The Young Telegraph Operator - 2

The Young Telegraph Operator - 2

Three or four months were spent pleasantly and profitably by the youth in this course of

study, and Edison took to it enthusiastically, giving it no less than eighteen hours a day.

He then put up a little telegraph line from the station to the village, a distance of about a

mile, and opened an office in a drug store; but the business was naturally very small. The

telegraph operator at Port Huron knowing of his proficiency, and wanting to get into the

United States Military Telegraph Corps, where the pay in those days of the Civil War was

high, succeeded in convincing his brother-in-law, Mr. M. Walker, that young Edison

could fill the position. Edison was, of course, well acquainted with the operators along

the road and at the southern terminal, and took up his new duties very easily. The office

was located in a jewelry store, where newspapers and periodicals were also sold. Edison

was to be found at the office both day and night, sleeping there. "I became quite valuable

to Mr. Walker. After working all day I worked at the office nights as well, for the reason

that `press report' came over one of the wires until 3 A.M., and I would cut in and copy it

as well as I could, to become more rapidly proficient. The goal of the rural telegraph

operator was to be able to take press. Mr. Walker tried to get my father to apprentice me

at $20 per month, but they could not agree. I then applied for a job on the Grand Trunk

Railroad as a railway operator, and was given a place, nights, at Stratford Junction,

Canada." Apparently his friend Mackenzie helped him in the matter. The position carried

a salary of $25 per month. No serious objections were raised by his family, for the

distance from Port Huron was not great, and Stratford was near Bayfield, the old home

from which the Edisons had come, so that there were doubtless friends or even relatives

in the vicinity. This was in 1863.

Mr. Walker was an observant man, who has since that time installed a number of

waterworks systems and obtained several patents of his own. He describes the boy of

sixteen as engrossed intensely in his experiments and scientific reading, and somewhat

indifferent, for this reason, to his duties as operator. This office was not particularly busy,

taking from $50 to $75 a month, but even the messages taken in would remain unsent on

the hook while Edison was in the cellar below trying to solve some chemical problem.

The manager would see him studying sometimes an article in such a paper as the

Scientific American, and then disappearing to buy a few sundries for experiments.

Returning from the drug store with his chemicals, he would not be seen again until

required by his duties, or until he had found out for himself, if possible, in this offhand

manner, whether what he had read was correct or not. When he had completed his

experiment all interest in it was lost, and the jars and wires would be left to any fate that

might befall them. In like manner Edison would make free use of the watchmaker's tools

that lay on the little table in the front window, and would take the wire pliers there

without much thought as to their value as distinguished from a lineman's tools. The one

idea was to do quickly what he wanted to do; and the same swift, almost headlong trial of

anything that comes to hand, while the fervor of a new experiment is felt, has been noted

at all stages of the inventor's career. One is reminded of Palissy's recklessness, when in

his efforts to make the enamel melt on his pottery he used the very furniture of his home

for firewood.

Mr. Edison remarks the fact that there was very little difference between the telegraph of

that time and of to-day, except the general use of the old Morse register with the dots and

dashes recorded by indenting paper strips that could be read and checked later at leisure if

necessary. He says: "The telegraph men couldn't explain how it worked, and I was always

trying to get them to do so. I think they couldn't. I remember the best explanation I got

was from an old Scotch line repairer employed by the Montreal Telegraph Company,

which operated the railroad wires. He said that if you had a dog like a dachshund, long

enough to reach from Edinburgh to London, if you 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." To-day Mr. Edison is just as unable to solve the inner

mystery of electrical transmission. Nor is he alone. At the banquet given to celebrate his

jubilee in 1896 as professor at Glasgow University, Lord Kelvin, the greatest physicist of

our time, admitted with tears in his eyes and the note of tragedy in his voice, that when it

came to explaining the nature of electricity, he knew just as little as when he had begun

as a student, and felt almost as though his life had been wasted while he tried to grapple

with the great mystery of physics.