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"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 con- versed 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 Rose-
water, 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."
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