office no place for an
operator with heart-disease." Around the dingy walls were a dozen
tables, the ends next to the wall. They were about the size of those
seen in old-fashioned country hotels for holding the wash-bowl and
pitcher. The copper wires connecting the instruments to the switchboard
were small, crystallized, and rotten. The battery-room was filled
with old record-books and message bundles, and one hundred cells of
nitric-acid battery, arranged on a stand in the centre of the room. This
stand, as well as the floor, was almost eaten through by the destructive
action of the powerful acid. Grim and uncompromising as the description
reads, it was typical of the equipment in those remote days of the
telegraph at the close of the war.

Illustrative of the length to which telegraphers could go at a time when
they were so much in demand, Edison tells the following story: "When I
took the position there was a great shortage of operators. One night at
2 A.M. another operator and I were on duty. I was taking press report,
and the other man was working the New York wire. We heard a heavy tramp,
tramp, tramp on the rickety stairs. Suddenly the door was thrown
open with great violence, dislodging it from one of the hinges. There
appeared in the doorway one of the best operators we had, who
worked daytime, and who was of a very quiet disposition except when
intoxicated. He was a great friend of the manager of the office. His
eyes were bloodshot and wild, and one sleeve had been torn away from his
coat. Without noticing either of us he went up to the stove and kicked
it over. The stove-pipe fell, dislocated at every joint. It was half
full of exceedingly fine soot, which floated out and filled the room
completely. This produced a momentary respite to his labors. When the
atmosphere had cleared sufficiently to see, he went around and pulled
every table away from the wall, piling them on top of the stove in the
middle of the room. Then he proceeded to pull the switchboard away from
the wall. It was held tightly by screws. He succeeded, finally, and when
it gave way he fell with the board, and striking on a table cut
himself so that he soon became covered with blood. He then went to the
battery-room and knocked all the batteries off on the floor. The nitric
acid soon began to combine with the plaster in the room below, which
was the public receiving-room for messengers and bookkeepers. The excess
acid poured through and ate up the account-books. After having finished
everything to his satisfaction, he left. I told the other operator to
do nothing. We would leave things just as they were, and wait until the
manager came. In the mean time, as I knew all the wires coming through
to the switchboard, I rigged up a temporary set of instruments so that
the New York business could be cleared up, and we also got the remainder
of the press matter. At 7 o'clock the day men began to appear. They were
told to go down-stairs and wait the coming of the manager. At 8 o'clock
he appeared, walked around, went into the battery-room, and then came to
me, saying: 'Edison, who did this?' I told him that Billy L. had come in
full of soda-water and invented the ruin before him. He walked backward
and forward, about a minute, then coming up to my table put his fist
down, and said: 'If Billy L. ever does that again, I will discharge
him.' It was needless to say that there were other operators who took
advantage of that kind of discipline, and I had many calls at night
after that, but none with such destructive effects."

This was one aspect of life as it presented itself to the sensitive
and observant young operator in Louisville. But there was another,
more intellectual side, in the contact afforded with journalism and its
leaders, and the information taken in almost unconsciously as to the
political and social movements of the time. Mr. Edison looks back on
this with great satisfaction. "I remember," he says, "the discussions
between the celebrated poet and journalist George D. Prentice, then
editor of the Courier-Journal, and Mr. Tyler, of the Associated Press.
I believe Prentice was the father of the humorous paragraph of the
American newspaper. He was poetic, highly educated, and a brilliant
talker. He was very thin and small. I do not think he weighed over one
hundred and twenty five pounds. Tyler was a graduate of Harvard, and had
a very clear enunciation, and, in sharp contrast to Prentice, he was a
large man. After the paper had gone to press, Prentice would generally
come over to Tyler's office and start talking. Having while in Tyler's
office heard them arguing on the immortality of the soul, etc., I asked
permission of Mr. Tyler if, after finishing the press matter, I might
come in and listen to the conversation, which I did many times after.
One thing I never could comprehend was that Tyler had a sideboard with
liquors and generally crackers. Prentice would pour out half a glass of
what they call corn whiskey, and would dip the crackers in it and eat
them. Tyler took it sans food. One teaspoonful of that stuff would put
me to sleep."

Mr. Edison throws also a curious side-light on the origin of the comic
column in the modern American newspaper, the telegraph giving to a new
joke or a good story the ubiquity and instantaneity of an important
historical event. "It was the practice of the press operators all over
the country at that time, when a lull occurred, to start in and send
jokes or stories the day men had collected; and these were copied and
pasted up on the bulletin-board. Cleveland was the originating
office for 'press,' which it received from New York, and sent it out
simultaneously to Milwaukee, Chicago, Toledo, Detroit, Pittsburg,
Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Vincennes, Terre Haute, St.
Louis, and Louisville. Cleveland would call first on Milwaukee, if he
had anything. If so, he would send it, and Cleveland would repeat it to
all of us. Thus any joke or story originating anywhere in that area
was known the next day all over. The press men would come in and copy
anything which could be published, which was about three per cent. I
collected, too, quite a large scrap-book of it, but unfortunately have
lost it."

Edison tells an amusing story of his own pursuits at this time. Always
an omnivorous reader, he had some difficulty in getting a sufficient
quantity of literature for home consumption, and was in the habit
of buying books at auctions and second-hand stores. One day at an
auction-room he secured a stack of twenty unbound volumes of the North
American Review for two dollars. These he had bound and delivered at the
telegraph office. One morning, when he was free as usual at 3 o'clock,
he started off at a rapid pace with ten volumes on his shoulder. He
found himself very soon the subject of a fusillade. When he stopped, a
breathless policeman grabbed him by the throat and ordered him to drop
his parcel and explain matters, as a suspicious character. He opened the
package showing the books, somewhat to the disgust of the officer, who
imagined he had caught a burglar sneaking away in the dark alley with
his booty. Edison explained that being deaf he had heard no challenge,
and therefore had kept moving; and the policeman remarked apologetically
that it was fortunate for Edison he was not a better shot.

The incident is curiously revelatory of the character of the man, for
it must be admitted that while literary telegraphers are by no means
scarce, there are very few who would spend scant savings on back numbers
of a ponderous review at an age when tragedy, beer, and pretzels are far
more enticing. Through all his travels Edison has preserved those books,
and has them now in his library at Llewellyn Park, on Orange Mountain,
New Jersey.

