5. CHAPTER V
ARDUOUS YEARS IN THE CENTRAL WEST
IN 1903, when accepting the position of honorary
electrician to the International Exposition held in
St. Louis in 1904, to commemorate the centenary of
the Louisiana Purchase, Mr. Edison spoke in his
letter of the Central West as a "region where as a
young telegraph operator I spent many arduous years
before moving East.'' The term of probation thus
referred to did not end until 1868, and while it lasted
Edison's wanderings carried him from Detroit to New
Orleans, and took him, among other cities, to Indianapolis,
Cincinnati, Louisville, and Memphis, some of
which he visited twice in his peregrinations to secure
work. From Canada, after the episodes noted in the
last chapter, he went to Adrian, Michigan, and of
what happened there Edison tells a story typical of
his wanderings for several years to come. "After
leaving my first job at Stratford Junction, I got a
position as operator on the Lake Shore & Michigan
Southern at Adrian, Michigan, in the division superintendent's
office. As usual, I took the `night trick,'
which most operators disliked, but which I preferred,
as it gave me more leisure to experiment. I had obtained
from the station agent a small room, and had
established a little shop of my own. One day the day
operator wanted to get off, and I was on duty. About
9 o'clock the superintendent handed me a despatch
which he said was very important, and which I must
get off at once. The wire at the time was very busy,
and I asked if I should break in. I got orders to do
so, and acting under those orders of the superintendent,
I broke in and tried to send the despatch; but
the other operator would not permit it, and the struggle
continued for ten minutes. Finally I got possession
of the wire and sent the message. The superintendent
of telegraph, who then lived in Adrian and
went to his office in Toledo every day, happened that
day to be in the Western Union office up-town—and
it was the superintendent I was really struggling
with! In about twenty minutes he arrived livid with
rage, and I was discharged on the spot. I informed
him that the general superintendent had told me to
break in and send the despatch, but the general
superintendent then and there repudiated the whole
thing. Their families were socially close, so I was
sacrificed. My faith in human nature got a slight
jar.''
Edison then went to Toledo and secured a position
at Fort Wayne, on the Pittsburg, Fort Wayne &
Chicago Railroad, now leased to the Pennsylvania
system. This was a "day job,'' and he did not like
it. He drifted two months later to Indianapolis,
arriving there in the fall of 1864, when he was at first
assigned to duty at the Union Station at a salary
of $75 a month for the Western Union Telegraph
Company, whose service he now entered, and with
which he has been destined to maintain highly important
and close relationships throughout a large
part of his life. Superintendent Wallick appears to
have treated him generously and to have loaned him
instruments, a kindness that was greatly appreciated,
for twenty years later the inventor called on his old
employer, and together they visited the scene where
the borrowed apparatus had been mounted on a
rough board in the depot. Edison did not stay long
in Indianapolis, however, resigning in February, 1865,
and proceeding to Cincinnati. The transfer was possibly
due to trouble caused by one of his early inventions
embodying what has been characterized by
an expert as "probably the most simple and ingenious
arrangement of connections for a repeater.''
His ambition was to take "press report,'' but finding,
even after considerable practice, that he "broke''
frequently, he adjusted two embossing Morse registers
—one to receive the press matter, and the other to repeat
the dots and dashes at a lower speed, so that the
message could be copied leisurely. Hence he could
not be rushed or "broken'' in receiving, while he
could turn out "copy'' that was a marvel of neatness
and clearness. All was well so long as ordinary conditions
prevailed, but when an unusual pressure occurred
the little system fell behind, and the newspapers complained
of the slowness with which reports were delivered
to them. It is easy to understand that with
matter received at a rate of forty words per minute
and worked off at twenty-five words per minute a
serious congestion or delay would result, and the
newspapers were more anxious for the news than they
were for fine penmanship.
Of this device Mr. Edison remarks: "Together we
took press for several nights, my companion keeping
the apparatus in adjustment and I copying. The
regular press operator would go to the theatre or
take a nap, only finishing the report after 1 A.M. One
of the newspapers complained of bad copy toward
the end of the report—that, is from 1 to 3 A.M., and
requested that the operator taking the report up to
1 A.M.—which was ourselves—take it all, as the copy
then was perfectly unobjectionable. This led to an
investigation by the manager, and the scheme was
forbidden.
"This instrument, many years afterward, was applied
by me for transferring messages from one wire to
any other wire simultaneously, or after any interval
of time. It consisted of a disk of paper, the indentations
being formed in a volute spiral, exactly as in
the disk phonograph to-day. It was this instrument
which gave me the idea of the phonograph while working
on the telephone.''
Arrived in Cincinnati, where he got employment in
the Western Union commercial telegraph department
at a wage of $60 per month, Edison made the
acquaintance of Milton F. Adams, already referred to
as facile princeps the typical telegrapher in all his
more sociable and brilliant aspects. Speaking of that
time, Mr. Adams says: "I can well recall when Edison
drifted in to take a job. He was a youth of about
eighteen years, decidedly unprepossessing in dress and
rather uncouth in manner. I was twenty-one, and
very dudish. He was quite thin in those days, and
his nose was very prominent, giving a Napoleonic
look to his face, although the curious resemblance did
not strike me at the time. The boys did not take to
him cheerfully, and he was lonesome. I sympathized
with him, and we became close companions. As an
operator he had no superiors and very few equals.
