AT THIRTEEN, EDISON drove a freight train for the first time, down forty-seven and a half miles of track—“all alone,” he boasted afterward, although the engineer’s eye must surely have been on him.1 Solo or not, it was an ecstatic moment for a boy on the edge of adolescence, with the engine roaring loud enough to make him forget that he could no longer hear birds sing.2

The Chicago, Detroit & Grand Trunk Junction Railroad ran a daily round trip between his hometown of Port Huron and Detroit, Michigan. Every morning at eight, young “Al”^*1 boarded the baggage car of the southbound local, well supplied with candy, hickory nuts, and popcorn balls to sell during his three-hour journey to the big city.3 Lake Huron receded behind him, and the St. Clair River slid by on his left, with Canada—his family’s ancestral country—spreading out beyond. Then for a while both river and frontier disappeared, as the train edged inland to pass through Smith’s Creek, Ridgeway, New Haven, New Baltimore, Mount Clemens, and Utica—small towns that half a year earlier had seemed unattainably remote but were now familiar, almost neighborly parts of his expanding environs. When the river reappeared, it had swelled into Lake St. Clair, and Detroit, opening up ahead, offered him almost four hours of urban freedom.

Al was not yet old enough to qualify for membership of the Young Men’s Society Reading Room, but the city’s stores were open for browsing and for the purchase of chemical and electrical supplies to aid his experiments at night. Useful bits of brass and iron and, with luck, the occasional old battery cell could be filched from dumps around the Grand Trunk’s machine shop and engine houses on Michigan Avenue. Every afternoon on his way back to Michigan Central Depot, he picked up a hundred copies of the Detroit Free Press, to supplement his candy sales on the return journey home. If any papers were left unsold by the time the train, slowing, approached Port Huron, he would jump off with them onto a sandbank and walk the last quarter-mile into town, hawking his last stock en route.4

Otherwise he would stay on the train until its run ended at Fort Gratiot, a sleepy old military reserve guarding the confluence of the river and Lake Huron.^*2 Sam Edison’s big white house and observation tower stood within the stockade. So Al did not have far to walk, past the hospital and graveyard (not his favorite locality, on dark winter nights) before reaching the comforts of home, and dinner, and his reeking basement laboratory.5

NOW WE HAVE RODE

Free time, free throwaways, the Free Press, and even free railroad freight privileges, as his business expanded to include fruit and grocery sales—Al was his own man now, no longer subject to Nancy Edison’s disciplined schooling. Earning an excellent income of forty to fifty dollars a week, he conscientiously paid her a dollar a day for his keep and invested the rest of his fortune in chemical and electrical equipment. At the same time he voluntarily continued his liberal education, reading the works of Thomas Paine at the behest of his father, a lifelong libertarian who espoused the rights of the southern states to secede from the Union.6

That issue became fraught on 18 May, when the Free Press gloomily reported the nomination in Chicago of the “black Republican,” Abraham Lincoln, for president of the United States. The newspapers Al sold that summer covered the election campaign with apocalyptic “by Magnetic Telegraph” bulletins prophesying rebellion in the South and “irrepressible conflict” if Lincoln was elected. When, around midnight on 6 November, the first dispatches confirming his victory came down an accessible wire into Port Huron, Al was able to “read” some of the results to fellow urchins by putting his tongue to it and tasting the tiny shocks of each dot and dash. From that moment on, war between the states was inevitable. Fort Gratiot awoke from its slumbers, and recruits began to drill on the parade ground.7

He was fourteen by the time Fort Sumter fell, and for most of 1861 no more aware than any Michigan youth his age of the catastrophe unfolding in the South and East. The state sent regiment after regiment to the distant battlefields, but was otherwise peaceful as ever.8 Al saw more immigrant Norwegians—daily trainloads of them heading for Iowa and Minnesota—than he did men in uniform. Meanwhile his grocery and news businesses prospered to such an extent that he began to employ other boys. One sold bread, tobacco, and stick candy aboard the immigrant “special.” Another loaded baskets of market vegetables onto the morning express to Port Huron, where a German lad collected them and sold them on commission downtown. Al himself continued his lucrative commute, buying butter and, in season, immense quantities of blackberries from farmers en route, and purveying them at either end of the line.

Early in 1862 he bought three hundred pounds of old type slugs from a junk dealer, and a small secondhand press to accommodate them. It occurred to him that since the front part of the baggage car, a small, unventilated compartment, was never used, he could turn it into a mobile print shop, teach himself how to set type, and produce his own onboard newspaper. The first issue of The Weekly Herald (“Published by A. Edison”) appeared on 3 February as a double-sided, copy-rich broadsheet, elegantly laid out and even decorated verso with a woodcut of a puffing locomotive. Only the orthography left something to be desired.9 Under the headline LOCAL INTELEGENCE, the paper’s chief correspondent reminded the Grand Trunk Railway that it had a policy of rewarding meritorious service.

Now we have rode with Mr. E. L. Northrop, one of their Engineers, and we do not believe you could fall in with another Engineer, more careful, or attentive to his Engine, being the most steady Engineer that we have ever rode behind (and we consider ourselves some judge having been Railway riding for over two years constantly,) always kind, and obligeing, and ever at his post.^*3,10

Elsewhere Al reported that “Gen. Cassius M. Clay, will enter the army on his return home,” announced the forthcoming thousandth birthday of the Empire of Russia, listed the latest per-pound price of dressed hogs and turkeys, allowed himself a pause for philosophical reflection (“Reason Justice and Equity, never had weight enough on the face of the earth, to govern the councils of men”), and even found space at the foot of column four for a joke: “ ‘Let me collect myself,’ as the man said when he was blown up by a powder mill.”11

Eager readers were offered a subscription to the Herald of eight cents monthly, and were promised that their names would be gratefully published in future issues. These inducements, coupled perhaps with curiosity as to whether anywhere else in the world a newspaper was being printed and sold aboard a moving train, led to a rapid rise in circulation to more than four hundred copies a week.12

