HIS FIRST GLIMPSE OF PARADISE
“How long did you remain an engine-boy?”
“Not very long,” Mr. Carnegie replied; “perhaps a year.”
“And then?”
“I entered a telegraph office as a messenger boy.”
Although Mr. Carnegie did not dwell much on this period, he once described it at a dinner given in honor of the American Consul at Dunfermline, Scotland, when he said:—
“I awake from a dream that has carried me away back to the days of my boyhood, the day when the little white-haired Scottish laddie, dressed in a blue jacket, walked with his father into the telegraph office in Pittsburg to undergo examination as an applicant for a position as messenger boy.
“Well I remember when my uncle spoke to my parents about it, and my father objected, because I was then getting one dollar and eighty cents per week for running the small engine in a cellar in Allegheny City, but my uncle said a messenger’s wages would be two dollars and fifty cents.... If you want an idea as to heaven on earth, imagine what it is to be taken from a dark cellar, where I fired the boiler from morning until night, and dropped into an office, where light shone from all sides, with books, papers, and pencils in profusion around me, and oh, the tick of those mysterious brass instruments on the desk, annihilating space and conveying intelligence to the world. This was my first glimpse of paradise, and I walked on air.”
“How did you manage to rise from this position?”
“I learned how to operate a telegraph instrument, and then waited an opportunity to show that I was fit to be an operator. Eventually my chance came.”
The truth is that James D. Reid, the superintendent of the office, and himself a Scotchman, favored the ambitious lad. In his “History of the Telegraph,” he says of him:—
“I liked the boy’s looks, and it was easy to see that, though he was little, he was full of spirit. He had not been with me a month when he asked me to teach him to telegraph. He spent all his spare time in practice, sending and receiving by sound and not by tape, as was the custom in those days. Pretty soon he could do as well as I could at the key.”