Edison, His Life and Inventions

F >> Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin >> Edison, His Life and Inventions




CHAPTER IV

THE YOUNG TELEGRAPH OPERATOR

"WHILE a newsboy on the railroad," says Edison, "I got very much
interested in electricity, probably from visiting telegraph offices with
a chum who had tastes similar to mine." It will also have been noted
that he used the telegraph to get items for his little journal, and to
bulletin his special news of the Civil War along the line. The next step
was natural, and having with his knowledge of chemistry no trouble about
"setting up" his batteries, the difficulties of securing apparatus were
chiefly those connected with the circuits and the instruments. American
youths to-day are given, if of a mechanical turn of mind, to amateur
telegraphy or telephony, but seldom, if ever, have to make any part of
the system constructed. In Edison's boyish days it was quite different,
and telegraphic supplies were hard to obtain. But he and his "chum"
had a line between their homes, built of common stove-pipe wire. The
insulators were bottles set on nails driven into trees and short poles.
The magnet wire was wound with rags for insulation, and pieces of spring
brass were used for keys. With an idea of securing current cheaply,
Edison applied the little that he knew about static electricity,
and actually experimented with cats, which he treated vigorously as
frictional machines until the animals fled in dismay, and Edison had
learned his first great lesson in the relative value of sources of
electrical energy. The line was made to work, however, and additional to
the messages that the boys interchanged, Edison secured practice in an
ingenious manner. His father insisted on 11.30 as proper bedtime, which
left but a short interval after the long day on the train. But each
evening, when the boy went home with a bundle of papers that had
not been sold in the town, his father would sit up reading the
"returnables." Edison, therefore, on some excuse, left the papers
with his friend, but suggested that he could get the news from him by
telegraph, bit by bit. The scheme interested his father, and was
put into effect, the messages being written down and handed over for
perusal. This yielded good practice nightly, lasting until 12 and
1 o'clock, and was maintained for some time until Mr. Edison became
willing that his son should stay up for a reasonable time. The papers
were then brought home again, and the boys amused themselves to their
hearts' content until the line was pulled down by a stray cow wandering
through the orchard. Meantime better instruments had been secured, and
the rudiments of telegraphy had been fairly mastered.

The mixed train on which Edison was employed as newsboy did the
way-freight work and shunting at the Mount Clemens station, about half
an hour being usually spent in the work. One August morning, in 1862,
while the shunting was in progress, and a laden box-car had been pushed
out of a siding, Edison, who was loitering about the platform, saw the
little son of the station agent, Mr. J. U. Mackenzie, playing with the
gravel on the main track along which the car without a brakeman was
rapidly approaching. Edison dropped his papers and his glazed cap,
and made a dash for the child, whom he picked up and lifted to safety
without a second to spare, as the wheel of the car struck his heel; and
both were cut about the face and hands by the gravel ballast on which
they fell. The two boys were picked up by the train-hands and carried
to the platform, and the grateful father at once offered to teach the
rescuer, whom he knew and liked, the art of train telegraphy and to make
an operator of him. It is needless to say that the proposal was eagerly
accepted.

Edison found time for his new studies by letting one of his friends look
after the newsboy work on the train for part of the trip, reserving
to himself the run between Port Huron and Mount Clemens. That he was
already well qualified as a beginner is evident from the fact that he
had mastered the Morse code of the telegraphic alphabet, and was able
to take to the station a neat little set of instruments he had just
finished with his own hands at a gun-shop in Detroit. This was probably
a unique achievement in itself among railway operators of that day or of
later times. The drill of the student involved chiefly the acquisition
of the special signals employed in railway work, including the numerals
and abbreviations applied to save time. Some of these have passed
into the slang of the day, "73" being well known as a telegrapher's
expression of compliments or good wishes, while "23" is an accident
or death message, and has been given broader popular significance as
a general synonym for "hoodoo." All of this came easily to Edison, who
had, moreover, as his Herald showed, an unusual familiarity with train
movement along that portion of the Grand Trunk road.

