Edison sits down and for four and one-half hours takes the speedy messages. The faster the instrument clicks, the faster he writes the words. At the end New York calls:
“Hello!”
“Hello yourself!” Edison flashes back.
“Who the dickens are you?” asks the New York operator.
“Tom Edison.”
“You are the first man in the country, that could ever take me at my fastest,” clicks out New York, “and the only one who could ever sit at the other end of my wire for more than two hours and a half. I’m proud to know you.”
This little story of Thomas Alva Edison shows that even as a young man he exhibited unusual ability. He was born on February 11, 1847, at Milan, Erie County, Ohio. His family moved to Port Huron, Michigan, when the boy was seven, and when he was only twelve years old Edison became a train newsboy on the railway to Detroit. It was during this time that he rigged up apparatus in the baggage car and experimented with chemistry and telegraphy.
He was but fifteen when he became a telegraph operator. But his studies and experiments interfered so much with his duties that he was discharged many times. He worked in a number of cities of the United States and Canada. At the age of twenty-one he had built an automatic repeater, by which a telegraphic message could be transferred from one wire to another without the aid of an operator. By means of this messages could be sent direct to a much greater distance than formerly.
Edison finally went to Boston, as related herein, and thence to New York, in 1869. There he invented an improved printing telegraph for stock quotations, the ticker. For this he received $40,000.
Then he built a laboratory at Newark, New Jersey; but four years later moved to Menlo Park, and later to West Orange, New Jersey. All the time he continued his experiments and inventions. He lives now at Orange, and is as hard a worker as he was when a young man.