Gradually appropriating unto himself more and more of the baggage car, Al set up a traveling laboratory where he could consult Fresenius’s Qualitative Analysis and mix chemicals at only moderate risk of blowing out the windows. Since the time it took to put the Herald to bed each Saturday interfered with both his experiments and his candy sales, he soon subcontracted the latter chore to a Port Huron schoolboy. Forty-five years later Barney Maisonville recalled their partnership:

Al was very quiet and preoccupied in disposition….Most boys like to have money, but he never seemed to care for it himself. The receipts of his sales, when I sold for him, were from eight to ten dollars the day, of which about one-half was profit. But when I handed the money to him, he would simply take it and put it in his pocket. One day I asked him to count it, but he said: “Oh, never mind, I guess it’s all right.”…

He was always studying out something, and usually had a book dealing with some scientific subject in his pocket. If you spoke to him he would answer intelligently enough, but you could always see that he was thinking of something else when he was talking. Even when playing checkers he would move the pieces about carelessly as if he did it only to keep company, and not for any love of the game. His conversation was deliberate, and he was slow in his actions and carriage.

Still, he showed sometimes that he knew how money could be made.13

25 CENTS APIECE, GENTLEMEN

This was evident on Wednesday 9 April, when Al arrived in Detroit on his usual midmorning train and found crowds milling anxiously around the great bulletin boards that city newspapers posted outside their headquarters for breaking news. According to headlines being chalked up by editors with telegrams in their free hands, an epochal clash of arms had taken place on Sunday at Shiloh, on the Tennessee River, and the first accounts were only just coming in. In twelve hours of conflict, starting with a surprise dawn attack on General Grant’s Union Army, more blood had been shed than ever before in American history. Some pints of it had fatally filled the boots of the commanding Confederate general, Albert S. Johnston, who was now succeeded by Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard. Grant had repelled the onslaught, but only just, and had failed to pursue the enemy as rain and darkness descended. Monday’s fighting had been almost as savage, with one late wire reporting that sixty thousand may have been killed or wounded by the time Beauregard was beaten.14

Al was already enough of a journalist to realize that there would be a phenomenal demand for the afternoon edition of the Detroit Free Press at every stop on his return trip home. Thinking and moving much faster than Barney gave him credit for, he copied the main headlines on display and hurried to give them to the Grand Trunk telegraph operator at Michigan Central. In exchange for a healthy bribe—three months’ worth of complimentary magazines—the operator sent an alert to the railroad’s upstate stationmasters, instructing them to post the headlines locally and announce that a major delivery of newspapers was coming north on the four P.M. train.15

The Detroit Free Press reports the Battle of Shiloh, 10 April 1862.

Al’s next stop was the Free Press office, where the afternoon edition was already thumping off the presses.16

He demanded one thousand copies “on trust.” Henry N. Walker, the paper’s editor, was touched by his sass and authorized the order.17 Enlisting another boy’s help, Al got the papers onto the train and had them folded by the time it reached Utica, where he usually sold only two copies.

I saw a crowd ahead on the platform [and] thought it was some excursion, but the moment I landed there was a rush for me; then I realized that the telegraph was a great invention. I sold 35 papers; the next station, Mt. Clemens, [was] a place of about 1000. I usually sold 6 to 8 papers. I decided that if I found a corresponding crowd there that the only thing to do to correct my lack of judgment in not getting more papers was to raise the price from 5 cents to 10. The crowd was there and I raised the price; at the various towns there were corresponding crowds. It had been my practice at Port Huron to jump from the train at a point about 1/4 mile from the station where the train generally slackened speed. I had drawn several loads of sand at this point and become very expert. The little German boy with the horse met me at this point; when the wagon approached the outskirts of the town I was met by a large crowd. I then yelled 25 cents apiece, gentlemen, I haven’t got enough to go round. I sold all out and made what to me then was an immense amount of money. I started the next day to learn telegraphy.18

LO! YOU HAVE O

Al’s studies for a new career were given impetus by a Grand Trunk conductor who became exasperated by his use of the train for personal business.19 Stacks of newsprint and crates of groceries, with fruit flies traveling free, were bad enough, but chemistry experiments posed the additional threat of an onboard fire. Sure enough, late that summer one of his phosphorus sticks fell to the floor, nearly immolating the baggage car. Al found himself ejected—instruments, printing press, and all—onto the platform at Mount Clemens, a newsboy no longer.

As luck would have it, the local stationmaster, James Mackenzie, was a skilled telegraph operator and glad to teach him the trade. He was indebted to Al for having pulled his infant son from the tracks one August morning when cars were shunting.^*4 For about four months he taught the former newsboy how to send and receive (or in telegraphic parlance, “write” and “read”) Morse code.20 Memorizing mnemonic rhymes helped:

• One dot stands for E, for enterprise sure,

•• And two stands for I, for self ever pure,

• • Yet divide them a trifle, and lo! you have O,

— — Or space them a bit, and M is the go.21

Al studied eighteen hours a day for most of the fall and early winter of 1862. He spent his mornings and afternoons with Mackenzie, returning to Fort Gratiot on the evening train for solitary practice at night. His tapping technique—the ability to “pound brass” in a fragmented yet flowing rhythm—gradually improved, although it would take years before he attained real wrist freedom, and could hear a ticking stream of dots and dashes as if it were ordinary speech.22

He still took frequent trains to the city, and used the facilities of a local gun shop to make his own set of instruments. The mechanics of telegraphy was still simple, although the demands of war communications and reportage for greater speed and message volume would soon make them less so. All Al needed at first was a brass transmitter with a sprung key and, at the other end of a length of stovepipe wire, an electromagnetic relay that either printed dots and dashes on tape or ticked them out on a sounder. Grove batteries, each consisting of a clutch of sour-smelling, open-top cells, provided the energy to send and receive. When he added a subsidiary station to his experimental network, he found that a less powerful Daniell battery was enough to activate the local circuit.23