Three or four months were spent pleasantly and profitably by the youth
in this course of study, and Edison took to it enthusiastically, giving
it no less than eighteen hours a day. He then put up a little telegraph
line from the station to the village, a distance of about a mile, and
opened an office in a drug store; but the business was naturally very
small. The telegraph operator at Port Huron knowing of his proficiency,
and wanting to get into the United States Military Telegraph Corps,
where the pay in those days of the Civil War was high, succeeded in
convincing his brother-in-law, Mr. M. Walker, that young Edison could
fill the position. Edison was, of course, well acquainted with the
operators along the road and at the southern terminal, and took up his
new duties very easily. The office was located in a jewelry store, where
newspapers and periodicals were also sold. Edison was to be found at the
office both day and night, sleeping there. "I became quite valuable to
Mr. Walker. After working all day I worked at the office nights as well,
for the reason that 'press report' came over one of the wires until 3
A.M., and I would cut in and copy it as well as I could, to become more
rapidly proficient. The goal of the rural telegraph operator was to be
able to take press. Mr. Walker tried to get my father to apprentice me
at $20 per month, but they could not agree. I then applied for a job on
the Grand Trunk Railroad as a railway operator, and was given a place,
nights, at Stratford Junction, Canada." Apparently his friend Mackenzie
helped him in the matter. The position carried a salary of $25 per
month. No serious objections were raised by his family, for the distance
from Port Huron was not great, and Stratford was near Bayfield, the
old home from which the Edisons had come, so that there were doubtless
friends or even relatives in the vicinity. This was in 1863.

Mr. Walker was an observant man, who has since that time installed a
number of waterworks systems and obtained several patents of his own. He
describes the boy of sixteen as engrossed intensely in his experiments
and scientific reading, and somewhat indifferent, for this reason, to
his duties as operator. This office was not particularly busy, taking
from $50 to $75 a month, but even the messages taken in would remain
unsent on the hook while Edison was in the cellar below trying to solve
some chemical problem. The manager would see him studying sometimes
an article in such a paper as the Scientific American, and then
disappearing to buy a few sundries for experiments. Returning from the
drug store with his chemicals, he would not be seen again until required
by his duties, or until he had found out for himself, if possible, in
this offhand manner, whether what he had read was correct or not. When
he had completed his experiment all interest in it was lost, and the
jars and wires would be left to any fate that might befall them. In like
manner Edison would make free use of the watchmaker's tools that lay
on the little table in the front window, and would take the wire pliers
there without much thought as to their value as distinguished from a
lineman's tools. The one idea was to do quickly what he wanted to do;
and the same swift, almost headlong trial of anything that comes to
hand, while the fervor of a new experiment is felt, has been noted
at all stages of the inventor's career. One is reminded of Palissy's
recklessness, when in his efforts to make the enamel melt on his pottery
he used the very furniture of his home for firewood.

Mr. Edison remarks the fact that there was very little difference
between the telegraph of that time and of to-day, except the general use
of the old Morse register with the dots and dashes recorded by indenting
paper strips that could be read and checked later at leisure if
necessary. He says: "The telegraph men couldn't explain how it worked,
and I was always trying to get them to do so. I think they couldn't. I
remember the best explanation I got was from an old Scotch line repairer
employed by the Montreal Telegraph Company, which operated the railroad
wires. He said that if you had a dog like a dachshund, long enough to
reach from Edinburgh to London, if you pulled his tail in Edinburgh he
would bark in London. I could understand that, but I never could get
it through me what went through the dog or over the wire." To-day
Mr. Edison is just as unable to solve the inner mystery of electrical
transmission. Nor is he alone. At the banquet given to celebrate his
jubilee in 1896 as professor at Glasgow University, Lord Kelvin, the
greatest physicist of our time, admitted with tears in his eyes and the
note of tragedy in his voice, that when it came to explaining the
nature of electricity, he knew just as little as when he had begun as
a student, and felt almost as though his life had been wasted while he
tried to grapple with the great mystery of physics.

