Those who had known him in the full tide and flush of health had not the
pain of noting either physical or mental decay. He was at a meeting in
connection with engineering in July. Some weeks later he took a severe
fever, and after ten day's illness, without much suffering, the end
came. On the 12th August, in his sixty-seventh year, George Stephenson,
the great engineer, passed away.
The whole civilised world bewailed his going. He had lived long enough
for it to realise and appreciate the mark he had made on the age. But
most of all did the colliers mourn him--the men to whom he had been as
a kindly father, a leader, a hero. They laid him in the quiet little
churchyard at Chesterfield, and they raised monuments to him all over
the country, as a grateful people will do,--erected statues and memorial
schools, and painted portraits. But a man like George Stephenson needs
no memorial of stone. He has left an undying work to speak for him,
and a character that has moved men to admiration everywhere for its
simplicity, combined with its greatness, its manliness, that made
it possible for him, the poor collier's son, to meet on equal
ground--himself also being a man--men of the highest rank in the land.
We cannot, any of us, imitate his genius or his power of invention, or
his splendid physical strength, but it is within the scope of all of us,
however young or insignificant, to copy his conscientious, unwearied
hard work.
"Ah, ye lads," he used to say to young men when he was himself an old
one, in his broad, honest Doric, "there's none o' ye know what _wark_
is!"
He has left us a splendid example of patience, content, courage,
attention to detail. But most precious of all, of a heart that beat
as kindly in old age as in youth, that made him dearly loved by his
workmen, and that never turned away from hearing and helping those in
trouble.
Riches and success and prosperity, crowding upon him in later years, had
no power to spoil the simple beauty of his character, for the Wylam
collier's son, besides being the world's honoured inventor, was also
"one of Nature's gentlemen."
THOMAS ALVA EDISON.
To see as a boy the greatest inventor of the age, we shall have to cross
the Atlantic and take a journey to the United States of America. England
has done wonders in the way of discovery and invention, but it is to New
England, as we call it, because she is a daughter of the old Mother
Country, that we must go for a brightness and a sharpness of wit that
sometimes make us think of the flash of polished steel.
We all know the name of Edison. It is not a name of history, for he is
living to-day, a man still in his prime, still sending out from that
wonderful brain of his things that astonish men, and have won for him
the name of the "wonder-worker of the modern world."
I have before me as I write the picture of a square, brick house, with
outside shutters hooked back, a white paling half encircling it, and a
couple of bare, leafless trees before it. The house is plain and poor,
and has a strangely unfamiliar look to our English eyes, but it is of
the deepest interest to us as the birthplace of Thomas Edison.
[Illustration: EDISON IN HIS LABORATORY.]
The boy first saw the light in 1847, and though he came into the world
with but a poor provision waiting him, he found himself welcomed with
a very wealth of love and tenderness. Mrs. Edison had Scotch blood in
her veins, and she was a mother in a thousand. It is a common thing
in history to find that a son draws his greatness, many of his best
qualities, from his mother, and this son took many of his from Mrs.
Edison. She was his constant companion, his loving nurse, his gentle
teacher during those early years of life that leave so deep an impress
on the "afterwards."
The child was seven years old when the Edison family moved to a place
called Port Huron, and there he began to spend every spare moment in
reading. So earnest was he that he set himself to read through the
Detroit Free Library, and had devoured a close row of volumes before
his attempt was discovered.
Strange and solemn sound some of the titles of the books he read when
he was twelve years old--a time when most boys are lightly dipping into
newspapers and magazines and books of adventure. Burton's _Anatomy of
Melancholy_, Hume's _History of England_, Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire_.
In 1862, when he was barely fifteen years old, he came out more fully
from the shelter of home and mixed with the busy world, making a place
in it for himself by his own young wits. He was a newspaper boy, and
sold his papers like other boys, not stopping still in one place, but
going on the train to different stations along the line, and selling as
he went.
About this time there was a great fever and ferment in America. The
North were fighting with the South, and people panted for news of each
battle as it took place. Papers with reports were devoured as soon as
printed.