Over and above technology, Al had a normal adolescent’s longing for information. He persuaded the Detroit Young Men’s Society that he was almost grown up and hence qualified to hang out in its well-stocked reading room.^*5 He became a member well in advance of his sixteenth birthday, and proceeded to devour Les Misérables and several other novels of Victor Hugo, along with Thomas Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and many volumes of the Penny Cyclopædia. If he also, as he later claimed, read Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, it was surely with incomprehension.24

At some point in the course of the winter of 1862–63 he worked for a while as a “plug,” or trainee operator, in Miciah Walker’s jewelry-cum-bookstore in Port Huron. There was a small telegraph office on the premises that received press dispatches overnight, as a service to the local newspaper. He found, in the course of taking copy there until three every morning, that his temperament was nocturnal, and that solitude suited him. If he felt drowsy during the day, there was always a chair somewhere for him to catnap in, his muffled hearing providing all the peace he needed.25

By spring he was proficient enough in Morse to apply for a night operator’s job at Stratford Junction, on the Grand Trunk Railway just across the Canadian border. The work involved monitoring the movements of trains by means of telegraph messages exchanged with other stations along the line. Mr. Walker tried to keep him in Port Huron as an apprentice at twenty dollars monthly, but Al was not drawn to the jewelry business, and his father, who would have to agree to his indenture, was not tempted by the terms.26

Al in any case had good reason to get out of town. Fort Gratiot was no longer a congenial place to live in. Sam Edison’s libertarian views and history of radical opposition to any authority grated on the pro-Union nativism of the fort keeper, Henry Hartsuff. “He is from Canada—reported to be a very dishonest man,” Hartsuff wrote the War Department. “His sympathies are intensely secession[ist] which renders his presence here very odious.”27

Sam, who delighted in confrontation, could be relied on to resist eviction. Al in contrast wanted nothing so much as a paid post not too far from home, with lots of spare time to continue his self-education in chemistry and electricity. Stratford Junction promised all this. By pleasant coincidence, it was located in the same general area of Ontario where his parents had spent their early married life. His ninety-six-year-old grandfather, Samuel Ogden Edison, Sr., still lived in Elgin County, along with sundry other paternal and maternal relatives. So when Al’s job application was accepted, Nancy need not feel her youngest son had entirely left the bosom of the family.28

A BOY FREE FROM FEAR

Although he persuaded himself that working as a night operator for twenty-five dollars a week would give him the whole day for experimenting, Al was still a teenager who needed more sleep than he would in adulthood. The Stratford depot was a quiet one between dusk and dawn. Were it not for a standard security procedure that required him to flash dah-di-di-di-dit down the line every hour, he could have enjoyed long periods of repose. This nuisance precipitated his first invention, an automatic sender. It consisted of a notched wheel driven by his office clock and attached to the transmitter in such a way that on the hour, a wooden hammer would rise and fall on the key in the precise rhythm required. The device worked well until a dispatcher came to investigate why “Stratford” was sometimes impossible to “raise,” despite the regularity of its signal.29

Al incurred further disapproval one night when he almost succeeded in getting two freight trains to collide head on. He responded affirmatively to a call asking if he would stop one of the trains, so as to let the other one through. But by the time he descended from the telegraph office to the yard and looked around for the signalman, a rush and a roar told him that the wrong train had gone through. He dashed back upstairs and wired ahead that he had been unable to “hold it.” The reply from the next station was “Hell.”30

Fortunately the track was straight, and the converging trains saw each other in time to brake to a halt. Next morning the general superintendent of the Grand Trunk Railroad ordered the Stratford agent to bring Al to his office in Toronto and explain why a sixteen-year-old had been permitted to hold such a responsible position after dark.

He took me in hand and stated that I could be sent to Kingston States Prison, etc. Just at this point, three English swells came into the office. There was a great shaking of hands and joy all around; feeling this was a good time to be neglected I silently made for the door, down the stairs to the lower freight station, got into the caboose going to the next freight…and kept secluded until I landed a boy free from fear in the U. S. of America.31

Al was also a boy rich in platinum. During his brief stay in Canada he had heard about a stash of old Grove battery cells at the Grand Trunk depot in Goderich, and slyly asked the agent if he might strip them of their “tin” cathodes. Some of those precious metal strips, amounting to several ounces of reworked scrap, would be used in his laboratory experiments forty years later.32

NEVER HEARD YOU ON HERE

He now became a “tramp” telegraph operator, in common with hundreds of other youths, skilled or semiskilled, who rode the nation’s rails in the latter days of the Civil War. They were in such demand, as the wires thrummed with news from the front, that train conductors often let them travel free to whichever town they liked.

Although Morse code had ended the historic dependency of communication upon transportation, the two fields were still intertwined, in that telegraph companies needed rights of way for their wires, and railroads needed wire stations to control the movements of their trains—ideally staffed by personnel who could be relied on to stay awake.33

Not a few of the young “sparkers” or “lightning slingers,” as they called themselves, were seeking to evade the draft. In the late summer of 1863 Al was still a year and a half from that dread fate. Meanwhile the wandering life suited him, as did the glamour of working in an industry at the forefront of modern technology. Every issue of The Telegrapher magazine carried the front-page motto “Is it not a feat sublime? Intellect hath conquered time.” There were so many job opportunities across the country that any qualified candidate stood a chance of being hired, for decent money, the moment he stepped off the train.^*6 Often as not his immediate predecessor would be stepping on, in search of a town that had prettier girls or served better corn whiskey.34

All but the smallest of small-town branches had a number of operators working together, sharing digs and dirty jokes (many of which would go on the lines in “blue” Morse code) with the exaggerated camaraderie of theater folk during the course of a limited production.35 It was unlikely that any pair of temporary buddies would meet again, after deploying in different directions from a six-month partnership in Carson City, Nevada, or Cleveland, Ohio—although for years they might weirdly recognize each other’s “fist” in interchanged, unsigned signals, gibberish to the outside world.36

BOSTON: Your next number is 1.

