3 ~ The wanderyears

 

1

To Mackenzie’s surprise, Edison arrived at Mt. Clemens for the first day of his lessons with a neat set of telegraph instruments that he himself had made at a gunsmith’s shop in Detroit. How patient and skillful with his hands this boy was! He was forever collecting bits of scrap metal or wire at little or no cost; his homemade set for example, had good brass springs. In our material-rich country an inventive fellow could thrive on what others cast off as junk. At about that time, Tom Edison found a pile of corroded and broken-up battery cells in the storeroom of a railroad station; having been given permission to strip the old cells of their electrodes, he discovered that they contained several ounces of sheet platinum! — a perfect treasure-trove, which he used and re-used during many years.

At Mt. Clemens he underwent a rigorous apprenticeship in the autumn of 1862, being trained during five months to send and receive dispatches, and learning also the abbreviated signals used by railroad telegraphers. In the early stages he would be able to serve as a second-class or “plug” telegrapher; to attain the expert’s speed of forty-five words a minute would need considerably longer practice at this art. But even as a “plug” the young Edison could find work almost anywhere, because the need for telegraphers was so urgent during the Civil War, many hundreds of them having been recruited by the armies of both sides.

These were his wanderyears that began when he was only sixteen. In those days the strange new tribe of telegraphers were generally young men already noted for their nomadic or Bohemian habits, traveling light, pitching their tents for a brief season at one place, then journeying on to another that seemed to offer greener pastures. There were, to be sure, a few steady young operators who rose from the ranks to become industrial magnates, like Andrew Carnegie and Theodore Vail. But in a nation where opportunity always seemed to beckon elsewhere, and where so many were on the move, none were less stable as a group than the young telegraphers of that era.

“Edison,” one of them would suddenly exclaim, “I have only sixty cents in the world, and I am going to San Francisco!” And the next day he would go.

It used to be a tradition, carried over from European folkways, for the journeyman in certain trades to enjoy his Wanderjahr, or two, before settling into his career. As a tramp operator Edison traveled thousands of miles in the Middle West, South and East. His apprenticeship was to be uncommonly long, and he was to be well acquainted with hardship, which he bore, however, with the rollicking spirit usually affected by the brethren of the key, many of them hard-drinking, free-living fellows. He was not indisposed to working long hours — as he had done when he was keen to learn his trade under Mackenzie — yet he sometimes showed a marked indifference to routine tasks while his mind wandered to more engrossing subjects. Since his few hours of rest were spent in the reading of scientific or technical books and in “tinkering” for long periods with devices of his own, mechanical or electrical, he was often weary when at the operator’s table.

The path of self-instruction and self-improvement was, for him, prolonged by many detours; even after years had passed, without money, without friends, it was not easy to enter upon the true vocation he already dreamed of for himself. His “university” was the rough, workaday world; it was nightwork in shabby telegraph or railroad offices during a turbulent era of war and reconstruction; it was made up also of solitude and study in squalid rooming houses. He might have lost his way or gone downhill, like so many others, in that long-drawn-out, often unhappy interlude of his youth. Yet when these “arduous years” (as he called them) were gone and he had come to manhood, something of iron had entered into him. What he had seen and learned, how he had learned it all, at so much effort, marked him with sharply individual traits of character and mind, setting him apart from those whose youth had been passed in sheltered ease, under wise and solicitous mentors.

 

By the winter of 1863 he had absorbed all that the excellent Mackenzie could teach him and returned to Port Huron. At the jewelry and bookstore of Thomas Walker in that town there was now a little telegraph office, but the operator had gone off to war, and so the place was offered to Tom Edison. Walker himself was a man of some learning and technical skill; he had all sorts of instruments and machines stored in his cellar, and even files of scientific periodicals. In order to practice at his receiving, Tom Edison placed a cot in back of the store and stayed up at night to “cut in” on press copy coming to the local newspaper at high speed. The volume of telegrams handled here was small; but even this Edison would neglect, while he disappeared into Walker’s cellar, pored over back numbers of the Scientific American, or played with electrical circuits of his own device. What vexed Mr. Walker was that the impetuous boy would make free with his fine watchmaking instruments, using them to cut wires or to work on corrosive primary cells. A more serious issue in dispute, however, may have been the fact that Tom was paid only twenty dollars a month, and his father refused to allow him to sign apprenticeship papers for less than twenty-five dollars.