Most of the time he was monkeying with the batteries
and circuits, and devising things to make the work of
telegraphy less irksome. He also relieved the monotony
of office-work by fitting up the battery circuits
to play jokes on his fellow-operators, and to deal with
the vermin that infested the premises. He arranged
in the cellar what he called his `rat paralyzer,' a very
simple contrivance consisting of two plates insulated
from each other and connected with the main battery.
They were so placed that when a rat passed over
them the fore feet on the one plate and the hind feet
on the other completed the circuit and the rat departed
this life, electrocuted.''
Shortly after Edison's arrival at Cincinnati came
the close of the Civil War and the assassination of
President Lincoln. It was natural that telegraphers
should take an intense interest in the general struggle,
for not only did they handle all the news relating to
it, but many of them were at one time or another personal
participants. For example, one of the operators
in the Cincinnati office was George Ellsworth,
who was telegrapher for Morgan, the famous Southern
Guerrilla, and was with him when he made his raid
into Ohio and was captured near the Pennsylvania
line. Ellsworth himself made a narrow escape by
swimming the Ohio River with the aid of an army
mule. Yet we can well appreciate the unimpressionable
way in which some of the men did their work,
from an anecdote that Mr. Edison tells of that awful
night of Friday, April 14, 1865: "I noticed,'' he says,
"an immense crowd gathering in the street outside
a newspaper office. I called the attention of the
other operators to the crowd, and we sent a messenger
boy to find the cause of the excitement. He returned
in a few minutes and shouted `Lincoln's shot.' Instinctively
the operators looked from one face to another
to see which man had received the news. All
the faces were blank, and every man said he had not
taken a word about the shooting. `Look over your
files,' said the boss to the man handling the press
stuff. For a few moments we waited in suspense,
and then the man held up a sheet of paper containing
a short account of the shooting of the President. The
operator had worked so mechanically that he had
handled the news without the slightest knowledge of
its significance.'' Mr. Adams says that at the time
the city was en fête on account of the close of the
war, the name of the assassin was received by telegraph,
and it was noted with a thrill of horror that it
was that of a brother of Edwin Booth and of Junius
Brutus Booth—the latter of whom was then playing
at the old National Theatre. Booth was hurried
away into seclusion, and the next morning the city
that had been so gay over night with bunting was
draped with mourning.
Edison's diversions in Cincinnati were chiefly those
already observed. He read a great deal, but spent
most of his leisure in experiment. Mr. Adams remarks:
"Edison and I were very fond of tragedy.
Forrest and John McCullough were playing at the
National Theatre, and when our capital was sufficient
we would go to see those eminent tragedians alternate
in Othello and Iago. Edison always enjoyed Othello
greatly. Aside from an occasional visit to the Loewen
Garden `over the Rhine,' with a glass of beer and
a few pretzels, consumed while listening to the excellent
music of a German band, the theatre was the
sum and substance of our innocent dissipation.''
The Cincinnati office, as a central point, appears to
have been attractive to many of the clever young
operators who graduated from it to positions of larger
responsibility. Some of them were conspicuous for
their skill and versatility. Mr. Adams tells this interesting
story as an illustration: "L. C. Weir, or Charlie,
as he was known, at that time agent for the Adams
Express Company, had the remarkable ability of taking
messages and copying them twenty-five words
behind the sender. One day he came into the operating-room,
and passing a table he heard Louisville
calling Cincinnati. He reached over to the key and
answered the call. My attention was arrested by the
fact that he walked off after responding, and the
sender happened to be a good one. Weir coolly asked
for a pen, and when he sat down the sender was just
one message ahead of him with date, address, and
signature. Charlie started in, and in a beautiful,
large, round hand copied that message. The sender
went right along, and when he finished with six messages
closed his key. When Weir had done with the
last one the sender began to think that after all there
had been no receiver, as Weir did not `break,' but
simply gave his O. K. He afterward became president
of the Adams Express, and was certainly a wonderful
operator.'' The operating-room referred to
was on the fifth floor of the building with no elevators.
Those were the early days of trade unionism in
telegraphy, and the movement will probably never
quite die out in the craft which has always shown so
much solidarity. While Edison was in Cincinnati a
delegation of five union operators went over from
Cleveland to form a local branch, and the occasion
was one of great conviviality. Night came, but the
unionists were conspicuous by their absence, although
more circuits than one were intolerant of delay and
clamorous for attention—eight local unionists being
away. The Cleveland report wire was in special
need, and Edison, almost alone in the office, devoted
himself to it all through the night and until 3 o'clock
the next morning, when he was relieved.
He had previously been getting $80 a month, and
had eked this out by copying plays for the theatre.
His rating was that of a "plug'' or inferior operator;
but he was determined to lift himself into the class of
first-class operators, and had kept up the practice of
going to the office at night to "copy press,'' acting
willingly as a substitute for any operator who wanted
to get off for a few hours—which often meant all
night. Speaking of this special ordeal, for which he
had thus been unconsciously preparing, Edison says:
"My copy looked fine if viewed as a whole, as I could
write a perfectly straight line across the wide sheet,
which was not ruled. There were no flourishes, but
the individual letters would not bear close inspection.
