Edison, His Life and Inventions

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


As a matter of fact, the conditions at Louisville at that time were not
much better than they had been at Memphis. The telegraph operating-room
was in a deplorable condition. It was on the second story of a
dilapidated building on the principal street of the city, with the
battery-room in the rear; behind which was the office of the agent of
the Associated Press. The plastering was about one-third gone from the
ceiling. A small stove, used occasionally in the winter, was connected
to the chimney by a tortuous pipe. The office was never cleaned. The
switchboard for manipulating the wires was about thirty-four inches
square. The brass connections on it were black with age and with the
arcing effects of lightning, which, to young Edison, seemed particularly
partial to Louisville. "It would strike on the wires," he says, "with
an explosion like a cannon-shot, making that office no place for an
operator with heart-disease." Around the dingy walls were a dozen
tables, the ends next to the wall. They were about the size of those
seen in old-fashioned country hotels for holding the wash-bowl and
pitcher. The copper wires connecting the instruments to the switchboard
were small, crystallized, and rotten. The battery-room was filled
with old record-books and message bundles, and one hundred cells of
nitric-acid battery, arranged on a stand in the centre of the room. This
stand, as well as the floor, was almost eaten through by the destructive
action of the powerful acid. Grim and uncompromising as the description
reads, it was typical of the equipment in those remote days of the
telegraph at the close of the war.

Illustrative of the length to which telegraphers could go at a time when
they were so much in demand, Edison tells the following story: "When I
took the position there was a great shortage of operators. One night at
2 A.M. another operator and I were on duty. I was taking press report,
and the other man was working the New York wire. We heard a heavy tramp,
tramp, tramp on the rickety stairs. Suddenly the door was thrown
open with great violence, dislodging it from one of the hinges. There
appeared in the doorway one of the best operators we had, who
worked daytime, and who was of a very quiet disposition except when
intoxicated. He was a great friend of the manager of the office. His
eyes were bloodshot and wild, and one sleeve had been torn away from his
coat. Without noticing either of us he went up to the stove and kicked
it over. The stove-pipe fell, dislocated at every joint. It was half
full of exceedingly fine soot, which floated out and filled the room
completely. This produced a momentary respite to his labors. When the
atmosphere had cleared sufficiently to see, he went around and pulled
every table away from the wall, piling them on top of the stove in the
middle of the room. Then he proceeded to pull the switchboard away from
the wall. It was held tightly by screws. He succeeded, finally, and when
it gave way he fell with the board, and striking on a table cut
himself so that he soon became covered with blood. He then went to the
battery-room and knocked all the batteries off on the floor. The nitric
acid soon began to combine with the plaster in the room below, which
was the public receiving-room for messengers and bookkeepers. The excess
acid poured through and ate up the account-books. After having finished
everything to his satisfaction, he left. I told the other operator to
do nothing. We would leave things just as they were, and wait until the
manager came. In the mean time, as I knew all the wires coming through
to the switchboard, I rigged up a temporary set of instruments so that
the New York business could be cleared up, and we also got the remainder
of the press matter. At 7 o'clock the day men began to appear. They were
told to go down-stairs and wait the coming of the manager. At 8 o'clock
he appeared, walked around, went into the battery-room, and then came to
me, saying: 'Edison, who did this?' I told him that Billy L. had come in
full of soda-water and invented the ruin before him. He walked backward
and forward, about a minute, then coming up to my table put his fist
down, and said: 'If Billy L. ever does that again, I will discharge
him.' It was needless to say that there were other operators who took
advantage of that kind of discipline, and I had many calls at night
after that, but none with such destructive effects."