In the winter of 1864 a heavy ice jam severed the telegraph cable between Port Huron and Sarnia on the Canadian shore of the St. Clair. The ferry service was also cut off, and all communication at this international crossing was out — until the young apprentice telegrapher turned up with one of his bright ideas. All that was required, he said, was that a railroad locomotive and engineer be brought down to the dock. This was done, and Edison stood by while the engineer, under his direction, gave long and short blasts of his whistle in Morse code. Three quarters of a mile distant, on the opposite shore, a curious crowd of Canadians gathered as if wondering what all the whistling was about; then a telegrapher among them caught the idea, a locomotive cab was driven down to the ferry dock on the other side, and tooted back its loud reply.⁵⁶

A little local celebrity as a consequence came to Port Huron’s telegrapher; this may have helped to win him his next post, in May, 1864, as a railroad dispatcher at Stratford Junction, on the Ontario side about forty miles from Port Huron. His was the night shift from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. — for which he always, hereafter, showed preference. The job required only that he await messages and signal trains or stations according to a stated schedule. Traffic, however, was light; Edison found ways of occupying the hours of this night-owl life by reading or by working with his hands over some mechanical device or piece of clockwork.

On the Grand Trunk Railway it was the rule to have the station operators signal to the office of the train dispatcher at certain hours, to guarantee that they were attentive to their duty. Edison’s “sixing” signal, so-called, came over quite punctually at the right hours. But after a while it was noticed at the central control office that, when the train dispatcher there tried to reach Stratford Junction following Edison’s signal that he was on the alert, no response came. This was queer; the train dispatcher’s office soon investigated the new operator.

What was discovered was that the youth had devised a clockwork attachment, having a wheel with a notched rim, which, at a given hour, such as 9 p.m., automatically, like an alarm bell, transmitted by telegraph the dots and dashes making the “sixing” signal. It was a rudimentary version of the district messenger’s call box. The device was conceived with a purpose; for in the small hours of the night, with no train movements to signal, he had formed the habit of taking cat naps (which became a lifelong habit); he hardly ever rested in the daytime hours when he was supposed to sleep. The railroad officials, however, were not amused at Edison’s ingenuity and administered a severe reprimand.

A short time later he was in trouble again, though, according to his recollection, through no negligence of his own. He had continued to busy himself in the daytime, and to take those cat naps for a half hour between trains or signal times, but had arranged with the friendly night yardman to be awakened at specified hours so that he might take his call at the telegraph table. One night he received a hurried order to hold up a freight train; he rushed out to find the signalman, but before he could do so and have the signal set, the train had run past. He hurried back to the telegraph and reported that he could not hold that train, that the order had not come in time. The telegraphed reply was an oath — the train dispatcher’s order had already been given to another train, which was coming up the single track in the opposite direction and by now had left the last station before Stratford. The danger of a serious collision was therefore imminent. Edison recalls that he “ran toward a lower station, near the junction... in a forlorn hope of catching the train. The night was dark, and I fell into a culvert and was knocked senseless.”⁵⁷ Fortunately disaster was avoided, when the engineers approaching on a straight track saw each other’s headlights and stopped in time.

Edison was summoned to come by train the next morning to the general manager’s office in Toronto. There he was sternly questioned and informed that his presumed negligence could, very possibly, under Canadian law, subject him to a prison sentence. The conference, however, was interrupted by the arrival of an important business delegation, which distracted the attention of the angry manager. Edison was a badly frightened boy; but while the manager was occupied he managed to slip out, jump a fast freight train, and make his way back to Sarnia, feeling relief only when the ferry had landed him again on Michigan soil.

 

2

In that one year, 1864, when he was seventeen, Tom Edison seems to have held four jobs in as many different towns, as far as we can determine his itinerary. After losing the place at Stratford, he went to a railroad junction at Adrian, Michigan, at seventy-five dollars a month; then, on being fired for some small act of insubordination, he moved on to Fort Wayne, only to be dismissed soon afterward. Next we find him listed, for three months after November, 1864, as a second-class operator on the payroll of Western Union’s office at Indianapolis. By mid-February, 1865, he had shifted to Cincinnati’s large Western Union headquarters. He was a rolling stone in those days; his low rating gave him little tenure; and he himself has confessed that, while he could receive messages pretty well, as an apprentice he was very poor at sending. In most cases he was fired, either because he was not amenable to office discipline, or was at times inattentive to his duties. He might cut in on the manager’s own wire because he thought the message he was sending was more urgent. Or he would let outgoing messages pile up on the hook above his telegraph table for hours on end while he drew diagrams or read a book.⁵⁸ Sometimes while he was receiving messages an idea came to him; Edison would signal the out-of-town operator to stop sending, draw out his notebook, jot down some notes, and then tell the operator to resume.

