Inventors

Cyrus McCormick's plough was a success that encouraged him to take hold of the more difficult problem of the reaper. He found that some device, such as his father's, would cut grain after a fashion, provided it was in perfect condition and stood up straight; the moment it became matted and tangled and beaten down by wind and rain the machine was useless. Other devices had been arranged whereby a fly-wheel armed with sickles slashed off the heads of the wheat, leaving the stalks; but here again such a machine would work only when the field was in prime condition. He determined that no device was of any value which would not cut grain as it might happen to stand, stalk and all. After months of labor in his father's shop, making every part of the machine himself, in both wood and iron, as he said, he turned out, in 1831, the first reaper that really cut an average field of wheat satisfactorily. Its three great essential features were those of the reaper of to-day—a vibrating cutting-blade, a reel to bring the grain within reach of the blade, a platform to receive the falling grain, and a divider to separate the grain to be cut from that to be left standing. This machine, drawn by horses, was tested in a field of six acres of oats, belonging to John Steele, within a mile of Walnut Grove. Its work astonished the neighboring farmers who gathered to witness the test. The problem of cutting standing grain by machinery had been solved.

There were, however, certain defects in the reaper which caused Cyrus McCormick not to put the machine on the market. All the cog-wheels were of wood. There was no place upon it for either the driver or the raker. The former rode on the near horse and the latter followed on foot, raking the grain from it as best he could. But it cut grain fast, and both father and son were so impressed by its possibilities as foreshadowed in even this crude affair, that for the next few years they devoted their time, money, and thoughts to it. Robert McCormick was as enthusiastic as his son, and he is rightly entitled to a share of the honor, for his invention of 1816 turned the attention of his son to the problem and pointed out the radical errors to be avoided. A year after its first trial, with certain improvements, the reaper cut fifty acres of wheat in so perfect and rapid a manner as to insure its practical value beyond all doubt. The self-restraint shown by McCormick in refusing to sell machines until he was satisfied with them shows the man. The patent was granted in 1834, but for six years he kept at work experimenting, changing, improving, during the short periods of each harvest. In a letter to the Commissioner of Patents, on file in the Patent Office, Mr. McCormick said: "From the experiment of 1831 until the harvest of 1840 I did not sell a reaper, although during that time I had many exhibitions of it, for experience proved to me that it was best for the public as well as for myself that no sales were made, as defects presented themselves that would render the reaper unprofitable in other hands. Many improvements were found necessary, requiring a great deal of thought and study. I was sometimes flattered, at other times discouraged, and at all times deemed it best not to attempt the sale of machines until satisfied that the reaper would succeed."

About 1835 the McCormicks engaged in a partnership for the smelting of iron ore. The reaper, as a business pursuit, was yet in the distance, and the new iron industry offered large profits. The panic of 1837 swept away these hopes. Cyrus sacrificed all he had, even the farm given him by his father, to settle his debts, and his scrupulous integrity in this matter turned disaster into blessing, for it compelled him to take up the reaper with renewed energy. With the aid of his father and of his brothers, William and Leander, he began the manufacture of the machine in the primitive workshop at Walnut Grove, turning out less than fifty machines a year, all of them made under great disadvantages. The sickles were made forty miles away, and as there were no railroads in those days, the blades, six feet long, had to be carried on horseback. Neither was it easy, when once the machines were made, to get them to market. The first consignment sent to the Western prairies, in 1844, was taken in wagons from Walnut Grove to Scottsville, then down the canal to Richmond, Va.; thence by water to New Orleans, and then up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers to Cincinnati.

The great West, with its vast prairies, was the natural market for the reaper. Upon the small farms of the East hand labor might still suffice for the harvest; in the West, where the farms were enormous and labor scarce, it was out of the question. Realizing that while his reaper was a luxury in Virginia, it was a necessity in Ohio and Illinois, Cyrus McCormick went to Cincinnati in the autumn of 1844 and began manufacturing. At the same time he made some valuable improvements and obtained a second patent. The reaper had become known and the inventor rode on horseback through Illinois and Wisconsin, obtaining farmers' orders for reapers, which he offered to A.C. Brown, of Cincinnati, as security for payment, if he would use his workshops for manufacturing them. McCormick was enabled also to arrange with a firm in Brockport, N.Y., to make his reapers on a royalty, and this business provided the great wheat district of Central New York with machines. In 1847 and 1848 he obtained still other patents for new features of the reaper.

