THOMAS ALVA EDISON
After a photograph from life
Makes a set of telegraphic instruments
Becomes a tramp telegrapher
200. Begins to Study Electricity. He studied ten days, then disappeared. He returned with a complete set of telegraphic instruments made by his own hand! After his trade was learned he began a period of wandering as a telegraph operator. For many boys still in their teens this would have been a time of destruction, but Edison neither drank nor smoked. He wandered from Adrian to Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Memphis, and Boston, stopping for shorter or longer periods at each place.
By the time he was twenty-two he had invented and partly finished his plan of sending two dispatches along the same wire at the same time. This was equal to doubling the number of wires in use.
Repairs electric machinery and gains a situation
Edison was a poor boy and was two or three hundred dollars in debt. He went from Boston to New York. The speculators in Wall Street were wild with excitement, for the electric machinery had broken down. Nobody could make it work. Edison pushed his way to the front, saw the difficulty, and at once removed it.
All were loud in their praise of Edison. On the next day he was engaged to take charge of all the electric machinery at three hundred dollars per month.