Another cause of trouble was his continual monkeying with some paraphernalia or “invention” that would make the routine work of telegraphy less irksome or allow it to be done more expeditiously. Finally, his disposition to play practical jokes on people by means of some gadget of his own devising was as marked as ever. All this overflow of playful activity derived, in part, from inward compulsions he himself scarcely understood, or from buried resentments or frustrations; in part, also from an irrepressible, though awkwardly directed, passion to contrive, to discover, to create, and, in short, to invent.

One of his few intimate friends among the roving telegraphers, toward 1865, was Milton F. Adams, whom he met in Cincinnati, a whimsical and carefree young fellow who dressed like a dude and always said the most surprising or devilish things with a perfectly bland expression. Adams later testified that Tom Edison in youth was a queer fish, an eccentric: “The boys did not take to him cheerfully, and he was lonesome.” At eighteen, the itinerant telegrapher was “decidedly unprepossessing” in dress and uncouth in manner. He is also described as thin-faced, with a prominent nose, an unruly cowlick, and wearing loosely fitted clothes topped off by a soiled paper collar and a straw hat — in short a country “hick.”⁵⁹

A photograph taken when he was twenty, however, in Sunday suit and with his face washed, shows no such Lincolnesque homeliness, but reveals a handsome youth with a finely-shaped head, a sensitive mouth, a strong round jaw, and large, expressive eyes. There is an air of pride and a consciousness of strength in this country boy.

Arriving in a strange town to apply for a job, he would usually rent a cheap back room in a boardinghouse, then fill up most of the room with his scientific impedimenta, consisting of tools, balls of wire, batteries, bottles of chemicals, books. His pockets usually bulged with metal scraps, pliers, and other instruments of the electrician’s trade. All the money beyond that needed for his wretched meals — which, as he said, amounted to a “system of flesh reduction” — he devoted to the purchase of books and equipment. An hour after receiving his wages, according to another of his co-workers, Walter P. Phillips,

 

Edison would come strolling in and blandly ask some of us to lend him half a dollar with which to get his supper. When reminded he had received half a month’s salary that day he would smile, and taking a brown, paper-covered parcel from under his arm, he would display a Ruhmkorff coil, an expensive set of helices, or something equally useless in the eyes of his comrades; from which we were led to infer that [his] salary had already been exchanged for these apparently useless instruments.⁶⁰

 

The typical offices in which he worked in the towns of the Middle West were dingy places, usually located in some dilapidated building of the downtown district. From the ceilings a good deal of plaster would have fallen away. On diminutive tables set against the walls were the telegraphic instruments, linked to the small switchboard by worn copper wires. The connections were loose, permitting arcing effects like lightning, or even explosions like cannon shots. In the battery room adjacent would be stands of old Grove cells, whose acid gave forth noxious odors.

Cincinnati was the largest city Edison had ever seen; then the metropolis of the Middle West, it offered many advantages in the way of bookshops, the famous Mechanics Library, theaters, and intelligent company. Yet toward the close of the Civil War, according to the recollections of a telegrapher who served there, the city was rougher and more lawless than it had ever been; fights, street robberies, and murders were daily occurrences.

Discipline among the men of the telegraph fraternity during the war became very lax, as Edison has recalled. A good part of their work was for the war service. Thus in mid-December of 1864, when Edison worked in Indianapolis, it was reported that General Hood’s Confederate Army was marching upon Nashville and threatened to surround General Thomas’s Union forces there. Urgent cipher messages from Washington passed through Edison’s hands, calling for instant communication with General Thomas at Nashville — though the wires leading in that direction seemed to be cut. In efforts to reach Nashville via Louisville Edison tried all kinds of roundabout ways but could get no response from Louisville.

 

Finally at 1 a.m.... contact was made with a telegraph office along the railroad near Louisville, and a relay of horses was engaged to... bring the cipher dispatches to General Thomas. [On December 16 the Union army beat off the Confederate attack.]

A couple of days afterward it was found that there were three night-operators at Louisville. One of them had gone to Jeffersonville, fallen off a horse and broken a leg. Another had been stabbed in a gambling house, while the third had gone... to see a man hanged and had got left by train.⁶¹

 

The work at the Cincinnati office of Western Union proceeded with a deadening routine; fast press reporters, such as Edison had become by 1865, transmitted long messages at forty-five words a minute; so tensely concentrated were they in their responses, that more often than not they became wholly unaware of the meaning of those messages. One day in April, 1865, the telegraphers noticed from their windows that a great crowd had gathered in the street outside the office of the Cincinnati Enquirer. A messenger was sent there and brought back an “extra” sheet of newspaper with great headlines announcing: “LINCOLN SHOT.” As Edison used to recall the incident, there had been, all that day, a great rush of press reports; but now the operators in the Western Union office looked at each other wonderingly to see which of them had transmitted this fateful news. Yet no one could recall it, until one man found in his files the copy sheet reporting the assassination. “The man had worked so mechanically,” Edison observed, “that he had handled the news without the slightest knowledge of its significance.”⁶²

