none ever proved their claims. Men who were studying improvements on
the telegraph had glimpses of the ultimate possibility of transmitting
speech by wire, and Elisha Gray filed a caveat on that point later on
the very day that Bell filed his application for a patent. But Gray’s
was a caveat, or a declaration that the applicant believes he can
invent a certain device, and Bell’s was the statement that he had
already perfected his invention. Bell’s claim stood against the world,
and men now recognize that the telephone was born on that afternoon in
June, 1875, when the young teacher of deaf-mutes first caught the
faint twang of a snapping reed sent across a few yards of wire.
XIV
EDISON AND THE ELECTRIC LIGHT
1847-
To some men the material world is always presenting itself in the form
of a series of fascinating puzzles, to be solved as one might work out
a game of chess. The astronomer is given certain figures, and from
those he intends to derive certain laws; the scientist knows the
properties of certain materials and from those he is to reach some new
combination that will produce a new result. He is not an inventor as
much as he is a detective; he picks up the clews to certain happenings
and constructs a working theory to fit them. In mechanics this theory
that he constructs usually takes the form of a machine. And this
machine is not so much a new discovery as it is the practical
working-out of certain carefully-selected laws of nature.
Perhaps there has never been a man whose thoughts were so continually
asking the question why as Thomas Alva Edison. Certainly there has
never been one who has found the answer to that question in so many
lines of scientific study. He has not merely happened on his
discoveries. He has not been as much interested in the result as in
the reasons for it. He belongs to the experimenting age. Once on a
time men took the facts of nature for granted. But if they had always
done so there would have been no telegraph, no telephone, no electric
light, no phonograph. Each of these were achieved by working on a
definite problem, and in no haphazard way. The inventor has become a
scientist and a mechanic, and no longer an amateur discoverer. Chance
has much less to do with the winning of new knowledge than it once
had.
A visitor to Edison’s laboratory tells how he found him holding a vial
of some liquid to the light. After a long look at it he put the vial
down on the table, and resting his head in his hands, stared intently
at it, as if he expected the vial to make some answer. Then he picked
it up, shook it, and held it again to the light. The visitor
introduced himself. Edison nodded toward the bottle. “Take a look at
those filings,” said he. “See how curiously they settle when I shake
the bottle. In alcohol they behave one way, but in oil in this way.
Isn’t that the most curious thing you ever saw--better than a play at
one of your city theatres, eh?” Again he shook the vial. “What I want
to know is what they mean by it; and I’m going to find out.” There is
the man, he wants to know “what they mean by it,” he continually asks
the question why, he is the great experimenter among great inventors.
Edison has shown the calibre of his mind in a score of different ways.
He has been showing it ever since the days when he was a newsboy on
the trains of the Canadian Grand Trunk Railroad and the Michigan
Central. Then he fitted up a corner of the baggage-car of his train as
a miniature laboratory, and filled it with the bottles and retorts
that had been discarded at the railroad workshops. Among his treasures
was a copy of Fresenius’s “Qualitative Analysis,” engaging reading for
a boy only twelve years old. But he was not only a chemist. When he
was not working on the train he would be hanging about machine shops,
listening and watching and considering. One day the manager of the
_Detroit Free Press_ told him he might have some three hundred pounds
of old type that had been used up. The newsboy found an old hand-press
and began to print a paper himself, called the _Grand Trunk Herald_,
and sold it to the employees and regular passengers on his line.
Usually he would set the type before the train started, and print it
in the spare moments of his trip. Sometimes one of the station-masters
on the run, who was also a telegraph operator, would get a piece of
important news, write it down, and hand the paper to Edison as the
train stopped. Then the boy would go to his shop in the caboose, set
up the item, print it, and sell it, beating the daily newspapers that
might be awaiting the passengers at the end of the ride.