Drifting after a time from Louisville, Edison made his way as far north
as Detroit, but, like the famous Duke of York, soon made his way back
again. Possibly the severer discipline after the happy-go-lucky regime
in the Southern city had something to do with this restlessness, which
again manifested itself, however, on his return thither. The end of the
war had left the South a scene of destruction and desolation, and
many men who had fought bravely and well found it hard to reconcile
themselves to the grim task of reconstruction. To them it seemed better
to "let ill alone" and seek some other clime where conditions would
be less onerous. At this moment a great deal of exaggerated talk was
current as to the sunny life and easy wealth of Latin America, and under
its influences many "unreconstructed" Southerners made their way
to Mexico, Brazil, Peru, or the Argentine. Telegraph operators were
naturally in touch with this movement, and Edison's fertile
imagination was readily inflamed by the glowing idea of all these vague
possibilities. Again he threw up his steady work and, with a couple of
sanguine young friends, made his way to New Orleans. They had the
notion of taking positions in the Brazilian Government telegraphs, as
an advertisement had been inserted in some paper stating that operators
were wanted. They had timed their departure from Louisville so as to
catch a specially chartered steamer, which was to leave New Orleans for
Brazil on a certain day, to convey a large number of Confederates and
their families, who were disgusted with the United States and were
going to settle in Brazil, where slavery still prevailed. Edison and his
friends arrived in New Orleans just at the time of the great riot, when
several hundred negroes were killed, and the city was in the hands of
a mob. The Government had seized the steamer chartered for Brazil, in
order to bring troops from the Yazoo River to New Orleans to stop the
rioting. The young operators therefore visited another shipping-office
to make inquiries as to vessels for Brazil, and encountered an old
Spaniard who sat in a chair near the steamer agent's desk, and to
whom they explained their intentions. He had lived and worked in South
America, and was very emphatic in his assertion, as he shook his yellow,
bony finger at them, that the worst mistake they could possibly make
would be to leave the United States. He would not leave on any account,
and they as young Americans would always regret it if they forsook their
native land, whose freedom, climate, and opportunities could not be
equalled anywhere on the face of the globe. Such sincere advice as this
could not be disdained, and Edison made his way North again. One cannot
resist speculation as to what might have happened to Edison himself and
to the development of electricity had he made this proposed plunge into
the enervating tropics. It will be remembered that at a somewhat similar
crisis in life young Robert Burns entertained seriously the idea of
forsaking Scotland for the West Indies. That he did not go was certainly
better for Scottish verse, to which he contributed later so many
immortal lines; and it was probably better for himself, even if he died
a gauger. It is simply impossible to imagine Edison working out the
phonograph, telephone, and incandescent lamp under the tropical climes
he sought. Some years later he was informed that both his companions had
gone to Vera Cruz, Mexico, and had died there of yellow fever.

Work was soon resumed at Louisville, where the dilapidated old office
occupied at the close of the war had been exchanged for one much more
comfortable and luxurious in its equipment. As before, Edison was
allotted to press report, and remembers very distinctly taking the
Presidential message and veto of the District of Columbia bill
by President Johnson. As the matter was received over the wire he
paragraphed it so that each printer had exactly three lines, thus
enabling the matter to be set up very expeditiously in the newspaper
offices. This earned him the gratitude of the editors, a dinner, and all
the newspaper "exchanges" he wanted. Edison's accounts of the sprees and
debauches of other night operators in the loosely managed offices enable
one to understand how even a little steady application to the work in
hand would be appreciated. On one occasion Edison acted as treasurer for
his bibulous companions, holding the stakes, so to speak, in order that
the supply of liquor might last longer. One of the mildest mannered of
the party took umbrage at the parsimony of the treasurer and knocked
him down, whereupon the others in the party set upon the assailant and
mauled him so badly that he had to spend three weeks in hospital. At
another time two of his companions sharing the temporary hospitality of
his room smashed most of the furniture, and went to bed with their boots
on. Then his kindly good-nature rebelled. "I felt that this was running
hospitality into the ground, so I pulled them out and left them on the
floor to cool off from their alcoholic trance."

Edison seems on the whole to have been fairly comfortable and happy in
Louisville, surrounding himself with books and experimental apparatus,
and even inditing a treatise on electricity. But his very thirst for
knowledge and new facts again proved his undoing. The instruments in the
handsome new offices were fastened in their proper places, and operators
were strictly forbidden to remove them, or to use the batteries except
on regular work. This prohibition meant little to Edison, who had access
to no other instruments except those of the company. "I went one night,"
he says, "into the battery-room to obtain some sulphuric acid for
experimenting. The carboy tipped over, the acid ran out, went through
to the manager's room below, and ate up his desk and all the carpet. The
next morning I was summoned before him, and told that what the company
wanted was operators, not experimenters. I was at liberty to take my pay
and get out."

The fact that Edison is a very studious man, an insatiate lover and
reader of books, is well known to his associates; but surprise is often
expressed at his fund of miscellaneous information. This, it will be
seen, is partly explained by his work for years as a "press" reporter.
He says of this: "The second time I was in Louisville, they had moved
into a new office, and the discipline was now good. I took the press
job. In fact, I was a very poor sender, and therefore made the taking
of press report a specialty. The newspaper men allowed me to come over
after going to press at 3 A.M. and get all the exchanges I wanted. These
I would take home and lay at the foot of my bed. I never slept more than
four or five hours' so that I would awake at nine or ten and read
these papers until dinner-time. I thus kept posted, and knew from their
activity every member of Congress, and what committees they were on; and
all about the topical doings, as well as the prices of breadstuffs
in all the primary markets. I was in a much better position than
most operators to call on my imagination to supply missing words or
sentences, which were frequent in those days of old, rotten wires, badly
insulated, especially on stormy nights. Upon such occasions I had to
supply in some cases one-fifth of the whole matter--pure guessing--but
I got caught only once. There had been some kind of convention in
Virginia, in which John Minor Botts was the leading figure. There
was great excitement about it, and two votes had been taken in the
convention on the two days. There was no doubt that the vote the next
day would go a certain way. A very bad storm came up about 10 o'clock,
and my wire worked very badly. Then there was a cessation of all
signals; then I made out the words 'Minor Botts.' The next was a New
York item. I filled in a paragraph about the convention and how the vote
had gone, as I was sure it would. But next day I learned that instead of
there being a vote the convention had adjourned without action until the
day after." In like manner, it was at Louisville that Mr. Edison got
an insight into the manner in which great political speeches are more
frequently reported than the public suspects. "The Associated Press
had a shorthand man travelling with President Johnson when he made his
celebrated swing around the circle in a private train delivering hot
speeches in defence of his conduct. The man engaged me to write out
the notes from his reading. He came in loaded and on the verge of
incoherence. We started in, but about every two minutes I would have to
scratch out whole paragraphs and insert the same things said in
another and better way. He would frequently change words, always to the
betterment of the speech. I couldn't understand this, and when he got
through, and I had copied about three columns, I asked him why those
changes, if he read from notes. 'Sonny,' he said, 'if these politicians
had their speeches published as they deliver them, a great many
shorthand writers would be out of a job. The best shorthanders and the
holders of good positions are those who can take a lot of rambling,
incoherent stuff and make a rattling good speech out of it.'"