This was one aspect of life as it presented itself to the sensitive
and observant young operator in Louisville. But there was another,
more intellectual side, in the contact afforded with journalism and its
leaders, and the information taken in almost unconsciously as to the
political and social movements of the time. Mr. Edison looks back on
this with great satisfaction. "I remember," he says, "the discussions
between the celebrated poet and journalist George D. Prentice, then
editor of the Courier-Journal, and Mr. Tyler, of the Associated Press.
I believe Prentice was the father of the humorous paragraph of the
American newspaper. He was poetic, highly educated, and a brilliant
talker. He was very thin and small. I do not think he weighed over one
hundred and twenty five pounds. Tyler was a graduate of Harvard, and had
a very clear enunciation, and, in sharp contrast to Prentice, he was a
large man. After the paper had gone to press, Prentice would generally
come over to Tyler's office and start talking. Having while in Tyler's
office heard them arguing on the immortality of the soul, etc., I asked
permission of Mr. Tyler if, after finishing the press matter, I might
come in and listen to the conversation, which I did many times after.
One thing I never could comprehend was that Tyler had a sideboard with
liquors and generally crackers. Prentice would pour out half a glass of
what they call corn whiskey, and would dip the crackers in it and eat
them. Tyler took it sans food. One teaspoonful of that stuff would put
me to sleep."

Mr. Edison throws also a curious side-light on the origin of the comic
column in the modern American newspaper, the telegraph giving to a new
joke or a good story the ubiquity and instantaneity of an important
historical event. "It was the practice of the press operators all over
the country at that time, when a lull occurred, to start in and send
jokes or stories the day men had collected; and these were copied and
pasted up on the bulletin-board. Cleveland was the originating
office for 'press,' which it received from New York, and sent it out
simultaneously to Milwaukee, Chicago, Toledo, Detroit, Pittsburg,
Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Vincennes, Terre Haute, St.
Louis, and Louisville. Cleveland would call first on Milwaukee, if he
had anything. If so, he would send it, and Cleveland would repeat it to
all of us. Thus any joke or story originating anywhere in that area
was known the next day all over. The press men would come in and copy
anything which could be published, which was about three per cent. I
collected, too, quite a large scrap-book of it, but unfortunately have
lost it."

Edison tells an amusing story of his own pursuits at this time. Always
an omnivorous reader, he had some difficulty in getting a sufficient
quantity of literature for home consumption, and was in the habit
of buying books at auctions and second-hand stores. One day at an
auction-room he secured a stack of twenty unbound volumes of the North
American Review for two dollars. These he had bound and delivered at the
telegraph office. One morning, when he was free as usual at 3 o'clock,
he started off at a rapid pace with ten volumes on his shoulder. He
found himself very soon the subject of a fusillade. When he stopped, a
breathless policeman grabbed him by the throat and ordered him to drop
his parcel and explain matters, as a suspicious character. He opened the
package showing the books, somewhat to the disgust of the officer, who
imagined he had caught a burglar sneaking away in the dark alley with
his booty. Edison explained that being deaf he had heard no challenge,
and therefore had kept moving; and the policeman remarked apologetically
that it was fortunate for Edison he was not a better shot.

The incident is curiously revelatory of the character of the man, for
it must be admitted that while literary telegraphers are by no means
scarce, there are very few who would spend scant savings on back numbers
of a ponderous review at an age when tragedy, beer, and pretzels are far
more enticing. Through all his travels Edison has preserved those books,
and has them now in his library at Llewellyn Park, on Orange Mountain,
New Jersey.