"Now," thought Edison, "is my chance," and there began to work in the
brain of the boy a big scheme. As the first step to carrying it out, he
betook himself to the station telegraph clerk.
"If," he said, "you will let me wire the war news on a few stations
ahead, and have it written up on the blackboard, I will promise you some
papers, and now and then a magazine."
He repeated his request to the different clerks along the line. His
eager face and twinkling eyes and earnest words won all hearts, and his
request was granted. He next went to the editor of a well-known paper.
"Give me a thousand copies," he begged, "and I will pay out of the
proceeds of my venture." Here, again, he succeeded. And now it remained
but to get the engine-driver to promise him a few minutes at the
different stations, and he started on his venture.
At the first stopping-place he had been wont to sell some half-dozen
papers. That day, as he looked out, the platform was strangely crowded,
and it suddenly dawned on him, from the eager faces of the people and
their excited gestures, that it was _papers_ they wanted! He dashed on
to the platform, and in a few minutes had sold forty at five cents each,
or about a penny of our money. It was much the same at the next station.
The people had read the headings on the station blackboard, and they
crowded on to the platform, an excited, hustling mob, for papers! It
dawned on the boy, here was a chance to raise his prices, so he doubled
them, and sold 150 where he had used to sell a dozen! It was the same
all along the line. At the last station--Port Huron--his home, the
people were most excited of all. The town was a mile from the station.
Edison started off with his papers, but was met half-way by an eager,
hurrying crowd. They all wanted news. He stopped, drawing up in front of
a church where a prayer-meeting was being held. Presently the people
poured out and surrounded the boy, willingly paying him five times the
usual price of his paper. He began "to take in," as he expressed it, in
his own terse, telling words, "a young fortune."
After this the busy boyish brain began to look eagerly ahead, to face
life seriously. He did not start off on a fresh tack. He took hold of
what was nearest to his hand, and he bent his mind on improving that. He
had found people were in a hurry for news. The quicker they got it the
better they were pleased. Nothing could surely be quicker than that they
should get it damp from the press! So it flashed into his brain--why not
print a paper on the train?
The question was no sooner asked than answered.
He looked about till he lighted on an old car, and he rigged it up as
a printing-office with old types and stereos he begged from a newspaper
office. In this novel press-room he threw off sheet after sheet of
what he called _The Grand Trunk Herald_, the first and last paper ever
printed on a train. The boy of fifteen was editor, compositor, and
newsvendor in one. The paper "caught on," and the circulation went up
to 400.
But, alas! misfortune was soon to overwhelm the young adventurer. One
unlucky day the printing-office--the old car, which grew daily more
decrepit and unequal to the jolting of the journey--by a more violent
lurch than usual threw over a bottle of phosphorus. The cork flew out,
and in a few seconds the car was in flames. They were easily enough got
under, but Edison's venture had received its deathblow. The furious
car-conductor would henceforth have none of him. He boxed his ears, and
pitched him on to the platform along with his precious belongings--the
whole paraphernalia of his craft.
It is a sorry picture that presents itself to our mind's eye. The boy
standing half stunned, the rubbish and _debris_ of his belongings
strewn at his feet, and the cherished old jolting car, the scene of his
labours, gradually fading into distance! It seemed as if his bright
dreams were all extinguished, his golden hopes doomed to come to
nothing. As he stood there he faced it all--a mere boy low down in the
world, badly fed, poorly clothed, almost penniless, but we do not hear
that he either flinched or complained, or that a boyish sob rose in his
throat. He was made of the stuff of the Stoic. It is our hearts that are
sore and anguished, not chiefly for the hopes and dreams disappointed,
but because of a terrible calamity that befell him then, when he was
perhaps hardly conscious of it; but that grew darker and weightier as
the years rolled on.
When the irritated conductor had boxed the boy's ears, so brutal had
been his onslaught that the delicate nerves were injured for life,
and now with the flight of years has come deafness to wrap the great
inventor in a partial mantle of silence. It is perhaps we who feel
most the infinite pathos of the thing, while the man himself bears his
affliction with the same noble patience with which he accepted
disappointment long years ago as a boy.
