“Adams,” he said to a friend, “I’ve got so much to do, and life is so short, that I’m going to hustle.”
And if we try to look at what he has crowded into a life not long, we must allow he has indeed “hustled” to some purpose. As we briefly glance at the bent of his manhood, his doings fairly dazzle us. He read enormously all sorts of works on telegraphy and electricity, and he produced from his brain that which makes him the greatest inventor of the age. If we tried to enumerate his inventions the names alone would fill pages. We can do little more than name a few. Among the first of these was how to send four messages at the same time over one telegraph wire.
But even after he had embarked on the glorious sea of discovery, what “ups and downs”—what sea-saws of fortune were in store for him! Hunger at times, torn clothes, and battered shoes. But from depths and half-drowning up again he always came to the surface. He rose grandly, relying on his own indomitable will. About this time good fortune befell him. For inventing some telegraphic appliances he got 50,000 dollars, or rather more than £10,000. He could hardly believe his good luck, and it was with this he immediately rigged up for himself a workshop.
And now he was rapidly rising, and the field before him was gradually opening up wider and wider. He started a laboratory at a place called Newark, and from this time onwards his inventions seemed to flow from his brain in a well-nigh continuous stream.
His workmen were devoted to his service. His genial good-humour and kindliness, the absence of all harshness in his manner, and his love of fun could not but endear him to them. They caught the infection, too, of his earnestness. When he had an idea in his brain he worked at it, as it were, red-hot, almost without rest or cessation, and they were rarely reluctant to help him.
“Now, you fellows!” he would say, shutting himself and his workmen up in a room on the top flat, “I’ve locked the door, and you’ll have to stay here until this job is completed.”
During sixty hours, perhaps, he would take no sleep and little food, while his brain would work at highest pressure until the thing was wrought. Then he would relax, and sleep for as long as thirty-six hours at a stretch.
And now his fame had spread far and wide. The people at Menlo Park, to which he removed—some twenty-four miles from New York—began to look upon him as a wizard—a man possessing magical powers. It seemed to them there was nothing he could not do. Exaggerated tales of his wonderful powers spread over the country.
“If people track me here,” he said (he had been besieged at Newark), “I shall simply have to take to the woods.”
Child after child was the offspring of the inventor’s brain. At one time, within the space of a few years, as many as forty-five were born.