Steam, Steel and Electricity

by James W. Steele

Another of the men who might be appropriately included in any comprehensive list of aiders and abettors of the present telegraph system were Leonard D. Gale, then Professor of Chemistry in the University of New York, and Professor Joseph Henry, who had made, and was apparently indifferent to the importance of it because there was no alphabet to use it with, the first electric telegraph ever constructed to be read, or used, by sound. Last, though hardly least if all facts are understood, might be included a skillful youth named William Baxter, afterwards known as the inventor of the "Baxter Engine," who, shut in a room with Vail in a machine shop in New Jersey, made in conjunction with the author of the alphabet the first telegraphic instrument that, with Henry's magnet and battery cells, sent across space the first message ever read by a person who did not know what the words of the message would say or mean until they had been received.

After the telegraph the state of electrical knowledge was for a long time such that electrical invention was in a sense impossible. The renowned exploit of Field was not an invention, but a heroic and successful extension of the scope and usefulness of an invention. But thought was not idle, and filled the interval with preparations for final achievements unequaled in the history of science. Two of these results are the electric light and the telephone. For the various "candles," such as that of Jablochkoff, exhibited at Paris in 1870, only served to stimulate investigation of the alluring possibilities of the subject. The details of these great inventions are better known than those of any others. The telegraph and the newspaper reporter had come upon the field as established institutions. Every process and progress was a piece of news of intense interest. When the light glowed in its bulb and sparkled and flashed at the junction points of its chocolate-colored sticks it had been confidently expected. There was little surprise. The practical light of the world was considered probable, profitable, and absolutely sure. The real story will never be told. The thoughts, which phrase may also include the inevitable disappointments of the inventor, are never written down by him. That variety of brain which, with a few great exceptions, was not known until modern, very recent times, which does not speculate, contrive, imagine only, but also reduces all ideas to commercial form, has yet to have its analysis and its historian, for it is to all intents a new phase of the evolution of mind.

A typical example of this class of intellect is Mr. Thomas A. Edison. It may be doubted if such a man could, in the qualities that make him remarkable, be the product of any other country than ours. In common with nearly all those who have left a deep impression upon our country, Edison was the child of that hackneyed "respectable poverty" which here is a different condition from that existing all over Europe, where the phrase was coined. There, the phrase, and the condition it describes, mean a dull content, an incapacity to rise, a happy indifference to all other conditions, a dullness that does not desire to learn, to change, to think. To respectable poverty in other civilizations there are strong local associations like those of a cat, not arising to the dignity of love of country. In the United States, without a word, without argument or question, a young man becomes a pioneer--not necessarily one of locality or physical newness, but a pioneer in mind--in creed, politics, business--in the boundless domain of hope and endeavor. In America no man is as his father was except in physical traits. No man there is a volunteer soldier fighting his country's battles except from a conviction that he ought to be. A man is an inventor, a politician, a writer, first because he knows that valuable changes are possible, and, second, because he can make such changes profitable to himself. It is the great realm of immutable steadfastness combined with constant change; unique among the nations.

Edison never had more than two months regular schooling in his entire boyhood. There is, therefore, nothing trained, "regular," technical, about him. If there had been it is probable that we might never have heard of him. He is one of the innumerable standing arguments against the old system advocated by everybody's father, and especially by the older fathers of the church, and which meant that every man and woman was practically cut by the same pattern, or cast in the same general mould, and was to be fitted for a certain notch by training alone. No more than thirty years ago the note of preparation for the grooves of life was constantly sounded. Natural aptitude, "bent," inclination, were disregarded. The maxim concocted by some envious dull man that "genius is only another name for industry," was constantly quoted and believed.

But Edison's mother had been trained, practically, as an instructor of youth. He had hints from her in the technical portions of a boy's primary training. He is not an ignorant man, but, on the contrary, a very highly educated one. But it is an education he has constructed for himself out of his aptitudes, as all other actual educations have really been. When he was ten years old he had read standard works, and at twelve is stated to have struggled, ineffectually perhaps, with Newton's Principia. At that age he became a train-boy on the Grand Trunk railroad for the purpose of earning his living; only another way of pioneering and getting what was to be got by personal endeavor. While in that business he edited and printed a little newspaper; not to please an amateurish love of the beautiful art of printing, but for profit. He was selling papers, and he wanted one of his own to sell because then he would get more out of it in a small way. He never afterwards showed any inclination toward journalism, and did not become a reporter or correspondent, or start a rural daily. While he was a train-boy, enjoying every opportunity for absorbing a knowledge of human nature, and of finally becoming a passenger conductor or a locomotive engineer, something called his attention to the telegraph as a promoter of business, as a great and useful institution, and he resolved to become an "operator." This was his electrical beginning. Yet before he took this step he was accused of a proclivity toward extraordinary things. In the old "caboose" where he edited, set up, and printed his newspaper he had established a small chemical laboratory, and out of these chemicals there is said to have been jolted one day an accident which caused him some unpopularity with the railroad people. He was all the time a business man. He employed four boy helpers in his news and publishing business. It took him a long time to learn the telegraph business under the circumstances, and when he was at last installed on a "plug" circuit he began at once to do unusual things with the current and its machines and appliances. This is what he tells of his first electrical invention.

There was an operator at one end of the circuit who was so swift that Edison and his companion could not "take" fast enough to keep up with him. He found two old Morse registers--the machines that printed with a steel point the dots and dashes on a paper slip wound off of a reel. These he arranged in such a way that the message written, or indented, on them by the first instrument were given to him by the second instrument at any desired rate of speed or slowness.

This gave to him and his friend time to catch up. This, in Morse's time, would have been thought an achievement. Edison seems to regard it as a joke. There was no time for prolonged experiment. It was an emergency, and the idea must necessarily have been supplemented by a quick mechanical skill.

It was this same automatic recorder, the idea embodied in it, that by thought and logical deduction afterwards produced that wonderful automaton, the phonograph. He rigged a hasty instrument that was based upon the idea that if the indentations made in a slip of paper could be made to repeat the ticking sound of the instrument, similar indentations made by a point on a diaphragm that was moved by the voice might be made to repeat the voice. His rude first instrument gave back a sound vaguely resembling the single word first shouted into it and supposed to be indented on a slip of paper, and this was enough to stimulate further effort. He finally made drawings and took them to a machinist whom he knew, afterwards one of his assistants, who laughed at the idea but made the model. Previously he bet a friend a barrel of apples that he could do it. When the model was finished he arranged a piece of tin foil and talked into it, and when it gave back a distinct sound the machinist was frightened, and Edison won his barrel of apples, "which," he says, "I was very glad to get."

The "Wizard" is a man evidently pertaining to the class of human eccentrics who excite the interest of their fellow-men "to see what they will do next," but without any idea of the final value of that which may come by what seems to them to be mere unbalanced oddity. Such people are invariably misunderstood until they succeed. When he invented the automatic repeating telegraph he was discharged, and walked from Decatur to Nashville, 150 miles, with only a dollar or two as his entire possessions. With a pass thence to Louisville, he and a friend arrived at that place in a snowstorm, and clad in linen "dusters." This does not seem scientific or professor-like, but it has not hindered; possibly it has immensely helped. It reminds one of the Franklinic episodes when remembered in connection with future scientific renown and the court of France.