At that time he straightway turned his eyes bravely homewards. He picked
up his precious belongings, and carried them to a cellar in his father's
house.
It was about this time that his mind began to bend towards that which
has ever held for him a keen interest through life--the Telegraph. A
waking ambition in him desired strongly to perfect himself in it. He
was poor and friendless, and yet firmly, doggedly resolved to get on
somehow. So out of his scant earnings--still as newsboy--he bought a
book on Telegraphy, and this he pored over night and day.
And now at this early age I think the great inventor must have touched
that mine that was afterwards to yield him so wondrously of its wealth.
The boyish mind was putting out feelers, gropingly at first, in the
direction of creation, that divine faculty that is granted to so few of
us. We can recognise the seed in its first tiny sproutings. He and a boy
friend resolved to make a telegraph. They made a line of wire between
their houses, insulated with bottles, and crossed under a busy
thoroughfare by means of an old cable found in the bed of the Detroit
River. The first magnets were wound with wire and swathed in ancient
rags, and a piece of spring brass formed the key. Edison pressed two
large and formidable-looking cats into his service, tied a wire to their
legs, and applied friction to their backs. But the experiment ended in
failure. The cats, frightened and furious, resented the liberty, and
parted company with, the wire, dashing off in different directions.
But failure never discouraged Edison, nor stayed the working of his
brain. He was a true philosopher, and he was, like an elastic ball,
possessed of enormous rebound.
Handed down to us there is a story of the boy which, while it may not
throw much light on his brain, throws some on his heart and on his ready
courage. He was still a newspaper boy on the trains, and while at most
stations a few minutes was the limit of waiting, at a certain station
where shunting took place the minutes ran to half an hour. The boy was
wont to spend this half-hour with the stationmaster's child, of whom he
was fond, or to loiter about his garden. On this particular day the
engine-driver had unlinked the cars in a siding, and one was being
sent with a good deal of impetus to join another portion. It came on
steadily, no one on it to control it, and right in its path was the
unconscious baby smiling in the morning sunshine. Not a moment was to
be lost. Edison threw down his papers and his hat on the platform and
dashed to the rescue. And not a second too soon. As he threw himself and
the child free of the line the car passed and struck his heel. The two
fell with such violence on the gravel beyond that the stone particles
were driven into their flesh, but they were safe!
The grateful father was at a loss how he could show his gratitude to the
rescuer of his child. He had little money and no reward to give. At last
a plan occurred to him.
"I will teach you telegraphing," he said to the boy, "and prepare you
for the position of night operator at not less than twenty-five dollars
a month."
Edison was delighted. The bargain was struck. The wage seemed, no doubt,
a small fortune to the boy--rather more than five of our English pounds.
And now he had got his "toe on the tape," his foot on the ladder, if
it were only on the lowest round. In three months he could teach his
master, and the promised situation was got for him. From that he passed
to other situations, and gradually he began to make his mark.
He had a mind wonderfully quick to see a difficult situation and to deal
with it.
There is a story told of how one winter a severe frost had coated the
great river between Port Huron and Sarnia, how the cable was broken,
and people could neither get news nor send it to the opposite bank of
the river. The spot was crowded with people, baffled and vexed. Edison
came along with a brain rarely at fault and faced the thing. Suddenly,
to the onlookers' astonishment, he mounted a locomotive and sent a
piercing whistle across the water, imitating by the toots of the engine
the dots and dashes of the telegraph system.
In this way he shouted--
"Holloa, Sarnia! Sarnia, do you get what I say?"
At first there was silence on the part of the telegraph man across the
water. The people on the bank were breathless with excitement. At last
the reply came clear--thrilling. The man on the other side had
understood, and the two cities could "talk" again to each other.
After this, people began to hear of Edison's fame. But the mania for
experiments had seized him. The cut-and-dried monotonous routine of work
seemed flat and stale to him by comparison. It was as if an enchanted
region of fairyland had been opened to the boy. To be allowed to revel
in it he denied himself food and necessary sleep. When he was seventeen
years old he invented a telegraph instrument that would transfer
writing from one line to another without the help of the operator.
