The scene--the Boston office of a great telegraph company. The
time--a half century ago. Enter a tall young man wearing a slouchy,
broad-brimmed hat and a wet duster clinging to his legs, who marches
into the superintendent’s office, and says: “Here I am.” The
superintendent gazes at him. “Who are you?” he finally asks.
“Tom Edison.”
“And who on earth might Tom Edison be?”
The young man explains that he has been ordered to report for duty at
the Boston office. He is told to sit down and wait. A little while
later a New York sender, who is one of the most rapid in the telegraph
business at the time, calls up.
All the operators are busy.
“Let that new fellow try him,” says the chief.
Edison sits down and for four and one-half hours takes the speedy
messages. The faster the instrument clicks, the faster he writes the
words. At the end New York calls:
“Hello!”
“Hello yourself!” Edison flashes back.
“Who the dickens are you?” asks the New York operator.
“Tom Edison.”
“You are the first man in the country, that could ever take me at my
fastest,” clicks out New York, “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 little story of Thomas Alva Edison shows that even as a young man
he exhibited unusual ability. He was born on February 11, 1847, at
Milan, Erie County, Ohio. His family moved to Port Huron, Michigan,
when the boy was seven, and when he was only twelve years old Edison
became a train newsboy on the railway to Detroit. It was during this
time that he rigged up apparatus in the baggage car and experimented
with chemistry and telegraphy.
He was but fifteen when he became a telegraph operator. But his
studies and experiments interfered so much with his duties that he was
discharged many times. He worked in a number of cities of the United
States and Canada. At the age of twenty-one he had built an automatic
repeater, by which a telegraphic message could be transferred from
one wire to another without the aid of an operator. By means of this
messages could be sent direct to a much greater distance than formerly.
Edison finally went to Boston, as related herein, and thence to New
York, in 1869. There he invented an improved printing telegraph for
stock quotations, the ticker. For this he received $40,000.
Then he built a laboratory at Newark, New Jersey; but four years later
moved to Menlo Park, and later to West Orange, New Jersey. All the time
he continued his experiments and inventions. He lives now at Orange,
and is as hard a worker as he was when a young man.
Among Edison’s more important inventions are his system of multiplex
telegraphy; the carbon telephone transmitter; the phonograph;
the incandescent lamp and light system; the kinetoscope; and the
talking-moving-picture. In all he has had seven hundred patents granted
to him.
In 1878 Edison was made Chevalier and afterward Commander of the Legion
of Honor by the French government.
PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION
ILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR, VOL. 1, No. 29, SERIAL No. 29