Going back to Cincinnati and beginning his second term there as an
operator, Edison found the office in new quarters and with greatly
improved management. He was again put on night duty, much to his
satisfaction. He rented a room in the top floor of an office building,
bought a cot and an oil-stove, a foot lathe, and some tools. He
cultivated the acquaintance of Mr. Sommers, superintendent of telegraph
of the Cincinnati & Indianapolis Railroad, who gave him permission to
take such scrap apparatus as he might desire, that was of no use to the
company. With Sommers on one occasion he had an opportunity to indulge
his always strong sense of humor. "Sommers was a very witty man,"
he says, "and fond of experimenting. We worked on a self-adjusting
telegraph relay, which would have been very valuable if we could have
got it. I soon became the possessor of a second-hand Ruhmkorff induction
coil, which, although it would only give a small spark, would twist the
arms and clutch the hands of a man so that he could not let go of the
apparatus. One day we went down to the round-house of the Cincinnati &
Indianapolis Railroad and connected up the long wash-tank in the room
with the coil, one electrode being connected to earth. Above this
wash-room was a flat roof. We bored a hole through the roof, and could
see the men as they came in. The first man as he entered dipped his
hands in the water. The floor being wet he formed a circuit, and up went
his hands. He tried it the second time, with the same result. He then
stood against the wall with a puzzled expression. We surmised that
he was waiting for somebody else to come in, which occurred shortly
after--with the same result. Then they went out, and the place was soon
crowded, and there was considerable excitement. Various theories
were broached to explain the curious phenomenon. We enjoyed the sport
immensely." It must be remembered that this was over forty years ago,
when there was no popular instruction in electricity, and when its
possibilities for practical joking were known to very few. To-day such a
crowd of working-men would be sure to include at least one student of
a night school or correspondence course who would explain the mystery
offhand.

Note has been made of the presence of Ellsworth in the Cincinnati
office, and his service with the Confederate guerrilla Morgan, for whom
he tapped Federal wires, read military messages, sent false ones, and
did serious mischief generally. It is well known that one operator can
recognize another by the way in which he makes his signals--it is his
style of handwriting. Ellsworth possessed in a remarkable degree the
skill of imitating these peculiarities, and thus he deceived the Union
operators easily. Edison says that while apparently a quiet man in
bearing, Ellsworth, after the excitement of fighting, found the tameness
of a telegraph office obnoxious, and that he became a bad "gun man"
in the Panhandle of Texas, where he was killed. "We soon became
acquainted," says Edison of this period in Cincinnati, "and he wanted me
to invent a secret method of sending despatches so that an intermediate
operator could not tap the wire and understand it. He said that if it
could be accomplished, he could sell it to the Government for a large
sum of money. This suited me, and I started in and succeeded in making
such an instrument, which had in it the germ of my quadruplex now used
throughout the world, permitting the despatch of four messages over
one wire simultaneously. By the time I had succeeded in getting the
apparatus to work, Ellsworth suddenly disappeared. Many years afterward
I used this little device again for the same purpose. At Menlo Park, New
Jersey, I had my laboratory. There were several Western Union wires cut
into the laboratory, and used by me in experimenting at night. One day
I sat near an instrument which I had left connected during the night. I
soon found it was a private wire between New York and Philadelphia, and
I heard among a lot of stuff a message that surprised me. A week after
that I had occasion to go to New York, and, visiting the office of
the lessee of the wire, I asked him if he hadn't sent such and such a
message. The expression that came over his face was a sight. He asked me
how I knew of any message. I told him the circumstances, and suggested
that he had better cipher such communications, or put on a secret
sounder. The result of the interview was that I installed for him my old
Cincinnati apparatus, which was used thereafter for many years."

Edison did not make a very long stay in Cincinnati this time, but went
home after a while to Port Huron. Soon tiring of idleness and isolation
he sent "a cry from Macedonia" to his old friend "Milt" Adams, who was
in Boston, and whom he wished to rejoin if he could get work promptly in
the East.

Edison himself gives the details of this eventful move, when he went
East to grow up with the new art of electricity. "I had left Louisville
the second time, and went home to see my parents. After stopping at home
for some time, I got restless, and thought I would like to work in the
East. Knowing that a former operator named Adams, who had worked with me
in the Cincinnati office, was in Boston, I wrote him that I wanted a job
there. He wrote back that if I came on immediately he could get me in
the Western Union office. I had helped out the Grand Trunk Railroad
telegraph people by a new device when they lost one of the two submarine
cables they had across the river, making the remaining cable act just as
well for their purpose, as if they had two. I thought I was entitled
to a pass, which they conceded; and I started for Boston. After leaving
Toronto a terrific blizzard came up and the train got snowed under in a
cut. After staying there twenty-four hours, the trainmen made snowshoes
of fence-rail splints and started out to find food, which they did about
a half mile away. They found a roadside inn, and by means of snowshoes
all the passengers were taken to the inn. The train reached Montreal
four days late. A number of the passengers and myself went to the
military headquarters to testify in favor of a soldier who was on
furlough, and was two days late, which was a serious matter with
military people, I learned. We willingly did this, for this soldier
was a great story-teller, and made the time pass quickly. I met here a
telegraph operator named Stanton, who took me to his boarding-house,
the most cheerless I have ever been in. Nobody got enough to eat; the
bedclothes were too short and too thin; it was 28 degrees below zero,
and the wash-water was frozen solid. The board was cheap, being only
$1.50 per week.

"Stanton said that the usual live-stock accompaniment of operators'
boarding-houses was absent; he thought the intense cold had caused
them to hibernate. Stanton, when I was working in Cincinnati, left his
position and went out on the Union Pacific to work at Julesburg, which
was a cattle town at that time and very tough. I remember seeing him off
on the train, never expecting to see him again. Six months afterward,
while working press wire in Cincinnati, about 2 A.M., there was flung
into the middle of the operating-room a large tin box. It made a
report like a pistol, and we all jumped up startled. In walked Stanton.
'Gentlemen,' he said 'I have just returned from a pleasure trip to the
land beyond the Mississippi. All my wealth is contained in my metallic
travelling case and you are welcome to it.' The case contained one
paper collar. He sat down, and I noticed that he had a woollen comforter
around his neck with his coat buttoned closely. The night was intensely
warm. He then opened his coat and revealed the fact that he had nothing
but the bare skin. 'Gentlemen,' said he, 'you see before you an operator
who has reached the limit of impecuniosity.'" Not far from the limit of
impecuniosity was Edison himself, as he landed in Boston in 1868 after
this wintry ordeal.

