The Young Telegraph Operator - 6

The Young Telegraph Operator - 6

Such a class or group of men can always be presented by an individual type, and this is

assuredly best embodied in Milton F. Adams, one of Edison's earliest and closest friends,

to whom reference will be made in later chapters, and whose life has been so full of

adventurous episodes that he might well be regarded as the modern Gil Blas. That career

is certainly well worth the telling as "another story," to use the Kipling phrase. Of him

Edison says: "Adams was one of a class of operators never satisfied to work at any place

for any great length of time. He had the `wanderlust.' After enjoying hospitality in Boston

in 1868-69, on the floor of my hall- bedroom, which was a paradise for the entomologist,

while the boarding-house itself was run on the banting system of flesh reduction, he came

to me one day and said: `Good-bye, Edison; I have got sixty cents, and I am going to San

Francisco.' And he did go. How, I never knew personally. I learned afterward that he got

a job there, and then within a week they had a telegraphers' strike. He got a big torch and

sold patent medicine on the streets at night to support the strikers. Then he went to Peru

as partner of a man who had a grizzly bear which they proposed entering against a bull in

the bull-ring in that city. The grizzly was killed in five minutes, and so the scheme died.

Then Adams crossed the Andes, and started a market-report bureau in Buenos Ayres.

This didn't pay, so he started a restaurant in Pernambuco, Brazil. There he did very well,

but something went wrong (as it always does to a nomad), so he went to the Transvaal,

and ran a panorama called `Paradise Lost' in the Kaffir kraals. This didn't pay, and he

became the editor of a newspaper; then went to England to raise money for a railroad in

Cape Colony. Next I heard of him in New York, having just arrived from Bogota, United

States of Colombia, with a power of attorney and $2000 from a native of that republic,

who had applied for a patent for tightening a belt to prevent it from slipping on a pulley--

a device which he thought a new and great invention, but which was in use ever since

machinery was invented. I gave Adams, then, a position as salesman for electrical

apparatus. This he soon got tired of, and I lost sight of him." Adams, in speaking of this

episode, says that when he asked for transportation expenses to St. Louis, Edison pulled

out of his pocket a ferry ticket to Hoboken, and said to his associates: "I'll give him that,

and he'll get there all right." This was in the early days of electric lighting; but down to

the present moment the peregrinations of this versatile genius of the key have never

ceased in one hemisphere or the other, so that as Mr. Adams himself remarked to the

authors in April, 1908: "The life has been somewhat variegated, but never dull."

The fact remains also that throughout this period Edison, while himself a very Ishmael,

never ceased to study, explore, experiment. Referring to this beginning of his career, he

mentions a curious fact that throws light on his ceaseless application. "After I became a

telegraph operator," he says, "I practiced for a long time to become a rapid reader of

print, and got so expert I could sense the meaning of a whole line at once. This faculty, I

believe, should be taught in schools, as it appears to be easily acquired. Then one can

read two or three books in a day, whereas if each word at a time only is sensed, reading is

laborious."