He was always trying to do something new. After his little paper became well known, he began to buy chemicals and keep them in bottles in his printing office in the car. One day the phosphorus jar fell off the shelf and broke. This set fire to the floor of the car. While Alva was putting out the fire the conductor came through. It made him so angry to have a boy around who might burn up the train with his experiments, that he threw out bottles, printing-press, and type, and pushed the boy after them.
Alva did not hold a grudge against that conductor. He only wondered that the trainmen had stood that sort of thing so long. He saved all he could out of the ruins and set up his printing plant in the cellar of his father’s house. He went back to work as though nothing had happened, and attended only to selling papers. One day while waiting on the platform of a station he saw the station agent’s child on the tracks and an express train coming. Throwing down his newspapers he jumped, seized the child, and sprang across the track just in time to save its life and his own.
The station man wept as he seized the heroic newsboy’s hand. “I am a poor man,” he said, “so I can’t repay you for saving my child’s life; but I can teach you telegraphy.”
Edison was delighted. He stopped at that station several times a week and learned very soon to send and receive messages. It is harder to take than to send telegraph dispatches. Young Edison invented a machine which would run more slowly than the telegraph and which gave him time to write out the words while the “dots and dashes” of the telegraph alphabet were clicking away. But sometimes it is impossible to attach this appliance; so young Edison practised till he could receive the fastest news story.
He knocked about the country, hiring out as telegraph operator, but he was always trying to make new machines and improvements. This was more interesting to him than telegraphing. After living in several western cities the young telegrapher and inventor applied for a job in the Western Union office in Boston. Here is Mr. Edison’s own account of his first experience there:
“I had been four days and nights on the road, and, having had very little sleep, I did not present a very fresh or stylish appearance. The manager asked me when I was ready to go to work. ‘Now,’ I replied. I was then told to return at 5.30 P.M., and punctually at that hour I entered the main room and was introduced to the night manager. My appearance caused much mirth, and, as I afterwards learned, the night operators consulted together how they might put up a job on the jay from the woolly West. I was assigned to New York No. 1 wire.
“After waiting upwards of one hour I was told to come over to a certain table and take a special report for the Boston Herald, the conspirators having arranged to have one of the fastest senders in New York send the dispatch and ‘salt’ the new man. I sat down without suspecting and the New York man started slowly. I had perfected myself in a simple and rapid style of handwriting, without flourishes, which could be increased from forty-five to fifty-four words a minute by reducing the size of the lettering. This was several words faster than any other operator in the United States could write.
“Soon the New York man increased his speed and I easily adapted my pace to his. This put my rival on his mettle, and he was soon doing his fastest work. At this point I happened to look up, and saw the operators all looking over my shoulder with their faces shining with fun and excitement. I knew then that they were trying to put a job on me, but I kept my own counsel and went on placidly with my work—even sharpening a pencil now and then, as an extra aggravation.
“The New York man then commenced to slur over his words, running them together, and sticking the signals; but I had been used to this style of telegraphy in taking reports and was not in the least discomfited. At last, when I thought the fun had gone far enough, I opened the key and clicked back to him: ‘Say, young man, change off and send with the other foot!’ This broke the New York man all up, and he turned the job over to another man to finish.”
Young Edison got the greatest benefit he could from the Boston Public Library. The following year he went to New York and found work with the Gold Reporting Telegraph Company, where he invented the “ticker” now so common in stockbrokers’ offices. He was employed at a salary of three hundred dollars a month. He now began to devote all his time to inventing. In a short time he had devised and constructed several machines and improvements for which he was offered forty thousand dollars. This enabled him to begin inventing and manufacturing on a large scale. He built a factory and employed three hundred men to carry out his fast-increasing ideas and make the necessary machines and drawings for securing his patents.