Edison, His Life and Inventions
by Dyer and Martin
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman
Go to Part 2 of 2

BY

FRANK LEWIS DYER
GENERAL COUNSEL FOR THE EDISON LABORATORY
AND ALLIED INTERESTS

AND

THOMAS COMMERFORD MARTIN
EX-PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE
OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERS

CONTENTS

          INTRODUCTION
I.       THE AGE OF ELECTRICITY
II.      EDISON'S PEDIGREE
III.     BOYHOOD AT PORT HURON, MICHIGAN
IV.      THE YOUNG TELEGRAPH OPERATOR
V.       ARDUOUS YEARS IN THE CENTRAL WEST
VI.      WORK AND INVENTION IN BOSTON
VII.     THE STOCK TICKER
VIII.    AUTOMATIC, DUPLEX, AND QUADRUPLEX TELEGRAPHY
IX.      THE TELEPHONE, MOTOGRAPH, AND MICROPHONE
X.       THE PHONOGRAPH
XI.      THE INVENTION OF THE INCANDESCENT LAMP
XII.     MEMORIES OF MENLO PARK
XIII.    A WORLD-HUNT FOR FILAMENT MATERIAL
XIV.     INVENTING A COMPLETE SYSTEM OF LIGHTING
XV.      INTRODUCTION OF THE EDISON ELECTRIC LIGHT
XVI.     THE FIRST EDISON CENTRAL STATION
XVII.    OTHER EARLY STATIONS--THE METER
XVIII.   THE ELECTRIC RAILWAY
XIX.     MAGNETIC ORE MILLING WORK
XX.      EDISON PORTLAND CEMENT
XXI.     MOTION PICTURES
XXII.    THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE EDISON STORAGE BATTERY
XXIII.   MISCELLANEOUS INVENTIONS
XXIV.    EDISON'S METHOD IN INVENTING
XXV.     THE LABORATORY AT ORANGE AND THE STAFF
XXVI.    EDISON IN COMMERCE AND MANUFACTURE
XXVII.   THE VALUE OF EDISON'S INVENTIONS TO THE WORLD
XXVIII.  THE BLACK FLAG
XXIX.    THE SOCIAL SIDE OF EDISON
          APPENDIX
          LIST OF UNITED STATES PATENTS
          FOREIGN PATENTS
          INDEX

INTRODUCTION

PRIOR to this, no complete, authentic, and authorized
record of the work of Mr. Edison, during an active life,
has been given to the world. That life, if there is anything
in heredity, is very far from finished; and while it continues
there will be new achievement.

An insistently expressed desire on the part of the
public for a definitive biography of Edison was the
reason for the following pages. The present authors
deem themselves happy in the confidence reposed in
them, and in the constant assistance they have enjoyed
from Mr. Edison while preparing these pages,
a great many of which are altogether his own. This
co-operation in no sense relieves the authors of
responsibility as to any of the views or statements of
their own that the book contains. They have realized
the extreme reluctance of Mr. Edison to be made the
subject of any biography at all; while he has felt that,
if it must be written, it were best done by the hands
of friends and associates of long standing, whose judgment
and discretion he could trust, and whose intimate
knowledge of the facts would save him from
misrepresentation.

The authors of the book are profoundly conscious
of the fact that the extraordinary period of electrical
development embraced in it has been prolific of great
men. They have named some of them; but there
has been no idea of setting forth various achievements
or of ascribing distinctive merits. This treatment
is devoted to one man whom his fellow-citizens
have chosen to regard as in many ways representative
of the American at his finest flowering in
the field of invention during the nineteenth century.

It is designed in these pages to bring the reader face
to face with Edison; to glance at an interesting childhood
and a youthful period marked by a capacity for
doing things, and by an insatiable thirst for knowledge;
then to accompany him into the great creative
stretch of forty years, during which he has done so
much. This book shows him plunged deeply into
work for which he has always had an incredible
capacity, reveals the exercise of his unsurpassed
inventive ability, his keen reasoning powers, his
tenacious memory, his fertility of resource; follows
him through a series of innumerable experiments,
conducted methodically, reaching out like rays of
search-light into all the regions of science and nature,
and finally exhibits him emerging triumphantly from
countless difficulties bearing with him in new arts
the fruits of victorious struggle.

These volumes aim to be a biography rather than
a history of electricity, but they have had to cover so
much general ground in defining the relations and
contributions of Edison to the electrical arts, that they
serve to present a picture of the whole development
effected in the last fifty years, the most fruitful that
electricity has known. The effort has been made to
avoid technique and abstruse phrases, but some
degree of explanation has been absolutely necessary
in regard to each group of inventions. The task of
the authors has consisted largely in summarizing
fairly the methods and processes employed by Edison;
and some idea of the difficulties encountered by
them in so doing may be realized from the fact that
one brief chapter, for example,--that on ore milling--
covers nine years of most intense application and
activity on the part of the inventor. It is something
like exhibiting the geological eras of the earth in an
outline lantern slide, to reduce an elaborate series
of strenuous experiments and a vast variety of
ingenious apparatus to the space of a few hundred
words.

A great deal of this narrative is given in Mr. Edison's
own language, from oral or written statements
made in reply to questions addressed to him with
the object of securing accuracy. A further large part
is based upon the personal contributions of many
loyal associates; and it is desired here to make grateful
acknowledgment to such collaborators as Messrs.
Samuel Insull, E. H. Johnson, F. R. Upton, R. N
Dyer, S. B. Eaton, Francis Jehl, W. S. Andrews, W.
J. Jenks, W. J. Hammer, F. J. Sprague, W. S. Mallory,
an, C. L. Clarke, and others, without whose aid
the issuance of this book would indeed have been
impossible. In particular, it is desired to acknowledge
indebtedness to Mr. W. H. Meadowcroft not only for
substantial aid in the literary part of the work, but
for indefatigable effort to group, classify, and summarize
the boundless material embodied in Edison's
note-books and memorabilia of all kinds now kept
at the Orange laboratory. Acknowledgment must
also be made of the courtesy and assistance of Mrs.
Edison, and especially of the loan of many interesting
and rare photographs from her private collection.

EDISON

HIS LIFE AND INVENTIONS

CHAPTER I

THE AGE OF ELECTRICITY

THE year 1847 marked a period of great territorial
acquisition by the American people, with incalculable
additions to their actual and potential wealth.
By the rational compromise with England in the dispute
over the Oregon region, President Polk had secured
during 1846, for undisturbed settlement, three
hundred thousand square miles of forest, fertile land,
and fisheries, including the whole fair Columbia Valley.
Our active "policy of the Pacific" dated from
that hour. With swift and clinching succession came
the melodramatic Mexican War, and February, 1848,
saw another vast territory south of Oregon and west
of the Rocky Mountains added by treaty to the United
States. Thus in about eighteen months there had
been pieced into the national domain for quick development
and exploitation a region as large as the
entire Union of Thirteen States at the close of the War
of Independence. Moreover, within its boundaries
was embraced all the great American gold-field, just
on the eve of discovery, for Marshall had detected the
shining particles in the mill-race at the foot of the
Sierra Nevada nine days before Mexico signed away
her rights in California and in all the vague, remote
hinterland facing Cathayward.

Equally momentous were the times in Europe, where
the attempt to secure opportunities of expansion as
well as larger liberty for the individual took quite
different form. The old absolutist system of government
was fast breaking up, and ancient thrones were
tottering. The red lava of deep revolutionary fires
oozed up through many glowing cracks in the political
crust, and all the social strata were shaken. That the
wild outbursts of insurrection midway in the fifth
decade failed and died away was not surprising, for
the superincumbent deposits of tradition and convention
were thick. But the retrospect indicates that
many reforms and political changes were accomplished,
although the process involved the exile of not a few
ardent spirits to America, to become leading statesmen,
inventors, journalists, and financiers. In 1847,
too, Russia began her tremendous march eastward into
Central Asia, just as France was solidifying her first
gains on the littoral of northern Africa. In England
the fierce fervor of the Chartist movement, with its
violent rhetoric as to the rights of man, was sobering
down and passing pervasively into numerous practical
schemes for social and political amelioration, constituting
in their entirety a most profound change
throughout every part of the national life.

Into such times Thomas Alva Edison was born, and
his relations to them and to the events of the past
sixty years are the subject of this narrative. Aside
from the personal interest that attaches to the picturesque
career, so typically American, there is a broader
aspect in which the work of the "Franklin of the
Nineteenth Century" touches the welfare and progress
of the race. It is difficult at any time to determine
the effect of any single invention, and the investigation
becomes more difficult where inventions of the
first class have been crowded upon each other in rapid
and bewildering succession. But it will be admitted
that in Edison one deals with a central figure of the
great age that saw the invention and introduction in
practical form of the telegraph, the submarine cable,
the telephone, the electric light, the electric railway,
the electric trolley-car, the storage battery, the electric
motor, the phonograph, the wireless telegraph; and
that the influence of these on the world's affairs has
not been excelled at any time by that of any other
corresponding advances in the arts and sciences.
These pages deal with Edison's share in the great
work of the last half century in abridging distance,
communicating intelligence, lessening toil, improving
illumination, recording forever the human voice; and
on behalf of inventive genius it may be urged that its
beneficent results and gifts to mankind compare with
any to be credited to statesman, warrior, or creative
writer of the same period.

Viewed from the standpoint of inventive progress,
the first half of the nineteenth century had passed
very profitably when Edison appeared--every year
marked by some notable achievement in the arts and
sciences, with promise of its early and abundant fruition
in commerce and industry. There had been
exactly four decades of steam navigation on American
waters. Railways were growing at the rate of
nearly one thousand miles annually. Gas had become
familiar as a means of illumination in large cities.
Looms and tools and printing-presses were everywhere
being liberated from the slow toil of man-power.
The first photographs had been taken. Chloroform,
nitrous oxide gas, and ether had been placed at the
service of the physician in saving life, and the revolver,
guncotton, and nitroglycerine added to the agencies
for slaughter. New metals, chemicals, and elements
had become available in large numbers, gases had
been liquefied and solidified, and the range of useful
heat and cold indefinitely extended. The safety-lamp
had been given to the miner, the caisson to the bridge-
builder, the anti-friction metal to the mechanic for
bearings. It was already known how to vulcanize
rubber, and how to galvanize iron. The application of
machinery in the harvest-field had begun with the
embryonic reaper, while both the bicycle and the
automobile were heralded in primitive prototypes. The
gigantic expansion of the iron and steel industry was
foreshadowed in the change from wood to coal in the
smelting furnaces. The sewing-machine had brought
with it, like the friction match, one of the most profound
influences in modifying domestic life, and making
it different from that of all preceding time.

Even in 1847 few of these things had lost their
novelty, most of them were in the earlier stages of
development. But it is when we turn to electricity
that the rich virgin condition of an illimitable new
kingdom of discovery is seen. Perhaps the word
"utilization" or "application" is better than discovery,
for then, as now, an endless wealth of phenomena
noted by experimenters from Gilbert to
Franklin and Faraday awaited the invention that
could alone render them useful to mankind. The
eighteenth century, keenly curious and ceaselessly active
in this fascinating field of investigation, had not,
after all, left much of a legacy in either principles or
appliances. The lodestone and the compass; the
frictional machine; the Leyden jar; the nature of conductors
and insulators; the identity of electricity and
the thunder-storm flash; the use of lightning-rods;
the physiological effects of an electrical shock--these
constituted the bulk of the bequest to which philosophers
were the only heirs. Pregnant with possibilities
were many of the observations that had been
recorded. But these few appliances made up the
meagre kit of tools with which the nineteenth century
entered upon its task of acquiring the arts and conveniences
now such an intimate part of "human nature's
daily food" that the average American to-day
pays more for his electrical service than he does for
bread.

With the first year of the new century came Volta's
invention of the chemical battery as a means of producing
electricity. A well-known Italian picture represents
Volta exhibiting his apparatus before the
young conqueror Napoleon, then ravishing from the
Peninsula its treasure of ancient art and founding an
ephemeral empire. At such a moment this gift of de-
spoiled Italy to the world was a noble revenge, setting
in motion incalculable beneficent forces and agencies.
For the first time man had command of a steady supply
of electricity without toil or effort. The useful
results obtainable previously from the current of a
frictional machine were not much greater than those
to be derived from the flight of a rocket. While the
frictional appliance is still employed in medicine, it
ranks with the flint axe and the tinder-box in industrial
obsolescence. No art or trade could be founded
on it; no diminution of daily work or increase of daily
comfort could be secured with it. But the little battery
with its metal plates in a weak solution proved
a perennial reservoir of electrical energy, safe and
controllable, from which supplies could be drawn at will.
That which was wild had become domesticated; regular
crops took the place of haphazard gleanings from
brake or prairie; the possibility of electrical starvation
was forever left behind.

Immediately new processes of inestimable value
revealed themselves; new methods were suggested.
Almost all the electrical arts now employed made
their beginnings in the next twenty-five years, and
while the more extensive of them depend to-day on
the dynamo for electrical energy, some of the most
important still remain in loyal allegiance to the older
source. The battery itself soon underwent modifications,
and new types were evolved--the storage,
the double-fluid, and the dry. Various analogies
next pointed to the use of heat, and the thermoelectric
cell emerged, embodying the application of
flame to the junction of two different metals. Davy,
of the safety-lamp, threw a volume of current across
the gap between two sticks of charcoal, and the voltaic
arc, forerunner of electric lighting, shed its bright
beams upon a dazzled world. The decomposition of
water by electrolytic action was recognized and made
the basis of communicating at a distance even
before the days of the electromagnet. The ties
that bind electricity and magnetism in twinship of
relation and interaction were detected, and Faraday's
work in induction gave the world at once the
dynamo and the motor. "Hitch your wagon to a
star," said Emerson. To all the coal-fields and all
the waterfalls Faraday had directly hitched the wheels
of industry. Not only was it now possible to convert
mechanical energy into electricity cheaply and in
illimitable quantities, but electricity at once showed
its ubiquitous availability as a motive power. Boats
were propelled by it, cars were hauled, and even papers
printed. Electroplating became an art, and telegraphy
sprang into active being on both sides of the
Atlantic.

At the time Edison was born, in 1847, telegraphy,
upon which he was to leave so indelible an imprint,
had barely struggled into acceptance by the public.
In England, Wheatstone and Cooke had introduced a
ponderous magnetic needle telegraph. In America, in
1840, Morse had taken out his first patent on an electromagnetic
telegraph, the principle of which is dominating
in the art to this day. Four years later the
memorable message "What hath God wrought!" was
sent by young Miss Ellsworth over his circuits, and
incredulous Washington was advised by wire of the
action of the Democratic Convention in Baltimore in
nominating Polk. By 1847 circuits had been strung
between Washington and New York, under private
enterprise, the Government having declined to buy
the Morse system for $100,000. Everything was crude
and primitive. The poles were two hundred feet apart
and could barely hold up a wash-line. The slim, bare,
copper wire snapped on the least provocation, and the
circuit was "down" for thirty-six days in the first six
months. The little glass-knob insulators made seductive
targets for ignorant sportsmen. Attempts to insulate
the line wire were limited to coating it with tar
or smearing it with wax for the benefit of all the bees
in the neighborhood. The farthest western reach of
the telegraph lines in 1847 was Pittsburg, with three-
ply iron wire mounted on square glass insulators with
a little wooden pentroof for protection. In that office,
where Andrew Carnegie was a messenger boy, the
magnets in use to receive the signals sent with the aid
of powerful nitric-acid batteries weighed as much as
seventy-five pounds apiece. But the business was
fortunately small at the outset, until the new device,
patronized chiefly by lottery-men, had proved its
utility. Then came the great outburst of activity.
Within a score of years telegraph wires covered the
whole occupied country with a network, and the first
great electrical industry was a pronounced success,
yielding to its pioneers the first great harvest of
electrical fortunes. It had been a sharp struggle for bare
existence, during which such a man as the founder of
Cornell University had been glad to get breakfast in
New York with a quarter-dollar picked up on Broadway.

CHAPTER II

EDISON'S PEDIGREE

THOMAS ALVA EDISON was born at Milan
Ohio, February 11, 1847. The State that rivals
Virginia as a "Mother of Presidents" has evidently
other titles to distinction of the same nature. For
picturesque detail it would not be easy to find any
story excelling that of the Edison family before it
reached the Western Reserve. The story epitomizes
American idealism, restlessness, freedom of individual
opinion, and ready adjustment to the surrounding
conditions of pioneer life. The ancestral Edisons
who came over from Holland, as nearly as can be
determined, in 1730, were descendants of extensive
millers on the Zuyder Zee, and took up patents
of land along the Passaic River, New Jersey,
close to the home that Mr. Edison established in
the Orange Mountains a hundred and sixty years
later. They landed at Elizabethport, New Jersey,
and first settled near Caldwell in that State, where
some graves of the family may still be found. President
Cleveland was born in that quiet hamlet. It is
a curious fact that in the Edison family the
pronunciation of the name has always been with the
long "e" sound, as it would naturally be in the
Dutch language. The family prospered and must
have enjoyed public confidence, for we find the name
of Thomas Edison, as a bank official on Manhattan
Island, signed to Continental currency in 1778.
According to the family records this Edison, great-
grandfather of Thomas Alva, reached the extreme
old age of 104 years. But all was not well, and, as
has happened so often before, the politics of father
and son were violently different. The Loyalist movement
that took to Nova Scotia so many Americans
after the War of Independence carried with it John,
the son of this stalwart Continental. Thus it came
about that Samuel Edison, son of John, was born at
Digby, Nova Scotia, in 1804. Seven years later John
Edison who, as a Loyalist or United Empire emigrant,
had become entitled under the laws of Canada to a
grant of six hundred acres of land, moved westward
to take possession of this property. He made his
way through the State of New York in wagons drawn
by oxen to the remote and primitive township of
Bayfield, in Upper Canada, on Lake Huron. Although
the journey occurred in balmy June, it was necessarily
attended with difficulty and privation; but the new
home was situated in good farming country, and once
again this interesting nomadic family settled down.

John Edison moved from Bayfield to Vienna, Ontario,
on the northern bank of Lake Erie. Mr. Edison
supplies an interesting reminiscence of the old man
and his environment in those early Canadian days.
"When I was five years old I was taken by my father
and mother on a visit to Vienna. We were driven
by carriage from Milan, Ohio, to a railroad, then to a
port on Lake Erie, thence by a canal-boat in a tow
of several to Port Burwell, in Canada, across the lake,
and from there we drove to Vienna, a short distance
away. I remember my grandfather perfectly as he
appeared, at 102 years of age, when he died. In the
middle of the day he sat under a large tree in front
of the house facing a well-travelled road. His head
was covered completely with a large quantity of very
white hair, and he chewed tobacco incessantly, nodding
to friends as they passed by. He used a very
large cane, and walked from the chair to the house,
resenting any assistance. I viewed him from a distance,
and could never get very close to him. I remember
some large pipes, and especially a molasses
jug, a trunk, and several other things that came from
Holland."

John Edison was long-lived, like his father, and
reached the ripe old age of 102, leaving his son
Samuel charged with the care of the family destinies,
but with no great burden of wealth. Little is known
of the early manhood of this father of T. A. Edison
until we find him keeping a hotel at Vienna, marrying
a school-teacher there (Miss Nancy Elliott, in 1828),
and taking a lively share in the troublous politics of
the time. He was six feet in height, of great bodily
vigor, and of such personal dominance of character
that he became a captain of the insurgent forces
rallying under the banners of Papineau and Mackenzie.
The opening years of Queen Victoria's reign
witnessed a belated effort in Canada to emphasize
the principle that there should not be taxation without
representation; and this descendant of those
who had left the United States from disapproval of
such a doctrine, flung himself headlong into its
support.

It has been said of Earl Durham, who pacified
Canada at this time and established the present system
of government, that he made a country and marred
a career. But the immediate measures of repression
enforced before a liberal policy was adopted were
sharp and severe, and Samuel Edison also found his
own career marred on Canadian soil as one result of
the Durham administration. Exile to Bermuda with
other insurgents was not so attractive as the perils of
a flight to the United States. A very hurried
departure was effected in secret from the scene of
trouble, and there are romantic traditions of his
thrilling journey of one hundred and eighty-two
miles toward safety, made almost entirely without
food or sleep, through a wild country infested with
Indians of unfriendly disposition. Thus was the
Edison family repatriated by a picturesque political
episode, and the great inventor given a birthplace on
American soil, just as was Benjamin Franklin when
his father came from England to Boston. Samuel
Edison left behind him, however, in Canada, several
brothers, all of whom lived to the age of ninety or
more, and from whom there are descendants in the
region.

After some desultory wanderings for a year or two
along the shores of Lake Erie, among the prosperous
towns then springing up, the family, with its Canadian
home forfeited, and in quest of another resting-place,
came to Milan, Ohio, in 1842. That pretty little
village offered at the moment many attractions as a
possible Chicago. The railroad system of Ohio was
still in the future, but the Western Reserve had
already become a vast wheat-field, and huge quantities
of grain from the central and northern counties
sought shipment to Eastern ports. The Huron
River, emptying into Lake Erie, was navigable within
a few miles of the village, and provided an admirable
outlet. Large granaries were established, and proved
so successful that local capital was tempted into the
project of making a tow-path canal from Lockwood
Landing all the way to Milan itself. The quaint old
Moravian mission and quondam Indian settlement of
one hundred inhabitants found itself of a sudden
one of the great grain ports of the world, and bidding
fair to rival Russian Odessa. A number of grain
warehouses, or primitive elevators, were built along
the bank of the canal, and the produce of the region
poured in immediately, arriving in wagons drawn by
four or six horses with loads of a hundred bushels.
No fewer than six hundred wagons came clattering in,
and as many as twenty sail vessels were loaded with
thirty-five thousand bushels of grain, during a single
day. The canal was capable of being navigated by
craft of from two hundred to two hundred and fifty
tons burden, and the demand for such vessels soon
led to the development of a brisk ship-building industry,
for which the abundant forests of the region
supplied the necessary lumber. An evidence of the
activity in this direction is furnished by the fact
that six revenue cutters were launched at this port
in these brisk days of its prime.

Samuel Edison, versatile, buoyant of temper, and
ever optimistic, would thus appear to have pitched
his tent with shrewd judgment. There was plenty
of occupation ready to his hand, and more than one
enterprise received his attention; but he devoted
his energies chiefly to the making of shingles, for
which there was a large demand locally and along
the lake. Canadian lumber was used principally in
this industry. The wood was imported in "bolts"
or pieces three feet long. A bolt made two shingles;
it was sawn asunder by hand, then split and shaved.
None but first-class timber was used, and such shingles
outlasted far those made by machinery with their
cross-grain cut. A house in Milan, on which some
of those shingles were put in 1844, was still in excellent
condition forty-two years later. Samuel Edison
did well at this occupation, and employed several
men, but there were other outlets from time to time
for his business activity and speculative disposition.

Edison's mother was an attractive and highly
educated woman, whose influence upon his disposition
and intellect has been profound and lasting.
She was born in Chenango County, New York, in 1810,
and was the daughter of the Rev. John Elliott, a
Baptist minister and descendant of an old Revolutionary
soldier, Capt. Ebenezer Elliott, of Scotch
descent. The old captain was a fine and picturesque
type. He fought all through the long War of Independence
--seven years--and then appears to have
settled down at Stonington, Connecticut. There, at
any rate, he found his wife, "grandmother Elliott,"
who was Mercy Peckham, daughter of a Scotch
Quaker. Then came the residence in New York
State, with final removal to Vienna, for the old
soldier, while drawing his pension at Buffalo, lived
in the little Canadian town, and there died, over
100 years old. The family was evidently one of considerable
culture and deep religious feeling, for two
of Mrs. Edison's uncles and two brothers were also
in the same Baptist ministry. As a young woman
she became a teacher in the public high school at
Vienna, and thus met her husband, who was residing
there. The family never consisted of more than three
children, two boys and a girl. A trace of the Canadian
environment is seen in the fact that Edison's
elder brother was named William Pitt, after the
great English statesman. Both his brother and the
sister exhibited considerable ability. William Pitt
Edison as a youth was so clever with his pencil that
it was proposed to send him to Paris as an art student.
In later life he was manager of the local
street railway lines at Port Huron, Michigan, in
which he was heavily interested. He also owned a
good farm near that town, and during the ill-health
at the close of his life, when compelled to spend much
of the time indoors, he devoted himself almost entirely
to sketching. It has been noted by intimate
observers of Thomas A. Edison that in discussing
any project or new idea his first impulse is to take
up any piece of paper available and make drawings
of it. His voluminous note-books are a mass of
sketches. Mrs-Tannie Edison Bailey, the sister, had,
on the other hand, a great deal of literary ability,
and spent much of her time in writing.

The great inventor, whose iron endurance and
stern will have enabled him to wear down all his
associates by work sustained through arduous days
and sleepless nights, was not at all strong as a child,
and was of fragile appearance. He had an abnormally
large but well-shaped head, and it is said that
the local doctors feared he might have brain trouble.
In fact, on account of his assumed delicacy, he was
not allowed to go to school for some years, and even
when he did attend for a short time the results were
not encouraging--his mother being hotly indignant
upon hearing that the teacher had spoken of him to
an inspector as "addled." The youth was, indeed,
fortunate far beyond the ordinary in having a
mother at once loving, well-informed, and ambitious,
capable herself, from her experience as a teacher, of
undertaking and giving him an education better than
could be secured in the local schools of the day.
Certain it is that under this simple regime studious
habits were formed and a taste for literature developed
that have lasted to this day. If ever there was a
man who tore the heart out of books it is Edison,
and what has once been read by him is never forgotten
if useful or worthy of submission to the test
of experiment.

But even thus early the stronger love of mechanical
processes and of probing natural forces manifested
itself. Edison has said that he never saw a statement
in any book as to such things that he did
not involuntarily challenge, and wish to demonstrate
as either right or wrong. As a mere child the busy
scenes of the canal and the grain warehouses were of
consuming interest, but the work in the ship-building
yards had an irresistible fascination. His questions
were so ceaseless and innumerable that the penetrating
curiosity of an unusually strong mind was regarded
as deficiency in powers of comprehension, and
the father himself, a man of no mean ingenuity and
ability, reports that the child, although capable of
reducing him to exhaustion by endless inquiries, was
often spoken of as rather wanting in ordinary acumen.
This apparent dulness is, however, a quite common
incident to youthful genius.

The constructive tendencies of this child of whom
his father said once that he had never had any boyhood
days in the ordinary sense, were early noted in
his fondness for building little plank roads out of the
debris of the yards and mills. His extraordinarily
retentive memory was shown in his easy acquisition
of all the songs of the lumber gangs and canal men
before he was five years old. One incident tells how
he was found one day in the village square copying
laboriously the signs of the stores. A highly characteristic
event at the age of six is described by his
sister. He had noted a goose sitting on her eggs
and the result. One day soon after, he was missing.
By-and-by, after an anxious search, his father found
him sitting in a nest he had made in the barn, filled
with goose-eggs and hens' eggs he had collected, trying
to hatch them out.

One of Mr. Edison's most vivid recollections goes
back to 1850, when as a child three of four years old
he saw camped in front of his home six covered
wagons, "prairie schooners," and witnessed their
departure for California. The great excitement over
the gold discoveries was thus felt in Milan, and these
wagons, laden with all the worldly possessions of
their owners, were watched out of sight on their long
journey by this fascinated urchin, whose own discoveries
in later years were to tempt many other
argonauts into the auriferous realms of electricity.

Another vivid memory of this period concerns his
first realization of the grim mystery of death. He
went off one day with the son of the wealthiest man
in the town to bathe in the creek. Soon after they
entered the water the other boy disappeared. Young
Edison waited around the spot for half an hour or
more, and then, as it was growing dark, went home
puzzled and lonely, but silent as to the occurrence.
About two hours afterward, when the missing boy
was being searched for, a man came to the Edison
home to make anxious inquiry of the companion with
whom he had last been seen. Edison told all the
circumstances with a painful sense of being in some
way implicated. The creek was at once dragged, and
then the body was recovered.

Edison had himself more than one narrow escape.
Of course he fell in the canal and was nearly drowned;
few boys in Milan worth their salt omitted that
performance. On another occasion he encountered a
more novel peril by falling into the pile of wheat in
a grain elevator and being almost smothered. Holding
the end of a skate-strap for another lad to shorten
with an axe, he lost the top of a finger. Fire also
had its perils. He built a fire in a barn, but the
flames spread so rapidly that, although he escaped
himself, the barn was wholly destroyed, and he was
publicly whipped in the village square as a warning
to other youths. Equally well remembered is a dangerous
encounter with a ram that attacked him while
he was busily engaged digging out a bumblebee's
nest near an orchard fence. The animal knocked
him against the fence, and was about to butt him
again when he managed to drop over on the safe side
and escape. He was badly hurt and bruised, and no
small quantity of arnica was needed for his wounds.

Meantime little Milan had reached the zenith of
its prosperity, and all of a sudden had been deprived
of its flourishing grain trade by the new Columbus,
Sandusky & Hocking Railroad; in fact, the short
canal was one of the last efforts of its kind in this
country to compete with the new means of transportation.
The bell of the locomotive was everywhere
ringing the death-knell of effective water haulage,
with such dire results that, in 1880, of the 4468
miles of American freight canal, that had cost $214,000,000,
no fewer than 1893 miles had been abandoned,
and of the remaining 2575 miles quite a large
proportion was not paying expenses. The short
Milan canal suffered with the rest, and to-day lies
well-nigh obliterated, hidden in part by vegetable
gardens, a mere grass-grown depression at the foot
of the winding, shallow valley. Other railroads also
prevented any further competition by the canal, for
a branch of the Wheeling & Lake Erie now passes
through the village, while the Lake Shore & Michigan
Southern runs a few miles to the south.

The owners of the canal soon had occasion to
regret that they had disdained the overtures of
enterprising railroad promoters desirous of reaching
the village, and the consequences of commercial isolation
rapidly made themselves felt. It soon became
evident to Samuel Edison and his wife that the cozy
brick home on the bluff must be given up and the
struggle with fortune resumed elsewhere. They were
well-to-do, however, and removing, in 1854, to Port
Huron, Michigan, occupied a large colonial house
standing in the middle of an old Government fort
reservation of ten acres overlooking the wide expanse
of the St. Clair River just after it leaves Lake Huron.
It was in many ways an ideal homestead, toward
which the family has always felt the strongest attachment,
but the association with Milan has never
wholly ceased. The old house in which Edison was
born is still occupied (in 1910) by Mr. S. O. Edison,
a half-brother of Edison's father, and a man of marked
inventive ability. He was once prominent in the
iron-furnace industry of Ohio, and was for a time
associated in the iron trade with the father of the
late President McKinley. Among his inventions may
be mentioned a machine for making fuel from wheat
straw, and a smoke-consuming device.

This birthplace of Edison remains the plain, substantial
little brick house it was originally: one-
storied, with rooms finished on the attic floor. Being
built on the hillside, its basement opens into the rear
yard. It was at first heated by means of open coal
grates, which may not have been altogether adequate
in severe winters, owing to the altitude and the north-
eastern exposure, but a large furnace is one of the
more modern changes. Milan itself is not materially
unlike the smaller Ohio towns of its own time or
those of later creation, but the venerable appearance
of the big elm-trees that fringe the trim lawns tells
of its age. It is, indeed, an extremely neat, snug little
place, with well-kept homes, mostly of frame construction,
and flagged streets crossing each other at
right angles. There are no poor--at least, everybody
is apparently well-to-do. While a leisurely atmosphere
pervades the town, few idlers are seen. Some
of the residents are engaged in local business; some
are occupied in farming and grape culture; others are
employed in the iron-works near-by, at Norwalk.
The stores and places of public resort are gathered
about the square, where there is plenty of room for
hitching when the Saturday trading is done at that
point, at which periods the fitful bustle recalls the
old wheat days when young Edison ran with curiosity
among the six and eight horse teams that had brought
in grain. This square is still covered with fine
primeval forest trees, and has at its centre a handsome
soldiers' monument of the Civil War, to which
four paved walks converge. It is an altogether pleasant
and unpretentious town, which cherishes with no
small amount of pride its association with the name
of Thomas Alva Edison.

In view of Edison's Dutch descent, it is rather
singular to find him with the name of Alva, for the
Spanish Duke of Alva was notoriously the worst
tyrant ever known to the Low Countries, and his
evil deeds occupy many stirring pages in Motley's
famous history. As a matter of fact, Edison was
named after Capt. Alva Bradley, an old friend of his
father, and a celebrated ship-owner on the Lakes.
Captain Bradley died a few years ago in wealth, while
his old associate, with equal ability for making money,
was never able long to keep it (differing again from
the Revolutionary New York banker from whom his
son's other name, "Thomas," was taken).

CHAPTER III

BOYHOOD AT PORT HURON, MICHIGAN

THE new home found by the Edison family at
Port Huron, where Alva spent his brief boyhood
before he became a telegraph operator and roamed
the whole middle West of that period, was unfortunately
destroyed by fire just after the close of the
Civil War. A smaller but perhaps more comfortable
home was then built by Edison's father on some
property he had bought at the near-by village of
Gratiot, and there his mother spent the remainder
of her life in confirmed invalidism, dying in 1871.
Hence the pictures and postal cards sold largely to
souvenir-hunters as the Port Huron home do not
actually show that in or around which the events
now referred to took place.

It has been a romance of popular biographers, based
upon the fact that Edison began his career as a
newsboy, to assume that these earlier years were
spent in poverty and privation, as indeed they usually
are by the "newsies" who swarm and shout their
papers in our large cities. While it seems a pity to
destroy this erroneous idea, suggestive of a heroic
climb from the depths to the heights, nothing could
be further from the truth. Socially the Edison family
stood high in Port Huron at a time when there
was relatively more wealth and general activity than
to-day. The town in its pristine prime was a great
lumber centre, and hummed with the industry of
numerous sawmills. An incredible quantity of lumber
was made there yearly until the forests near-by
vanished and the industry with them. The wealth
of the community, invested largely in this business
and in allied transportation companies, was accumulated
rapidly and as freely spent during those days
of prosperity in St. Clair County, bringing with it a
high standard of domestic comfort. In all this the
Edisons shared on equal terms.

Thus, contrary to the stories that have been so
widely published, the Edisons, while not rich by any
means, were in comfortable circumstances, with a
well-stocked farm and large orchard to draw upon
also for sustenance. Samuel Edison, on moving to
Port Huron, became a dealer in grain and feed, and
gave attention to that business for many years. But
he was also active in the lumber industry in the
Saginaw district and several other things. It was
difficult for a man of such mercurial, restless
temperament to stay constant to any one occupation;
in fact, had he been less visionary he would have
been more prosperous, but might not have had a son
so gifted with insight and imagination. One instance
of the optimistic vagaries which led him incessantly
to spend time and money on projects that would not
have appealed to a man less sanguine was the
construction on his property of a wooden observation
tower over a hundred feet high, the top of which was
reached toilsomely by winding stairs, after the pay-

ment of twenty-five cents. It is true that the tower
commanded a pretty view by land and water, but
Colonel Sellers himself might have projected this
enterprise as a possible source of steady income. At
first few visitors panted up the long flights of steps
to the breezy platform. During the first two months
Edison's father took in three dollars, and felt extremely
blue over the prospect, and to young Edison and his
relatives were left the lonely pleasures of the lookout
and the enjoyment of the telescope with which it
was equipped. But one fine day there came an excursion
from an inland town to see the lake. They
picnicked in the grove, and six hundred of them went
up the tower. After that the railroad company began
to advertise these excursions, and the receipts
each year paid for the observatory.