Another episode of this period is curious in its revelation of the
tenacity with which Edison has always held to some of his oldest
possessions with a sense of personal attachment. "While working
at Stratford Junction," he says, "I was told by one of the freight
conductors that in the freight-house at Goodrich there were several
boxes of old broken-up batteries. I went there and found over eighty
cells of the well-known Grove nitric-acid battery. The operator there,
who was also agent, when asked by me if I could have the electrodes of
each cell, made of sheet platinum, gave his permission readily, thinking
they were of tin. I removed them all, amounting to several ounces.
Platinum even in those days was very expensive, costing several dollars
an ounce, and I owned only three small strips. I was overjoyed at this
acquisition, and those very strips and the reworked scrap are used to
this day in my laboratory over forty years later."

It was at Stratford that Edison's inventiveness was first displayed. The
hours of work of a night operator are usually from 7 P.M. to 7 A.M., and
to insure attention while on duty it is often provided that the operator
every hour, from 9 P.M. until relieved by the day operator, shall send
in the signal "6" to the train dispatcher's office. Edison revelled in
the opportunity for study and experiment given him by his long hours
of freedom in the daytime, but needed sleep, just as any healthy youth
does. Confronted by the necessity of sending in this watchman's signal
as evidence that he was awake and on duty, he constructed a small wheel
with notches on the rim, and attached it to the clock in such a manner
that the night-watchman could start it when the line was quiet, and at
each hour the wheel revolved and sent in accurately the dots required
for "sixing." The invention was a success, the device being, indeed,
similar to that of the modern district messenger box; but it was soon
noticed that, in spite of the regularity of the report, "Sf" could not
be raised even if a train message were sent immediately after. Detection
and a reprimand came in due course, but were not taken very seriously.

A serious occurrence that might have resulted in accident drove him soon
after from Canada, although the youth could hardly be held to blame for
it. Edison says: "This night job just suited me, as I could have the
whole day to myself. I had the faculty of sleeping in a chair any time
for a few minutes at a time. I taught the night-yardman my call, so I
could get half an hour's sleep now and then between trains, and in case
the station was called the watchman would awaken me. One night I got an
order to hold a freight train, and I replied that I would. I rushed out
to find the signalman, but before I could find him and get the signal
set, the train ran past. I ran to the telegraph office, and reported
that I could not hold her. The reply was: 'Hell!' The train dispatcher,
on the strength of my message that I would hold the train, had permitted
another to leave the last station in the opposite direction. There was a
lower station near the junction where the day operator slept. I started
for it on foot. The night was dark, and I fell into a culvert and was
knocked senseless." Owing to the vigilance of the two engineers on
the locomotives, who saw each other approaching on the straight single
track, nothing more dreadful happened than a summons to the thoughtless
operator to appear before the general manager at Toronto. On reaching
the manager's office, his trial for neglect of duty was fortunately
interrupted by the call of two Englishmen; and while their conversation
proceeded, Edison slipped quietly out of the room, hurried to the Grand
Trunk freight depot, found a conductor he knew taking out a freight
train for Sarnia, and was not happy until the ferry-boat from Sarnia had
landed him once more on the Michigan shore. The Grand Trunk still owes
Mr. Edison the wages due him at the time he thus withdrew from its
service, but the claim has never been pressed.

The same winter of 1863-64, while at Port Huron, Edison had a further
opportunity of displaying his ingenuity. An ice-jam had broken the light
telegraph cable laid in the bed of the river across to Sarnia, and thus
communication was interrupted. The river is three-quarters of a mile
wide, and could not be crossed on foot; nor could the cable be repaired.
Edison at once suggested using the steam whistle of the locomotive,
and by manipulating the valve conversed the short and long outbursts of
shrill sound into the Morse code. An operator on the Sarnia shore was
quick enough to catch the significance of the strange whistling, and
messages were thus sent in wireless fashion across the ice-floes in the
river. It is said that such signals were also interchanged by military
telegraphers during the war, and possibly Edison may have heard of
the practice; but be that as it may, he certainly showed ingenuity
and resource in applying such a method to meet the necessity. It is
interesting to note that at this point the Grand Trunk now has its St.
Clair tunnel, through which the trains are hauled under the river-bed by
electric locomotives.

