He did not have enough money to buy as many papers as he wanted. He asked the superintendent to let him have one thousand copies of the Press on credit. The request was instantly refused. Thereupon he marched up the stairs to the office of the paper’s owner, and asked if he would give him fifteen hundred copies on trust. The owner looked at the boy for a moment, and then wrote out an order. “Take that down-stairs,” said he, “and you will get what you want.” As Edison said in telling the story afterward, “Then I felt happier than I have ever felt since.”
He took his fifteen hundred copies to his storehouse on the train. At the station where the first stop was made he usually sold two papers. That day as they ran in to the platform it looked as if a riot had occurred. All the town was clamoring for papers. He sold a couple of hundred at five cents each. Another crowd met him at the next stop, and he raised his price to ten cents a copy. The same thing happened at each place where they stopped. When he reached Port Huron he put what was left of his stock in a wagon, and drove through the main streets. He sold his papers at a quarter of a dollar and more apiece. He went by a church, and called out the news of the battle. In ten seconds the minister and all his congregation were clamoring about the wagon, bidding against each other for copies of the precious issue. He had made a small fortune for a boy, and felt that he owed it largely to his use of the telegraph. Quick-witted he was, beyond a doubt, of an inventive turn, but a shrewd business man on top of all.
He wanted to be a telegraph-operator. Electricity fascinated him, and he could watch the machines and listen to the music of their clicking by the hour. He set up a line of his own in his father’s basement at Port Huron, making his batteries of bottles, old stovepipe wire, nails and zinc that he could pick up for a trifle. He studied the subject in his shop in the corner of the baggage-car, during the scant moments when he was neither printer nor newsboy. Once a bottle of phosphorus upset and started a fire. The boy was thrashed and his bottles and wires thrown out. But he was too doggedly persistent to mind any mishap. He saved the small son of the station-master at Port Clements from being run down by a train, and in return the father offered to teach him telegraphy. So little by little he learned his chosen work.
He obtained a position as night operator at Port Huron. That kept him busy at night, but he refused to sleep during the daytime as other night operators did, and used that time to work on his own schemes. To catch some sleep he kept a loud alarm-clock at his office, and set it so that he would be waked when trains were due and he was needed. But sometimes trains were off schedule, and again and again he would oversleep. At last the train despatcher ordered Edison to signal him the letter “A” in the Morse alphabet every half hour. The boy willingly agreed. A few nights later he brought an invention of his own to the office, and connected it by wires with the clock and the telegraph. Then he watched it work. Exactly on the half hour a little lever fell, sending an excellent copy of the Morse “A” to the key of the telegraph. Another lever closed the circuit. He kept his eyes on this instrument of his making until he had seen it act faultlessly again at the next half hour. Then he went to sleep. Night after night the signal was sent without a mistake, and the despatcher began to regain some of the confidence he had lost in the young operator. Then one night the despatcher chanced to be at the next station to Edison’s, and it occurred to him to call the latter up and have a chat with him. He signaled for fifteen minutes, and received no answer. Then he jumped on a hand-car and rode to Edison’s station. Looking through the window he saw the youth sound asleep. His eyes took in the strange instrument upon the table. It was near the half hour, and as the man watched he saw one lever of the instrument throw open the key and the other send the signal over the wire. The operator was still sleeping soundly. The despatcher recognized the young man’s ingenuity, but he also realized that he had been fooled, and so he woke Edison none too gently, and told him that his services were no longer in demand on that road.
Ingenuity, mechanical short-cuts, new devices for doing old work, were what beset his mind. He was not interested in doing the simple routine service of a telegrapher, he wanted to see what improvements on it he could make. Often this keenness for new ideas led him into trouble with his employers; occasionally it was of real service. At one time an ice-jam had broken the cable-line between Port Huron, in Michigan, and Sarnia, over the Canadian line. The river there was a mile and a half wide. The officers were wondering how they could get their messages across when they saw Edison jump upon a locomotive standing in the train-yard. He seized the valve that controlled the whistle. He opened and closed it so that the locomotive’s whistles resembled the dots and dashes of the telegraph code. He called Sarnia again and again. “Do you hear this? Do you get this?” he sent by the whistle. Four and five times he sent the message, and finally the whistle of a locomotive across the river answered him. In that way communication was again established.
A little later, when Edison was employed as operator in the railroad office at Indianapolis, he practiced receiving newspaper reports in his spare hours at night. He and a friend named Parmley would take the place of the regular man, who was glad to have them do it. “I would sit down,” said Edison, “for ten minutes, and ‘take’ as much as I could from the instrument, carrying the rest in my head. Then while I wrote out, Parmley would serve his turn at ‘taking,’ and so on. This worked well until they put a new man on at the Cincinnati end. He was one of the quickest despatchers in the business, and we soon found it was hopeless for us to try to keep up with him. Then it was that I worked out my first invention, and necessity was certainly the mother of it.
“I got two old Morse registers and arranged them in such a way that by running a strip of paper through them the dots and dashes were recorded on it by the first instrument as fast as they were delivered from the Cincinnati end, and were transmitted to us through the other instrument at any desired rate of speed. They would come in on one instrument at the rate of forty words a minute, and would be ground out of our instrument at the rate of twenty-five. Then weren’t we proud! Our copy used to be so clean and beautiful that we hung it up on exhibition; and our manager used to come and gaze at it silently with a puzzled expression. He could not understand it, neither could any of the other operators; for we used to hide my impromptu automatic recorder when our toil was over. But the crash came when there was a big night’s work—a presidential vote, I think it was—and copy kept pouring in at the top rate of speed until we fell an hour and a half or two hours behind. The newspapers sent in frantic complaints, an investigation was made, and our little scheme was discovered. We couldn’t use it any more.”
His fortunes rose and fell, for, although he was now becoming a very expert operator, taking messages with greater and greater speed, he would continue to stray into new fields of experiment. When he started to work in the Western Union office in Memphis, which was soon after the end of the Civil War, he found that all messages that were sent from New Orleans to New York had to be received at Memphis, sent on from there to Louisville, taken again, and so forwarded by half a dozen relays to New York. Many errors might creep in by such a system. To cure this he devised an automatic repeater, which could be attached to the line at Memphis, and would of its own accord send the message on. In this way the signals could go directly from New Orleans to New York. The device worked, and was highly praised in the local newspapers. But it happened that the manager of the office had a relative who was just completing a similar instrument, and Edison had forestalled him. Consequently he found himself discharged. He got a railroad pass as far as Decatur, and walked a hundred and fifty miles from there to Nashville. So by alternate riding and walking he finally reached Louisville. A little later he was offered a place in the Boston office.
He had plenty of nerve, and was not at all put out at the amusement of the other men when he walked into the Boston office, clad in an old and shapeless linen duster. “Here I am,” he announced to the superintendent. “And who are you?” he was asked. “Tom Edison. I was told to report here.”
The superintendent sent him to the operating-room. Shortly after a New York telegrapher, famed for his speed, called up. Every one else was busy, and Edison was told to take his message. He sat down, and for four and a half hours wrote the messages, numbering the pages and throwing them on the floor for the office boy to gather up. As time went on the messages came with such lightning speed that the whole force gathered about to see the new man work. They had never seen such quickness. At the end of the last message came the words, “Who the devil are you?” “Tom Edison,” the operator ticked back. “You are the first man in the country,” wired the man in New York, “that could ever take me at my fastest, 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.”