It might be thought that, immersed in business
and preoccupied with schemes of this character, Mr.
Edison was to blame for the neglect of his son's
education. But that was not the case. The conditions
were peculiar. It was at the Port Huron public
school that Edison received all the regular scholastic
instruction he ever enjoyed--just three months.
He might have spent the full term there, but, as
already noted, his teacher had found him "addled."
He was always, according to his own recollection,
at the foot of the class, and had come almost to regard
himself as a dunce, while his father entertained
vague anxieties as to his stupidity. The truth of the
matter seems to be that Mrs. Edison, a teacher of uncommon
ability and force, held no very high opinion
of the average public-school methods and results, and
was both eager to undertake the instruction of her
son and ambitious for the future of a boy whom she
knew from pedagogic experience to be receptive and
thoughtful to a very unusual degree. With her he
found study easy and pleasant. The quality of culture
in that simple but refined home, as well as the
intellectual character of this youth without schooling,
may be inferred from the fact that before he
had reached the age of twelve he had read, with his
mother's help, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, Hume's History of England, Sears' History of
the World, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and the
Dictionary of Sciences; and had even attempted to
struggle through Newton's Principia, whose mathematics
were decidedly beyond both teacher and
student. Besides, Edison, like Faraday, was never
a mathematician, and has had little personal use for
arithmetic beyond that which is called "mental."
He said once to a friend: "I can always hire some
mathematicians, but they can't hire me." His father,
by-the-way, always encouraged these literary tastes,
and paid him a small sum for each new book mastered.
It will be noted that fiction makes no showing
in the list; but it was not altogether excluded
from the home library, and Edison has all his life
enjoyed it, particularly the works of such writers as
Victor Hugo, after whom, because of his enthusiastic
admiration--possibly also because of his imagination--he
was nicknamed by his fellow-operators,
"Victor Hugo Edison."

Electricity at that moment could have no allure
for a youthful mind. Crude telegraphy represented
what was known of it practically, and about that the
books read by young Edison were not redundantly
informational. Even had that not been so, the
inclinations of the boy barely ten years old were
toward chemistry, and fifty years later there is seen
no change of predilection. It sounds like heresy to
say that Edison became an electrician by chance,
but it is the sober fact that to this pre-eminent and
brilliant leader in electrical achievement escape into
the chemical domain still has the aspect of a delightful
truant holiday. One of the earliest stories about
his boyhood relates to the incident when he induced
a lad employed in the family to swallow a large
quantity of Seidlitz powders in the belief that the
gases generated would enable him to fly. The agonies
of the victim attracted attention, and Edison's
mother marked her displeasure by an application of
the switch kept behind the old Seth Thomas "grandfather
clock." The disastrous result of this experiment
did not discourage Edison at all, as he attributed
failure to the lad rather than to the motive
power. In the cellar of the Edison homestead young
Alva soon accumulated a chemical outfit, constituting
the first in a long series of laboratories. The word
"laboratory" had always been associated with
alchemists in the past, but as with "filament" this
untutored stripling applied an iconoclastic practicability
to it long before he realized the significance of
the new departure. Goethe, in his legend of Faust,
shows the traditional or conventional philosopher in
his laboratory, an aged, tottering, gray-bearded
investigator, who only becomes youthful upon dia-
bolical intervention, and would stay senile without
it. In the Edison laboratory no such weird transformation
has been necessary, for the philosopher had
youth, fiery energy, and a grimly practical determination
that would submit to no denial of the goal
of something of real benefit to mankind. Edison and
Faust are indeed the extremes of philosophic thought
and accomplishment.

The home at Port Huron thus saw the first Edison
laboratory. The boy began experimenting when he
was about ten or eleven years of age. He got a copy
of Parker's School Philosophy, an elementary book on
physics, and about every experiment in it he tried.
Young Alva, or "Al," as he was called, thus early
displayed his great passion for chemistry, and in the
cellar of the house he collected no fewer than two
hundred bottles, gleaned in baskets from all parts of
the town. These were arranged carefully on shelves
and all labelled "Poison," so that no one else would
handle or disturb them. They contained the chemicals
with which he was constantly experimenting.
To others this diversion was both mysterious and
meaningless, but he had soon become familiar with
all the chemicals obtainable at the local drug stores,
and had tested to his satisfaction many of the statements
encountered in his scientific reading. Edison
has said that sometimes he has wondered how it was
he did not become an analytical chemist instead of
concentrating on electricity, for which he had at first
no great inclination.

Deprived of the use of a large part of her cellar,
tiring of the "mess" always to be found there, and
somewhat fearful of results, his mother once told the
boy to clear everything out and restore order. The
thought of losing all his possessions was the cause
of so much ardent distress that his mother relented,
but insisted that he must get a lock and key, and
keep the embryonic laboratory closed up all the time
except when he was there. This was done. From
such work came an early familiarity with the nature
of electrical batteries and the production of current
from them. Apparently the greater part of his spare
time was spent in the cellar, for he did not share to
any extent in the sports of the boys of the
neighborhood, his chum and chief companion, Michael
Oates, being a lad of Dutch origin, many years older,
who did chores around the house, and who could be
recruited as a general utility Friday for the experiments
of this young explorer--such as that with the
Seidlitz powders.

Such pursuits as these consumed the scant pocket-
money of the boy very rapidly. He was not in regular
attendance at school, and had read all the books
within reach. It was thus he turned newsboy, overcoming
the reluctance of his parents, particularly
that of his mother, by pointing out that he could by
this means earn all he wanted for his experiments
and get fresh reading in the shape of papers and
magazines free of charge. Besides, his leisure hours
in Detroit he would be able to spend at the public
library. He applied (in 1859) for the privilege of
selling newspapers on the trains of the Grand Trunk
Railroad, between Port Huron and Detroit, and obtained
the concession after a short delay, during
which he made an essay in his task of selling newspapers.

Edison had, as a fact, already had some commercial
experience from the age of eleven. The ten acres of
the reservation offered an excellent opportunity for
truck-farming, and the versatile head of the family
could not avoid trying his luck in this branch of
work. A large "market garden" was laid out, in
which Edison worked pretty steadily with the help of
the Dutch boy, Michael Oates--he of the flying
experiment. These boys had a horse and small wagon
intrusted to them, and every morning in the season
they would load up with onions, lettuce, peas, etc.,
and go through the town.

As much as $600 was turned over to Mrs. Edison
in one year from this source. The boy was indefatigable
but not altogether charmed with agriculture.
"After a while I tired of this work, as hoeing
corn in a hot sun is unattractive, and I did not
wonder that it had built up cities. Soon the Grand
Trunk Railroad was extended from Toronto to Port
Huron, at the foot of Lake Huron, and thence to
Detroit, at about the same time the War of the
Rebellion broke out. By a great amount of persistence
I got permission from my mother to go on the
local train as a newsboy. The local train from Port
Huron to Detroit, a distance of sixty-three miles,
left at 7 A.M. and arrived again at 9.30 P.M. After
being on the train for several months, I started two
stores in Port Huron--one for periodicals, and the
other for vegetables, butter, and berries in the season.
These were attended by two boys who shared in the
profits. The periodical store I soon closed, as the
boy in charge could not be trusted. The vegetable
store I kept up for nearly a year. After the railroad
had been opened a short time, they put on an express
which left Detroit in the morning and returned in
the evening. I received permission to put a newsboy
on this train. Connected with this train was
a car, one part for baggage and the other part for
U. S. mail, but for a long time it was not used. Every
morning I had two large baskets of vegetables from
the Detroit market loaded in the mail-car and sent
to Port Huron, where the boy would take them to
the store. They were much better than those grown
locally, and sold readily. I never was asked to pay
freight, and to this day cannot explain why, except
that I was so small and industrious, and the nerve to
appropriate a U. S. mail-car to do a free freight business
was so monumental. However, I kept this up
for a long time, and in addition bought butter from
the farmers along the line, and an immense amount
of blackberries in the season. I bought wholesale
and at a low price, and permitted the wives of the
engineers and trainmen to have the benefit of the
discount. After a while there was a daily immigrant
train put on. This train generally had from seven
to ten coaches filled always with Norwegians, all
bound for Iowa and Minnesota. On these trains I
employed a boy who sold bread, tobacco, and stick
candy. As the war progressed the daily newspaper
sales became very profitable, and I gave up the vegetable
store."

The hours of this occupation were long, but the
work was not particularly heavy, and Edison soon
found opportunity for his favorite avocation--chemical
experimentation. His train left Port Huron at
7 A.M., and made its southward trip to Detroit in
about three hours. This gave a stay in that city
from 10 A.M. until the late afternoon, when the train
left, arriving at Port Huron about 9.30 P.M. The
train was made up of three coaches--baggage, smoking,
and ordinary passenger or "ladies." The baggage-car
was divided into three compartments--one
for trunks and packages, one for the mail, and one for
smoking. In those days no use was made of the
smoking-compartment, as there was no ventilation,
and it was turned over to young Edison, who not only
kept papers there and his stock of goods as a "candy
butcher," but soon had it equipped with an extraordinary
variety of apparatus. There was plenty of
leisure on the two daily runs, even for an industrious
boy, and thus he found time to transfer his laboratory
from the cellar and re-establish it on the train.

His earnings were also excellent--so good, in fact,
that eight or ten dollars a day were often taken in,
and one dollar went every day to his mother. Thus
supporting himself, he felt entitled to spend any other
profit left over on chemicals and apparatus. And
spent it was, for with access to Detroit and its large
stores, where he bought his supplies, and to the public
library, where he could quench his thirst for technical
information, Edison gave up all his spare time
and money to chemistry. Surely the country could
have presented at that moment no more striking example
of the passionate pursuit of knowledge under
difficulties than this newsboy, barely fourteen years
of age, with his jars and test-tubes installed on a
railway baggage-car.

Nor did this amazing equipment stop at batteries
and bottles. The same little space a few feet square
was soon converted by this precocious youth into a
newspaper office. The outbreak of the Civil War
gave a great stimulus to the demand for all newspapers,
noticing which he became ambitious to publish
a local journal of his own, devoted to the news
of that section of the Grand Trunk road. A small
printing-press that had been used for hotel bills of
fare was picked up in Detroit, and type was also
bought, some of it being placed on the train so that
composition could go on in spells of leisure. To one
so mechanical in his tastes as Edison, it was quite
easy to learn the rudiments of the printing art, and
thus the Weekly Herald came into existence, of which
he was compositor, pressman, editor, publisher, and
newsdealer. Only one or two copies of this journal
are now discoverable, but its appearance can be
judged from the reduced facsimile here shown. The
thing was indeed well done as the work of a youth
shown by the date to be less than fifteen years old.
The literary style is good, there are only a few trivial
slips in spelling, and the appreciation is keen of what
would be interesting news and gossip. The price was
three cents a copy, or eight cents a month for regular
subscribers, and the circulation ran up to over
four hundred copies an issue. This was by no means
the result of mere public curiosity, but attested the
value of the sheet as a genuine newspaper, to which
many persons in the railroad service along the line
were willing contributors. Indeed, with the aid of
the railway telegraph, Edison was often able to print
late news of importance, of local origin, that the distant
regular papers like those of Detroit, which he
handled as a newsboy, could not get. It is no wonder
that this clever little sheet received the approval
and patronage of the English engineer Stephenson
when inspecting the Grand Trunk system, and was
noted by no less distinguished a contemporary than
the London Times as the first newspaper in the world
to be printed on a train in motion. The youthful
proprietor sometimes cleared as much as twenty to
thirty dollars a month from this unique journalistic
enterprise.

But all this extra work required attention, and
Edison solved the difficulty of attending also to the
newsboy business by the employment of a young
friend, whom he trained and treated liberally as an
understudy. There was often plenty of work for
both in the early days of the war, when the news of
battle caused intense excitement and large sales of
papers. Edison, with native shrewdness already so
strikingly displayed, would telegraph the station
agents and get them to bulletin the event of the day
at the front, so that when each station was reached
there were eager purchasers waiting. He recalls in
particular the sensation caused by the great battle
of Shiloh, or Pittsburg Landing, in April, 1862, in
which both Grant and Sherman were engaged, in
which Johnston died, and in which there was a ghastly
total of 25,000 killed and wounded.

In describing his enterprising action that day, Edison
says that when he reached Detroit the bulletin-
boards of the newspaper offices were surrounded with
dense crowds, which read awestricken the news that
there were 60,000 killed and wounded, and that the
result was uncertain. "I knew that if the same
excitement was attained at the various small towns
along the road, and especially at Port Huron, the sale
of papers would be great. I then conceived the idea
of telegraphing the news ahead, went to the operator
in the depot, and by giving him Harper's Weekly and
some other papers for three months, he agreed to
telegraph to all the stations the matter on the bulletin-board.
I hurriedly copied it, and he sent it, requesting
the agents to display it on the blackboards
used for stating the arrival and departure of trains. I
decided that instead of the usual one hundred papers
I could sell one thousand; but not having sufficient
money to purchase that number, I determined in my
desperation to see the editor himself and get credit.
The great paper at that time was the Detroit Free
Press. I walked into the office marked "Editorial"
and told a young man that I wanted to see the editor
on important business--important to me, anyway,
I was taken into an office where there were two men,
and I stated what I had done about telegraphing,
and that I wanted a thousand papers, but only had
money for three hundred, and I wanted credit. One
of the men refused it, but the other told the first
spokesman to let me have them. This man, I afterward
learned, was Wilbur F. Storey, who subsequently
founded the Chicago Times, and became celebrated in
the newspaper world. By the aid of another boy I
lugged the papers to the train and started folding
them. The first station, called Utica, was a small
one where I generally sold two papers. I saw a
crowd ahead on the platform, and thought it some
excursion, but the moment I landed there was a rush
for me; then I realized that the telegraph was a great
invention. I sold thirty-five papers there. The next
station was Mount Clemens, now a watering-place,
but then a town of about one thousand. I usually
sold six to eight papers there. I decided that if I
found a corresponding crowd there, the only thing
to do to correct my lack of judgment in not getting
more papers was to raise the price from five cents to
ten. The crowd was there, and I raised the price. At
the various towns there were corresponding crowds.
It had been my practice at Port Huron to jump from
the train at a point about one-fourth of a mile from
the station, where the train generally slackened
speed. I had drawn several loads of sand to this
point to jump on, and had become quite expert. The
little Dutch boy with the horse met me at this point.
When the wagon approached the outskirts of the
town I was met by a large crowd. I then yelled:
`Twenty-five cents apiece, gentlemen! I haven't
enough to go around!' I sold all out, and made what
to me then was an immense sum of money."

Such episodes as this added materially to his income,
but did not necessarily increase his savings,
for he was then, as now, an utter spendthrift so long
as some new apparatus or supplies for experiment
could be had. In fact, the laboratory on wheels soon
became crowded with such equipment, most costly
chemicals were bought on the instalment plan, and
Fresenius' Qualitative Analysis served as a basis for
ceaseless testing and study. George Pullman, who
then had a small shop at Detroit and was working
on his sleeping-car, made Edison a lot of wooden
apparatus for his chemicals, to the boy's delight.
Unfortunately a sudden change came, fraught with
disaster. The train, running one day at thirty miles
an hour over a piece of poorly laid track, was thrown
suddenly out of the perpendicular with a violent
lurch, and, before Edison could catch it, a stick of
phosphorus was jarred from its shelf, fell to the
floor, and burst into flame. The car took fire, and
the boy, in dismay, was still trying to quench the
blaze when the conductor, a quick-tempered Scotchman,
who acted also as baggage-master, hastened to
the scene with water and saved his car. On the arrival
at Mount Clemens station, its next stop, Edison
and his entire outfit, laboratory, printing-plant, and
all, were promptly ejected by the enraged conductor,
and the train then moved off, leaving him on the platform,
tearful and indignant in the midst of his beloved
but ruined possessions. It was lynch law of a
kind; but in view of the responsibility, this action of
the conductor lay well within his rights and duties.

It was through this incident that Edison acquired
the deafness that has persisted all through his life,
a severe box on the ears from the scorched and angry
conductor being the direct cause of the infirmity.
Although this deafness would be regarded as a great
affliction by most people, and has brought in its train
other serious baubles, Mr. Edison has always regarded
it philosophically, and said about it recently:
"This deafness has been of great advantage to me
in various ways. When in a telegraph office, I could
only hear the instrument directly on the table at
which I sat, and unlike the other operators, I was not
bothered by the other instruments. Again, in
experimenting on the telephone, I had to improve the
transmitter so I could hear it. This made the telephone
commercial, as the magneto telephone receiver
of Bell was too weak to be used as a transmitter
commercially. It was the same with the phonograph.
The great defect of that instrument was the
rendering of the overtones in music, and the hissing
consonants in speech. I worked over one year,
twenty hours a day' Sundays and all, to get the word
`specie ' perfectly recorded and reproduced on the
phonograph. When this was done I knew that
everything else could be done which was a fact.
Again, my nerves have been preserved intact. Broadway
is as quiet to me as a country village is to a
person with normal hearing."

Saddened but not wholly discouraged, Edison soon
reconstituted his laboratory and printing-office at
home, although on the part of the family there was
some fear and objection after this episode, on the score
of fire. But Edison promised not to bring in anything
of a dangerous nature. He did not cease the
publication of the Weekly Herald. On the contrary,
he prospered in both his enterprises until persuaded
by the "printer's devil" in the office of the
Port Huron Commercial to change the character of
his journal, enlarge it, and issue it under the name
of Paul Pry, a happy designation for this or kindred
ventures in the domain of society journalism. No
copies of Paul Pry can now be found, but it is
known that its style was distinctly personal, that
gossip was its specialty, and that no small offence
was given to the people whose peculiarities or peccadilloes
were discussed in a frank and breezy style by
the two boys. In one instance the resentment of
the victim of such unsought publicity was so intense
he laid hands on Edison and pitched the startled
young editor into the St. Clair River. The name of
this violator of the freedom of the press was thereafter
excluded studiously from the columns of Paul
Pry, and the incident may have been one of those
which soon caused the abandonment of the paper.
Edison had great zest in this work, and but for the
strong influences in other directions would probably
have continued in the newspaper field, in which he
was, beyond question, the youngest publisher and
editor of the day.

Before leaving this period of his career, it is to be
noted that it gave Edison many favorable opportunities.
In Detroit he could spend frequent hours
in the public library, and it is matter of record that
he began his liberal acquaintance with its contents
by grappling bravely with a certain section and trying
to read it through consecutively, shelf by shelf,
regardless of subject. In a way this is curiously
suggestive of the earnest, energetic method of "frontal
attack" with which the inventor has since addressed
himself to so many problems in the arts and sciences.

The Grand Trunk Railroad machine-shops at Port
Huron were a great attraction to the boy, who appears
to have spent a good deal of his time there. He who
was to have much to do with the evolution of the
modern electric locomotive was fascinated by the
mechanism of the steam locomotive; and whenever
he could get the chance Edison rode in the cab with
the engineer of his train. He became thoroughly
familiar with the intricacies of fire-box, boiler, valves,
levers, and gears, and liked nothing better than to
handle the locomotive himself during the run. On
one trip, when the engineer lay asleep while his eager
substitute piloted the train, the boiler "primed,"
and a deluge overwhelmed the young driver, who
stuck to his post till the run and the ordeal were
ended. Possibly this helped to spoil a locomotive
engineer, but went to make a great master of the new
motive power. "Steam is half an Englishman," said
Emerson. The temptation is strong to say that workaday
electricity is half an American. Edison's own
account of the incident is very laughable: "The engine
was one of a number leased to the Grand Trunk by
the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy. It had bright brass
bands all over, the woodwork beautifully painted,
and everything highly polished, which was the custom
up to the time old Commodore Vanderbilt
stopped it on his roads. After running about fifteen
miles the fireman couldn't keep his eyes open (this
event followed an all-night dance of the trainmen's
fraternal organization), and he agreed to permit me
to run the engine. I took charge, reducing the speed
to about twelve miles an hour, and brought the
train of seven cars to her destination at the Grand
Trunk junction safely. But something occurred which
was very much out of the ordinary. I was very much
worried about the water, and I knew that if it got
low the boiler was likely to explode. I hadn't gone
twenty miles before black damp mud blew out of the
stack and covered every part of the engine, including
myself. I was about to awaken the fireman to find
out the cause of this when it stopped. Then I approached
a station where the fireman always went out
to the cowcatcher, opened the oil-cup on the steam-
chest, and poured oil in. I started to carry out the
procedure when, upon opening the oil-cup, the steam
rushed out with a tremendous noise, nearly knocking
me off the engine. I succeeded in closing the oil-cup
and got back in the cab, and made up my mind that
she would pull through without oil. I learned afterward
that the engineer always shut off steam when
the fireman went out to oil. This point I failed to
notice. My powers of observation were very much improved
after this occurrence. Just before I reached
the junction another outpour of black mud occurred,
and the whole engine was a sight--so much so that
when I pulled into the yard everybody turned to see
it, laughing immoderately. I found the reason of the
mud was that I carried so much water it passed over
into the stack, and this washed out all the accumulated
soot."

One afternoon about a week before Christmas Edison's
train jumped the track near Utica, a station
on the line. Four old Michigan Central cars with
rotten sills collapsed in the ditch and went all to
pieces, distributing figs, raisins, dates, and candies
all over the track and the vicinity. Hating to see so
much waste, Edison tried to save all he could by eating
it on the spot, but as a result "our family doctor had
the time of his life with me in this connection."

An absurd incident described by Edison throws a
vivid light on the free-and-easy condition of early railroad
travel and on the Southern extravagance of the
time. "In 1860, just before the war broke out there
came to the train one afternoon, in Detroit, two fine-
looking young men accompanied by a colored servant.
They bought tickets for Port Huron, the terminal point
for the train. After leaving the junction just outside
of Detroit, I brought in the evening papers. When I
came opposite the two young men, one of them said:
`Boy, what have you got?' I said: `Papers.' `All
right.' He took them and threw them out of the
window, and, turning to the colored man, said:
`Nicodemus, pay this boy.' I told Nicodemus the
amount, and he opened a satchel and paid me. The
passengers didn't know what to make of the transaction.
I returned with the illustrated papers and
magazines. These were seized and thrown out of
the window, and I was told to get my money of
Nicodemus. I then returned with all the old magazines
and novels I had not been able to sell, thinking
perhaps this would be too much for them. I was
small and thin, and the layer reached above my head,
and was all I could possibly carry. I had prepared a
list, and knew the amount in case they bit again.
When I opened the door, all the passengers roared
with laughter. I walked right up to the young men.
One asked me what I had. I said `Magazines and
novels.' He promptly threw them out of the window,
and Nicodemus settled. Then I came in with
cracked hickory nuts, then pop-corn balls, and, finally,
molasses candy. All went out of the window. I felt
like Alexander the Great!--I had no more chance! I
had sold all I had. Finally I put a rope to my trunk,
which was about the size of a carpenter's chest, and
started to pull this from the baggage-car to the
passenger-car. It was almost too much for my
strength, but at last I got it in front of those men.
I pulled off my coat, shoes, and hat, and laid them
on the chest. Then he asked: `What have you got,
boy?' I said: `Everything, sir, that I can spare that is
for sale.' The passengers fairly jumped with laughter.
Nicodemus paid me $27 for this last sale, and threw
the whole out of the door in the rear of the car. These
men were from the South, and I have always retained
a soft spot in my heart for a Southern gentleman."

While Edison was a newsboy on the train a request
came to him one day to go to the office of E. B. Ward
& Company, at that time the largest owners of steamboats
on the Great Lakes. The captain of their largest
boat had died suddenly, and they wanted a message
taken to another captain who lived about fourteen
miles from Ridgeway station on the railroad. This
captain had retired, taken up some lumber land, and
had cleared part of it. Edison was offered $15 by
Mr. Ward to go and fetch him, but as it was a wild
country and would be dark, Edison stood out for
$25, so that he could get the companionship of another
lad. The terms were agreed to. Edison arrived
at Ridgeway at 8.30 P.M., when it was raining and as
dark as ink. Getting another boy with difficulty to
volunteer, he launched out on his errand in the pitch-
black night. The two boys carried lanterns, but the
road was a rough path through dense forest. The
country was wild, and it was a usual occurrence to
see deer, bear, and coon skins nailed up on the sides
of houses to dry. Edison had read about bears, but
couldn't remember whether they were day or night
prowlers. The farther they went the more apprehensive
they became, and every stump in the ravished
forest looked like a bear. The other lad proposed
seeking safety up a tree, but Edison demurred on
the plea that bears could climb, and that the message
must be delivered that night to enable the captain to
catch the morning train. First one lantern went
out, then the other. "We leaned up against a tree
and cried. I thought if I ever got out of that scrape
alive I would know more about the habits of animals
and everything else, and be prepared for all kinds of
mischance when I undertook an enterprise. However,
the intense darkness dilated the pupils of our
eyes so as to make them very sensitive, and we could
just see at times the outlines of the road. Finally,
just as a faint gleam of daylight arrived, we entered
the captain's yard and delivered the message. In
my whole life I never spent such a night of horror
as this, but I got a good lesson."

An amusing incident of this period is told by Edison.
"When I was a boy," he says, "the Prince of Wales,
the late King Edward, came to Canada (1860). Great
preparations were made at Sarnia, the Canadian town
opposite Port Huron. About every boy, including myself,
went over to see the affair. The town was draped
in flags most profusely, and carpets were laid on the
cross-walks for the prince to walk on. There were
arches, etc. A stand was built raised above the general
level, where the prince was to be received by the
mayor. Seeing all these preparations, my idea of
a prince was very high; but when he did arrive I
mistook the Duke of Newcastle for him, the duke
being a fine-looking man. I soon saw that I was mistaken:
that the prince was a young stripling, and did
not meet expectations. Several of us expressed our
belief that a prince wasn't much, after all, and said
that we were thoroughly disappointed. For this one
boy was whipped. Soon the Canuck boys attacked
the Yankee boys, and we were all badly licked. I,
myself, got a black eye. That has always prejudiced
me against that kind of ceremonial and folly." It is
certainly interesting to note that in later years the
prince for whom Edison endured the ignominy of a
black eye made generous compensation in a graceful
letter accompanying the gold Albert Medal awarded
by the Royal Society of Arts.

Another incident of the period is as follows: "After
selling papers in Port Huron, which was often not
reached until about 9.30 at night, I seldom got home
before 11.00 or 11.30. About half-way home from the
station and the town, and within twenty-five feet of
the road in a dense wood, was a soldiers' graveyard
where three hundred soldiers were buried, due to a
cholera epidemic which took place at Fort Gratiot,
near by, many years previously. At first we used
to shut our eyes and run the horse past this graveyard,
and if the horse stepped on a twig my heart
would give a violent movement, and it is a wonder
that I haven't some valvular disease of that organ.
But soon this running of the horse became monotonous,
and after a while all fears of graveyards absolutely
disappeared from my system. I was in the
condition of Sam Houston, the pioneer and founder
of Texas, who, it was said, knew no fear. Houston
lived some distance from the town and generally went
home late at night, having to pass through a dark
cypress swamp over a corduroy road. One night, to
test his alleged fearlessness, a man stationed himself
behind a tree and enveloped himself in a sheet. He
confronted Houston suddenly, and Sam stopped and
said: `If you are a man, you can't hurt me. If you
are a ghost, you don't want to hurt me. And if you are
the devil, come home with me; I married your sister!' "

It is not to be inferred, however, from some of
the preceding statements that the boy was of an
exclusively studious bent of mind. He had then, as
now, the keen enjoyment of a joke, and no particular
aversion to the practical form. An incident of the
time is in point. "After the breaking out of the war
there was a regiment of volunteer soldiers quartered at
Fort Gratiot, the reservation extending to the boundary
line of our house. Nearly every night we would
hear a call, such as `Corporal of the Guard, No. 1.'
This would be repeated from sentry to sentry until
it reached the barracks, when Corporal of the Guard,
No. 1, would come and see what was wanted. I and
the little Dutch boy, after returning from the town
after selling our papers, thought we would take a
hand at military affairs. So one night, when it was
very dark, I shouted for Corporal of the Guard, No. 1.
The second sentry, thinking it was the terminal
sentry who shouted, repeated it to the third, and so
on. This brought the corporal along the half mile,
only to find that he was fooled. We tried him three
nights; but the third night they were watching, and
caught the little Dutch boy, took him to the lock-up
at the fort, and shut him up. They chased me to
the house. I rushed for the cellar. In one small
apartment there were two barrels of potatoes and a
third one nearly empty. I poured these remnants
into the other barrels, sat down, and pulled the barrel
over my head, bottom up. The soldiers had awakened
my father, and they were searching for me with
candles and lanterns. The corporal was absolutely
certain I came into the cellar, and couldn't see how I
could have gotten out, and wanted to know from
my father if there was no secret hiding-place. On
assurance of my father, who said that there was not,
he said it was most extraordinary. I was glad when
they left, as I was cramped, and the potatoes were
rotten that had been in the barrel and violently
offensive. The next morning I was found in bed,
and received a good switching on the legs from my
father, the first and only one I ever received from
him, although my mother kept a switch behind the
old Seth Thomas clock that had the bark worn off.
My mother's ideas and mine differed at times,
especially when I got experimenting and mussed up
things. The Dutch boy was released next morning."

CHAPTER IV

THE YOUNG TELEGRAPH OPERATOR

"WHILE a newsboy on the railroad," says Edison,
"I got very much interested in electricity,
probably from visiting telegraph offices with a chum
who had tastes similar to mine." It will also have
been noted that he used the telegraph to get items
for his little journal, and to bulletin his special news
of the Civil War along the line. The next step was
natural, and having with his knowledge of chemistry
no trouble about "setting up" his batteries, the
difficulties of securing apparatus were chiefly those
connected with the circuits and the instruments.
American youths to-day are given, if of a mechanical
turn of mind, to amateur telegraphy or telephony,
but seldom, if ever, have to make any part of the
system constructed. In Edison's boyish days it was
quite different, and telegraphic supplies were hard to
obtain. But he and his "chum" had a line between
their homes, built of common stove-pipe wire. The insulators
were bottles set on nails driven into trees and
short poles. The magnet wire was wound with rags for
insulation, and pieces of spring brass were used for
keys. With an idea of securing current cheaply,
Edison applied the little that he knew about static
electricity, and actually experimented with cats,
which he treated vigorously as frictional machines
until the animals fled in dismay, and Edison had
learned his first great lesson in the relative value of
sources of electrical energy. The line was made to
work, however, and additional to the messages that
the boys interchanged, Edison secured practice in an
ingenious manner. His father insisted on 11.30 as
proper bedtime, which left but a short interval after
the long day on the train. But each evening, when
the boy went home with a bundle of papers that had
not been sold in the town, his father would sit up
reading the "returnables." Edison, therefore, on
some excuse, left the papers with his friend, but
suggested that he could get the news from him by
telegraph, bit by bit. The scheme interested his
father, and was put into effect, the messages being
written down and handed over for perusal. This
yielded good practice nightly, lasting until 12 and 1
o'clock, and was maintained for some time until Mr.
Edison became willing that his son should stay up
for a reasonable time. The papers were then brought
home again, and the boys amused themselves to their
hearts' content until the line was pulled down by a
stray cow wandering through the orchard. Meantime
better instruments had been secured, and the
rudiments of telegraphy had been fairly mastered.

The mixed train on which Edison was employed as
newsboy did the way-freight work and shunting at
the Mount Clemens station, about half an hour being
usually spent in the work. One August morning, in
1862, while the shunting was in progress, and a laden
box-car had been pushed out of a siding, Edison, who
was loitering about the platform, saw the little son
of the station agent, Mr. J. U. Mackenzie, playing
with the gravel on the main track along which the
car without a brakeman was rapidly approaching.
Edison dropped his papers and his glazed cap, and
made a dash for the child, whom he picked up and
lifted to safety without a second to spare, as the wheel
of the car struck his heel; and both were cut about the
face and hands by the gravel ballast on which they
fell. The two boys were picked up by the train-hands
and carried to the platform, and the grateful father
at once offered to teach the rescuer, whom he knew
and liked, the art of train telegraphy and to make
an operator of him. It is needless to say that the
proposal was eagerly accepted.

Edison found time for his new studies by letting
one of his friends look after the newsboy work on the
train for part of the trip, reserving to himself the run
between Port Huron and Mount Clemens. That he
was already well qualified as a beginner is evident
from the fact that he had mastered the Morse code
of the telegraphic alphabet, and was able to take to
the station a neat little set of instruments he had
just finished with his own hands at a gun-shop in
Detroit. This was probably a unique achievement
in itself among railway operators of that day or of
later times. The drill of the student involved chiefly
the acquisition of the special signals employed in
railway work, including the numerals and abbreviations
applied to save time. Some of these have passed
into the slang of the day, "73" being well known as
a telegrapher's expression of compliments or good
wishes, while "23" is an accident or death message,
and has been given broader popular significance as
a general synonym for "hoodoo." All of this came
easily to Edison, who had, moreover, as his Herald
showed, an unusual familiarity with train movement
along that portion of the Grand Trunk road.

Three or four months were spent pleasantly and
profitably by the youth in this course of study, and
Edison took to it enthusiastically, giving it no less
than eighteen hours a day. He then put up a little
telegraph line from the station to the village, a distance
of about a mile, and opened an office in a drug
store; but the business was naturally very small.
The telegraph operator at Port Huron knowing of his
proficiency, and wanting to get into the United States
Military Telegraph Corps, where the pay in those days
of the Civil War was high, succeeded in convincing
his brother-in-law, Mr. M. Walker, that young Edison
could fill the position. Edison was, of course, well
acquainted with the operators along the road and at
the southern terminal, and took up his new duties
very easily. The office was located in a jewelry store,
where newspapers and periodicals were also sold.
Edison was to be found at the office both day and
night, sleeping there. "I became quite valuable to
Mr. Walker. After working all day I worked at the
office nights as well, for the reason that `press report'
came over one of the wires until 3 A.M., and I would
cut in and copy it as well as I could, to become more
rapidly proficient. The goal of the rural telegraph
operator was to be able to take press. Mr. Walker
tried to get my father to apprentice me at $20 per
month, but they could not agree. I then applied for
a job on the Grand Trunk Railroad as a railway
operator, and was given a place, nights, at Stratford
Junction, Canada." Apparently his friend Mackenzie
helped him in the matter. The position carried
a salary of $25 per month. No serious objections
were raised by his family, for the distance from Port
Huron was not great, and Stratford was near Bayfield,
the old home from which the Edisons had come,
so that there were doubtless friends or even relatives
in the vicinity. This was in 1863.

