NETWORKING
Boston.
Edison usually doesn’t notice the arrival of the morning mail. Today, however, he anxiously gets up from his notebooks every few minutes and looks out the window to see if the mail carrier is coming. He has placed an ad in The Telegrapher, a magazine published by the telegraph operators’ union, and wants to see how it looks.
The ad isn’t for a product. It’s for Edison himself. He’s announcing that he’s quitting the job he wanted so much when he was a fifteen-year-old in Michigan. After more than six years as a telegraph operator, he’s had some extraordinary adventures and has made a name for himself in the industry. Now almost twenty-two, he has something even bigger planned.
ROAD WARRIOR
After Edison saved the young son of James MacKenzie, the grateful father made good on his promise to teach Edison telegraphy and Morse code. Then the telegraph operator at the Port Huron Station left to join the Union Army, and Edison was given a part-time position to replace him. It was the first of a series of jobs all over North America: Stratford Junction, Ontario, Canada; Adrian, Michigan; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Indianapolis, Indiana; Cincinnati, Ohio; Memphis, Tennessee; Louisville, Kentucky; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Boston, Massachusetts. He bounced around for five years, sometimes going back to a city where he’d worked before, but mostly looking for something new.
He was a young man in a hurry, but he was getting nowhere fast. At one point he almost moved to Brazil after reading an advertisement for telegraph jobs there. He changed his mind at the last minute because of an encounter with a stranger in the steamship office. After mentioning that he was moving to Brazil for work, he got some advice that he remembered years later.
Library of Congress
The young telegrapher
“I’ve sailed the seas for fifty years,” the man said, “and have been in every port in every country, and there’s no country like the U.S. If there’s anything in a man, the U.S. is the place to bring it out. Any man who leaves this country to better his condition is an ignorant damned fool.”
Edison had been having last-minute doubts, and the man’s strong advice changed his mind. The man was right, even though a lot of the country was in turmoil following the Civil War. (In New Orleans, where the conversation took place, there had just been a race riot and a massacre of African Americans. Edison also saw racial violence in Memphis and Louisville.) Despite its many problems at the time, the United States still offered more opportunities than South America or Europe for a man like Edison.
THE INCIDENT IN
NEW ORLEANS ON JULY 30, 1866, WAS AN ATTACK AGAINST PROTESTORS WHO WERE CHALLENGING NEW LOCAL LAWS MEANT TO LIMIT THE RIGHTS OF AFRICAN
AMERICANS. IT DREW NATIONAL ATTENTION.
THERE WERE CONCERNS THE WAR WOULD START AGAIN.
Considering his later success, Edison’s real problem may be surprising: For a long time, he was bad at his job. He was unable to send or receive messages at the speeds achieved by first-rate telegraphers. Also, he didn’t give his full attention to his work. He preferred to tinker with new devices and methods that would improve the young technology. Although he chose night shifts so he could do his experiments or read scientific books and journals, his bad habits were noticed. After almost causing a deadly train crash at a job in Canada, he came close to being arrested. Before the head of the railway could call the police, Edison slipped away and caught the first train leaving Toronto for the United States.
MOTHER OF INVENTION
While he wasn’t much of a telegraph operator, he was brilliant in his understanding of the medium. His inventions were all meant to push telegraphy from what it was to what it could be. To make it easier for operators to receive messages that came over the line quickly, he adapted a machine that recorded the Morse code signals on paper to also play back the signals at a slower speed. Going a step further, he created a printer that could automatically type out messages as they were received. For a company trying to sell telegraphs in China, he tried to create a fax machine so users could send handwritten Chinese characters. (The closest thing to a fax machine at the time was a device that used a nine-foot-tall pendulum. Faxes wouldn’t be common in offices until the mid-1980s.) He also came up with devices to improve how signals traveled along telegraph lines. A signal can lose its strength over the course of about twenty miles. It requires boosters along the way and automatic relays to send it to the right place. Edison made those too.
Edison was making the same kind of improvements to the telegraph network that engineers would make to computers and the Internet a century later: He was making information move along the network faster and farther, and he was improving what we now call the “interface”—the human interaction with the machine. He was like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in the early days of Apple Computer, trying to make the technology so easy anyone could use it. He didn’t want the telegraph operator to adjust to the telegraph; he wanted the machine to adjust to the operator. The first practical typewriters had only just been introduced while he was working on a device that would let an operator with no knowledge of Morse code send a message by using a dial to select actual letters of the alphabet. In essence this was an early electric keyboard. (The dial ran from A to Z. The QWERTY configuration of horizontal keyboards hadn’t been invented yet.)
INDEPENDENCE DAY
Now Edison lives in Boston, where he has been working at the Western Union telegraph office. Thanks to friends he has made in the past few years, and to articles he has published in The Telegrapher, he has earned a good reputation and the trust of businessmen who finance his inventions.
Always keen to earn money, he has also been setting up private telegraph lines for companies that have more than one location in the city. In Edison’s time, that meant climbing to the roofs of buildings to stretch wires across the city, and attaching all the power supplies and boosters and relays the system needed. Only then could he could attach the terminals that were actually used to send and receive messages. He also set up a service that would become very important to him later: the delivery of stock and gold prices via telegraph. Banks and brokerage firms in Boston are eager to receive the latest prices from the floor of the stock and gold exchanges in other cities, like New York.
His success has given him the confidence to leave behind the relatively simple work of sending and receiving messages as an operator for Western Union. He already has a notebook full of good ideas. Today he’s going to act on them.
Finally, the mail! Edison quickly flips through the pages of The Telegrapher and finds the advertisement he placed. With a smile on his face, he reads the announcement: “Mr. T. A. Edison has resigned his situation in the Western Union office, Boston, and will devote his time to bringing out his inventions.” 