Drifting after a time from Louisville, Edison made his way as far north
as Detroit, but, like the famous Duke of York, soon made his way back
again. Possibly the severer discipline after the happy-go-lucky regime
in the Southern city had something to do with this restlessness, which
again manifested itself, however, on his return thither. The end of the
war had left the South a scene of destruction and desolation, and
many men who had fought bravely and well found it hard to reconcile
themselves to the grim task of reconstruction. To them it seemed better
to "let ill alone" and seek some other clime where conditions would
be less onerous. At this moment a great deal of exaggerated talk was
current as to the sunny life and easy wealth of Latin America, and under
its influences many "unreconstructed" Southerners made their way
to Mexico, Brazil, Peru, or the Argentine. Telegraph operators were
naturally in touch with this movement, and Edison's fertile
imagination was readily inflamed by the glowing idea of all these vague
possibilities. Again he threw up his steady work and, with a couple of
sanguine young friends, made his way to New Orleans. They had the
notion of taking positions in the Brazilian Government telegraphs, as
an advertisement had been inserted in some paper stating that operators
were wanted. They had timed their departure from Louisville so as to
catch a specially chartered steamer, which was to leave New Orleans for
Brazil on a certain day, to convey a large number of Confederates and
their families, who were disgusted with the United States and were
going to settle in Brazil, where slavery still prevailed. Edison and his
friends arrived in New Orleans just at the time of the great riot, when
several hundred negroes were killed, and the city was in the hands of
a mob. The Government had seized the steamer chartered for Brazil, in
order to bring troops from the Yazoo River to New Orleans to stop the
rioting. The young operators therefore visited another shipping-office
to make inquiries as to vessels for Brazil, and encountered an old
Spaniard who sat in a chair near the steamer agent's desk, and to
whom they explained their intentions. He had lived and worked in South
America, and was very emphatic in his assertion, as he shook his yellow,
bony finger at them, that the worst mistake they could possibly make
would be to leave the United States. He would not leave on any account,
and they as young Americans would always regret it if they forsook their
native land, whose freedom, climate, and opportunities could not be
equalled anywhere on the face of the globe. Such sincere advice as this
could not be disdained, and Edison made his way North again. One cannot
resist speculation as to what might have happened to Edison himself and
to the development of electricity had he made this proposed plunge into
the enervating tropics. It will be remembered that at a somewhat similar
crisis in life young Robert Burns entertained seriously the idea of
forsaking Scotland for the West Indies. That he did not go was certainly
better for Scottish verse, to which he contributed later so many
immortal lines; and it was probably better for himself, even if he died
a gauger. It is simply impossible to imagine Edison working out the
phonograph, telephone, and incandescent lamp under the tropical climes
he sought. Some years later he was informed that both his companions had
gone to Vera Cruz, Mexico, and had died there of yellow fever.

Work was soon resumed at Louisville, where the dilapidated old office
occupied at the close of the war had been exchanged for one much more
comfortable and luxurious in its equipment. As before, Edison was
allotted to press report, and remembers very distinctly taking the
Presidential message and veto of the District of Columbia bill
by President Johnson. As the matter was received over the wire he
paragraphed it so that each printer had exactly three lines, thus
enabling the matter to be set up very expeditiously in the newspaper
offices. This earned him the gratitude of the editors, a dinner, and all
the newspaper "exchanges" he wanted. Edison's accounts of the sprees and
debauches of other night operators in the loosely managed offices enable
one to understand how even a little steady application to the work in
hand would be appreciated. On one occasion Edison acted as treasurer for
his bibulous companions, holding the stakes, so to speak, in order that
the supply of liquor might last longer. One of the mildest mannered of
the party took umbrage at the parsimony of the treasurer and knocked
him down, whereupon the others in the party set upon the assailant and
mauled him so badly that he had to spend three weeks in hospital. At
another time two of his companions sharing the temporary hospitality of
his room smashed most of the furniture, and went to bed with their boots
on. Then his kindly good-nature rebelled. "I felt that this was running
hospitality into the ground, so I pulled them out and left them on the
floor to cool off from their alcoholic trance."

Edison seems on the whole to have been fairly comfortable and happy in
Louisville, surrounding himself with books and experimental apparatus,
and even inditing a treatise on electricity. But his very thirst for
knowledge and new facts again proved his undoing. The instruments in the
handsome new offices were fastened in their proper places, and operators
were strictly forbidden to remove them, or to use the batteries except
on regular work. This prohibition meant little to Edison, who had access
to no other instruments except those of the company. "I went one night,"
he says, "into the battery-room to obtain some sulphuric acid for
experimenting. The carboy tipped over, the acid ran out, went through
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 what the company
wanted was operators, not experimenters. I was at liberty to take my pay
and get out."