Mr. Walker was an observant man, who has since
that time installed a number of waterworks systems
and obtained several patents of his own. He describes
the boy of sixteen as engrossed intensely in
his experiments and scientific reading, and somewhat
indifferent, for this reason, to his duties as operator.
This office was not particularly busy, taking from
$50 to $75 a month, but even the messages taken
in would remain unsent on the hook while Edison
was in the cellar below trying to solve some chemical
problem. The manager would see him studying
sometimes an article in such a paper as the Scientific
American, and then disappearing to buy a few sundries
for experiments. Returning from the drug
store with his chemicals, he would not be seen again
until required by his duties, or until he had found out
for himself, if possible, in this offhand manner,
whether what he had read was correct or not. When
he had completed his experiment all interest in it
was lost, and the jars and wires would be left to any
fate that might befall them. In like manner Edison
would make free use of the watchmaker's tools that
lay on the little table in the front window, and would
take the wire pliers there without much thought as
to their value as distinguished from a lineman's
tools. The one idea was to do quickly what he
wanted to do; and the same swift, almost headlong
trial of anything that comes to hand, while the fervor
of a new experiment is felt, has been noted at all
stages of the inventor's career. One is reminded of
Palissy's recklessness, when in his efforts to make the
enamel melt on his pottery he used the very furniture
of his home for firewood.

Mr. Edison remarks the fact that there was very
little difference between the telegraph of that time
and of to-day, except the general use of the old Morse
register with the dots and dashes recorded by indenting
paper strips that could be read and checked
later at leisure if necessary. He says: "The telegraph
men couldn't explain how it worked, and I
was always trying to get them to do so. I think they
couldn't. I remember the best explanation I got
was from an old Scotch line repairer employed by the
Montreal Telegraph Company, which operated the
railroad wires. He said that if you had a dog like
a dachshund, long enough to reach from Edinburgh
to London, if you pulled his tail in Edinburgh he would
bark in London. I could understand that, but I
never could get it through me what went through the
dog or over the wire." To-day Mr. Edison is just as
unable to solve the inner mystery of electrical
transmission. Nor is he alone. At the banquet given to
celebrate his jubilee in 1896 as professor at Glasgow
University, Lord Kelvin, the greatest physicist of our
time, admitted with tears in his eyes and the note of
tragedy in his voice, that when it came to explaining
the nature of electricity, he knew just as little as
when he had begun as a student, and felt almost as
though his life had been wasted while he tried to
grapple with the great mystery of physics.

Another episode of this period is curious in its
revelation of the tenacity with which Edison has
always held to some of his oldest possessions with a
sense of personal attachment. "While working at
Stratford Junction," he says, "I was told by one of
the freight conductors that in the freight-house at
Goodrich there were several boxes of old broken-up
batteries. I went there and found over eighty cells
of the well-known Grove nitric-acid battery. The
operator there, who was also agent, when asked by
me if I could have the electrodes of each cell, made
of sheet platinum, gave his permission readily, thinking
they were of tin. I removed them all, amounting
to several ounces. Platinum even in those days
was very expensive, costing several dollars an ounce,
and I owned only three small strips. I was overjoyed
at this acquisition, and those very strips and
the reworked scrap are used to this day in my laboratory
over forty years later."

It was at Stratford that Edison's inventiveness was
first displayed. The hours of work of a night operator
are usually from 7 P.M. to 7 A.M., and to insure attention
while on duty it is often provided that the
operator every hour, from 9 P.M. until relieved by the
day operator, shall send in the signal "6" to the
train dispatcher's office. Edison revelled in the
opportunity for study and experiment given him by his
long hours of freedom in the daytime, but needed
sleep, just as any healthy youth does. Confronted
by the necessity of sending in this watchman's signal
as evidence that he was awake and on duty, he constructed
a small wheel with notches on the rim, and
attached it to the clock in such a manner that the
night-watchman could start it when the line was
quiet, and at each hour the wheel revolved and sent
in accurately the dots required for "sixing." The
invention was a success, the device being, indeed,
similar to that of the modern district messenger box;
but it was soon noticed that, in spite of the regularity
of the report, "Sf" could not be raised even if a train
message were sent immediately after. Detection and
a reprimand came in due course, but were not taken
very seriously.

A serious occurrence that might have resulted in
accident drove him soon after from Canada, although
the youth could hardly be held to blame for it.
Edison says: "This night job just suited me, as I
could have the whole day to myself. I had the faculty
of sleeping in a chair any time for a few minutes at
a time. I taught the night-yardman my call, so I
could get half an hour's sleep now and then between
trains, and in case the station was called the watchman
would awaken me. One night I got an order
to hold a freight train, and I replied that I would.
I rushed out to find the signalman, but before I could
find him and get the signal set, the train ran past.
I ran to the telegraph office, and reported that I could
not hold her. The reply was: `Hell!' The train dispatcher,
on the strength of my message that I would
hold the train, had permitted another to leave the
last station in the opposite direction. There was
a lower station near the junction where the day
operator slept. I started for it on foot. The night
was dark, and I fell into a culvert and was knocked
senseless." Owing to the vigilance of the two engineers
on the locomotives, who saw each other approaching
on the straight single track, nothing more
dreadful happened than a summons to the thoughtless
operator to appear before the general manager at
Toronto. On reaching the manager's office, his trial
for neglect of duty was fortunately interrupted by
the call of two Englishmen; and while their conversation
proceeded, Edison slipped quietly out of the
room, hurried to the Grand Trunk freight depot,
found a conductor he knew taking out a freight train
for Sarnia, and was not happy until the ferry-boat
from Sarnia had landed him once more on the Michigan
shore. The Grand Trunk still owes Mr. Edison
the wages due him at the time he thus withdrew
from its service, but the claim has never been pressed.

The same winter of 1863-64, while at Port Huron,
Edison had a further opportunity of displaying his
ingenuity. An ice-jam had broken the light telegraph
cable laid in the bed of the river across to
Sarnia, and thus communication was interrupted.
The river is three-quarters of a mile wide, and could
not be crossed on foot; nor could the cable be repaired.
Edison at once suggested using the steam whistle of
the locomotive, and by manipulating the valve con-
versed the short and long outbursts of shrill sound
into the Morse code. An operator on the Sarnia shore
was quick enough to catch the significance of the
strange whistling, and messages were thus sent in
wireless fashion across the ice-floes in the river. It
is said that such signals were also interchanged by
military telegraphers during the war, and possibly
Edison may have heard of the practice; but be that
as it may, he certainly showed ingenuity and resource
in applying such a method to meet the necessity.
It is interesting to note that at this point the Grand
Trunk now has its St. Clair tunnel, through which the
trains are hauled under the river-bed by electric
locomotives.

Edison had now begun unconsciously the roaming
and drifting that took him during the next five years
all over the Middle States, and that might well have
wrecked the career of any one less persistent and
industrious. It was a period of his life corresponding
to the Wanderjahre of the German artisan, and
was an easy way of gratifying a taste for travel
without the risk of privation. To-day there is little
temptation to the telegrapher to go to distant parts
of the country on the chance that he may secure a
livelihood at the key. The ranks are well filled everywhere,
and of late years the telegraph as an art or
industry has shown relatively slight expansion, owing
chiefly to the development of telephony. Hence, if vacancies
occur, there are plenty of operators available,
and salaries have remained so low as to lead to one or
two formidable and costly strikes that unfortunately
took no account of the economic conditions of demand
and supply. But in the days of the Civil War there
was a great dearth of skilful manipulators of the key.
About fifteen hundred of the best operators in the
country were at the front on the Federal side alone,
and several hundred more had enlisted. This created
a serious scarcity, and a nomadic operator going to any
telegraphic centre would be sure to find a place open
waiting for him. At the close of the war a majority
of those who had been with the two opposed armies
remained at the key under more peaceful surroundings,
but the rapid development of the commercial
and railroad systems fostered a new demand, and
then for a time it seemed almost impossible to train
new operators fast enough. In a few years, however,
the telephone sprang into vigorous existence,
dating from 1876, drawing off some of the most
adventurous spirits from the telegraph field; and the
deterrent influence of the telephone on the telegraph
had made itself felt by 1890. The expiration of the
leading Bell telephone patents, five years later,
accentuated even more sharply the check that had
been put on telegraphy, as hundreds and thousands
of "independent" telephone companies were then
organized, throwing a vast network of toll lines over
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and other States, and
affording cheap, instantaneous means of communication
without any necessity for the intervention of an
operator.

It will be seen that the times have changed radically
since Edison became a telegrapher, and that in
this respect a chapter of electrical history has been
definitely closed. There was a day when the art
offered a distinct career to all of its practitioners,
and young men of ambition and good family were
eager to begin even as messenger boys, and were
ready to undergo a severe ordeal of apprenticeship
with the belief that they could ultimately attain positions
of responsibility and profit. At the same time
operators have always been shrewd enough to regard
the telegraph as a stepping-stone to other careers
in life. A bright fellow entering the telegraph service
to-day finds the experience he may gain therein
valuable, but he soon realizes that there are not
enough good-paying official positions to "go around,"
so as to give each worthy man a chance after he has
mastered the essentials of the art. He feels, therefore,
that to remain at the key involves either stagnation
or deterioration, and that after, say, twenty-five years
of practice he will have lost ground as compared with
friends who started out in other occupations. The
craft of an operator, learned without much difficulty,
is very attractive to a youth, but a position at the
key is no place for a man of mature years. His services,
with rare exceptions, grow less valuable as he
advances in age and nervous strain breaks him down.
On the contrary, men engaged in other professions
find, as a rule, that they improve and advance with
experience, and that age brings larger rewards and
opportunities.

The list of well-known Americans who have been
graduates of the key is indeed an extraordinary one,
and there is no department of our national life in
which they have not distinguished themselves. The
contrast, in this respect, between them and their
European colleagues is highly significant. In Europe
the telegraph systems are all under government
management, the operators have strictly limited
spheres of promotion, and at the best the transition
from one kind of employment to another is not
made so easily as in the New World. But in the
United States we have seen Rufus Bullock become
Governor of Georgia, and Ezra Cornell Governor of
New York. Marshall Jewell was Postmaster-General
of President Grant's Cabinet, and Daniel Lamont was
Secretary of State in President Cleveland's. Gen.
T. T. Eckert, past-President of the Western Union
Telegraph Company, was Assistant Secretary of War
under President Lincoln; and Robert J. Wynne, afterward
a consul-general, served as Assistant Postmaster
General. A very large proportion of the presidents
and leading officials of the great railroad systems are
old telegraphers, including Messrs. W. C. Brown,
President of the New York Central Railroad, and
Marvin Hughitt, President of the Chicago & North
western Railroad. In industrial and financial life
there have been Theodore N. Vail, President of the
Bell telephone system; L. C. Weir, late President of
the Adams Express; A. B. Chandler, President of the
Postal Telegraph and Cable Company; Sir W. Van
Home, identified with Canadian development; Robert
C. Clowry, President of the Western Union Telegraph
Company; D. H. Bates, Manager of the Baltimore &
Ohio telegraph for Robert Garrett; and Andrew
Carnegie, the greatest ironmaster the world has ever
known, as well as its greatest philanthropist. In
journalism there have been leaders like Edward Rose-

water, founder of the Omaha Bee; W. J. Elverson, of
the Philadelphia Press; and Frank A. Munsey, publisher
of half a dozen big magazines. George Kennan
has achieved fame in literature, and Guy Carleton
and Harry de Souchet have been successful as dramatists.
These are but typical of hundreds of men
who could be named who have risen from work at the
key to become recognized leaders in differing spheres
of activity.

But roving has never been favorable to the formation
of steady habits. The young men who thus
floated about the country from one telegraph office
to another were often brilliant operators, noted for
speed in sending and receiving, but they were undisciplined,
were without the restraining influences of
home life, and were so highly paid for their work that
they could indulge freely in dissipation if inclined
that way. Subjected to nervous tension for hours
together at the key, many of them unfortunately
took to drink, and having ended one engagement in
a city by a debauch that closed the doors of the
office to them, would drift away to the nearest town,
and there securing work, would repeat the performance.
At one time, indeed, these men were so numerous
and so much in evidence as to constitute a type
that the public was disposed to accept as representative
of the telegraphic fraternity; but as the conditions
creating him ceased to exist, the "tramp
operator" also passed into history. It was, however,
among such characters that Edison was very largely
thrown in these early days of aimless drifting, to learn
something perhaps of their nonchalant philosophy of
life, sharing bed and board with them under all kinds
of adverse conditions, but always maintaining a stoic
abstemiousness, and never feeling other than a keen
regret at the waste of so much genuine ability and
kindliness on the part of those knights errant of the
key whose inevitable fate might so easily have been
his own.

Such a class or group of men can always be presented
by an individual type, and this is assuredly
best embodied in Milton F. Adams, one of Edison's
earliest and closest friends, to whom reference will
be made in later chapters, and whose life has been
so full of adventurous episodes that he might well be
regarded as the modern Gil Blas. That career is
certainly well worth the telling as "another story,"
to use the Kipling phrase. Of him Edison says:
"Adams was one of a class of operators never satisfied
to work at any place for any great length of
time. He had the `wanderlust.' After enjoying hospitality
in Boston in 1868-69, on the floor of my hall-
bedroom, which was a paradise for the entomologist,
while the boarding-house itself was run on the banting
system of flesh reduction, he came to me one day
and said: `Good-bye, Edison; I have got sixty cents,
and I am going to San Francisco.' And he did go.
How, I never knew personally. I learned afterward
that he got a job there, and then within a week they
had a telegraphers' strike. He got a big torch and
sold patent medicine on the streets at night to support
the strikers. Then he went to Peru as partner
of a man who had a grizzly bear which they proposed
entering against a bull in the bull-ring in that city.
The grizzly was killed in five minutes, and so the
scheme died. Then Adams crossed the Andes, and
started a market-report bureau in Buenos Ayres.
This didn't pay, so he started a restaurant in Pernambuco,
Brazil. There he did very well, but something
went wrong (as it always does to a nomad), so
he went to the Transvaal, and ran a panorama called
`Paradise Lost' in the Kaffir kraals. This didn't
pay, and he became the editor of a newspaper; then
went to England to raise money for a railroad in Cape
Colony. Next I heard of him in New York, having
just arrived from Bogota, United States of Colombia,
with a power of attorney and $2000 from a native
of that republic, who had applied for a patent for
tightening a belt to prevent it from slipping on a
pulley--a device which he thought a new and great
invention, but which was in use ever since machinery
was invented. I gave Adams, then, a position as salesman
for electrical apparatus. This he soon got tired
of, and I lost sight of him." Adams, in speaking of
this episode, says that when he asked for transportation
expenses to St. Louis, Edison pulled out of his
pocket a ferry ticket to Hoboken, and said to his
associates: "I'll give him that, and he'll get there
all right." This was in the early days of electric
lighting; but down to the present moment the peregrinations
of this versatile genius of the key have
never ceased in one hemisphere or the other, so that
as Mr. Adams himself remarked to the authors in
April, 1908: "The life has been somewhat variegated,
but never dull."

The fact remains also that throughout this period
Edison, while himself a very Ishmael, never ceased
to study, explore, experiment. Referring to this beginning
of his career, he mentions a curious fact that
throws light on his ceaseless application. "After I
became a telegraph operator," he says, "I practiced
for a long time to become a rapid reader of print, and
got so expert I could sense the meaning of a whole
line at once. This faculty, I believe, should be taught
in schools, as it appears to be easily acquired. Then
one can read two or three books in a day, whereas if
each word at a time only is sensed, reading is laborious."

CHAPTER V

ARDUOUS YEARS IN THE CENTRAL WEST

IN 1903, when accepting the position of honorary
electrician to the International Exposition held in
St. Louis in 1904, to commemorate the centenary of
the Louisiana Purchase, Mr. Edison spoke in his
letter of the Central West as a "region where as a
young telegraph operator I spent many arduous years
before moving East." The term of probation thus
referred to did not end until 1868, and while it lasted
Edison's wanderings carried him from Detroit to New
Orleans, and took him, among other cities, to Indianapolis,
Cincinnati, Louisville, and Memphis, some of
which he visited twice in his peregrinations to secure
work. From Canada, after the episodes noted in the
last chapter, he went to Adrian, Michigan, and of
what happened there Edison tells a story typical of
his wanderings for several years to come. "After
leaving my first job at Stratford Junction, I got a
position as operator on the Lake Shore & Michigan
Southern at Adrian, Michigan, in the division superintendent's
office. As usual, I took the `night trick,'
which most operators disliked, but which I preferred,
as it gave me more leisure to experiment. I had obtained
from the station agent a small room, and had
established a little shop of my own. One day the day
operator wanted to get off, and I was on duty. About
9 o'clock the superintendent handed me a despatch
which he said was very important, and which I must
get off at once. The wire at the time was very busy,
and I asked if I should break in. I got orders to do
so, and acting under those orders of the superintendent,
I broke in and tried to send the despatch; but
the other operator would not permit it, and the struggle
continued for ten minutes. Finally I got possession
of the wire and sent the message. The superintendent
of telegraph, who then lived in Adrian and
went to his office in Toledo every day, happened that
day to be in the Western Union office up-town--and
it was the superintendent I was really struggling
with! In about twenty minutes he arrived livid with
rage, and I was discharged on the spot. I informed
him that the general superintendent had told me to
break in and send the despatch, but the general
superintendent then and there repudiated the whole
thing. Their families were socially close, so I was
sacrificed. My faith in human nature got a slight
jar."

Edison then went to Toledo and secured a position
at Fort Wayne, on the Pittsburg, Fort Wayne &
Chicago Railroad, now leased to the Pennsylvania
system. This was a "day job," and he did not like
it. He drifted two months later to Indianapolis,
arriving there in the fall of 1864, when he was at first
assigned to duty at the Union Station at a salary
of $75 a month for the Western Union Telegraph
Company, whose service he now entered, and with
which he has been destined to maintain highly im-
portent and close relationships throughout a large
part of his life. Superintendent Wallick appears to
have treated him generously and to have loaned him
instruments, a kindness that was greatly appreciated,
for twenty years later the inventor called on his old
employer, and together they visited the scene where
the borrowed apparatus had been mounted on a
rough board in the depot. Edison did not stay long
in Indianapolis, however, resigning in February, 1865,
and proceeding to Cincinnati. The transfer was possibly
due to trouble caused by one of his early inventions
embodying what has been characterized by
an expert as "probably the most simple and ingenious
arrangement of connections for a repeater."
His ambition was to take "press report," but finding,
even after considerable practice, that he "broke"
frequently, he adjusted two embossing Morse registers
--one to receive the press matter, and the other to repeat
the dots and dashes at a lower speed, so that the
message could be copied leisurely. Hence he could
not be rushed or "broken" in receiving, while he
could turn out "copy" that was a marvel of neatness
and clearness. All was well so long as ordinary conditions
prevailed, but when an unusual pressure occurred
the little system fell behind, and the newspapers complained
of the slowness with which reports were delivered
to them. It is easy to understand that with
matter received at a rate of forty words per minute
and worked off at twenty-five words per minute a
serious congestion or delay would result, and the
newspapers were more anxious for the news than they
were for fine penmanship.

Of this device Mr. Edison remarks: "Together we
took press for several nights, my companion keeping
the apparatus in adjustment and I copying. The
regular press operator would go to the theatre or
take a nap, only finishing the report after 1 A.M. One
of the newspapers complained of bad copy toward
the end of the report--that, is from 1 to 3 A.M., and
requested that the operator taking the report up to
1 A.M.--which was ourselves--take it all, as the copy
then was perfectly unobjectionable. This led to an
investigation by the manager, and the scheme was
forbidden.

"This instrument, many years afterward, was applied
by me for transferring messages from one wire to
any other wire simultaneously, or after any interval
of time. It consisted of a disk of paper, the indentations
being formed in a volute spiral, exactly as in
the disk phonograph to-day. It was this instrument
which gave me the idea of the phonograph while working
on the telephone."

Arrived in Cincinnati, where he got employment in
the Western Union commercial telegraph department
at a wage of $60 per month, Edison made the
acquaintance of Milton F. Adams, already referred to
as facile princeps the typical telegrapher in all his
more sociable and brilliant aspects. Speaking of that
time, Mr. Adams says: "I can well recall when Edison
drifted in to take a job. He was a youth of about
eighteen years, decidedly unprepossessing in dress and
rather uncouth in manner. I was twenty-one, and
very dudish. He was quite thin in those days, and
his nose was very prominent, giving a Napoleonic
look to his face, although the curious resemblance did
not strike me at the time. The boys did not take to
him cheerfully, and he was lonesome. I sympathized
with him, and we became close companions. As an
operator he had no superiors and very few equals.
Most of the time he was monkeying with the batteries
and circuits, and devising things to make the work of
telegraphy less irksome. He also relieved the monotony
of office-work by fitting up the battery circuits
to play jokes on his fellow-operators, and to deal with
the vermin that infested the premises. He arranged
in the cellar what he called his `rat paralyzer,' a very
simple contrivance consisting of two plates insulated
from each other and connected with the main battery.
They were so placed that when a rat passed over
them the fore feet on the one plate and the hind feet
on the other completed the circuit and the rat departed
this life, electrocuted."

Shortly after Edison's arrival at Cincinnati came
the close of the Civil War and the assassination of
President Lincoln. It was natural that telegraphers
should take an intense interest in the general struggle,
for not only did they handle all the news relating to
it, but many of them were at one time or another personal
participants. For example, one of the operators
in the Cincinnati office was George Ellsworth,
who was telegrapher for Morgan, the famous Southern
Guerrilla, and was with him when he made his raid
into Ohio and was captured near the Pennsylvania
line. Ellsworth himself made a narrow escape by
swimming the Ohio River with the aid of an army
mule. Yet we can well appreciate the unimpression-
able way in which some of the men did their work,
from an anecdote that Mr. Edison tells of that awful
night of Friday, April 14, 1865: "I noticed," he says,
"an immense crowd gathering in the street outside
a newspaper office. I called the attention of the
other operators to the crowd, and we sent a messenger
boy to find the cause of the excitement. He returned
in a few minutes and shouted `Lincoln's shot.' Instinctively
the operators looked from one face to another
to see which man had received the news. All
the faces were blank, and every man said he had not
taken a word about the shooting. `Look over your
files,' said the boss to the man handling the press
stuff. For a few moments we waited in suspense,
and then the man held up a sheet of paper containing
a short account of the shooting of the President. The
operator had worked so mechanically that he had
handled the news without the slightest knowledge of
its significance." Mr. Adams says that at the time
the city was en fete on account of the close of the
war, the name of the assassin was received by telegraph,
and it was noted with a thrill of horror that it
was that of a brother of Edwin Booth and of Junius
Brutus Booth--the latter of whom was then playing
at the old National Theatre. Booth was hurried
away into seclusion, and the next morning the city
that had been so gay over night with bunting was
draped with mourning.

Edison's diversions in Cincinnati were chiefly those
already observed. He read a great deal, but spent
most of his leisure in experiment. Mr. Adams remarks:
"Edison and I were very fond of tragedy.
Forrest and John McCullough were playing at the
National Theatre, and when our capital was sufficient
we would go to see those eminent tragedians alternate
in Othello and Iago. Edison always enjoyed Othello
greatly. Aside from an occasional visit to the Loewen
Garden `over the Rhine,' with a glass of beer and
a few pretzels, consumed while listening to the excellent
music of a German band, the theatre was the
sum and substance of our innocent dissipation."

The Cincinnati office, as a central point, appears to
have been attractive to many of the clever young
operators who graduated from it to positions of larger
responsibility. Some of them were conspicuous for
their skill and versatility. Mr. Adams tells this interesting
story as an illustration: "L. C. Weir, or Charlie,
as he was known, at that time agent for the Adams
Express Company, had the remarkable ability of taking
messages and copying them twenty-five words
behind the sender. One day he came into the operating-
room, and passing a table he heard Louisville
calling Cincinnati. He reached over to the key and
answered the call. My attention was arrested by the
fact that he walked off after responding, and the
sender happened to be a good one. Weir coolly asked
for a pen, and when he sat down the sender was just
one message ahead of him with date, address, and
signature. Charlie started in, and in a beautiful,
large, round hand copied that message. The sender
went right along, and when he finished with six messages
closed his key. When Weir had done with the
last one the sender began to think that after all there
had been no receiver, as Weir did not `break,' but
simply gave his O. K. He afterward became president
of the Adams Express, and was certainly a wonderful
operator." The operating-room referred to
was on the fifth floor of the building with no elevators.

Those were the early days of trade unionism in
telegraphy, and the movement will probably never
quite die out in the craft which has always shown so
much solidarity. While Edison was in Cincinnati a
delegation of five union operators went over from
Cleveland to form a local branch, and the occasion
was one of great conviviality. Night came, but the
unionists were conspicuous by their absence, although
more circuits than one were intolerant of delay and
clamorous for attention---eight local unionists being
away. The Cleveland report wire was in special
need, and Edison, almost alone in the office, devoted
himself to it all through the night and until 3 o'clock
the next morning, when he was relieved.

He had previously been getting $80 a month, and
had eked this out by copying plays for the theatre.
His rating was that of a "plug" or inferior operator;
but he was determined to lift himself into the class of
first-class operators, and had kept up the practice of
going to the office at night to "copy press," acting
willingly as a substitute for any operator who wanted
to get off for a few hours--which often meant all
night. Speaking of this special ordeal, for which he
had thus been unconsciously preparing, Edison says:
"My copy looked fine if viewed as a whole, as I could
write a perfectly straight line across the wide sheet,
which was not ruled. There were no flourishes, but
the individual letters would not bear close inspection.
When I missed understanding a word, there was no
time to think what it was, so I made an illegible one
to fill in, trusting to the printers to sense it. I knew
they could read anything, although Mr. Bloss, an
editor of the Inquirer, made such bad copy that one
of his editorials was pasted up on the notice-board in
the telegraph office with an offer of one dollar to any
man who could `read twenty consecutive words.' Nobody
ever did it. When I got through I was too
nervous to go home, so waited the rest of the night
for the day manager, Mr. Stevens, to see what was to
be the outcome of this Union formation and of my
efforts. He was an austere man, and I was afraid
of him. I got the morning papers, which came out
at 4 A. M., and the press report read perfectly, which
surprised me greatly. I went to work on my regular
day wire to Portsmouth, Ohio, and there was
considerable excitement, but nothing was said to me,
neither did Mr. Stevens examine the copy on the
office hook, which I was watching with great interest.
However, about 3 P. M. he went to the hook, grabbed
the bunch and looked at it as a whole without examining
it in detail, for which I was thankful. Then he
jabbed it back on the hook, and I knew I was all
right. He walked over to me, and said: `Young
man, I want you to work the Louisville wire nights;
your salary will be $125.' Thus I got from the plug
classification to that of a `first-class man.' "

But no sooner was this promotion secured than he
started again on his wanderings southward, while his
friend Adams went North, neither having any difficulty
in making the trip. "The boys in those days
had extraordinary facilities for travel. As a usual
thing it was only necessary for them to board a train
and tell the conductor they were operators. Then
they would go as far as they liked. The number of
operators was small, and they were in demand
everywhere." It was in this way Edison made his way
south as far as Memphis, Tennessee, where the telegraph
service at that time was under military law,
although the operators received $125 a month. Here
again Edison began to invent and improve on existing
apparatus, with the result of having once more
to "move on." The story may be told in his own
terse language: "I was not the inventor of the auto
repeater, but while in Memphis I worked on one.
Learning that the chief operator, who was a protege
of the superintendent, was trying in some way to put
New York and New Orleans together for the first
time since the close of the war, I redoubled my efforts,
and at 2 o'clock one morning I had them speaking
to each other. The office of the Memphis Avalanche
was in the same building. The paper got wind of it
and sent messages. A column came out in the morning
about it; but when I went to the office in the
afternoon to report for duty I was discharged with
out explanation. The superintendent would not even
give me a pass to Nashville, so I had to pay my fare.
I had so little money left that I nearly starved at
Decatur, Alabama, and had to stay three days before
going on north to Nashville. Arrived in that city, I
went to the telegraph office, got money enough to
buy a little solid food, and secured a pass to Louisville.
I had a companion with me who was also out
of a job. I arrived at Louisville on a bitterly cold
day, with ice in the gutters. I was wearing a linen
duster and was not much to look at, but got a position
at once, working on a press wire. My travelling
companion was less successful on account of his
`record.' They had a limit even in those days when
the telegraph service was so demoralized."

Some reminiscences of Mr. Edison are of interest
as bearing not only upon the "demoralized" telegraph
service, but the conditions from which the
New South had to emerge while working out its
salvation. "The telegraph was still under military
control, not having been turned over to the original
owners, the Southern Telegraph Company. In addition
to the regular force, there was an extra force
of two or three operators, and some stranded ones,
who were a burden to us, for board was high. One of
these derelicts was a great source of worry to me,
personally. He would come in at all hours and either
throw ink around or make a lot of noise. One night
he built a fire in the grate and started to throw pistol
cartridges into the flames. These would explode, and
I was twice hit by the bullets, which left a black-and-
blue mark. Another night he came in and got from
some part of the building a lot of stationery with
`Confederate States' printed at the head. He was
a fine operator, and wrote a beautiful hand. He
would take a sheet of this paper, write capital `A,
and then take another sheet and make the `A' differently;
and so on through the alphabet; each time
crumpling the paper up in his hand and throwing
it on the floor. He would keep this up until the room
was filled nearly flush with the table. Then he would
quit.

"Everything at that time was `wide open.'
Disorganization reigned supreme. There was no head
to anything. At night myself and a companion would
go over to a gorgeously furnished faro-bank and get
our midnight lunch. Everything was free. There
were over twenty keno-rooms running. One of them
that I visited was in a Baptist church, the man with
the wheel being in the pulpit, and the gamblers in
the pews.

"While there the manager of the telegraph office
was arrested for something I never understood, and
incarcerated in a military prison about half a mile
from the office. The building was in plain sight from
the office, and four stories high. He was kept strictly
incommunicado. One day, thinking he might be confined
in a room facing the office, I put my arm out
of the window and kept signalling dots and dashes
by the movement of the arm. I tried this several
times for two days. Finally he noticed it, and putting
his arm through the bars of the window he established
communication with me. He thus sent several messages
to his friends, and was afterward set free."

Another curious story told by Edison concerns a
fellow-operator on night duty at Chattanooga Junction,
at the time he was at Memphis: "When it was
reported that Hood was marching on Nashville, one
night a Jew came into the office about 11 o'clock in
great excitement, having heard the Hood rumor. He,
being a large sutler, wanted to send a message to save
his goods. The operator said it was impossible--that
orders had been given to send no private messages.
Then the Jew wanted to bribe my friend, who steadfastly
refused for the reason, as he told the Jew, that
he might be court-martialled and shot. Finally the
Jew got up to $800. The operator swore him to
secrecy and sent the message. Now there was no
such order about private messages, and the Jew, finding
it out, complained to Captain Van Duzer, chief of
telegraphs, who investigated the matter, and while he
would not discharge the operator, laid him off
indefinitely. Van Duzer was so lenient that if an
operator were discharged, all the operator had to do
was to wait three days and then go and sit on the
stoop of Van Duzer's office all day, and he would be
taken back. But Van Duzer swore he would never
give in in this case. He said that if the operator had
taken $800 and sent the message at the regular rate,
which was twenty-five cents, it would have been all
right, as the Jew would be punished for trying to
bribe a military operator; but when the operator took
the $800 and then sent the message deadhead, he
couldn't stand it, and he would never relent."

A third typical story of this period deals with a
cipher message for Thomas. Mr. Edison narrates it
as follows: "When I was an operator in Cincinnati
working the Louisville wire nights for a time, one
night a man over on the Pittsburg wire yelled out:
`D. I. cipher,' which meant that there was a cipher
message from the War Department at Washington
and that it was coming--and he yelled out `Louisville.'
I started immediately to call up that place.
It was just at the change of shift in the office. I
could not get Louisville, and the cipher message began
to come. It was taken by the operator on the other
table direct from the War Department. It was for
General Thomas, at Nashville. I called for about
twenty minutes and notified them that I could not
get Louisville. I kept at it for about fifteen minutes
longer, and notified them that there was still no
answer from Louisville. They then notified the War
Department that they could not get Louisville. Then
we tried to get it by all kinds of roundabout ways,
but in no case could anybody get them at that office.
Soon a message came from the War Department to
send immediately for the manager of the Cincinnati
office. He was brought to the office and several
messages were exchanged, the contents of which, of course,
I did not know, but the matter appeared to be very
serious, as they were afraid of General Hood, of the
Confederate Army, who was then attempting to march
on Nashville; and it was very important that this
cipher of about twelve hundred words or so should
be got through immediately to General Thomas. I
kept on calling up to 12 or 1 o'clock, but no Louisville.
About 1 o'clock the operator at the Indianapolis
office got hold of an operator on a wire which ran
from Indianapolis to Louisville along the railroad,
who happened to come into his office. He arranged
with this operator to get a relay of horses, and the
message was sent through Indianapolis to this operator
who had engaged horses to carry the despatches to
Louisville and find out the trouble, and get the
despatches through without delay to General Thomas.
In those days the telegraph fraternity was rather
demoralized, and the discipline was very lax. It was
found out a couple of days afterward that there were
three night operators at Louisville. One of them had
gone over to Jeffersonville and had fallen off a horse
and broken his leg, and was in a hospital. By a
remarkable coincidence another of the men had been
stabbed in a keno-room, and was also in hospital
while the third operator had gone to Cynthiana to
see a man hanged and had got left by the train."

I think the most important line of
investigation is the production of
Electricity direct from carbon.
                      Edison

Young Edison remained in Louisville for about
two years, quite a long stay for one with such nomadic
instincts. It was there that he perfected the peculiar
vertical style of writing which, beginning with him in
telegraphy, later became so much of a fad with teachers
of penmanship and in the schools. He says of this form
of writing, a current example of which is given above:
"I developed this style in Louisville while taking press
reports. My wire was connected to the `blind' side
of a repeater at Cincinnati, so that if I missed a word
or sentence, or if the wire worked badly, I could not
break in and get the last words, because the Cincinnati
man had no instrument by which he could
hear me. I had to take what came. When I got the
job, the cable across the Ohio River at Covington,
connecting with the line to Louisville, had a variable
leak in it, which caused the strength of the signalling
current to make violent fluctuations. I obviated this
by using several relays, each with a different adjustment,
working several sounders all connected with
one sounding-plate. The clatter was bad, but I could
read it with fair ease. When, in addition to this infernal
leak, the wires north to Cleveland worked badly,
it required a large amount of imagination to get
the sense of what was being sent. An imagination
requires an appreciable time for its exercise, and as
the stuff was coming at the rate of thirty-five to forty
words a minute, it was very difficult to write down
what was coming and imagine what wasn't coming.
Hence it was necessary to become a very rapid writer,
so I started to find the fastest style. I found that the
vertical style, with each letter separate and without
any flourishes, was the most rapid, and that the
smaller the letter the greater the rapidity. As I took
on an average from eight to fifteen columns of news
report every day, it did not take long to perfect this
method." Mr. Edison has adhered to this characteristic
style of penmanship down to the present
time.