The new invention of the telegraph, and the great possibilities of its
use, early caught his attention. About the time the Civil War began
the newsboy adopted a new idea in his business. He had always found it
difficult to know how many newspapers to carry on each trip. If he had
too large a stock some would be left on his hands, if he carried too
few he would be sold out early and lose a good profit. He made a
friend of one of the compositors of the _Detroit Free Press_, and got
him to show him the proofs of the paper. That gave him some idea of
the news of the day, and he could judge how many papers he would
probably need. One day the proof-slip told him that there had been a
terrific battle at Pittsburg Landing, or Shiloh, and that sixty
thousand men had been killed and wounded. He knew that this would sell
the paper. All he needed was to let people get an inkling of what the
news was.
Edison dashed to the telegraph-operator and asked if he would wire a
message to each of the large stations on the railroad line requesting
the station-masters to chalk up a notice on their train
bulletin-board, giving the fact that there had been a great battle,
and that papers telling about it would reach the station at such an
hour. In return he offered the operator newspaper service for six
months free. The bargain was made, and the boy hurried to the
newspaper office.
He did not have enough money to buy as many papers as he wanted. He
asked the superintendent to let him have one thousand copies of the
_Press_ on credit. The request was instantly refused. Thereupon he
marched up the stairs to the office of the paper’s owner, and asked if
he would give him fifteen hundred copies on trust. The owner looked at
the boy for a moment, and then wrote out an order. “Take that
down-stairs,” said he, “and you will get what you want.” As Edison
said in telling the story afterward, “Then I felt happier than I have
ever felt since.”
He took his fifteen hundred copies to his storehouse on the train. At
the station where the first stop was made he usually sold two papers.
That day as they ran in to the platform it looked as if a riot had
occurred. All the town was clamoring for papers. He sold a couple of
hundred at five cents each. Another crowd met him at the next stop,
and he raised his price to ten cents a copy. The same thing happened
at each place where they stopped. When he reached Port Huron he put
what was left of his stock in a wagon, and drove through the main
streets. He sold his papers at a quarter of a dollar and more apiece.
He went by a church, and called out the news of the battle. In ten
seconds the minister and all his congregation were clamoring about the
wagon, bidding against each other for copies of the precious issue. He
had made a small fortune for a boy, and felt that he owed it largely
to his use of the telegraph. Quick-witted he was, beyond a doubt, of
an inventive turn, but a shrewd business man on top of all.
He wanted to be a telegraph-operator. Electricity fascinated him, and
he could watch the machines and listen to the music of their clicking
by the hour. He set up a line of his own in his father’s basement at
Port Huron, making his batteries of bottles, old stovepipe wire, nails
and zinc that he could pick up for a trifle. He studied the subject in
his shop in the corner of the baggage-car, during the scant moments
when he was neither printer nor newsboy. Once a bottle of phosphorus
upset and started a fire. The boy was thrashed and his bottles and
wires thrown out. But he was too doggedly persistent to mind any
mishap. He saved the small son of the station-master at Port Clements
from being run down by a train, and in return the father offered to
teach him telegraphy. So little by little he learned his chosen work.
He obtained a position as night operator at Port Huron. That kept him
busy at night, but he refused to sleep during the daytime as other
night operators did, and used that time to work on his own schemes. To
catch some sleep he kept a loud alarm-clock at his office, and set it
so that he would be waked when trains were due and he was needed. But
sometimes trains were off schedule, and again and again he would
oversleep. At last the train despatcher ordered Edison to signal him
the letter “A” in the Morse alphabet every half hour. The boy
willingly agreed. A few nights later he brought an invention of his
own to the office, and connected it by wires with the clock and the
telegraph. Then he watched it work. Exactly on the half hour a little
lever fell, sending an excellent copy of the Morse “A” to the key of
the telegraph. Another lever closed the circuit. He kept his eyes on
this instrument of his making until he had seen it act faultlessly
again at the next half hour. Then he went to sleep. Night after night
the signal was sent without a mistake, and the despatcher began to
regain some of the confidence he had lost in the young operator. Then
one night the despatcher chanced to be at the next station to
Edison’s, and it occurred to him to call the latter up and have a chat
with him. He signaled for fifteen minutes, and received no answer.