In 1846 he had already fixed upon Chicago as the best centre of operations for the reaper business, and at the close of the year he moved there. The next year the sale of the reapers rose to seven hundred, and more than doubled in 1849. Having associated his two brothers, William S. and Leander J., with him, Cyrus McCormick found time to devote himself to introducing the reaper in the Old World. The American exhibit at the London World's Fair of 1851 was rather a small one, redeemed largely by the McCormick reaper, which the London Times, as I have already said, praised as worth to the farmers of Great Britain more than the whole cost of the exhibition. To it was awarded the grand prize, known as the council medal.

The reaper's advance in public favor was as steady on the other side of the water as here, and medals and honors were awarded McCormick at many important exhibitions. During the Paris Exposition of 1867 McCormick superintended the work of his reapers at a field trial held by the exposition authorities, and so conclusively defeated all competitors that Napoleon III., who walked after the reapers, expressed his determination to confer upon the inventor, then and there, the Cross of the Legion of Honor. At the French Exposition of 1878 the McCormick wire-binder won the grand prize. From 1850 the success of the reaper was assured. Mr. McCormick might have rested content with what had been achieved, but it was not his nature. He not only continued to bear upon his shoulders the larger share of responsibility of the rapidly growing business, but he labored persistently to add to the effectiveness of his invention.

The great fire that swept Chicago in 1871 left nothing of the already important works established by Mr. McCormick. But, as might be expected from such a man, he was a tower of strength to the city in her time of distress, and one of those to rally first from the blow and to inspire hope. Within a year, assisted by his brother Leander, he had raised from the ashes an immense establishment, which with the growth of the last few years now covers forty acres of ground. More than 2,000 men are here employed. The statistics for last year show that more than 20,000 tons of special bar-iron and steel, 2,800 tons of sheet steel, and 26,000 tons of castings were used in making the 142,000 machines sold. Ten million feet of lumber were used, chiefly in boxing and crating, as very little wood is now used in the reaper.

This is a marvellous development from the little Virginia shop of 1840, with its output of one machine a week, and the growth means far more for the country at large than might be inferred from these figures; the farmers of the world owe more to the McCormick reaper than they can repay. The whir of the American reaper is heard around the world. In Egypt, Russia, India, Australia the machine is helping man with more than a giant's strength. Recent American travellers through Persia have described the singular effect produced upon them by seeing the McCormick reaper doing its steady work in the fields over which Haroun Al Raschid may have roamed. And this wonderful machine is followed with awe by the more ignorant of the natives, who look upon its achievements as little short of magical. They are not far wrong, however, for it is more amazing than any wonder described in their "Arabian Nights."

The last years of Cyrus H. McCormick's life were such as have fallen to few of the world's benefactors, for as a rule the pioneer who shows the road has a hard time of it, even unto the end. Mr. McCormick had the satisfaction of knowing not only that by his invention he had conferred a blessing upon the workmen of the world, but that the world had acknowledged the debt. Material prosperity, however, was not considered any reason for luxurious idleness. To the close of his life Mr. McCormick continued to supervise the business of his firm and to make the reaper more perfect. No great exhibition abroad or in this country passed without some of its honors falling to the share of the McCormick reaper.

The private life of Cyrus H. McCormick was a happy one, and to this may be attributed no small share of the elasticity and courage that recognized no defeat as final. Congress failed to do him justice; his business was attacked by hordes of rivals; it was interrupted by the fire of 1871 and afterward threatened by labor strikes incited by self-seeking demagogues. Hard work was the rule of his life and not the exception. But that his nature remained sweet and just is shown by his untiring work upon behalf of others. His home life, as I have just remarked, was unusually blessed. In 1858 he married Miss Nettie Fowler, a daughter of Melzar Fowler, of Jefferson County, New York. Of the seven children born of this marriage, five lived to grow up, his son, Cyrus H. McCormick, now occupying his father's place at the head of the great works in Chicago. One of the daughters, Anita, is the widow of Emmons Blaine. The inventor of the reaping-machine died on the 13th of May, 1884. Robert H. Parkinson, of Cincinnati, speaks as follows of one of the last interviews he had with Mr. McCormick: "Though struggling with the infirmities of age, he took on a kind of majesty which belongs alone to that combination of great mental and moral strength, and he surprised me by the power with which he grappled the matters under discussion, and the strong personality before which obstacles went down as swiftly and inevitably as grain before the knife of his machine. I think myself fortunate in having had this glimpse of him and in being able to remember with so much personal association a life so complete in its achievements, so far-reaching in its impress, alike upon the material, moral, and religious progress of the country, and so thoroughly successful and beneficial in every department of activity and influence which it entered." One of his friends, speaking of Mr. McCormick, said: "That which gave intensity to his purpose, strength to his will, and nerved him with perseverance that never failed was his supreme regard for justice, his worshipful reverence for the true and right. The thoroughness of his conviction that justice must be done, that right must be maintained, made him insensible to reproach and impatient of delay. I do not wonder that his character was strong, nor that his purpose was invincible, nor that his plans were crowned with an ultimate and signal success, for where conviction of right is the motive-power and the attainment of justice the end in view, with faith in God there is no such word as fail."