The fact that Edison is a very studious man, an insatiate lover and
reader of books, is well known to his associates; but surprise is often
expressed at his fund of miscellaneous information. This, it will be
seen, is partly explained by his work for years as a "press" reporter.
He says of this: "The second time I was in Louisville, they had moved
into a new office, and the discipline was now good. I took the press
job. In fact, I was a very poor sender, and therefore made the taking
of press report a specialty. The newspaper men allowed me to come over
after going to press at 3 A.M. and get all the exchanges I wanted. These
I would take home and lay at the foot of my bed. I never slept more than
four or five hours' so that I would awake at nine or ten and read
these papers until dinner-time. I thus kept posted, and knew from their
activity every member of Congress, and what committees they were on; and
all about the topical doings, as well as the prices of breadstuffs
in all the primary markets. I was in a much better position than
most operators to call on my imagination to supply missing words or
sentences, which were frequent in those days of old, rotten wires, badly
insulated, especially on stormy nights. Upon such occasions I had to
supply in some cases one-fifth of the whole matter--pure guessing--but
I got caught only once. There had been some kind of convention in
Virginia, in which John Minor Botts was the leading figure. There
was great excitement about it, and two votes had been taken in the
convention on the two days. There was no doubt that the vote the next
day would go a certain way. A very bad storm came up about 10 o'clock,
and my wire worked very badly. Then there was a cessation of all
signals; then I made out the words 'Minor Botts.' The next was a New
York item. I filled in a paragraph about the convention and how the vote
had gone, as I was sure it would. But next day I learned that instead of
there being a vote the convention had adjourned without action until the
day after." In like manner, it was at Louisville that Mr. Edison got
an insight into the manner in which great political speeches are more
frequently reported than the public suspects. "The Associated Press
had a shorthand man travelling with President Johnson when he made his
celebrated swing around the circle in a private train delivering hot
speeches in defence of his conduct. The man engaged me to write out
the notes from his reading. He came in loaded and on the verge of
incoherence. We started in, but about every two minutes I would have to
scratch out whole paragraphs and insert the same things said in
another and better way. He would frequently change words, always to the
betterment of the speech. I couldn't understand this, and when he got
through, and I had copied about three columns, I asked him why those
changes, if he read from notes. 'Sonny,' he said, 'if these politicians
had their speeches published as they deliver them, a great many
shorthand writers would be out of a job. The best shorthanders and the
holders of good positions are those who can take a lot of rambling,
incoherent stuff and make a rattling good speech out of it.'"

Going back to Cincinnati and beginning his second term there as an
operator, Edison found the office in new quarters and with greatly
improved management. He was again put on night duty, much to his
satisfaction. He rented a room in the top floor of an office building,
bought a cot and an oil-stove, a foot lathe, and some tools. He
cultivated the acquaintance of Mr. Sommers, superintendent of telegraph
of the Cincinnati & Indianapolis Railroad, who gave him permission to
take such scrap apparatus as he might desire, that was of no use to the
company. With Sommers on one occasion he had an opportunity to indulge
his always strong sense of humor. "Sommers was a very witty man,"
he says, "and fond of experimenting. We worked on a self-adjusting
telegraph relay, which would have been very valuable if we could have
got it. I soon became the possessor of a second-hand Ruhmkorff induction
coil, which, 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 of the
apparatus. One day we went down to the round-house of the Cincinnati &
Indianapolis Railroad and connected up the long wash-tank in the room
with the coil, one electrode being connected to earth. Above this
wash-room was a flat roof. We bored a hole through the roof, and could
see the men as they came in. The first man as he entered dipped his
hands in the water. The floor being wet he formed a circuit, and up went
his hands. He tried it the second time, with the same result. He then
stood against the wall with a puzzled expression. We surmised that
he was waiting for somebody else to come in, which occurred shortly
after--with the same result. Then they went out, and the place was soon
crowded, and there was considerable excitement. Various theories
were broached to explain the curious phenomenon. We enjoyed the sport
immensely." It must be remembered that this was over forty years ago,
when there was no popular instruction in electricity, and when its
possibilities for practical joking were known to very few. To-day such a
crowd of working-men would be sure to include at least one student of
a night school or correspondence course who would explain the mystery
offhand.