As a matter of fact, the conditions at Louisville
at that time were not much better than they had been
at Memphis. The telegraph operating-room was in
a deplorable condition. It was on the second story
of a dilapidated building on the principal street of
the city, with the battery-room in the rear; behind
which was the office of the agent of the Associated
Press. The plastering was about one-third gone from
the ceiling. A small stove, used occasionally in the
winter, was connected to the chimney by a tortuous
pipe. The office was never cleaned. The switchboard
for manipulating the wires was about thirty-
four inches square. The brass connections on it were
black with age and with the arcing effects of lightning,
which, to young Edison, seemed particularly partial
to Louisville. "It would strike on the wires," he
says, "with an explosion like a cannon-shot, making
that office no place for an operator with heart-disease."
Around the dingy walls were a dozen tables, the ends
next to the wall. They were about the size of those
seen in old-fashioned country hotels for holding
the wash-bowl and pitcher. The copper wires
connecting the instruments to the switchboard were
small, crystallized, and rotten. The battery-room
was filled with old record-books and message bundles,
and one hundred cells of nitric-acid battery, arranged
on a stand in the centre of the room. This stand, as
well as the floor, was almost eaten through by the
destructive action of the powerful acid. Grim and
uncompromising as the description reads, it was
typical of the equipment in those remote days of
the telegraph at the close of the war.

Illustrative of the length to which telegraphers
could go at a time when they were so much in de-
mand, Edison tells the following story: "When I took
the position there was a great shortage of operators.
One night at 2 A.M. another operator and I were on
duty. I was taking press report, and the other man
was working the New York wire. We heard a heavy
tramp, tramp, tramp on the rickety stairs. Suddenly
the door was thrown open with great violence,
dislodging it from one of the hinges. There appeared in
the doorway one of the best operators we had, who
worked daytime, and who was of a very quiet
disposition except when intoxicated. He was a great
friend of the manager of the office. His eyes were
bloodshot and wild, and one sleeve had been torn
away from his coat. Without noticing either of us
he went up to the stove and kicked it over. The
stove-pipe fell, dislocated at every joint. It was half
full of exceedingly fine soot, which floated out and
filled the room completely. This produced a
momentary respite to his labors. When the atmosphere
had cleared sufficiently to see, he went around
and pulled every table away from the wall, piling
them on top of the stove in the middle of the room.
Then he proceeded to pull the switchboard away from
the wall. It was held tightly by screws. He succeeded,
finally, and when it gave way he fell with
the board, and striking on a table cut himself so that
he soon became covered with blood. He then went
to the battery-room and knocked all the batteries off
on the floor. The nitric acid soon began to combine
with the plaster in the room below, which was the
public receiving-room for messengers and bookkeepers.
The excess acid poured through and ate up
the account-books. After having finished everything
to his satisfaction, he left. I told the other operator
to do nothing. We would leave things just as they
were, and wait until the manager came. In the
mean time, as I knew all the wires coming through to
the switchboard, I rigged up a temporary set of
instruments so that the New York business could be cleared
up, and we also got the remainder of the press matter.
At 7 o'clock the day men began to appear. They
were told to go down-stairs and wait the coming of
the manager. At 8 o'clock he appeared, walked
around, went into the battery-room, and then came
to me, saying: `Edison, who did this?' I told him
that Billy L. had come in full of soda-water and
invented the ruin before him. He walked backward
and forward, about a minute, then coming up to my
table put his fist down, and said: `If Billy L. ever
does that again, I will discharge him.' It was needless
to say that there were other operators who took
advantage of that kind of discipline, and I had many
calls at night after that, but none with such destructive
effects."

This was one aspect of life as it presented itself to
the sensitive and observant young operator in Louisville.
But there was another, more intellectual side,
in the contact afforded with journalism and its leaders,
and the information taken in almost unconsciously
as to the political and social movements of the time.
Mr. Edison looks back on this with great satisfaction.
"I remember," he says, "the discussions between the
celebrated poet and journalist George D. Prentice,
then editor of the Courier-Journal, and Mr. Tyler, of
the Associated Press. I believe Prentice was the
father of the humorous paragraph of the American
newspaper. He was poetic, highly educated, and a
brilliant talker. He was very thin and small. I do
not think he weighed over one hundred and twenty
five pounds. Tyler was a graduate of Harvard, and
had a very clear enunciation, and, in sharp contrast
to Prentice, he was a large man. After the paper had
gone to press, Prentice would generally come over to
Tyler's office and start talking. Having while in
Tyler's office heard them arguing on the immortality
of the soul, etc., I asked permission of Mr. Tyler if,
after finishing the press matter, I might come in and
listen to the conversation, which I did many times
after. One thing I never could comprehend was that
Tyler had a sideboard with liquors and generally
crackers. Prentice would pour out half a glass of
what they call corn whiskey, and would dip the
crackers in it and eat them. Tyler took it sans food.
One teaspoonful of that stuff would put me to sleep."

Mr. Edison throws also a curious side-light on the
origin of the comic column in the modern American
newspaper, the telegraph giving to a new joke or a
good story the ubiquity and instantaneity of an important
historical event. "It was the practice of the
press operators all over the country at that time, when
a lull occurred, to start in and send jokes or stories
the day men had collected; and these were copied
and pasted up on the bulletin-board. Cleveland was
the originating office for `press,' which it received
from New York, and sent it out simultaneously to
Milwaukee, Chicago, Toledo, Detroit, Pittsburg,
Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Vincennes,
Terre Haute, St. Louis, and Louisville.
Cleveland would call first on Milwaukee, if he had
anything. If so, he would send it, and Cleveland
would repeat it to all of us. Thus any joke or story
originating anywhere in that area was known the
next day all over. The press men would come in
and copy anything which could be published, which
was about three per cent. I collected, too, quite a
large scrap-book of it, but unfortunately have lost it."

Edison tells an amusing story of his own pursuits
at this time. Always an omnivorous reader, he had
some difficulty in getting a sufficient quantity of
literature for home consumption, and was in the habit
of buying books at auctions and second-hand stores.
One day at an auction-room he secured a stack of
twenty unbound volumes of the North American
Review for two dollars. These he had bound and delivered
at the telegraph office. One morning, when
he was free as usual at 3 o'clock, he started off at a
rapid pace with ten volumes on his shoulder. He
found himself very soon the subject of a fusillade.
When he stopped, a breathless policeman grabbed him
by the throat and ordered him to drop his parcel and
explain matters, as a suspicious character. He opened
the package showing the books, somewhat to the
disgust of the officer, who imagined he had caught a
burglar sneaking away in the dark alley with his
booty. Edison explained that being deaf he had
heard no challenge, and therefore had kept moving;
and the policeman remarked apologetically that it
was fortunate for Edison he was not a better shot.

The incident is curiously revelatory of the character
of the man, for it must be admitted that while literary
telegraphers are by no means scarce, there are very
few who would spend scant savings on back numbers
of a ponderous review at an age when tragedy, beer,
and pretzels are far more enticing. Through all his
travels Edison has preserved those books, and has
them now in his library at Llewellyn Park, on Orange
Mountain, New Jersey.

Drifting after a time from Louisville, Edison made
his way as far north as Detroit, but, like the famous
Duke of York, soon made his way back again. Possibly
the severer discipline after the happy-go-lucky
regime in the Southern city had something to do with
this restlessness, which again manifested itself, however,
on his return thither. The end of the war had
left the South a scene of destruction and desolation,
and many men who had fought bravely and well
found it hard to reconcile themselves to the grim
task of reconstruction. To them it seemed better to
"let ill alone" and seek some other clime where
conditions would be less onerous. At this moment a
great deal of exaggerated talk was current as to the
sunny life and easy wealth of Latin America, and
under its influences many "unreconstructed" Southerners
made their way to Mexico, Brazil, Peru, or the
Argentine. Telegraph operators were naturally in
touch with this movement, and Edison's fertile imagination
was readily inflamed by the glowing idea of
all these vague possibilities. Again he threw up his
steady work and, with a couple of sanguine young
friends, made his way to New Orleans. They had the
notion of taking positions in the Brazilian Government
telegraphs, as an advertisement had been inserted
in some paper stating that operators were
wanted. They had timed their departure from Louisville
so as to catch a specially chartered steamer,
which was to leave New Orleans for Brazil on a
certain day, to convey a large number of Confederates
and their families, who were disgusted with the
United States and were going to settle in Brazil,
where slavery still prevailed. Edison and his friends
arrived in New Orleans just at the time of the great
riot, when several hundred negroes were killed, and
the city was in the hands of a mob. The Government
had seized the steamer chartered for Brazil, in order
to bring troops from the Yazoo River to New Orleans
to stop the rioting. The young operators therefore
visited another shipping-office to make inquiries as
to vessels for Brazil, and encountered an old Spaniard
who sat in a chair near the steamer agent's desk, and
to whom they explained their intentions. He had
lived and worked in South America, and was very
emphatic in his assertion, as he shook his yellow, bony
finger at them, that the worst mistake they could
possibly make would be to leave the United States.
He would not leave on any account, and they as
young Americans would always regret it if they forsook
their native land, whose freedom, climate, and
opportunities could not be equalled anywhere on the
face of the globe. Such sincere advice as this could
not be disdained, and Edison made his way North
again. One cannot resist speculation as to what might
have happened to Edison himself and to the develop-
ment of electricity had he made this proposed plunge
into the enervating tropics. It will be remembered
that at a somewhat similar crisis in life young Robert
Burns entertained seriously the idea of forsaking
Scotland for the West Indies. That he did not go
was certainly better for Scottish verse, to which he
contributed later so many immortal lines; and it was
probably better for himself, even if he died a gauger.
It is simply impossible to imagine Edison working
out the phonograph, telephone, and incandescent
lamp under the tropical climes he sought. Some years
later he was informed that both his companions had
gone to Vera Cruz, Mexico, and had died there of
yellow fever.

Work was soon resumed at Louisville, where the
dilapidated old office occupied at the close of the war
had been exchanged for one much more comfortable
and luxurious in its equipment. As before, Edison
was allotted to press report, and remembers very
distinctly taking the Presidential message and veto of
the District of Columbia bill by President Johnson.
As the matter was received over the wire he paragraphed
it so that each printer had exactly three
lines, thus enabling the matter to be set up very
expeditiously in the newspaper offices. This earned
him the gratitude of the editors, a dinner, and all the
newspaper "exchanges" he wanted. Edison's accounts
of the sprees and debauches of other night
operators in the loosely managed offices enable one to
understand how even a little steady application to
the work in hand would be appreciated. On one
occasion Edison acted as treasurer for his bibulous
companions, holding the stakes, so to speak, in order
that the supply of liquor might last longer. One of
the mildest mannered of the party took umbrage at
the parsimony of the treasurer and knocked him
down, whereupon the others in the party set upon
the assailant and mauled him so badly that he had
to spend three weeks in hospital. At another time
two of his companions sharing the temporary
hospitality of his room smashed most of the furniture,
and went to bed with their boots on. Then his kindly
good-nature rebelled. "I felt that this was running
hospitality into the ground, so I pulled them out and left
them on the floor to cool off from their alcoholic trance."

Edison seems on the whole to have been fairly
comfortable and happy in Louisville, surrounding himself
with books and experimental apparatus, and even
inditing a treatise on electricity. But his very thirst
for knowledge and new facts again proved his undoing.
The instruments in the handsome new offices
were fastened in their proper places, and operators
were strictly forbidden to remove them, or to use the
batteries except on regular work. This prohibition
meant little to Edison, who had access to no other
instruments except those of the company. "I went
one night," he says, "into the battery-room to obtain
some sulphuric acid for experimenting. The carboy
tipped over, the acid ran out, went through to the
manager's room below, and ate up his desk and all the
carpet. The next morning I was summoned before
him, and told that what the company wanted was
operators, not experimenters. I was at liberty to
take my pay and get out."

The fact that Edison is a very studious man, an
insatiate lover and reader of books, is well known to
his associates; but surprise is often expressed at his
fund of miscellaneous information. This, it will be
seen, is partly explained by his work for years as a
"press" reporter. He says of this: "The second
time I was in Louisville, they had moved into a new
office, and the discipline was now good. I took the
press job. In fact, I was a very poor sender, and
therefore made the taking of press report a specialty.
The newspaper men allowed me to come over after
going to press at 3 A.M. and get all the exchanges I
wanted. These I would take home and lay at the
foot of my bed. I never slept more than four or five
hours' so that I would awake at nine or ten and read
these papers until dinner-time. I thus kept posted,
and knew from their activity every member of Congress,
and what committees they were on; and all
about the topical doings, as well as the prices of
breadstuffs in all the primary markets. I was in a
much better position than most operators to call on
my imagination to supply missing words or sentences,
which were frequent in those days of old, rotten
wires, badly insulated, especially on stormy nights.
Upon such occasions I had to supply in some cases
one-fifth of the whole matter--pure guessing--but I
got caught only once. There had been some kind of
convention in Virginia, in which John Minor Botts
was the leading figure. There was great excitement
about it, and two votes had been taken in the
convention on the two days. There was no doubt that
the vote the next day would go a certain way. A
very bad storm came up about 10 o'clock, and my
wire worked very badly. Then there was a cessation
of all signals; then I made out the words `Minor
Botts.' The next was a New York item. I filled in
a paragraph about the convention and how the vote
had gone, as I was sure it would. But next day I
learned that instead of there being a vote the
convention had adjourned without action until the day
after." In like manner, it was at Louisville that Mr.
Edison got an insight into the manner in which great
political speeches are more frequently reported than
the public suspects. "The Associated Press had a
shorthand man travelling with President Johnson
when he made his celebrated swing around the circle
in a private train delivering hot speeches in defence
of his conduct. The man engaged me to write out
the notes from his reading. He came in loaded and
on the verge of incoherence. We started in, but about
every two minutes I would have to scratch out whole
paragraphs and insert the same things said in another
and better way. He would frequently change words,
always to the betterment of the speech. I couldn't
understand this, and when he got through, and I had
copied about three columns, I asked him why those
changes, if he read from notes. `Sonny,' he said,
`if these politicians had their speeches published as
they deliver them, a great many shorthand writers
would be out of a job. The best shorthanders and
the holders of good positions are those who can take
a lot of rambling, incoherent stuff and make a rattling
good speech out of it.' "

Going back to Cincinnati and beginning his second
term there as an operator, Edison found the office
in new quarters and with greatly improved management.
He was again put on night duty, much to his
satisfaction. He rented a room in the top floor of an
office building, bought a cot and an oil-stove, a foot
lathe, and some tools. He cultivated the acquaintance
of Mr. Sommers, superintendent of telegraph of
the Cincinnati & Indianapolis Railroad, who gave
him permission to take such scrap apparatus as he
might desire, that was of no use to the company.
With Sommers on one occasion he had an opportunity
to indulge his always strong sense of humor. "Sommers
was a very witty man," he says, "and fond of
experimenting. We worked on a self-adjusting telegraph
relay, which would have been very valuable if
we could have got it. I soon became the possessor
of a second-hand Ruhmkorff induction coil, which,
although it would only give a small spark, would
twist the arms and clutch the hands of a man so that
he could not let go of the apparatus. One day we
went down to the round-house of the Cincinnati &
Indianapolis Railroad and connected up the long wash-
tank in the room with the coil, one electrode being
connected to earth. Above this wash-room was a
flat roof. We bored a hole through the roof, and
could see the men as they came in. The first man
as he entered dipped his hands in the water. The
floor being wet he formed a circuit, and up went his
hands. He tried it the second time, with the same
result. He then stood against the wall with a
puzzled expression. We surmised that he was waiting
for somebody else to come in, which occurred
shortly after--with the same result. Then they went
out, and the place was soon crowded, and there was
considerable excitement. Various theories were
broached to explain the curious phenomenon. We
enjoyed the sport immensely." It must be remembered
that this was over forty years ago, when there
was no popular instruction in electricity, and when
its possibilities for practical joking were known to
very few. To-day such a crowd of working-men
would be sure to include at least one student of a
night school or correspondence course who would
explain the mystery offhand.

Note has been made of the presence of Ellsworth
in the Cincinnati office, and his service with the
Confederate guerrilla Morgan, for whom he tapped
Federal wires, read military messages, sent false ones,
and did serious mischief generally. It is well known
that one operator can recognize another by the way
in which he makes his signals--it is his style of
handwriting. Ellsworth possessed in a remarkable degree
the skill of imitating these peculiarities, and thus he
deceived the Union operators easily. Edison says
that while apparently a quiet man in bearing, Ellsworth,
after the excitement of fighting, found the
tameness of a telegraph office obnoxious, and that he
became a bad "gun man" in the Panhandle of Texas,
where he was killed. "We soon became acquainted,"
says Edison of this period in Cincinnati, "and he
wanted me to invent a secret method of sending
despatches so that an intermediate operator could not
tap the wire and understand it. He said that if it
could be accomplished, he could sell it to the Govern-
ment for a large sum of money. This suited me, and
I started in and succeeded in making such an
instrument, which had in it the germ of my quadruplex
now used throughout the world, permitting the despatch
of four messages over one wire simultaneously.
By the time I had succeeded in getting the apparatus
to work, Ellsworth suddenly disappeared. Many
years afterward I used this little device again for the
same purpose. At Menlo Park, New Jersey, I had
my laboratory. There were several Western Union
wires cut into the laboratory, and used by me in
experimenting at night. One day I sat near an instrument
which I had left connected during the night.
I soon found it was a private wire between New York
and Philadelphia, and I heard among a lot of stuff
a message that surprised me. A week after that I
had occasion to go to New York, and, visiting the
office of the lessee of the wire, I asked him if he hadn't
sent such and such a message. The expression that
came over his face was a sight. He asked me how I
knew of any message. I told him the circumstances,
and suggested that he had better cipher such
communications, or put on a secret sounder. The result
of the interview was that I installed for him my old
Cincinnati apparatus, which was used thereafter for
many years."

Edison did not make a very long stay in Cincinnati
this time, but went home after a while to Port Huron.
Soon tiring of idleness and isolation he sent "a cry
from Macedonia" to his old friend "Milt" Adams,
who was in Boston, and whom he wished to rejoin if
he could get work promptly in the East.

Edison himself gives the details of this eventful
move, when he went East to grow up with the new
art of electricity. "I had left Louisville the second
time, and went home to see my parents. After
stopping at home for some time, I got restless, and
thought I would like to work in the East. Knowing
that a former operator named Adams, who had worked
with me in the Cincinnati office, was in Boston, I wrote
him that I wanted a job there. He wrote back that
if I came on immediately he could get me in the
Western Union office. I had helped out the Grand
Trunk Railroad telegraph people by a new device
when they lost one of the two submarine cables they
had across the river, making the remaining cable
act just as well for their purpose, as if they had two.
I thought I was entitled to a pass, which they
conceded; and I started for Boston. After leaving
Toronto a terrific blizzard came up and the train got
snowed under in a cut. After staying there twenty-
four hours, the trainmen made snowshoes of fence-
rail splints and started out to find food, which they did
about a half mile away. They found a roadside inn,
and by means of snowshoes all the passengers were
taken to the inn. The train reached Montreal four
days late. A number of the passengers and myself
went to the military headquarters to testify in favor of
a soldier who was on furlough, and was two days late,
which was a serious matter with military people, I
learned. We willingly did this, for this soldier was
a great story-teller, and made the time pass quickly.
I met here a telegraph operator named Stanton,
who took me to his boarding-house, the most cheer-
less I have ever been in. Nobody got enough to eat;
the bedclothes were too short and too thin; it was
28 degrees below zero, and the wash-water was frozen
solid. The board was cheap, being only $1.50 per
week.

"Stanton said that the usual live-stock accompaniment
of operators' boarding-houses was absent;
he thought the intense cold had caused them
to hibernate. Stanton, when I was working in Cincinnati,
left his position and went out on the Union
Pacific to work at Julesburg, which was a cattle town
at that time and very tough. I remember seeing him
off on the train, never expecting to see him again.
Six months afterward, while working press wire in
Cincinnati, about 2 A.M., there was flung into the middle
of the operating-room a large tin box. It made
a report like a pistol, and we all jumped up startled.
In walked Stanton. `Gentlemen,' he said `I have
just returned from a pleasure trip to the land beyond
the Mississippi. All my wealth is contained in my
metallic travelling case and you are welcome to it.'
The case contained one paper collar. He sat down,
and I noticed that he had a woollen comforter around
his neck with his coat buttoned closely. The night
was intensely warm. He then opened his coat and
revealed the fact that he had nothing but the bare
skin. `Gentlemen,' said he, `you see before you an
operator who has reached the limit of impecuniosity.' "
Not far from the limit of impecuniosity was Edison
himself, as he landed in Boston in 1868 after this
wintry ordeal.

This chapter has run to undue length, but it must
not close without one citation from high authority
as to the service of the military telegraph corps so
often referred to in it. General Grant in his
Memoirs, describing the movements of the Army of
the Potomac, lays stress on the service of his
telegraph operators, and says: "Nothing could be more
complete than the organization and discipline of this
body of brave and intelligent men. Insulated wires
were wound upon reels, two men and a mule detailed
to each reel. The pack-saddle was provided with a
rack like a sawbuck, placed crosswise, so that the
wheel would revolve freely; there was a wagon provided
with a telegraph operator, battery, and instruments
for each division corps and army, and for my
headquarters. Wagons were also loaded with light
poles supplied with an iron spike at each end to hold
the wires up. The moment troops were in position
to go into camp, the men would put up their wires.
Thus in a few minutes' longer time than it took a
mule to walk the length of its coil, telegraphic
communication would be effected between all the
headquarters of the army. No orders ever had to be given
to establish the telegraph."

CHAPTER VI

WORK AND INVENTION IN BOSTON

MILTON ADAMS was working in the office of the
Franklin Telegraph Company in Boston when
he received Edison's appeal from Port Huron, and
with characteristic impetuosity at once made it his
business to secure a position for his friend. There
was no opening in the Franklin office, so Adams went
over to the Western Union office, and asked the manager,
Mr. George F. Milliken, if he did not want an
operator who, like young Lochinvar, came out of the
West. "What kind of copy does he make?" was the
cautious response. "I passed Edison's letter through
the window for his inspection. Milliken read it, and
a look of surprise came over his countenance as he
asked me if he could take it off the line like that. I
said he certainly could, and that there was nobody
who could stick him. Milliken said that if he was that
kind of an operator I could send for him, and I wrote
to Edison to come on, as I had a job for him in the
main office of the Western Union." Meantime Edison
had secured his pass over the Grand Trunk Railroad,
and spent four days and nights on the journey, suffering
extremes of cold and hunger. Franklin's arrival
in Philadelphia finds its parallel in the very modest
debut of Adams's friend in Boston.

It took only five minutes for Edison to get the
"job," for Superintendent Milliken, a fine type of
telegraph official, saw quickly through the superficialities,
and realized that it was no ordinary young
operator he was engaging. Edison himself tells the
story of what happened. "The manager asked me
when I was ready to go to work. `Now,' I replied
I was then told to return at 5.30 P.M., and punctually
at that hour I entered the main operating-room and
was introduced to the night manager. The weather
being cold, and being clothed poorly, my peculiar
appearance caused much mirth, and, as I afterward
learned, the night operators had consulted together
how they might `put up a job on the jay from the
woolly West.' I was given a pen and assigned to
the New York No. 1 wire. After waiting an hour,
I was told to come over to a special table and take a
special report for the Boston Herald, the conspirators
having arranged to have one of the fastest senders
in New York send the despatch and `salt' the new
man. I sat down unsuspiciously at the table, and
the New York man started slowly. Soon he increased
his speed, to which I easily adapted my
pace. This put my rival on his mettle, and he put
on his best powers, which, however, were soon reached.
At this point I happened to look up, and saw the
operators all looking over my shoulder, with their
faces shining with fun and excitement. I knew then
that they were trying to put up a job on me, but
kept my own counsel. The New York man then
commenced to slur over his words, running them together
and sticking the signals; but I had been used
to this style of telegraphy in taking report, and was
not in the least discomfited. Finally, when I thought
the fun had gone far enough, and having about completed
the special, I quietly opened the key and remarked,
telegraphically, to my New York friend:
`Say, young man, change off and send with your
other foot.' This broke the New York man all up,
and he turned the job over to another man to finish."

Edison had a distaste for taking press report, due
to the fact that it was steady, continuous work, and
interfered with the studies and investigations that
could be carried on in the intervals of ordinary
commercial telegraphy. He was not lazy in any sense.
While he had no very lively interest in the mere
routine work of a telegraph office, he had the profoundest
curiosity as to the underlying principles of
electricity that made telegraphy possible, and he
had an unflagging desire and belief in his own ability
to improve the apparatus he handled daily. The
whole intellectual atmosphere of Boston was favorable
to the development of the brooding genius in
this shy, awkward, studious youth, utterly indifferent
to clothes and personal appearance, but ready to
spend his last dollar on books and scientific
paraphernalia. It is matter of record that he did once
buy a new suit for thirty dollars in Boston, but the
following Sunday, while experimenting with acids in
his little workshop, the suit was spoiled. "That is
what I get for putting so much money in a new suit,"
was the laconic remark of the youth, who was more
than delighted to pick up a complete set of Faraday's
works about the same time. Adams says that when
Edison brought home these books at 4 A.M. he read
steadily until breakfast-time, and then he remarked,
enthusiastically: "Adams, I have got so much to do
and life is so short, I am going to hustle." And
thereupon he started on a run for breakfast. Edison
himself says: "It was in Boston I bought Faraday's
works. I think I must have tried about everything
in those books. His explanations were simple. He
used no mathematics. He was the Master Experimenter.
I don't think there were many copies of
Faraday's works sold in those days. The only people
who did anything in electricity were the
telegraphers and the opticians making simple school
apparatus to demonstrate the principles." One of
these firms was Palmer & Hall, whose catalogue of
1850 showed a miniature electric locomotive made
by Mr. Thomas Hall, and exhibited in operation the
following year at the Charitable Mechanics' Fair in
Boston. In 1852 Mr. Hall made for a Dr. A. L. Henderson,
of Buffalo, New York, a model line of railroad
with electric-motor engine, telegraph line, and electric
railroad signals, together with a figure operating the
signals at each end of the line automatically. This
was in reality the first example of railroad trains
moved by telegraph signals, a practice now so common
and universal as to attract no comment. To
show how little some fundamental methods can change
in fifty years, it may be noted that Hall conveyed the
current to his tiny car through forty feet of rail,
using the rail as conductor, just as Edison did more
than thirty years later in his historic experiments
for Villard at Menlo Park; and just as a large pro-
portion of American trolley systems do at this present
moment.

It was among such practical, investigating folk as
these that Edison was very much at home. Another
notable man of this stamp, with whom Edison was
thrown in contact, was the late Mr. Charles Williams,
who, beginning his career in the electrical field in
the forties, was at the height of activity as a maker
of apparatus when Edison arrived in the city; and
who afterward, as an associate of Alexander Graham
Bell, enjoyed the distinction of being the first
manufacturer in the world of telephones. At his Court
Street workshop Edison was a frequent visitor. Telegraph
repairs and experiments were going on constantly,
especially on the early fire-alarm telegraphs[1]
of Farmer and Gamewell, and with the aid of one of the
men there--probably George Anders--Edison worked
out into an operative model his first invention, a vote-
recorder, the first Edison patent, for which papers
were executed on October 11, 1868, and which was
taken out June 1, 1869, No. 90,646. The purpose of
this particular device was to permit a vote in the
National House of Representatives to be taken in a
minute or so, complete lists being furnished of all
members voting on the two sides of any question
Mr. Edison, in recalling the circumstances, says:
"Roberts was the telegraph operator who was the
financial backer to the extent of $100. The invention
when completed was taken to Washington. I think it
was exhibited before a committee that had something
to do with the Capitol. The chairman of the committee,
after seeing how quickly and perfectly it
worked, said: `Young man, if there is any invention
on earth that we don't want down here, it is this.
One of the greatest weapons in the hands of a minority
to prevent bad legislation is filibustering on
votes, and this instrument would prevent it.' I saw
the truth of this, because as press operator I had taken
miles of Congressional proceedings, and to this day
an enormous amount of time is wasted during each
session of the House in foolishly calling the members'
names and recording and then adding their
votes, when the whole operation could be done in
almost a moment by merely pressing a particular
button at each desk. For filibustering purposes,
however, the present methods are most admirable."
Edison determined from that time forth to devote
his inventive faculties only to things for which there
was a real, genuine demand, something that subserved
the actual necessities of humanity. This first
patent was taken out for him by the late Hon. Carroll
D. Wright, afterward U. S. Commissioner of Labor,
and a well-known publicist, then practicing patent law
in Boston. He describes Edison as uncouth in manner,
a chewer rather than a smoker of tobacco, but
full of intelligence and ideas.

[1] The general scheme of a fire-alarm telegraph system embodies
a central office to which notice can be sent from any number of
signal boxes of the outbreak of a fire in the district covered by
the box, the central office in turn calling out the nearest fire
engines, and warning the fire department in general of the
occurrence. Such fire alarms can be exchanged automatically, or
by operators, and are sometimes associated with a large fire-alarm
bell or whistle. Some boxes can be operated by the passing public;
others need special keys. The box mechanism is usually of
the ratchet, step-by-step movement, familiar in district messenger
call-boxes.

Edison's curiously practical, though imaginative,
mind demanded realities to work upon, things that
belong to "human nature's daily food," and he soon
harked back to telegraphy, a domain in which he
was destined to succeed, and over which he was to
reign supreme as an inventor. He did not, however,
neglect chemistry, but indulged his tastes in that
direction freely, although we have no record that this
work was anything more, at that time, than the
carrying out of experiments outlined in the books.
The foundations were being laid for the remarkable
chemical knowledge that later on grappled successfully
with so many knotty problems in the realm of
chemistry; notably with the incandescent lamp and
the storage battery. Of one incident in his chemical
experiments he tells the following story: "I had read
in a scientific paper the method of making nitroglycerine,
and was so fired by the wonderful properties
it was said to possess, that I determined to make
some of the compound. We tested what we considered
a very small quantity, but this produced such
terrible and unexpected results that we became
alarmed, the fact dawning upon us that we had a very
large white elephant in our possession. At 6 A.M. I
put the explosive into a sarsaparilla bottle, tied a
string to it, wrapped it in a paper, and gently let it
down into the sewer, corner of State and Washington
Streets." The associate in this was a man whom he
had found endeavoring to make electrical apparatus
for sleight-of-hand performances.

In the Boston telegraph office at that time, as perhaps
at others, there were operators studying to en-
ter college; possibly some were already in attendance
at Harvard University. This condition was not unusual
at one time; the first electrical engineer graduated
from Columbia University, New York, followed
up his studies while a night operator, and came out
brilliantly at the head of his class. Edison says of
these scholars that they paraded their knowledge
rather freely, and that it was his delight to go to the
second-hand book stores on Cornhill and study up
questions which he could spring upon them when he
got an occasion. With those engaged on night duty
he got midnight lunch from an old Irishman called
"the Cake Man," who appeared regularly with his
wares at 12 midnight. "The office was on the
ground floor, and had been a restaurant previous to
its occupation by the Western Union Telegraph
Company. It was literally loaded with cockroaches,
which lived between the wall and the board running
around the room at the floor, and which came after
the lunch. These were such a bother on my table that
I pasted two strips of tinfoil on the wall at my desk,
connecting one piece to the positive pole of the big
battery supplying current to the wires and the negative
pole to the other strip. The cockroaches moving
up on the wall would pass over the strips. The moment
they got their legs across both strips there was
a flash of light and the cockroaches went into gas.
This automatic electrocuting device attracted so much
attention, and got half a column in an evening paper,
that the manager made me stop it." The reader will
remember that a similar plan of campaign against
rats was carried out by Edison while in the West.

About this time Edison had a narrow escape from
injury that might easily have shortened his career,
and he seems to have provoked the trouble more or
less innocently by using a little elementary chemistry.
"After being in Boston several months," he says,
"working New York wire No. 1, I was requested to
work the press wire, called the `milk route,' as there
were so many towns on it taking press simultaneously.
New York office had reported great delays on the
wire, due to operators constantly interrupting, or
`breaking,' as it was called, to have words repeated
which they had failed to get; and New York claimed
that Boston was one of the worst offenders. It was
a rather hard position for me, for if I took the report
without breaking, it would prove the previous Boston
operator incompetent. The results made the
operator have some hard feelings against me. He
was put back on the wire, and did much better after
that. It seems that the office boy was down on this
man. One night he asked me if I could tell him how
to fix a key so that it would not `break,' even if the
circuit-breaker was open, and also so that it could not
be easily detected. I told him to jab a penful of
ink on the platinum points, as there was sugar enough
to make it sufficiently thick to hold up when the
operator tried to break--the current still going through
the ink so that he could not break.

"The next night about 1 A.M. this operator, on the
press wire, while I was standing near a House printer
studying it, pulled out a glass insulator, then used
upside down as a substitute for an ink-bottle, and
threw it with great violence at me, just missing my
head. It would certainly have killed me if it had
not missed. The cause of the trouble was that this
operator was doing the best he could not to break,
but being compelled to, opened his key and found he
couldn't. The press matter came right along, and
he could not stop it. The office boy had put the ink
in a few minutes before, when the operator had
turned his head during a lull. He blamed me instinctively
as the cause of the trouble. Later on we
became good friends. He took his meals at the same
emaciator that I did. His main object in life seemed
to be acquiring the art of throwing up wash-pitchers
and catching them without breaking them. About
one-third of his salary was used up in paying for
pitchers."

One day a request reached the Western Union
Telegraph office in Boston, from the principal of a
select school for young ladies, to the effect that she
would like some one to be sent up to the school to
exhibit and describe the Morse telegraph to her
"children." There has always been a warm interest
in Boston in the life and work of Morse, who was born
there, at Charlestown, barely a mile from the birthplace
of Franklin, and this request for a little lecture
on Morse's telegraph was quite natural. Edison, who
was always ready to earn some extra money for his
experiments, and was already known as the best-
informed operator in the office, accepted the
invitation. What happened is described by Adams as
follows: "We gathered up a couple of sounders, a
battery, and sonic wire, and at the appointed time
called on her to do the stunt. Her school-room was
about twenty by twenty feet, not including a small
platform. We rigged up the line between the two
ends of the room, Edison taking the stage while I
was at the other end of the room. All being in
readiness, the principal was told to bring in her
children. The door opened and in came about twenty
young ladies elegantly gowned, not one of whom was
under seventeen. When Edison saw them I thought
he would faint. He called me on the line and asked
me to come to the stage and explain the mysteries of
the Morse system. I replied that I thought he was in
the right place, and told him to get busy with his talk
on dots and dashes. Always modest, Edison was so
overcome he could hardly speak, but he managed
to say, finally, that as his friend Mr. Adams was
better equipped with cheek than he was, we would
change places, and he would do the demonstrating
while I explained the whole thing. This caused the
bevy to turn to see where the lecturer was. I went
on the stage, said something, and we did some
telegraphing over the line. I guess it was satisfactory;
we got the money, which was the main point to us."
Edison tells the story in a similar manner, but insists
that it was he who saved the situation. "I managed
to say that I would work the apparatus, and Mr.
Adams would make the explanations. Adams was so
embarrassed that he fell over an ottoman. The girls
tittered, and this increased his embarrassment until he
couldn't say a word. The situation was so desperate
that for a reason I never could explain I started in
myself and talked and explained better than I ever did
before or since. I can talk to two or three persons;
but when there are more they radiate some unknown
form of influence which paralyzes my vocal cords.
However, I got out of this scrape, and many times
afterward when I chanced with other operators to meet
some of the young ladies on their way home from
school, they would smile and nod, much to the
mystification of the operators, who were ignorant of
this episode."

