Boyhood At Port Huron, Michigan - 5

Boyhood At Port Huron, Michigan - 5

His earnings were also excellent--so good, in fact, that eight or ten dollars a day were

often taken in, and one dollar went every day to his mother. Thus supporting himself, he

felt entitled to spend any other profit left over on chemicals and apparatus. And spent it

was, for with access to Detroit and its large stores, where he bought his supplies, and to

the public library, where he could quench his thirst for technical information, Edison

gave up all his spare time and money to chemistry. Surely the country could have

presented at that moment no more striking example of the passionate pursuit of

knowledge under difficulties than this newsboy, barely fourteen years of age, with his

jars and test-tubes installed on a railway baggage-car.

Nor did this amazing equipment stop at batteries and bottles. The same little space a few

feet square was soon converted by this precocious youth into a newspaper office. The

outbreak of the Civil War gave a great stimulus to the demand for all newspapers,

noticing which he became ambitious to publish a local journal of his own, devoted to the

news of that section of the Grand Trunk road. A small printing-press that had been used

for hotel bills of fare was picked up in Detroit, and type was also bought, some of it being

placed on the train so that composition could go on in spells of leisure. To one so

mechanical in his tastes as Edison, it was quite easy to learn the rudiments of the printing

art, and thus the Weekly Herald came into existence, of which he was compositor,

pressman, editor, publisher, and newsdealer. Only one or two copies of this journal are

now discoverable, but its appearance can be judged from the reduced facsimile here

shown. The thing was indeed well done as the work of a youth shown by the date to be

less than fifteen years old. The literary style is good, there are only a few trivial slips in

spelling, and the appreciation is keen of what would be interesting news and gossip. The

price was three cents a copy, or eight cents a month for regular subscribers, and the

circulation ran up to over four hundred copies an issue. This was by no means the result

of mere public curiosity, but attested the value of the sheet as a genuine newspaper, to

which many persons in the railroad service along the line were willing contributors.

Indeed, with the aid of the railway telegraph, Edison was often able to print late news of

importance, of local origin, that the distant regular papers like those of Detroit, which he

handled as a newsboy, could not get. It is no wonder that this clever little sheet received

the approval and patronage of the English engineer Stephenson when inspecting the

Grand Trunk system, and was noted by no less distinguished a contemporary than the

London Times as the first newspaper in the world to be printed on a train in motion. The

youthful proprietor sometimes cleared as much as twenty to thirty dollars a month from

this unique journalistic enterprise.

But all this extra work required attention, and Edison solved the difficulty of attending

also to the newsboy business by the employment of a young friend, whom he trained and

treated liberally as an understudy. There was often plenty of work for both in the early

days of the war, when the news of battle caused intense excitement and large sales of

papers. Edison, with native shrewdness already so strikingly displayed, would telegraph

the station agents and get them to bulletin the event of the day at the front, so that when

each station was reached there were eager purchasers waiting. He recalls in particular the

sensation caused by the great battle of Shiloh, or Pittsburg Landing, in April, 1862, in

which both Grant and Sherman were engaged, in which Johnston died, and in which there

was a ghastly total of 25,000 killed and wounded.