As an itinerant telegrapher, Edison often lived in vermin-infested bedrooms. At the Western Union office in Cincinnati, formerly the site of a large restaurant, they were menaced by armies of rats. One of Edison’s first essays in invention of a primitive sort was a contrivance made up of two metal plates insulated from each other and connected with a main battery. This machine he laid out in the cellar, designating it as a “rat-paralyzer.” When one of the rodents chanced to place its forefeet on one plate and its hindfeet on the other, then, as Milton Adams phrased it, “it would render up its soul and depart this earthly sphere.”

It was also while working at Cincinnati that Edison and a companion, to vary the routine, devised another electrical fun-maker. Operated by a Ruhmkorff induction coil, which generated alternating current at high voltage from an ordinary battery, it was secretly connected by one electrode with the washtrough in a railroad roundhouse, the other electrode being connected to the earth. Here the railroad workers, of course, came in to wash up. He relates:

 

Above the wash-room was a flat roof; we bored a hole in it and could see the men as they came in. The first man dipped his hands in the water. The floor being wet, he formed a circuit, and up went his hands... The Ruhmkorff coil, although it would only give a small spark, would twist the arms and clutch the hands of a man so that he could not let go.⁶³

 

Having received their shock treatment and recovered from their pain and surprise, the railway laborers, being good Americans, would then go and wait quietly by the wall to see how others coming after them would react to the same trick. Finally a crowd would have gathered, all excited and puzzled, while Edison, from his peephole, enjoyed the sport hugely.

Most of his associates would hardly have been considered very respectable. They went on jamborees and got gloriously drunk. Two of his acquaintances who were out of work were befriended by Edison, who allowed them to sleep in his room at night while he was working; in return for his hospitality, they appropriated a whole shelfful of books he had recently collected, and pawned them for corn whisky. Then they returned and made a shambles of his place, falling asleep, fully clad, in his bed. Edison “felt that this was running hospitality into the ground, and so I pulled them out and left them on the floor in the hallway to cool off from their alcoholic trance.”⁶⁴

One night, when he was working in his office in Cincinnati, there was a loud knock at the door, which an instant afterward was abruptly flung open; a tin box then landed on the floor with a nerve-shattering crash. It was immediately followed by a wandering telegrapher who had left town a few months earlier to manage a frontier post in the Rocky Mountains. He cried out in the carefree manner so often affected by the Lightning Slingers: “Gentlemen, I have just returned from a pleasure trip beyond the Mississippi. All my wealth is contained in my metallic traveling case, and you are welcome to it.” The “traveling case” held only a solitary paper collar.⁶⁵

Some time later, in 1866 — he was then engaged at his trade in Louisville, and the telegraph management there was as lax as anywhere else — Edison was working at night with one other man, taking reports, when he heard a tremendous commotion at the door.

 

There appeared one of the most skilled operators of the force, a man whose splendid abilities were crippled by his habitual drunkenness. His eyes were bloodshot and wild and one sleeve had been torn away from the coat. He hesitated, then walked up to the stove without noticing either of us, and kicked it over with all its length of sooty pipe. Then he proceeded to pull down the switchboard and yank all the operating tables away from the wall. Pulling one of them away, he fell with it, cut himself and was covered with blood. After that he went into the battery-room, where he pulled down the shelves, upsetting bottles of nitric acid which ran over... eating everything away.

 

Tom Edison silently signaled to his fellow operator to say nothing. The intoxicated man, when sober, was a great friend of the manager, and few such operators were then to be hired. After he had demolished all he could reach, he disappeared, and the place was left in the condition he had wrought; Edison, however, rigged up the switchboard wires in temporary fashion so that incoming dispatches could be taken.

 

The manager came at eight o’clock in the morning, looked all about the office and was dumbfounded.

“Edison, who did this?”

“Billy L.” I replied unwillingly.

The manager paced the floor for a minute, then said: “If Billy L. ever does that again, I will discharge him.”⁶⁶

 

There was even a trade-union organized at the Cincinnati office in 1865, when Edison worked there. A delegation of five men from Cleveland simply blew into town, recruited a local branch for the National Telegraph Union, then determined to celebrate the event with a spontaneous walkout and many rounds of beer for all hands. Arriving after the workers had gone — and knowing nothing then of labor unions — Edison found only the office boy on hand. Meanwhile the press report wires clamored for attention. All that night he manipulated the wires single-handed, doing a good deal of “guessing” whenever he fell behind; he was still there in the morning when the office manager arrived. The manager was told, though not by Edison, of what had happened. He studied the files of press copy hanging on the hook (which Edison much feared contained figments of his imagination) then turned to the lone operator and said, “Young man, I want you to work the Louisville wire nights. Your salary will be a hundred and five dollars.” This was promotion indeed, for he had been receiving much less than that hitherto. It had come in the time of a strike, whose meaning he did not understand or perhaps cared nothing about. But he had long hoped to be advanced to the rank of a first-class operator regularly taking press copy as fast as mind and hand could go.

When he applied for a job nowadays, looking like a young rustic in his old linen duster, and was asked if he could send and receive fast, he would say nothing, but sit down and set the instrument humming. As an operator, it was said, he had few equals; at the age of nineteen he sometimes emerged winner in intercity tournaments between expert operators demonstrating their speed.

 

3

Out of those vagabond years there would seem to be little of actual accomplishment for Edison to show, save his experience of the world of men, and the knowledge of his trade. The money he earned also melted away quickly, not only in extravagant purchases of electrical equipment, but also in loans or gifts to his itinerant comrades, who, as one of them said, often found themselves “in the last stages of impecuniosity.” On the other hand there are many bits of evidence to be seen, during those years of careless youth, of Edison’s growing mechanical resourcefulness, of his earnest gropings toward innovations.

In Cincinnati, at any rate, he began to enjoy some of the amenities of civilization. He now had a few good friends and with them sometimes indulged in moderate dissipations, such as visits to the garden cafés “over the Rhine,” to hear the music of German bands over draughts of beer with pretzels. There was also the National Theatre, where Edison was entranced at seeing Edwin Forrest and John McCullough in plays of Shakespeare, of which Othello was long his favorite. Milton Adams afterward said that Edison was very fond of tragedy. Yet at any moment the comic spirit might seize him, and he would mimic and clown to the amusement of his companions. After seeing a performance of The Black Crook, Edison, returning to his room with two friends, entertained them by rendering the dances he had just seen in a costume improvised out of his red flannel underwear.

“I cannot avoid a tinge of regret,” one of his Cincinnati companions wrote him a dozen years later, “when I think of the loss suffered by dramatic art when you turned your back on tragedy.”⁶⁷

At seventeen to eighteen he already attracted the interest of intelligent men. The manager of the Western Union office at Indianapolis, when Edison worked there in 1864, was kind enough to lend him some of his fine electrical instruments so that he might experiment with them. In Cincinnati the following year he made the acquaintance of Ezra T. Gilliland, a telegrapher of some education and with some skill at mechanical invention; their minds seemed to run in the same path, and they became close friends — who were to meet again in later years. Gilliland said then of Edison that he seemed “one of the most wonderful young fellows” he had ever known.⁶⁸

The telegraph (in the days before the telephone was invented) held a place of enormous importance in peace and war ever since it had entered into practical use, about fifteen years before Edison came to it. Technical improvements were being introduced at regular intervals; yet in the sixties installation was still faulty, cables “leaked” current badly under river crossings, and the Morse register which had lately come into use (a receiver with a needle that embossed dots and dashes on a moving paper tape), often faltered under pressure, leaving blanks to be filled in by the operator’s imagination.

While he was in Indianapolis in the autumn of 1864, Edison, then seventeen and a half, conceived the idea of using a repeating device which, after recording the impressions received from the Morse register, could be played back at the convenience of the receiving operator, and at a speed he could regulate. The beauty of this scheme was that at periods when a great rush of press copy came at high speed, it could be received at leisure and its messages copied in Roman letters with complete accuracy instead of in haste. Edison described his device as follows:

 

I got two old Morse registers and arranged them in such a way that by running a strip of paper through them, the dots and dashes were recorded on it by the first instrument as fast as they were delivered... and transferred to us through the other instrument at any desired rate of speed or slowness. They would come in at the rate of fifty words a minute and we would grind them out at the rate of twenty-five. Then weren’t we proud. Our copy used to be so clean and beautiful that we hung it up on exhibition. The manager used to come and gaze at it in silence with a puzzled expression... He could not understand it; nor could any of the other operators; for we used to drag off my impromptu automatic recorder and hide it when our toil was over.⁶⁹

 

It was a most ingenious repeating system, but it broke down under pressure.

 

The crash came [Edison said] when there was a big night’s work — a presidential vote, I think — and copy kept pouring in at top speed, until we fell two hours behind. The newspapers sent in frantic complaints, an investigation was made, and our little scheme was discovered.