ST. LOUIS: Thank you. Number 1, New York 9th to—.

BOSTON: Please sqe.

ST. LOUIS: I sign &.

BOSTON: Never heard you on here before. Where did they dig you out? That’s a hot sig. Ha! Ha!37

Should one of them, against all probability, go on to become a famous inventor, he would have to endure countless reminders of past intimacy from lonely old tappers with unremembered names. By the same token, there was always a chance that the vagaries of later life would lead to surprise reunions that might be sweet, or turn sour.

Al’s next roost was Adrian, Michigan, where he bonded with a local boy named Ezra Gilliland.38 He was again employed as a night operator, this time by the Lake Shore & Southern Railroad, at seventy-five dollars a month. His stay there lasted long enough for him to establish a little workshop of his own. But when he made the mistake, one evening, of “breaking in” with an urgent message on a wire occupied by the superintendent, he was obliged to move on to a day job in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The schedule there did not suit him, so in the fall of 1864 he became a “second-class operator” for the Western Union Company at Union Station, Indianapolis.39

WORDS PER MINUTE

Here Al turned eighteen and became at least the beginnings of an inventor. His clockwork sender in Stratford had been little more than a toy, but he now devised an instrument of serious purpose that prefigured two of his most important mature achievements, the translating embosser and the phonograph.

It was a recorder-repeater that satisfied his aesthetic desire to transcribe “press report”—inflowing, often enormously long journalistic dispatches—in script that was both clear and beautiful, while at the same time dealing with the prohibitive speed at which most dispatches came over the wire. He was, for all the elegance of his handwriting, by no means slow as a copyist. But even the most agile taker found it hard to keep up with the forty words per minute characteristic of most transmissions. (Virtuoso senders in New York and Washington took a sadistic delight in forcing provincial operators to beg for the occasional ritardando.) It was an open secret, as a result, that takers often rephrased sentences, or even omitted whole paragraphs, especially late at night when their wrists became tired. Editors complained about patchy press reports but had to make do with what came through.40

Al lined up two pendulum-driven Morse registers and geared the one to receive fast copy, indenting every dot and dash on a cylinder of paper tape. The tape unspooled into a bin, whence it was drawn up by the other register, and played back through a sounder at whatever speed—usually twenty-five words per minute—a transcriber found comfortable. He invented the machine primarily as a practice instrument to improve his own taking, but when he won permission to use it officially, the high quality of his copy embarrassed the station’s top press man, and he was encouraged to seek employment elsewhere.41

The waning days of the war found him at the Western Union branch on Fourth Street in Cincinnati, ambitious now to become a top press man himself.^*7 An office that could increase the speed and volume of its message handling was an office unlikely to fire any proficient operator, at least at the rate to which Al was becoming accustomed. Putting aside experiments for the moment, he practiced so hard that he acquired the automaton-like trance typical of takers, whereby they heard code, and wrote words, without absorbing the meaning of either.42

This was chillingly apparent on the night of 14 April 1865, when he and his fellow operators became aware that a huge crowd was gathering half a block away, outside the headquarters of The Cincinnati Enquirer. They sent a boy to inquire about the excitement, and he came back shouting, “Lincoln’s shot.”43

The newspaper must have gotten its story from a Western Union telegram, which meant that someone in the room—who?—had received, automatically transcribed, and messengered the century’s biggest news down the street without paying attention to its contents. “Look over your files,” the office manager said. After a short search the scribbled report was found and held up. Al, reminiscing forty-four years later, chose not to identify its author.44

His current salary was eighty dollars a month, only five dollars more than he had earned in Adrian and not enough to support much recreation in a large, expensive city. He economized by sharing digs with a pair of actors and a pair of office friends—Ezra Gilliland, who had followed him to Cincinnati, and Milton Adams, a sophisticated dandy uncomplimentary about Al’s hickish demeanor. “The boys did not take to him cheerfully, and he was lonesome.”45

Influenced as much, perhaps, by the dramatic circumstances of Lincoln’s death as by the profession of his roommates, Al developed a taste for plays and playacting and showed occasional signs of wanting to tread the boards himself. He attended performances at the National Theater in Cincinnati whenever he could afford to, and memorized chunks of Shakespeare to quote aloud, notably the opening soliloquy in Richard III (performed with a limp and hunched back). For the rest of his life he would write Now is the winter of our discontent when he wanted to show off his calligraphy.46

He was justifiably proud of the telegraph taker’s script he developed this year—line by line perfectly straight across unruled paper, with no time-wasting flourishes, and only the occasional character misshapen as he kept trying to increase his speed.^*8 When he stayed away from a union meeting and took the press report alone into the small hours (writing with an agate pen on five layers of oiled tissue and interleaved carbons), he was rewarded with a visit from the day manager, J. F. Stevens. “Young man, I want you to work the Louisville wire nights. Your salary will be $125.”47

The appointment was worth more than extra money. Al was now officially a first-class operator, entitled to special respect wherever he wandered next on the “linked lightning” network.48

NO COUNTRY LIKE THE US

Three months in Nashville. Another three in Memphis. Four more in Louisville….49 Peacetime and the erasure of the Mason-Dixon Line brought a sense of exultant reopening of the American South, to a Northern youth just turned nineteen, full of wanderlust and curious to explore that beaten land. “I have growed Considerably,” he advised his parents on a message form stamped by the South-Western Telegraph Company. “I dont look much like a Boy Now.”50