Another amusing story of this period of impecuniosity
and financial strain is told thus by Edison: "My
friend Adams was working in the Franklin Telegraph
Company, which competed with the Western Union.
Adams was laid off, and as his financial resources had
reached absolute zero centigrade, I undertook to let
him sleep in my hall bedroom. I generally had hall
bedrooms, because they were cheap and I needed
money to buy apparatus. I also had the pleasure of
his genial company at the boarding-house about a
mile distant, but at the sacrifice of some apparatus.
One morning, as we were hastening to breakfast, we
came into Tremont Row, and saw a large crowd in
front of two small `gents' furnishing goods stores.
We stopped to ascertain the cause of the excitement.
One store put up a paper sign in the display window
which said: `Three-hundred pairs of stockings received
this day, five cents a pair--no connection with the
store next door.' Presently the other store put up
a sign stating they had received three hundred pairs,
price three cents per pair, and stated that they had
no connection with the store next door. Nobody
went in. The crowd kept increasing. Finally, when
the price had reached three pairs for one cent, Adams
said to me: `I can't stand this any longer; give me
a cent.' I gave him a nickel, and he elbowed his way
in; and throwing the money on the counter, the
store being filled with women clerks, he said: `Give
me three pairs.' The crowd was breathless, and the
girl took down a box and drew out three pairs of
baby socks. `Oh!' said Adams, `I want men's size.'
`Well, sir, we do not permit one to pick sizes for that
amount of money.' And the crowd roared; and this
broke up the sales."

It has generally been supposed that Edison did not
take up work on the stock ticker until after his arrival
a little later in New York; but he says: "After the
vote-recorder I invented a stock ticker, and started
a ticker service in Boston; had thirty or forty
subscribers, and operated from a room over the Gold
Exchange. This was about a year after Callahan
started in New York." To say the least, this evidenced
great ability and enterprise on the part of
the youth. The dealings in gold during the Civil
War and after its close had brought gold indicators
into use, and these had soon been followed by "stock
tickers," the first of which was introduced in New
York in 1867. The success of this new but still
primitively crude class of apparatus was immediate.
Four manufacturers were soon busy trying to keep
pace with the demands for it from brokers; and the
Gold & Stock Telegraph Company formed to exploit
the system soon increased its capital from $200,000
to $300,000, paying 12 per cent. dividends on the
latter amount. Within its first year the capital was
again increased to $1,000,000, and dividends of 10
per cent. were paid easily on that sum also. It is
needless to say that such facts became quickly known
among the operators, from whose ranks, of course,
the new employees were enlisted; and it was a common
ambition among the more ingenious to produce
a new ticker. From the beginning, each phase of
electrical development--indeed, each step in
mechanics--has been accompanied by the well-known
phenomenon of invention; namely, the attempt of the
many to perfect and refine and even re-invent where
one or two daring spirits have led the way. The
figures of capitalization and profit just mentioned
were relatively much larger in the sixties than they
are to-day; and to impressionable young operators
they spelled illimitable wealth. Edison was, how
ever, about the only one in Boston of whom history
makes record as achieving any tangible result in this
new art; and he soon longed for the larger telegraphic
opportunity of New York. His friend, Milt Adams,
went West with quenchless zest for that kind of roving
life and aimless adventure of which the serious
minded Edison had already had more than enough.
Realizing that to New York he must look for further
support in his efforts, Edison, deep in debt for his
embryonic inventions, but with high hope and
courage, now made the next momentous step in his
career. He was far riper in experience and practice
of his art than any other telegrapher of his age, and
had acquired, moreover, no little knowledge of the
practical business of life. Note has been made above
of his invention of a stock ticker in Boston, and of
his establishing a stock-quotation circuit. This was
by no means all, and as a fitting close to this chapter
he may be quoted as to some other work and its perils
in experimentation: "I also engaged in putting up
private lines, upon which I used an alphabetical dial
instrument for telegraphing between business
establishments, a forerunner of modern telephony. This
instrument was very simple and practical, and any
one could work it after a few minutes' explanation.
I had these instruments made at Mr. Hamblet's, who
had a little shop where he was engaged in experimenting
with electric clocks. Mr. Hamblet was the
father and introducer in after years of the Western
Union Telegraph system of time distribution. My
laboratory was the headquarters for the men, and
also of tools and supplies for those private lines.
They were put up cheaply, as I used the roofs of
houses, just as the Western Union did. It never
occurred to me to ask permission from the owners;
all we did was to go to the store, etc., say we were
telegraph men, and wanted to go up to the wires on
the roof; and permission was always granted.

"In this laboratory I had a large induction coil
which I had borrowed to make some experiments with.
One day I got hold of both electrodes of the coil, and
it clinched my hand on them so that I couldn't let
go. The battery was on a shelf. The only way I
could get free was to back off and pull the coil, so
that the battery wires would pull the cells off the shelf
and thus break the circuit. I shut my eyes and
pulled, but the nitric acid splashed all over my face
and ran down my back. I rushed to a sink, which
was only half big enough, and got in as well as I could
and wiggled around for several minutes to permit
the water to dilute the acid and stop the pain. My
face and back were streaked with yellow; the skin
was thoroughly oxidized. I did not go on the street
by daylight for two weeks, as the appearance of my
face was dreadful. The skin, however, peeled off,
and new skin replaced it without any damage."

CHAPTER VII

THE STOCK TICKER

"THE letters and figures used in the language of
the tape," said a well-known Boston stock
speculator, "are very few, but they spell ruin in
ninety-nine million ways." It is not to be inferred,
however, that the modern stock ticker has anything
to do with the making or losing of fortunes. There
were regular daily stock-market reports in London
newspapers in 1825, and New York soon followed the
example. As far back as 1692, Houghton issued in
London a weekly review of financial and commercial
transactions, upon which Macaulay based the lively
narrative of stock speculation in the seventeenth
century, given in his famous history. That which
the ubiquitous stock ticker has done is to give
instantaneity to the news of what the stock market is
doing, so that at every minute, thousands of miles
apart, brokers, investors, and gamblers may learn
the exact conditions. The existence of such facilities
is to be admired rather than deplored. News is vital
to Wall Street, and there is no living man on whom
the doings in Wall Street are without effect. The
financial history of the United States and of the world,
as shown by the prices of government bonds and
general securities, has been told daily for forty years
on these narrow strips of paper tape, of which thousands
of miles are run yearly through the "tickers"
of New York alone. It is true that the record of the
chattering little machine, made in cabalistic abbreviations
on the tape, can drive a man suddenly to the
very verge of insanity with joy or despair; but if
there be blame for that, it attaches to the American
spirit of speculation and not to the ingenious mechanism
which reads and registers the beating of the
financial pulse.

Edison came first to New York in 1868, with his
early stock printer, which he tried unsuccessfully to
sell. He went back to Boston, and quite undismayed
got up a duplex telegraph. "Toward the end
of my stay in Boston," he says, "I obtained a loan
of money, amounting to $800, to build a peculiar
kind of duplex telegraph for sending two messages
over a single wire simultaneously. The apparatus
was built, and I left the Western Union employ and
went to Rochester, New York, to test the apparatus
on the lines of the Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph between
that city and New York. But the assistant at
the other end could not be made to understand anything,
notwithstanding I had written out a very
minute description of just what to do. After trying
for a week I gave it up and returned to New York
with but a few cents in my pocket." Thus he who
has never speculated in a stock in his life was destined
to make the beginnings of his own fortune by providing
for others the apparatus that should bring to the
eye, all over a great city, the momentary fluctuations
of stocks and bonds. No one could have been in
direr poverty than he when the steamboat landed
him in New York in 1869. He was in debt, and his
few belongings in books and instruments had to be
left behind. He was not far from starving. Mr.
W. S. Mallory, an associate of many years, quotes
directly from him on this point: "Some years ago
we had a business negotiation in New York which
made it necessary for Mr. Edison and me to visit the
city five or six times within a comparatively short
period. It was our custom to leave Orange about
11 A.M., and on arrival in New York to get our lunch
before keeping the appointments, which were usually
made for two o'clock. Several of these lunches were
had at Delmonico's, Sherry's, and other places of
similar character, but one day, while en route, Mr.
Edison said: `I have been to lunch with you several
times; now to-day I am going to take you to lunch
with me, and give you the finest lunch you ever had.'
When we arrived in Hoboken, we took the downtown
ferry across the Hudson, and when we arrived
on the Manhattan side Mr. Edison led the way to
Smith & McNell's, opposite Washington Market, and
well known to old New Yorkers. We went inside and
as soon as the waiter appeared Mr. Edison ordered
apple dumplings and a cup of coffee for himself. He
consumed his share of the lunch with the greatest
possible pleasure. Then, as soon as he had finished,
he went to the cigar counter and purchased cigars.
As we walked to keep the appointment he gave me
the following reminiscence: When he left Boston and
decided to come to New York he had only money
enough for the trip. After leaving the boat his first
thought was of breakfast; but he was without money
to obtain it. However, in passing a wholesale tea-
house he saw a man tasting tea, so he went in and
asked the `taster' if he might have some of the tea.
This the man gave him, and thus he obtained his first
breakfast in New York. He knew a telegraph operator
here, and on him he depended for a loan to tide
him over until such time as he should secure a position.
During the day he succeeded in locating this operator,
but found that he also was out of a job, and that the
best he could do was to loan him one dollar, which
he did. This small sum of money represented both
food and lodging until such time as work could be
obtained. Edison said that as the result of the time
consumed and the exercise in walking while he found
his friend, he was extremely hungry, and that he gave
most serious consideration as to what he should buy
in the way of food, and what particular kind of food
would be most satisfying and filling. The result was
that at Smith & McNell's he decided on apple dumplings
and a cup of coffee, than which he never ate anything
more appetizing. It was not long before he
was at work and was able to live in a normal manner."

During the Civil War, with its enormous increase
in the national debt and the volume of paper money,
gold had gone to a high premium; and, as ever, by its
fluctuations in price the value of all other commodities
was determined. This led to the creation of a
"Gold Room" in Wall Street, where the precious
metal could be dealt in; while for dealings in stocks
there also existed the "Regular Board," the "Open
Board," and the "Long Room." Devoted to one,
but the leading object of speculation, the "Gold
Room" was the very focus of all the financial and
gambling activity of the time, and its quotations
governed trade and commerce. At first notations in
chalk on a blackboard sufficed, but seeing their
inadequacy, Dr. S. S. Laws, vice-president and actual
presiding officer of the Gold Exchange, devised and
introduced what was popularly known as the "gold
indicator." This exhibited merely the prevailing
price of gold; but as its quotations changed from
instant to instant, it was in a most literal sense "the
cynosure of neighboring eyes." One indicator looked
upon the Gold Room; the other opened toward the
street. Within the exchange the face could easily be
seen high up on the west wall of the room, and the
machine was operated by Mr. Mersereau, the official
registrar of the Gold Board.

Doctor Laws, who afterward became President of
the State University of Missouri, was an inventor of
unusual ability and attainments. In his early youth
he had earned his livelihood in a tool factory; and,
apparently with his savings, he went to Princeton,
where he studied electricity under no less a teacher
than the famous Joseph Henry. At the outbreak of
the war in 1861 he was president of one of the
Presbyterian synodical colleges in the South, whose
buildings passed into the hands of the Government.
Going to Europe, he returned to New York in 1863,
and, becoming interested with a relative in financial
matters, his connection with the Gold Exchange soon
followed, when it was organized. The indicating
mechanism he now devised was electrical, controlled
at central by two circuit-closing keys, and was a
prototype of all the later and modern step-by-step printing
telegraphs, upon which the distribution of financial
news depends. The "fraction" drum of the indicator
could be driven in either direction, known as
the advance and retrograde movements, and was
divided and marked in eighths. It geared into a
"unit" drum, just as do speed-indicators and
cyclometers. Four electrical pulsations were required to
move the drum the distance between the fractions.
The general operation was simple, and in normally
active times the mechanism and the registrar were
equal to all emergencies. But it is obvious that the
record had to be carried away to the brokers' offices
and other places by messengers; and the delay,
confusion, and mistakes soon suggested to Doctor Laws
the desirability of having a number of indicators at
such scattered points, operated by a master transmitter,
and dispensing with the regiments of noisy
boys. He secured this privilege of distribution, and,
resigning from the exchange, devoted his exclusive
attention to the "Gold Reporting Telegraph," which
he patented, and for which, at the end of 1866, he
had secured fifty subscribers. His indicators were
small oblong boxes, in the front of which was a long
slot, allowing the dials as they travelled past, inside,
to show the numerals constituting the quotation;
the dials or wheels being arranged in a row
horizontally, overlapping each other, as in modern fare
registers which are now seen on most trolley cars.
It was not long before there were three hundred
subscribers; but the very success of this device brought
competition and improvement. Mr. E. A. Callahan,
an ingenious printing-telegraph operator, saw that
there were unexhausted possibilities in the idea, and
his foresight and inventiveness made him the father
of the "ticker," in connection with which he was
thus, like Laws, one of the first to grasp and exploit
the underlying principle of the "central station" as
a universal source of supply. The genesis of his
invention Mr. Callahan has told in an interesting way:
"In 1867, on the site of the present Mills Building on
Broad Street, opposite the Stock Exchange of today,
was an old building which had been cut up to
subserve the necessities of its occupants, all engaged
in dealing in gold and stocks. It had one main entrance
from the street to a hallway, from which entrance
to the offices of two prominent broker firms
was obtained. Each firm had its own army of boys,
numbering from twelve to fifteen, whose duties were
to ascertain the latest quotations from the different
exchanges. Each boy devoted his attention to some
particularly active stock. Pushing each other to
get into these narrow quarters, yelling out the prices
at the door, and pushing back for later ones, the
hustle made this doorway to me a most undesirable
refuge from an April shower. I was simply whirled
into the street. I naturally thought that much of
this noise and confusion might be dispensed with, and
that the prices might be furnished through some
system of telegraphy which would not require the
employment of skilled operators. The conception of
the stock ticker dates from this incident."

Mr. Callahan's first idea was to distribute gold
quotations, and to this end he devised an "indicator."
It consisted of two dials mounted separately, each
revolved by an electromagnet, so that the desired
figures were brought to an aperture in the case
enclosing the apparatus, as in the Laws system. Each
shaft with its dial was provided with two ratchet
wheels, one the reverse of the other. One was used in
connection with the propelling lever, which was provided
with a pawl to fit into the teeth of the reversed
ratchet wheel on its forward movement. It was thus
made impossible for either dial to go by momentum
beyond its limit. Learning that Doctor Laws, with
the skilful aid of F. L. Pope, was already active in the
same direction, Mr. Callahan, with ready wit, transformed
his indicator into a "ticker" that would make
a printed record. The name of the "ticker" came
through the casual remark of an observer to whom
the noise was the most striking feature of the
mechanism. Mr. Callahan removed the two dials, and,
substituting type wheels, turned the movements face
to face, so that each type wheel could imprint its
characters upon a paper tape in two lines. Three
wires stranded together ran from the central office
to each instrument. Of these one furnished the current
for the alphabet wheel, one for the figure wheel,
and one for the mechanism that took care of the
inking and printing on the tape. Callahan made the
further innovation of insulating his circuit wires,
although the cost was then forty times as great as
that of bare wire. It will be understood that
electromagnets were the ticker's actuating agency. The
ticker apparatus was placed under a neat glass shade
and mounted on a shelf. Twenty-five instruments
were energized from one circuit, and the quotations
were supplied from a "central" at 18 New Street.
The Gold & Stock Telegraph Company was promptly
organized to supply to brokers the system, which
was very rapidly adopted throughout the financial
district of New York, at the southern tip of Manhattan
Island. Quotations were transmitted by the
Morse telegraph from the floor of the Stock Exchange
to the "central," and thence distributed to the
subscribers. Success with the "stock" news system was
instantaneous.

It was at this juncture that Edison reached New
York, and according to his own statement found
shelter at night in the battery-room of the Gold
Indicator Company, having meantime applied for a
position as operator with the Western Union. He
had to wait a few days, and during this time he seized
the opportunity to study the indicators and the complicated
general transmitter in the office, controlled
from the keyboard of the operator on the floor of the
Gold Exchange. What happened next has been the
basis of many inaccurate stories, but is dramatic
enough as told in Mr. Edison's own version: "On the
third day of my arrival and while sitting in the office,
the complicated general instrument for sending on all
the lines, and which made a very great noise, suddenly
came to a stop with a crash. Within two minutes
over three hundred boys--a boy from every broker
in the street--rushed up-stairs and crowded the long
aisle and office, that hardly had room for one hundred,
all yelling that such and such a broker's wire was out
of order and to fix it at once. It was pandemonium,
and the man in charge became so excited that he lost
control of all the knowledge he ever had. I went to
the indicator, and, having studied it thoroughly, knew
where the trouble ought to be, and found it. One of
the innumerable contact springs had broken off and
had fallen down between the two gear wheels and
stopped the instrument; but it was not very noticeable.
As I went out to tell the man in charge what
the matter was, Doctor Laws appeared on the scene,
the most excited person I had seen. He demanded
of the man the cause of the trouble, but the man was
speechless. I ventured to say that I knew what the
trouble was, and he said, `Fix it! Fix it! Be quick!'
I removed the spring and set the contact wheels at
zero; and the line, battery, and inspecting men all
scattered through the financial district to set the
instruments. In about two hours things were working
again. Doctor Laws came in to ask my name and
what I was doing. I told him, and he asked me to
come to his private office the following day. His
office was filled with stacks of books all relating to
metaphysics and kindred matters. He asked me a
great many questions about the instruments and his
system, and I showed him how he could simplify
things generally. He then requested that I should
call next day. On arrival, he stated at once that
he had decided to put me in charge of the whole
plant, and that my salary would be $300 per month!
This was such a violent jump from anything I had
ever seen before, that it rather paralyzed me for a
while, I thought it was too much to be lasting, but
I determined to try and live up to that salary if
twenty hours a day of hard work would do it. I
kept this position, made many improvements, devised
several stock tickers, until the Gold & Stock
Telegraph Company consolidated with the Gold Indicator
Company." Certainly few changes in fortune
have been more sudden and dramatic in any
notable career than this which thus placed an ill-
clad, unkempt, half-starved, eager lad in a position
of such responsibility in days when the fluctuations
in the price of gold at every instant meant fortune or
ruin to thousands.

Edison, barely twenty-one years old, was a keen
observer of the stirring events around him. "Wall
Street" is at any time an interesting study, but it
was never at a more agitated and sensational period
of its history than at this time. Edison's arrival in
New York coincided with an active speculation in
gold which may, indeed, be said to have provided him
with occupation; and was soon followed by the attempt
of Mr. Jay Gould and his associates to corner
the gold market, precipitating the panic of Black
Friday, September 24, 1869. Securing its import
duties in the precious metal and thus assisting to
create an artificial stringency in the gold market, the
Government had made it a practice to relieve the
situation by selling a million of gold each month.
The metal was thus restored to circulation. In some
manner, President Grant was persuaded that general
conditions and the movement of the crops would be
helped if the sale of gold were suspended for a time;
and, this put into effect, he went to visit an old
friend in Pennsylvania remote from railroads and
telegraphs. The Gould pool had acquired control of
$10,000,000 in gold, and drove the price upward
rapidly from 144 toward their goal of 200. On Black
Friday they purchased another $28,000,000 at 160,
and still the price went up. The financial and
commercial interests of the country were in panic; but
the pool persevered in its effort to corner gold, with
a profit of many millions contingent on success.
Yielding to frantic requests, President Grant, who
returned to Washington, caused Secretary Boutwell,
of the Treasury, to throw $4,000,000 of gold into the
market. Relief was instantaneous, the corner was
broken, but the harm had been done. Edison's remarks
shed a vivid side-light on this extraordinary
episode: "On Black Friday," he says, "we had a
very exciting time with the indicators. The Gould
and Fisk crowd had cornered gold, and had run the
quotations up faster than the indicator could follow.
The indicator was composed of several wheels; on
the circumference of each wheel were the numerals;
and one wheel had fractions. It worked in the same
way as an ordinary counter; one wheel made ten
revolutions, and at the tenth it advanced the adjacent
wheel; and this in its turn having gone ten revolutions,
advanced the next wheel, and so on. On the
morning of Black Friday the indicator was quoting
150 premium, whereas the bids by Gould's agents in
the Gold Room were 165 for five millions or any part.
We had a paper-weight at the transmitter (to speed
it up), and by one o'clock reached the right quotation.
The excitement was prodigious. New Street,
as well as Broad Street, was jammed with excited
people. I sat on the top of the Western Union telegraph
booth to watch the surging, crazy crowd. One
man came to the booth, grabbed a pencil, and
attempted to write a message to Boston. The first
stroke went clear off the blank; he was so excited that
he had the operator write the message for him. Amid
great excitement Speyer, the banker, went crazy and
it took five men to hold him; and everybody lost their
head. The Western Union operator came to me and
said: `Shake, Edison, we are O. K. We haven't got
a cent.' I felt very happy because we were poor.
These occasions are very enjoyable to a poor man;
but they occur rarely."

There is a calm sense of detachment about this
description that has been possessed by the narrator
even in the most anxious moments of his career. He
was determined to see all that could be seen, and,
quitting his perch on the telegraph booth, sought the
more secluded headquarters of the pool forces. "A
friend of mine was an operator who worked in the
office of Belden & Company, 60 Broadway, which
were headquarters for Fisk. Mr. Gould was up-town
in the Erie offices in the Grand Opera House. The firm
on Broad Street, Smith, Gould & Martin, was the other
branch. All were connected with wires. Gould seemed
to be in charge, Fisk being the executive down-town.
Fisk wore a velvet corduroy coat and a very peculiar
vest. He was very chipper, and seemed to be light-
hearted and happy. Sitting around the room were
about a dozen fine-looking men. All had the complexion
of cadavers. There was a basket of cham-
pagne. Hundreds of boys were rushing in paying
checks, all checks being payable to Belden & Company.
When James Brown, of Brown Brothers &
Company, broke the corner by selling five million
gold, all payments were repudiated by Smith, Gould
& Martin; but they continued to receive checks at
Belden & Company's for some time, until the Street
got wind of the game. There was some kind of conspiracy
with the Government people which I could
not make out, but I heard messages that opened my
eyes as to the ramifications of Wall Street. Gold fell
to 132, and it took us all night to get the indicator
back to that quotation. All night long the streets
were full of people. Every broker's office was brilliantly
lighted all night, and all hands were at work.
The clearing-house for gold had been swamped, and
all was mixed up. No one knew if he was bankrupt
or not."

Edison in those days rather liked the modest coffee-
shops, and mentions visiting one. "When on the
New York No. 1 wire, that I worked in Boston, there
was an operator named Jerry Borst at the other end.
He was a first-class receiver and rapid sender. We
made up a scheme to hold this wire, so he changed
one letter of the alphabet and I soon got used to it;
and finally we changed three letters. If any operator
tried to receive from Borst, he couldn't do it, so Borst
and I always worked together. Borst did less talking
than any operator I ever knew. Never having seen
him, I went while in New York to call upon him. I
did all the talking. He would listen, stroke his
beard, and say nothing. In the evening I went over
to an all-night lunch-house in Printing House Square
in a basement--Oliver's. Night editors, including
Horace Greeley, and Henry Raymond, of the New
York Times, took their midnight lunch there. When
I went with Borst and another operator, they pointed
out two or three men who were then celebrated in the
newspaper world. The night was intensely hot and
close. After getting our lunch and upon reaching the
sidewalk, Borst opened his mouth, and said: `That's
a great place; a plate of cakes, a cup of coffee, and
a Russian bath, for ten cents.' This was about fifty
per cent. of his conversation for two days."

The work of Edison on the gold-indicator had
thrown him into close relationship with Mr. Franklin
L. Pope, the young telegraph engineer then associated
with Doctor Laws, and afterward a distinguished
expert and technical writer, who became
President of the American Institute of Electrical
Engineers in 1886. Each recognized the special ability
of the other, and barely a week after the famous
events of Black Friday the announcement of their
partnership appeared in the Telegrapher of October
1, 1869. This was the first "professional card," if
it may be so described, ever issued in America by a
firm of electrical engineers, and is here reproduced.
It is probable that the advertisement, one of the largest
in the Telegrapher, and appearing frequently, was
not paid for at full rates, as the publisher, Mr. J. N.
Ashley, became a partner in the firm, and not altogether
a "sleeping one" when it came to a division
of profits, which at times were considerable. In
order to be nearer his new friend Edison boarded with
Pope at Elizabeth, New Jersey, for some time, living
"the strenuous life" in the performance of his duties.
Associated with Pope and Ashley, he followed up his
work on telegraph printers with marked success.
"While with them I devised a printer to print gold
quotations instead of indicating them. The lines were
started, and the whole was sold out to the Gold &
Stock Telegraph Company. My experimenting was
all done in the small shop of a Doctor Bradley,
located near the station of the Pennsylvania Railroad
in Jersey City. Every night I left for Elizabeth on
the 1 A.M. train, then walked half a mile to Mr. Pope's
house and up at 6 A.M. for breakfast to catch the
7 A.M. train. This continued all winter, and many
were the occasions when I was nearly frozen in the
Elizabeth walk." This Doctor Bradley appears to
have been the first in this country to make electrical
measurements of precision with the galvanometer,
but was an old-school experimenter who would work
for years on an instrument without commercial value.
He was also extremely irascible, and when on one
occasion the connecting wire would not come out of
one of the binding posts of a new and costly galvanometer,
he jerked the instrument to the floor and then
jumped on it. He must have been, however, a man
of originality, as evidenced by his attempt to age
whiskey by electricity, an attempt that has often
since been made. "The hobby he had at the time
I was there," says Edison, "was the aging of raw
whiskey by passing strong electric currents through
it. He had arranged twenty jars with platinum
electrodes held in place by hard rubber. When all
was ready, he filled the cells with whiskey, connected
the battery, locked the door of the small room in
which they were placed, and gave positive orders
that no one should enter. He then disappeared for
three days. On the second day we noticed a terrible
smell in the shop, as if from some dead animal. The
next day the doctor arrived and, noticing the smell,
asked what was dead. We all thought something
had got into his whiskey-room and died. He opened
it and was nearly overcome. The hard rubber he
used was, of course, full of sulphur, and this being
attacked by the nascent hydrogen, had produced
sulphuretted hydrogen gas in torrents, displacing all
of the air in the room. Sulphuretted hydrogen is,
as is well known, the gas given off by rotten eggs."

Another glimpse of this period of development is
afforded by an interesting article on the stock-reporting
telegraph in the Electrical World of March 4, 1899,
by Mr. Ralph W. Pope, the well-known Secretary of
the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, who
had as a youth an active and intimate connection
with that branch of electrical industry. In the course
of his article he mentions the curious fact that Doctor
Laws at first, in receiving quotations from the Exchanges,
was so distrustful of the Morse system that
he installed long lines of speaking-tube as a more
satisfactory and safe device than a telegraph wire.
As to the relations of that time Mr. Pope remarks:
"The rivalry between the two concerns resulted in
consolidation, Doctor Laws's enterprise being
absorbed by the Gold & Stock Telegraph Company,
while the Laws stock printer was relegated to the
scrap-heap and the museum. Competition in the
field did not, however, cease. Messrs. Pope and
Edison invented a one-wire printer, and started a
system of `gold printers' devoted to the recording
of gold quotations and sterling exchange only. It
was intended more especially for importers and
exchange brokers, and was furnished at a lower price
than the indicator service.... The building and
equipment of private telegraph lines was also entered
upon. This business was also subsequently absorbed
by the Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, which was
probably at this time at the height of its prosperity.
The financial organization of the company was peculiar
and worthy of attention. Each subscriber for
a machine paid in $100 for the privilege of securing
an instrument. For the service he paid $25 weekly.
In case he retired or failed, he could transfer his
`right,' and employees were constantly on the alert
for purchasable rights, which could be disposed of
at a profit. It was occasionally worth the profit to
convince a man that he did not actually own the
machine which had been placed in his office.... The
Western Union Telegraph Company secured a majority
of its stock, and Gen. Marshall Lefferts was
elected president. A private-line department was
established, and the business taken over from Pope,
Edison, and Ashley was rapidly enlarged."

At this juncture General Lefferts, as President of
the Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, requested
Edison to go to work on improving the stock ticker,
furnishing the money; and the well-known "Universal"
ticker, in wide-spread use in its day, was one
result. Mr. Edison gives a graphic picture of the
startling effect on his fortunes: "I made a great many
inventions; one was the special ticker used for many
years outside of New York in the large cities. This
was made exceedingly simple, as they did not have
the experts we had in New York to handle anything
complicated. The same ticker was used on the London
Stock Exchange. After I had made a great number
of inventions and obtained patents, the General
seemed anxious that the matter should be closed up.
One day I exhibited and worked a successful device
whereby if a ticker should get out of unison in a
broker's office and commence to print wild figures,
it could be brought to unison from the central station,
which saved the labor of many men and much trouble
to the broker. He called me into his office, and said:
`Now, young man, I want to close up the matter of
your inventions. How much do you think you should
receive?' I had made up my mind that, taking into
consideration the time and killing pace I was working
at, I should be entitled to $5000, but could get along
with $3000. When the psychological moment arrived,
I hadn't the nerve to name such a large sum,
so I said: `Well, General, suppose you make me an
offer.' Then he said: `How would $40,000 strike
you?' This caused me to come as near fainting as I
ever got. I was afraid he would hear my heart beat.
I managed to say that I thought it was fair. `All
right, I will have a contract drawn; come around in
three days and sign it, and I will give you the money.'
I arrived on time, but had been doing some considerable
thinking on the subject. The sum seemed to
be very large for the amount of work, for at that time
I determined the value by the time and trouble, and
not by what the invention was worth to others. I
thought there was something unreal about it. However,
the contract was handed to me. I signed without
reading it." Edison was then handed the first
check he had ever received, one for $40,000 drawn
on the Bank of New York, at the corner of William
and Wall Streets. On going to the bank and passing
in the check at the wicket of the paying teller, some
brief remarks were made to him, which in his deafness
he did not understand. The check was handed
back to him, and Edison, fancying for a moment that
in some way he had been cheated, went outside "to
the large steps to let the cold sweat evaporate." He
then went back to the General, who, with his secretary,
had a good laugh over the matter, told him the check
must be endorsed, and sent with him a young man
to identify him. The ceremony of identification
performed with the paying teller, who was quite merry
over the incident, Edison was given the amount in
bundles of small bills "until there certainly seemed
to be one cubic foot." Unaware that he was the victim
of a practical joke, Edison proceeded gravely to
stow away the money in his overcoat pockets and all
his other pockets. He then went to Newark and sat
up all night with the money for fear it might be
stolen. Once more he sought help next morning,
when the General laughed heartily, and, telling the
clerk that the joke must not be carried any further,
enabled him to deposit the currency in the bank and
open an account.

Thus in an inconceivably brief time had Edison
passed from poverty to independence; made a deep
impression as to his originality and ability on
important people, and brought out valuable inventions;
lifting himself at one bound out of the ruck of
mediocrity, and away from the deadening drudgery of the
key. Best of all he was enterprising, one of the
leaders and pioneers for whom the world is always
looking; and, to use his own criticism of himself, he
had "too sanguine a temperament to keep money
in solitary confinement." With quiet self-possession
he seized his opportunity, began to buy machinery,
rented a shop and got work for it. Moving quickly
into a larger shop, Nos. 10 and 12 Ward Street,
Newark, New Jersey, he secured large orders from
General Lefferts to build stock tickers, and employed
fifty men. As business increased he put on a night
force, and was his own foreman on both shifts. Half
an hour of sleep three or four times in the twenty-
four hours was all he needed in those days, when one
invention succeeded another with dazzling rapidity,
and when he worked with the fierce, eruptive energy
of a great volcano, throwing out new ideas incessantly
with spectacular effect on the arts to which they
related. It has always been a theory with Edison that
we sleep altogether too much; but on the other hand
he never, until long past fifty, knew or practiced the
slightest moderation in work or in the use of strong
coffee and black cigars. He has, moreover, while
of tender and kindly disposition, never hesitated to
use men up as freely as a Napoleon or Grant; seeing
only the goal of a complete invention or perfected de-
vice, to attain which all else must become subsidiary.
He gives a graphic picture of his first methods as a
manufacturer: "Nearly all my men were on piece
work, and I allowed them to make good wages, and
never cut until the pay became absurdly high as they
got more expert. I kept no books. I had two hooks.
All the bills and accounts I owed I jabbed on one
hook; and memoranda of all owed to myself I put
on the other. When some of the bills fell due, and
I couldn't deliver tickers to get a supply of money, I
gave a note. When the notes were due, a messenger
came around from the bank with the note and a
protest pinned to it for $1.25. Then I would go to
New York and get an advance, or pay the note if I
had the money. This method of giving notes for
my accounts and having all notes protested I kept
up over two years, yet my credit was fine. Every
store I traded with was always glad to furnish goods,
perhaps in amazed admiration of my system of doing
business, which was certainly new." After a while
Edison got a bookkeeper, whose vagaries made him
look back with regret on the earlier, primitive method.
"The first three months I had him go over the books
to find out how much we had made. He reported
$3000. I gave a supper to some of my men to celebrate
this, only to be told two days afterward that
he had made a mistake, and that we had lost $500; and
then a few days after that he came to me again and
said he was all mixed up, and now found that we had
made over $7000." Edison changed bookkeepers, but
never thereafter counted anything real profit until he
had paid all his debts and had the profits in the bank.

