PART I
"Uncle John, I've decided to go to Wellesley College."
"I'm glad to hear it, Dora. Have you money enough?"
"That's just the trouble, Uncle John. I have exactly twenty-four dollars that I've earned picking berries the last three summers. But I'm only eleven, you know, and I shan't try to go before I'm eighteen. That will give me seven more summers to work. Only I can never pay my college expenses if I can't earn more than eight dollars a summer."
"That's true, Dora. I wish I were rich enough to send you myself. But school teachers are not wealthy, you know."
"Oh, I don't want anybody to give me the money, Uncle John. I want to earn it. Don't you know of something that's more profitable than berry-picking?"
"I'll think about it, Dora."
This conversation took place in 1878, when Dora's Uncle John, who was a high school principal in New Jersey, was spending his Christmas vacation at Dora's home in a little village on the Maine coast. Nothing more was said about the college money then; but when Uncle John came again in February, he showed that he had interested himself in the ambitious plans of his little niece.
Wellesley College in 1886.
"Dora," he inquired, "do you want to go to college as much as ever?"
"Yes, more, Uncle John. Have you thought of anything for me to do this summer?"
"I know something you can do, Dora, if you want to."
"Oh, Uncle John, what is it?"
"How should you like to work for me?"
"I should like to ever so much. But I don't know enough yet to correct high school papers. All I can do is housework."
"And that's just what I want of you, Dora. You didn't know I had leased the Atlantic House, did you?"
"No, indeed, Uncle John. Do you mean you're coming here summers to manage that hotel?"
"Yes, for the next ten years, anyway, I expect. Do you like to fill lamps and clean chimneys, Dora?"
"Why, that's the part of the housework I can do best."
"That's good. Will you work for me twelve weeks this summer for three dollars and a half a week?"
"Oh, Uncle John, of course I will. But isn't there gas in that hotel?"
"No, just kerosene lamps. I know some people like gas better, but I don't. It's too dangerous and it's bad for one's eyes. So even if I could spare the money this summer, I shouldn't pipe the house for gas. It can't be many years before there will be a cleaner and better light. The Wizard will soon attend to that."
"What do you mean, Uncle? Who is the Wizard?"
"The most wonderful man in America, Dora. His name is Thomas Alva Edison, and he lives in Menlo Park, New Jersey, not far from where I teach. I know him a little. He is the man who, I think, best represents the scientific spirit of the nineteenth century. He's an inventor, but a systematic one. He doesn't trust to chance."
"What has he invented, Uncle? I don't think I ever heard of him."
"I fancy not, Dora. So far his work has been largely improvements on inventions already made. Just now, as I said, he is experimenting to find a way of lighting buildings by electricity. He will succeed, I know; and I shall wait for his electric light. I expect, though, to wait a number of years yet, for even though he should discover the secret within a few months, no one can supply the necessary apparatus. It will take years, I'm sure, before electric lighting is cheap enough to be common."
"How did you get acquainted with such a wonderful man, Uncle?"
"I knew him first when I was getting ready for college. Like you, I had my own way to pay; and I learned to be a telegraph operator. The summer before I entered Harvard I had a place in the Boston office of the Western Union Telegraph Company. Mr. Edison was a young man too, and he came to work in the office while I was there.
"The night he came we tried to play a joke on him, but the joke was decidedly on ourselves. Edison wore an old linen duster, and looked so much like a country boy that we thought he couldn't know much about taking messages. So we arranged with a skillful New York operator to send a long message faster and faster, and we saw to it that the new boy had to take it. To our surprise, he proved the fastest operator we had ever known and very carelessly and easily handled the quick dots and dashes. The joke was on the New York operator, too, for after a while Edison signaled, 'Say, young man, why don't you change off and send with your other foot?'
"An operator like that didn't stay long in the office. He went to New York, and almost at once got a position at three hundred dollars a month because he was bright enough to repair a stock-indicator in a broker's office. Soon afterward he improved the indicator so much that the president of the company gave him forty thousand dollars for his new idea.