When he wrote again on a similar blank, not bothering to date it or say where he was, he seemed to have wider travel in mind, and was studying foreign languages in books: “Spanish very good now before I Come home I will be able to Speak Spanish & Read & write it as fast as any Spaniard. I can also Read French too but Cant Speak it.” In early August 1866 he was in New Orleans and conspiring with two fellow sparkers to take a steamer to Brazil, possibly unaware that the preferred language there was Portuguese. They had heard that the imperial government was spending many milreis on an extension of the national telegraph system and assumed that with their technical skills they could partake of this flow of gold. But a race riot broke out in the city, the steamer they planned to take to Rio de Janeiro was commandeered for the use of federal troops, and an Ancient Mariner who had lived in South America shook a skinny hand in Al’s face, advising him that “there was no country like the US” for a young man who sought to better himself.51

Chastened, Al told his friends he was going back home and set off on the long trip to Port Huron.^*9 The railroad north through the depressed landscape of Alabama was so rotten—“scrap iron laid on wooden stringers”—that the train had to chug along at little more than a walking pace. He was able to lean out his car window and pick peaches off passing trees.52

Like many another returning prodigal, he found that “home” was not the happy place it had once been. During the late years of the war in Fort Gratiot, Henry Hartsuff’s animus against Sam Edison (“a villainous and malignant Copperhead rejoicing over rebel victories and abusing our government and public men”) had increased to the point of paranoia. As caretaker of the fort, Hartsuff had a reputation for hard drinking and official corruption, but he enjoyed the protection of a son who was a general in the army. Using that influence, he got the chief quartermaster in Detroit to requisition the big white house in the grove, by right of eminent domain in a military reservation. In consequence he at last succeeded in evicting Sam from a property bought in good faith twelve years before, paying him only $500 of its appraised $2,300 value.53

The elderly Edisons were now living in a dark little cottage just outside the fort. Sam was as ornery and antigovernment as ever,^*10 pursuing a furious lawsuit against the army that anyone could see was doomed. Nancy was ailing and losing her mind. Al stood their misery for no more than a month, then returned to the South-Western Telegraph Company office in Louisville.54

EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCHES

His second spell in Kentucky lasted until the following July. By then he was well into his twenty-first year, able to copy an average of eight to fifteen columns of Associated Press report every day in a highly individual scrip: “I found that the vertical style, with each letter separate and without any flourishes, was the most rapid, and that the smaller the letter the greater the rapidity.” He could write between fifteen hundred and two thousand words without tiring, in a minute hand as readable as diamond type.55

This virtuosity was perfected, moreover, in conditions that strained his faculties to the limit. He worked on the second floor of a dilapidated downtown building, in a room that was never cleaned and only sporadically heated in the winter. The ceiling was half stripped of its plaster, and ornamented with dried splats of chewing tobacco. The copper wires that connected his telegraph set to the switchboard were eroded with blue crystals, and the board’s brass leads were black with the smoke of lightning strikes, “which seemed to be particularly partial to Louisville.” Every now and again in stormy weather there would be an explosive crack from the wall, not good for the health of operators with heart problems. Al’s principal feed came via the “blind” side of a repeater in Cincinnati, meaning that he was unable to interrupt a transmission and request the repetition of a dropped word or sentence. The wire also tended to leak when it crossed the Ohio River at Covington, so he got violent changes of current when receiving. He smoothed out some of the fluctuations by playing the signal through a quartet of relays and sounders. “The clatter was bad, but I could read it with fair ease. When, in addition to this infernal leak, the wires north to Cleveland worked badly, it required a large amount of imagination to get the sense of what was being sent…and as the stuff was coming in at the rate of thirty-five to forty words a minute, it was very difficult to write down what was coming and imagine what wasn’t coming.”56

His champion feats as a taker were nighttime transcriptions of President Andrew Johnson’s 7,126-word Second Annual Message to Congress in December, and Johnson’s subsequent 6,111-word veto of the District of Columbia franchise bill early in the new year of 1867. In memory, he conflated both messages into one avalanche of verbiage, with section after section being scissored off as he wrote and rushed to the Courier-Journal’s office for typesetting. “I was fifteen hours in the chair on this occasion without a moment’s intermission for food.” Actually the articles appeared a month apart, but each involved Herculean effort, and justified his reputation as one of the fastest takers in the country.57

By midsummer Al was back at the Western Union office in Cincinnati, for a three-month stint that saw him use his mastery of telegraph technology as a key to open up wider fields of science, such as magnetism, metallurgy, and conductivity. He began to keep a notebook of experimental ideas (some his own, some copied for instruction): self-adjusting and polarized relays, long-distance electromechanical repeaters, duplex transmitters, a secret signaling method for the army, a private-line telegraph system for Procter & Gamble. He drew them in a free-flowing, two-dimensional style that showed a palpable pleasure in the way each design spilled out of his pen, without a single short-circuit of electricity or ink. He compiled lists of scholarly books to study. Among them was the first volume of Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity, borrowed from the Free Library around the same time the great man’s death was announced in London. It and its three companion volumes became his lifelong bible, and Faraday of all scientists the one he most revered. He also satisfied a growing appetite for current and cultural affairs by devouring twenty volumes of The North American Review, which he had bought for two dollars in Louisville and could not be parted from thereafter.58

The more Al brooded over his books and clapped together strange-looking models and forgot to eat and declined booze and wore, according to one incredulous observer, the same suit season after season, the more eccentric he seemed to some of his less cerebral colleagues. They called him “Luny Edison” or “Victor Hugo” because of his fondness for French novels, and wondered why he never seemed to have any money, although he had been earning an excellent salary for two years. “He was always broke,” one of them complained. “The day after pay day he’d come to me to borrow a dollar.”59

Ezra Gilliland, J. F. Stevens, and others in Cincinnati who understood him better knew that Al was spending all he had on technical equipment and supplies.60 It was a compulsion, the instinctive behavior of a man—boy no longer, a technician already mutating into a thinker—who could not help doing what he was born to do.