When I missed understanding a word, there was no
time to think what it was, so I made an illegible one
to fill in, trusting to the printers to sense it. I knew
they could read anything, although Mr. Bloss, an
editor of the
Inquirer, made such bad copy that one
of his editorials was pasted up on the notice-board in
the telegraph office with an offer of one dollar to any
man who could `read twenty consecutive words.' Nobody
ever did it. When I got through I was too
nervous to go home, so waited the rest of the night
for the day manager, Mr. Stevens, to see what was to
be the outcome of this Union formation and of my
efforts. He was an austere man, and I was afraid
of him. I got the morning papers, which came out
at 4 A. M., and the press report read perfectly, which
surprised me greatly. I went to work on my regular
day wire to Portsmouth, Ohio, and there was
considerable excitement, but nothing was said to me,
neither did Mr. Stevens examine the copy on the
office hook, which I was watching with great interest.
However, about 3 P. M. he went to the hook, grabbed
the bunch and looked at it as a whole without examining
it in detail, for which I was thankful. Then he
jabbed it back on the hook, and I knew I was all
right. He walked over to me, and said: `Young
man, I want you to work the Louisville wire nights;
your salary will be $125.' Thus I got from the plug
classification to that of a `first-class man.' ''
But no sooner was this promotion secured than he
started again on his wanderings southward, while his
friend Adams went North, neither having any difficulty
in making the trip. "The boys in those days
had extraordinary facilities for travel. As a usual
thing it was only necessary for them to board a train
and tell the conductor they were operators. Then
they would go as far as they liked. The number of
operators was small, and they were in demand
everywhere.'' It was in this way Edison made his way
south as far as Memphis, Tennessee, where the telegraph
service at that time was under military law,
although the operators received $125 a month. Here
again Edison began to invent and improve on existing
apparatus, with the result of having once more
to "move on.'' The story may be told in his own
terse language: "I was not the inventor of the auto
repeater, but while in Memphis I worked on one.
Learning that the chief operator, who was a protégé
of the superintendent, was trying in some way to put
New York and New Orleans together for the first
time since the close of the war, I redoubled my efforts,
and at 2 o'clock one morning I had them speaking
to each other. The office of the
Memphis Avalanche
was in the same building. The paper got wind of it
and sent messages. A column came out in the morning
about it; but when I went to the office in the
afternoon to report for duty I was discharged with
out explanation. The superintendent would not even
give me a pass to Nashville, so I had to pay my fare.
I had so little money left that I nearly starved at
Decatur, Alabama, and had to stay three days before
going on north to Nashville. Arrived in that city, I
went to the telegraph office, got money enough to
buy a little solid food, and secured a pass to Louisville.
I had a companion with me who was also out
of a job. I arrived at Louisville on a bitterly cold
day, with ice in the gutters. I was wearing a linen
duster and was not much to look at, but got a position
at once, working on a press wire. My travelling
companion was less successful on account of his
`record.' They had a limit even in those days when
the telegraph service was so demoralized.''
Some reminiscences of Mr. Edison are of interest
as bearing not only upon the "demoralized'' telegraph
service, but the conditions from which the
New South had to emerge while working out its
salvation. "The telegraph was still under military
control, not having been turned over to the original
owners, the Southern Telegraph Company. In addition
to the regular force, there was an extra force
of two or three operators, and some stranded ones,
who were a burden to us, for board was high. One of
these derelicts was a great source of worry to me,
personally. He would come in at all hours and either
throw ink around or make a lot of noise. One night
he built a fire in the grate and started to throw pistol
cartridges into the flames. These would explode, and
I was twice hit by the bullets, which left a black-and-blue
mark. Another night he came in and got from
some part of the building a lot of stationery with
`Confederate States' printed at the head. He was
a fine operator, and wrote a beautiful hand. He
would take a sheet of this paper, write capital `A,
and then take another sheet and make the `A' differently;
and so on through the alphabet; each time
crumpling the paper up in his hand and throwing
it on the floor. He would keep this up until the room
was filled nearly flush with the table. Then he would
quit.
"Everything at that time was `wide open.'
Disorganization reigned supreme. There was no head
to anything. At night myself and a companion would
go over to a gorgeously furnished faro-bank and get
our midnight lunch. Everything was free. There
were over twenty keno-rooms running. One of them
that I visited was in a Baptist church, the man with
the wheel being in the pulpit, and the gamblers in
the pews.
"While there the manager of the telegraph office
was arrested for something I never understood, and
incarcerated in a military prison about half a mile
from the office. The building was in plain sight from
the office, and four stories high. He was kept strictly
incommunicado. One day, thinking he might be confined
in a room facing the office, I put my arm out
of the window and kept signalling dots and dashes
by the movement of the arm. I tried this several
times for two days. Finally he noticed it, and putting
his arm through the bars of the window he established
communication with me. He thus sent several messages
to his friends, and was afterward set free.''
Another curious story told by Edison concerns a
fellow-operator on night duty at Chattanooga Junction,
at the time he was at Memphis: "When it was
reported that Hood was marching on Nashville, one
night a Jew came into the office about 11 o'clock in
great excitement, having heard the Hood rumor. He,
being a large sutler, wanted to send a message to save
his goods. The operator said it was impossible—that
orders had been given to send no private messages.