Then he jumped on a hand-car and rode to Edison’s station. Looking
through the window he saw the youth sound asleep. His eyes took in the
strange instrument upon the table. It was near the half hour, and as
the man watched he saw one lever of the instrument throw open the key
and the other send the signal over the wire. The operator was still
sleeping soundly. The despatcher recognized the young man’s ingenuity,
but he also realized that he had been fooled, and so he woke Edison
none too gently, and told him that his services were no longer in
demand on that road.
Ingenuity, mechanical short-cuts, new devices for doing old work, were
what beset his mind. He was not interested in doing the simple routine
service of a telegrapher, he wanted to see what improvements on it he
could make. Often this keenness for new ideas led him into trouble
with his employers; occasionally it was of real service. At one time
an ice-jam had broken the cable-line between Port Huron, in Michigan,
and Sarnia, over the Canadian line. The river there was a mile and a
half wide. The officers were wondering how they could get their
messages across when they saw Edison jump upon a locomotive standing
in the train-yard. He seized the valve that controlled the whistle. He
opened and closed it so that the locomotive’s whistles resembled the
dots and dashes of the telegraph code. He called Sarnia again and
again. “Do you hear this? Do you get this?” he sent by the whistle.
Four and five times he sent the message, and finally the whistle of a
locomotive across the river answered him. In that way communication
was again established.
A little later, when Edison was employed as operator in the railroad
office at Indianapolis, he practiced receiving newspaper reports in
his spare hours at night. He and a friend named Parmley would take the
place of the regular man, who was glad to have them do it. “I would
sit down,” said Edison, “for ten minutes, and ‘take’ as much as I
could from the instrument, carrying the rest in my head. Then while I
wrote out, Parmley would serve his turn at ‘taking,’ and so on. This
worked well until they put a new man on at the Cincinnati end. He was
one of the quickest despatchers in the business, and we soon found it
was hopeless for us to try to keep up with him. Then it was that I
worked out my first invention, and necessity was certainly the mother
of it.
“I got two old Morse registers and arranged them in such a way that by
running a strip of paper through them the dots and dashes were
recorded on it by the first instrument as fast as they were delivered
from the Cincinnati end, and were transmitted to us through the other
instrument at any desired rate of speed. They would come in on one
instrument at the rate of forty words a minute, and would be ground
out of our instrument at the rate of twenty-five. Then weren’t we
proud! Our copy used to be so clean and beautiful that we hung it up
on exhibition; and our manager used to come and gaze at it silently
with a puzzled expression. He could not understand it, neither could
any of the other operators; for we used to hide my impromptu automatic
recorder when our toil was over. But the crash came when there was a
big night’s work--a presidential vote, I think it was--and copy kept
pouring in at the top rate of speed until we fell an hour and a half
or two hours behind. The newspapers sent in frantic complaints, an
investigation was made, and our little scheme was discovered. We
couldn’t use it any more.”
His fortunes rose and fell, for, although he was now becoming a very
expert operator, taking messages with greater and greater speed, he
would continue to stray into new fields of experiment. When he started
to work in the Western Union office in Memphis, which was soon after
the end of the Civil War, he found that all messages that were sent
from New Orleans to New York had to be received at Memphis, sent on
from there to Louisville, taken again, and so forwarded by half a
dozen relays to New York. Many errors might creep in by such a system.
To cure this he devised an automatic repeater, which could be attached
to the line at Memphis, and would of its own accord send the message
on. In this way the signals could go directly from New Orleans to New
York. The device worked, and was highly praised in the local
newspapers. But it happened that the manager of the office had a
relative who was just completing a similar instrument, and Edison had
forestalled him. Consequently he found himself discharged. He got a
railroad pass as far as Decatur, and walked a hundred and fifty miles
from there to Nashville. So by alternate riding and walking he finally
reached Louisville. A little later he was offered a place in the
Boston office.