 

Use of the duplicating register was forbidden, and Edison was removed from the press copy desk. Yet experiment with innovations in telegraphic apparatus remained an obsession with him.

A year or so later, after the end of the war, he drifted away from Cincinnati, to work at first in Nashville and then in Memphis, Tennessee. These places were then still under military occupation but telegraphers were in high demand and received as much as $125 a month and rations. Here again his passion for technical improvisation undid him.

At that time connections by wire between New Orleans and New York were completed only by long detours, that is, by retelegraphing in roundabout fashion from one city to another, with much loss of time and attendant error. Edison then adapted his old repeater device, made up of two Morse registers, as used by him in Indianapolis. “I was the first person to connect New Orleans and New York directly... just after the war. I perfected my repeater, which was put on at Memphis and worked without a hitch.”

The manager of the Memphis office, however, had been working on the same problem together with a relative employed in the office. Finding himself bested, he took offense at Edison, accused him of creating disturbances in his office, and summarily discharged him.

The boy was in fact stranded, for no money had been given him for transportation even to the next town along the railroad having a telegraph office.

 

I managed, with another operator who was in the same boat, to get a railroad pass as far as Decatur, but from there we had to walk to Nashville, one hundred and fifty miles, with only a dollar or two in the world. Then we got a pass to Louisville, where we arrived clad in linen dusters in the midst of a snowstorm. I shall never forget the sensation we made in that city walking through the snow in our airy apparel.⁷⁰

 

At Memphis a confrere said of him: “He spent his money buying apparatus and books, and wouldn’t buy clothing. That winter he went without an overcoat and nearly froze.”⁷¹

It was all very well to make light of his misfortunes; but the streets were icy, his shoes were broken and shapeless, and he was penniless. In truth he was sometimes so utterly spent that he became ill. Fortunately, he found work at the Louisville telegraph office, thanks to his demonstrated skill. Now he conquered his wandering habit for more than a year and, save for a brief excursion or two, remained fixed.

Once more he turned his poor furnished room, which was on Third Street, not far from the Western Union office, into a combined laboratory, machine shop, and library. “I began to frequent secondhand book stores and acquired quite a library,” he said. During this stay in Louisville he purchased for two dollars a set of twenty volumes of the North American Review, which then published many scientific articles. The bundle of books was left for a while in his office; on deciding to bring them to his room one night after his work was done — and that was 3 a.m. — he slung the heavy bundle over his back and walked along one of the dark streets of the city. Suddenly he became aware of something like bullets flying about his head. He halted and looked back. A policeman was waving at him, had in fact been calling to him loudly and, having no reply (for he had not been heard by Edison), had opened fire. Fortunately, the officer, who thought he had a thief in hand, was a poor shot. When, seizing the young man, he forced him to open the package, he was disgusted to find it contained only volumes of old magazines.

That Edison was now maturing is suggested by the sort of acquaintances he sought out at Louisville. Through handling press copy for the Courier he came to know its editor, George D. Prentice, a celebrated journalist of that day who was said to have created the fashion for running columns of humorous paragraphs in American newspapers. Edison thought him highly educated, “poetic,” and a fine talker. With him was usually to be found a tall man named Tyler, heading the Associated Press office, who was a Harvard graduate. The two men were much given to lengthy discussions of general, scientific and philosophic ideas. Edison used to invite himself to these nocturnal sessions after the newspaper went to bed and would listen silently through the night, while Prentice dipped crackers in corn whisky as he talked, and Tyler consumed his tumblers of whisky neat and without food.⁷²

During this period of more than a year, when his life in Louisville assumed some regularity, his self-education went forward more rapidly. We find that he tried to teach himself foreign languages. At this time he also had the novel idea of training himself in a new style of penmanship, writing characters that were blunt and vertical, while suppressing all curls and flourishes. It was a kind of manuscript-print writing that he found saved considerable time in taking down fast press reports from the sounder. It remained his style of writing for life.

In March, 1867, he won the admiration of all his colleagues by taking down the whole text of one of President Andrew Johnson’s long veto messages during a single sitting that lasted from 3:30 p.m. on one afternoon to 4:30 a.m. of the next day — and all in his wonderfully clear manuscript hand.

