The trail of the swinging lanterns

Napoleon Bonaparte on isolated St. Helena, when rebelliously pacing beside his titled and devoted aide one gloomy day exclaimed “Montholon! Montholon! the world has produced but three great generals—Alexander the Great, Julius Cæsar and myself.” What monumental self esteem. Strategist and tacticial genius though he proved himself, such plannings and ambition at that period meant the circumvention and bloody ruin of his fellow men and their household gods. Introducing here the Little Corporal’s egoism, the chaotic condition of the times and his campaigns of destruction serve to emphasize the wonderfully constructive and scientific achievements so quietly evolved for man’s benefit by the brain of another but unwarlike genius, Thomas Alva Edison. Until Armageddon, his has been a peaceful era with ploughshares replacing swords and commerce expanding unmolested.

To the Land of Evangeline, his Netherlands forebears are said to have treked with the United Empire Loyalists in Revolutionary times. A generation later they left Nova Scotia and settled in that part of the Province of Ontario now registered as the County of Norfolk. Near the little town of Vienna, close to Lake Erie’s shore, where I believe relatives still reside, Thomas Edison’s elder brothers were born, but not until after 1837, when Robert Edison transferred his family to Milan, Ohio, twelve miles from Lake Erie, did the lad Thomas and his sister first behold the sunshine, the birth of the former occurring February, 1847.

Evidently his elementary education began in that state, but the fact that his brother Pitt Edison, managed a street railway at Port Huron, Michigan, probably accounts for the lad’s presence thereabouts and furnished an incentive to his precocious, nomadic predilections. Joseph Draper from the County of Tipperary, ninety-year-old veteran, living in Toronto, recently deceased, who was in 1855 a giant conductor with the Ontario, Simcoe & Huron Railroad, (Northern Railway), told me he remembered well how young Thomas Edison later on sold newspapers between Detroit and Port Huron, on his trains running through to Sarnia and London. He declared that the embryo merchant was an active, well behaved and likeable stripling who, even during the chrysalis stage, nourished a specific bent by carrying with him a portable telegraph key. During the weary months of the Civil War, 1862–3, he obtained in Detroit a printing press, old type, with accessories and learning the contents of war bulletins, etc., from station to station, set up and printed the news and jokes which he sold along the line under the caption “Grand Trunk Herald.”

Conductor Draper said he was often compelled to reprimand the boy for tinkering with chemicals and for his untidiness with bottles in that corner of the baggage car where he kept his stock of magazines and candy. He intimated also that about this time the young experimentor risked his life in saving the child of the Grand Trunk Railway Agent at Mount Clemens, Michigan, from an onrushing train and the grateful father taught him telegraphing.

Living in an atmosphere of daily contact with keys and sounders, he took to “jerking lightning” like a sailor to the sea, soon becoming proficient.

In 1867 he worked on the wire, covering the “night trick” at Stratford, Ont., and was also at Park Hill, where the late George B. Reeve, of Grand Trunk—Southern Pacific prominence, picked up operating. In the autumn of 1913 when the Stratford, Ont., yard limits were extended and reorganized to conform to the requirements of the new “Grand Trunk” station, opened in December of that year, the old eastend ducat, (dovecote-do’ecot), in which young Edison is said to have served a part of his apprenticeship as an operator, was torn down to make way for a modern signal tower.

Every railroad telegrapher is said to experience once, sooner or later during his career, being temporarily petrified with alarm on finding he has ordered two trains to pass “head on” or from the rear on a single track. Railroad rumor only is my authority for repeating a report that young Edison figured in such a collision on paper. The publication “Railways and Other Ways” quotes an interview given by Mr. Edison at London, Canada, many years ago in which the great inventor referred to his oversight when a youth at Stratford in overlooking the delivery to conductor of a train order the result of which permitted two trains to approach on a single track. Fortunately the line between Stratford and St. Marys Junction was straight and an accident may have been averted by quick thinking and rapid action.