Then the Jew wanted to bribe my friend, who steadfastly
refused for the reason, as he told the Jew, that
he might be court-martialled and shot. Finally the
Jew got up to $800. The operator swore him to
secrecy and sent the message. Now there was no
such order about private messages, and the Jew, finding
it out, complained to Captain Van Duzer, chief of
telegraphs, who investigated the matter, and while he
would not discharge the operator, laid him off
indefinitely. Van Duzer was so lenient that if an
operator were discharged, all the operator had to do
was to wait three days and then go and sit on the
stoop of Van Duzer's office all day, and he would be
taken back. But Van Duzer swore he would never
give in in this case. He said that if the operator had
taken $800 and sent the message at the regular rate,
which was twenty-five cents, it would have been all
right, as the Jew would be punished for trying to
bribe a military operator; but when the operator took
the $800 and then sent the message deadhead, he
couldn't stand it, and he would never relent.''
A third typical story of this period deals with a
cipher message for Thomas. Mr. Edison narrates it
as follows: "When I was an operator in Cincinnati
working the Louisville wire nights for a time, one
night a man over on the Pittsburg wire yelled out:
`D. I. cipher,' which meant that there was a cipher
message from the War Department at Washington
and that it was coming—and he yelled out `Louisville.'
I started immediately to call up that place.
It was just at the change of shift in the office. I
could not get Louisville, and the cipher message began
to come. It was taken by the operator on the other
table direct from the War Department. It was for
General Thomas, at Nashville. I called for about
twenty minutes and notified them that I could not
get Louisville. I kept at it for about fifteen minutes
longer, and notified them that there was still no
answer from Louisville. They then notified the War
Department that they could not get Louisville. Then
we tried to get it by all kinds of roundabout ways,
but in no case could anybody get them at that office.
Soon a message came from the War Department to
send immediately for the manager of the Cincinnati
office. He was brought to the office and several
messages were exchanged, the contents of which, of course,
I did not know, but the matter appeared to be very
serious, as they were afraid of General Hood, of the
Confederate Army, who was then attempting to march
on Nashville; and it was very important that this
cipher of about twelve hundred words or so should
be got through immediately to General Thomas. I
kept on calling up to 12 or 1 o'clock, but no Louisville.
About 1 o'clock the operator at the Indianapolis
office got hold of an operator on a wire which ran
from Indianapolis to Louisville along the railroad,
who happened to come into his office. He arranged
with this operator to get a relay of horses, and the
message was sent through Indianapolis to this operator
who had engaged horses to carry the despatches to
Louisville and find out the trouble, and get the
despatches through without delay to General Thomas.
In those days the telegraph fraternity was rather
demoralized, and the discipline was very lax. It was
found out a couple of days afterward that there were
three night operators at Louisville. One of them had
gone over to Jeffersonville and had fallen off a horse
and broken his leg, and was in a hospital. By a
remarkable coincidence another of the men had been
stabbed in a keno-room, and was also in hospital
while the third operator had gone to Cynthiana to
see a man hanged and had got left by the train.''
Young Edison remained in Louisville for about
two years, quite a long stay for one with such nomadic
instincts. It was there that he perfected the peculiar
vertical style of writing which, beginning with him in
telegraphy, later became so much of a fad with teachers
of penmanship and in the schools. He says of this form
of writing, a current example of which is given above:
"I developed this style in Louisville while taking press
reports. My wire was connected to the `blind' side
of a repeater at Cincinnati, so that if I missed a word
or sentence, or if the wire worked badly, I could not
break in and get the last words, because the Cincinnati
man had no instrument by which he could
hear me. I had to take what came. When I got the
job, the cable across the Ohio River at Covington,
connecting with the line to Louisville, had a variable
leak in it, which caused the strength of the signalling
current to make violent fluctuations. I obviated this
by using several relays, each with a different adjustment,
working several sounders all connected with
one sounding-plate. The clatter was bad, but I could
read it with fair ease. When, in addition to this infernal
leak, the wires north to Cleveland worked badly,
it required a large amount of imagination to get
the sense of what was being sent. An imagination
requires an appreciable time for its exercise, and as
the stuff was coming at the rate of thirty-five to forty
words a minute, it was very difficult to write down
what was coming and imagine what wasn't coming.
Hence it was necessary to become a very rapid writer,
so I started to find the fastest style. I found that the
vertical style, with each letter separate and without
any flourishes, was the most rapid, and that the
smaller the letter the greater the rapidity. As I took
on an average from eight to fifteen columns of news
report every day, it did not take long to perfect this
method.'' Mr. Edison has adhered to this characteristic
style of penmanship down to the present
time.
As a matter of fact, the conditions at Louisville
at that time were not much better than they had been
at Memphis. The telegraph operating-room was in
a deplorable condition. It was on the second story
of a dilapidated building on the principal street of
the city, with the battery-room in the rear; behind
which was the office of the agent of the Associated
Press. The plastering was about one-third gone from
the ceiling. A small stove, used occasionally in the
winter, was connected to the chimney by a tortuous
pipe. The office was never cleaned. The switchboard
for manipulating the wires was about thirty-four
inches square. The brass connections on it were
black with age and with the arcing effects of lightning,
which, to young Edison, seemed particularly partial
to Louisville. "It would strike on the wires,'' he
says, "with an explosion like a cannon-shot, making
that office no place for an operator with heart-disease.''
