Instead of going to college Edison started a newspaper—a kind of amateur affair, in which he himself wrote editorials, news-items and advertisements—this when he was seventeen years old.
The best way to become a skilled writer is to write; and if there is a better way to learn than by doing, the world has not yet discovered it.
Also, if there is a finer advantage for a youth who would be a financier than to have a shiftless father, it has not been recorded.
When nineteen, Edison had two thousand dollars in cash—more money than his father had ever seen at any one time.
The Grand Trunk folks found that their ex-trainboy could operate, and so they called on him to help them out, up and down the line. Then the Western Union wanted extra good men, and young Edison was given double pay to go to New Orleans, where there was a pitiful dearth of operators, the Southern operators being mostly dead, and Northern men not caring to live in the South.
So Edison traveled North and South and East and West, gathering gear. He had studied the science of telegraphy closely enough to see that it could be improved upon. One message at a time for one wire was absurd—why not two, or four, and why not send messages both ways at once!
It was the general idea then that electricity traveled: Edison knew better—electricity merely rendered the wire sensitive.
Edison was getting a reputation among his associates. He had read everything, and when his key was not busy, there was in his hand a copy of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall."