papers to make the grand _coup_ I intended. I had very little cash and,
I feared, still less credit. I went to the superintendent of the
delivery department, and preferred a modest request for one thousand
copies of the _Free Press_ on trust. I was not much surprised when my
request was curtly and gruffly refused. In those days, though, I was a
pretty cheeky boy and I felt desperate, for I saw a small fortune in
prospect if my telegraph operator had kept his word--a point on which I
was still a trifle doubtful. Nerving myself for a great stroke, I
marched upstairs into the office of Wilbur F. Storey himself and asked
to see him. A few minutes later I was shown in to him. I told who I was,
and that I wanted fifteen hundred copies of the paper on credit. The
tall, thin, dark-eyed, ascetic-looking man stared at me for a moment and
then scratched a few words on a slip of paper. 'Take that downstairs,'
said he, 'and you will get what you want.' And so I did. Then I felt
happier than I have ever felt since.
"I took my fifteen hundred papers, got three boys to help me fold them,
and mounted the train all agog to find out whether the telegraph
operator had kept his word. At the town where our first stop was made I
usually sold two papers. As the train swung into that station I looked
ahead and thought there must be a riot going on. A big crowd filled the
platform and as the train drew up I began to realize that they wanted my
papers. Before we left I had sold a hundred or two at five cents apiece.
At the next station the place was fairly black with people. I raised the
'ante' and sold three hundred papers at ten cents each. So it went on
until Port Huron was reached. Then I transferred my remaining stock to
the wagon which always waited for me there, hired a small boy to sit on
the pile of papers in the back, so as to discount any pilfering, and
sold out every paper I had at a quarter of a dollar or more per copy. I
remember I passed a church full of worshippers, and stopped to yell out
my news. In ten seconds there was not a soul left in meeting. All of
them, including the parson, were clustered around me, bidding against
each other for copies of the precious paper.
"You can understand why it struck me then that the telegraph must be
about the best thing going, for it was the telegraphic notices on the
bulletin-boards that had done the trick. I determined at once to become
a telegraph-operator. But if it hadn't been for Wilbur F. Storey I
should never have fully appreciated the wonders of electrical science."
Telegraphy became a hobby with the boy. From every operator along the
road he picked up something. He strung the basement of his father's
house at Port Huron with wires, and constructed a short line, using for
the batteries stove-pipe wire, old bottles, nails, and zinc which
urchins of the neighborhood were induced to cut out from under the
stoves of their unsuspecting mothers and bring to young Edison at three
cents a pound. In order to save time for his experiments, he had the
habit of leaping from a train while it was going at the rate of
twenty-five miles an hour, landing upon a pile of sand arranged by him
for that purpose. An act of personal courage--the saving of the
station-master's child at Port Clements from an advancing train--was a
turning-point in his career, for the grateful father taught him
telegraphing in the regular way. Telegraphy was then in its infancy,
comparatively speaking; operators were few, and good wages could be
earned by means of much less proficiency than is now required. Still,
Edison had so little leisure at his disposal for learning the new trade,
that it took him several years to become an expert operator. Most of his
studies were carried on in the corner of the baggage-car that served him
as printing-office, laboratory, and business headquarters. With so many
irons in the fire, mishaps were sure to occur. Once he received a
drubbing on account of an article reflecting unpleasantly upon some
employee of the road. One day during his absence a bottle of phosphorus
upset and set the old railroad caboose on fire, whereupon the conductor
threw out all the painfully acquired apparatus and thrashed its owner.
Edison's first regular employment as telegraph-operator was at
Indianapolis when he was eighteen years old. He received a small salary
for day-work in the railroad office there, and at night he used to
receive newspaper reports for practice. The regular operator was a man
given to copious libations, who was glad enough to sleep off their
effects while Edison and a young friend of his named Parmley did his
work. "I would sit down," says 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.
[Illustration: Edison's Tinfoil Phonograph--the First Practical
Machine.]
"It was that same rude automatic recorder that indirectly led me long
afterward to invent the phonograph. I'll tell you how this came about.