Around the dingy walls were a dozen tables, the ends
next to the wall. They were about the size of those
seen in old-fashioned country hotels for holding
the wash-bowl and pitcher. The copper wires
connecting the instruments to the switchboard were
small, crystallized, and rotten. The battery-room
was filled with old record-books and message bundles,
and one hundred cells of nitric-acid battery, arranged
on a stand in the centre of the room. This stand, as
well as the floor, was almost eaten through by the
destructive action of the powerful acid. Grim and
uncompromising as the description reads, it was
typical of the equipment in those remote days of
the telegraph at the close of the war.
Illustrative of the length to which telegraphers
could go at a time when they were so much in demand,
Edison tells the following story: "When I took
the position there was a great shortage of operators.
One night at 2 A.M. another operator and I were on
duty. I was taking press report, and the other man
was working the New York wire. We heard a heavy
tramp, tramp, tramp on the rickety stairs. Suddenly
the door was thrown open with great violence,
dislodging it from one of the hinges. There appeared in
the doorway one of the best operators we had, who
worked daytime, and who was of a very quiet
disposition except when intoxicated. He was a great
friend of the manager of the office. His eyes were
bloodshot and wild, and one sleeve had been torn
away from his coat. Without noticing either of us
he went up to the stove and kicked it over. The
stove-pipe fell, dislocated at every joint. It was half
full of exceedingly fine soot, which floated out and
filled the room completely. This produced a
momentary respite to his labors. When the atmosphere
had cleared sufficiently to see, he went around
and pulled every table away from the wall, piling
them on top of the stove in the middle of the room.
Then he proceeded to pull the switchboard away from
the wall. It was held tightly by screws. He succeeded,
finally, and when it gave way he fell with
the board, and striking on a table cut himself so that
he soon became covered with blood. He then went
to the battery-room and knocked all the batteries off
on the floor. The nitric acid soon began to combine
with the plaster in the room below, which was the
public receiving-room for messengers and bookkeepers.
The excess acid poured through and ate up
the account-books. After having finished everything
to his satisfaction, he left. I told the other operator
to do nothing. We would leave things just as they
were, and wait until the manager came. In the
mean time, as I knew all the wires coming through to
the switchboard, I rigged up a temporary set of
instruments so that the New York business could be cleared
up, and we also got the remainder of the press matter.
At 7 o'clock the day men began to appear. They
were told to go down-stairs and wait the coming of
the manager. At 8 o'clock he appeared, walked
around, went into the battery-room, and then came
to me, saying: `Edison, who did this?' I told him
that Billy L. had come in full of soda-water and
invented the ruin before him. He walked backward
and forward, about a minute, then coming up to my
table put his fist down, and said: `If Billy L. ever
does that again, I will discharge him.' It was needless
to say that there were other operators who took
advantage of that kind of discipline, and I had many
calls at night after that, but none with such destructive
effects.''
This was one aspect of life as it presented itself to
the sensitive and observant young operator in Louisville.
But there was another, more intellectual side,
in the contact afforded with journalism and its leaders,
and the information taken in almost unconsciously
as to the political and social movements of the time.
Mr. Edison looks back on this with great satisfaction.
"I remember,'' he says, "the discussions between the
celebrated poet and journalist George D. Prentice,
then editor of the Courier-Journal, and Mr. Tyler, of
the Associated Press. I believe Prentice was the
father of the humorous paragraph of the American
newspaper. He was poetic, highly educated, and a
brilliant talker. He was very thin and small. I do
not think he weighed over one hundred and twenty
five pounds. Tyler was a graduate of Harvard, and
had a very clear enunciation, and, in sharp contrast
to Prentice, he was a large man. After the paper had
gone to press, Prentice would generally come over to
Tyler's office and start talking. Having while in
Tyler's office heard them arguing on the immortality
of the soul, etc., I asked permission of Mr. Tyler if,
after finishing the press matter, I might come in and
listen to the conversation, which I did many times
after. One thing I never could comprehend was that
Tyler had a sideboard with liquors and generally
crackers. Prentice would pour out half a glass of
what they call corn whiskey, and would dip the
crackers in it and eat them. Tyler took it
sans food.
One teaspoonful of that stuff would put me to sleep.''
Mr. Edison throws also a curious side-light on the
origin of the comic column in the modern American
newspaper, the telegraph giving to a new joke or a
good story the ubiquity and instantaneity of an important
historical event. "It was the practice of the
press operators all over the country at that time, when
a lull occurred, to start in and send jokes or stories
the day men had collected; and these were copied
and pasted up on the bulletin-board. Cleveland was
the originating office for `press,' which it received
from New York, and sent it out simultaneously to
Milwaukee, Chicago, Toledo, Detroit, Pittsburg,
Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Vincennes,
Terre Haute, St. Louis, and Louisville.
Cleveland would call first on Milwaukee, if he had
anything. If so, he would send it, and Cleveland
would repeat it to all of us. Thus any joke or story
originating anywhere in that area was known the
next day all over. The press men would come in
and copy anything which could be published, which
was about three per cent. I collected, too, quite a
large scrap-book of it, but unfortunately have lost it.''
Edison tells an amusing story of his own pursuits
at this time. Always an omnivorous reader, he had
some difficulty in getting a sufficient quantity of
literature for home consumption, and was in the habit
of buying books at auctions and second-hand stores.
One day at an auction-room he secured a stack of
twenty unbound volumes of the North American
Review for two dollars. These he had bound and delivered
at the telegraph office. One morning, when
he was free as usual at 3 o'clock, he started off at a
rapid pace with ten volumes on his shoulder. He
found himself very soon the subject of a fusillade.
