THE BOYS' LIFE OF EDISON
I
THE EARLY DAYS OF ELECTRICITY
This is the life story of the greatest of inventors in the field of electricity. It is true that Thomas A. Edison has helped the progress of the world by many other inventions and discoveries quite outside of electricity, but it is in this field that he is best known. Now, in this age of electricity, it happens very fortunately that a close personal association with Mr. Edison makes it possible at last to tell younger readers the real story of Mr. Edison's life, partly in his own words. It has been a life full of surprises as well as of great achievements, and one of the surprises which we meet at the start is that, unlike Mozart, who showed his musical genius in infancy, and unlike others devoted to one thing from the outset, Edison took up electricity almost by accident.
Yet this is not so strange when we think how little electricity there was to take up in the middle of the nineteenth century. Electricity was not studied in the schools. It was not a separate art or business. Men of science had occupied themselves with electricity for a long time, but they really did not know as much about it as a bright boy in the upper grammar grades to-day. Speaking in a very general way, we may say that simple frictional electricity[1] was an old story, that Franklin had discovered the identity of electricity and lightning, and that Galvani had discovered in 1790 and Volta had developed in 1801 the generating of electric currents from batteries composed of zinc and copper plates immersed in sulphuric acid.
But it was not until 1835, only twelve years before Edison was born, that Samuel F. B. Morse applied electrical currents to the sending of an alphabet of dots and dashes by wire. Thus it was in the infancy of telegraphy that Edison first saw the light.
Telegraph apparatus in those early days was of a crude and cumbersome kind—quite different from that which young students experiment with at the present time. For instance, the receiving magnets of the earliest telegraphs, which performed the same office as the modern sounders, weighed seventy-five pounds instead of a few ounces.
It was a very difficult undertaking for Morse to establish the telegraph after he had invented it. It was such a new idea that the public could not seem to understand its use and possibilities. People would not believe that it was possible to send messages regularly over a long stretch of wire, and, even if it were possible, that it would be of much use anyway. It took him a long time to raise money to put up a telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington. Before this, he had offered to sell the whole invention outright to the United States Government for one hundred thousand dollars; but the Government did not buy, as the invention was not thought to be worth that much money.