After thinking over the matter a great deal, I came to the point where,
in 1877, I had worked out satisfactorily an instrument that would not
only record telegrams by indenting a strip of paper with dots and dashes
of the Morse code, but would also repeat a message any number of times
at any rate of speed required. I was then experimenting with the
telephone also, and my mind was filled with theories of sound vibrations
and their transmission by diaphragms. Naturally enough, the idea
occurred to me: if the indentations on paper could be made to give forth
again the click of the instrument, why could not the vibrations of a
diaphragm be recorded and similarly reproduced? I rigged up an
instrument hastily and pulled a strip of paper through it, at the same
time shouting, 'Hallo'! Then the paper was pulled through again, my
friend Batchelor and I listening breathlessly. We heard a distinct
sound, which a strong imagination might have translated into the
original 'Hallo.' That was enough to lead me to a further experiment.
But Batchelor was sceptical, and bet me a barrel of apples that I
couldn't make the thing go. I made a drawing of a model and took it to
Mr. Kruesi, at that time engaged on piece-work for me, but now assistant
general manager of our machine-shop at Schenectady. I told him it was a
talking-machine. He grinned, thinking it a joke; but he set to work and
soon had the model ready. I arranged some tinfoil on it, and spoke into
the machine. Kruesi looked on, still grinning. But when I arranged the
machine for transmission and we both heard a distinct sound from it, he
nearly fell down in his fright. I was a little scared myself, I must
admit. I won that barrel of apples from Batchelor, though, and was
mighty glad to get it."
To go back to earlier days, the story of Edison's first years as a
full-fledged operator shows that from the beginning he was more of an
inventor than an operator. He was full of ideas, some of which were
gratefully received. One day an ice-jam broke the cable between Port
Huron, in Michigan, and Sarnia, on the Canada side, and stopped
communication. The river is a mile and a half wide and was impassable.
Young Edison jumped upon a locomotive and seized the valve controlling
the whistle. He had the idea that the scream of the whistle might be
broken into long and short notes, corresponding to the dots and dashes
of the telegraphic code. "Hallo there, Sarnia! Do you get me? Do you
hear what I say?" tooted the locomotive.
No answer.
"Do you hear what I say, Sarnia?"
A third, fourth, and fifth time the message went across without
response, but finally the idea was caught on the other side; answering
toots came cheerfully back and the connection was recovered.
Anything connected with the difficulties of telegraphy had a fascination
for him. He lost many a place because of unpardonable blunders due to
his passion for improvement. At Stratford, Canada, being required to
report the word "Six" every half hour to the manager to show that he was
awake and on duty, he rigged up a wheel to do it for him. At
Indianapolis he kept press reports waiting while he experimented with
new devices for receiving them. At Louisville, in procuring some
sulphuric acid at night for his experiments, he tipped over a carboy of
it, ruining the handsome outfit of a banking establishment below. At
Cincinnati he abandoned the office on every pretext to hasten to the
Mechanics' Library to pass his day in reading.
An indication of his thirst for knowledge, and of a _naïve_ ignoring of
enormous difficulties, is found in a project formed by him at this time
to read through the whole public library. There was no one to tell him
that a summary of human knowledge may be found in a moderate number of
volumes, nor to point out to him what they are. Each book was to him a
part of the great domain of knowledge, none of which he meant to lose.
He began with the solid treatises of a dusty lower shelf and actually
read, in the accomplishment of his heroic purpose, fifteen feet along
that shelf. He omitted no book and nothing in the book. The list
contained Newton's "Principia," Ure's Scientific Dictionary, and
Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy."
At that time a message sent from New Orleans to New York had to be taken
at Memphis, re-telegraphed to Louisville, taken down again by the
operator there, and telegraphed to another centre, and so on till it
reached New York. Time was lost and the chance of error was increased.
Edison was the first to connect New Orleans and New York directly. It
was just after the war. He perfected an automatic repeater which was put
on at Memphis and did its work perfectly. The manager of the office
there, one Johnson, had a relative who was also busy on the same
problem, but Edison solved it ahead of him and received complimentary
notices from the local papers. He was discharged without cause. He got a
pass as far as Decatur on his way home, but had to walk from there to
Nashville, a hundred and fifty miles. From there he got a pass to
Louisville, where he arrived during a sharp snow-storm, clad in a linen
duster.
It was soon after this that Edison, already a swift and competent
operator when he devoted himself to practical work, received promise of
employment in the Boston office. The weather was quite cold and his
peculiar dress, topped with a slouchy broad-brimmed hat, made something
of a sensation. But Edison then cared as little for dress as he does
to-day. So one raw wet day a tall man with a limp, wet duster clinging
to his legs, stalked into the superintendent's room, and said:
"Here I am."
The superintendent eyed him from head to foot, and said:
"Who are you?"