There were no want of openings now for him to choose from, but sometimes
doors after they had been opened were rudely shut again through envy
and evil feeling. In the great world of invention and discovery there
are perhaps more "ups and downs" than in any other. Some of Edison's
fellow-workers were kind and generous--others were jealous and
detracting. One manager did him an ill turn. He was unequal to
completing a discovery he had begun. On the thing being shown him,
Edison immediately "saw a light" and brought it to completion, but
jealousy crept into the man's small mind and he dismissed the boy on
a false charge.
So at seventeen he was thrown again on the world. Money was still
scarce. Books and instruments and calls from home swallowed up the most
of it. The boy was chafing under ill-treatment and a sense of injustice.
The want of sleep, perhaps of proper food, was telling on him, but he
looked forward with a clear, undaunted eye. He wanted to reach a certain
town where he believed work awaited him. It meant a walk of a hundred
miles. He was weak, disheartened, ill-prepared for it, but he did it.
He arrived footsore and weary, with torn shoes and tattered clothes,
and his worldly possessions tied in a handkerchief on his back.
In this shabby plight he presented himself at the telegraph office. He
was eyed coldly enough at first, but by-and-by when tests were given he
stood the tests. There was that in the eager eyes and underneath the
shabby clothes that could not but make itself felt as a power. He began
work. At first his fellow-clerks laughed at him. In time they were won
over, and later he stood out as a workman of the first order.
He began to collect about him materials for printing--machinery without
which he never felt quite happy. He did a clever thing one day in the
office that brought him into notice. He took a press report at one
sitting--a sitting that lasted from 3.30 p.m. till 4.30 a.m.! After that
he carefully divided it into paragraphs so that each printer would have
exactly three lines to print, and so that a column could be set up in
two or three minutes!
It may be that about this time money was rather more plentiful, for
Edison began to go to second-hand bookshops and so to gratify his
deep-seated thirst for knowledge.
His kindness of heart was well known, and there were many about only
too ready to take advantage of it. There were telegraphists who roamed
the country in time of war--"tramp operators" they were called, who took
short engagements and generally ended their time with a "spree." These
found out Edison--a man who did not drink himself and a man who might be
persuaded to lend them money--and these were his worst enemies.
One day he had bought at an auction fifty volumes of the _North American
Review_. Half a dozen men were sponging off him in his rooms when he
brought home the books and ranged them unsuspiciously round his walls.
Directly he had gone out his guests helped themselves to his purchase,
landed them at the nearest pawnbroker's, and drank the money they
brought.
But his love for experiments sometimes brought him into scrapes and
disaster, as when he moved a bottle of sulphuric acid one day, strictly
against rules, and the bottle spilt, the contents eating through the
floor to the manager's room below and there eating up _his_ floor and
carpet, the unlucky accident bringing Edison his dismissal.
And now, at the age of twenty-one, after many different situations
and different experiences, Edison turned his steps to Boston. His
openhandedness had left him short of money. As was often the case with
him, he was sailing very close to the wind. His dress was poor and
shabby, and four days' and nights' travelling had not improved his
appearance. When he presented himself at the office where he was to
be taken on, the other clerks ridiculed him as "a jay from the woolly
west."
They made up their minds to play a practical joke on him. They took the
New York telegraph man into their confidence. It was arranged he should
send a despatch which Edison was to receive. By this time Edison had
so perfected himself in receiving messages that he could write from
forty-six to fifty-four words a minute--quicker than any operator in
the United States.
Not knowing his man, the sender began slowly--then quickened his
pace. So did Edison. Quicker still he worked. Edison was in no way
discomfited. Soon the New York man had reached his highest speed, to
which Edison responded with ease, cool, collected, and stopping now and
then to sharpen a pencil between.
By this time he had discovered that the others were trying to get "a
rise" out of him, but he went on steadily with his work. Then he
stopped and spoke quietly through to the New York man.
"Say, young man," he said, in his dry humorous way, "change off and send
with your other foot."
But the New York man had reached the end of his tether and had to get
someone else to finish, and so Edison won his laurels, and "the jay from
the woolly west" was regarded ever after with enormous respect.