He was, then, no ordinary “tramp operator” when he was nineteen, during his extended sojourn in Louisville, but a studious fellow with his nose often in books and mechanical treatises. Using the crude instruments of electrical science that were to be found in our provincial cities, he measured and tested things, often trying new combinations of electrical circuits of varying strength and polarity. When there was heavy interference and “clatter” on the telegraph line into Louisville, owing to storms or the leaky cable under the Ohio River, he remembered using several relays, each with a different adjustment, in order to receive the electrical impulses more clearly. A little earlier, in Cincinnati, he had worked with another man on a “self-adjusting telegraph relay,” which would have been very valuable if they could have got it.⁷³

The germs of many ideas and stratagems perfected by him in later years were implanted in his mind when he worked at the telegraph key. On returning to Cincinnati for a second stay, after the war, Edison chanced to meet an operator of somewhat secretive character who had formerly been an intelligence agent for the Confederate army, “tapping” Federal telegraph messages, imitating their “style,” sending out false reports, and creating much mischief, until he was eventually captured. Now in peacetime the former spy suggested that Edison help him devise a secret method of sending dispatches so that an intermediate operator could not understand them. If they succeeded they might sell such sounders to governments for large sums. Edison went to work and tried to perfect such an instrument, either by varying the strength of the battery current or alternating the direction of its flow — though his recollections on this point are not clear. At any rate, the former spy suddenly disappeared; but the idea of the thing remained with Edison for future development.⁷⁴

As he described this phase of his life afterward, his mind was in a tumult, besieged by all sorts of ideas and schemes. During the fairly stationary year in Louisville the “mysteries of electrical force” as applied to the telegraph, and all the future potentialities of electricity obsessed him night and day. He remembered having written a treatise on electricity at the time. “Even during his sleep, his brain continued to devise the most intricate machines, all traces of which vanished as soon as he awoke. This tendency to dream inventions clung to him all his life.”⁷⁵

It was then that he dared to hope that he would become an inventor — like the famous Samuel F. B. Morse, one of America’s “kings of fortune.” But Morse’s telegraph was still only a crude, slow-moving instrument, of limited radius, and operating upon only a single electrical impulse. It fairly cried out for improvements, for refinements of all sorts. In this field Americans were still seemingly backward; in England and Germany systems of duplex transmission over a single wire, though still crude, were already patented by 1865; and the first automatic printing telegraphs, as well, had been under development since 1848.

There were so many things to be invented! At Memphis, just prior to his coming to Louisville, Edison had seemed so feverish about his schemes, and pottered about so busily with new electrical circuits, over which he hoped to send two messages at the same time, that the manager had called him “the luny one.”⁷⁶ But during those early, fumbling investigations he observed many things unseen by others and acquired experience that was to serve him well in later years. Even his simple repeating device foreshadowed new developments in automatic telegraphy.

At Louisville’s Western Union office he became, once more, passionately absorbed in schemes for reconnecting wiring and batteries for duplex transmission. To the annoyance of the manager he dismantled all the instruments and reconnected them — though without any decisive result. He was thereafter forbidden to monkey with the circuits and batteries, but having no other instruments to work with, and being inflamed with curiosity to learn at last the consequence of his experiments, he defied this order.

 

I went one night into the battery-room to obtain some sulphuric acid for experimenting. The carboy tipped over, the acid ran out, went through the ceiling to the manager’s room below, and ate up his desk and all the carpet. The next morning I was summoned before him and told that the company wanted operators, not experimenters.⁷⁷

 

He was desperate, feeling himself near a solution, and earnestly appealed to a fellow telegrapher who had some savings. If he could but have the loan of one hundred dollars and a little time he would complete his apparatus, and he offered the other man half of the profits that would flow from this venture. But the other would not entrust his capital to the shabby youth of nineteen. As it happened, a duplex apparatus was not long afterward patented by another inventor, J. B. Stearns, of Boston. Edison always believed that by ill luck and the niggardliness of that man in Louisville he had missed the opportunity to precede Stearns.⁷⁸

Truly, the lot of an aspiring inventor was not an easy one. His insatiable curiosity about new telegraphic techniques, his very spirit of innovation often got the young Edison into hot water. To his employers he seemed indifferent both to his duties and their property rights, and they reacted repeatedly by throwing him out in humiliating fashion — though he occasionally displayed flashing speed as an operator when it pleased him to do so. On being sacked again, he would make his way to another town by means of a railroad pass, or on his legs.

His sense of accumulating frustrations and misfortunes seemed to have reached a climactic phase after he had been working in Louisville about six months. He had ideas for various inventions, though in the matter of the multiplex telegraph they were scarcely clarified for him, and he was burning with anxiety to try them. But to explore, to test his ideas would need much work, equipment, and, above all, money. And who was there who would trust him with some money? He might go without an overcoat to buy some necessary equipment; even then his tests might prove failures. Alternately he was on fire with ambition and reduced to a state of despair. Feeling his situation hopeless — since he would never find time or money while working at his monotonous trade — he did what many other unhappy youths have done: he pinned all his hopes upon some romantic escape from present ills. He resolved that he would go abroad, to some far-off place, and seek his fortune. Thus he committed an act of folly the consequences of which might well have proved tragic for him.

