Hero Tales from History — Edison, The Wizard of Many Inventions

EDISON, THE WIZARD OF MANY INVENTIONS

Thomas Alva Edison was born in the little village of Milan, Ohio.

His father was a mechanic, who could turn his hand to anything.

While Alva, as they called him at home, was a small boy, the family moved to Port Huron.

Here the lad was sent to school, but he asked so many questions that the teacher sent him home.

Then Alva’s mother, who had been a school teacher, tried to educate him.

She had great patience with his questions, but there were so many that neither she nor his father could answer that he took to reading books.

He had the same desire to “know the why” of everything that other great men have shown when they were boys.

Though the Edison boy had no taste for school, he was fond of reading.

When he learned how much he could find out from books, he started in, boy-like, to read all the books in a public library.

He had worried through several great sets of volumes when he discovered that not all books were of interest to him.

After that he chose only those on subjects he liked to read about.

His father was a poor man, and as Alva was not in school he wanted to do his part toward making a living for the family.

He began by selling papers around home.

Then he had a chance to be train boy on the old Grand Trunk railroad between Port Huron and Detroit.

His mother was afraid to have him run on trains and be away from home, but he showed that he could take care of himself.

It was during this time that he began taking books from the Detroit Public Library.

He was such a wide-awake, good-natured lad that the trainmen liked him.

He found that he had a good deal of time to spare; so he got some old type from a printer and, in a corner of the baggage car, began to print a four-page newspaper about the size of a small handkerchief, which he named _The Grand Trunk Herald_.

The trainmen and their families and friends liked this young Edison’s news.

Soon he had about five hundred subscribers, so he made about ten dollars a week from his little paper.

Meanwhile he attended strictly to business.

During the Civil War he would find out when there had been a battle and have the telegraph operator send word of the event ahead of the train to the towns where the trains would stop.

This brought hundreds of people down to the stations at [Illustration: THOMAS A. EDISON AND ONE OF HIS EARLY DYNAMOS.

] train-time to learn the news of the battle.

Young Edison would sell hundreds--once he sold a thousand--newspapers at ten to twenty-five cents apiece.

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.

He improved the telegraph so that six messages could be sent at once over the same wire.

He made improvements in electric and other motor cars, as well as in the telephone.

He also made a delicate instrument to measure the heat of the stars, which he called the tasimeter.

Out of more than fourteen hundred different inventions, any one of which would have made him famous, the best known are the incandescent electric light, the phonograph and the moving-picture machine.

Thomas A. Edison is the greatest inventor that ever lived.

He has done more for the world’s wealth, comfort, and happiness than any other man save, perhaps, Dr. Benjamin Franklin.

Yet he is one of the most modest of men.

When he was invited to a dinner at which several distinguished men wished to pay him some of the high honors due him, he said: “I would not sit and listen to an hour of such talk for a hundred thousand dollars!

” When asked how he gained his great success, Mr. Edison replied: “By not looking at the clock.

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