He had plenty of nerve, and was not at all put out at the amusement of
the other men when he walked into the Boston office, clad in an old
and shapeless linen duster. “Here I am,” he announced to the
superintendent. “And who are you?” he was asked. “Tom Edison. I was
told to report here.”
The superintendent sent him to the operating-room. Shortly after a New
York telegrapher, famed for his speed, called up. Every one else was
busy, and Edison was told to take his message. He sat down, and for
four and a half hours wrote the messages, numbering the pages and
throwing them on the floor for the office boy to gather up. As time
went on the messages came with such lightning speed that the whole
force gathered about to see the new man work. They had never seen such
quickness. At the end of the last message came the words, “Who the
devil are you?” “Tom Edison,” the operator ticked back. “You are the
first man in the country,” wired the man in New York, “that could ever
take me at my fastest, and the only one who could ever sit at the
other end of my wire for more than two hours and a half. I’m proud to
know you.”
This story may be legendary, but it is known to be a fact that Edison
was at this time the fastest operator in the employ of the Western
Union, and that he could take the messages sent him with a careless
ease which amounted almost to indifference. He had also cultivated an
unusually clear handwriting, which was of great help in writing out
the messages.
As soon as he was settled at the Boston office he opened a small
workshop, where he might try to complete some of the many devices he
had in mind. He took out his first patent in 1868, when he was
twenty-one years old, and it was obtained for what he called an
electrical vote recorder. This was intended for use in Congress and
the State Legislatures, and to take the place of the slow process of
calling the roll on any vote. It was worked somewhat on the plan of
the hotel indicator. The voter, sitting at his desk, would press one
button if he wanted to vote “aye,” and another if he wanted to vote
“no.” His vote was then recorded on a dial by the Speaker’s desk, and
as soon as each member had pressed one or the other button the total
votes on each side could be known. The machine worked perfectly, and
Edison took it to Washington in high hopes of having it adopted by
Congress. The chairman to whom he was referred examined it carefully.
Then he said, “Young man, it works all right and couldn’t be better.
With an instrument like that it would be difficult to monkey with the
vote if you wanted to. But it won’t do. In fact, it’s the last thing
on earth that we want here. Filibustering and delay in the counting of
the votes are often the only means we have of defeating bad
legislation. So, though I admire your genius and the spirit which
prompted you to invent so excellent a machine, we shan’t require it
here. Take the thing away.”
“Of course I was very sorry,” said Edison, in speaking of this
interview later, “for I had banked on that machine bringing me in
money. But it was a lesson to me. There and then I made a vow that I
would never invent anything which was not wanted, or which was not
necessary to the community at large. And so far I believe I have kept
that vow.”
It was very evident there was a keen-witted man at work in the Boston
office. The operators there had been much annoyed by an army of
cockroaches that used to march across the table where they put their
lunches and make a raid on the sandwiches and pies. One day Edison
appeared with some tin-foil and four or five yards of fine wire. He
unrolled the tin-foil, and, cutting two narrow strips from the long
sheet, he stretched them around the table, keeping them near together,
but not touching, and fastening them with small tacks. Then he
connected the ribbons of foil with two batteries.
The leaders of the cockroach army arrived. The advance guard got his
fore-creepers over the first ribbon safely, but as soon as they
touched the parallel ribbon over he fell. In a very short time the
invading army had met its Waterloo, and the lunches were safe from any
further attack.
At another time the tin dipper that hung by the tank of drinking-water
temporarily disappeared. When it was returned Edison put up a sign,
reading, “Please return this dipper.” He also connected the nail on
which the dipper hung with a wire attached to an electric battery.
After that the dipper stayed in its place under penalty of a wrenched
arm for moving it without first disconnecting the battery.