When he stopped, a breathless policeman grabbed him
by the throat and ordered him to drop his parcel and
explain matters, as a suspicious character. He opened
the package showing the books, somewhat to the
disgust of the officer, who imagined he had caught a
burglar sneaking away in the dark alley with his
booty. Edison explained that being deaf he had
heard no challenge, and therefore had kept moving;
and the policeman remarked apologetically that it
was fortunate for Edison he was not a better shot.
The incident is curiously revelatory of the character
of the man, for it must be admitted that while literary
telegraphers are by no means scarce, there are very
few who would spend scant savings on back numbers
of a ponderous review at an age when tragedy, beer,
and pretzels are far more enticing. Through all his
travels Edison has preserved those books, and has
them now in his library at Llewellyn Park, on Orange
Mountain, New Jersey.
Drifting after a time from Louisville, Edison made
his way as far north as Detroit, but, like the famous
Duke of York, soon made his way back again. Possibly
the severer discipline after the happy-go-lucky
régime in the Southern city had something to do with
this restlessness, which again manifested itself, however,
on his return thither. The end of the war had
left the South a scene of destruction and desolation,
and many men who had fought bravely and well
found it hard to reconcile themselves to the grim
task of reconstruction. To them it seemed better to
"let ill alone'' and seek some other clime where
conditions would be less onerous. At this moment a
great deal of exaggerated talk was current as to the
sunny life and easy wealth of Latin America, and
under its influences many "unreconstructed'' Southerners
made their way to Mexico, Brazil, Peru, or the
Argentine. Telegraph operators were naturally in
touch with this movement, and Edison's fertile imagination
was readily inflamed by the glowing idea of
all these vague possibilities. Again he threw up his
steady work and, with a couple of sanguine young
friends, made his way to New Orleans. They had the
notion of taking positions in the Brazilian Government
telegraphs, as an advertisement had been inserted
in some paper stating that operators were
wanted. They had timed their departure from Louisville
so as to catch a specially chartered steamer,
which was to leave New Orleans for Brazil on a
certain day, to convey a large number of Confederates
and their families, who were disgusted with the
United States and were going to settle in Brazil,
where slavery still prevailed. Edison and his friends
arrived in New Orleans just at the time of the great
riot, when several hundred negroes were killed, and
the city was in the hands of a mob. The Government
had seized the steamer chartered for Brazil, in order
to bring troops from the Yazoo River to New Orleans
to stop the rioting. The young operators therefore
visited another shipping-office to make inquiries as
to vessels for Brazil, and encountered an old Spaniard
who sat in a chair near the steamer agent's desk, and
to whom they explained their intentions. He had
lived and worked in South America, and was very
emphatic in his assertion, as he shook his yellow, bony
finger at them, that the worst mistake they could
possibly make would be to leave the United States.
He would not leave on any account, and they as
young Americans would always regret it if they forsook
their native land, whose freedom, climate, and
opportunities could not be equalled anywhere on the
face of the globe. Such sincere advice as this could
not be disdained, and Edison made his way North
again. One cannot resist speculation as to what might
have happened to Edison himself and to the development
of electricity had he made this proposed plunge
into the enervating tropics. It will be remembered
that at a somewhat similar crisis in life young Robert
Burns entertained seriously the idea of forsaking
Scotland for the West Indies. That he did not go
was certainly better for Scottish verse, to which he
contributed later so many immortal lines; and it was
probably better for himself, even if he died a gauger.
It is simply impossible to imagine Edison working
out the phonograph, telephone, and incandescent
lamp under the tropical climes he sought. Some years
later he was informed that both his companions had
gone to Vera Cruz, Mexico, and had died there of
yellow fever.
Work was soon resumed at Louisville, where the
dilapidated old office occupied at the close of the war
had been exchanged for one much more comfortable
and luxurious in its equipment. As before, Edison
was allotted to press report, and remembers very
distinctly taking the Presidential message and veto of
the District of Columbia bill by President Johnson.
As the matter was received over the wire he paragraphed
it so that each printer had exactly three
lines, thus enabling the matter to be set up very
expeditiously in the newspaper offices. This earned
him the gratitude of the editors, a dinner, and all the
newspaper "exchanges'' he wanted. Edison's accounts
of the sprees and debauches of other night
operators in the loosely managed offices enable one to
understand how even a little steady application to
the work in hand would be appreciated. On one
occasion Edison acted as treasurer for his bibulous
companions, holding the stakes, so to speak, in order
that the supply of liquor might last longer. One of
the mildest mannered of the party took umbrage at
the parsimony of the treasurer and knocked him
down, whereupon the others in the party set upon
the assailant and mauled him so badly that he had
to spend three weeks in hospital. At another time
two of his companions sharing the temporary
hospitality of his room smashed most of the furniture,
and went to bed with their boots on. Then his kindly
good-nature rebelled. "I felt that this was running
hospitality into the ground, so I pulled them out and left
them on the floor to cool off from their alcoholic trance.''
Edison seems on the whole to have been fairly
comfortable and happy in Louisville, surrounding himself
with books and experimental apparatus, and even
inditing a treatise on electricity. But his very thirst
for knowledge and new facts again proved his undoing.