"Next he proved his value to the telegraph company again by locating a break in the wire between New York and Albany. The president of the Western Union had promised to consider any invention Edison might make if the young man would find the trouble on the line in two days. Edison was not two hours in locating the break; and ever after that the Western Union people were glad enough to be told of all his new ideas."
"Is he working for the Western Union now?"
Stock Indicator or "Ticker"
"No, not now. Just as soon as he had enough money in the bank so that he could afford time to experiment, he opened a factory and laboratory of his own. He made stock tickers for a while; but he cared more about improving them than selling them. 'No matter,' I have heard him say, 'whether I take an egg beater or an electric motor into my hand, I want to improve it. I'm a poor manufacturer, because I can't let well enough alone.' So, instead of making stock indicators, he went to work to improve the telegraph. He saved the Western Union Company millions of dollars by making a device for sending four messages at the same time over one wire. So you see he made their one hundred thousand miles of wire into four hundred thousand without using any more wire. That's a wizard's work, I think."
"I should think so, too," agreed Dora. "That seems to me as hard as singing two notes at once."
"But it can be done, nevertheless; and Edison was so pleased with that invention that he put his factory at Newark into the hands of a capable superintendent and established a laboratory at Menlo Park, where he is now, about twenty-five miles from Newark. Then he began to think about the telephone. Do you know what that is, Dora?"
"I've heard about it, of course, but I never saw one. There are some telephones in Portland, though."
"Yes, and there's going to be one here. I'm going to connect the hotel with the telegraph office at the station this summer, and sometime I'll give you a chance to talk over the wire. It's easier to use the telephone now than it was at first, for in the beginning there was a continual buzzing that was very annoying; but Edison has stopped all that by improving what we call the transmitter."
Dora's idea of a telephone was indistinct; but she was satisfied with the explanation to come, and she wanted to hear more of Mr. Edison. "Has he made anything else?" she asked.
"Oh, yes," replied Uncle John. "What I think is the most wonderful thing Edison has done is the phonograph. Next to the telephone, that to me is the biggest marvel in the world of science. Think, Dora, of speaking into a machine that makes a picture of the sound waves produced by your voice, and then, a day or a year or a century later, letting the instrument work backward and hearing your own voice exactly as it sounded at first. Such a mechanism almost frightens me. It makes me sure that if a man like Edison can keep the idle words men speak through centuries, the Master Mind of this universe can keep them for us forever."
Edison's First Phonograph.
Dora must have caught a little of her uncle's thought, for she said, slowly, "Do you mean that everything I say I shall hear again sometime?"
"I don't know exactly, Dora. But I am sure that God, who gave you power to speak, knows how to keep your words forever; and I am sure you will never cease to be glad for all the kind words you may speak for human ears to hear.
"But I'd almost forgotten about the electric light, Dora. Let me tell you what Edison said about that the last time I saw him. He told me of seeing in Philadelphia what is called an arc lamp—two pieces of carbon that electricity has heated white hot and that give off a powerful light, much more powerful than any gas lamp you ever saw could give. But a lamp like that, though it makes a fine street lamp, is not suitable for lighting a house. It's too bright and too big. Edison says it needs to be subdivided so that it can be distributed to houses just as gas is now.
"That's Edison's present problem, Dora. He is such an untiring worker that I don't believe it will take many months; and when the process is perfected and the implements for generating the electricity can be secured, I mean to make my hotel the prettiest place at night on the Maine coast. But meantime, Dora, suppose you learn to wipe lamps so dry and polish chimneys so bright and trim wicks so even that every summer visitor at the 'Atlantic' will be glad to get away for a while from the flaring, ill-smelling, poisonous gas light."
"I will, Uncle John, I will! I'll be the best lamp-trimmer on the whole Maine coast!"
"That's the spirit that will take you to college, Dora," answered her uncle. "Don't lose a bit of it."