Edison's Pedigree - 3

Edison's Pedigree - 3

The great inventor, whose iron endurance and stern will have enabled him to wear down

all his associates by work sustained through arduous days and sleepless nights, was not at

all strong as a child, and was of fragile appearance. He had an abnormally large but wellshaped

head, and it is said that the local doctors feared he might have brain trouble. In

fact, on account of his assumed delicacy, he was not allowed to go to school for some

years, and even when he did attend for a short time the results were not encouraging--his

mother being hotly indignant upon hearing that the teacher had spoken of him to an

inspector as "addled." The youth was, indeed, fortunate far beyond the ordinary in having

a mother at once loving, well-informed, and ambitious, capable herself, from her

experience as a teacher, of undertaking and giving him an education better than could be

secured in the local schools of the day. Certain it is that under this simple regime studious

habits were formed and a taste for literature developed that have lasted to this day. If ever

there was a man who tore the heart out of books it is Edison, and what has once been read

by him is never forgotten if useful or worthy of submission to the test of experiment.

But even thus early the stronger love of mechanical processes and of probing natural

forces manifested itself. Edison has said that he never saw a statement in any book as to

such things that he did not involuntarily challenge, and wish to demonstrate as either

right or wrong. As a mere child the busy scenes of the canal and the grain warehouses

were of consuming interest, but the work in the ship-building yards had an irresistible

fascination. His questions were so ceaseless and innumerable that the penetrating

curiosity of an unusually strong mind was regarded as deficiency in powers of

comprehension, and the father himself, a man of no mean ingenuity and ability, reports

that the child, although capable of reducing him to exhaustion by endless inquiries, was

often spoken of as rather wanting in ordinary acumen. This apparent dulness is, however,

a quite common incident to youthful genius.

The constructive tendencies of this child of whom his father said once that he had never

had any boyhood days in the ordinary sense, were early noted in his fondness for building

little plank roads out of the debris of the yards and mills. His extraordinarily retentive

memory was shown in his easy acquisition of all the songs of the lumber gangs and canal

men before he was five years old. One incident tells how he was found one day in the

village square copying laboriously the signs of the stores. A highly characteristic event at

the age of six is described by his sister. He had noted a goose sitting on her eggs and the

result. One day soon after, he was missing. By-and-by, after an anxious search, his father

found him sitting in a nest he had made in the barn, filled with goose-eggs and hens' eggs

he had collected, trying to hatch them out.

One of Mr. Edison's most vivid recollections goes back to 1850, when as a child three of

four years old he saw camped in front of his home six covered wagons, "prairie

schooners," and witnessed their departure for California. The great excitement over the

gold discoveries was thus felt in Milan, and these wagons, laden with all the worldly

possessions of their owners, were watched out of sight on their long journey by this

fascinated urchin, whose own discoveries in later years were to tempt many other

argonauts into the auriferous realms of electricity.

Another vivid memory of this period concerns his first realization of the grim mystery of

death. He went off one day with the son of the wealthiest man in the town to bathe in the

creek. Soon after they entered the water the other boy disappeared. Young Edison waited

around the spot for half an hour or more, and then, as it was growing dark, went home

puzzled and lonely, but silent as to the occurrence. About two hours afterward, when the

missing boy was being searched for, a man came to the Edison home to make anxious

inquiry of the companion with whom he had last been seen. Edison told all the

circumstances with a painful sense of being in some way implicated. The creek was at

once dragged, and then the body was recovered.