Edison had now begun unconsciously the roaming and drifting that took
him during the next five years all over the Middle States, and that
might well have wrecked the career of any one less persistent
and industrious. It was a period of his life corresponding to the
Wanderjahre of the German artisan, and was an easy way of gratifying a
taste for travel without the risk of privation. To-day there is little
temptation to the telegrapher to go to distant parts of the country on
the chance that he may secure a livelihood at the key. The ranks are
well filled everywhere, and of late years the telegraph as an art or
industry has shown relatively slight expansion, owing chiefly to the
development of telephony. Hence, if vacancies occur, there are plenty of
operators available, and salaries have remained so low as to lead to one
or two formidable and costly strikes that unfortunately took no account
of the economic conditions of demand and supply. But in the days of the
Civil War there was a great dearth of skilful manipulators of the key.
About fifteen hundred of the best operators in the country were at the
front on the Federal side alone, and several hundred more had enlisted.
This created a serious scarcity, and a nomadic operator going to any
telegraphic centre would be sure to find a place open waiting for him.
At the close of the war a majority of those who had been with the two
opposed armies remained at the key under more peaceful surroundings, but
the rapid development of the commercial and railroad systems fostered a
new demand, and then for a time it seemed almost impossible to train
new operators fast enough. In a few years, however, the telephone sprang
into vigorous existence, dating from 1876, drawing off some of the
most adventurous spirits from the telegraph field; and the deterrent
influence of the telephone on the telegraph had made itself felt by
1890. The expiration of the leading Bell telephone patents, five years
later, accentuated even more sharply the check that had been put
on telegraphy, as hundreds and thousands of "independent" telephone
companies were then organized, throwing a vast network of toll lines
over Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and other States, and affording
cheap, instantaneous means of communication without any necessity for
the intervention of an operator.

It will be seen that the times have changed radically since Edison
became a telegrapher, and that in this respect a chapter of electrical
history has been definitely closed. There was a day when the art offered
a distinct career to all of its practitioners, and young men of ambition
and good family were eager to begin even as messenger boys, and were
ready to undergo a severe ordeal of apprenticeship with the belief that
they could ultimately attain positions of responsibility and profit.
At the same time operators have always been shrewd enough to regard the
telegraph as a stepping-stone to other careers in life. A bright fellow
entering the telegraph service to-day finds the experience he may
gain therein valuable, but he soon realizes that there are not enough
good-paying official positions to "go around," so as to give each worthy
man a chance after he has mastered the essentials of the art. He feels,
therefore, that to remain at the key involves either stagnation or
deterioration, and that after, say, twenty-five years of practice he
will have lost ground as compared with friends who started out in other
occupations. The craft of an operator, learned without much difficulty,
is very attractive to a youth, but a position at the key is no place
for a man of mature years. His services, with rare exceptions, grow less
valuable as he advances in age and nervous strain breaks him down. On
the contrary, men engaged in other professions find, as a rule, that
they improve and advance with experience, and that age brings larger
rewards and opportunities.

The list of well-known Americans who have been graduates of the key is
indeed an extraordinary one, and there is no department of our national
life in which they have not distinguished themselves. The contrast,
in this respect, between them and their European colleagues is highly
significant. In Europe the telegraph systems are all under government
management, the operators have strictly limited spheres of promotion,
and at the best the transition from one kind of employment to another is
not made so easily as in the New World. But in the United States we have
seen Rufus Bullock become Governor of Georgia, and Ezra Cornell Governor
of New York. Marshall Jewell was Postmaster-General of President
Grant's Cabinet, and Daniel Lamont was Secretary of State in President
Cleveland's. Gen. T. T. Eckert, past-President of the Western Union
Telegraph Company, was Assistant Secretary of War under President
Lincoln; and Robert J. Wynne, afterward a consul-general, served as
Assistant Postmaster General. A very large proportion of the
presidents and leading officials of the great railroad systems are old
telegraphers, including Messrs. W. C. Brown, President of the New York
Central Railroad, and Marvin Hughitt, President of the Chicago & North
western Railroad. In industrial and financial life there have been
Theodore N. Vail, President of the Bell telephone system; L. C. Weir,
late President of the Adams Express; A. B. Chandler, President of the
Postal Telegraph and Cable Company; Sir W. Van Home, identified with
Canadian development; Robert C. Clowry, President of the Western
Union Telegraph Company; D. H. Bates, Manager of the Baltimore &
Ohio telegraph for Robert Garrett; and Andrew Carnegie, the greatest
ironmaster the world has ever known, as well as its greatest
philanthropist. In journalism there have been leaders like Edward
Rosewater, founder of the Omaha Bee; W. J. Elverson, of the Philadelphia
Press; and Frank A. Munsey, publisher of half a dozen big magazines.
George Kennan has achieved fame in literature, and Guy Carleton and
Harry de Souchet have been successful as dramatists. These are but
typical of hundreds of men who could be named who have risen from
work at the key to become recognized leaders in differing spheres of
activity.