Cyrus H. McCormick was not only the inventor of a great labor-saving device, but he helped his fellow-man in other ways. Philanthropy, religion, education, journalism, and politics received a share of his attention. More than thirty years ago he was already an active power for good in the councils of his church. In 1859 he proposed to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church to endow with $100,000 the professorships of a theological seminary, to be established in Chicago. This was done, and during his lifetime he gave about half a million dollars to this institution—the Theological Seminary of the Northwest. The McCormick professorship of natural philosophy in the Washington and Lee University of Virginia, and gifts to the Union Theological Seminary at Hampden-Sidney, and to the college at Hastings, Neb., also attest his solicitude for the church in which he had been reared and of which he had been a member since 1834. In 1872 he came to the aid of the struggling organ of the Presbyterian Church in the Northwest, the Interior, and used it to foster union between the Old and the New Schools in the church, to aid in harmonizing the Presbyterian Church in the North and South, to advance the interests of the Theological Seminary, and to promote the welfare of the Presbyterian Church in the Northwest. Under his care and advice the Interior grew to be a mighty voice, expressing the convictions, the aspirations, and hopes of a great church.

IX.

Thomas A. Edison is sometimes spoken of rather as a master mechanic than as a master inventor or discoverer, and with regard to some of his work—I might even say most of it—this characterization holds true. Edison's fame is chiefly associated in the popular mind with the electric light. Yet it is perfectly well known to every student of the matter, that in all that he has done toward making the electric light a useful every-day—or perhaps I should say every-night—affair, he has simply made practicable what other men had invented or discovered before him. The fundamental discovery upon which the incandescent electric lamp is founded—that a wire of metal or other substance if heated to incandescence in a glass bulb from which the air has been exhausted will give light for a longer or shorter time, according to the character of the apparatus and the degree to which a perfect vacuum has been effected in the bulb—this dates from the first half of the century. As early as 1849 Despretz, the French scientist, described a series of experiments with sticks of carbon sealed in a glass globe from which air had been exhausted. When a powerful current was passed through the carbon filament it became luminous and remained so for a short time. This was, perhaps, the first of a long line of similar experiments in which a number of American physicists—Farmer, Draper, Henry, Morse, and Maxim among them—took part. But notwithstanding the labors of a score of experts in Europe and this country, the incandescent electric light—the wire in a glass bulb exhausted of its air—remained a laboratory curiosity up to the time, fifteen years ago, when Edison took hold of it. It gave light only for a short time and was too expensive a toy for practical use. The carbon burned out or disintegrated, and the lamp failed. Edison took hold of the mechanical difficulties of the problem. With a patience, an ingenuity, a fertility of device in which he stands alone, he got to the bottom of each radical defect and remedied it. The lamp would not burn long because the platinum wire used gave out, partly because platinum was not fitted for the work, fusing at too low a temperature. Edison substituted carbonized strips of paper. These in turn failed, and he found a species of bamboo that answered. The lamp would not burn because air still remained in the little bulbs notwithstanding the most careful manipulation with Sprengel pumps to exhaust the air. Edison invented new pumps and devices by which the air, down to one millionth part, was excluded. The lamp cost too much to operate, because large copper wires were needed to carry the current, and the generators used up steam power too fast. Edison devised new forms of conductors and generators. All such work called more for mechanical ingenuity than for actual invention. No new principles were involved—merely the better adaptation of known methods. Given a perfect carbon, a globe perfectly free from air, cheap electric current, and cheap means of carrying it from the generating machine to the lamps, and the problem was solved.