THE JAY FROM THE WOOLLY WEST

In January 1868 James Ashley, the editor of The Telegrapher, received an article submission from an aspiring inventor in Port Huron, Michigan. It illustrated a double transmitter of exquisite symmetry, and the accompanying text guaranteed that “by means of this ingenious arrangement, two communications may be transmitted in opposite directions at the same time on a single wire.”61

Ashley thought the manuscript, which was long and technical, interesting enough to publish on the front page of his journal, but by the time he got around to doing so in the spring, the author had moved from Port Huron and was identified as “Mr. Thomas A. Edison, of the Western Union Telegraph Office, Boston, Mass.”62

Edison’s arrival at that major branch of the nation’s biggest corporation marked the formal beginning of his inventive career, although it would be six months yet before he applied for his first patent, and four more before he felt confident enough to make the ultimate transition to New York.63

He certainly did not look like a person of substance when he arrived at the office in Boston, being half-starved and more than usually shabby after a blizzard-slowed train journey. But he came recommended as an “A1 man” by Milt Adams, who had befriended him during his first spell in Cincinnati and was now working for the Franklin Telegraph Company in Boston. He was assigned to begin taking copy at five-thirty that evening. His fellow night operators lost no time in setting up what they thought was a trap for “the jay from the woolly West.” They gave him a cheap pen and put him onto the number-one wire from New York, saying that a fifteen-hundred-word dispatch from the Boston Herald was about to come through. By prearrangement, they had lined up one of the fastest tappers in Manhattan to send it, starting moderato assai and then accelerating to his best presto.64

Edison effortlessly kept up with the transmission, writing very small, conscious that he had a surprised audience watching over his shoulder. Taker’s instinct reassured him he could do four or five words per minute more than the New York man could send. His correspondent began to tire, slurring rhythms and sticking the signals, but as Edison remarked afterward, “I had been used to this style of telegraphy in taking report, and was not in the least discomfited.” When he sensed his invisible tormentor had tired, he opened the line and tapped a message of his own: “Suppose you send a little while with your other foot.”^*11,65

From then on, the number-one wire was his privileged conduit. He was by his own admission a poor sender, but now became nationally known for his “chirography.” Ashley used that imposing word as a headline in The Telegrapher, claiming below that Thomas Edison was “about the finest writer we know of.” He said he had seen one of the young man’s press report cards, measuring “five by eight inches, and there are 647 words upon it…the whole plain as print.”66

Milt Adams fell on hard times as soon as he had helped Edison to good. Franklin Telegraph could not stand the competition of Western Union and fired him. Edison compassionately put him up in the “hall bedroom” of his apartment on Bullfinch Street. Neither of them had any money because Adams’s finances were reduced to “absolute zero centigrade,” and Edison’s, as usual, were invested in experimental equipment. Poverty drew them together, and they became inseparable, eating together in an “emaciator” boardinghouse where the portions were so small as to be almost affordable.67

It followed that they had no spare cash for social life. One night the headmistress of a girls’ private school dropped by the Western Union office and asked Edison if he would stage a telegraph demonstration for her students. The invitation led to his first recorded experience of an electromagnetic shock not induced by a battery.

A few days before I carried the apparatus and with Adams’s assistance, set it up in the school, which was in a double private house near the public library. The apparatus was set up when school was out. I was then very busy building private telegraph lines and equipping them with instruments which I had invented, and forgot all about the appointment and was only reminded of it by Adams who had been trying to find me and had at last located me on top of Jordan, Marsh & Company’s store, putting up a wire. He said, we must be there in 15 minutes and I must hurry. I had on working clothes and I didn’t realize that my face needed washing. However, I thought they were only children and wouldn’t notice it. On arriving at the place, we were met by the lady of the house and I told her I had forgotten about the appointment and hadn’t time to change my clothes. She said that didn’t make the slightest difference. Adams’s clothes were not of the best because of his long estrangement from money. On opening the main parlor door, I never was so paralyzed in my life. I was speechless, there were over 40 young ladies from 17 to 22 years, from the best families. I managed to say that I would work the apparatus and Mr. Adams would make the explanations. Adams was so embarrassed that he fell over an ottoman, the girls tittered and this increased his embarrassment, until he couldn’t say a word. The situation was so desperate that for a reason I could never explain, I started in myself and talked and explained better than I ever did before or since.68

It was a matter of smug satisfaction to him afterward, when strolling around town with colleagues from the office, that any chance encounter with the girls would attract smiles and nods in his direction.69

HOW TO USE A JACKKNIFE

Another epiphany occurred when Edison, who loved to browse the secondhand bookstores on Cornhill in Boston, bought all three volumes of Faraday’s Experimental Researches. Owning and studying the complete work affected him much more than his exposure to a borrowed volume in Cincinnati. He tried in various makeshift laboratories to perform all the procedures of the “Master Experimenter” himself, rejoicing in the simplicity of his prose and the spare use of mathematics. Adams recalled him coming home from Western Union at four A.M. and studying Faraday instead of going to bed. “I am now twenty-one,” Edison burst out over breakfast. “I may live to be fifty. Can I get as much done as he did? I have got so much to do and life is so short, I am going to hustle.”70

By now Ashley had published his article on the double transmitter and praised it in The Telegrapher as an “interesting and ingenious” device, if not particularly original. The editor pointed out that double transmission had been used for many years in Germany. “But Mr. Edison has simplified the process by which it is effective.” This set Edison on the road to improving, and ultimately amplifying, duplex technology. His hopes of an early patent were frustrated when Joseph B. Stearns, a fire alarm specialist in Boston, was awarded protection for a similar system in June. Refusing to be discouraged, Edison listed fourteen ways in which he thought his transmitter was superior, and arranged with a local machinist to build three complete sets on spec, advertising them at the lofty prices of $400, $450, and $500. He got no orders.71

