4. CHAPTER IV
THE YOUNG TELEGRAPH OPERATOR
"WHILE a newsboy on the railroad,'' says Edison,
"I got very much interested in electricity,
probably from visiting telegraph offices with a chum
who had tastes similar to mine.'' It will also have
been noted that he used the telegraph to get items
for his little journal, and to bulletin his special news
of the Civil War along the line. The next step was
natural, and having with his knowledge of chemistry
no trouble about "setting up'' his batteries, the
difficulties of securing apparatus were chiefly those
connected with the circuits and the instruments.
American youths to-day are given, if of a mechanical
turn of mind, to amateur telegraphy or telephony,
but seldom, if ever, have to make any part of the
system constructed. In Edison's boyish days it was
quite different, and telegraphic supplies were hard to
obtain. But he and his "chum'' had a line between
their homes, built of common stove-pipe wire. The insulators
were bottles set on nails driven into trees and
short poles. The magnet wire was wound with rags for
insulation, and pieces of spring brass were used for
keys. With an idea of securing current cheaply,
Edison applied the little that he knew about static
electricity, and actually experimented with cats,
which he treated vigorously as frictional machines
until the animals fled in dismay, and Edison had
learned his first great lesson in the relative value of
sources of electrical energy. The line was made to
work, however, and additional to the messages that
the boys interchanged, Edison secured practice in an
ingenious manner. His father insisted on 11.30 as
proper bedtime, which left but a short interval after
the long day on the train. But each evening, when
the boy went home with a bundle of papers that had
not been sold in the town, his father would sit up
reading the "returnables.'' Edison, therefore, on
some excuse, left the papers with his friend, but
suggested that he could get the news from him by
telegraph, bit by bit. The scheme interested his
father, and was put into effect, the messages being
written down and handed over for perusal. This
yielded good practice nightly, lasting until 12 and 1
o'clock, and was maintained for some time until Mr.
Edison became willing that his son should stay up
for a reasonable time. The papers were then brought
home again, and the boys amused themselves to their
hearts' content until the line was pulled down by a
stray cow wandering through the orchard. Meantime
better instruments had been secured, and the
rudiments of telegraphy had been fairly mastered.
The mixed train on which Edison was employed as
newsboy did the way-freight work and shunting at
the Mount Clemens station, about half an hour being
usually spent in the work. One August morning, in
1862, while the shunting was in progress, and a laden
box-car had been pushed out of a siding, Edison, who
was loitering about the platform, saw the little son
of the station agent, Mr. J. U. Mackenzie, playing
with the gravel on the main track along which the
car without a brakeman was rapidly approaching.
Edison dropped his papers and his glazed cap, and
made a dash for the child, whom he picked up and
lifted to safety without a second to spare, as the wheel
of the car struck his heel; and both were cut about the
face and hands by the gravel ballast on which they
fell. The two boys were picked up by the train-hands
and carried to the platform, and the grateful father
at once offered to teach the rescuer, whom he knew
and liked, the art of train telegraphy and to make
an operator of him. It is needless to say that the
proposal was eagerly accepted.
Edison found time for his new studies by letting
one of his friends look after the newsboy work on the
train for part of the trip, reserving to himself the run
between Port Huron and Mount Clemens. That he
was already well qualified as a beginner is evident
from the fact that he had mastered the Morse code
of the telegraphic alphabet, and was able to take to
the station a neat little set of instruments he had
just finished with his own hands at a gun-shop in
Detroit. This was probably a unique achievement
in itself among railway operators of that day or of
later times. The drill of the student involved chiefly
the acquisition of the special signals employed in
railway work, including the numerals and abbreviations
applied to save time. Some of these have passed
into the slang of the day, "73'' being well known as
a telegrapher's expression of compliments or good
wishes, while "23'' is an accident or death message,
and has been given broader popular significance as
a general synonym for "hoodoo.'' All of this came
easily to Edison, who had, moreover, as his
Herald
showed, an unusual familiarity with train movement
along that portion of the Grand Trunk road.
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.
Another episode of this period is curious in its
revelation of the tenacity with which Edison has
always held to some of his oldest possessions with a
sense of personal attachment. "While working at
Stratford Junction,'' he says, "I was told by one of
the freight conductors that in the freight-house at
Goodrich there were several boxes of old broken-up
batteries. I went there and found over eighty cells
of the well-known Grove nitric-acid battery. The
operator there, who was also agent, when asked by
me if I could have the electrodes of each cell, made
of sheet platinum, gave his permission readily, thinking
they were of tin. I removed them all, amounting
to several ounces. Platinum even in those days
was very expensive, costing several dollars an ounce,
and I owned only three small strips. I was overjoyed
at this acquisition, and those very strips and
the reworked scrap are used to this day in my laboratory
over forty years later.''