With regard to Edison's work upon the telegraph, telephone, electric railway, dynamo, the ore-extracting machines, the electric pen, and a score of other inventions which have made him the most profitable customer of the United States Patent Office in this or any other generation, the labor of this remarkable genius has also been largely that of one who made practical and useful the dreams of others. And I am by no means sure that the man who does this is not entitled to more credit than he who simply suggests that such and such a wonder might be accomplished and stops there. It is certain that before Edison we had no electric lights; now we have them in every important building in the country, and ere long shall have them everywhere.

Edison dislikes intensely the term discoverer as applied to himself. "Discovery is not invention," he once remarked in the course of an interesting talk with Mr. George Parsons Lathrop, printed in Harper's Magazine. "A discovery is more or less in the nature of an accident. A man walks along the road intending to catch the train. On the way his foot kicks against something, and looking down to see what he has hit, he sees a gold bracelet embedded in the dust. He has discovered that, certainly not invented it. He did not set out to find a bracelet, yet the value of it is just as great to him at the moment as if, after long years of study, he had invented a machine for making a gold bracelet out of common road metal. Goodyear discovered the way to make hard rubber. He was at work experimenting with india-rubber, and quite by chance he hit upon a process which hardened it—the last result in the world that he wished or expected to attain. In a discovery there must be an element of the accidental, and an important one, too; while an invention is purely deductive. In my own case but few, and those the least important, of my inventions owed anything to accident. Most of them have been hammered out after long and patient labor, and are the result of countless experiments all directed toward attaining some well-defined object. All mechanical improvements may safely be said to be inventions and not discoveries. The sewing-machine was an invention. So were the steam-engine and the typewriter. Speaking of this latter, did I ever tell you that I made the first twelve typewriters at my old factory in Railroad Avenue, Newark? This was in 1869 or 1870, and I myself had worked at a machine of similar character, but never found time to develop it fully."

There is one great invention, however, for which Edison deserves credit, both as discoverer and practical inventor—the phonograph. Here was a genuine discovery. The phonograph knows no other parent than Edison, and he has brought it to its present condition by devotion and tireless skill. I have always believed in the phonograph as an instrument destined to play some day an important part among the blessings that ingenuity has given to man. There are still obstacles in the way of its practical success, but that the missing screw or spring—perhaps no more than that—will be found in the near future, is not doubted by any competent observer.

Thomas Alva Edison was born February 11, 1847, at Milan, Erie County, O., an obscure canal village. When a small boy, his family, a most humble one (his father being a village jack-of-all-trades, living upon odd jobs done for neighboring farmers), moved to Port Huron, Mich., where Edison's boyhood was passed. There his father was in turn tailor, well-digger, nursery-man, dealer in grain, lumber, and farm lands. His parents were of Dutch-Scotch descent and gave him the iron constitution that enables him to-day, at the age of forty-seven, to tire out the most robust of his assistants. One of his ancestors lived to the age of one hundred and two, and another to the age of one hundred and three, so that we may reasonably expect the famous inventor to open the door for us to still other wonders of which we do not yet even dream. His mother, born in Massachusetts, had a good education and at one time taught school in Canada. Of regular schooling, young Edison had but two months in his life. Whatever else he knew as a boy he learned from his mother. There are no records showing extraordinary promise on his part. He was an omnivorous reader, having an intense curiosity about the world and its great men. At ten years of age he was reading Hume's "England," Gibbon's "Rome," the Penny Encyclopædia, and some books on chemistry.

At the age of twelve he entered upon his life work as newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railroad of Canada and the Michigan Central, selling papers, books, candies, etc., to the passengers.

"Were you one of the train-boys," he was once asked, "who sold figs in boxes with bottoms half an inch thick?"

"If I recollect aright," he replied, with a merry twinkle, "the bottoms of my boxes were a good inch."

Perhaps the twelve-year-old boy learned something from the books and papers he sold. At all events he says that the love of chemistry, even at that age, led him to make the corner of the baggage-car where he stored his wares a small laboratory, fitted up with such retorts and bottles as he could pick up in the railroad workshops. He had a copy of Fresenius's "Qualitative Analysis," into which he plunged with the ardor a small boy usually shows for nothing literary unless it has a yellow cover decorated with an Indian's head. He seems also to have had a habit of "hanging around" all interesting places, from a machine-shop to a printing-office, keeping his eyes very wide open. In one such expedition he received as a gift from W.F. Storey, of the Detroit Free Press, three hundred pounds of old type thrown out as useless. With an old hand-press he began printing a paper of his own, the Grand Trunk Herald, of which he sold several hundred copies a week, the employees of the road being his best customers. "My news," he says, talking of this time, "was purely local. But I was proud of my newspaper and looked upon myself as a full-fledged newspaper man. My items used to run about like this: 'John Robinson, baggage-master at James's Creek Station, fell off the platform yesterday and hurt his leg. The boys are sorry for John.' Or, 'No. 3 Burlington engine has gone into the shed for repairs.'"