This chapter has run to undue length, but it must not close without one
citation from high authority as to the service of the military telegraph
corps so often referred to in it. General Grant in his Memoirs,
describing the movements of the Army of the Potomac, lays stress on the
service of his telegraph operators, and says: "Nothing could be more
complete than the organization and discipline of this body of brave and
intelligent men. Insulated wires were wound upon reels, two men and a
mule detailed to each reel. The pack-saddle was provided with a rack
like a sawbuck, placed crosswise, so that the wheel would revolve
freely; there was a wagon provided with a telegraph operator,
battery, and instruments for each division corps and army, and for my
headquarters. Wagons were also loaded with light poles supplied with an
iron spike at each end to hold the wires up. The moment troops were in
position to go into camp, the men would put up their wires. Thus in a
few minutes' longer time than it took a mule to walk the length of
its coil, telegraphic communication would be effected between all the
headquarters of the army. No orders ever had to be given to establish
the telegraph."



CHAPTER VI

WORK AND INVENTION IN BOSTON

MILTON ADAMS was working in the office of the Franklin Telegraph Company
in Boston when he received Edison's appeal from Port Huron, and with
characteristic impetuosity at once made it his business to secure a
position for his friend. There was no opening in the Franklin office, so
Adams went over to the Western Union office, and asked the manager,
Mr. George F. Milliken, if he did not want an operator who, like young
Lochinvar, came out of the West. "What kind of copy does he make?" was
the cautious response. "I passed Edison's letter through the window for
his inspection. Milliken read it, and a look of surprise came over his
countenance as he asked me if he could take it off the line like that. I
said he certainly could, and that there was nobody who could stick him.
Milliken said that if he was that kind of an operator I could send for
him, and I wrote to Edison to come on, as I had a job for him in the
main office of the Western Union." Meantime Edison had secured his pass
over the Grand Trunk Railroad, and spent four days and nights on the
journey, suffering extremes of cold and hunger. Franklin's arrival in
Philadelphia finds its parallel in the very modest debut of Adams's
friend in Boston.

It took only five minutes for Edison to get the "job," for
Superintendent Milliken, a fine type of telegraph official, saw quickly
through the superficialities, and realized that it was no ordinary
young operator he was engaging. Edison himself tells the story of what
happened. "The manager asked me when I was ready to go to work. 'Now,'
I replied I was then told to return at 5.30 P.M., and punctually at that
hour I entered the main operating-room and was introduced to the night
manager. The weather being cold, and being clothed poorly, my peculiar
appearance caused much mirth, and, as I afterward learned, the night
operators had consulted together how they might 'put up a job on the jay
from the woolly West.' I was given a pen and assigned to the New York
No. 1 wire. After waiting an hour, I was told to come over to a special
table and take a special report for the Boston Herald, the conspirators
having arranged to have one of the fastest senders in New York send the
despatch and 'salt' the new man. I sat down unsuspiciously at the table,
and the New York man started slowly. Soon he increased his speed, to
which I easily adapted my pace. This put my rival on his mettle, and he
put on his best powers, which, however, were soon reached. At this
point I happened to look up, and saw the operators all looking over my
shoulder, with their faces shining with fun and excitement. I knew then
that they were trying to put up a job on me, but kept my own counsel.
The New York man then commenced to slur over his words, running them
together and sticking the signals; but I had been used to this style
of telegraphy in taking report, and was not in the least discomfited.
Finally, when I thought the fun had gone far enough, and having
about completed the special, I quietly opened the key and remarked,
telegraphically, to my New York friend: 'Say, young man, change off and
send with your other foot.' This broke the New York man all up, and he
turned the job over to another man to finish."

Edison had a distaste for taking press report, due to the fact that
it was steady, continuous work, and interfered with the studies and
investigations that could be carried on in the intervals of ordinary
commercial telegraphy. He was not lazy in any sense. While he had no
very lively interest in the mere routine work of a telegraph office,
he had the profoundest curiosity as to the underlying principles of
electricity that made telegraphy possible, and he had an unflagging
desire and belief in his own ability to improve the apparatus he handled
daily. The whole intellectual atmosphere of Boston was favorable to the
development of the brooding genius in this shy, awkward, studious youth,
utterly indifferent to clothes and personal appearance, but ready to
spend his last dollar on books and scientific paraphernalia. It is
matter of record that he did once buy a new suit for thirty dollars in
Boston, but the following Sunday, while experimenting with acids in his
little workshop, the suit was spoiled. "That is what I get for putting
so much money in a new suit," was the laconic remark of the youth, who
was more than delighted to pick up a complete set of Faraday's works
about the same time. Adams says that when Edison brought home these
books at 4 A.M. he read steadily until breakfast-time, and then he
remarked, enthusiastically: "Adams, I have got so much to do and life is
so short, I am going to hustle." And thereupon he started on a run for
breakfast. Edison himself says: "It was in Boston I bought Faraday's
works. I think I must have tried about everything in those books. His
explanations were simple. He used no mathematics. He was the Master
Experimenter. I don't think there were many copies of Faraday's works
sold in those days. The only people who did anything in electricity were
the telegraphers and the opticians making simple school apparatus to
demonstrate the principles." One of these firms was Palmer & Hall, whose
catalogue of 1850 showed a miniature electric locomotive made by Mr.
Thomas Hall, and exhibited in operation the following year at the
Charitable Mechanics' Fair in Boston. In 1852 Mr. Hall made for a Dr.
A. L. Henderson, of Buffalo, New York, a model line of railroad with
electric-motor engine, telegraph line, and electric railroad signals,
together with a figure operating the signals at each end of the line
automatically. This was in reality the first example of railroad trains
moved by telegraph signals, a practice now so common and universal as
to attract no comment. To show how little some fundamental methods can
change in fifty years, it may be noted that Hall conveyed the current
to his tiny car through forty feet of rail, using the rail as conductor,
just as Edison did more than thirty years later in his historic
experiments for Villard at Menlo Park; and just as a large proportion of
American trolley systems do at this present moment.