The factory work at this time related chiefly to
stock tickers, principally the "Universal," of which
at one time twelve hundred were in use. Edison's
connection with this particular device was very
close while it lasted. In a review of the ticker art,
Mr. Callahan stated, with rather grudging praise,
that "a ticker at the present time (1901) would be
considered as impracticable and unsalable if it were
not provided with a unison device," and he goes on
to remark: "The first unison on stock tickers was
one used on the Laws printer.[2] It was a crude and
unsatisfactory piece of mechanism and necessitated
doubling of the battery in order to bring it into action.
It was short-lived. The Edison unison comprised a
lever with a free end travelling in a spiral or worm
on the type-wheel shaft until it met a pin at the end
of the worm, thus obstructing the shaft and leaving
the type-wheels at the zero-point until released by
the printing lever. This device is too well known to
require a further description. It is not applicable
to any instrument using two independently moving
type-wheels; but on nearly if not all other instruments
will be found in use." The stock ticker has
enjoyed the devotion of many brilliant inventors--
G. M. Phelps, H. Van Hoevenbergh, A. A. Knudson,
G. B. Scott, S. D. Field, John Burry--and remains in
extensive use as an appliance for which no substitute
or competitor has been found. In New York the
two great stock exchanges have deemed it necessary
to own and operate a stock-ticker service for the sole
benefit of their members; and down to the present
moment the process of improvement has gone on,
impelled by the increasing volume of business to be
reported. It is significant of Edison's work, now
dimmed and overlaid by later advances, that at the
very outset he recognized the vital importance of
interchangeability in the construction of this delicate
and sensitive apparatus. But the difficulties of these
early days were almost insurmountable. Mr. R. W.
Pope says of the "Universal" machines that they were
simple and substantial and generally satisfactory,
but adds: "These instruments were supposed to have
been made with interchangeable parts; but as a
matter of fact the instances in which these parts
would fit were very few. The instruction-book prepared
for the use of inspectors stated that `The parts
should not be tinkered nor bent, as they are accurately
made and interchangeable.' The difficulties encountered
in fitting them properly doubtless gave rise to a
story that Mr. Edison had stated that there were three
degrees of interchangeability. This was interpreted to
mean: First, the parts will fit; second, they will almost
fit; third, they do not fit, and can't be made to fit."

[2] This I invented as well.--T. A. E.

This early shop affords an illustration of the manner
in which Edison has made a deep impression on the
personnel of the electrical arts. At a single bench
there worked three men since rich or prominent.
One was Sigmund Bergmann, for a time partner with
Edison in his lighting developments in the United
States, and now head and principal owner of electrical
works in Berlin employing ten thousand men. The
next man adjacent was John Kruesi, afterward engineer
of the great General Electric Works at
Schenectady. A third was Schuckert, who left the
bench to settle up his father's little estate at Nuremberg,
stayed there and founded electrical factories,
which became the third largest in Germany, their
proprietor dying very wealthy. "I gave them a good
training as to working hours and hustling," says their
quondam master; and this is equally true as applied
to many scores of others working in companies bearing
the Edison name or organized under Edison
patents. It is curiously significant in this connection
that of the twenty-one presidents of the national
society, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers,
founded in 1884, eight have been intimately
associated with Edison--namely, Norvin Green and
F. L. Pope, as business colleagues of the days of which
we now write; while Messrs. Frank J. Sprague, T. C.
Martin, A. E. Kennelly, S. S. Wheeler, John W.
Lieb, Jr., and Louis A. Ferguson have all been at one
time or another in the Edison employ. The remark
was once made that if a famous American teacher
sat at one end of a log and a student at the other end,
the elements of a successful university were present.
It is equally true that in Edison and the many men
who have graduated from his stern school of endeavor,
America has had its foremost seat of electrical
engineering.

CHAPTER VIII

AUTOMATIC, DUPLEX, AND QUADRUPLEX
TELEGRAPHY

WORK of various kinds poured in upon the young
manufacturer, busy also with his own schemes
and inventions, which soon began to follow so many
distinct lines of inquiry that it ceases to be easy or
necessary for the historian to treat them all in
chronological sequence. Some notion of his ceaseless
activity may be formed from the fact that he started no
fewer than three shops in Newark during 1870-71,
and while directing these was also engaged by the
men who controlled the Automatic Telegraph Company
of New York, which had a circuit to Washington,
to help it out of its difficulties. "Soon after
starting the large shop (10 and 12 Ward Street,
Newark), I rented shop-room to the inventor of a
new rifle. I think it was the Berdan. In any event,
it was a rifle which was subsequently adopted by the
British Army. The inventor employed a tool-maker
who was the finest and best tool-maker I had ever
seen. I noticed that he worked pretty near the
whole of the twenty-four hours. This kind of application
I was looking for. He was getting $21.50 per
week, and was also paid for overtime. I asked him
if he could run the shop. `I don't know; try me!' he
said. `All right, I will give you $60 per week to run
both shifts.' He went at it. His executive ability
was greater than that of any other man I have yet
seen. His memory was prodigious, conversation
laconic, and movements rapid. He doubled the production
inside three months, without materially increasing
the pay-roll, by increasing the cutting speeds
of tools, and by the use of various devices. When in
need of rest he would lie down on a work-bench,
sleep twenty or thirty minutes, and wake up fresh.
As this was just what I could do, I naturally conceived
a great pride in having such a man in charge
of my work. But almost everything has trouble connected
with it. He disappeared one day, and although
I sent men everywhere that it was likely he
could be found, he was not discovered. After two
weeks he came into the factory in a terrible condition
as to clothes and face. He sat down and, turning to
me, said: `Edison, it's no use, this is the third time;
I can't stand prosperity. Put my salary back and
give me a job.' I was very sorry to learn that it was
whiskey that spoiled such a career. I gave him an
inferior job and kept him for a long time."

Edison had now entered definitely upon that career
as an inventor which has left so deep an imprint on
the records of the United States Patent Office, where
from his first patent in 1869 up to the summer of 1910
no fewer than 1328 separate patents have been applied
for in his name, averaging thirty-two every
year, and one about every eleven days; with a
substantially corresponding number issued. The
height of this inventive activity was attained
about 1882, in which year no fewer than 141 pat-
ents were applied for, and seventy-five granted to
him, or nearly nine times as many as in 1876, when
invention as a profession may be said to have been
adopted by this prolific genius. It will be understood,
of course, that even these figures do not represent
the full measure of actual invention, as in every
process and at every step there were many discoveries
that were not brought to patent registration, but
remained "trade secrets." And furthermore, that in
practically every case the actual patented invention
followed from one to a dozen or more gradually developing
forms of the same idea.

An Englishman named George Little had brought
over a system of automatic telegraphy which worked
well on a short line, but was a failure when put upon
the longer circuits for which automatic methods are
best adapted. The general principle involved in
automatic or rapid telegraphs, except the photographic
ones, is that of preparing the message in
advance, for dispatch, by perforating narrow strips of
paper with holes--work which can be done either by
hand-punches or by typewriter apparatus. A certain
group of perforations corresponds to a Morse
group of dots and dashes for a letter of the alphabet.
When the tape thus made ready is run rapidly through
a transmitting machine, electrical contact occurs
wherever there is a perforation, permitting the current
from the battery to flow into the line and thus
transmit signals correspondingly. At the distant end
these signals are received sometimes on an ink-writing
recorder as dots and dashes, or even as typewriting
letters; but in many of the earlier systems, like that
of Bain, the record at the higher rates of speed was
effected by chemical means, a tell-tale stain being
made on the travelling strip of paper by every spurt
of incoming current. Solutions of potassium iodide
were frequently used for this purpose, giving a sharp,
blue record, but fading away too rapidly.

The Little system had perforating apparatus operated
by electromagnets; its transmitting machine
was driven by a small electromagnetic motor; and
the record was made by electrochemical decomposition,
the writing member being a minute platinum
roller instead of the more familiar iron stylus. Moreover,
a special type of wire had been put up for the
single circuit of two hundred and eighty miles between
New York and Washington. This is believed to have
been the first "compound" wire made for telegraphic
or other signalling purposes, the object being to secure
greater lightness with textile strength and high
conductivity. It had a steel core, with a copper ribbon
wound spirally around it, and tinned to the core wire.
But the results obtained were poor, and in their
necessity the parties in interest turned to Edison.

Mr. E. H. Johnson tells of the conditions: "Gen.
W. J. Palmer and some New York associates had
taken up the Little automatic system and had expended
quite a sum in its development, when, thinking
they had reduced it to practice, they got Tom
Scott, of the Pennsylvania Railroad to send his
superintendent of telegraph over to look into and
report upon it. Of course he turned it down. The
syndicate was appalled at this report, and in this
extremity General Palmer thought of the man who
had impressed him as knowing it all by the telling
of telegraphic tales as a means of whiling away lonesome
hours on the plains of Colorado, where they
were associated in railroad-building. So this man--
it was I--was sent for to come to New York and
assuage their grief if possible. My report was that
the system was sound fundamentally, that it contained
the germ of a good thing, but needed working
out. Associated with General Palmer was one Col.
Josiah C. Reiff, then Eastern bond agent for the
Kansas Pacific Railroad. The Colonel was always
resourceful, and didn't fail in this case. He knew of
a young fellow who was doing some good work for
Marshall Lefferts, and who it was said was a genius
at invention, and a very fiend for work. His name
was Edison, and he had a shop out at Newark, New
Jersey. He came and was put in my care for the
purpose of a mutual exchange of ideas and for a report
by me as to his competency in the matter. This was
my introduction to Edison. He confirmed my views
of the automatic system. He saw its possibilities,
as well as the chief obstacles to be overcome--viz.,
the sluggishness of the wire, together with the need
of mechanical betterment of the apparatus; and he
agreed to take the job on one condition--namely,
that Johnson would stay and help, as `he was a man
with ideas.' Mr. Johnson was accordingly given
three months' leave from Colorado railroad-building,
and has never seen Colorado since."

Applying himself to the difficulties with wonted
energy, Edison devised new apparatus, and solved
the problem to such an extent that he and his as-
sistants succeeded in transmitting and recording one
thousand words per minute between New York and
Washington, and thirty-five hundred words per
minute to Philadelphia. Ordinary manual transmission
by key is not in excess of forty to fifty words
a minute. Stated very briefly, Edison's principal
contribution to the commercial development of the
automatic was based on the observation that in a
line of considerable length electrical impulses become
enormously extended, or sluggish, due to a
phenomenon known as self-induction, which with
ordinary Morse work is in a measure corrected
by condensers. But in the automatic the aim was
to deal with impulses following each other from
twenty-five to one hundred times as rapidly as in
Morse lines, and to attempt to receive and record
intelligibly such a lightning-like succession of signals would
have seemed impossible. But Edison discovered that
by utilizing a shunt around the receiving instrument,
with a soft iron core, the self-induction would produce
a momentary and instantaneous reversal of the
current at the end of each impulse, and thereby give
an absolutely sharp definition to each signal. This
discovery did away entirely with sluggishness, and
made it possible to secure high speeds over lines of
comparatively great lengths. But Edison's work on
the automatic did not stop with this basic suggestion,
for he took up and perfected the mechanical construction
of the instruments, as well as the perforators,
and also suggested numerous electrosensitive
chemicals for the receivers, so that the automatic
telegraph, almost entirely by reason of his individual
work, was placed on a plane of commercial practicability.
The long line of patents secured by him
in this art is an interesting exhibit of the development
of a germ to a completed system, not, as is
usually the case, by numerous inventors working
over considerable periods of time, but by one man
evolving the successive steps at a white heat of
activity.

This system was put in commercial operation, but
the company, now encouraged, was quite willing to
allow Edison to work out his idea of an automatic
that would print the message in bold Roman letters
instead of in dots and dashes; with consequent gain
in speed in delivery of the message after its receipt
in the operating-room, it being obviously necessary
in the case of any message received in Morse characters
to copy it in script before delivery to the recipient.
A large shop was rented in Newark, equipped with
$25,000 worth of machinery, and Edison was given
full charge. Here he built their original type of
apparatus, as improved, and also pushed his experiments
on the letter system so far that at a test, between
New York and Philadelphia, three thousand words
were sent in one minute and recorded in Roman type.
Mr. D. N. Craig, one of the early organizers of the
Associated Press, became interested in this company,
whose president was Mr. George Harrington, formerly
Assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury.

Mr. Craig brought with him at this time--the early
seventies--from Milwaukee a Mr. Sholes, who had a
wooden model of a machine to which had been given the
then new and unfamiliar name of "typewriter." Craig
was interested in the machine, and put the model in
Edison's hands to perfect. "This typewriter proved a
difficult thing," says Edison, "to make commercial.
The alignment of the letters was awful. One letter
would be one-sixteenth of an inch above the others;
and all the letters wanted to wander out of line. I
worked on it till the machine gave fair results.[3] Some
were made and used in the office of the Automatic
company. Craig was very sanguine that some day all
business letters would be written on a typewriter.
He died before that took place; but it gradually
made its way. The typewriter I got into commercial
shape is now known as the Remington. About this
time I got an idea I could devise an apparatus by
which four messages could simultaneously be sent
over a single wire without interfering with each other.
I now had five shops, and with experimenting on this
new scheme I was pretty busy; at least I did not
have ennui."

[3] See illustration on opposite page, showing reproduction of the
work done with this machine.

A very interesting picture of Mr. Edison at this time
is furnished by Mr. Patrick B. Delany, a well-known
inventor in the field of automatic and multiplex
telegraphy, who at that time was a chief operator of the
Franklin Telegraph Company at Philadelphia. His
remark about Edison that "his ingenuity inspired
confidence, and wavering financiers stiffened up when
it became known that he was to develop the automatic"
is a noteworthy evidence of the manner in
which the young inventor had already gained a firm
footing. He continues: "Edward H. Johnson was
brought on from the Denver & Rio Grande Railway
to assist in the practical introduction of automatic
telegraphy on a commercial basis, and about this
time, in 1872, I joined the enterprise. Fairly good
results were obtained between New York and Washington,
and Edison, indifferent to theoretical difficulties,
set out to prove high speeds between New
York and Charleston, South Carolina, the compound
wire being hitched up to one of the Southern &
Atlantic wires from Washington to Charleston for
the purpose of experimentation. Johnson and I
went to the Charleston end to carry out Edison's
plans, which were rapidly unfolded by telegraph
every night from a loft on lower Broadway, New
York. We could only get the wire after all business
was cleared, usually about midnight, and for months,
in the quiet hours, that wire was subjected to more
electrical acrobatics than any other wire ever
experienced. When the experiments ended, Edison's
system was put into regular commercial operation
between New York and Washington; and did fine
work. If the single wire had not broken about every
other day, the venture would have been a financial
success; but moisture got in between the copper ribbon
and the steel core, setting up galvanic action
which made short work of the steel. The demonstration
was, however, sufficiently successful to impel
Jay Gould to contract to pay about $4,000,000 in stock
for the patents. The contract was never completed so
far as the $4,000,000 were concerned, but Gould made
good use of it in getting control of the Western Union."

One of the most important persons connected with
the automatic enterprise was Mr. George Harrington,
to whom we have above referred, and with whom Mr.
Edison entered into close confidential relations, so
that the inventions made were held jointly, under a
partnership deed covering "any inventions or
improvements that may be useful or desired in
automatic telegraphy." Mr. Harrington was assured at
the outset by Edison that while the Little perforator
would give on the average only seven or eight words
per minute, which was not enough for commercial
purposes, he could devise one giving fifty or sixty
words, and that while the Little solution for the
receiving tape cost $15 to $17 per gallon, he could
furnish a ferric solution costing only five or six cents
per gallon. In every respect Edison "made good,"
and in a short time the system was a success, "Mr.
Little having withdrawn his obsolete perforator, his
ineffective resistance, his costly chemical solution, to
give place to Edison's perforator, Edison's resistance
and devices, and Edison's solution costing a few cents
per gallon. But," continues Mr. Harrington, in a
memorable affidavit, "the inventive efforts of Mr.
Edison were not confined to automatic telegraphy,
nor did they cease with the opening of that line to
Washington." They all led up to the quadruplex.

Flattered by their success, Messrs. Harrington and
Reiff, who owned with Edison the foreign patents for
the new automatic system, entered into an arrangement
with the British postal telegraph authorities
for a trial of the system in England, involving its
probable adoption if successful. Edison was sent to
England to make the demonstration, in 1873, reporting
there to Col. George E. Gouraud, who had been
an associate in the United States Treasury with Mr.
Harrington, and was now connected with the new
enterprise. With one small satchel of clothes, three
large boxes of instruments, and a bright fellow-
telegrapher named Jack Wright, he took voyage on the
Jumping Java, as she was humorously known, of
the Cunard line. The voyage was rough and the
little Java justified her reputation by jumping all
over the ocean. "At the table," says Edison, "there
were never more than ten or twelve people. I wondered
at the time how it could pay to run an ocean
steamer with so few people; but when we got into
calm water and could see the green fields, I was
astounded to see the number of people who appeared.
There were certainly two or three hundred. I learned
afterward that they were mostly going to the Vienna
Exposition. Only two days could I get on deck, and
on one of these a gentleman had a bad scalp wound
from being thrown against the iron wall of a small
smoking-room erected over a freight hatch."

Arrived in London, Edison set up his apparatus at
the Telegraph Street headquarters, and sent his companion
to Liverpool with the instruments for that
end. The condition of the test was that he was to
send from Liverpool and receive in London, and to
record at the rate of one thousand words per minute,
five hundred words to be sent every half hour for six
hours. Edison was given a wire and batteries to
operate with, but a preliminary test soon showed that
he was going to fail. Both wire and batteries were
poor, and one of the men detailed by the authorities
to watch the test remarked quietly, in a friendly way:
"You are not going to have much show. They are
going to give you an old Bridgewater Canal wire that
is so poor we don't work it, and a lot of `sand batteries'
at Liverpool."[4] The situation was rather depressing
to the young American thus encountering,
for the first time, the stolid conservatism and opposition
to change that characterizes so much of official
life and methods in Europe. "I thanked him," says
Edison, "and hoped to reciprocate somehow. I knew
I was in a hole. I had been staying at a little hotel
in Covent Garden called the Hummums! and got
nothing but roast beef and flounders, and my imagination
was getting into a coma. What I needed was
pastry. That night I found a French pastry shop
in High Holborn Street and filled up. My imagination
got all right. Early in the morning I saw
Gouraud, stated my case, and asked if he would stand
for the purchase of a powerful battery to send to
Liverpool. He said `Yes.' I went immediately to
Apps on the Strand and asked if he had a powerful
battery. He said he hadn't; that all that he had
was Tyndall's Royal Institution battery, which he
supposed would not serve. I saw it--one hundred
cells--and getting the price--one hundred guineas--
hurried to Gouraud. He said `Go ahead.' I telegraphed
to the man in Liverpool. He came on, got
the battery to Liverpool, set up and ready, just two
hours before the test commenced. One of the principal
things that made the system a success was that
the line was put to earth at the sending end through
a magnet, and the extra current from this, passed to
the line, served to sharpen the recording waves. This
new battery was strong enough to pass a powerful
current through the magnet without materially
diminishing the strength of the line current."

[4] The sand battery is now obsolete. In this type, the cell
containing the elements was filled with sand, which was kept moist
with an electrolyte.

The test under these more favorable circumstances
was a success. "The record was as perfect as copper
plate, and not a single remark was made in the `time
lost' column." Edison was now asked if he thought
he could get a greater speed through submarine cables
with this system than with the regular methods, and
replied that he would like a chance to try it. For
this purpose, twenty-two hundred miles of Brazilian
cable then stored under water in tanks at the Greenwich
works of the Telegraph Construction & Maintenance
Company, near London, was placed at his
disposal from 8 P.M. until 6 A.M. "This just suited
me, as I preferred night-work. I got my apparatus
down and set up, and then to get a preliminary idea
of what the distortion of the signal would be, I sent
a single dot, which should have been recorded upon my
automatic paper by a mark about one-thirty-second of
an inch long. Instead of that it was twenty-seven feet
long! If I ever had any conceit, it vanished from
my boots up. I worked on this cable more than two
weeks, and the best I could do was two words per
minute, which was only one-seventh of what the
guaranteed speed of the cable should be when laid.
What I did not know at the time was that a coiled
cable, owing to induction, was infinitely worse than
when laid out straight, and that my speed was as
good as, if not better than, with the regular system;
but no one told me this." While he was engaged on
these tests Colonel Gouraud came down one night to
visit him at the lonely works, spent a vigil with him,
and toward morning wanted coffee. There was only
one little inn near by, frequented by longshoremen and
employees from the soap-works and cement-factories
--a rough lot--and there at daybreak they went as
soon as the other customers had left for work. "The
place had a bar and six bare tables, and was simply
infested with roaches. The only things that I ever
could get were coffee made from burnt bread, with
brown molasses-cake. I ordered these for Gouraud.
The taste of the coffee, the insects, etc., were too
much. He fainted. I gave him a big dose of gin,
and this revived him. He went back to the works
and waited until six when the day men came, and
telegraphed for a carriage. He lost all interest in
the experiments after that, and I was ordered back
to America." Edison states, however, that the automatic
was finally adopted in England and used for
many years; indeed, is still in use there. But they
took whatever was needed from his system, and he
"has never had a cent from them."

Arduous work was at once resumed at home on
duplex and quadruplex telegraphy, just as though
there had been no intermission or discouragement
over dots twenty-seven feet long. A clue to his activity
is furnished in the fact that in 1872 he had
applied for thirty-eight patents in the class of teleg-
raphy, and twenty-five in 1873; several of these
being for duplex methods, on which he had experimented.
The earlier apparatus had been built several
years prior to this, as shown by a curious little
item of news that appeared in the Telegrapher of
January 30, 1869: "T. A. Edison has resigned his
situation in the Western Union office, Boston, and will
devote his time to bringing out his inventions."
Oh, the supreme, splendid confidence of youth! Six
months later, as we have seen, he had already made
his mark, and the same journal, in October, 1869,
could say: "Mr. Edison is a young man of the highest
order of mechanical talent, combined with good
scientific electrical knowledge and experience. He
has already invented and patented a number of
valuable and useful inventions, among which may
be mentioned the best instrument for double transmission
yet brought out." Not bad for a novice of
twenty-two. It is natural, therefore, after his
intervening work on indicators, stock tickers, automatic
telegraphs, and typewriters, to find him harking back
to duplex telegraphy, if, indeed, he can be said to have
dropped it in the interval. It has always been one of
the characteristic features of Edison's method of
inventing that work in several lines has gone forward
at the same time. No one line of investigation has
ever been enough to occupy his thoughts fully; or
to express it otherwise, he has found rest in turning
from one field of work to another, having absolutely
no recreations or hobbies, and not needing them. It
may also be said that, once entering it, Mr. Edison
has never abandoned any field of work. He may
change the line of attack; he may drop the subject
for a time; but sooner or later the note-books or the
Patent Office will bear testimony to the reminiscent
outcropping of latent thought on the matter. His
attention has shifted chronologically, and by process
of evolution, from one problem to another, and some
results are found to be final; but the interest of the
man in the thing never dies out. No one sees more
vividly than he the fact that in the interplay of the
arts one industry shapes and helps another, and that
no invention lives to itself alone.

The path to the quadruplex lay through work on
the duplex, which, suggested first by Moses G. Farmer
in 1852, had been elaborated by many ingenious
inventors, notably in this country by Stearns, before
Edison once again applied his mind to it. The different
methods of such multiple transmission--namely,
the simultaneous dispatch of the two communications
in opposite directions over the same wire, or the
dispatch of both at once in the same direction--gave
plenty of play to ingenuity. Prescott's Elements of
the Electric Telegraph, a standard work in its day,
described "a method of simultaneous transmission
invented by T. A. Edison, of New Jersey, in 1873,"
and says of it: "Its peculiarity consists in the fact
that the signals are transmitted in one direction by
reversing the polarity of a constant current, and in
the opposite direction by increasing or decreasing
the strength of the same current." Herein lay the
germ of the Edison quadruplex. It is also noted that
"In 1874 Edison invented a method of simultaneous
transmission by induced currents, which has given
very satisfactory results in experimental trials." Interest
in the duplex as a field of invention dwindled,
however, as the quadruplex loomed up, for while
the one doubled the capacity of a circuit, the latter
created three "phantom wires," and thus quadruplexed
the working capacity of any line to which
it was applied. As will have been gathered from the
above, the principle embodied in the quadruplex is
that of working over the line with two currents from
each end that differ from each other in strength or
nature, so that they will affect only instruments
adapted to respond to just such currents and no
others; and by so arranging the receiving apparatus
as not to be affected by the currents transmitted from
its own end of the line. Thus by combining instruments
that respond only to variation in the strength
of current from the distant station, with instruments
that respond only to the change in the direction of
current from the distant station, and by grouping a
pair of these at each end of the line, the quadruplex
is the result. Four sending and four receiving operators
are kept busy at each end, or eight in all. Aside
from other material advantages, it is estimated that
at least from $15,000,000 to $20,000,000 has been
saved by the Edison quadruplex merely in the cost
of line construction in America.

The quadruplex has not as a rule the same working
efficiency that four separate wires have. This is due
to the fact that when one of the receiving operators
is compelled to "break" the sending operator for any
reason, the "break" causes the interruption of the
work of eight operators, instead of two, as would be
the case on a single wire. The working efficiency of
the quadruplex, therefore, with the apparatus in good
working condition, depends entirely upon the skill
of the operators employed to operate it. But this
does not reflect upon or diminish the ingenuity required
for its invention. Speaking of the problem
involved, Edison said some years later to Mr. Upton,
his mathematical assistant, that "he always considered
he was only working from one room to another.
Thus he was not confused by the amount of wire and
the thought of distance."

The immense difficulties of reducing such a system
to practice may be readily conceived, especially when
it is remembered that the "line" itself, running across
hundreds of miles of country, is subject to all manner
of atmospheric conditions, and varies from moment
to moment in its ability to carry current, and also
when it is borne in mind that the quadruplex requires
at each end of the line a so-called "artificial line,"
which must have the exact resistance of the working
line and must be varied with the variations in resistance
of the working line. At this juncture other
schemes were fermenting in his brain; but the
quadruplex engrossed him. "This problem was of most
difficult and complicated kind, and I bent all my
energies toward its solution. It required a peculiar
effort of the mind, such as the imagining of eight
different things moving simultaneously on a mental
plane, without anything to demonstrate their
efficiency." It is perhaps hardly to be wondered at
that when notified he would have to pay 12 1/2 per cent.
extra if his taxes in Newark were not at once paid,
he actually forgot his own name when asked for it
suddenly at the City Hall, lost his place in the line,
and, the fatal hour striking, had to pay the surcharge
after all!

So important an invention as the quadruplex could
not long go begging, but there were many difficulties
connected with its introduction, some of which are
best described in Mr. Edison's own words: "Around
1873 the owners of the Automatic Telegraph Company
commenced negotiations with Jay Gould for
the purchase of the wires between New York and
Washington, and the patents for the system, then in
successful operation. Jay Gould at that time controlled
the Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company,
and was competing with the Western Union and
endeavoring to depress Western Union stock on the
Exchange. About this time I invented the quadruplex.
I wanted to interest the Western Union Telegraph
Company in it, with a view of selling it, but
was unsuccessful until I made an arrangement with
the chief electrician of the company, so that he could
be known as a joint inventor and receive a portion of
the money. At that time I was very short of money,
and needed it more than glory. This electrician
appeared to want glory more than money, so it was an
easy trade. I brought my apparatus over and was
given a separate room with a marble-tiled floor,
which, by-the-way, was a very hard kind of floor to
sleep on, and started in putting on the finishing
touches.

"After two months of very hard work, I got a
detail at regular times of eight operators, and we
got it working nicely from one room to another over
a wire which ran to Albany and back. Under certain
conditions of weather, one side of the quadruplex
would work very shakily, and I had not succeeded
in ascertaining the cause of the trouble. On a certain
day, when there was a board meeting of the company,
I was to make an exhibition test. The day arrived.
I had picked the best operators in New York, and
they were familiar with the apparatus. I arranged
that if a storm occurred, and the bad side got shaky,
they should do the best they could and draw freely
on their imaginations. They were sending old messages.
About 1, o'clock everything went wrong, as
there was a storm somewhere near Albany, and the
bad side got shaky. Mr. Orton, the president, and
Wm. H. Vanderbilt and the other directors came in.
I had my heart trying to climb up around my oesophagus.
I was paying a sheriff five dollars a day to
withhold judgment which had been entered against
me in a case which I had paid no attention to; and if
the quadruplex had not worked before the president,
I knew I was to have trouble and might lose my
machinery. The New York Times came out next
day with a full account. I was given $5000 as part
payment for the invention, which made me easy, and
I expected the whole thing would be closed up. But
Mr. Orton went on an extended tour just about that
time. I had paid for all the experiments on the
quadruplex and exhausted the money, and I was
again in straits. In the mean time I had introduced
the apparatus on the lines of the company, where it
was very successful.

"At that time the general superintendent of the
Western Union was Gen. T. T. Eckert (who had been
Assistant Secretary of War with Stanton). Eckert
was secretly negotiating with Gould to leave the
Western Union and take charge of the Atlantic &
Pacific--Gould's company. One day Eckert called
me into his office and made inquiries about money
matters. I told him Mr. Orton had gone off and left
me without means, and I was in straits. He told me
I would never get another cent, but that he knew a
man who would buy it. I told him of my arrangement
with the electrician, and said I could not sell
it as a whole to anybody; but if I got enough for it,
I would sell all my interest in any SHARE I might have.
He seemed to think his party would agree to this. I
had a set of quadruplex over in my shop, 10 and 12
Ward Street, Newark, and he arranged to bring him
over next evening to see the apparatus. So the next
morning Eckert came over with Jay Gould and
introduced him to me. This was the first time I had
ever seen him. I exhibited and explained the
apparatus, and they departed. The next day Eckert
sent for me, and I was taken up to Gould's house,
which was near the Windsor Hotel, Fifth Avenue.
In the basement he had an office. It was in the
evening, and we went in by the servants' entrance,
as Eckert probably feared that he was watched.
Gould started in at once and asked me how much I
wanted. I said: `Make me an offer.' Then he said:
`I will give you $30,000.' I said: `I will sell any
interest I may have for that money,' which was something
more than I thought I could get. The next
morning I went with Gould to the office of his lawyers,
Sherman & Sterling, and received a check for
$30,000, with a remark by Gould that I had got the
steamboat Plymouth Rock, as he had sold her for
$30,000 and had just received the check. There
was a big fight on between Gould's company and the
Western Union, and this caused more litigation.
The electrician, on account of the testimony involved,
lost his glory. The judge never decided the case,
but went crazy a few months afterward." It was
obviously a characteristically shrewd move on the
part of Mr. Gould to secure an interest in the quadruplex,
as a factor in his campaign against the Western
Union, and as a decisive step toward his control of
that system, by the subsequent merger that included
not only the Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company,
but the American Union Telegraph Company.

Nor was Mr. Gould less appreciative of the value of
Edison's automatic system. Referring to matters
that will be taken up later in the narrative, Edison
says: "After this Gould wanted me to help install the
automatic system in the Atlantic & Pacific company,
of which General Eckert had been elected president,
the company having bought the Automatic Telegraph
Company. I did a lot of work for this company
making automatic apparatus in my shop at Newark.
About this time I invented a district messenger call-
box system, and organized a company called the
Domestic Telegraph Company, and started in to install
the system in New York. I had great difficulty
in getting subscribers, having tried several canvassers,
who, one after the other, failed to get sub-
scribers. When I was about to give it up, a test
operator named Brown, who was on the Automatic
Telegraph wire between New York and Washington,
which passed through my Newark shop, asked permission
to let him try and see if he couldn't get subscribers.
I had very little faith in his ability to get
any, but I thought I would give him a chance, as he
felt certain of his ability to succeed. He started in,
and the results were surprising. Within a month he
had procured two hundred subscribers, and the company
was a success. I have never quite understood
why six men should fail absolutely, while the seventh
man should succeed. Perhaps hypnotism would
account for it. This company was sold out to the
Atlantic & Pacific company." As far back as 1872,
Edison had applied for a patent on district messenger
signal boxes, but it was not issued until
January, 1874, another patent being granted in
September of the same year. In this field of telegraph
application, as in others, Edison was a very early
comer, his only predecessor being the fertile and
ingenious Callahan, of stock-ticker fame. The first
president of the Gold & Stock Telegraph Company,
Elisha W. Andrews, had resigned in 1870 in order to
go to England to introduce the stock ticker in London.
He lived in Englewood, New Jersey, and the
very night he had packed his trunk the house was
burglarized. Calling on his nearest friend the next
morning for even a pair of suspenders, Mr. Andrews
was met with regrets of inability, because the burglars
had also been there. A third and fourth friend in
the vicinity was appealed to with the same dishearten-
ing reply of a story of wholesale spoliation. Mr.
Callahan began immediately to devise a system of
protection for Englewood; but at that juncture a
servant-girl who had been for many years with a
family on the Heights in Brooklyn went mad suddenly
and held an aged widow and her daughter as
helpless prisoners for twenty-four hours without
food or water. This incident led to an extension of
the protective idea, and very soon a system was
installed in Brooklyn with one hundred subscribers.
Out of this grew in turn the district messenger system,
for it was just as easy to call a messenger as to sound
a fire-alarm or summon the police. To-day no large
city in America is without a service of this character,
but its function was sharply limited by the introduction
of the telephone.

Returning to the automatic telegraph it is interesting
to note that so long as Edison was associated with
it as a supervising providence it did splendid work,
which renders the later neglect of automatic or
"rapid telegraphy" the more remarkable. Reid's
standard Telegraph in America bears astonishing testimony
on this point in 1880, as follows: "The Atlantic
& Pacific Telegraph Company had twenty-two
automatic stations. These included the chief cities
on the seaboard, Buffalo, Chicago, and Omaha. The
through business during nearly two years was largely
transmitted in this way. Between New York and
Boston two thousand words a minute have been sent.
The perforated paper was prepared at the rate of
twenty words per minute. Whatever its demerits
this system enabled the Atlantic & Pacific company
to handle a much larger business during 1875 and 1876
than it could otherwise have done with its limited
number of wires in their then condition." Mr. Reid
also notes as a very thorough test of the perfect
practicability of the system, that it handled the
President's message, December 3, 1876, of 12,600 words
with complete success. This long message was filed
at Washington at 1.05 and delivered in New York at
2.07. The first 9000 words were transmitted in
forty-five minutes. The perforated strips were prepared
in thirty minutes by ten persons, and duplicated
by nine copyists. But to-day, nearly thirty-
five years later, telegraphy in America is still
practically on a basis of hand transmission!

Of this period and his association with Jay Gould,
some very interesting glimpses are given by Edison.
"While engaged in putting in the automatic system,
I saw a great deal of Gould, and frequently went
uptown to his office to give information. Gould had
no sense of humor. I tried several times to get off
what seemed to me a funny story, but he failed to see
any humor in them. I was very fond of stories, and
had a choice lot, always kept fresh, with which I
could usually throw a man into convulsions. One
afternoon Gould started in to explain the great future
of the Union Pacific Railroad, which he then controlled.
He got a map, and had an immense amount
of statistics. He kept at it for over four hours, and
got very enthusiastic. Why he should explain to me,
a mere inventor, with no capital or standing, I couldn't
make out. He had a peculiar eye, and I made up
my mind that there was a strain of insanity some-
where. This idea was strengthened shortly afterward
when the Western Union raised the monthly
rental of the stock tickers. Gould had one in his
house office, which he watched constantly. This he
had removed, to his great inconvenience, because the
price had been advanced a few dollars! He railed over
it. This struck me as abnormal. I think Gould's
success was due to abnormal development. He certainly
had one trait that all men must have who want
to succeed. He collected every kind of information
and statistics about his schemes, and had all the
data. His connection with men prominent in official
life, of which I was aware, was surprising to me. His
conscience seemed to be atrophied, but that may be
due to the fact that he was contending with men
who never had any to be atrophied. He worked incessantly
until 12 or 1 o'clock at night. He took no
pride in building up an enterprise. He was after
money, and money only. Whether the company
was a success or a failure mattered not to him. After
he had hammered the Western Union through his
opposition company and had tired out Mr. Vanderbilt,
the latter retired from control, and Gould went
in and consolidated his company and controlled the
Western Union. He then repudiated the contract
with the Automatic Telegraph people, and they never
received a cent for their wires or patents, and I lost
three years of very hard labor. But I never had any
grudge against him, because he was so able in his line,
and as long as my part was successful the money with
me was a secondary consideration. When Gould got
the Western Union I knew no further progress in
telegraphy was possible, and I went into other lines."
The truth is that General Eckert was a conservative
--even a reactionary--and being prejudiced like many
other American telegraph managers against "machine
telegraphy," threw out all such improvements.