Edison had now determined to become an inventor, and as soon as he was
able gave up his position in the Boston telegraph office, where his
routine work took too much of his time, and went to New York to look
for other opportunities. It happened that one day soon after his
arrival he was walking through Wall Street and was attracted to the
office of the Law Gold Indicator. The indicators or stock-tickers of
this company were a new device, and were distributed through most of
the large brokerage houses of the city. On the morning when Edison
casually looked in, the machines had stopped work, no one could find
out what was the matter, and the brokers were much disturbed. Edison
watched Mr. Law and his workmen searching for the trouble. Then he
said that he thought he could fix the machines. Mr. Law told him to
try. He removed a loose contact spring that had fallen between the
wheels, and immediately the tickers began to work again. The other
workmen looked foolish, and Mr. Law asked the newcomer to step into
his private office. At the end of the interview the owner had offered
Edison the position of manager at a salary of three hundred dollars a
month, and Edison had accepted.
He determined to improve this stock-indicator, and set to work at
once. Soon he had evolved a number of important additions. The
president of the company sent for him and asked how much he would take
for these improvements. The inventor said that he would leave that to
the president. Forty thousand dollars was named and accepted. Edison
opened a bank account, and gave more time to working in his own
laboratory. He had got well started up the rungs of the ladder he
planned to climb.
His work lay along the lines of the telegraph, and he was anxious to
win the support of the Western Union for his new ideas. His chance
came when there was a breakdown of the lines between New York and
Albany. He went to the Western Union president, who had already heard
of him, and said, “If I locate this trouble within two or three hours,
will you take up my inventions and give them honest consideration?”
The president answered, “I’ll consider your inventions if you get us
out of this fix within two days.” Edison rushed forthwith to the main
office. There he called up Pittsburg and asked for their best
operator. When he had him he told him to call up the best man at
Albany, and get him to telegraph down the line to New York as far as
he could, and report back to him. Inside of an hour he received the
message, “I can telegraph all right down to within two miles of
Poughkeepsie, and there is trouble with the wire there.” Edison went
back to the president and told him that if he would send a repair
train to Poughkeepsie they would find a break two miles the other side
of the city and could have it repaired that afternoon. They followed
his directions, and communication was restored before night. After
that the Western Union officials gave the most careful consideration
to every new invention that Edison brought them.
As soon as he had money in bank Edison carried out a plan he had long
had in mind. He gave up his workshop in New York and opened a factory
and experimenting shop in Newark, New Jersey, where he would have
plenty of room for himself and his assistants. He began by
manufacturing his improved “stock-tickers,” and he met with very
considerable success. But he felt that manufacturing was not his
forte. He said of this venture later, “I was a poor manufacturer,
because I could not let well enough alone. My first impulse upon
taking any apparatus into my hand, from an egg-beater to an electric
motor, is to seek a way of improving it. Therefore, as soon as I have
finished a machine I am anxious to take it apart again in order to
make an experiment. That is a costly mania for a manufacturer.”
In his Newark shop Edison now turned his attention to improvements on
the telegraph. His first important invention was the duplex, by which
two messages could be sent over the same wire in opposite directions
at the same time without any confusion or obstruction to each other.
This doubled the capacity of the single wire. Later he decided to
carry this system farther, and perfected the quadruplex device. By
this two messages could be sent simultaneously in each direction, and
two sending and two receiving operators were employed at each end of a
single wire. The principle involved was that of working with two
electric currents that differ from each other in strength or nature,
and which only affect receiving instruments specially adapted to take
such currents, and no others. This invention changed a hundred
thousand miles of wire into four hundred thousand, and saved the
Western Union untold millions of dollars which would otherwise have
had to be expended for new wires and repairs to the old ones.
Along somewhat similar lines Edison perfected an automatic telegraph,
an harmonic multiplex telegraph, and an autographic telegraph. The
harmonic multiplex used tuning-forks to separate the several different
messages sent at the same time, and the autographic telegraph allowed
of the transmission of an exact reproduction of a message written by
the sender in one place and received in another. And in addition to
all these leading inventions he was continually improving on the main
system, and his improvements were rapidly bought and taken over by the
Western Union Company.