He repeated his request to the different clerks along the line. His eager face and twinkling eyes and earnest words won all hearts, and his request was granted. He next went to the editor of a well-known paper.
“Give me a thousand copies,” he begged, “and I will pay out of the proceeds of my venture.” Here, again, he succeeded. And now it remained but to get the engine-driver to promise him a few minutes at the different stations, and he started on his venture.
At the first stopping-place he had been wont to sell some half-dozen papers. That day, as he looked out, the platform was strangely crowded, and it suddenly dawned on him, from the eager faces of the people and their excited gestures, that it was papers they wanted! He dashed on to the platform, and in a few minutes had sold forty at five cents each, or about a penny of our money. It was much the same at the next station. The people had read the headings on the station blackboard, and they crowded on to the platform, an excited, hustling mob, for papers! It dawned on the boy, here was a chance to raise his prices, so he doubled them, and sold 150 where he had used to sell a dozen! It was the same all along the line. At the last station—Port Huron—his home, the people were most excited of all. The town was a mile from the station. Edison started off with his papers, but was met half-way by an eager, hurrying crowd. They all wanted news. He stopped, drawing up in front of a church where a prayer-meeting was being held. Presently the people poured out and surrounded the boy, willingly paying him five times the usual price of his paper. He began “to take in,” as he expressed it, in his own terse, telling words, “a young fortune.”
After this the busy boyish brain began to look eagerly ahead, to face life seriously. He did not start off on a fresh tack. He took hold of what was nearest to his hand, and he bent his mind on improving that. He had found people were in a hurry for news. The quicker they got it the better they were pleased. Nothing could surely be quicker than that they should get it damp from the press! So it flashed into his brain—why not print a paper on the train?
The question was no sooner asked than answered.
He looked about till he lighted on an old car, and he rigged it up as a printing-office with old types and stereos he begged from a newspaper office. In this novel press-room he threw off sheet after sheet of what he called The Grand Trunk Herald, the first and last paper ever printed on a train. The boy of fifteen was editor, compositor, and newsvendor in one. The paper “caught on,” and the circulation went up to 400.
But, alas! misfortune was soon to overwhelm the young adventurer. One unlucky day the printing-office—the old car, which grew daily more decrepit and unequal to the jolting of the journey—by a more violent lurch than usual threw over a bottle of phosphorus. The cork flew out, and in a few seconds the car was in flames. They were easily enough got under, but Edison’s venture had received its deathblow. The furious car-conductor would henceforth have none of him. He boxed his ears, and pitched him on to the platform along with his precious belongings—the whole paraphernalia of his craft.
It is a sorry picture that presents itself to our mind’s eye. The boy standing half stunned, the rubbish and débris of his belongings strewn at his feet, and the cherished old jolting car, the scene of his labours, gradually fading into distance! It seemed as if his bright dreams were all extinguished, his golden hopes doomed to come to nothing. As he stood there he faced it all—a mere boy low down in the world, badly fed, poorly clothed, almost penniless, but we do not hear that he either flinched or complained, or that a boyish sob rose in his throat. He was made of the stuff of the Stoic. It is our hearts that are sore and anguished, not chiefly for the hopes and dreams disappointed, but because of a terrible calamity that befell him then, when he was perhaps hardly conscious of it; but that grew darker and weightier as the years rolled on.
When the irritated conductor had boxed the boy’s ears, so brutal had been his onslaught that the delicate nerves were injured for life, and now with the flight of years has come deafness to wrap the great inventor in a partial mantle of silence. It is perhaps we who feel most the infinite pathos of the thing, while the man himself bears his affliction with the same noble patience with which he accepted disappointment long years ago as a boy.
At that time he straightway turned his eyes bravely homewards. He picked up his precious belongings, and carried them to a cellar in his father’s house.