In many guises I have heard repeated the story of his original device for answering his dispatcher’s call though wrapped in the arms of Morpheus for forty pilfered winks. He was working in Western Ontario and the rule declared that each operator should keep in touch with the dispatcher every hour while on duty, write “6” and sign their telegraphic signature of a letter or two. This meant the next thing to eternal vigilance during the quiet, lonesome hours of the night. It would appear Edison attached an extra wheel to the mechanism of the office clock, governing it by an independent spring. Around the rim of this wheel he cut dots and dashes spelling the stereotyped message and his code “Sig.”, arranging the wheel’s position so that it made one revolution each hour at the time agents usually flashed “All well.” From the clock pinions a series of wire coils connected with a weak solution jar battery, were rigged and thence passing over the telegraph key joined the charged main wires leading therefrom. When the clock struck each hour the supplementary wheel sent the necessary intermittent ticks along the temporary mediums and were in turn transmitted via the trunk wires to headquarters. The version given me by another “oldest inhabitant” would indicate that he had the night watchman trained to turn the wheel hourly by hand. With such ingenuity did the budding inventor abbreviate his nocturnal vigils and conductors Mammoth Johnston and silk hat Dick Thorpe never knew the difference as they whizzed past into the encircling gloom. This anecdote bears the hall mark of a measure of probability and has been vouched for by some of Edison’s contemporaries, but the yarn that he once affixed to the telegraphic office door a contrivance that made it collide with the nasal organ of a spying superintendent is likely spurious. When working at Fort Gratiot he introduced without fuss or feathers, an improvement in relaying messages across the River at Sarnia which reduced the labor involved by half, evincing in this test an early aversion to ponderous method and high costs, which has characterized his subsequent experiments and helpful discoveries.

In his commercial wire practice at Detroit his colleagues of other days remember him as a good press reporter whose handwriting resembled printing more than a string of Spencerian script. They tell how he tied the Gotham wiseacres and would be jokers into knots with his deliberateness and speed, the key and its characters being a part of him, like a Centaur and his horse. His demeanor was at times friendly and discursive, followed by spells of dreamy reflection and profound reticence and he would frequently immerse himself in tinkerings with the sounder and key, adding to and endeavoring to make them different and more amenable to his advanced ideas. The reel with a paper ribbon on which a message from the other end was registered by means of dots and dashes indented thereon, had not then been entirely replaced by the sound system.

On February 24th, 1868, Mr. Edison arrived in Toronto en route Boston, and after a brief visit with his former friend John Murray, a well known dispatcher, afterwards some years at Belleville, started eastward. On this date a traffic paralyzing three day storm set in and the “G.T.R.” train was snow stalled, compelling Mr. Edison and several others to return. Expecting improved weather and resumption of train service, he spent considerable time about the old depot and men who met him then state that he was a desultory talker, an inveterate thinker and a chain smoker quite oblivious to the fleeting hours of the night. The late James Stephenson was superintendent at Toronto that winter, Henry Bourlier so long and honorably connected with the Allans, was station agent, W. A. Wilson, erect and active to-day, just recently retired from the “New York Central,” was the Morse Code operator, W. C. Nunn—inventor of a railway signal device in 1856—was agent at Belville and “the admiral,” Mr. Frederick J. Glackmeyer, Ontario Parliamentary Sergeant-at-Arms, December 27th, 1867 (50 years) 1917, had only two months before bid adieu to ticket work in the old station where Thomas Edison purchased his ticket.

On February 27th, he again essayed the sixteen hour journey to Montreal, and at Boston in 1870 the Duplex System appeared, enabling two operators to send independent messages over a single wire. Then came his perfection of the Quadruplex, permitting two people at each end to forward and receive telegrams simultaneously.

His astounding creative mentality seemed to give birth to successive world wonders as regularly as the birds nest in springtime and more or less familiar brain children include the telegraphic button repeater, stock-tickers, an electric pencil with motor for duplicating, the phonograph and waxen records, dictaphone and revolutionizing incandescent light, then the mechanism for taking moving pictures. To-day the speaking cinematographic pictures or kinetophone, steps confidently out of the laboratories at Orange, N.J., to mystify yet convince the incredulous and expectant populace.

Some years ago his friend John Murray paid his respects at New York and was well received by his former acquaintance. Requesting permission to inspect the interior economy of the “Western Union” telegraph office, Mr. Edison introduced him by letter to the proper person asking that every attention be shown him and adding “When Mr. Murray was an operator on the ‘G.T.R.,’ I was a news vendor.”

Thus does this unusual man round out a useful career, his balance an object lesson to conceited prigs and his wizard-like achievements an incentive to rising generations.