The course of electrical history has been variegated
by some very remarkable litigation; but none
was ever more extraordinary than that referred to
here as arising from the transfer of the Automatic
Telegraph Company to Mr. Jay Gould and the
Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company. The terms
accepted by Colonel Reiff from Mr. Gould, on December
30, 1874, provided that the purchasing telegraph
company should increase its capital to $15,000,000,
of which the Automatic interests were to receive
$4,000,000 for their patents, contracts, etc. The
stock was then selling at about 25, and in the later
consolidation with the Western Union "went in"
at about 60; so that the real purchase price was not
less than $1,000,000 in cash. There was a private
arrangement in writing with Mr. Gould that he was
to receive one-tenth of the "result" to the Automatic
group, and a tenth of the further results secured
at home and abroad. Mr. Gould personally bought
up and gave money and bonds for one or two individual
interests on the above basis, including that
of Harrington, who in his representative capacity
executed assignments to Mr. Gould. But payments
were then stopped, and the other owners were left
without any compensation, although all that belonged
to them in the shape of property and patents
was taken over bodily into Atlantic & Pacific hands,
and never again left them. Attempts at settlement
were made in their behalf, and dragged wearily,
due apparently to the fact that the plans were
blocked by General Eckert, who had in some
manner taken offence at a transaction effected
without his active participation in all the details.
Edison, who became under the agreement the electrician
of the Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company,
has testified to the unfriendly attitude assumed toward
him by General Eckert, as president. In a
graphic letter from Menlo Park to Mr. Gould, dated
February 2, 1877, Edison makes a most vigorous and
impassioned complaint of his treatment, "which,
acting cumulatively, was a long, unbroken
disappointment to me"; and he reminds Mr. Gould of
promises made to him the day the transfer had been
effected of Edison's interest in the quadruplex. The
situation was galling to the busy, high-spirited young
inventor, who, moreover, "had to live"; and it led
to his resumption of work for the Western Union
Telegraph Company, which was only too glad to get
him back. Meantime, the saddened and perplexed
Automatic group was left unpaid, and it was not
until 1906, on a bill filed nearly thirty years before,
that Judge Hazel, in the United States Circuit Court for
the Southern District of New York, found strongly
in favor of the claimants and ordered an accounting.
The court held that there had been a most wrongful
appropriation of the patents, including alike those
relating to the automatic, the duplex, and the quadruplex,
all being included in the general arrangement
under which Mr. Gould had held put his tempting
bait of $4,000,000. In the end, however, the complainant
had nothing to show for all his struggle,
as the master who made the accounting set the
damages at one dollar!

Aside from the great value of the quadruplex,
saving millions of dollars, for a share in which Edison
received $30,000, the automatic itself is described
as of considerable utility by Sir William Thomson
in his juror report at the Centennial Exposition of
1876, recommending it for award. This leading
physicist of his age, afterward Lord Kelvin, was an
adept in telegraphy, having made the ocean cable
talk, and he saw in Edison's "American Automatic,"
as exhibited by the Atlantic & Pacific company, a
most meritorious and useful system. With the aid
of Mr. E. H. Johnson he made exhaustive tests, carrying
away with him to Glasgow University the surprising
records that he obtained. His official report
closes thus: "The electromagnetic shunt with soft
iron core, invented by Mr. Edison, utilizing Professor
Henry's discovery of electromagnetic induction in a
single circuit to produce a momentary reversal of the
line current at the instant when the battery is thrown
off and so cut off the chemical marks sharply at the
proper instant, is the electrical secret of the great
speed he has achieved. The main peculiarities of
Mr. Edison's automatic telegraph shortly stated in
conclusion are: (1) the perforator; (2) the contact-
maker; (3) the electromagnetic shunt; and (4) the
ferric cyanide of iron solution. It deserves award as
a very important step in land telegraphy." The attitude
thus disclosed toward Mr. Edison's work was
never changed, except that admiration grew as fresh
inventions were brought forward. To the day of his
death Lord Kelvin remained on terms of warmest
friendship with his American co-laborer, with whose
genius he thus first became acquainted at Philadelphia
in the environment of Franklin.

It is difficult to give any complete idea of the activity
maintained at the Newark shops during these
anxious, harassed years, but the statement that at
one time no fewer than forty-five different inventions
were being worked upon, will furnish some notion of
the incandescent activity of the inventor and his
assistants. The hours were literally endless; and
upon one occasion, when the order was in hand for
a large quantity of stock tickers, Edison locked his
men in until the job had been finished of making
the machine perfect, and "all the bugs taken out,"
which meant sixty hours of unintermitted struggle
with the difficulties. Nor were the problems and inventions
all connected with telegraphy. On the contrary,
Edison's mind welcomed almost any new suggestion
as a relief from the regular work in hand.
Thus: "Toward the latter part of 1875, in the Newark
shop, I invented a device for multiplying copies of
letters, which I sold to Mr. A. B. Dick, of Chicago,
and in the years since it has been universally introduced
throughout the world. It is called the `Mimeograph.'
I also invented devices for and introduced
paraffin paper, now used universally for wrapping up
candy, etc." The mimeograph employs a pointed
stylus, used as in writing with a lead-pencil, which
is moved over a kind of tough prepared paper placed
on a finely grooved steel plate. The writing is thus
traced by means of a series of minute perforations in
the sheet, from which, as a stencil, hundreds of copies
can be made. Such stencils can be prepared on
typewriters. Edison elaborated this principle in two
other forms--one pneumatic and one electric--the
latter being in essence a reciprocating motor. Inside
the barrel of the electric pen a little plunger, carrying
the stylus, travels to and fro at a very high rate
of speed, due to the attraction and repulsion of the
solenoid coils of wire surrounding it; and as the hand
of the writer guides it the pen thus makes its record
in a series of very minute perforations in the paper.
The current from a small battery suffices to energize
the pen, and with the stencil thus made hundreds of
copies of the document can be furnished. As a matter
of fact, as many as three thousand copies have been
made from a single mimeographic stencil of this
character.

CHAPTER IX

THE TELEPHONE, MOTOGRAPH, AND MICROPHONE

A VERY great invention has its own dramatic history.
Episodes full of human interest attend
its development. The periods of weary struggle, the
daring adventure along unknown paths, the clash of
rival claimants, are closely similar to those which
mark the revelation and subjugation of a new continent.
At the close of the epoch of discovery it is
seen that mankind as a whole has made one more
great advance; but in the earlier stages one watched
chiefly the confused vicissitudes of fortune of the
individual pioneers. The great modern art of telephony
has had thus in its beginnings, its evolution,
and its present status as a universal medium of
intercourse, all the elements of surprise, mystery,
swift creation of wealth, tragic interludes, and colossal
battle that can appeal to the imagination and hold
public attention. And in this new electrical industry,
in laying its essential foundations, Edison has
again been one of the dominant figures.

As far back as 1837, the American, Page, discovered
the curious fact that an iron bar, when magnetized
and demagnetized at short intervals of time, emitted
sounds due to the molecular disturbances in the
mass. Philipp Reis, a simple professor in Germany,
utilized this principle in the construction of apparatus
for the transmission of sound; but in the grasp of
the idea he was preceded by Charles Bourseul, a
young French soldier in Algeria, who in 1854, under
the title of "Electrical Telephony," in a Parisian
illustrated paper, gave a brief and lucid description as
follows:

"We know that sounds are made by vibrations, and
are made sensible to the ear by the same vibrations, which
are reproduced by the intervening medium. But the intensity
of the vibrations diminishes very rapidly with the
distance; so that even with the aid of speaking-tubes and
trumpets it is impossible to exceed somewhat narrow
limits. Suppose a man speaks near a movable disk
sufficiently flexible to lose none of the vibrations of the
voice; that this disk alternately makes and breaks the
connection with a battery; you may have at a distance
another disk which will simultaneously execute the same
vibrations.... Any one who is not deaf and dumb may
use this mode of transmission, which would require no
apparatus except an electric battery, two vibrating disks,
and a wire."

This would serve admirably for a portrayal of the
Bell telephone, except that it mentions distinctly
the use of the make-and-break method (i. e., where
the circuit is necessarily opened and closed as in
telegraphy, although, of course, at an enormously
higher rate), which has never proved practical.

So far as is known Bourseul was not practical
enough to try his own suggestion, and never made
a telephone. About 1860, Reis built several forms
of electrical telephonic apparatus, all imitating in
some degree the human ear, with its auditory tube,
tympanum, etc., and examples of the apparatus were
exhibited in public not only in Germany, but in
England. There is a variety of testimony to the
effect that not only musical sounds, but stray words
and phrases, were actually transmitted with mediocre,
casual success. It was impossible, however, to maintain
the devices in adjustment for more than a few
seconds, since the invention depended upon the
make-and-break principle, the circuit being made and
broken every time an impulse-creating sound went
through it, causing the movement of the diaphragm
on which the sound-waves impinged. Reis himself
does not appear to have been sufficiently interested
in the marvellous possibilities of the idea to follow
it up--remarking to the man who bought his telephonic
instruments and tools that he had shown the
world the way. In reality it was not the way, although
a monument erected to his memory at Frankfort
styles him the inventor of the telephone. As
one of the American judges said, in deciding an early
litigation over the invention of the telephone, a hundred
years of Reis would not have given the world
the telephonic art for public use. Many others after
Reis tried to devise practical make-and-break telephones,
and all failed; although their success would
have rendered them very valuable as a means of
fighting the Bell patent. But the method was a good
starting-point, even if it did not indicate the real
path. If Reis had been willing to experiment with
his apparatus so that it did not make-and-break, he
would probably have been the true father of the
telephone, besides giving it the name by which it is
known. It was not necessary to slam the gate open
and shut. All that was required was to keep the
gate closed, and rattle the latch softly. Incidentally
it may be noted that Edison in experimenting with
the Reis transmitter recognized at once the defect
caused by the make-and-break action, and sought
to keep the gap closed by the use, first, of one drop
of water, and later of several drops. But the water
decomposed, and the incurable defect was still there.

The Reis telephone was brought to America by
Dr. P. H. Van der Weyde, a well-known physicist in
his day, and was exhibited by him before a technical
audience at Cooper Union, New York, in 1868, and
described shortly after in the technical press. The
apparatus attracted attention, and a set was secured
by Prof. Joseph Henry for the Smithsonian Institution.
There the famous philosopher showed and explained
it to Alexander Graham Bell, when that
young and persevering Scotch genius went to get
help and data as to harmonic telegraphy, upon which
he was working, and as to transmitting vocal sounds.
Bell took up immediately and energetically the idea
that his two predecessors had dropped--and reached
the goal. In 1875 Bell, who as a student and teacher
of vocal physiology had unusual qualifications for
determining feasible methods of speech transmission,
constructed his first pair of magneto telephones for
such a purpose. In February of 1876 his first telephone
patent was applied for, and in March it was
issued. The first published account of the modern
speaking telephone was a paper read by Bell before
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Bos-
ton in May of that year; while at the Centennial
Exposition at Philadelphia the public first gained
any familiarity with it. It was greeted at once with
scientific acclaim and enthusiasm as a distinctly new
and great invention, although at first it was regarded
more as a scientific toy than as a commercially valuable
device.

By an extraordinary coincidence, the very day that
Bell's application for a patent went into the United
States Patent Office, a caveat was filed there by
Elisha Gray, of Chicago, covering the specific idea of
transmitting speech and reproducing it in a telegraphic
circuit "through an instrument capable of
vibrating responsively to all the tones of the human
voice, and by which they are rendered audible." Out
of this incident arose a struggle and a controversy
whose echoes are yet heard as to the legal and moral
rights of the two inventors, the assertion even being
made that one of the most important claims of Gray,
that on a liquid battery transmitter, was surreptitiously
"lifted" into the Bell application, then covering
only the magneto telephone. It was also asserted
that the filing of the Gray caveat antedated by a few
hours the filing of the Bell application. All such issues
when brought to the American courts were brushed
aside, the Bell patent being broadly maintained in
all its remarkable breadth and fullness, embracing
an entire art; but Gray was embittered and chagrined,
and to the last expressed his belief that the
honor and glory should have been his. The path of
Gray to the telephone was a natural one. A Quaker
carpenter who studied five years at Oberlin College,
he took up electrical invention, and brought out
many ingenious devices in rapid succession in the
telegraphic field, including the now universal needle
annunciator for hotels, etc., the useful telautograph,
automatic self-adjusting relays, private-line printers
--leading up to his famous "harmonic" system.
This was based upon the principle that a sound
produced in the presence of a reed or tuning-fork
responding to the sound, and acting as the armature of
a magnet in a closed circuit, would, by induction,
set up electric impulses in the circuit and cause a
distant magnet having a similarly tuned armature to
produce the same tone or note. He also found that
over the same wire at the same time another series
of impulses corresponding to another note could be
sent through the agency of a second set of magnets
without in any way interfering with the first series
of impulses. Building the principle into apparatus,
with a keyboard and vibrating "reeds" before his
magnets, Doctor Gray was able not only to transmit
music by his harmonic telegraph, but went so far as
to send nine different telegraph messages at the
same instant, each set of instruments depending on
its selective note, while any intermediate office could
pick up the message for itself by simply tuning its
relays to the keynote required. Theoretically the
system could be split up into any number of notes
and semi-tones. Practically it served as the basis
of some real telegraphic work, but is not now in use.
Any one can realize, however, that it did not take so
acute and ingenious a mind very long to push forward
to the telephone, as a dangerous competitor
with Bell, who had also, like Edison, been working
assiduously in the field of acoustic and multiple telegraphs.
Seen in the retrospect, the struggle for the
goal at this moment was one of the memorable incidents
in electrical history.

Among the interesting papers filed at the Orange
Laboratory is a lithograph, the size of an ordinary
patent drawing, headed "First Telephone on Record."
The claim thus made goes back to the period
when all was war, and when dispute was hot and rife
as to the actual invention of the telephone. The
device shown, made by Edison in 1875, was actually
included in a caveat filed January 14, 1876, a month
before Bell or Gray. It shows a little solenoid
arrangement, with one end of the plunger attached to
the diaphragm of a speaking or resonating chamber.
Edison states that while the device is crudely capable
of use as a magneto telephone, he did not invent it
for transmitting speech, but as an apparatus for
analyzing the complex waves arising from various
sounds. It was made in pursuance of his investigations
into the subject of harmonic telegraphs. He
did not try the effect of sound-waves produced by
the human voice until Bell came forward a few months
later; but he found then that this device, made in
1875, was capable of use as a telephone. In his testimony
and public utterances Edison has always given
Bell credit for the discovery of the transmission of
articulate speech by talking against a diaphragm
placed in front of an electromagnet; but it is only
proper here to note, in passing, the curious fact that
he had actually produced a device that COULD talk,
prior to 1876, and was therefore very close to Bell,
who took the one great step further. A strong
characterization of the value and importance of the work
done by Edison in the development of the carbon
transmitter will be found in the decision of Judge
Brown in the United States Circuit Court of Appeals,
sitting in Boston, on February 27, 1901, declaring
void the famous Berliner patent of the Bell telephone
system.[5]

[5] See Federal Reporter, vol. 109, p. 976 et seq.

Bell's patent of 1876 was of an all-embracing character,
which only the make-and-break principle, if
practical, could have escaped. It was pointed out
in the patent that Bell discovered the great principle
that electrical undulations induced by the vibrations
of a current produced by sound-waves can be
represented graphically by the same sinusoidal curve
that expresses the original sound vibrations themselves;
or, in other words, that a curve representing
sound vibrations will correspond precisely to a curve
representing electric impulses produced or generated
by those identical sound vibrations--as, for example,
when the latter impinge upon a diaphragm acting
as an armature of an electromagnet, and which by
movement to and fro sets up the electric impulses by
induction. To speak plainly, the electric impulses
correspond in form and character to the sound vibration
which they represent. This reduced to a patent
"claim" governed the art as firmly as a papal bull
for centuries enabled Spain to hold the Western
world. The language of the claim is: "The method
of and apparatus for transmitting vocal or other
sounds telegraphically as herein described, by causing
electrical undulations similar in form to the vibrations
of the air accompanying the said vocal or other
sounds substantially as set forth." It was a long
time, however, before the inclusive nature of this
grant over every possible telephone was understood
or recognized, and litigation for and against the
patent lasted during its entire life. At the outset,
the commercial value of the telephone was little
appreciated by the public, and Bell had the greatest
difficulty in securing capital; but among far-sighted
inventors there was an immediate "rush to the gold
fields." Bell's first apparatus was poor, the results
being described by himself as "unsatisfactory and
discouraging," which was almost as true of the
devices he exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial.
The new-comers, like Edison, Berliner, Blake, Hughes,
Gray, Dolbear, and others, brought a wealth of ideas,
a fund of mechanical ingenuity, and an inventive
ability which soon made the telephone one of the
most notable gains of the century, and one of the
most valuable additions to human resources. The
work that Edison did was, as usual, marked by
infinite variety of method as well as by the power to
seize on the one needed element of practical success.
Every one of the six million telephones in use in the
United States, and of the other millions in use through
out the world, bears the imprint of his genius, as at
one time the instruments bore his stamped name.
For years his name was branded on every Bell telephone
set, and his patents were a mainstay of what
has been popularly called the "Bell monopoly."
Speaking of his own efforts in this field, Mr. Edison
says:

"In 1876 I started again to experiment for the
Western Union and Mr. Orton. This time it was the
telephone. Bell invented the first telephone, which
consisted of the present receiver, used both as a
transmitter and a receiver (the magneto type). It
was attempted to introduce it commercially, but it
failed on account of its faintness and the extraneous
sounds which came in on its wires from various
causes. Mr. Orton wanted me to take hold of it and
make it commercial. As I had also been working on
a telegraph system employing tuning-forks,
simultaneously with both Bell and Gray, I was pretty
familiar with the subject. I started in, and soon
produced the carbon transmitter, which is now
universally used.

"Tests were made between New York and Philadelphia,
also between New York and Washington,
using regular Western Union wires. The noises were
so great that not a word could be heard with the Bell
receiver when used as a transmitter between New
York and Newark, New Jersey. Mr. Orton and
W. K. Vanderbilt and the board of directors witnessed
and took part in the tests. The Western
Union then put them on private lines. Mr. Theodore
Puskas, of Budapest, Hungary, was the first man
to suggest a telephone exchange, and soon after
exchanges were established. The telephone department
was put in the hands of Hamilton McK. Twombly,
Vanderbilt's ablest son-in-law, who made a success
of it. The Bell company, of Boston, also started an
exchange, and the fight was on, the Western Union
pirating the Bell receiver, and the Boston company
pirating the Western Union transmitter. About this
time I wanted to be taken care of. I threw out hints
of this desire. Then Mr. Orton sent for me. He had
learned that inventors didn't do business by the
regular process, and concluded he would close it
right up. He asked me how much I wanted. I had
made up my mind it was certainly worth $25,000,
if it ever amounted to anything for central-station
work, so that was the sum I had in mind to stick to
and get--obstinately. Still it had been an easy job,
and only required a few months, and I felt a little
shaky and uncertain. So I asked him to make me
an offer. He promptly said he would give me
$100,000. `All right,' I said. `It is yours on one
condition, and that is that you do not pay it all at
once, but pay me at the rate of $6000 per year for
seventeen years'--the life of the patent. He seemed
only too pleased to do this, and it was closed. My
ambition was about four times too large for my
business capacity, and I knew that I would soon
spend this money experimenting if I got it all at
once, so I fixed it that I couldn't. I saved seventeen
years of worry by this stroke."

Thus modestly is told the debut of Edison in the
telephone art, to which with his carbon transmitter
he gave the valuable principle of varying the resistance
of the transmitting circuit with changes in the
pressure, as well as the vital practice of using the
induction coil as a means of increasing the effective
length of the talking circuit. Without these, modern
telephony would not and could not exist.[6] But Edison,
in telephonic work, as in other directions, was
remarkably fertile and prolific. His first inventions
in the art, made in 1875-76, continue through many
later years, including all kinds of carbon instruments
--the water telephone, electrostatic telephone,
condenser telephone, chemical telephone, various
magneto telephones, inertia telephone, mercury telephone,
voltaic pile telephone, musical transmitter, and
the electromotograph. All were actually made and
tested.

[6] Briefly stated, the essential difference between Bell's
telephone and Edison's is this: With the former the sound vibrations
impinge upon a steel diaphragm arranged adjacent to the pole of
a bar electromagnet, whereby the diaphragm acts as an armature,
and by its vibrations induces very weak electric impulses
in the magnetic coil. These impulses, according to Bell's theory,
correspond in form to the sound-waves, and passing over the line
energize the magnet coil at the receiving end, and by varying the
magnetism cause the receiving diaphragm to be similarly vibrated
to reproduce the sounds. A single apparatus is therefore used at
each end, performing the double function of transmitter and receiver.
With Edison's telephone a closed circuit is used on which
is constantly flowing a battery current, and included in that circuit
is a pair of electrodes, one or both of which is of carbon.
These electrodes are always in contact with a certain initial
pressure, so that current will be always flowing over the circuit.
One of the electrodes is connected with the diaphragm on which
the sound-waves impinge, and the vibration of this diaphragm
causes the pressure between the electrodes to be correspondingly
varied, and thereby effects a variation in the current, resulting in
the production of impulses which actuate the receiving magnet.
In other words, with Bell's telephone the sound-waves themselves
generate the electric impulses, which are hence extremely
faint. With the Edison telephone, the sound-waves actuate an
electric valve, so to speak, and permit variations in a current of
any desired strength.

A second distinction between the two telephones is this: With
the Bell apparatus the very weak electric impulses generated by
the vibration of the transmitting diaphragm pass over the entire
line to the receiving end, and in consequence the permissible
length of line is limited to a few miles under ideal conditions.
With Edison's telephone the battery current does not flow on
the main line, but passes through the primary circuit of an
induction coil, by which corresponding impulses of enormously
higher potential are sent out on the main line to the receiving
end. In consequence, the line may be hundreds of miles in
length. No modern telephone system in use to-day lacks these
characteristic features--the varying resistance and the induction
coil.

The principle of the electromotograph was utilized
by Edison in more ways than one, first of all in telegraphy
at this juncture. The well-known Page patent,
which had lingered in the Patent Office for years, had
just been issued, and was considered a formidable
weapon. It related to the use of a retractile spring
to withdraw the armature lever from the magnet of
a telegraph or other relay or sounder, and thus controlled
the art of telegraphy, except in simple circuits.
"There was no known way," remarks Edison,
"whereby this patent could be evaded, and its
possessor would eventually control the use of what
is known as the relay and sounder, and this was vital
to telegraphy. Gould was pounding the Western
Union on the Stock Exchange, disturbing its railroad
contracts, and, being advised by his lawyers that
this patent was of great value, bought it. The moment
Mr. Orton heard this he sent for me and explained
the situation, and wanted me to go to work
immediately and see if I couldn't evade it or discover
some other means that could be used in case Gould
sustained the patent. It seemed a pretty hard job,
because there was no known means of moving a
lever at the other end of a telegraph wire except by
the use of a magnet. I said I would go at it that
night. In experimenting some years previously, I
had discovered a very peculiar phenomenon, and that
was that if a piece of metal connected to a battery
was rubbed over a moistened piece of chalk resting
on a metal connected to the other pole, when the
current passed the friction was greatly diminished.
When the current was reversed the friction was greatly
increased over what it was when no current was
passing. Remembering this, I substituted a piece of
chalk rotated by a small electric motor for the magnet,
and connecting a sounder to a metallic finger
resting on the chalk, the combination claim of Page
was made worthless. A hitherto unknown means was
introduced in the electric art. Two or three of the
devices were made and tested by the company's expert.
Mr. Orton, after he had me sign the patent
application and got it in the Patent Office, wanted
to settle for it at once. He asked my price. Again
I said: `Make me an offer.' Again he named $100,000.
I accepted, providing he would pay it at the
rate of $6000 a year for seventeen years. This was
done, and thus, with the telephone money, I received
$12,000 yearly for that period from the Western
Union Telegraph Company."

A year or two later the motograph cropped up again
in Edison's work in a curious manner. The telephone
was being developed in England, and Edison had
made arrangements with Colonel Gouraud, his old
associate in the automatic telegraph, to represent his
interests. A company was formed, a large number
of instruments were made and sent to Gouraud in
London, and prospects were bright. Then there came
a threat of litigation from the owners of the Bell
patent, and Gouraud found he could not push the
enterprise unless he could avoid using what was asserted
to be an infringement of the Bell receiver.
He cabled for help to Edison, who sent back word
telling him to hold the fort. "I had recourse again,"
says Edison, "to the phenomenon discovered by me
years previous, that the friction of a rubbing electrode
passing over a moist chalk surface was varied by
electricity. I devised a telephone receiver which
was afterward known as the `loud-speaking telephone,'
or `chalk receiver.' There was no magnet,
simply a diaphragm and a cylinder of compressed
chalk about the size of a thimble. A thin spring
connected to the centre of the diaphragm extended
outwardly and rested on the chalk cylinder, and was
pressed against it with a pressure equal to that which
would be due to a weight of about six pounds. The
chalk was rotated by hand. The volume of sound
was very great. A person talking into the carbon
transmitter in New York had his voice so amplified
that he could be heard one thousand feet away in
an open field at Menlo Park. This great excess of
power was due to the fact that the latter came from
the person turning the handle. The voice, instead
of furnishing all the power as with the present receiver,
merely controlled the power, just as an engineer
working a valve would control a powerful
engine.

"I made six of these receivers and sent them in
charge of an expert on the first steamer. They were
welcomed and tested, and shortly afterward I shipped
a hundred more. At the same time I was ordered to
send twenty young men, after teaching them to become
expert. I set up an exchange, around the
laboratory, of ten instruments. I would then go out
and get each one out of order in every conceivable
way, cutting the wires of one, short-circuiting another,
destroying the adjustment of a third, putting
dirt between the electrodes of a fourth, and so on.
A man would be sent to each to find out the trouble.
When he could find the trouble ten consecutive
times, using five minutes each, he was sent to London.
About sixty men were sifted to get twenty.
Before all had arrived, the Bell company there, seeing
we could not be stopped, entered into negotiations
for consolidation. One day I received a cable from
Gouraud offering `30,000' for my interest. I cabled
back I would accept. When the draft came I was
astonished to find it was for L30,000. I had thought
it was dollars."

In regard to this singular and happy conclusion,
Edison makes some interesting comments as to the
attitude of the courts toward inventors, and the
difference between American and English courts. "The
men I sent over were used to establish telephone
exchanges all over the Continent, and some of them
became wealthy. It was among this crowd in London
that Bernard Shaw was employed before he became
famous. The chalk telephone was finally discarded
in favor of the Bell receiver--the latter being
more simple and cheaper. Extensive litigation with
new-comers followed. My carbon-transmitter patent
was sustained, and preserved the monopoly of the
telephone in England for many years. Bell's patent
was not sustained by the courts. Sir Richard Webster,
now Chief-Justice of England, was my counsel,
and sustained all of my patents in England for many
years. Webster has a marvellous capacity for understanding
things scientific; and his address before the
courts was lucidity itself. His brain is highly organized.
My experience with the legal fraternity is
that scientific subjects are distasteful to them, and
it is rare in this country, on account of the system of
trying patent suits, for a judge really to reach the
meat of the controversy, and inventors scarcely ever
get a decision squarely and entirely in their favor.
The fault rests, in my judgment, almost wholly with
the system under which testimony to the extent of
thousands of pages bearing on all conceivable subjects,
many of them having no possible connection
with the invention in dispute, is presented to an over-
worked judge in an hour or two of argument supported
by several hundred pages of briefs; and the
judge is supposed to extract some essence of justice
from this mass of conflicting, blind, and misleading
statements. It is a human impossibility, no matter
how able and fair-minded the judge may be. In
England the case is different. There the judges are
face to face with the experts and other witnesses.
They get the testimony first-hand and only so much as
they need, and there are no long-winded briefs and
arguments, and the case is decided then and there,
a few months perhaps after suit is brought, instead of
many years afterward, as in this country. And in
England, when a case is once finally decided it is
settled for the whole country, while here it is not so.
Here a patent having once been sustained, say, in
Boston, may have to be litigated all over again in
New York, and again in Philadelphia, and so on for
all the Federal circuits. Furthermore, it seems to
me that scientific disputes should be decided by some
court containing at least one or two scientific men--
men capable of comprehending the significance of
an invention and the difficulties of its accomplishment
--if justice is ever to be given to an inventor.
And I think, also, that this court should have the
power to summon before it and examine any recognized
expert in the special art, who might be able to
testify to FACTS for or against the patent, instead of
trying to gather the truth from the tedious essays
of hired experts, whose depositions are really nothing
but sworn arguments. The real gist of patent suits
is generally very simple, and I have no doubt that
any judge of fair intelligence, assisted by one or more
scientific advisers, could in a couple of days at the
most examine all the necessary witnesses; hear all
the necessary arguments, and actually decide an ordinary
patent suit in a way that would more nearly
be just, than can now be done at an expenditure of
a hundred times as much money and months and
years of preparation. And I have no doubt that
the time taken by the court would be enormously
less, because if a judge attempts to read the bulky
records and briefs, that work alone would require
several days.

"Acting as judges, inventors would not be very apt
to correctly decide a complicated law point; and on
the other hand, it is hard to see how a lawyer can
decide a complicated scientific point rightly. Some
inventors complain of our Patent Office, but my own
experience with the Patent Office is that the examiners
are fair-minded and intelligent, and when they
refuse a patent they are generally right; but I think
the whole trouble lies with the system in vogue in the
Federal courts for trying patent suits, and in the fact,
which cannot be disputed, that the Federal judges,
with but few exceptions, do not comprehend complicated
scientific questions. To secure uniformity
in the several Federal circuits and correct errors, it
has been proposed to establish a central court of
patent appeals in Washington. This I believe in;
but this court should also contain at least two scientific
men, who would not be blind to the sophistry of
paid experts.[7] Men whose inventions would have
created wealth of millions have been ruined and
prevented from making any money whereby they could
continue their careers as creators of wealth for the
general good, just because the experts befuddled the
judge by their misleading statements."

[7] As an illustration of the perplexing nature of expert evidence in
patent cases, the reader will probably be interested in perusing
the following extracts from the opinion of Judge Dayton, in the
suit of Bryce Bros. Co. vs. Seneca Glass Co., tried in the United
States Circuit Court, Northern District of West Virginia, reported
in The Federal Reporter, 140, page 161:

"On this subject of the validity of this patent, a vast amount
of conflicting, technical, perplexing, and almost hypercritical
discussion and opinion has been indulged, both in the testimony and
in the able and exhaustive arguments and briefs of counsel.
Expert Osborn for defendant, after setting forth minutely his
superior qualifications mechanical education, and great experience,
takes up in detail the patent claims, and shows to his own
entire satisfaction that none of them are new; that all of them
have been applied, under one form or another, in some twenty-
two previous patents, and in two other machines, not patented,
to-wit, the Central Glass and Kuny Kahbel ones; that the whole
machine is only `an aggregation of well-known mechanical elements
that any skilled designer would bring to his use in the
construction of such a machine.' This certainly, under ordinary
conditions, would settle the matter beyond peradventure; for
this witness is a very wise and learned man in these things, and
very positive. But expert Clarke appears for the plaintiff, and
after setting forth just as minutely his superior qualifications,
mechanical education, and great experience, which appear fully
equal in all respects to those of expert Osborn, proceeds to take
up in detail the patent claims, and shows to his entire satisfaction
that all, with possibly one exception, are new, show inventive
genius, and distinct advances upon the prior art. In the most
lucid, and even fascinating, way he discusses all the parts of this
machine, compares it with the others, draws distinctions, points
out the merits of the one in controversy and the defects of all
the others, considers the twenty-odd patents referred to by
Osborn, and in the politest, but neatest, manner imaginable shows
that expert Osborn did not know what he was talking about, and
sums the whole matter up by declaring this `invention of Mr.
Schrader's, as embodied in the patent in suit, a radical and wide
departure, from the Kahbel machine' (admitted on all sides to be
nearest prior approach to it), `a distinct and important advance
in the art of engraving glassware, and generally a machine for
this purpose which has involved the exercise of the inventive
faculty in the highest degree.'

"Thus a more radical and irreconcilable disagreement between
experts touching the same thing could hardly be found. So it is
with the testimony. If we take that for the defendant, the Central
Glass Company machine, and especially the Kuny Kahbel
machine, built and operated years before this patent issued, and
not patented, are just as good, just as effective and practical, as
this one, and capable of turning out just as perfect work and as
great a variety of it. On the other hand, if we take that produced
by the plaintiff, we are driven to the conclusion that these
prior machines, the product of the same mind, were only progressive
steps forward from utter darkness, so to speak, into full
inventive sunlight, which made clear to him the solution of the
problem in this patented machine. The shortcomings of the
earlier machines are minutely set forth, and the witnesses for the
plaintiff are clear that they are neither practical nor profitable.

"But this is not all of the trouble that confronts us in this
case. Counsel of both sides, with an indomitable courage that
must command admiration, a courage that has led them to a vast
amount of study, investigation, and thought, that in fact has
made them all experts, have dissected this record of 356 closely
printed pages, applied all mechanical principles and laws to the
facts as they see them, and, besides, have ransacked the law-
books and cited an enormous number of cases, more or less in
point, as illustration of their respective contentions. The courts
find nothing more difficult than to apply an abstract principle to
all classes of cases that may arise. The facts in each case so
frequently create an exception to the general rule that such rule
must be honored rather in its breach than in its observance.
Therefore, after a careful examination of these cases, it is no
criticism of the courts to say that both sides have found abundant
and about an equal amount of authority to sustain their
respective contentions, and, as a result, counsel have submitted,
in briefs, a sum total of 225 closely printed pages, in which they
have clearly, yet, almost to a mathematical certainty, demonstrated
on the one side that this Schrader machine is new and
patentable, and on the other that it is old and not so. Under
these circumstances, it would be unnecessary labor and a fruitless
task for me to enter into any further technical discussion of the
mechanical problems involved, for the purpose of seeking to convince
either side of its error. In cases of such perplexity as this
generally some incidents appear that speak more unerringly than
do the tongues of the witnesses, and to some of these I purpose
to now refer."