The instruments in the handsome new offices
were fastened in their proper places, and operators
were strictly forbidden to remove them, or to use the
batteries except on regular work. This prohibition
meant little to Edison, who had access to no other
instruments except those of the company. "I went
one night,'' he says, "into the battery-room to obtain
some sulphuric acid for experimenting. The carboy
tipped over, the acid ran out, went through to the
manager's room below, and ate up his desk and all the
carpet. The next morning I was summoned before
him, and told that what the company wanted was
operators, not experimenters. I was at liberty to
take my pay and get out.''
The fact that Edison is a very studious man, an
insatiate lover and reader of books, is well known to
his associates; but surprise is often expressed at his
fund of miscellaneous information. This, it will be
seen, is partly explained by his work for years as a
"press'' reporter. He says of this: "The second
time I was in Louisville, they had moved into a new
office, and the discipline was now good. I took the
press job. In fact, I was a very poor sender, and
therefore made the taking of press report a specialty.
The newspaper men allowed me to come over after
going to press at 3 A.M. and get all the exchanges I
wanted. These I would take home and lay at the
foot of my bed. I never slept more than four or five
hours' so that I would awake at nine or ten and read
these papers until dinner-time. I thus kept posted,
and knew from their activity every member of Congress,
and what committees they were on; and all
about the topical doings, as well as the prices of
breadstuffs in all the primary markets. I was in a
much better position than most operators to call on
my imagination to supply missing words or sentences,
which were frequent in those days of old, rotten
wires, badly insulated, especially on stormy nights.
Upon such occasions I had to supply in some cases
one-fifth of the whole matter—pure guessing—but I
got caught only once. There had been some kind of
convention in Virginia, in which John Minor Botts
was the leading figure. There was great excitement
about it, and two votes had been taken in the
convention on the two days. There was no doubt that
the vote the next day would go a certain way. A
very bad storm came up about 10 o'clock, and my
wire worked very badly. Then there was a cessation
of all signals; then I made out the words `Minor
Botts.' The next was a New York item. I filled in
a paragraph about the convention and how the vote
had gone, as I was sure it would. But next day I
learned that instead of there being a vote the
convention had adjourned without action until the day
after.'' In like manner, it was at Louisville that Mr.
Edison got an insight into the manner in which great
political speeches are more frequently reported than
the public suspects. "The Associated Press had a
shorthand man travelling with President Johnson
when he made his celebrated swing around the circle
in a private train delivering hot speeches in defence
of his conduct. The man engaged me to write out
the notes from his reading. He came in loaded and
on the verge of incoherence. We started in, but about
every two minutes I would have to scratch out whole
paragraphs and insert the same things said in another
and better way. He would frequently change words,
always to the betterment of the speech. I couldn't
understand this, and when he got through, and I had
copied about three columns, I asked him why those
changes, if he read from notes. `Sonny,' he said,
`if these politicians had their speeches published as
they deliver them, a great many shorthand writers
would be out of a job. The best shorthanders and
the holders of good positions are those who can take
a lot of rambling, incoherent stuff and make a rattling
good speech out of it.' ''
Going back to Cincinnati and beginning his second
term there as an operator, Edison found the office
in new quarters and with greatly improved management.
He was again put on night duty, much to his
satisfaction. He rented a room in the top floor of an
office building, bought a cot and an oil-stove, a foot
lathe, and some tools. He cultivated the acquaintance
of Mr. Sommers, superintendent of telegraph of
the Cincinnati & Indianapolis Railroad, who gave
him permission to take such scrap apparatus as he
might desire, that was of no use to the company.
With Sommers on one occasion he had an opportunity
to indulge his always strong sense of humor. "Sommers
was a very witty man,'' he says, "and fond of
experimenting. We worked on a self-adjusting telegraph
relay, which would have been very valuable if
we could have got it. I soon became the possessor
of a second-hand Ruhmkorff induction coil, which,
although it would only give a small spark, would
twist the arms and clutch the hands of a man so that
he could not let go of the apparatus. One day we
went down to the round-house of the Cincinnati &
Indianapolis Railroad and connected up the long wash-tank
in the room with the coil, one electrode being
connected to earth. Above this wash-room was a
flat roof. We bored a hole through the roof, and
could see the men as they came in. The first man
as he entered dipped his hands in the water. The
floor being wet he formed a circuit, and up went his
hands. He tried it the second time, with the same
result. He then stood against the wall with a
puzzled expression. We surmised that he was waiting
for somebody else to come in, which occurred
shortly after—with the same result. Then they went
out, and the place was soon crowded, and there was
considerable excitement. Various theories were
broached to explain the curious phenomenon. We
enjoyed the sport immensely.'' It must be remembered
that this was over forty years ago, when there
was no popular instruction in electricity, and when
its possibilities for practical joking were known to
very few. To-day such a crowd of working-men
would be sure to include at least one student of a
night school or correspondence course who would
explain the mystery offhand.