But roving has never been favorable to the formation of steady habits.
The young men who thus floated about the country from one telegraph
office to another were often brilliant operators, noted for speed in
sending and receiving, but they were undisciplined, were without the
restraining influences of home life, and were so highly paid for their
work that they could indulge freely in dissipation if inclined that way.
Subjected to nervous tension for hours together at the key, many of them
unfortunately took to drink, and having ended one engagement in a city
by a debauch that closed the doors of the office to them, would drift
away to the nearest town, and there securing work, would repeat the
performance. At one time, indeed, these men were so numerous and so
much in evidence as to constitute a type that the public was disposed
to accept as representative of the telegraphic fraternity; but as the
conditions creating him ceased to exist, the "tramp operator" also
passed into history. It was, however, among such characters that Edison
was very largely thrown in these early days of aimless drifting, to
learn something perhaps of their nonchalant philosophy of life, sharing
bed and board with them under all kinds of adverse conditions, but
always maintaining a stoic abstemiousness, and never feeling other than
a keen regret at the waste of so much genuine ability and kindliness on
the part of those knights errant of the key whose inevitable fate might
so easily have been his own.

Such a class or group of men can always be presented by an individual
type, and this is assuredly best embodied in Milton F. Adams, one of
Edison's earliest and closest friends, to whom reference will be made in
later chapters, and whose life has been so full of adventurous episodes
that he might well be regarded as the modern Gil Blas. That career is
certainly well worth the telling as "another story," to use the Kipling
phrase. Of him Edison says: "Adams was one of a class of operators never
satisfied to work at any place for any great length of time. He had the
'wanderlust.' After enjoying hospitality in Boston in 1868-69, on the
floor of my hall-bedroom, which was a paradise for the entomologist,
while the boarding-house itself was run on the banting system of flesh
reduction, he came to me one day and said: 'Good-bye, Edison; I have
got sixty cents, and I am going to San Francisco.' And he did go. How, I
never knew personally. I learned afterward that he got a job there, and
then within a week they had a telegraphers' strike. He got a big
torch and sold patent medicine on the streets at night to support the
strikers. Then he went to Peru as partner of a man who had a grizzly
bear which they proposed entering against a bull in the bull-ring in
that city. The grizzly was killed in five minutes, and so the scheme
died. Then Adams crossed the Andes, and started a market-report
bureau in Buenos Ayres. This didn't pay, so he started a restaurant in
Pernambuco, Brazil. There he did very well, but something went wrong
(as it always does to a nomad), so he went to the Transvaal, and ran a
panorama called 'Paradise Lost' in the Kaffir kraals. This didn't pay,
and he became the editor of a newspaper; then went to England to raise
money for a railroad in Cape Colony. Next I heard of him in New York,
having just arrived from Bogota, United States of Colombia, with a power
of attorney and $2000 from a native of that republic, who had applied
for a patent for tightening a belt to prevent it from slipping on a
pulley--a device which he thought a new and great invention, but which
was in use ever since machinery was invented. I gave Adams, then, a
position as salesman for electrical apparatus. This he soon got tired
of, and I lost sight of him." Adams, in speaking of this episode, says
that when he asked for transportation expenses to St. Louis, Edison
pulled out of his pocket a ferry ticket to Hoboken, and said to his
associates: "I'll give him that, and he'll get there all right." This
was in the early days of electric lighting; but down to the present
moment the peregrinations of this versatile genius of the key have never
ceased in one hemisphere or the other, so that as Mr. Adams himself
remarked to the authors in April, 1908: "The life has been somewhat
variegated, but never dull."