It was among such practical, investigating folk as these that Edison was
very much at home. Another notable man of this stamp, with whom Edison
was thrown in contact, was the late Mr. Charles Williams, who, beginning
his career in the electrical field in the forties, was at the height of
activity as a maker of apparatus when Edison arrived in the city; and
who afterward, as an associate of Alexander Graham Bell, enjoyed the
distinction of being the first manufacturer in the world of telephones.
At his Court Street workshop Edison was a frequent visitor. Telegraph
repairs and experiments were going on constantly, especially on the
early fire-alarm telegraphs [1] of Farmer and Gamewell, and with the aid
of one of the men there--probably George Anders--Edison worked out
into an operative model his first invention, a vote-recorder, the first
Edison patent, for which papers were executed on October 11, 1868,
and which was taken out June 1, 1869, No. 90,646. The purpose of
this particular device was to permit a vote in the National House of
Representatives to be taken in a minute or so, complete lists being
furnished of all members voting on the two sides of any question Mr.
Edison, in recalling the circumstances, says: "Roberts was the telegraph
operator who was the financial backer to the extent of $100. The
invention when completed was taken to Washington. I think it was
exhibited before a committee that had something to do with the Capitol.
The chairman of the committee, after seeing how quickly and perfectly
it worked, said: 'Young man, if there is any invention on earth that
we don't want down here, it is this. One of the greatest weapons in
the hands of a minority to prevent bad legislation is filibustering on
votes, and this instrument would prevent it.' I saw the truth of
this, because as press operator I had taken miles of Congressional
proceedings, and to this day an enormous amount of time is wasted during
each session of the House in foolishly calling the members' names and
recording and then adding their votes, when the whole operation could be
done in almost a moment by merely pressing a particular button at each
desk. For filibustering purposes, however, the present methods are
most admirable." Edison determined from that time forth to devote his
inventive faculties only to things for which there was a real, genuine
demand, something that subserved the actual necessities of humanity.
This first patent was taken out for him by the late Hon. Carroll
D. Wright, afterward U. S. Commissioner of Labor, and a well-known
publicist, then practicing patent law in Boston. He describes Edison as
uncouth in manner, a chewer rather than a smoker of tobacco, but full of
intelligence and ideas.

     [Footnote 1: The general scheme of a fire-alarm telegraph
     system embodies a central office to which notice can be sent
     from any number of signal boxes of the outbreak of a fire in
     the district covered by the box, the central office in turn
     calling out the nearest fire engines, and warning the fire
     department in general of the occurrence. Such fire alarms
     can be exchanged automatically, or by operators, and are
     sometimes associated with a large fire-alarm bell or
     whistle. Some boxes can be operated by the passing public;
     others need special keys. The box mechanism is usually of
     the ratchet, step-by-step movement, familiar in district
     messenger call-boxes.]

Edison's curiously practical, though imaginative, mind demanded
realities to work upon, things that belong to "human nature's daily
food," and he soon harked back to telegraphy, a domain in which he
was destined to succeed, and over which he was to reign supreme as
an inventor. He did not, however, neglect chemistry, but indulged his
tastes in that direction freely, although we have no record that
this work was anything more, at that time, than the carrying out of
experiments outlined in the books. The foundations were being laid for
the remarkable chemical knowledge that later on grappled successfully
with so many knotty problems in the realm of chemistry; notably with
the incandescent lamp and the storage battery. Of one incident in his
chemical experiments he tells the following story: "I had read in a
scientific paper the method of making nitroglycerine, and was so fired
by the wonderful properties it was said to possess, that I determined
to make some of the compound. We tested what we considered a very small
quantity, but this produced such terrible and unexpected results that we
became alarmed, the fact dawning upon us that we had a very large
white elephant in our possession. At 6 A.M. I put the explosive into
a sarsaparilla bottle, tied a string to it, wrapped it in a paper,
and gently let it down into the sewer, corner of State and Washington
Streets." The associate in this was a man whom he had found endeavoring
to make electrical apparatus for sleight-of-hand performances.

In the Boston telegraph office at that time, as perhaps at others, there
were operators studying to enter college; possibly some were already in
attendance at Harvard University. This condition was not unusual at one
time; the first electrical engineer graduated from Columbia University,
New York, followed up his studies while a night operator, and came out
brilliantly at the head of his class. Edison says of these scholars that
they paraded their knowledge rather freely, and that it was his delight
to go to the second-hand book stores on Cornhill and study up questions
which he could spring upon them when he got an occasion. With those
engaged on night duty he got midnight lunch from an old Irishman called
"the Cake Man," who appeared regularly with his wares at 12 midnight.
"The office was on the ground floor, and had been a restaurant previous
to its occupation by the Western Union Telegraph Company. It was
literally loaded with cockroaches, which lived between the wall and the
board running around the room at the floor, and which came after the
lunch. These were such a bother on my table that I pasted two strips
of tinfoil on the wall at my desk, connecting one piece to the positive
pole of the big battery supplying current to the wires and the negative
pole to the other strip. The cockroaches moving up on the wall would
pass over the strips. The moment they got their legs across both strips
there was a flash of light and the cockroaches went into gas. This
automatic electrocuting device attracted so much attention, and got half
a column in an evening paper, that the manager made me stop it." The
reader will remember that a similar plan of campaign against rats was
carried out by Edison while in the West.

About this time Edison had a narrow escape from injury that might easily
have shortened his career, and he seems to have provoked the trouble
more or less innocently by using a little elementary chemistry. "After
being in Boston several months," he says, "working New York wire No.
1, I was requested to work the press wire, called the 'milk route,' as
there were so many towns on it taking press simultaneously. New
York office had reported great delays on the wire, due to operators
constantly interrupting, or 'breaking,' as it was called, to have words
repeated which they had failed to get; and New York claimed that Boston
was one of the worst offenders. It was a rather hard position for me,
for if I took the report without breaking, it would prove the previous
Boston operator incompetent. The results made the operator have some
hard feelings against me. He was put back on the wire, and did much
better after that. It seems that the office boy was down on this man.
One night he asked me if I could tell him how to fix a key so that it
would not 'break,' even if the circuit-breaker was open, and also so
that it could not be easily detected. I told him to jab a penful of
ink on the platinum points, as there was sugar enough to make it
sufficiently thick to hold up when the operator tried to break--the
current still going through the ink so that he could not break.

"The next night about 1 A.M. this operator, on the press wire, while
I was standing near a House printer studying it, pulled out a glass
insulator, then used upside down as a substitute for an ink-bottle,
and threw it with great violence at me, just missing my head. It would
certainly have killed me if it had not missed. The cause of the trouble
was that this operator was doing the best he could not to break, but
being compelled to, opened his key and found he couldn't. The press
matter came right along, and he could not stop it. The office boy had
put the ink in a few minutes before, when the operator had turned his
head during a lull. He blamed me instinctively as the cause of the
trouble. Later on we became good friends. He took his meals at the same
emaciator that I did. His main object in life seemed to be acquiring
the art of throwing up wash-pitchers and catching them without breaking
them. About one-third of his salary was used up in paying for pitchers."

