Odd as it seems at first, all these marvelous inventions, and many others, are the result of one man’s work; in fact, this man has thought out so many marvelous inventions that the whole world agrees that he is the greatest inventor that has ever lived. Should you like to hear the life story of one who is so truly great? I am sure you would, for in the best sense he is a self-made American.
But, you ask, what is a self-made American? He is one born in poverty who has had to struggle hard for everything he has ever had; one who has had to force his way to success through all sorts of obstacles.
This great inventor first saw the light of day in the humble home of a poor laboring man who lived in Milan, a small canal town in the state of Ohio. In 1854 when Thomas A. Edison, for that is his name, was seven years 18 of age, his parents moved to Port Huron, Michigan, where most of his boyhood days were spent.
As we should naturally expect, Thomas was sent to school, but his teachers did not understand him and his progress was very poor. Finally his mother took him out of school and taught him herself. This she was able to do, for, before she married, she was a successful school teacher in Canada.
Later in life, in speaking of his mother, he said: “I was always a careless boy, and with a mother of different mental caliber I should have probably turned out badly. But her firmness, her sweetness, her goodness, were potent powers to keep me in the right path. I remember I never used to be able to get along at school. I don’t know why it was, but I was always at the foot of the class. I used to feel that my teachers never sympathized with me, and that my father thought that I was stupid, and at last I almost decided that I must really be a dunce. My mother was always kind, always sympathetic, and she never misunderstood or misjudged me. My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt I had someone to live for, some one I must not disappoint. The memory of her will always be a blessing to me.”
When young Edison was twelve years of age, he became a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railroad. That he was a wide-awake, energetic lad is shown by the following experience as told by himself.
“At the beginning of the Civil War I was slaving late and early at selling papers; but to tell the truth I was not making a fortune. I worked on so small a margin that I had to be mighty careful not to overload myself with papers that I could not sell. On the other hand, I could not afford to carry so few that I found myself sold out long before the end of the trip. To enable myself to hit the happy mean, I found a plan which turned out admirably. I made a friend of one of the compositors of the Free Press office, and persuaded him to show me every day a galley-proof of the most important news articles. From a study of its head-lines, I soon learned to gauge the value of the day’s news and its selling capacity, so that I could form a tolerably correct estimate of the number of papers I should need. As a rule I could dispose of about two hundred; but if there was any special news from the seat of war, the sale ran up to three hundred or over.
“Well, one day my compositor brought me a proof-slip of which nearly the whole was taken up with a gigantic display head. It was the first report of the battle of Pittsburgh Landing––afterward called Shiloh, you know, and it gave the number of killed and wounded as sixty thousand men.
“I grasped the situation at once. Here was a chance for enormous sales, if only the people along the line could know what had happened! If only they could see the proof-slip I was then reading! Suddenly an idea occurred 20 to me. I rushed off to the telegraph operator and gravely made a proposition to him which he received just as gravely. He, on his part, was to wire to each of the principal stations on our route, asking the station-master to chalk up on the bulletin-board, used for announcing the time of arrival and departure of trains, the news of the great battle, with its accompanying slaughter. This he was to do at once, while I, in return, agreed to supply him with current literature for nothing during the next six months from that date.