In drawing some vitriol one night, he upset the carboy, and the acid eating its way through the floor, played havoc with the furniture of a luxurious bank in the flat below. He was discharged for this, but soon obtained another engagement as a press operator in Cincinnati. He spent his leisure in the Mechanics' Library, studying works on electricity and general science. He also developed his ideas on the duplex system; and if they were not carried out, they at least directed him to the quadruplex system with which his name was afterwards associated.
These attempts to improve his time seem to have made him unpopular, for after a short term in Cincinnati, he returned to Port Huron. A friend, Mr. F. Adams, operator in the Boston office of the Western Union Telegraph Company, recommended Edison to his manager, Mr. G. F. Milliken, as a good man to work the New York wire, and the berth was offered to Edison by telegraph. He accepted, and left at once for Boston by the Grand Trunk Railway, but the train was snowed up for two days near the bluffs of the St. Lawrence. The consequence might have been serious had provisions not been found by a party of foragers.
Mr. Milliken was the first of Edison's masters, and perhaps his fellows, who appreciated him. Mediocrity had only seen the gawky stripling, with his moonstruck air, and pestilent habit of trying some new crotchet. Himself an inventor, Milliken recognised in his deep-set eye and musing brow the fire of a suppressed genius. He was then just twenty-one. The friendship of Mr. Milliken, and the opportunity for experiment, rendered the Boston office a congenial one.
His by-hours were spent in a little workshop he had opened. Among his inventions at this period were a dial telegraph, and a 'printer' for use on private lines, and an electro-chemical vote recorder, which the Legislature of Massachusetts declined to adopt. With the assistance of Mr. F. L. Pope, patent adviser to the Western Union Telegraph Company, his duplex system was tried, with encouraging results.
The ready ingenuity of Edison is shown by his device for killing the cockroaches which overran the Boston office. He arranged some strips of tinfoil on the wall, and connected these to the poles of a battery in such a way that when the insects ran towards the bait which he had provided, they stepped from one foil to the other, and completed the circuit of the current, thus receiving a smart shock, which dislodged them into a pail of water, standing below.
In 1870, after two years in Boston, where he had spent all his earnings, chiefly on his books and workshop, he found himself in New York, tramping the streets on the outlook for a job, and all but destitute. After repeated failures he chanced to enter the office of the Laws Gold Reporting Telegraph Company while the instrument which Mr. Laws had invented to report the fluctuations of the money market had broken down. No one could set it right; there was a fever in the market, and Mr. Laws, we are told, was in despair. Edison volunteered to set it right, and though his appearance was unpromising, he was allowed to try.
The insight of the born mechanic, the sleight of hand which marks the true experimenter, have in them something magical to the ignorant. In Edison's hands the instrument seemed to rectify itself. This was his golden opportunity. He was engaged by the company, and henceforth his career as an inventor was secure. The Gold Indicator Company afterwards gave him a responsible position. He improved their indicator, and invented the Gold and Stock Quotation Printer, an apparatus for a similar purpose. He entered into partnership with Mr. Pope and Mr. Ashley, and introduced the Pope and Edison Printer. A private line which he established was taken over by the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company, and soon their system was worked almost exclusively with Edison's invention.
He was retained in their service, and that of the Western Union Telegraph Company, as a salaried inventor, they having the option of buying all his telegraphic inventions at a price to be agreed upon.
At their expense a large electrical factory was established under his direction at Newark, New Jersey, where he was free to work out his ideas and manufacture his apparatus. Now that he was emancipated from drudgery, and fairly started on the walk which Nature had intended for him, he rejoiced in the prolific freedom of his mind, which literally teemed with projects. His brain was no longer a prey to itself from the 'local action,' or waste energy of restrained ideas and revolving thoughts. [The term 'local action' is applied by electricians to the waste which goes on in a voltaic battery, although its current is not flowing in the outer circuit and doing useful work.] If anything, he attempted too much. Patents were taken out by the score, and at one time there were no less than forty-five distinct inventions in progress. The Commissioner of Patents described him as 'the young man who kept the path to the Patent Office hot with his footsteps.'
His capacity for labouring without rest is very remarkable. On one occasion, after improving his Gold and Stock Quotation Printer, an order for the new instruments, to the extent of 30,000 dollars, arrived at the factory. The model had acted well, but the first instruments made after it proved a failure. Edison thereupon retired to the upper floor of the factory with some of his best workmen, and intimated that they must all remain there until the defect was put right. After sixty hours of continuous toil, the fault was remedied, and Edison went to bed, where he slept for thirty-six hours.