One day a request reached the Western Union Telegraph office in Boston,
from the principal of a select school for young ladies, to the effect
that she would like some one to be sent up to the school to exhibit and
describe the Morse telegraph to her "children." There has always been
a warm interest in Boston in the life and work of Morse, who was born
there, at Charlestown, barely a mile from the birthplace of Franklin,
and this request for a little lecture on Morse's telegraph was quite
natural. Edison, who was always ready to earn some extra money for his
experiments, and was already known as the best-informed operator in the
office, accepted the invitation. What happened is described by Adams
as follows: "We gathered up a couple of sounders, a battery, and sonic
wire, and at the appointed time called on her to do the stunt. Her
school-room was about twenty by twenty feet, not including a small
platform. We rigged up the line between the two ends of the room, Edison
taking the stage while I was at the other end of the room. All being
in readiness, the principal was told to bring in her children. The door
opened and in came about twenty young ladies elegantly gowned, not one
of whom was under seventeen. When Edison saw them I thought he would
faint. He called me on the line and asked me to come to the stage and
explain the mysteries of the Morse system. I replied that I thought he
was in the right place, and told him to get busy with his talk on dots
and dashes. Always modest, Edison was so overcome he could hardly speak,
but he managed to say, finally, that as his friend Mr. Adams was better
equipped with cheek than he was, we would change places, and he would
do the demonstrating while I explained the whole thing. This caused the
bevy to turn to see where the lecturer was. I went on the stage, said
something, and we did some telegraphing over the line. I guess it was
satisfactory; we got the money, which was the main point to us." Edison
tells the story in a similar manner, but insists that it was he who
saved the situation. "I managed to say that I would work the apparatus,
and Mr. Adams would make the explanations. Adams was so embarrassed
that he fell over an ottoman. The girls tittered, and this increased
his embarrassment until he couldn't say a word. The situation was so
desperate that for a reason I never could explain I started in myself
and talked and explained better than I ever did before or since. I can
talk to two or three persons; but when there are more they radiate some
unknown form of influence which paralyzes my vocal cords. However, I got
out of this scrape, and many times afterward when I chanced with other
operators to meet some of the young ladies on their way home from
school, they would smile and nod, much to the mystification of the
operators, who were ignorant of this episode."

Another amusing story of this period of impecuniosity and financial
strain is told thus by Edison: "My friend Adams was working in the
Franklin Telegraph Company, which competed with the Western Union. Adams
was laid off, and as his financial resources had reached absolute zero
centigrade, I undertook to let him sleep in my hall bedroom. I generally
had hall bedrooms, because they were cheap and I needed money to
buy apparatus. I also had the pleasure of his genial company at the
boarding-house about a mile distant, but at the sacrifice of some
apparatus. One morning, as we were hastening to breakfast, we came
into Tremont Row, and saw a large crowd in front of two small 'gents'
furnishing goods stores. We stopped to ascertain the cause of the
excitement. One store put up a paper sign in the display window which
said: 'Three-hundred pairs of stockings received this day, five cents a
pair--no connection with the store next door.' Presently the other store
put up a sign stating they had received three hundred pairs, price three
cents per pair, and stated that they had no connection with the store
next door. Nobody went in. The crowd kept increasing. Finally, when the
price had reached three pairs for one cent, Adams said to me: 'I can't
stand this any longer; give me a cent.' I gave him a nickel, and he
elbowed his way in; and throwing the money on the counter, the store
being filled with women clerks, he said: 'Give me three pairs.' The
crowd was breathless, and the girl took down a box and drew out three
pairs of baby socks. 'Oh!' said Adams, 'I want men's size.' 'Well, sir,
we do not permit one to pick sizes for that amount of money.' And the
crowd roared; and this broke up the sales."

It has generally been supposed that Edison did not take up work on the
stock ticker until after his arrival a little later in New York; but he
says: "After the vote-recorder I invented a stock ticker, and started a
ticker service in Boston; had thirty or forty subscribers, and operated
from a room over the Gold Exchange. This was about a year after Callahan
started in New York." To say the least, this evidenced great ability
and enterprise on the part of the youth. The dealings in gold during the
Civil War and after its close had brought gold indicators into use, and
these had soon been followed by "stock tickers," the first of which
was introduced in New York in 1867. The success of this new but still
primitively crude class of apparatus was immediate. Four manufacturers
were soon busy trying to keep pace with the demands for it from brokers;
and the Gold & Stock Telegraph Company formed to exploit the system soon
increased its capital from $200,000 to $300,000, paying 12 per cent.
dividends on the latter amount. Within its first year the capital was
again increased to $1,000,000, and dividends of 10 per cent. were paid
easily on that sum also. It is needless to say that such facts became
quickly known among the operators, from whose ranks, of course, the new
employees were enlisted; and it was a common ambition among the more
ingenious to produce a new ticker. From the beginning, each phase
of electrical development--indeed, each step in mechanics--has been
accompanied by the well-known phenomenon of invention; namely, the
attempt of the many to perfect and refine and even re-invent where one
or two daring spirits have led the way. The figures of capitalization
and profit just mentioned were relatively much larger in the sixties
than they are to-day; and to impressionable young operators they spelled
illimitable wealth. Edison was, how ever, about the only one in Boston
of whom history makes record as achieving any tangible result in this
new art; and he soon longed for the larger telegraphic opportunity of
New York. His friend, Milt Adams, went West with quenchless zest for
that kind of roving life and aimless adventure of which the serious
minded Edison had already had more than enough. Realizing that to New
York he must look for further support in his efforts, Edison, deep in
debt for his embryonic inventions, but with high hope and courage,
now made the next momentous step in his career. He was far riper in
experience and practice of his art than any other telegrapher of his
age, and had acquired, moreover, no little knowledge of the practical
business of life. Note has been made above of his invention of a stock
ticker in Boston, and of his establishing a stock-quotation circuit.
This was by no means all, and as a fitting close to this chapter he may
be quoted as to some other work and its perils in experimentation:
"I also engaged in putting up private lines, upon which I used
an alphabetical dial instrument for telegraphing between business
establishments, a forerunner of modern telephony. This instrument
was very simple and practical, and any one could work it after a few
minutes' explanation. I had these instruments made at Mr. Hamblet's, who
had a little shop where he was engaged in experimenting with electric
clocks. Mr. Hamblet was the father and introducer in after years of the
Western Union Telegraph system of time distribution. My laboratory was
the headquarters for the men, and also of tools and supplies for those
private lines. They were put up cheaply, as I used the roofs of houses,
just as the Western Union did. It never occurred to me to ask permission
from the owners; all we did was to go to the store, etc., say we
were telegraph men, and wanted to go up to the wires on the roof; and
permission was always granted.

"In this laboratory I had a large induction coil which I had borrowed to
make some experiments with. One day I got hold of both electrodes of
the coil, and it clinched my hand on them so that I couldn't let go. The
battery was on a shelf. The only way I could get free was to back off
and pull the coil, so that the battery wires would pull the cells off
the shelf and thus break the circuit. I shut my eyes and pulled, but the
nitric acid splashed all over my face and ran down my back. I rushed to
a sink, which was only half big enough, and got in as well as I could
and wiggled around for several minutes to permit the water to dilute the
acid and stop the pain. My face and back were streaked with yellow; the
skin was thoroughly oxidized. I did not go on the street by daylight for
two weeks, as the appearance of my face was dreadful. The skin, however,
peeled off, and new skin replaced it without any damage."