It was at Stratford that Edison's inventiveness was
first displayed. The hours of work of a night operator
are usually from 7 P.M. to 7 A.M., and to insure attention
while on duty it is often provided that the
operator every hour, from 9 P.M. until relieved by the
day operator, shall send in the signal "6'' to the
train dispatcher's office. Edison revelled in the
opportunity for study and experiment given him by his
long hours of freedom in the daytime, but needed
sleep, just as any healthy youth does. Confronted
by the necessity of sending in this watchman's signal
as evidence that he was awake and on duty, he constructed
a small wheel with notches on the rim, and
attached it to the clock in such a manner that the
night-watchman could start it when the line was
quiet, and at each hour the wheel revolved and sent
in accurately the dots required for "sixing.'' The
invention was a success, the device being, indeed,
similar to that of the modern district messenger box;
but it was soon noticed that, in spite of the regularity
of the report, "Sf'' could not be raised even if a train
message were sent immediately after. Detection and
a reprimand came in due course, but were not taken
very seriously.
A serious occurrence that might have resulted in
accident drove him soon after from Canada, although
the youth could hardly be held to blame for it.
Edison says: "This night job just suited me, as I
could have the whole day to myself. I had the faculty
of sleeping in a chair any time for a few minutes at
a time. I taught the night-yardman my call, so I
could get half an hour's sleep now and then between
trains, and in case the station was called the watchman
would awaken me. One night I got an order
to hold a freight train, and I replied that I would.
I rushed out to find the signalman, but before I could
find him and get the signal set, the train ran past.
I ran to the telegraph office, and reported that I could
not hold her. The reply was: `Hell!' The train dispatcher,
on the strength of my message that I would
hold the train, had permitted another to leave the
last station in the opposite direction. There was
a lower station near the junction where the day
operator slept. I started for it on foot. The night
was dark, and I fell into a culvert and was knocked
senseless.'' Owing to the vigilance of the two engineers
on the locomotives, who saw each other approaching
on the straight single track, nothing more
dreadful happened than a summons to the thoughtless
operator to appear before the general manager at
Toronto. On reaching the manager's office, his trial
for neglect of duty was fortunately interrupted by
the call of two Englishmen; and while their conversation
proceeded, Edison slipped quietly out of the
room, hurried to the Grand Trunk freight depot,
found a conductor he knew taking out a freight train
for Sarnia, and was not happy until the ferry-boat
from Sarnia had landed him once more on the Michigan
shore. The Grand Trunk still owes Mr. Edison
the wages due him at the time he thus withdrew
from its service, but the claim has never been pressed.
The same winter of 1863-64, while at Port Huron,
Edison had a further opportunity of displaying his
ingenuity. An ice-jam had broken the light telegraph
cable laid in the bed of the river across to
Sarnia, and thus communication was interrupted.
The river is three-quarters of a mile wide, and could
not be crossed on foot; nor could the cable be repaired.
Edison at once suggested using the steam whistle of
the locomotive, and by manipulating the valve conversed
the short and long outbursts of shrill sound
into the Morse code. An operator on the Sarnia shore
was quick enough to catch the significance of the
strange whistling, and messages were thus sent in
wireless fashion across the ice-floes in the river. It
is said that such signals were also interchanged by
military telegraphers during the war, and possibly
Edison may have heard of the practice; but be that
as it may, he certainly showed ingenuity and resource
in applying such a method to meet the necessity.
It is interesting to note that at this point the Grand
Trunk now has its St. Clair tunnel, through which the
trains are hauled under the river-bed by electric
locomotives.
Edison had now begun unconsciously the roaming
and drifting that took him during the next five years
all over the Middle States, and that might well have
wrecked the career of any one less persistent and
industrious. It was a period of his life corresponding
to the Wanderjahre of the German artisan, and
was an easy way of gratifying a taste for travel
without the risk of privation. To-day there is little
temptation to the telegrapher to go to distant parts
of the country on the chance that he may secure a
livelihood at the key. The ranks are well filled everywhere,
and of late years the telegraph as an art or
industry has shown relatively slight expansion, owing
chiefly to the development of telephony. Hence, if vacancies
occur, there are plenty of operators available,
and salaries have remained so low as to lead to one or
two formidable and costly strikes that unfortunately
took no account of the economic conditions of demand
and supply. But in the days of the Civil War there
was a great dearth of skilful manipulators of the key.
About fifteen hundred of the best operators in the
country were at the front on the Federal side alone,
and several hundred more had enlisted. This created
a serious scarcity, and a nomadic operator going to any
telegraphic centre would be sure to find a place open
waiting for him. At the close of the war a majority
of those who had been with the two opposed armies
remained at the key under more peaceful surroundings,
but the rapid development of the commercial
and railroad systems fostered a new demand, and
then for a time it seemed almost impossible to train
new operators fast enough. In a few years, however,
the telephone sprang into vigorous existence,
dating from 1876, drawing off some of the most
adventurous spirits from the telegraph field; and the
deterrent influence of the telephone on the telegraph
had made itself felt by 1890. The expiration of the
leading Bell telephone patents, five years later,
accentuated even more sharply the check that had
been put on telegraphy, as hundreds and thousands
of "independent'' telephone companies were then
organized, throwing a vast network of toll lines over
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and other States, and
affording cheap, instantaneous means of communication
without any necessity for the intervention of an
operator.