"Tom Edison."
"And who on earth might Tom Edison be?"
The young man explained that he had been ordered to report for duty at
the Boston office, and was finally told to sit down in the
operating-room, where his advent created much merriment. The operators
guyed him loudly enough for him to hear. He didn't care. A few moments
later a New York sender noted for his swiftness called up the Boston
office. There was no one at liberty.
"Well," said the office chief, "let that new fellow try him." Edison sat
down, and for four hours and a half wrote out messages in his peculiarly
clear round hand, stuck a date and number on them and threw them on the
floor for the office boy to pick up. The time he took in numbering and
dating the sheets were the only seconds he was not writing out
transmitted words. Faster and faster ticked the instrument, and faster
and faster went Edison's fingers, until the rapidity with which the
messages came tumbling on the floor attracted the attention of the
other operators, who, when their work was done, gathered around to
witness the spectacle. At the close of the four and a half hours' work
there flashed from New York the salutation:
"Hello!"
"Hello yourself," ticked back Edison.
"Who the devil are you?" rattled into the Boston office.
"Tom Edison."
"You are the first man in the country," ticked the instrument, "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."
Edison was once asked with what invention he really began his career as
an inventor.
"Well," said he, in reply, "my first appearance at the Patent Office was
in 1868, when I was twenty-one, with an ingenious contrivance which I
called the electrical vote recorder. I had been impressed with the
enormous waste of time in Congress and in the State Legislatures by the
taking of votes on any motion. More than half an hour was sometimes
required to count the 'Ayes' and 'Noes.' So I devised a machine somewhat
on the plan of the hotel annunciator that was invented long afterward,
only mine was a great deal more complex. In front of each member's desk
were to have been two buttons, one for 'Aye,' the other for 'No,' and by
the side of the Speaker's desk a frame with two dials, one showing the
total of 'Ayes' and the other the total of 'Noes.' When the vote was
called for, each member could press the button he wished and the result
would appear automatically before the Speaker, who could glance at the
dials and announce the result. This contrivance would save several hours
of public time every day in the session, and I thought my fortune was
made. I interested a moneyed man in the thing and we went together to
Washington, where we soon found the right man to get the machine
adopted. I set forth its merits. Imagine my feelings when, in a
horrified tone, he exclaimed:
[Illustration: Vote Recorder--Edison's First Patented Invention.]
"'Young man, that won't do at all. That is just what we do not want.
Your invention would destroy the only hope the minority have of
influencing legislation. It would deliver them over, bound hand and
foot, to the majority. The present system gives them time, a weapon
which is invaluable, and as the ruling majority always knows that they
may some day become a minority, they will be as much averse to any
change as their opponents.' I saw the force of these remarks, and the
vote recorder got no further than the Patent Office."
But he began to believe in himself. His next work was upon the
applications of the vibratory principle in telegraphing, upon which so
many of his subsequent inventions were founded. His first ambitious
attempt was in the direction of a multiplex system for sending several
messages over one wire at the same time. It was not much of a success,
however, and Edison drifted to New York, where, after a vain attempt to
interest the telegraph companies in his inventions, he established
himself as an electrical expert ready for odd jobs and making a
specialty of telegraphy. One day the Western Union Company had trouble
with its Albany Wire. The wire wasn't broken, but wouldn't work, and
several days of experimenting on the part of the company's electricians
only served to puzzle them the more. As a forlorn hope they sent for
young Edison.
"How long will you give me?" he asked. "Six hours?"
The manager laughed and told him he would need longer than that.
Edison sat down at the instrument, established communication with Albany
by way of Pittsburgh, told the Albany office to put their best man at
the instrument, and began a rapid series of tests with currents of all
intensities. He directed the tests from both ends, and after two hours
and a half told the company's officers that the trouble existed at a
certain point he named on the line, and he told them what it was. They
telegraphed the office nearest this point the necessary directions, and
an hour later the wire was working properly. This incident first
established his value in New York as an expert, and the business became
profitable. Moreover, it led the different telegraph companies to give
respectful attention to what he had to offer in the way of patented
devices.