CHAPTER VII

THE STOCK TICKER


"THE letters and figures used in the language of the tape," said a
well-known Boston stock speculator, "are very few, but they spell ruin
in ninety-nine million ways." It is not to be inferred, however, that
the modern stock ticker has anything to do with the making or losing
of fortunes. There were regular daily stock-market reports in London
newspapers in 1825, and New York soon followed the example. As far back
as 1692, Houghton issued in London a weekly review of financial and
commercial transactions, upon which Macaulay based the lively narrative
of stock speculation in the seventeenth century, given in his famous
history. That which the ubiquitous stock ticker has done is to give
instantaneity to the news of what the stock market is doing, so that at
every minute, thousands of miles apart, brokers, investors, and gamblers
may learn the exact conditions. The existence of such facilities is to
be admired rather than deplored. News is vital to Wall Street, and there
is no living man on whom the doings in Wall Street are without effect.
The financial history of the United States and of the world, as shown
by the prices of government bonds and general securities, has been told
daily for forty years on these narrow strips of paper tape, of which
thousands of miles are run yearly through the "tickers" of New York
alone. It is true that the record of the chattering little machine, made
in cabalistic abbreviations on the tape, can drive a man suddenly to the
very verge of insanity with joy or despair; but if there be blame for
that, it attaches to the American spirit of speculation and not to
the ingenious mechanism which reads and registers the beating of the
financial pulse.

Edison came first to New York in 1868, with his early stock printer,
which he tried unsuccessfully to sell. He went back to Boston, and quite
undismayed got up a duplex telegraph. "Toward the end of my stay in
Boston," he says, "I obtained a loan of money, amounting to $800, to
build a peculiar kind of duplex telegraph for sending two messages over
a single wire simultaneously. The apparatus was built, and I left
the Western Union employ and went to Rochester, New York, to test the
apparatus on the lines of the Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph between that
city and New York. But the assistant at the other end could not be made
to understand anything, notwithstanding I had written out a very minute
description of just what to do. After trying for a week I gave it up and
returned to New York with but a few cents in my pocket." Thus he who
has never speculated in a stock in his life was destined to make the
beginnings of his own fortune by providing for others the apparatus
that should bring to the eye, all over a great city, the momentary
fluctuations of stocks and bonds. No one could have been in direr
poverty than he when the steamboat landed him in New York in 1869. He
was in debt, and his few belongings in books and instruments had to
be left behind. He was not far from starving. Mr. W. S. Mallory, an
associate of many years, quotes directly from him on this point: "Some
years ago we had a business negotiation in New York which made it
necessary for Mr. Edison and me to visit the city five or six times
within a comparatively short period. It was our custom to leave Orange
about 11 A.M., and on arrival in New York to get our lunch before
keeping the appointments, which were usually made for two o'clock.
Several of these lunches were had at Delmonico's, Sherry's, and other
places of similar character, but one day, while en route, Mr. Edison
said: 'I have been to lunch with you several times; now to-day I am
going to take you to lunch with me, and give you the finest lunch you
ever had.' When we arrived in Hoboken, we took the downtown ferry across
the Hudson, and when we arrived on the Manhattan side Mr. Edison led the
way to Smith & McNell's, opposite Washington Market, and well known to
old New Yorkers. We went inside and as soon as the waiter appeared
Mr. Edison ordered apple dumplings and a cup of coffee for himself. He
consumed his share of the lunch with the greatest possible pleasure.
Then, as soon as he had finished, he went to the cigar counter and
purchased cigars. As we walked to keep the appointment he gave me the
following reminiscence: When he left Boston and decided to come to New
York he had only money enough for the trip. After leaving the boat his
first thought was of breakfast; but he was without money to obtain it.
However, in passing a wholesale tea-house he saw a man tasting tea, so
he went in and asked the 'taster' if he might have some of the tea. This
the man gave him, and thus he obtained his first breakfast in New York.
He knew a telegraph operator here, and on him he depended for a loan to
tide him over until such time as he should secure a position. During the
day he succeeded in locating this operator, but found that he also was
out of a job, and that the best he could do was to loan him one dollar,
which he did. This small sum of money represented both food and lodging
until such time as work could be obtained. Edison said that as the
result of the time consumed and the exercise in walking while he found
his friend, he was extremely hungry, and that he gave most serious
consideration as to what he should buy in the way of food, and what
particular kind of food would be most satisfying and filling. The result
was that at Smith & McNell's he decided on apple dumplings and a cup
of coffee, than which he never ate anything more appetizing. It was not
long before he was at work and was able to live in a normal manner."

During the Civil War, with its enormous increase in the national debt
and the volume of paper money, gold had gone to a high premium; and, as
ever, by its fluctuations in price the value of all other commodities
was determined. This led to the creation of a "Gold Room" in Wall
Street, where the precious metal could be dealt in; while for dealings
in stocks there also existed the "Regular Board," the "Open Board," and
the "Long Room." Devoted to one, but the leading object of speculation,
the "Gold Room" was the very focus of all the financial and gambling
activity of the time, and its quotations governed trade and commerce.
At first notations in chalk on a blackboard sufficed, but seeing their
inadequacy, Dr. S. S. Laws, vice-president and actual presiding officer
of the Gold Exchange, devised and introduced what was popularly known
as the "gold indicator." This exhibited merely the prevailing price of
gold; but as its quotations changed from instant to instant, it was in
a most literal sense "the cynosure of neighboring eyes." One indicator
looked upon the Gold Room; the other opened toward the street. Within
the exchange the face could easily be seen high up on the west wall of
the room, and the machine was operated by Mr. Mersereau, the official
registrar of the Gold Board.

