“Well I remember when my uncle spoke to my parents about it, and my
father objected, because I was then getting one dollar and eighty cents
per week for running a small engine in a cellar in Allegheny City,
but my uncle said a messenger’s wages would be two dollars and fifty
cents.... If you want an idea as to heaven on earth, imagine what
it is to be taken from a dark cellar, where I fired the boiler from
morning until night, and dropped into an office, where light shone from
all sides, and around me books, papers, and pencils in profusion,
and oh! the tick of those mysterious brass instruments on the desk,
annihilating space and standing with throbbing spirits ready to convey
any intelligence to the world! This was my first glimpse of paradise,
and I walked on air.”
“How did you manage to rise from this position?”
“Well, I learned how to operate a telegraph instrument, and then waited
my opportunity to show that I was fit to be an operator. Eventually my
chance came, as everyone’s does.”
The truth is that the boy had the appearance of one anxious to learn
and quick to understand. James D. Reid, the superintendent of the
office, and himself a Scotchman, favored the ambitious lad, and helped
him. In his “History of the Telegraph,” he says of him:—
“I liked the boy’s looks, and it was easy to see that, though he was
little, he was full of spirit. He had not been with me a month when
he began to ask whether I would teach him to telegraph. I began to
instruct him and found him an apt pupil. He spent all his spare time
in practice, sending and receiving by sound and not by tape, as was
largely the custom in those days. Pretty soon he could do as well as I
could at the key, and then his ambition carried him away beyond doing
the drudgery of messenger work.”
“As you look back upon it,” I said to Mr. Carnegie, “do you consider
that so lowly a beginning is better than one a little less trying?”