After that his place was in the front rank. Now he had reached the
threshold of manhood, and a long, dazzling vista of achievement and
success stretched before him had he known it. About this time a great,
strong conviction of his responsibilities and of the opportunities life
held out to him swept over him.
"Adams," he said to a friend, "I've got so much to do, and life is so
short, that I'm going to hustle."
And if we try to look at what he has crowded into a life not long, we
must allow he has indeed "hustled" to some purpose. As we briefly
glance at the bent of his manhood, his doings fairly dazzle us. He read
enormously all sorts of works on telegraphy and electricity, and he
produced from his brain that which makes him the greatest inventor of
the age. If we tried to enumerate his inventions the names alone would
fill pages. We can do little more than name a few. Among the first of
these was how to send four messages at the same time over one telegraph
wire.
But even after he had embarked on the glorious sea of discovery,
what "ups and downs"--what sea-saws of fortune were in store for him!
Hunger at times, torn clothes, and battered shoes. But from depths and
half-drowning up again he always came to the surface. He rose grandly,
relying on his own indomitable will. About this time good fortune befell
him. For inventing some telegraphic appliances he got 50,000 dollars, or
rather more than L10,000. He could hardly believe his good luck, and
it was with this he immediately rigged up for himself a workshop.
And now he was rapidly rising, and the field before him was gradually
opening up wider and wider. He started a laboratory at a place called
Newark, and from this time onwards his inventions seemed to flow from
his brain in a well-nigh continuous stream.
His workmen were devoted to his service. His genial good-humour and
kindliness, the absence of all harshness in his manner, and his love of
fun could not but endear him to them. They caught the infection, too, of
his earnestness. When he had an idea in his brain he worked at it, as it
were, red-hot, almost without rest or cessation, and they were rarely
reluctant to help him.
"Now, you fellows!" he would say, shutting himself and his workmen up in
a room on the top flat, "I've locked the door, and you'll have to stay
here until this job is completed."
During sixty hours, perhaps, he would take no sleep and little food,
while his brain would work at highest pressure until the thing was
wrought. Then he would relax, and sleep for as long as thirty-six hours
at a stretch.
And now his fame had spread far and wide. The people at Menlo Park, to
which he removed--some twenty-four miles from New York--began to look
upon him as a wizard--a man possessing magical powers. It seemed to them
there was nothing he could not do. Exaggerated tales of his wonderful
powers spread over the country.
"If people track me here," he said (he had been besieged at Newark), "I
shall simply have to take to the woods."
Child after child was the offspring of the inventor's brain. At one
time, within the space of a few years, as many as forty-five were born.
There was the Microphone, which is much like the Telephone, except that
in the Microphone the sound is magnified. There was the Megaphone, which
brings far-away sounds near, so that cattle crunching grass six miles
off could be heard distinctly at Menlo Park! There was the Kinetoscope
we all know, which by swiftly passing pictures--as many as forty-six
a second--seems to give us a single person in motion, somewhat on the
lines of that toy of our childhood, "The Wheel of Life." And there was
the grand king of inventions--the Phonograph--that overtops all the
rest.
We know it, all of us, by this time. We have listened to it, with the
tubes at our ears, while the voice of someone speaking at a distance is
distinctly borne to us, or the strains of a song sung by some great
singer.
In 1888 Edison sent his first phonogram by steamer to England. His
friend here had only to take out the wax cylinder, put it into his
machine, and set it in motion, and lo! it seemed to him as if Edison
himself were in the room talking to him!
Great men all over the world recorded their astonishment and their
praises of the wonderful invention. The Queen sent him a message of
congratulation. People flocked to every exhibition to see it--to the
French one from countries all over Europe. They saw it and straightway
went into raptures. Edison himself, looking into the future, seemed to
see volumes it might yet be brought to do. It might be used to write
letters merely from dictation. It might be used to make clocks speak--to
tell when it was time to come to meals. It might be used for toys. A
tiny phonograph might be placed inside a doll, and it would straightway
"talk"; or in a toy animal, and it would grunt and growl!