Doctor Laws, who afterward became President of the State University of
Missouri, was an inventor of unusual ability and attainments. In
his early youth he had earned his livelihood in a tool factory; and,
apparently with his savings, he went to Princeton, where he studied
electricity under no less a teacher than the famous Joseph Henry. At the
outbreak of the war in 1861 he was president of one of the Presbyterian
synodical colleges in the South, whose buildings passed into the hands
of the Government. Going to Europe, he returned to New York in 1863,
and, becoming interested with a relative in financial matters, his
connection with the Gold Exchange soon followed, when it was organized.
The indicating mechanism he now devised was electrical, controlled at
central by two circuit-closing keys, and was a prototype of all the
later and modern step-by-step printing telegraphs, upon which the
distribution of financial news depends. The "fraction" drum of the
indicator could be driven in either direction, known as the advance and
retrograde movements, and was divided and marked in eighths. It geared
into a "unit" drum, just as do speed-indicators and cyclometers. Four
electrical pulsations were required to move the drum the distance
between the fractions. The general operation was simple, and in
normally active times the mechanism and the registrar were equal to all
emergencies. But it is obvious that the record had to be carried away
to the brokers' offices and other places by messengers; and the delay,
confusion, and mistakes soon suggested to Doctor Laws the desirability
of having a number of indicators at such scattered points, operated by a
master transmitter, and dispensing with the regiments of noisy boys.
He secured this privilege of distribution, and, resigning from the
exchange, devoted his exclusive attention to the "Gold Reporting
Telegraph," which he patented, and for which, at the end of 1866, he had
secured fifty subscribers. His indicators were small oblong boxes, in
the front of which was a long slot, allowing the dials as they travelled
past, inside, to show the numerals constituting the quotation; the dials
or wheels being arranged in a row horizontally, overlapping each other,
as in modern fare registers which are now seen on most trolley cars. It
was not long before there were three hundred subscribers; but the very
success of this device brought competition and improvement. Mr. E. A.
Callahan, an ingenious printing-telegraph operator, saw that there
were unexhausted possibilities in the idea, and his foresight and
inventiveness made him the father of the "ticker," in connection with
which he was thus, like Laws, one of the first to grasp and exploit the
underlying principle of the "central station" as a universal source
of supply. The genesis of his invention Mr. Callahan has told in an
interesting way: "In 1867, on the site of the present Mills Building on
Broad Street, opposite the Stock Exchange of today, was an old building
which had been cut up to subserve the necessities of its occupants, all
engaged in dealing in gold and stocks. It had one main entrance from the
street to a hallway, from which entrance to the offices of two prominent
broker firms was obtained. Each firm had its own army of boys, numbering
from twelve to fifteen, whose duties were to ascertain the latest
quotations from the different exchanges. Each boy devoted his attention
to some particularly active stock. Pushing each other to get into these
narrow quarters, yelling out the prices at the door, and pushing back
for later ones, the hustle made this doorway to me a most undesirable
refuge from an April shower. I was simply whirled into the street.
I naturally thought that much of this noise and confusion might be
dispensed with, and that the prices might be furnished through some
system of telegraphy which would not require the employment of skilled
operators. The conception of the stock ticker dates from this incident."

Mr. Callahan's first idea was to distribute gold quotations, and to
this end he devised an "indicator." It consisted of two dials mounted
separately, each revolved by an electromagnet, so that the desired
figures were brought to an aperture in the case enclosing the apparatus,
as in the Laws system. Each shaft with its dial was provided with two
ratchet wheels, one the reverse of the other. One was used in connection
with the propelling lever, which was provided with a pawl to fit into
the teeth of the reversed ratchet wheel on its forward movement. It was
thus made impossible for either dial to go by momentum beyond its limit.
Learning that Doctor Laws, with the skilful aid of F. L. Pope, was
already active in the same direction, Mr. Callahan, with ready wit,
transformed his indicator into a "ticker" that would make a printed
record. The name of the "ticker" came through the casual remark of
an observer to whom the noise was the most striking feature of the
mechanism. Mr. Callahan removed the two dials, and, substituting type
wheels, turned the movements face to face, so that each type wheel
could imprint its characters upon a paper tape in two lines. Three wires
stranded together ran from the central office to each instrument. Of
these one furnished the current for the alphabet wheel, one for the
figure wheel, and one for the mechanism that took care of the inking and
printing on the tape. Callahan made the further innovation of insulating
his circuit wires, although the cost was then forty times as great as
that of bare wire. It will be understood that electromagnets were the
ticker's actuating agency. The ticker apparatus was placed under a
neat glass shade and mounted on a shelf. Twenty-five instruments were
energized from one circuit, and the quotations were supplied from a
"central" at 18 New Street. The Gold & Stock Telegraph Company was
promptly organized to supply to brokers the system, which was very
rapidly adopted throughout the financial district of New York, at the
southern tip of Manhattan Island. Quotations were transmitted by the
Morse telegraph from the floor of the Stock Exchange to the "central,"
and thence distributed to the subscribers. Success with the "stock" news
system was instantaneous.

It was at this juncture that Edison reached New York, and according to
his own statement found shelter at night in the battery-room of the Gold
Indicator Company, having meantime applied for a position as operator
with the Western Union. He had to wait a few days, and during this time
he seized the opportunity to study the indicators and the complicated
general transmitter in the office, controlled from the keyboard of the
operator on the floor of the Gold Exchange. What happened next has been
the basis of many inaccurate stories, but is dramatic enough as told
in Mr. Edison's own version: "On the third day of my arrival and while
sitting in the office, the complicated general instrument for sending
on all the lines, and which made a very great noise, suddenly came to
a stop with a crash. Within two minutes over three hundred boys--a boy
from every broker in the street--rushed up-stairs and crowded the long
aisle and office, that hardly had room for one hundred, all yelling that
such and such a broker's wire was out of order and to fix it at once.
It was pandemonium, and the man in charge became so excited that he lost
control of all the knowledge he ever had. I went to the indicator, and,
having studied it thoroughly, knew where the trouble ought to be, and
found it. One of the innumerable contact springs had broken off and had
fallen down between the two gear wheels and stopped the instrument; but
it was not very noticeable. As I went out to tell the man in charge
what the matter was, Doctor Laws appeared on the scene, the most excited
person I had seen. He demanded of the man the cause of the trouble, but
the man was speechless. I ventured to say that I knew what the trouble
was, and he said, 'Fix it! Fix it! Be quick!' I removed the spring and
set the contact wheels at zero; and the line, battery, and inspecting
men all scattered through the financial district to set the instruments.
In about two hours things were working again. Doctor Laws came in to ask
my name and what I was doing. I told him, and he asked me to come to his
private office the following day. His office was filled with stacks of
books all relating to metaphysics and kindred matters. He asked me a
great many questions about the instruments and his system, and I showed
him how he could simplify things generally. He then requested that I
should call next day. On arrival, he stated at once that he had decided
to put me in charge of the whole plant, and that my salary would be $300
per month! This was such a violent jump from anything I had ever seen
before, that it rather paralyzed me for a while, I thought it was too
much to be lasting, but I determined to try and live up to that salary
if twenty hours a day of hard work would do it. I kept this position,
made many improvements, devised several stock tickers, until the Gold &
Stock Telegraph Company consolidated with the Gold Indicator Company."
Certainly few changes in fortune have been more sudden and dramatic in
any notable career than this which thus placed an ill-clad, unkempt,
half-starved, eager lad in a position of such responsibility in days
when the fluctuations in the price of gold at every instant meant
fortune or ruin to thousands.

Edison, barely twenty-one years old, was a keen observer of the stirring
events around him. "Wall Street" is at any time an interesting study,
but it was never at a more agitated and sensational period of its
history than at this time. Edison's arrival in New York coincided
with an active speculation in gold which may, indeed, be said to have
provided him with occupation; and was s

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