The young ex-Rebels in whose company he was thrown after the war, in the half-ruined cities of the South, were often seized with the fever to set off on adventurous journeys to some distant clime where they might win fortune through acts of courage, or at least escape from their present troubles. Two of these young Southerners, who were working with Edison as telegraph operators, called his attention one day to an advertisement in a local newspaper by the Brazilian government offering appointments at high salaries to experienced telegraphers. They were resolved, they said, to set off for South America and undertake the construction of great telegraph networks in the Brazilian jungle, where many Confederate Army veterans were already transplanting themselves to new slave plantations. Desperate and reckless as he was, Edison vowed that he would go with them.

In the early months of 1867 he began to prepare for his departure on this hazardous voyage, writing his mother that he was studying Spanish industriously with the aid of a Spanish-English dictionary and hoped to be able soon “to speak Spanish and read and write it as fast as any Spaniard.” He had already taught himself French in this way.⁷⁹

He then made a flying visit to Port Huron, by means of a railroad pass, in order to see his mother again before leaving the country. Both his parents, on hearing of his plans, tried earnestly to dissuade him. Nancy Edison had already lost four of her seven children, and she feared she would never see Alva again. Despite her pleadings he remained stubborn in his determination, and theirs was a sorrowful parting.

After rejoining his Southern friends in Louisville, he threw up his job and left with them for New Orleans, in great haste. They were to take passage on a specially chartered steamer that was to transport a whole contingent of former Confederate Army officers to Brazil. Arrived in New Orleans, however, they found the city under martial law following recent mob riots against the “carpetbag” regime, so that their ship’s departure was delayed. Edison, meanwhile, learned from a friendly Spaniard who had long lived in South America that the prospects of meeting with anything but danger and hardship in the forbidding Amazon region were dismal indeed. His informant painted the picture so darkly that Edison was persuaded to abandon the whole adventure. Returning to Louisville, he was lucky enough to regain his former job — only to lose it again several months later. His two friends, he learned afterward, had proceeded by boat only as far as Vera Cruz, Mexico, where they both died during a great plague of yellow fever.

In the late autumn of 1867, Edison made his way back to the parental home in Port Huron, Michigan, as penniless and hungry as ever. It was, indeed, a sad home-coming. His mother, whom he greatly loved, was transformed by grief. They were about to lose the big “house in the grove” which had been the Edisons’ spacious home these thirteen years; a change in authority at the Fort Gratiot reservation had resulted in the place being taken over by the military. To Nancy Edison’s bitter disappointment, they were forced to move to temporary quarters until a new dwelling could be found. The whole family now made great moan at the evil days that had befallen the “Ea-di-sons,” as they were called in Port Huron.⁸⁰

Hard work, anxiety, numerous deaths in the family, had all combined to make Edison’s mother old and ill before her time. Her illness was attended with symptoms of mental derangement, as her neighbors noticed.⁸¹ The father, never a reliable party, now betook himself elsewhere as often as possible.

It was not a home to remain in any longer than Tom Edison could manage. On the other hand, there was nothing for the mother to be happy over in the erratic career of her Alva. Though he earned a good living for those days, in spells, and aided his parents whenever he could, he usually had nothing to show for his labors. In contrast, his elder brother Pitt, who was employed for long years in the office of the local horsecar line, seemed a solid citizen.

“After stopping for some time at home, I got restless, and thought I would like to work in the East,” Edison recalled. A friend of Cincinnati days had written him from Boston, and Edison wrote inquiring if there was an operator’s job there. The reply advised him to come at once to the Western Union office in that city.⁸²

Boston was then not only America’s “hub of culture,” but also her foremost center of scientific learning. At this stage of his development Edison sensed that he needed contact with better sources of technical knowledge and equipment. In the 1850s there were not many more than two hundred graduate engineers in the United States, and few of them were knowledgeable in electricity. But Boston, the home of the Yankee inventors, had already well-established manufacturers of fine electrical equipment. There he would likely find the answers to many problems in electrical science that now tormented him.

How would he travel almost a thousand miles in winter without money? He had lately rendered some assistance to the Grand Trunk Railway, while in Port Huron, by helping to repair their broken electric cable across the St. Clair; and the railway repaid him with a free pass over their line to Boston.

Well might Mr. Horace Greeley of the Tribune urge our young men to “go West” to seek their fortune; Edison, a son of the West, determinedly rode eastward. Unlike his early wanderings, this remove was purposeful.