This was Edison's only dip into a literary occupation. He has no predilection in that way. He realizes the value of newspapers and books, but chiefly as tools, and his splendid library at the Orange laboratory, kept with scrupulous system, is filled with scientific books and periodicals only. Telegraphy was to be the field in which he was to win his first laurels. Some years ago he told the story as follows:

"At the beginning of the civil war I was slaving late and early at selling papers; but, to tell the truth, I was not making a fortune. I worked on so small a margin that I had to be mighty careful not to overload myself with papers that I could not sell. On the other hand, I could not afford to carry so few that I should find myself sold out long before the end of the trip. To enable myself to hit the happy mean, I formed a plan which turned out admirably. I made a friend of one of the compositors of the Free Press office, and persuaded him to show me every day a 'galley-proof' of the most important news article. From a study of its head-lines I soon learned to gauge the value of the day's news and its selling capacity, so that I could form a tolerably correct estimate of the number of papers I should need. As a rule I could dispose of about two hundred; but if there was any special news from the seat of war, the sale ran up to three hundred or over. Well, one day my compositor brought me a proof-slip of which nearly the whole was taken up with a gigantic display head. It was the first report of the battle of Pittsburgh Landing—afterward called Shiloh, you know—and it gave the number of killed and wounded as sixty thousand men.

"I grasped the situation at once. Here was a chance for enormous sales, if only the people along the line could know what had happened! If only they could see the proof-slip I was then reading! Suddenly an idea occurred to me. I rushed off to the telegraph-operator and gravely made a proposition to him which he received just as gravely. He on his part was to wire to each of the principal stations on our route, asking the station-master to chalk up on the bulletin-board—used for announcing the time of arrival and departure of trains—the news of the great battle, with its accompanying slaughter. This he was to do at once, while I, in return, agreed to supply him with current literature 'free, gratis, for nothing' during the next six months from that date.

"This bargain struck, I began to bethink me how I was to get enough papers to make the grand coup I intended. I had very little cash and, I feared, still less credit. I went to the superintendent of the delivery department, and preferred a modest request for one thousand copies of the Free Press on trust. I was not much surprised when my request was curtly and gruffly refused. In those days, though, I was a pretty cheeky boy and I felt desperate, for I saw a small fortune in prospect if my telegraph operator had kept his word—a point on which I was still a trifle doubtful. Nerving myself for a great stroke, I marched upstairs into the office of Wilbur F. Storey himself and asked to see him. A few minutes later I was shown in to him. I told who I was, and that I wanted fifteen hundred copies of the paper on credit. The tall, thin, dark-eyed, ascetic-looking man stared at me for a moment and then scratched a few words on a slip of paper. 'Take that downstairs,' said he, 'and you will get what you want.' And so I did. Then I felt happier than I have ever felt since.

"I took my fifteen hundred papers, got three boys to help me fold them, and mounted the train all agog to find out whether the telegraph operator had kept his word. At the town where our first stop was made I usually sold two papers. As the train swung into that station I looked ahead and thought there must be a riot going on. A big crowd filled the platform and as the train drew up I began to realize that they wanted my papers. Before we left I had sold a hundred or two at five cents apiece. At the next station the place was fairly black with people. I raised the 'ante' and sold three hundred papers at ten cents each. So it went on until Port Huron was reached. Then I transferred my remaining stock to the wagon which always waited for me there, hired a small boy to sit on the pile of papers in the back, so as to discount any pilfering, and sold out every paper I had at a quarter of a dollar or more per copy. I remember I passed a church full of worshippers, and stopped to yell out my news. In ten seconds there was not a soul left in meeting. All of them, including the parson, were clustered around me, bidding against each other for copies of the precious paper.

"You can understand why it struck me then that the telegraph must be about the best thing going, for it was the telegraphic notices on the bulletin-boards that had done the trick. I determined at once to become a telegraph-operator. But if it hadn't been for Wilbur F. Storey I should never have fully appreciated the wonders of electrical science."