Note has been made of the presence of Ellsworth in the Cincinnati
office, and his service with the Confederate guerrilla Morgan, for whom
he tapped Federal wires, read military messages, sent false ones, and
did serious mischief generally. It is well known that one operator can
recognize another by the way in which he makes his signals--it is his
style of handwriting. Ellsworth possessed in a remarkable degree the
skill of imitating these peculiarities, and thus he deceived the Union
operators easily. Edison says that while apparently a quiet man in
bearing, Ellsworth, after the excitement of fighting, found the tameness
of a telegraph office obnoxious, and that he became a bad "gun man"
in the Panhandle of Texas, where he was killed. "We soon became
acquainted," says Edison of this period in Cincinnati, "and he wanted me
to invent a secret method of sending despatches so that an intermediate
operator could not tap the wire and understand it. He said that if it
could be accomplished, he could sell it to the Government for a large
sum of money. This suited me, and I started in and succeeded in making
such an instrument, which had in it the germ of my quadruplex now used
throughout the world, permitting the despatch of four messages over
one wire simultaneously. By the time I had succeeded in getting the
apparatus to work, Ellsworth suddenly disappeared. Many years afterward
I used this little device again for the same purpose. At Menlo Park, New
Jersey, I had my laboratory. There were several Western Union wires cut
into the laboratory, and used by me in experimenting at night. One day
I sat near an instrument which I had left connected during the night. I
soon found it was a private wire between New York and Philadelphia, and
I heard among a lot of stuff a message that surprised me. A week after
that I had occasion to go to New York, and, visiting the office of
the lessee of the wire, I asked him if he hadn't sent such and such a
message. The expression that came over his face was a sight. He asked me
how I knew of any message. I told him the circumstances, and suggested
that he had better cipher such communications, or put on a secret
sounder. The result of the interview was that I installed for him my old
Cincinnati apparatus, which was used thereafter for many years."

Edison did not make a very long stay in Cincinnati this time, but went
home after a while to Port Huron. Soon tiring of idleness and isolation
he sent "a cry from Macedonia" to his old friend "Milt" Adams, who was
in Boston, and whom he wished to rejoin if he could get work promptly in
the East.

Edison himself gives the details of this eventful move, when he went
East to grow up with the new art of electricity. "I had left Louisville
the second time, and went home to see my parents. After stopping at home
for some time, I got restless, and thought I would like to work in the
East. Knowing that a former operator named Adams, who had worked with me
in the Cincinnati office, was in Boston, I wrote him that I wanted a job
there. He wrote back that if I came on immediately he could get me in
the Western Union office. I had helped out the Grand Trunk Railroad
telegraph people by a new device when they lost one of the two submarine
cables they had across the river, making the remaining cable act just as
well for their purpose, as if they had two. I thought I was entitled
to a pass, which they conceded; and I started for Boston. After leaving
Toronto a terrific blizzard came up and the train got snowed under in a
cut. After staying there twenty-four hours, the trainmen made snowshoes
of fence-rail splints and started out to find food, which they did about
a half mile away. They found a roadside inn, and by means of snowshoes
all the passengers were taken to the inn. The train reached Montreal
four days late. A number of the passengers and myself went to the
military headquarters to testify in favor of a soldier who was on
furlough, and was two days late, which was a serious matter with
military people, I learned. We willingly did this, for this soldier
was a great story-teller, and made the time pass quickly. I met here a
telegraph operator named Stanton, who took me to his boarding-house,
the most cheerless I have ever been in. Nobody got enough to eat; the
bedclothes were too short and too thin; it was 28 degrees below zero,
and the wash-water was frozen solid. The board was cheap, being only
$1.50 per week.

"Stanton said that the usual live-stock accompaniment of operators'
boarding-houses was absent; he thought the intense cold had caused
them to hibernate. Stanton, when I was working in Cincinnati, left his
position and went out on the Union Pacific to work at Julesburg, which
was a cattle town at that time and very tough. I remember seeing him off
on the train, never expecting to see him again. Six months afterward,
while working press wire in Cincinnati, about 2 A.M., there was flung
into the middle of the operating-room a large tin box. It made a
report like a pistol, and we all jumped up startled. In walked Stanton.
'Gentlemen,' he said 'I have just returned from a pleasure trip to the
land beyond the Mississippi. All my wealth is contained in my metallic
travelling case and you are welcome to it.' The case contained one
paper collar. He sat down, and I noticed that he had a woollen comforter
around his neck with his coat buttoned closely. The night was intensely
warm. He then opened his coat and revealed the fact that he had nothing
but the bare skin. 'Gentlemen,' said he, 'you see before you an operator
who has reached the limit of impecuniosity.'" Not far from the limit of
impecuniosity was Edison himself, as he landed in Boston in 1868 after
this wintry ordeal.