Radio Boys Cronies/Chapter IV

"With all he had to do, young Edison found that he had time on his hands which he might yet put to good use. One would think being 'candy butcher' and newsboy from 6 A.M. to 9 P.M., and making from $10.00 to $12.00 a day might satisfy the boy's cravings. But contentment wasn't one of Al Edison's numerous virtues.

"He did not know it, but he was following the footsteps of that other great American inventor, Benjamin Franklin, as a printer, editor, proprietor and publisher. In one of the stores where he stocked up with books, magazines and stationery for his train, there was an old printing press which the dealer, Mr. Roys, had taken for a debt. Mr. Roys once told the little story of that press:

"'Young Edison, who was a good boy and a favorite of mine, bought goods of me and had the run of the store. He saw the press, and I suppose he thought at once that he would publish a paper himself, for he could catch onto a new idea like lightning. He got me to show him how it worked, and finally bought it for a small sum.'

"From his printer friends on the _Free Press_ he bought some old type. Watching the compositors at work, he learned to set type and make up the forms, so within two weeks after purchasing the press he brought out the first number of _The Weekly Herald_--the first paper ever written, set up, proof-read, printed, published and sold (besides all his other work) on a local train--and this by a boy of fourteen!

"Of course, it had to be a sort of local paper, giving train and station gossip with sage remarks and 'preachments' from the boy's standpoint. It sold for three cents a copy, or eight cents a month to regular customers. Its biggest 'sworn circulation' was 700 copies, of which about 500 were _bona fide_ subscriptions, and the rest 'news-stand sales.'

"The great English engineer, Robert Stephenson, grandson of the inventor and improver of the locomotive, is said to have ordered a thousand copies to be distributed on railways all over the world to show what an American newsboy could do.

"Even the _London Times_, known for generations as '_The Thunderer_,' and long considered the greatest newspaper in both hemispheres, quoted from _The Weekly Herald_, as the only paper of its kind in the world. Young Edison's news venture was a financial success, for it added $45.00 a month to his already large income.

"But _Paul Pry_ came to grief because he tried to be funny in disclosing the secret motives of certain persons. People differ widely in their notions about fun. In a local paper, too, some one's feelin's are likely to get 'lacerated!' This was the case with a six-foot subscriber to the paper which was published then under Al Edison's pen name of 'Paul Pry.' One day the juvenile editor happened to meet his huge and wrathy reader too near the St. Clair river. Whereupon the subscriber took the editor by his collar and waistband and heaved him, neck and crop, into the river. Edison swam to shore, wet, but otherwise undisturbed, discontinued the publication of _Paul Pry_, and bade good-by to journalism forever!

"While young Edison was wading through such mammoth works as Sears's _History of the World_, Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and the _Dictionary of Sciences_ (and had begun to wrestle desperately with Newton's _Principia_!) he was showing a rare passion for chemistry. He 'annexed' the cellar for a laboratory. His mother said she counted, at one time, no less than two hundred bottles of chemicals, all shrewdly marked POISON, so that no one but himself would dare to touch them. Before long the lad took up so much room in his mother's cellar with his 'mess,' as she called it, that she told him to take it out, 'bag and baggage.'

"He once stated that his great desire to make money was largely because he needed the cash to buy materials for experiments. Therefore, in this emergency, he took keen pleasure in buying all the chemicals, appliances and apparatus he wished, and installing them in his real 'bag and baggage' car. As the railroad authorities had allowed him to set up a printing press, in addition to his miscellaneous stock in trade, why should he not have his laboratory there also? So his stock of batteries, chemicals and other 'calamity' grew apace.

"One day, after several weeks of happiness in his moving laboratory, he was 'dead to the world' in an experiment. Suddenly the car gave a lurch and jolted the bottle of phosphorus off its shelf. It broke, flamed up, set fire to the floor and endangered the whole train. While the boy was frantically fighting the fire, the Scotch conductor, red-headed and wrathy, rushed in and helped him to put it out.

"By this time they were stopping at Mt. Clemens, where the indignant Scotchman boxed the boy's ears and put him out also. Then the man threw the lad's bottles, apparatus and batteries after him, as if they were unloading a carload of freight there.

"These blows on his ears were the cause of the inventor's life-long deafness. But there never was a gamer sport than Thomas A. Edison. Once, long after this, he saw the labor of years and the outlay of at least two million dollars at the seashore washed away in a single night by a sudden storm. He only laughed and said that was 'spilt milk, not worth crying over.' Disappointments of that sort were 'the fortunes of war' or 'all for the best' to him. The injury so unjustly inflicted on him by that irate conductor was not a defect to him. Many years afterwards he said:

"'This deafness has been of great advantage to me in various ways. When in a telegraph office I could hear only the instrument directly on the table at which I sat, and, unlike the other operators, I was not bothered by the other instruments.

"'Again, in experimenting on the telephone, I had to improve the transmitter so that I could hear it. This made the telephone commercial, as the magneto telephone receiver of Bell was too weak to be used as a transmitter commercially.'

"It was the same with the phonograph. The great defect of that instrument was the rendering of the overtones in music and the hissing consonants in speech. Edison worked over one year, twenty hours a day, Sundays and all, to get the word 'specie' perfectly recorded and reproduced on the phonograph. When this was done, he knew that everything else could be done,--which was a fact.

"'Again,' Edison resumed, 'my nerves have been preserved intact. Broadway is as quiet to me as a country village is to a person with normal hearing.'"

The talk suddenly ceased. Then another voice announced from out of the horn: "The second installment of the lectures on Edison will be given at 3 P.M. next Friday. We will now hear a concert by Wayple's band."