It will be seen that the times have changed radically
since Edison became a telegrapher, and that in
this respect a chapter of electrical history has been
definitely closed. There was a day when the art
offered a distinct career to all of its practitioners,
and young men of ambition and good family were
eager to begin even as messenger boys, and were
ready to undergo a severe ordeal of apprenticeship
with the belief that they could ultimately attain positions
of responsibility and profit. At the same time
operators have always been shrewd enough to regard
the telegraph as a stepping-stone to other careers
in life. A bright fellow entering the telegraph service
to-day finds the experience he may gain therein
valuable, but he soon realizes that there are not
enough good-paying official positions to "go around,''
so as to give each worthy man a chance after he has
mastered the essentials of the art. He feels, therefore,
that to remain at the key involves either stagnation
or deterioration, and that after, say, twenty-five years
of practice he will have lost ground as compared with
friends who started out in other occupations. The
craft of an operator, learned without much difficulty,
is very attractive to a youth, but a position at the
key is no place for a man of mature years. His services,
with rare exceptions, grow less valuable as he
advances in age and nervous strain breaks him down.
On the contrary, men engaged in other professions
find, as a rule, that they improve and advance with
experience, and that age brings larger rewards and
opportunities.
The list of well-known Americans who have been
graduates of the key is indeed an extraordinary one,
and there is no department of our national life in
which they have not distinguished themselves. The
contrast, in this respect, between them and their
European colleagues is highly significant. In Europe
the telegraph systems are all under government
management, the operators have strictly limited
spheres of promotion, and at the best the transition
from one kind of employment to another is not
made so easily as in the New World. But in the
United States we have seen Rufus Bullock become
Governor of Georgia, and Ezra Cornell Governor of
New York. Marshall Jewell was Postmaster-General
of President Grant's Cabinet, and Daniel Lamont was
Secretary of State in President Cleveland's. Gen.
T. T. Eckert, past-President of the Western Union
Telegraph Company, was Assistant Secretary of War
under President Lincoln; and Robert J. Wynne, afterward
a consul-general, served as Assistant Postmaster
General. A very large proportion of the presidents
and leading officials of the great railroad systems are
old telegraphers, including Messrs. W. C. Brown,
President of the New York Central Railroad, and
Marvin Hughitt, President of the Chicago & North
western Railroad. In industrial and financial life
there have been Theodore N. Vail, President of the
Bell telephone system; L. C. Weir, late President of
the Adams Express; A. B. Chandler, President of the
Postal Telegraph and Cable Company; Sir W. Van
Home, identified with Canadian development; Robert
C. Clowry, President of the Western Union Telegraph
Company; D. H. Bates, Manager of the Baltimore &
Ohio telegraph for Robert Garrett; and Andrew
Carnegie, the greatest ironmaster the world has ever
known, as well as its greatest philanthropist. In
journalism there have been leaders like Edward Rosewater,
founder of the
Omaha Bee; W. J. Elverson, of
the
Philadelphia Press; and Frank A. Munsey, publisher
of half a dozen big magazines. George Kennan
has achieved fame in literature, and Guy Carleton
and Harry de Souchet have been successful as dramatists.
These are but typical of hundreds of men
who could be named who have risen from work at the
key to become recognized leaders in differing spheres
of activity.
But roving has never been favorable to the formation
of steady habits. The young men who thus
floated about the country from one telegraph office
to another were often brilliant operators, noted for
speed in sending and receiving, but they were undisciplined,
were without the restraining influences of
home life, and were so highly paid for their work that
they could indulge freely in dissipation if inclined
that way. Subjected to nervous tension for hours
together at the key, many of them unfortunately
took to drink, and having ended one engagement in
a city by a debauch that closed the doors of the
office to them, would drift away to the nearest town,
and there securing work, would repeat the performance.
At one time, indeed, these men were so numerous
and so much in evidence as to constitute a type
that the public was disposed to accept as representative
of the telegraphic fraternity; but as the conditions
creating him ceased to exist, the "tramp
operator'' also passed into history. It was, however,
among such characters that Edison was very largely
thrown in these early days of aimless drifting, to learn
something perhaps of their nonchalant philosophy of
life, sharing bed and board with them under all kinds
of adverse conditions, but always maintaining a stoic
abstemiousness, and never feeling other than a keen
regret at the waste of so much genuine ability and
kindliness on the part of those knights errant of the
key whose inevitable fate might so easily have been
his own.
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.''