Telegraphy became a hobby with the boy. From every operator along the road he picked up something. He strung the basement of his father's house at Port Huron with wires, and constructed a short line, using for the batteries stove-pipe wire, old bottles, nails, and zinc which urchins of the neighborhood were induced to cut out from under the stoves of their unsuspecting mothers and bring to young Edison at three cents a pound. In order to save time for his experiments, he had the habit of leaping from a train while it was going at the rate of twenty-five miles an hour, landing upon a pile of sand arranged by him for that purpose. An act of personal courage—the saving of the station-master's child at Port Clements from an advancing train—was a turning-point in his career, for the grateful father taught him telegraphing in the regular way. Telegraphy was then in its infancy, comparatively speaking; operators were few, and good wages could be earned by means of much less proficiency than is now required. Still, Edison had so little leisure at his disposal for learning the new trade, that it took him several years to become an expert operator. Most of his studies were carried on in the corner of the baggage-car that served him as printing-office, laboratory, and business headquarters. With so many irons in the fire, mishaps were sure to occur. Once he received a drubbing on account of an article reflecting unpleasantly upon some employee of the road. One day during his absence a bottle of phosphorus upset and set the old railroad caboose on fire, whereupon the conductor threw out all the painfully acquired apparatus and thrashed its owner.

Edison's first regular employment as telegraph-operator was at Indianapolis when he was eighteen years old. He received a small salary for day-work in the railroad office there, and at night he used to receive newspaper reports for practice. The regular operator was a man given to copious libations, who was glad enough to sleep off their effects while Edison and a young friend of his named Parmley did his work. "I would sit down," says Edison, "for ten minutes, and 'take' as much as I could from the instrument, carrying the rest in my head. Then while I wrote out, Parmley would serve his turn at 'taking,' and so on. This worked well until they put a new man on at the Cincinnati end. He was one of the quickest despatchers in the business, and we soon found it was hopeless for us to try to keep up with him. Then it was that I worked out my first invention, and necessity was certainly the mother of it.

"I got two old Morse registers and arranged them in such a way that by running a strip of paper through them the dots and dashes were recorded on it by the first instrument as fast as they were delivered from the Cincinnati end, and were transmitted to us through the other instrument at any desired rate of speed. They would come in on one instrument at the rate of forty words a minute, and would be ground out of our instrument at the rate of twenty-five. Then weren't we proud! Our copy used to be so clean and beautiful that we hung it up on exhibition; and our manager used to come and gaze at it silently with a puzzled expression. He could not understand it, neither could any of the other operators; for we used to hide my impromptu automatic recorder when our toil was over. But the crash came when there was a big night's work—a Presidential vote, I think it was—and copy kept pouring in at the top rate of speed until we fell an hour and a half or two hours behind. The newspapers sent in frantic complaints, an investigation was made, and our little scheme was discovered. We couldn't use it any more.

"It was that same rude automatic recorder that indirectly led me long afterward to invent the phonograph. I'll tell you how this came about. After thinking over the matter a great deal, I came to the point where, in 1877, I had worked out satisfactorily an instrument that would not only record telegrams by indenting a strip of paper with dots and dashes of the Morse code, but would also repeat a message any number of times at any rate of speed required. I was then experimenting with the telephone also, and my mind was filled with theories of sound vibrations and their transmission by diaphragms. Naturally enough, the idea occurred to me: if the indentations on paper could be made to give forth again the click of the instrument, why could not the vibrations of a diaphragm be recorded and similarly reproduced? I rigged up an instrument hastily and pulled a strip of paper through it, at the same time shouting, 'Hallo'! Then the paper was pulled through again, my friend Batchelor and I listening breathlessly. We heard a distinct sound, which a strong imagination might have translated into the original 'Hallo.' That was enough to lead me to a further experiment. But Batchelor was sceptical, and bet me a barrel of apples that I couldn't make the thing go. I made a drawing of a model and took it to Mr. Kruesi, at that time engaged on piece-work for me, but now assistant general manager of our machine-shop at Schenectady. I told him it was a talking-machine. He grinned, thinking it a joke; but he set to work and soon had the model ready. I arranged some tinfoil on it, and spoke into the machine. Kruesi looked on, still grinning. But when I arranged the machine for transmission and we both heard a distinct sound from it, he nearly fell down in his fright. I was a little scared myself, I must admit. I won that barrel of apples from Batchelor, though, and was mighty glad to get it."