Ashley’s editorial goodwill also encouraged him to contribute more articles to The Telegrapher. On 9 May “Edison’s Combination Repeater” described another derivative invention—the original in this case being George Phelps’s seminal combination printing telegraph of 1859. Edison argued that the Phelps machine, which was operated by a keyboard much like a piano’s, rat-tatted roman characters onto paper so rapidly that “repeaters in general use on the Morse lines” were unable to duplicate them accurately. His repeater (which he illustrated with one of his mirror-like binary designs) was built on a new principle, and employed magnets “of a peculiar construction,” in such a way that it could keep up with vibrations of any speed and, what was more, operate on “a current so feeble that its action would not be perceptible upon a Morse relay.”72

As the summer and early fall progressed, he continued with unflagging energy to experiment and publish—his most ambitious effort being an eighteen-hundred-word survey of Boston’s major manufacturers of electrical and telegraphic equipment in the 15 August issue of The Telegrapher. The article showed how thoroughly he had familiarized himself with the technological resources of the city in the four and a half months of his residence there. Among them was the prestigious shop of Charles Williams, Jr., where Moses Farmer had a little laboratory crammed with apparatus. Edison mentioned this fact without saying that he had taken space in the same building. But for some reason—possibly Farmer’s own austere, devoutly religious self-effacement—he made no attempt to ingratiate himself with the American Faraday.73

Working nights at Western Union, and by day literally under Williams’s roof in a third-floor attic, Edison invented and made half a dozen devices, including a stock ticker, a fire alarm, and a facsimile telegraph printer (“which I intend to use for Transmitting Chinese Characters”).74 He executed his first successful patent application on 13 October for an electrochemical vote recorder, whittling the submission model himself from pieces of hardwood. “To become a good inventor, you must first know how to use a jackknife.”75

It was a clever device—too clever to be commercial, as he soon found out. Designed to speed up the laborious process of vote counting in legislative bodies, it took signals of “aye” or “nay” from electric switches on every desk and imprinted them on a roll of chemically prepared paper, in each case identifying the signal with the legislator’s name. At the same time it separately tabulated the votes on an indicator dial. Edison’s dream of seeing his “recordograph” clicking and spinning in the chambers of Congress dissolved when he heard that speedy voting was the last thing politicos wanted in the passage of bills. They needed time to lobby one another in medias res. Edison resolved that hereafter he would invent only things that people wanted to use.76

Patenting, he learned, was an expensive procedure for a young inventor, with heavy fees for each application and approval, payable to agents, attorneys, draftsmen, and the Patent Office itself—not to mention the often enormous costs inherent in defending letters patent against charges of infringement, or prosecuting his own charges against plagiarists. Throughout Edison’s career from now on, a large part of his income, whether it totaled four or six figures, was absorbed into patent litigation like water through sand.

Another disagreeable aspect of professional inventing was the necessity to cultivate financial backers and influential businessmen. Edison happened to be good at it. Once money men got used to his uncouth appearance, they were beguiled by his humor and swayed by his utter self-confidence. But that did not make it any less humiliating to have to ask, and ask, and ask, and subsequently tolerate the maddening desire of investors to involve themselves in the creative process or, worse still, venture ideas of their own.

He started modestly, biting the ear of a fellow operator, DeWitt C. Roberts, who agreed to “furnish or cause to be furnished sufficient money to patent and manufacture one or more…Stockbroker Printing Instruments,” in return for a one-third interest in their potential sale. Roberts subsequently sold part of that interest to another investor—a warning to Edison that he could not always choose his pecuniary company. But Roberts also financed the vote recorder, and various Boston brokers, merchants, and telegraph company directors, most notably E. Baker Welch, lined up to support the young inventor as his reputation spread around the city.77

LABORATORY OVER THE GOLD-ROOM

On 30 January 1869 an announcement appeared in the “Personal” section of The Telegrapher: “Mr. T. A. Edison has resigned his situation in the Western Union office, Boston, Mass., and will devote his time to bringing out his inventions.”78

Eighteen days later Edison executed his second patent application, for an elegantly ratcheted black-and-gold “Stockbroker Printing Instrument,” almost as complex as a clock.79 It was aimed at the booming new market for alphanumerical tickers that reported fluctuations in prices on the New York gold and stock exchanges to subscribing brokers. The technology had been pioneered the year before by Edward Calahan, whose Gold & Stock Telegraph Company now sought to expand to Boston. So did the almost synonymous Gold & Stock Reporting Telegraph Company of his rival Samuel Laws.

Edison saucily chose to open a stock quotation service of his own at 9 Wilson Lane, in the same building Laws planned to put on line. He took two rooms on the floors above them, one for price monitoring and posting, the other for an experimental workshop he called his “Laboratory over the Gold-room.” Knowing little about the trading business, he relied on one of his backers, the broker Samuel W. Ropes, Jr., for market expertise. His first customer could not be bluer of chip or more Back Bay Brahmin: the banking and brokerage house of Kidder, Peabody. In time, Edison added twenty-five subscribers.80

If he expected Laws to buy his printer, he was disappointed. It was superior to Calahan’s original, having a single typewheel instead of two, and operating with a single drive wire rather than three. For a couple of months Edison and a new operator buddy, Frank Hanaford,^*12 eked out an impecunious living, installing cheap, private-line dial telegraphs in the Boston-Cambridge area. They had to shell out considerable sums for the purchase of such supplies as forty-seven glass and porcelain insulators for pole wiring, 1¾ pounds of blue vitriol electrolyte powder, and a variety of tars, oils, and sulfur to proof their wires against the city’s corrosive coal smog.81

By spring it was evident that Boston was either too small or too conservative for Edison’s restless ambition. Welch declined to provide funds for his “magnetograph” printer, which would have relieved customers of the need to maintain messy, accident-prone batteries.^*13 Nor would Western Union allow him to test an improved version of his double transmitter on any of its busy long-distance wires. He had high hopes for this instrument, and accordingly arranged to use a line belonging to the small Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company, in Rochester, New York.82

