Boyhood At Port Huron, Michigan - 2

Boyhood At Port Huron, Michigan - 2

It might be thought that, immersed in business and preoccupied with schemes of this

character, Mr. Edison was to blame for the neglect of his son's education. But that was

not the case. The conditions were peculiar. It was at the Port Huron public school that

Edison received all the regular scholastic instruction he ever enjoyed--just three months.

He might have spent the full term there, but, as already noted, his teacher had found him

"addled." He was always, according to his own recollection, at the foot of the class, and

had come almost to regard himself as a dunce, while his father entertained vague

anxieties as to his stupidity. The truth of the matter seems to be that Mrs. Edison, a

teacher of uncommon ability and force, held no very high opinion of the average publicschool

methods and results, and was both eager to undertake the instruction of her son

and ambitious for the future of a boy whom she knew from pedagogic experience to be

receptive and thoughtful to a very unusual degree. With her he found study easy and

pleasant. The quality of culture in that simple but refined home, as well as the intellectual

character of this youth without schooling, may be inferred from the fact that before he

had reached the age of twelve he had read, with his mother's help, Gibbon's Decline and

Fall of the Roman Empire, Hume's History of England, Sears' History of the World,

Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and the Dictionary of Sciences; and had even

attempted to struggle through Newton's Principia, whose mathematics were decidedly

beyond both teacher and student. Besides, Edison, like Faraday, was never a

mathematician, and has had little personal use for arithmetic beyond that which is called

"mental." He said once to a friend: "I can always hire some mathematicians, but they

can't hire me." His father, by-the-way, always encouraged these literary tastes, and paid

him a small sum for each new book mastered. It will be noted that fiction makes no

showing in the list; but it was not altogether excluded from the home library, and Edison

has all his life enjoyed it, particularly the works of such writers as Victor Hugo, after

whom, because of his enthusiastic admiration--possibly also because of his imagination--

he was nicknamed by his fellow-operators, "Victor Hugo Edison."

Electricity at that moment could have no allure for a youthful mind. Crude telegraphy

represented what was known of it practically, and about that the books read by young

Edison were not redundantly informational. Even had that not been so, the inclinations of

the boy barely ten years old were toward chemistry, and fifty years later there is seen no

change of predilection. It sounds like heresy to say that Edison became an electrician by

chance, but it is the sober fact that to this pre-eminent and brilliant leader in electrical

achievement escape into the chemical domain still has the aspect of a delightful truant

holiday. One of the earliest stories about his boyhood relates to the incident when he

induced a lad employed in the family to swallow a large quantity of Seidlitz powders in

the belief that the gases generated would enable him to fly. The agonies of the victim

attracted attention, and Edison's mother marked her displeasure by an application of the

switch kept behind the old Seth Thomas "grandfather clock." The disastrous result of this

experiment did not discourage Edison at all, as he attributed failure to the lad rather than

to the motive power. In the cellar of the Edison homestead young Alva soon accumulated

a chemical outfit, constituting the first in a long series of laboratories. The word

"laboratory" had always been associated with alchemists in the past, but as with

"filament" this untutored stripling applied an iconoclastic practicability to it long before

he realized the significance of the new departure. Goethe, in his legend of Faust, shows

the traditional or conventional philosopher in his laboratory, an aged, tottering, graybearded

investigator, who only becomes youthful upon dia- bolical intervention, and

would stay senile without it. In the Edison laboratory no such weird transformation has

been necessary, for the philosopher had youth, fiery energy, and a grimly practical

determination that would submit to no denial of the goal of something of real benefit to

mankind. Edison and Faust are indeed the extremes of philosophic thought and

accomplishment.