Radio Boys Cronies/Chapter VII

"It was during the time young Edison was employed at Port Huron," the radio continued, "that the cable under River St. Clair between that city and Port Sarnia was severed by an ice jam. The river at that point is three quarters of a mile wide. Navigation was suspended and the ice had broken up so that the stream could not be crossed on foot nor could the broken cable lying in the bed of the river be mended.

"The ingenious young telegrapher suggested signaling Sarnia by giving, with the whistle of a locomotive, the dot-and-dash letters of the Morse telegraph code. Or course, this strange whistling caused considerable wonderment on the Canada side until a shrewd operator recognized the long-and-short telegraph letters, and communication was at once established--important messages being transmitted by steam whistles--a gigantic system of broadcasting. This was a simple way out of a sublime difficulty involving the affairs of two great peoples.

"But the too-enterprising operator had started so much trouble for himself that he decided to find employment where his mind would not be distracted from his job or tempted away from working out his chemical and electrical experiments. Because of these he preferred the position of night operator. His telegraph work was really a side line.

"On these accounts he found a job as night operator at Stratford Junction, Canada West, as Ontario was then called. He was only sixteen but his salary of twenty-five dollars a month seemed very small after making ten or twelve dollars a day as 'candy butcher.' But on account of the chances it gave him for experimenting, he resigned himself to the smallness of his pay. The treatment he had received at the hands of that train conductor had convinced him that he could not follow his bent while working all day on the railroad.

"Mr. Edison likes to tell of the prevailing ignorance of the science of telegraphy. He once told a friend:

"'The telegraph men themselves seemed unable to explain how the thing worked, though I was always trying to find out. The best explanation I got was from an old Scotch line repairer employed by the Montreal Telegraph Company, then operating the railway wires. Here is the way he described it: "If you had a dachshund long enough to reach from Edinburgh to London, and 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.'

"It was at Stratford Junction that the Edison boy began his career of invention. From the first his chief aim was the saving of labor. In order to be sure that the operators all along the line were not asleep at their posts, they were required to send to the train dispatcher's office a certain dot-and-dash signal every hour in the night. Young Edison was like young Napoleon in grudging himself the necessary hours of sleep. While the ingenious lad was fond of machinery--to make a machine of himself was utterly distasteful to him. It was against his principles and instincts to do anything a mere machine could do instead. So he made a little wheel with a few notches in the rim, with which he connected the clock and the transmitter, so that at the required instant every hour in the night the wheel revolved and sent the proper signal to headquarters. Meanwhile that wily young operator slept the sleep of the genius, if not of the just. Of one experience at this little place Edison relates:

"'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 was to wake me. One night I got an order to hold a freight train, and I replied that I would do so. I ran out to find the signal man, but before I could locate him and get the signal set--_the train ran past!_ I rushed back to the telegraph office and reported that I could not hold it.

"'But on receiving my first message that I would hold the freight, the dispatcher let another train leave the next station going the opposite way. There was a station near the Junction where the day operator slept. I started to run in that direction, but it was pitch dark. I fell down a culvert and was knocked senseless.'

"The two engineers, with a feeling that all was not as it should be, kept a sharp lookout and saw each other just in time to avert a fatal accident. But young Edison was cited to trial, for gross neglect of duty, by the general manager. During an informal hearing two Englishmen called on the manager. While he was talking with them the young night operator disappeared. Boarding a freight train bound for Port Sarnia, he made his escape from the five-years' term in prison threatened by the irate manager. Edison afterward confessed that his heart did not leave his throat until he had crossed the ferry to Port Huron and 'one wide river' lay between him and the Canadian authorities.

"Following his escape from Canada young Edison knocked about the home country, North and South. As it was during the Civil War he had some peculiar adventures. After making a long circuit, broken in many places by 'short circuits,' the journeyman telegrapher landed in Port Huron, and wrote his friend Adams, then in Boston to find him a job.

"His friend relates that he asked the Boston manager of the Western Union Telegraph office if he wanted a first-class operator from the West.

"'What kind of copy does he make?'" was the manager's first query. "Adams continues:

"'I passed Edison's letter through the window for his inspection. He was surprised, for it was almost as plain as print, and asked:

"'Can he take it off the wire like that?'

"'I said he certainly could, and that there was nobody who could stick him. He told me to send for my man and I did. When Edison came he landed the job without delay.'"

"The inventor himself has told the story of his reporting for duty in Boston:

"'The manager asked me when I was ready to go to work.

"'_Now_!' said I, and was instructed to return at 5:30 P.M., which I did, to the minute. I came into the operators' room and was ushered into the night manager's presence.

"'The weather was cold and I was poorly dressed; so my appearance, as I was told afterward, occasioned considerable merriment, and the night operators conspired to "put up a job on the jay from the wild and woolly West." I was given a pen and told to take the New York No. 1 wire. After an hour's wait I was asked to take my place at a certain table and receive a special report for the Boston _Herald_, the conspirators having arranged to have one of the fastest operators in New York send the despatch and "salt" the new man.

"'Without suspecting what was up I sat down, and the New York man started in very slowly. Soon he increased his speed and I easily adapted my pace to his. This put the man on his mettle and he "laid in his best licks," but soon reached his limit.

"'At this point I happened to look up and saw the operators all looking over my shoulder with faces that seemed to expect something funny. Then I knew they were playing a trick on me, but I didn't let on.

"'Before long the New York man began slurring his words, running them together and sticking the signals; but I had been used to all that sort of thing in taking reports, so I wasn't put out in the least. At last, when I thought the joke had gone far enough, and as the special was nearly finished, I calmly opened the key and remarked over the wire to my New York rival:

"'Say, young man, change off and send with the other foot!'

"'This broke the fellow up so that he turned the job over to another operator to finish, to the real discomfiture of the fellows around me.'

"Friend Adams goes on to tell of other happennings at the Hub:

"'One day Edison was more than delighted to pick up a complete set of Faraday's works, bringing them home at 4 A.M. and reading steadily until breakfast time, when he said, with great enthusiasm:

"'Adams, I have got so much to do and life is so short, _I am going to hustle_!'"

"'Then he started off to breakfast on a dead run.'

"He soon opened a workshop in Boston and began making experiments. It was here that he made a working model of his vote recorder, the first invention he ever patented.

"Edison has told us of this trip to Washington and how he showed that his invention could register the House vote, pro and con, almost instantaneously. The chairman of the committee saw how quickly and perfectly it worked and said to him:

"'Young man, if there is any invention on earth that we _don't_ want down here, it is this. Filibustering on votes is one of the greatest weapons in the hands of a minority to prevent bad legislation, and this instrument would stop that.'

"The youth felt the force of this so much that he decided from that time forth not to try to invent anything unless it would meet a genuine demand,--not from a few, but many people.

"It was while in Boston that Edison grew weary of the monotonous life of a telegraph operator and began to work up an independent business along inventive lines, so that he really began his career as an inventor at the Hub.

"After the vote recorder, he invented a stock ticker, and started a ticker service in Boston which had thirty or forty subscribers, and operated from a room over the Gold Exchange.

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"The third talk on Mr. Edison and his inventions will be given from this broadcasting station WUK next Monday at the same hour."