Born in a little village in Erie County, Ohio, in 1847, Edison was early introduced to the struggle for existence. His father was very poor, being, indeed, the village jack-of-all-trades, and living upon such odd jobs as he was able to procure. The boy, of course, was put to work as soon as he was old enough, and of regular schooling had only two months in all his life. At the age of twelve, he was a train-boy on the Michigan Central Railroad, selling books, papers, candy, and fruit to the passengers. He managed to get some type and an old press and issued a little paper called the "Grand Trunk Herald," containing the news of the railroad. One day, he snatched the little child of the station-master at Port Clements, Michigan, from under the wheels of a train, and in return the grateful father taught the boy telegraphy.
It was the turning-point in his career, for it turned his attention to the study of electricity, with which he was soon fascinated. At eighteen, he was working as an operator at Indianapolis, but he was from the very first, more of an inventor than an operator, and his inventions sometimes got him into trouble. For instance, at one place where he had a night trick, he was required to report the word "six" every half-hour to the manager to show that he was awake and on duty. After a while, he rigged up a wheel to do it for him, and all went well until the manager happened to visit the office one night and found Edison sleeping calmly while his wheel was sending in the word "six." But he nevertheless developed into one of the swiftest operators in the country, all the time devising changes and improvements in the mechanism of telegraphy.
His first great success came with the sale of an improvement in the instruments used to record stock quotations, which enabled these "tickers" to print the quotations legibly on paper tape, and this success enabled him to get some capitalists to finance his experiments with the electric light. The arrangement was that they were to pay the expense of the experiments and to share in such inventions as resulted. For the sake of quiet, he moved out to a little place in New Jersey called Menlo Park, and built himself a shop. Then began that remarkable series of experiments—one of the most remarkable in history—which resulted in the perfection of the incandescent lamp.
The problem was to find a material for the filament which would give a bright light and which, would, at the same time, be durable, and with this end in view, hundreds and hundreds of different filaments were tried. The difficulties in the way of this experimenting were enormous, since the light only burns when in a vacuum, and the instant the vacuum is impaired, out it goes. At one time, all the lamps he had burning at Menlo Park, about eighty in all, went out, one after another, without apparent cause. The lamps had been equipped with filaments of carbon and had burned for a month. There seemed to be no reason why they should not burn for a year, and Edison was stunned by the catastrophe. He began at once the most exhaustive series of experiments ever undertaken by an American physicist, remaining in his laboratory for five days and nights, dining at his work bench on bread and cheese, and snatching a little sleep occasionally, when one of his assistants was on duty. It was finally discovered that the air had not been sufficiently exhausted from the lamps.
Again success seemed in sight, but soon the lamps began acting queerly again. Worn out with fatigue and disappointment, Edison took to his bed. Ultimate failure was freely predicted, and the price of gas stock rose again. In five months, the inventor had aged five years, but he was not yet ready to give up the fight. And at last it was won, and the incandescent lamp placed on the market. It has not displaced gas, as some people thought it would, but it is the basis of a business which made the inventor sufficiently rich to realize his great ambition of building himself the finest laboratory in the world; where the most expert iron-workers, wood-workers, glass-blowers, metal-spinners, machinists and chemists in the world find employment. Every known metal, every chemical, every kind of glass, stone, earth, wood, fibre, paper, skin, cloth, may be found in its store-rooms, ready for instant use. The library contains one of the finest collections of scientific books and periodicals to be found anywhere. These are the tools, and with them Edison is constantly at work upon a great variety of problems.
The first thing he turned his hand to after his installation in his new laboratory was the phonograph. The patient thought and experiment, extending over many years, lavished on this wonderful invention are almost unbelievable. The idea had come to him years before, when he had worked out an instrument that would not only record telegrams by indenting a strip of paper with the dots and dashes of the Morse code, but would also repeat the message any number of times by running the indented strip of paper through it.
"Naturally enough," said Edison, in telling the story, "the idea occurred to me that if the indentations on paper could be made to give off again the click of the instrument, why could not the vibrations of a diaphragm be recorded and similarly reproduced? I rigged up an instrument hastily and pulled a strip of paper through it, at the same time shouting 'Hallo!' Then the paper was pulled through again, and listening breathlessly, I heard a distinct sound, which a strong imagination might have translated into the original 'Hallo!' That was enough to lead me to a further experiment. I made a drawing of a model, and took it to Mr. Kruesi, at that time engaged on piece-work for me. I told him it was a talking-machine. He grinned, thinking it a joke; but he set to work and soon had the model ready. I arranged some tin-foil on it and spoke into the machine. Kruesi looked on, still grinning. But when I arranged the machine for transmission and we both heard a distinct sound from it, he nearly fell down in his fright. I must admit that I was a little scared myself." The words which he had spoken into the machine and which were the first ever to be reproduced mechanically, was the old Mother Goose quatrain, starting, "Mary had a Little Lamb."
From that rude beginning came the phonograph, with which Edison has never ceased to experiment. He has made improvements in it from year to year, until it has reached its present high state of efficiency—a state, however, which Edison hopes to improve still further. In addition to the two great inventions of the phonograph and incandescent lamp, which we have dwelt upon here, many more stand to his credit. In fact, he has been the greatest client the patent office ever had, nearly one thousand patents having been issued in his name. At the age of sixty-three, he shows no sign of falling off in either mental or physical energy, and no doubt more than one invention has yet to come from Llewellyn Park before he quits his great laboratory forever.
No one can ever guess at the future of electrical invention. The recent marvelous development of the wireless telegraph, by which the impalpable ether is harnessed to man's service, is an indication of the wonders which may be expected in the future. It was our own Joseph Henry who, in 1842, discovered the electric wave—the "induction" upon which wireless telegraphy depends. He discovered that when he produced an electric spark an inch long in a room at the top of his house, electrical action was instantly set up in another wire circuit in the cellar. After some study, he saw and announced that the electric spark started some sort of action in the ether, which passed through floors and ceilings and all other intervening objects, and caused induction in the wires in the cellar. But wireless telegraphy was made a commercial possibility not by any great scientist, but by a young Italian named Marconi. Already experiments with wireless telephony are going forward, and another half century may see all the labor of the world performed by this wonderful and mysterious force which we call electricity.