Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 13.djvu/504

488 of this time he was able to go into the telegraph-office at Port Huron. Here he worked for six months, and then went to Stratford, Canada, as night-operator. He soon after went to Adrian, Michigan, where, in addition to his telegraph-office, he had a small shop and tools, to which he turned his hand at odd moments for the purpose of repairing instruments. This situation he lost by violating some rule while absorbed in his workshop, but in two months after appeared in Indianapolis, where he came out with his first invention, an automatic repeater—an arrangement for transferring a message from one wire to another without the aid of an operator. From this place he went in turn to Cincinnati, Memphis, Louisville, New Orleans, and back again to Cincinnati, where we find him in 1867, at the age of twenty, absorbed in projects of invention. His utter negligence of dress and appearance, his insatiable thirst for reading, and his enthusiastic attempts to solve what appeared to others impossible, together with his willingness to work at all hours of the day or night, earned him the name of "Looney," by which he was best known for many years. Reaching his office here one night and finding it "on strike," he took in the situation, and went to work, keeping it up all night, working to his utmost, receiving the press dispatches. For this act he was raised from a salary of $65 to $105 per month, and given the best line in the office. While here he conceived the idea, afterward perfected in Boston, of sending two messages at the same time over the same wire. His "everlasting experiments" were looked upon with disfavor by the management, and the imagined neglect of his work caused so much dissatisfaction that he quit the office and returned home to Port Huron.

Here he soon received a call from the manager of the Boston office to be the Boston operator on the "crack" New York wire. The manager knew him, but the appearance there of the very similitude of a green country gawky raised a shout of laughter at his expense, which almost unnerved him, and, to make the matter worse, before he had time to compose himself, he was shown his place to make a trial. The position was the dread of operators; the New York man was one of the fastest senders in the country, delighted in victims, and in this instance sat at his instrument with a grim satisfaction, waiting to open on the "new man," and chuckling with his Boston comrades over their expected fun. They commenced, and the New York man crowded his sending-speed to his utmost, with never a "break" by the new man receiving. At the end of the message, the astonished and exhausted New York operator adds, "Who the deuce are you, anyhow?" to which the new man at Boston promptly replies, "I'm Tom Edison—shake hands."

We can make but brief mention of a few of the many incidents connected with Mr. Edison's history. In the Boston office one of his first efforts was at "internal improvement." The office was infested with cockroaches. He set up an apparatus for their automatic