Edison's mechanical skill soon became so noted that he was made
superintendent of the repair shop of one of the smaller telegraph
companies then in existence, all of which were using what was known as
the Page sounder, a device for signalling, the sole right to which was
claimed by the Western Union Company. Owing to the latter company's
success in a patent suit over this sounder, there came a time when an
injunction was obtained, silencing all sounders of that type, and
practically putting a serious obstacle in the way of rapid work. Edison
was called into the president's office and the situation explained. For
a long time, according to one who was present, he stood chewing
vigorously upon a mouthful of tobacco, looking first at the sounder in
his hand, and then falling into a brown study. At length he picked up a
sheet of tin used as a "back" for manifolding on thin sheets of paper,
and began to twist and cut it into queer shapes; a group of persons
gathered around and watched. Not a word was spoken. Finally Edison tore
off the Page sounder on the instrument before him, and substituting his
bit of tin, began working. It was not so good as the patented
arrangement discarded, but it worked. In four hours a hundred such
devices were in use over the line, and what would have been a ruinous
interruption to business was avoided.
Edison's first large sums of money came from the sale of an improvement
in the instruments used to record stock quotations in brokers' offices,
commonly known as "tickers." His success in this direction led him to
take a contract to manufacture some hundreds of "tickers," and his only
venture in this direction was carried out with considerable success at a
shop he rented in Newark about 1875. But as he told me a few years
later, in talking about this incident in his career, manufacturing was
not in his line. Like Thoreau, who having succeeded in making a perfect
lead-pencil, declared he should never make another, he hates routine. "I
was a poor manufacturer," said he, "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."
[Illustration: Edison in his Laboratory.]
It was his success with a device for printing stock quotations upon
paper tape that finally induced several New York capitalists to accept
Edison's offer to experiment with the incandescent electric light, they
to pay the expense of the experiments and share in the inventions if
any were made. For the sake of quiet Edison moved out to Menlo Park,
a little station on the Pennsylvania road about twenty-five miles beyond
Newark, and built a shop twenty-eight feet wide, one hundred feet long,
and two stories high. It was here that I first made his acquaintance, in
January, 1879, soon after the newspapers had announced that he had
solved the problem of the electric light. It may be remembered that gas
stock tumbled in price at that time, and there was a rush to sell before
the new light should displace gas altogether. One cold day I climbed the
hill from the station, and once past the reception-room, in which every
new-comer was carefully scrutinized, for inventors are apt to have odds
and ends lying about that they do not want seen by everyone, I found
myself in a long big work-shop. To anyone accustomed to the orderly
appearance of the ideal machine-shop, it presented a curious appearance,
for evidently half the machines in it--forges, lathes, furnaces,
retorts, etc.--were dismantled for the moment and useless. Half a dozen
workmen were busy in an apparently aimless manner.
Upstairs, in a room devoted to chemical experiments, I found Edison
himself. He is to-day just what he was then. Prosperity has not changed
him in the least, except perhaps in one particular. In those days of
struggle the inventor was far less affable with visitors than he is
to-day. One felt instinctively that he was a man struggling to
accomplish some serious task to which he was devoting every waking
thought and probably dreaming about it at night. As I strode across the
laboratory in the direction indicated by one of the workmen present, a
compactly built but not tall man, with rather a boyish, clean-shaven
face, prematurely old, was holding a vial of some liquid up to the
light. He had on a blouse such as chemists wear, but it was hardly
necessary, as his clothes were well stained with acids; his hands were
covered with some oil with which his hair was liberally streaked, as he
had a habit of wiping his fingers upon his head. "Good clothes are
wasted upon me," he once explained to me. "I feel it is wrong to wear
any, and I never put on a new suit when I can help it." Edison has been
slightly deaf for a number of years, and like all persons of defective
hearing, closely watches anyone with whom he talks. His patience with
visitors is proverbial, and provided any intelligence is shown, he will
plunge into long explanations. As he goes on from point to point,
warming up to his subject, he is sometimes quite oblivious to the fact
that it is all lost upon his visitor until brought back by some question
or comment which shows that he might as well talk Sanskrit. Then he
laughs and goes back to simpler matters.
I watched him for a few moments before presenting myself. After a long
look at his bottle, held up against the light, he put it down again on
the table before him, and resting his head between his hands, both
elbows on the table, he peered down at the bottle as if he expected it
to say something. Then, after a moment's brown study, he would seize it
again, give it a shake, as if to shake its secret out, and hold it up to
the light. As pantomime nothing could have been more expressive. That
liquid contained a secret it would not give up, but if it could be made
to give it up, Edison was the man to do it, as a terrier might worry the
life out of a rat.
[Illustration: Edison's Menlo Park Electric Locomotive (1880).]