The Williams’ Electrical Workshop
I realize now what a lucky boy I was, when at 13 years of age I had to leave school and go to work for my living, although I didn’t think so at that time. I am not advising my young friends to leave school at this age, for they may not have the opportunity to enter college as I did at 40. There’s a “tide in the affairs of men,” you know, and that was the beginning of its flood in my life, for after trying several vocations—clerking, bookkeeping, carpentering, etc.—and finding them all unattractive, I at last found just the job that suited me in the electrical work-shop of Charles Williams, at 109 Court Street, Boston—one of the best men I have ever known. Better luck couldn’t befall a boy than to be brought so early in life under the influence of such a high-minded gentleman as Charles Williams.
I want to say a few words about my work there, not only to give you a picture of such a shop in the early ’70s, but also because in this shop the telephone had its birth and a good deal of its early development.
Thomas A. Watson in 1874
I was first set to work on a hand lathe turning binding posts for $5 a week. The mechanics of to-day with their automatic screw machines, hardly know what it is to turn little rough castings with a hand tool. How the hot chips used to fly into our eyes! One day I had a fine idea. I bought a pair of 25-cent goggles, thinking the others would hail me as a benefactor of mankind and adopt my plan. But they laughed at me for being such a sissy boy and public opinion forced me back to the old time-honored plan of winking when I saw a chip coming. It was not an efficient plan, for the chip usually got there first. There was a liberal education in it for me in manual dexterity. There was no specializing in these shops at that time. Each workman built everything there was in the shop to build, and an apprentice also had a great variety of jobs, which kept him interested all the time, for his tools were poor and simple and it required lots of thought to get a job done right.