To go back to earlier days, the story of Edison's first years as a full-fledged operator shows that from the beginning he was more of an inventor than an operator. He was full of ideas, some of which were gratefully received. One day an ice-jam broke the cable between Port Huron, in Michigan, and Sarnia, on the Canada side, and stopped communication. The river is a mile and a half wide and was impassable. Young Edison jumped upon a locomotive and seized the valve controlling the whistle. He had the idea that the scream of the whistle might be broken into long and short notes, corresponding to the dots and dashes of the telegraphic code. "Hallo there, Sarnia! Do you get me? Do you hear what I say?" tooted the locomotive.

No answer.

"Do you hear what I say, Sarnia?"

A third, fourth, and fifth time the message went across without response, but finally the idea was caught on the other side; answering toots came cheerfully back and the connection was recovered.

Anything connected with the difficulties of telegraphy had a fascination for him. He lost many a place because of unpardonable blunders due to his passion for improvement. At Stratford, Canada, being required to report the word "Six" every half hour to the manager to show that he was awake and on duty, he rigged up a wheel to do it for him. At Indianapolis he kept press reports waiting while he experimented with new devices for receiving them. At Louisville, in procuring some sulphuric acid at night for his experiments, he tipped over a carboy of it, ruining the handsome outfit of a banking establishment below. At Cincinnati he abandoned the office on every pretext to hasten to the Mechanics' Library to pass his day in reading.

An indication of his thirst for knowledge, and of a naïve ignoring of enormous difficulties, is found in a project formed by him at this time to read through the whole public library. There was no one to tell him that a summary of human knowledge may be found in a moderate number of volumes, nor to point out to him what they are. Each book was to him a part of the great domain of knowledge, none of which he meant to lose. He began with the solid treatises of a dusty lower shelf and actually read, in the accomplishment of his heroic purpose, fifteen feet along that shelf. He omitted no book and nothing in the book. The list contained Newton's "Principia," Ure's Scientific Dictionary, and Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy."

At that time a message sent from New Orleans to New York had to be taken at Memphis, re-telegraphed to Louisville, taken down again by the operator there, and telegraphed to another centre, and so on till it reached New York. Time was lost and the chance of error was increased. Edison was the first to connect New Orleans and New York directly. It was just after the war. He perfected an automatic repeater which was put on at Memphis and did its work perfectly. The manager of the office there, one Johnson, had a relative who was also busy on the same problem, but Edison solved it ahead of him and received complimentary notices from the local papers. He was discharged without cause. He got a pass as far as Decatur on his way home, but had to walk from there to Nashville, a hundred and fifty miles. From there he got a pass to Louisville, where he arrived during a sharp snow-storm, clad in a linen duster.

It was soon after this that Edison, already a swift and competent operator when he devoted himself to practical work, received promise of employment in the Boston office. The weather was quite cold and his peculiar dress, topped with a slouchy broad-brimmed hat, made something of a sensation. But Edison then cared as little for dress as he does to-day. So one raw wet day a tall man with a limp, wet duster clinging to his legs, stalked into the superintendent's room, and said:

"Here I am."

The superintendent eyed him from head to foot, and said:

"Who are you?"

"Tom Edison."

"And who on earth might Tom Edison be?"

The young man explained that he had been ordered to report for duty at the Boston office, and was finally told to sit down in the operating-room, where his advent created much merriment. The operators guyed him loudly enough for him to hear. He didn't care. A few moments later a New York sender noted for his swiftness called up the Boston office. There was no one at liberty.

"Well," said the office chief, "let that new fellow try him." Edison sat down, and for four hours and a half wrote out messages in his peculiarly clear round hand, stuck a date and number on them and threw them on the floor for the office boy to pick up. The time he took in numbering and dating the sheets were the only seconds he was not writing out transmitted words. Faster and faster ticked the instrument, and faster and faster went Edison's fingers, until the rapidity with which the messages came tumbling on the floor attracted the attention of the other operators, who, when their work was done, gathered around to witness the spectacle. At the close of the four and a half hours' work there flashed from New York the salutation:

"Hello!"

"Hello yourself," ticked back Edison.

"Who the devil are you?" rattled into the Boston office.

"Tom Edison."

"You are the first man in the country," ticked the instrument, "that could ever take me at my fastest, and the only one who could ever sit at the other end of my wire for more than two hours and a half. I'm proud to know you."

Edison was once asked with what invention he really began his career as an inventor.