Note has been made of the presence of Ellsworth
in the Cincinnati office, and his service with the
Confederate guerrilla Morgan, for whom he tapped
Federal wires, read military messages, sent false ones,
and did serious mischief generally. It is well known
that one operator can recognize another by the way
in which he makes his signals—it is his style of
handwriting. Ellsworth possessed in a remarkable degree
the skill of imitating these peculiarities, and thus he
deceived the Union operators easily. Edison says
that while apparently a quiet man in bearing, Ellsworth,
after the excitement of fighting, found the
tameness of a telegraph office obnoxious, and that he
became a bad "gun man'' in the Panhandle of Texas,
where he was killed. "We soon became acquainted,''
says Edison of this period in Cincinnati, "and he
wanted me to invent a secret method of sending
despatches so that an intermediate operator could not
tap the wire and understand it. He said that if it
could be accomplished, he could sell it to the Government
for a large sum of money. This suited me, and
I started in and succeeded in making such an
instrument, which had in it the germ of my quadruplex
now used throughout the world, permitting the despatch
of four messages over one wire simultaneously.
By the time I had succeeded in getting the apparatus
to work, Ellsworth suddenly disappeared. Many
years afterward I used this little device again for the
same purpose. At Menlo Park, New Jersey, I had
my laboratory. There were several Western Union
wires cut into the laboratory, and used by me in
experimenting at night. One day I sat near an instrument
which I had left connected during the night.
I soon found it was a private wire between New York
and Philadelphia, and I heard among a lot of stuff
a message that surprised me. A week after that I
had occasion to go to New York, and, visiting the
office of the lessee of the wire, I asked him if he hadn't
sent such and such a message. The expression that
came over his face was a sight. He asked me how I
knew of any message. I told him the circumstances,
and suggested that he had better cipher such
communications, or put on a secret sounder. The result
of the interview was that I installed for him my old
Cincinnati apparatus, which was used thereafter for
many years.''
Edison did not make a very long stay in Cincinnati
this time, but went home after a while to Port Huron.
Soon tiring of idleness and isolation he sent "a cry
from Macedonia'' to his old friend "Milt'' Adams,
who was in Boston, and whom he wished to rejoin if
he could get work promptly in the East.
Edison himself gives the details of this eventful
move, when he went East to grow up with the new
art of electricity. "I had left Louisville the second
time, and went home to see my parents. After
stopping at home for some time, I got restless, and
thought I would like to work in the East. Knowing
that a former operator named Adams, who had worked
with me in the Cincinnati office, was in Boston, I wrote
him that I wanted a job there. He wrote back that
if I came on immediately he could get me in the
Western Union office. I had helped out the Grand
Trunk Railroad telegraph people by a new device
when they lost one of the two submarine cables they
had across the river, making the remaining cable
act just as well for their purpose, as if they had two.
I thought I was entitled to a pass, which they
conceded; and I started for Boston. After leaving
Toronto a terrific blizzard came up and the train got
snowed under in a cut. After staying there twenty-four
hours, the trainmen made snowshoes of fence-rail
splints and started out to find food, which they did
about a half mile away. They found a roadside inn,
and by means of snowshoes all the passengers were
taken to the inn. The train reached Montreal four
days late. A number of the passengers and myself
went to the military headquarters to testify in favor of
a soldier who was on furlough, and was two days late,
which was a serious matter with military people, I
learned. We willingly did this, for this soldier was
a great story-teller, and made the time pass quickly.
I met here a telegraph operator named Stanton,
who took me to his boarding-house, the most cheerless
I have ever been in. Nobody got enough to eat;
the bedclothes were too short and too thin; it was
28 degrees below zero, and the wash-water was frozen
solid. The board was cheap, being only $1.50 per
week.
"Stanton said that the usual live-stock accompaniment
of operators' boarding-houses was absent;
he thought the intense cold had caused them
to hibernate. Stanton, when I was working in Cincinnati,
left his position and went out on the Union
Pacific to work at Julesburg, which was a cattle town
at that time and very tough. I remember seeing him
off on the train, never expecting to see him again.
Six months afterward, while working press wire in
Cincinnati, about 2 A.M., there was flung into the middle
of the operating-room a large tin box. It made
a report like a pistol, and we all jumped up startled.
In walked Stanton. `Gentlemen,' he said `I have
just returned from a pleasure trip to the land beyond
the Mississippi. All my wealth is contained in my
metallic travelling case and you are welcome to it.'
The case contained one paper collar. He sat down,
and I noticed that he had a woollen comforter around
his neck with his coat buttoned closely. The night
was intensely warm. He then opened his coat and
revealed the fact that he had nothing but the bare
skin. `Gentlemen,' said he, `you see before you an
operator who has reached the limit of impecuniosity.' ''
Not far from the limit of impecuniosity was Edison
himself, as he landed in Boston in 1868 after this
wintry ordeal.
This chapter has run to undue length, but it must
not close without one citation from high authority
as to the service of the military telegraph corps so
often referred to in it. General Grant in his
Memoirs, describing the movements of the Army of
the Potomac, lays stress on the service of his
telegraph operators, and says: "Nothing could be more
complete than the organization and discipline of this
body of brave and intelligent men. Insulated wires
were wound upon reels, two men and a mule detailed
to each reel. The pack-saddle was provided with a
rack like a sawbuck, placed crosswise, so that the
wheel would revolve freely; there was a wagon provided
with a telegraph operator, battery, and instruments
for each division corps and army, and for my
headquarters. Wagons were also loaded with light
poles supplied with an iron spike at each end to hold
the wires up. The moment troops were in position
to go into camp, the men would put up their wires.
Thus in a few minutes' longer time than it took a
mule to walk the length of its coil, telegraphic
communication would be effected between all the
headquarters of the army. No orders ever had to be given
to establish the telegraph.''