Mr. Bernard Shaw, the distinguished English author,
has given a most vivid and amusing picture of this
introduction of Edison's telephone into England, describing
the apparatus as "a much too ingenious invention,
being nothing less than a telephone of such
stentorian efficiency that it bellowed your most private
communications all over the house, instead of
whispering them with some sort of discretion." Shaw,
as a young man, was employed by the Edison Telephone
Company, and was very much alive to his
surroundings, often assisting in public demonstra-
tions of the apparatus "in a manner which I am
persuaded laid the foundation of Mr. Edison's
reputation." The sketch of the men sent over from
America is graphic: "Whilst the Edison Telephone
Company lasted it crowded the basement of a high
pile of offices in Queen Victoria Street with American
artificers. These deluded and romantic men gave
me a glimpse of the skilled proletariat of the United
States. They sang obsolete sentimental songs with
genuine emotion; and their language was frightful
even to an Irishman. They worked with a ferocious
energy which was out of all proportion to the actual
result achieved. Indomitably resolved to assert their
republican manhood by taking no orders from a tall-
hatted Englishman whose stiff politeness covered
his conviction that they were relatively to himself
inferior and common persons, they insisted on being
slave-driven with genuine American oaths by a
genuine free and equal American foreman. They
utterly despised the artfully slow British workman,
who did as little for his wages as he possibly could;
never hurried himself; and had a deep reverence for
one whose pocket could be tapped by respectful
behavior. Need I add that they were contemptuously
wondered at by this same British workman as
a parcel of outlandish adult boys who sweated themselves
for their employer's benefit instead of looking
after their own interest? They adored Mr. Edison as
the greatest man of all time in every possible department
of science, art, and philosophy, and execrated
Mr. Graham Bell, the inventor of the rival telephone,
as his Satanic adversary; but each of them had (or
intended to have) on the brink of completion an improvement
on the telephone, usually a new transmitter.
They were free-souled creatures, excellent
company, sensitive, cheerful, and profane; liars,
braggarts, and hustlers, with an air of making slow
old England hum, which never left them even when,
as often happened, they were wrestling with difficulties
of their own making, or struggling in no-
thoroughfares, from which they had to be retrieved
like stray sheep by Englishmen without imagination
enough to go wrong."

Mr. Samuel Insull, who afterward became private
secretary to Mr. Edison, and a leader in the development
of American electrical manufacturing and the
central-station art, was also in close touch with the
London situation thus depicted, being at the time
private secretary to Colonel Gouraud, and acting for
the first half hour as the amateur telephone operator
in the first experimental exchange erected in Europe.
He took notes of an early meeting where the affairs of
the company were discussed by leading men like Sir
John Lubbock (Lord Avebury) and the Right Hon.
E. P. Bouverie (then a cabinet minister), none of
whom could see in the telephone much more than an
auxiliary for getting out promptly in the next morning's
papers the midnight debates in Parliament. "I
remember another incident," says Mr. Insull. "It
was at some celebration of one of the Royal Societies
at the Burlington House, Piccadilly. We had a telephone
line running across the roofs to the basement
of the building. I think it was to Tyndall's laboratory
in Burlington Street. As the ladies and gentle-
men came through, they naturally wanted to look
at the great curiosity, the loud-speaking telephone: in
fact, any telephone was a curiosity then. Mr. and
Mrs. Gladstone came through. I was handling the
telephone at the Burlington House end. Mrs. Gladstone
asked the man over the telephone whether he
knew if a man or woman was speaking; and the
reply came in quite loud tones that it was a
man!"

With Mr. E. H. Johnson, who represented Edison,
there went to England for the furtherance of this
telephone enterprise, Mr. Charles Edison, a nephew of
the inventor. He died in Paris, October, 1879, not
twenty years of age. Stimulated by the example of
his uncle, this brilliant youth had already made a
mark for himself as a student and inventor, and when
only eighteen he secured in open competition the contract
to install a complete fire-alarm telegraph system
for Port Huron. A few months later he was eagerly
welcomed by his uncle at Menlo Park, and after working
on the telephone was sent to London to aid in its
introduction. There he made the acquaintance of
Professor Tyndall, exhibited the telephone to the
late King of England; and also won the friendship
of the late King of the Belgians, with whom he took
up the project of establishing telephonic communication
between Belgium and England. At the time
of his premature death he was engaged in installing
the Edison quadruplex between Brussels and Paris,
being one of the very few persons then in Europe
familiar with the working of that invention.

Meantime, the telephonic art in America was
undergoing very rapid development. In March,
1878, addressing "the capitalists of the Electric
Telephone Company" on the future of his invention,
Bell outlined with prophetic foresight and remarkable
clearness the coming of the modern telephone
exchange. Comparing with gas and water distribution,
he said: "In a similar manner, it is conceivable
that cables of telephone wires could be laid underground
or suspended overhead communicating by
branch wires with private dwellings, country houses,
shops, manufactories, etc., uniting them through the
main cable with a central office, where the wire could
be connected as desired, establishing direct
communication between any two places in the city....
Not only so, but I believe, in the future, wires will
unite the head offices of telephone companies in different
cities; and a man in one part of the country
may communicate by word of mouth with another
in a distant place."

All of which has come to pass. Professor Bell also
suggested how this could be done by "the employ of
a man in each central office for the purpose of connecting
the wires as directed." He also indicated the
two methods of telephonic tariff--a fixed rental and
a toll; and mentioned the practice, now in use on
long-distance lines, of a time charge. As a matter
of fact, this "centralizing" was attempted in May,
1877, in Boston, with the circuits of the Holmes
burglar-alarm system, four banking-houses being thus
interconnected; while in January of 1878 the Bell
telephone central-office system at New Haven, Connecticut,
was opened for business, "the first fully
equipped commercial telephone exchange ever established
for public or general service."

All through this formative period Bell had adhered
to and introduced the magneto form of telephone,
now used only as a receiver, and very poorly adapted
for the vital function of a speech-transmitter. From
August, 1877, the Western Union Telegraph Company
worked along the other line, and in 1878,
with its allied Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, it
brought into existence the American Speaking Telephone
Company to introduce the Edison apparatus,
and to create telephone exchanges all over the country.
In this warfare, the possession of a good battery
transmitter counted very heavily in favor of the
Western Union, for upon that the real expansion of
the whole industry depended; but in a few months
the Bell system had its battery transmitter, too,
tending to equalize matters. Late in the same year
patent litigation was begun which brought out clearly
the merits of Bell, through his patent, as the original
and first inventor of the electric speaking telephone;
and the Western Union Telegraph Company made
terms with its rival. A famous contract bearing
date of November 10, 1879, showed that under the
Edison and other controlling patents the Western
Union Company had already set going some eighty-
five exchanges, and was making large quantities of
telephonic apparatus. In return for its voluntary
retirement from the telephonic field, the Western
Union Telegraph Company, under this contract, received
a royalty of 20 per cent. of all the telephone
earnings of the Bell system while the Bell patents
ran; and thus came to enjoy an annual income of
several hundred thousand dollars for some years, based
chiefly on its modest investment in Edison's work.
It was also paid several thousand dollars in cash for
the Edison, Phelps, Gray, and other apparatus on
hand. It secured further 40 per cent. of the stock
of the local telephone systems of New York and
Chicago; and last, but by no means least, it exacted
from the Bell interests an agreement to stay out of
the telegraph field.

By March, 1881, there were in the United States
only nine cities of more than ten thousand inhabitants,
and only one of more than fifteen thousand,
without a telephone exchange. The industry thrived
under competition, and the absence of it now had a
decided effect in checking growth; for when the
Bell patent expired in 1893, the total of telephone sets
in operation in the United States was only 291,253.
To quote from an official Bell statement:

"The brief but vigorous Western Union competition
was a kind of blessing in disguise. The very fact that
two distinct interests were actively engaged in the work
of organizing and establishing competing telephone
exchanges all over the country, greatly facilitated the
spread of the idea and the growth of the business, and
familiarized the people with the use of the telephone as a
business agency; while the keenness of the competition,
extending to the agents and employees of both companies,
brought about a swift but quite unforeseen and unlooked-
for expansion in the individual exchanges of the larger
cities, and a corresponding advance in their importance,
value, and usefulness."

The truth of this was immediately shown in 1894,
after the Bell patents had expired, by the tremendous
outburst of new competitive activity, in "independent"
country systems and toll lines through
sparsely settled districts--work for which the Edison
apparatus and methods were peculiarly adapted, yet
against which the influence of the Edison patent
was invoked. The data secured by the United States
Census Office in 1902 showed that the whole industry
had made gigantic leaps in eight years, and had
2,371,044 telephone stations in service, of which
1,053,866 were wholly or nominally independent of
the Bell. By 1907 an even more notable increase
was shown, and the Census figures for that year
included no fewer than 6,118,578 stations, of which
1,986,575 were "independent." These six million
instruments every single set employing the principle
of the carbon transmitter--were grouped into 15,527
public exchanges, in the very manner predicted by
Bell thirty years before, and they gave service in the
shape of over eleven billions of talks. The outstanding
capitalized value of the plant was $814,616,004,
the income for the year was nearly $185,000,000, and
the people employed were 140,000. If Edison had
done nothing else, his share in the creation of such
an industry would have entitled him to a high place
among inventors.

This chapter is of necessity brief in its reference to
many extremely interesting points and details; and
to some readers it may seem incomplete in its references
to the work of other men than Edison, whose
influence on telephony as an art has also been con-
siderable. In reply to this pertinent criticism, it
may be pointed out that this is a life of Edison, and
not of any one else; and that even the discussion of
his achievements alone in these various fields
requires more space than the authors have at their
disposal. The attempt has been made, however, to
indicate the course of events and deal fairly with the
facts. The controversy that once waged with great
excitement over the invention of the microphone,
but has long since died away, is suggestive of the
difficulties involved in trying to do justice to everybody.
A standard history describes the microphone
thus:

"A form of apparatus produced during the early days
of the telephone by Professor Hughes, of England, for
the purpose of rendering faint, indistinct sounds distinctly
audible, depended for its operation on the changes that
result in the resistance of loose contacts. This apparatus
was called the microphone, and was in reality but one of
the many forms that it is possible to give to the telephone
transmitter. For example, the Edison granular transmitter
was a variety of microphone, as was also Edison's
transmitter, in which the solid button of carbon was employed.
Indeed, even the platinum point, which in the
early form of the Reis transmitter pressed against the
platinum contact cemented to the centre of the diaphragm,
was a microphone."

At a time when most people were amazed at the idea
of hearing, with the aid of a "microphone," a fly walk
at a distance of many miles, the priority of invention
of such a device was hotly disputed. Yet without
desiring to take anything from the credit of the
brilliant American, Hughes, whose telegraphic apparatus
is still in use all over Europe, it may be
pointed out that this passage gives Edison the attribution
of at least two original forms of which those
suggested by Hughes were mere variations and modifications.
With regard to this matter, Mr. Edison
himself remarks: "After I sent one of my men over
to London especially, to show Preece the carbon
transmitter, and where Hughes first saw it, and
heard it--then within a month he came out with the
microphone, without any acknowledgment whatever.
Published dates will show that Hughes came along
after me."

There have been other ways also in which Edison
has utilized the peculiar property that carbon possesses
of altering its resistance to the passage of current,
according to the pressure to which it is subjected,
whether at the surface, or through closer union
of the mass. A loose road with a few inches of dust
or pebbles on it offers appreciable resistance to the
wheels of vehicles travelling over it; but if the surface
is kept hard and smooth the effect is quite different.
In the same way carbon, whether solid or
in the shape of finely divided powder, offers a high
resistance to the passage of electricity; but if the
carbon is squeezed together the conditions change,
with less resistance to electricity in the circuit.
For his quadruplex system, Mr. Edison utilized this
fact in the construction of a rheostat or resistance
box. It consists of a series of silk disks saturated
with a sizing of plumbago and well dried. The disks
are compressed by means of an adjustable screw; and
in this manner the resistance of a circuit can be varied
over a wide range.

In like manner Edison developed a "pressure" or
carbon relay, adapted to the transference of signals
of variable strength from one circuit to another. An
ordinary relay consists of an electromagnet inserted
in the main line for telegraphing, which brings a local
battery and sounder circuit into play, reproducing
in the local circuit the signals sent over the main line.
The relay is adjusted to the weaker currents likely to
be received, but the signals reproduced on the sounder
by the agency of the relay are, of course, all of equal
strength, as they depend upon the local battery,
which has only this steady work to perform. In
cases where it is desirable to reproduce the signals in
the local circuit with the same variations in strength
as they are received by the relay, the Edison carbon
pressure relay does the work. The poles of the
electromagnet in the local circuit are hollowed out
and filled up with carbon disks or powdered plumbago.
The armature and the carbon-tipped poles of
the electromagnet form part of the local circuit; and
if the relay is actuated by a weak current the armature
will be attracted but feebly. The carbon being only
slightly compressed will offer considerable resistance
to the flow of current from the local battery, and
therefore the signal on the local sounder will be weak.
If, on the contrary, the incoming current on the main
line be strong, the armature will be strongly attracted,
the carbon will be sharply compressed, the resistance
in the local circuit will be proportionately lowered,
and the signal heard on the local sounder will be a
loud one. Thus it will be seen, by another clever
juggle with the willing agent, carbon, for which he
has found so many duties, Edison is able to transfer
or transmit exactly, to the local circuit, the main-line
current in all its minutest variations.

In his researches to determine the nature of the
motograph phenomena, and to open up other sources
of electrical current generation, Edison has worked
out a very ingenious and somewhat perplexing piece
of apparatus known as the "chalk battery." It consists
of a series of chalk cylinders mounted on a shaft
revolved by hand. Resting against each of these
cylinders is a palladium-faced spring, and similar
springs make contact with the shaft between each
cylinder. By connecting all these springs in circuit
with a galvanometer and revolving the shaft rapidly,
a notable deflection is obtained of the galvanometer
needle, indicating the production of electrical energy.
The reason for this does not appear to have been
determined.

Last but not least, in this beautiful and ingenious
series, comes the "tasimeter," an instrument of most
delicate sensibility in the presence of heat. The
name is derived from the Greek, the use of the apparatus
being primarily to measure extremely minute
differences of pressure. A strip of hard rubber with
pointed ends rests perpendicularly on a platinum
plate, beneath which is a carbon button, under which
again lies another platinum plate. The two plates
and the carbon button form part of an electric circuit
containing a battery and a galvanometer. The
hard-rubber strip is exceedingly sensitive to heat.
The slightest degree of heat imparted to it causes it
to expand invisibly, thus increasing the pressure contact
on the carbon button and producing a variation
in the resistance of the circuit, registered immediately
by the little swinging needle of the galvanometer.
The instrument is so sensitive that with a delicate
galvanometer it will show the impingement of the
heat from a person's hand thirty feet away. The
suggestion to employ such an apparatus in astronomical
observations occurs at once, and it may be
noted that in one instance the heat of rays of light
from the remote star Arcturus gave results.

CHAPTER X

THE PHONOGRAPH

AT the opening of the Electrical Show in New
York City in October, 1908, to celebrate the
jubilee of the Atlantic Cable and the first quarter
century of lighting with the Edison service on
Manhattan Island, the exercises were all conducted by
means of the Edison phonograph. This included the
dedicatory speech of Governor Hughes, of New York;
the modest remarks of Mr. Edison, as president; the
congratulations of the presidents of several national
electric bodies, and a number of vocal and instrumental
selections of operatic nature. All this was
heard clearly by a very large audience, and was
repeated on other evenings. The same speeches were
used again phonographically at the Electrical Show
in Chicago in 1909--and now the records are
preserved for reproduction a hundred or a thousand
years hence. This tour de force, never attempted
before, was merely an exemplification of the value of
the phonograph not only in establishing at first hand
the facts of history, but in preserving the human
voice. What would we not give to listen to the very
accents and tones of the Sermon on the Mount, the
orations of Demosthenes, the first Pitt's appeal for
American liberty, the Farewell of Washington, or the
Address at Gettysburg? Until Edison made his wonderful
invention in 1877, the human race was entirely
without means for preserving or passing on to posterity
its own linguistic utterances or any other vocal
sound. We have some idea how the ancients looked
and felt and wrote; the abundant evidence takes us
back to the cave-dwellers. But all the old languages
are dead, and the literary form is their embalmment.
We do not even know definitely how Shakespeare's
and Goldsmith's plays were pronounced on the stage
in the theatres of the time; while it is only a guess
that perhaps Chaucer would sound much more modern
than he scans.

The analysis of sound, which owes so much to
Helmholtz, was one step toward recording; and the
various means of illustrating the phenomena of sound
to the eye and ear, prior to the phonograph, were all
ingenious. One can watch the dancing little flames
of Koenig, and see a voice expressed in tongues of
fire; but the record can only be photographic. In
like manner, the simple phonautograph of Leon Scott,
invented about 1858, records on a revolving cylinder
of blackened paper the sound vibrations transmitted
through a membrane to which a tiny stylus is attached;
so that a human mouth uses a pen and inscribes
its sign vocal. Yet after all we are just as
far away as ever from enabling the young actors at
Harvard to give Aristophanes with all the true, subtle
intonation and inflection of the Athens of 400 B.C.
The instrument is dumb. Ingenuity has been shown
also in the invention of "talking-machines," like
Faber's, based on the reed organ pipe. These autom-
ata can be made by dexterous manipulation to jabber
a little, like a doll with its monotonous "ma-ma," or
a cuckoo clock; but they lack even the sterile utility
of the imitative art of ventriloquism. The real great
invention lies in creating devices that shall be able
to evoke from tinfoil, wax, or composition at any
time to-day or in the future the sound that once was
as evanescent as the vibrations it made on the air.

Contrary to the general notion, very few of the
great modern inventions have been the result of a
sudden inspiration by which, Minerva-like, they have
sprung full-fledged from their creators' brain; but,
on the contrary, they have been evolved by slow and
gradual steps, so that frequently the final advance
has been often almost imperceptible. The Edison
phonograph is an important exception to the general
rule; not, of course, the phonograph of the present
day with all of its mechanical perfection, but as an
instrument capable of recording and reproducing
sound. Its invention has been frequently attributed
to the discovery that a point attached to a telephone
diaphragm would, under the effect of sound-waves,
vibrate with sufficient force to prick the finger. The
story, though interesting, is not founded on fact;
but, if true, it is difficult to see how the discovery in
question could have contributed materially to the
ultimate accomplishment. To a man of Edison's perception
it is absurd to suppose that the effect of the
so-called discovery would not have been made as a
matter of deduction long before the physical sensation
was experienced. As a matter of fact, the invention
of the phonograph was the result of pure reason.
Some time prior to 1877, Edison had been experimenting
on an automatic telegraph in which the
letters were formed by embossing strips of paper
with the proper arrangement of dots and dashes.
By drawing this strip beneath a contact lever, the
latter was actuated so as to control the circuits and
send the desired signals over the line. It was observed
that when the strip was moved very rapidly
the vibration of the lever resulted in the production
of an audible note. With these facts before him,
Edison reasoned that if the paper strip could be imprinted
with elevations and depressions representative
of sound-waves, they might be caused to actuate a
diaphragm so as to reproduce the corresponding
sounds. The next step in the line of development
was to form the necessary undulations on the strip,
and it was then reasoned that original sounds themselves
might be utilized to form a graphic record by
actuating a diaphragm and causing a cutting or indenting
point carried thereby to vibrate in contact
with a moving surface, so as to cut or indent the
record therein. Strange as it may seem, therefore,
and contrary to the general belief, the phonograph
was developed backward, the production of the sounds
being of prior development to the idea of actually
recording them.

Mr. Edison's own account of the invention of the
phonograph is intensely interesting. "I was
experimenting," he says, "on an automatic method of
recording telegraph messages on a disk of paper laid
on a revolving platen, exactly the same as the disk
talking-machine of to-day. The platen had a spiral
groove on its surface, like the disk. Over this was
placed a circular disk of paper; an electromagnet
with the embossing point connected to an arm
travelled over the disk; and any signals given
through the magnets were embossed on the disk of
paper. If this disk was removed from the machine
and put on a similar machine provided with a contact
point, the embossed record would cause the
signals to be repeated into another wire. The ordinary
speed of telegraphic signals is thirty-five to
forty words a minute; but with this machine several
hundred words were possible.

"From my experiments on the telephone I knew
of the power of a diaphragm to take up sound vibrations,
as I had made a little toy which, when you
recited loudly in the funnel, would work a pawl connected
to the diaphragm; and this engaging a ratchet-
wheel served to give continuous rotation to a pulley.
This pulley was connected by a cord to a little paper
toy representing a man sawing wood. Hence, if one
shouted: `Mary had a little lamb,' etc., the paper
man would start sawing wood. I reached the conclusion
that if I could record the movements of the
diaphragm properly, I could cause such record to
reproduce the original movements imparted to the
diaphragm by the voice, and thus succeed in recording
and reproducing the human voice.

"Instead of using a disk I designed a little machine
using a cylinder provided with grooves around the
surface. Over this was to be placed tinfoil, which
easily received and recorded the movements of the
diaphragm. A sketch was made, and the piece-work
price, $18, was marked on the sketch. I was in the
habit of marking the price I would pay on each
sketch. If the workman lost, I would pay his regular
wages; if he made more than the wages, he kept it.
The workman who got the sketch was John Kruesi.
I didn't have much faith that it would work, expecting
that I might possibly hear a word or so that
would give hope of a future for the idea. Kruesi,
when he had nearly finished it, asked what it was for.
I told him I was going to record talking, and then
have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd.
However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then
shouted `Mary had a little lamb,' etc. I adjusted the
reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly.
I was never so taken aback in my life. Everybody
was astonished. I was always afraid of things that
worked the first time. Long experience proved that
there were great drawbacks found generally before
they could be got commercial; but here was something
there was no doubt of."

No wonder that honest John Kruesi, as he stood
and listened to the marvellous performance of the
simple little machine he had himself just finished,
ejaculated in an awe-stricken tone: "Mein Gott im
Himmel!" And yet he had already seen Edison do
a few clever things. No wonder they sat up all night
fixing and adjusting it so as to get better and better
results--reciting and singing, trying each other's
voices, and then listening with involuntary awe as
the words came back again and again, just as long
as they were willing to revolve the little cylinder
with its dotted spiral indentations in the tinfoil under
the vibrating stylus of the reproducing diaphragm.
It took a little time to acquire the knack of turning
the crank steadily while leaning over the recorder to
talk into the machine; and there was some deftness
required also in fastening down the tinfoil on the
cylinder where it was held by a pin running in a
longitudinal slot. Paraffined paper appears also to
have been experimented with as an impressible
material. It is said that Carman, the foreman of the
machine shop, had gone the length of wagering Edison
a box of cigars that the device would not work. All
the world knows that he lost.

The original Edison phonograph thus built by
Kruesi is preserved in the South Kensington Museum,
London. That repository can certainly have no
greater treasure of its kind. But as to its immediate
use, the inventor says: "That morning I took it over
to New York and walked into the office of the Scientific
American, went up to Mr. Beach's desk, and said I
had something to show him. He asked what it was.
I told him I had a machine that would record and
reproduce the human voice. I opened the package,
set up the machine and recited, `Mary had a little
lamb,' etc. Then I reproduced it so that it could
be heard all over the room. They kept me at it until
the crowd got so great Mr. Beach was afraid the
floor would collapse; and we were compelled to stop.
The papers next morning contained columns. None
of the writers seemed to understand how it was done.
I tried to explain, it was so very simple, but the results
were so surprising they made up their minds probably
that they never would understand it--and they didn't.

"I started immediately making several larger and
better machines, which I exhibited at Menlo Park to
crowds. The Pennsylvania Railroad ran special
trains. Washington people telegraphed me to come
on. I took a phonograph to Washington and exhibited
it in the room of James G. Blaine's niece
(Gail Hamilton); and members of Congress and
notable people of that city came all day long until
late in the evening. I made one break. I recited
`Mary,' etc., and another ditty:

`There was a little girl, who had a little curl
     Right in the middle of her forehead;
And when she was good she was very, very good,
     But when she was bad she was horrid.'

It will be remembered that Senator Roscoe Conkling,
then very prominent, had a curl of hair on his forehead;
and all the caricaturists developed it abnormally.
He was very sensitive about the subject.
When he came in he was introduced; but being rather
deaf, I didn't catch his name, but sat down and
started the curl ditty. Everybody tittered, and I
was told that Mr. Conkling was displeased. About
11 o'clock at night word was received from President
Hayes that he would be very much pleased if I would
come up to the White House. I was taken there,
and found Mr. Hayes and several others waiting.
Among them I remember Carl Schurz, who was playing
the piano when I entered the room. The exhibition
continued till about 12.30 A.M., when Mrs. Hayes
and several other ladies, who had been induced to
get up and dress, appeared. I left at 3.30 A,M,

"For a long time some people thought there was
trickery. One morning at Menlo Park a gentleman
came to the laboratory and asked to see the phonograph.
It was Bishop Vincent, who helped Lewis
Miller found the Chautauqua I exhibited it, and
then he asked if he could speak a few words. I put
on a fresh foil and told him to go ahead. He
commenced to recite Biblical names with immense
rapidity. On reproducing it he said: `I am satisfied,
now. There isn't a man in the United States who
could recite those names with the same rapidity.' "

The phonograph was now fairly launched as a
world sensation, and a reference to the newspapers
of 1878 will show the extent to which it and Edison
were themes of universal discussion. Some of the
press notices of the period were most amazing--and
amusing. As though the real achievements of
this young man, barely thirty, were not tangible
and solid enough to justify admiration of his genius,
the "yellow journalists" of the period began busily
to create an "Edison myth," with gross absurdities of
assertion and attribution from which the modest
subject of it all has not yet ceased to suffer with
unthinking people. A brilliantly vicious example of
this method of treatment is to be found in the Paris
Figaro of that year, which under the appropriate
title of "This Astounding Eddison" lay bare before
the French public the most startling revelations as
to the inventor's life and character. "It should be
understood," said this journal, "that Mr. Eddison
does not belong to himself. He is the property of
the telegraph company which lodges him in New
York at a superb hotel; keeps him on a luxurious
footing, and pays him a formidable salary so as to
be the one to know of and profit by his discoveries.
The company has, in the dwelling of Eddison,
men in its employ who do not quit him for a
moment, at the table, on the street, in the laboratory.
So that this wretched man, watched more
closely than ever was any malefactor, cannot even
give a moment's thought to his own private affairs
without one of his guards asking him what he is
thinking about." This foolish "blague" was accompanied
by a description of Edison's new "aerophone,"
a steam machine which carried the voice a distance
of one and a half miles. "You speak to a jet of
vapor. A friend previously advised can answer you
by the same method." Nor were American journals
backward in this wild exaggeration.

The furor had its effect in stimulating a desire
everywhere on the part of everybody to see and hear
the phonograph. A small commercial organization
was formed to build and exploit the apparatus, and
the shops at Menlo Park laboratory were assisted by
the little Bergmann shop in New York. Offices were
taken for the new enterprise at 203 Broadway, where
the Mail and Express building now stands, and
where, in a general way, under the auspices of a
talented dwarf, C. A. Cheever, the embryonic phonograph
and the crude telephone shared rooms and expenses.
Gardiner G. Hubbard, father-in-law of Alex.
Graham Bell, was one of the stockholders in the
Phonograph Company, which paid Edison $10,000
cash and a 20 per cent. royalty. This curious part-
nership was maintained for some time, even when
the Bell Telephone offices were removed to Reade
Street, New York, whither the phonograph went also;
and was perhaps explained by the fact that just then
the ability of the phonograph as a money-maker
was much more easily demonstrated than was that
of the telephone, still in its short range magneto
stage and awaiting development with the aid of the
carbon transmitter.

The earning capacity of the phonograph then, as
largely now, lay in its exhibition qualities. The
royalties from Boston, ever intellectually awake and
ready for something new, ran as high as $1800 a
week. In New York there was a ceaseless demand
for it, and with the aid of Hilbourne L. Roosevelt, a
famous organ builder, and uncle of ex-President
Roosevelt, concerts were given at which the phonograph
was "featured." To manage this novel show
business the services of James Redpath were called
into requisition with great success. Redpath, famous
as a friend and biographer of John Brown, as a
Civil War correspondent, and as founder of the
celebrated Redpath Lyceum Bureau in Boston, divided
the country into territories, each section being leased
for exhibition purposes on a basis of a percentage of
the "gate money." To 203 Broadway from all over
the Union flocked a swarm of showmen, cranks, and
particularly of old operators, who, the seedier they
were in appearance, the more insistent they were that
"Tom" should give them, for the sake of "Auld lang
syne," this chance to make a fortune for him and for
themselves. At the top of the building was a floor
on which these novices were graduated in the use and
care of the machine, and then, with an equipment of
tinfoil and other supplies, they were sent out on the
road. It was a diverting experience while it lasted.
The excitement over the phonograph was maintained
for many months, until a large proportion of the
inhabitants of the country had seen it; and then the
show receipts declined and dwindled away. Many of
the old operators, taken on out of good-nature, were
poor exhibitors and worse accountants, and at last
they and the machines with which they had been
intrusted faded from sight. But in the mean time
Edison had learned many lessons as to this practical
side of development that were not forgotten when
the renascence of the phonograph began a few years
later, leading up to the present enormous and steady
demand for both machines and records.

It deserves to be pointed out that the phonograph
has changed little in the intervening years from the
first crude instruments of 1877-78. It has simply
been refined and made more perfect in a mechanical
sense. Edison was immensely impressed with its
possibilities, and greatly inclined to work upon it,
but the coming of the electric light compelled him to
throw all his energies for a time into the vast new
field awaiting conquest. The original phonograph,
as briefly noted above, was rotated by hand, and the
cylinder was fed slowly longitudinally by means of
a nut engaging a screw thread on the cylinder shaft.
Wrapped around the cylinder was a sheet of tinfoil,
with which engaged a small chisel-like recording
needle, connected adhesively with the centre of an
iron diaphragm. Obviously, as the cylinder was
turned, the needle followed a spiral path whose pitch
depended upon that of the feed screw. Along this
path a thread was cut in the cylinder so as to permit
the needle to indent the foil readily as the diaphragm
vibrated. By rotating the cylinder and by causing
the diaphragm to vibrate under the effect of vocal
or musical sounds, the needle-like point would form
a series of indentations in the foil corresponding to
and characteristic of the sound-waves. By now
engaging the point with the beginning of the grooved
record so formed, and by again rotating the cylinder,
the undulations of the record would cause the needle
and its attached diaphragm to vibrate so as to effect
the reproduction. Such an apparatus was necessarily
undeveloped, and was interesting only from a scientific
point of view. It had many mechanical defects
which prevented its use as a practical apparatus.
Since the cylinder was rotated by hand, the speed
at which the record was formed would vary
considerably, even with the same manipulator, so that
it would have been impossible to record and reproduce
music satisfactorily; in doing which exact uniformity
of speed is essential. The formation of the
record in tinfoil was also objectionable from a practical
standpoint, since such a record was faint and
would be substantially obliterated after two or three
reproductions. Furthermore, the foil could not be
easily removed from and replaced upon the instrument,
and consequently the reproduction had to follow
the recording immediately, and the successive
tinfoils were thrown away. The instrument was also
heavy and bulky. Notwithstanding these objections
the original phonograph created, as already remarked,
an enormous popular excitement, and the exhibitions
were considered by many sceptical persons as nothing
more than clever ventriloquism. The possibilities
of the instrument as a commercial apparatus
were recognized from the very first, and some of the
fields in which it was predicted that the phonograph
would be used are now fully occupied. Some have
not yet been realized. Writing in 1878 in the North
American-Review, Mr. Edison thus summed up his
own ideas as to the future applications of the new
invention:

"Among the many uses to which the phonograph will
be applied are the following:

1. Letter writing and all kinds of dictation without the
aid of a stenographer.

2. Phonographic books, which will speak to blind people
without effort on their part.

3. The teaching of elocution.

4. Reproduction of music.

5. The `Family Record'--a registry of sayings,
reminiscences, etc., by members of a family in their own
voices, and of the last words of dying persons.

6. Music-boxes and toys.

7. Clocks that should announce in articulate speech
the time for going home, going to meals, etc.

8. The preservation of languages by exact reproduction
of the manner of pronouncing.

9. Educational purposes; such as preserving the
explanations made by a teacher, so that the pupil can refer
to them at any moment, and spelling or other lessons
placed upon the phonograph for convenience in committing
to memory.

10. Connection with the telephone, so as to make that
instrument an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent
and invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of
momentary and fleeting communication."

Of the above fields of usefulness in which it was
expected that the phonograph might be applied, only
three have been commercially realized--namely, the
reproduction of musical, including vaudeville or talking
selections, for which purpose a very large proportion
of the phonographs now made is used; the employment
of the machine as a mechanical stenographer,
which field has been taken up actively only
within the past few years; and the utilization of the
device for the teaching of languages, for which purpose
it has been successfully employed, for example,
by the International Correspondence Schools of
Scranton, Pennsylvania, for several years. The other
uses, however, which were early predicted for the
phonograph have not as yet been worked out practically,
although the time seems not far distant when
its general utility will be widely enlarged. Both dolls
and clocks have been made, but thus far the world
has not taken them seriously.

The original phonograph, as invented by Edison,
remained in its crude and immature state for almost
ten years--still the object of philosophical interest,
and as a convenient text-book illustration of the
effect of sound vibration. It continued to be a theme
of curious interest to the imaginative, and the subject
of much fiction, while its neglected commercial
possibilities were still more or less vaguely referred to.
During this period of arrested development, Edison
was continuously working on the invention and commercial
exploitation of the incandescent lamp. In
1887 his time was comparatively free, and the phonograph
was then taken up with renewed energy, and
the effort made to overcome its mechanical defects
and to furnish a commercial instrument, so that its
early promise might be realized. The important
changes made from that time up to 1890 converted
the phonograph from a scientific toy into a successful
industrial apparatus. The idea of forming the record
on tinfoil had been early abandoned, and in its stead
was substituted a cylinder of wax-like material, in
which the record was cut by a minute chisel-like gouging
tool. Such a record or phonogram, as it was then
called, could be removed from the machine or replaced
at any time, many reproductions could be
obtained without wearing out the record, and whenever
desired the record could be shaved off by a
turning-tool so as to present a fresh surface on which
a new record could be formed, something like an
ancient palimpsest. A wax cylinder having walls
less than one-quarter of an inch in thickness could
be used for receiving a large number of records, since
the maximum depth of the record groove is hardly
ever greater than one one-thousandth of an inch.
Later on, and as the crowning achievement in the
phonograph field, from a commercial point of view,
came the duplication of records to the extent of many
thousands from a single "master." This work was
actively developed between the years 1890 and 1898,
and its difficulties may be appreciated when the
problem is stated; the copying from a single master
of many millions of excessively minute sound-waves
having a maximum width of one hundredth of an
inch, and a maximum depth of one thousandth of
an inch, or less than the thickness of a sheet of
tissue-paper. Among the interesting developments of
this process was the coating of the original or master
record with a homogeneous film of gold so thin that
three hundred thousand of these piled one on top of
the other would present a thickness of only one inch!