"Well," said he, in reply, "my first appearance at the Patent Office was in 1868, when I was twenty-one, with an ingenious contrivance which I called the electrical vote recorder. I had been impressed with the enormous waste of time in Congress and in the State Legislatures by the taking of votes on any motion. More than half an hour was sometimes required to count the 'Ayes' and 'Noes.' So I devised a machine somewhat on the plan of the hotel annunciator that was invented long afterward, only mine was a great deal more complex. In front of each member's desk were to have been two buttons, one for 'Aye,' the other for 'No,' and by the side of the Speaker's desk a frame with two dials, one showing the total of 'Ayes' and the other the total of 'Noes.' When the vote was called for, each member could press the button he wished and the result would appear automatically before the Speaker, who could glance at the dials and announce the result. This contrivance would save several hours of public time every day in the session, and I thought my fortune was made. I interested a moneyed man in the thing and we went together to Washington, where we soon found the right man to get the machine adopted. I set forth its merits. Imagine my feelings when, in a horrified tone, he exclaimed:

"'Young man, that won't do at all. That is just what we do not want. Your invention would destroy the only hope the minority have of influencing legislation. It would deliver them over, bound hand and foot, to the majority. The present system gives them time, a weapon which is invaluable, and as the ruling majority always knows that they may some day become a minority, they will be as much averse to any change as their opponents.' I saw the force of these remarks, and the vote recorder got no further than the Patent Office."

But he began to believe in himself. His next work was upon the applications of the vibratory principle in telegraphing, upon which so many of his subsequent inventions were founded. His first ambitious attempt was in the direction of a multiplex system for sending several messages over one wire at the same time. It was not much of a success, however, and Edison drifted to New York, where, after a vain attempt to interest the telegraph companies in his inventions, he established himself as an electrical expert ready for odd jobs and making a specialty of telegraphy. One day the Western Union Company had trouble with its Albany Wire. The wire wasn't broken, but wouldn't work, and several days of experimenting on the part of the company's electricians only served to puzzle them the more. As a forlorn hope they sent for young Edison.

"How long will you give me?" he asked. "Six hours?"

The manager laughed and told him he would need longer than that.

Edison sat down at the instrument, established communication with Albany by way of Pittsburgh, told the Albany office to put their best man at the instrument, and began a rapid series of tests with currents of all intensities. He directed the tests from both ends, and after two hours and a half told the company's officers that the trouble existed at a certain point he named on the line, and he told them what it was. They telegraphed the office nearest this point the necessary directions, and an hour later the wire was working properly. This incident first established his value in New York as an expert, and the business became profitable. Moreover, it led the different telegraph companies to give respectful attention to what he had to offer in the way of patented devices.

Edison's mechanical skill soon became so noted that he was made superintendent of the repair shop of one of the smaller telegraph companies then in existence, all of which were using what was known as the Page sounder, a device for signalling, the sole right to which was claimed by the Western Union Company. Owing to the latter company's success in a patent suit over this sounder, there came a time when an injunction was obtained, silencing all sounders of that type, and practically putting a serious obstacle in the way of rapid work. Edison was called into the president's office and the situation explained. For a long time, according to one who was present, he stood chewing vigorously upon a mouthful of tobacco, looking first at the sounder in his hand, and then falling into a brown study. At length he picked up a sheet of tin used as a "back" for manifolding on thin sheets of paper, and began to twist and cut it into queer shapes; a group of persons gathered around and watched. Not a word was spoken. Finally Edison tore off the Page sounder on the instrument before him, and substituting his bit of tin, began working. It was not so good as the patented arrangement discarded, but it worked. In four hours a hundred such devices were in use over the line, and what would have been a ruinous interruption to business was avoided.

Edison's first large sums of money came from the sale of an improvement in the instruments used to record stock quotations in brokers' offices, commonly known as "tickers." His success in this direction led him to take a contract to manufacture some hundreds of "tickers," and his only venture in this direction was carried out with considerable success at a shop he rented in Newark about 1875. But as he told me a few years later, in talking about this incident in his career, manufacturing was not in his line. Like Thoreau, who having succeeded in making a perfect lead-pencil, declared he should never make another, he hates routine. "I was a poor manufacturer," said he, "because I could not let well enough alone. My first impulse upon taking any apparatus into my hand, from an egg-beater to an electric-motor, is to seek a way of improving it. Therefore, as soon as I have finished a machine I am anxious to take it apart again in order to make an experiment. That is a costly mania for a manufacturer."