A STROKE OF LUCK

With an advance from Welch of only forty dollars in his pocket, Edison arrived in Rochester on 10 April. He had to wait four money-draining days before the A&P gave him access to its New York line, late at night in an office off the Reynolds Arcade. The four-hundred-mile wire turned out to be so badly insulated, and his apparatus so complex in operation, that the taker he had hired in Manhattan became confused and the test failed. He nevertheless posted an announcement in The Telegrapher that his transmission had been a “complete success,” returned briefly to Boston to settle up with various creditors there, then spent all the cash he had left on a one-way steamship ticket to New York.83

His excuse to Welch for this sortie was that he needed to get the double transmitter locally altered to handle the problem of long-distance induction—electromagnetic interference slowing and blurring the passage of signals. That work would take time, and the A&P would also have to fix its line before he could resume testing. But the real reason he gravitated to New York was that, like countless aspiring youths before him, he sniffed the city’s air and caught—or thought that he caught—the intoxicating perfume of success: “People here come and buy without your soliciting.”84

If so, they were not much in evidence on his first seventy-two hours there. He had to walk the streets all night with only enough money to buy a cup of coffee and a plateful of apple dumplings at Smith & McNell’s restaurant on Washington Street. For the rest of his life he would talk about the deliciousness of those dumplings. They kept him going until, on his third day in town, he stopped by Samuel Laws’s Gold & Stock Reporting Telegraph Company on Broadway—just in time to find the office going into a panic over its jammed general transmitter. He studied the machine’s workings and told Dr. Laws that a contact spring had snapped off and fallen between two gear wheels.85

“Fix it! Fix it!” Laws cried, losing revenue by the minute. “Be quick!”86

Edison removed the spring and set the contact wheel at zero, while employees scattered through the financial district to reset branch indicators. In two hours the system was working again. Dr. Laws gratefully hired him on the spot as an operator-mechanic at one hundred dollars a month.87 Although this was less than he had earned during his best years as a tramp operator, it meant that he would no longer have to sleep on shavings and could subsist on more than stodge and sugar. He proceeded to work with frenzied energy, sometimes up to twenty hours a day: “I’ll never give up for I may have a stroke of Luck before I die.” At the beginning of August, Laws appointed him superintendent of the company’s entire operating plant and tripled his salary.88

He justified his promotion by reconfiguring and improving a stock printer that Laws had designed but could not patent, because it replicated several features of an instrument designed by Edward Calahan. Edison produced what was in effect a new stock printer of his own, radically simpler, smaller, and smoother in operation. In the process, he lost the lucrative position he had only just won. Laws sold out to the competition on 27 August, creating a virtually monopolistic Gold & Stock Telegraph Company. The expanded firm came with its own superintendent, so by the end of the month Edison was back on the street.89

This time, however, he was already known in New York as the patentee of four useful inventions—the vote recorder, the private dial telegraph, the double transmitter, and the stock printer—as well as the author of several informative technical articles. A new book by Franklin Pope, Modern Practice of the Electric Telegraph, had a section that illustrated and praised “Edison’s Button Repeater” (one of the long-distance relays he had invented in Cincinnati) as “a very simple and ingenious arrangement of connections…which has been found to work well in practice.”90

Pope had preceded Edison as superintendent of the Laws company. Now that they both found themselves at large, with an abundance of skills to share, they decided to announce their own merger, and formed “a Bureau of Electrical and Telegraphic Engineering in this city.”91 Before it could be formally constituted, Edison had an experience downtown that ensured he would never regard money men as pillars of probity and responsibility.

On Friday 24 September he was on transmitter duty in the balcony of the “Gold Room” on New Street, a suffocatingly nicotinous parlor where speculators in gold stocks traded bullion under the stare of a water-spitting, gold-leaf dolphin. During the course of the day, soon to be known as “Black Friday,” Jay Gould launched a stealth assault on the gold market, attempting to “corner” a majority of it for himself. The room’s price indicator, which had drooped to as low as 144¼ the previous evening, surged to 155 in just six minutes. Tumult broke out on the floor. Edison, fascinated, climbed on top of the Western Union telegraph booth to watch sober-suited men behaving like a pack of howling coyotes. The financier Albert Speyers, who had bought $6 million worth of gold the day before, gave every appearance of going insane as he bid the price up to 160. At the climax of the hysteria, just before noon, the indicator reached 162½. Then news came that President Ulysses S. Grant had authorized the Treasury Department to sell $4 million in government gold. This turned Gould’s attack into a rout and caused a concurrent panic on the Stock Exchange. After closing, so many fortunes had been lost that the prospect of homicides, or suicides, on Wall Street was serious. A company of militia was posted to keep order.

Black Friday 1869. Gold price postings annotated by future president James A. Garfield.

About the only observers who stayed calm through the afternoon were Edison, the dolphin, and the Western Union operator, who said to him, “Shake, Edison, we are O. K. We haven’t got a cent.”92

MRS. POPE’S HOUSE

At the beginning of October the firm of Pope, Edison & Co. came into being, and opened an office downtown at 78–80 Broadway. James Ashley signed on as third partner, touting Edison in print as a young man who, in addition to being a master of electrical science, was also “of the highest order of mechanical talent.” The trio decided that their inaugural specialty was to be Edison’s latest invention, a single-wire “Financial and Commercial Instrument” that both received and printed Morse signals without a local battery. They placed an advertisement in The Telegrapher to announce, “We possess unequalled facilities for preparing Claims, Drawings, and Specifications for Patents.” All custom instruments would be made to order across the river in New Jersey, where Pope lived with his mother—and where Edison, too, would thenceforth be a paying guest.93

Mrs. Pope’s house was in Elizabeth, two Pennsylvania Railroad stops away from Jersey City, where Edison found some laboratory space. As the days shortened toward December, he fell into a commuter’s routine of rising every morning at six to catch the eastbound train there, working his customary eighteen-hour day, then waiting in frigid dark for the one A.M. local to take him back to Elizabeth.94

The cold he could stand with multiple layers of underwear, and the darkness he would one day do something about.