In 1847, the year Edison was born, there were only a few telegraph circuits in existence. The farthest line to the west was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was in this early telegraph office that Andrew Carnegie was a messenger boy. We could name a great many more notable men in our country who began their careers in a similar way, or as telegraph operators, in the early days of telegraphy, but space forbids.
Within a few years after Edison was born there came a great boom in telegraphy, and new lines were put up all over the country. Thus, by the time he had grown to boyhood the telegraph was a well-established business, and the first great electrical industry became a pronounced success.
There were no other electrical industries at this time, except electro-plating to a limited extent. The chief reason of this was probably that the only means of obtaining electrical current was by means of chemical batteries, as mechanical generators had not been developed at that time.
While the principles of the dynamo-electric machine had been discovered, and a few of these machines and small electric motors had been made by scientists, in the middle of the nineteenth century such machines were little more than scientific toys, and not to be compared with the generators of modern days.
Edison, therefore, was born at the very beginning of "The Age of Electricity," which can be said to have actually begun about 1840, or soon after.
It is not too much to say that the many important and practical inventions that he has since contributed to the electrical arts have had no small weight in causing the present time to be known as "The Age of Electricity."
[1] Made by rubbing certain objects together, like amber and silk, the original discovery over two thousand years ago.