Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Still, he showed sometimes that he knew how money could be made.13

  25 CENTS APIECE, GENTLEMEN

  This was evident on Wednesday 9 April, when Al arrived in Detroit on his usual midmorning train and found crowds milling anxiously around the great bulletin boards that city newspapers posted outside their headquarters for breaking news. According to headlines being chalked up by editors with telegrams in their free hands, an epochal clash of arms had taken place on Sunday at Shiloh, on the Tennessee River, and the first accounts were only just coming in. In twelve hours of conflict, starting with a surprise dawn attack on General Grant’s Union Army, more blood had been shed than ever before in American history. Some pints of it had fatally filled the boots of the commanding Confederate general, Albert S. Johnston, who was now succeeded by Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard. Grant had repelled the onslaught, but only just, and had failed to pursue the enemy as rain and darkness descended. Monday’s fighting had been almost as savage, with one late wire reporting that sixty thousand may have been killed or wounded by the time Beauregard was beaten.14

  Al was already enough of a journalist to realize that there would be a phenomenal demand for the afternoon edition of the Detroit Free Press at every stop on his return trip home. Thinking and moving much faster than Barney gave him credit for, he copied the main headlines on display and hurried to give them to the Grand Trunk telegraph operator at Michigan Central. In exchange for a healthy bribe—three months’ worth of complimentary magazines—the operator sent an alert to the railroad’s upstate stationmasters, instructing them to post the headlines locally and announce that a major delivery of newspapers was coming north on the four P.M. train.15

  The Detroit Free Press reports the Battle of Shiloh, 10 April 1862.

  Al’s next stop was the Free Press office, where the afternoon edition was already thumping off the presses.16

  He demanded one thousand copies “on trust.” Henry N. Walker, the paper’s editor, was touched by his sass and authorized the order.17 Enlisting another boy’s help, Al got the papers onto the train and had them folded by the time it reached Utica, where he usually sold only two copies.

  I saw a crowd ahead on the platform [and] thought it was some excursion, but the moment I landed there was a rush for me; then I realized that the telegraph was a great invention. I sold 35 papers; the next station, Mt. Clemens, [was] a place of about 1000. I usually sold 6 to 8 papers. I decided that if I found a corresponding crowd there that the only thing to do to correct my lack of judgment in not getting more papers was to raise the price from 5 cents to 10. The crowd was there and I raised the price; at the various towns there were corresponding crowds. It had been my practice at Port Huron to jump from the train at a point about 1/4 mile from the station where the train generally slackened speed. I had drawn several loads of sand at this point and become very expert. The little German boy with the horse met me at this point; when the wagon approached the outskirts of the town I was met by a large crowd. I then yelled 25 cents apiece, gentlemen, I haven’t got enough to go round. I sold all out and made what to me then was an immense amount of money. I started the next day to learn telegraphy.18

  LO! YOU HAVE O

  Al’s studies for a new career were given impetus by a Grand Trunk conductor who became exasperated by his use of the train for personal business.19 Stacks of newsprint and crates of groceries, with fruit flies traveling free, were bad enough, but chemistry experiments posed the additional threat of an onboard fire. Sure enough, late that summer one of his phosphorus sticks fell to the floor, nearly immolating the baggage car. Al found himself ejected—instruments, printing press, and all—onto the platform at Mount Clemens, a newsboy no longer.

  As luck would have it, the local stationmaster, James Mackenzie, was a skilled telegraph operator and glad to teach him the trade. He was indebted to Al for having pulled his infant son from the tracks one August morning when cars were shunting.*4 For about four months he taught the former newsboy how to send and receive (or in telegraphic parlance, “write” and “read”) Morse code.20 Memorizing mnemonic rhymes helped:

  • One dot stands for E, for enterprise sure,

  •• And two stands for I, for self ever pure,

  • • Yet divide them a trifle, and lo! you have O,

  — — Or space them a bit, and M is the go.21

  Al studied eighteen hours a day for most of the fall and early winter of 1862. He spent his mornings and afternoons with Mackenzie, returning to Fort Gratiot on the evening train for solitary practice at night. His tapping technique—the ability to “pound brass” in a fragmented yet flowing rhythm—gradually improved, although it would take years before he attained real wrist freedom, and could hear a ticking stream of dots and dashes as if it were ordinary speech.22

  He still took frequent trains to the city, and used the facilities of a local gun shop to make his own set of instruments. The mechanics of telegraphy was still simple, although the demands of war communications and reportage for greater speed and message volume would soon make them less so. All Al needed at first was a brass transmitter with a sprung key and, at the other end of a length of stovepipe wire, an electromagnetic relay that either printed dots and dashes on tape or ticked them out on a sounder. Grove batteries, each consisting of a clutch of sour-smelling, open-top cells, provided the energy to send and receive. When he added a subsidiary station to his experimental network, he found that a less powerful Daniell battery was enough to activate the local circuit.23

  Over and above technology, Al had a normal adolescent’s longing for information. He persuaded the Detroit Young Men’s Society that he was almost grown up and hence qualified to hang out in its well-stocked reading room.*5 He became a member well in advance of his sixteenth birthday, and proceeded to devour Les Misérables and several other novels of Victor Hugo, along with Thomas Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and many volumes of the Penny Cyclopædia. If he also, as he later claimed, read Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, it was surely with incomprehension.24

  At some point in the course of the winter of 1862–63 he worked for a while as a “plug,” or trainee operator, in Miciah Walker’s jewelry-cum-bookstore in Port Huron. There was a small telegraph office on the premises that received press dispatches overnight, as a service to the local newspaper. He found, in the course of taking copy there until three every morning, that his temperament was nocturnal, and that solitude suited him. If he felt drowsy during the day, there was always a chair somewhere for him to catnap in, his muffled hearing providing all the peace he needed.25

  By spring he was proficient enough in Morse to apply for a night operator’s job at Stratford Junction, on the Grand Trunk Railway just across the Canadian border. The work involved monitoring the movements of trains by means of telegraph messages exchanged with other stations along the line. Mr. Walker tried to keep him in Port Huron as an apprentice at twenty dollars monthly, but Al was not drawn to the jewelry business, and his father, who would have to agree to his indenture, was not tempted by the terms.26

  Al in any case had good reason to get out of town. Fort Gratiot was no longer a congenial place to live in. Sam Edison’s libertarian views and history of radical opposition to any authority grated on the pro-Union nativism of the fort keeper, Henry Hartsuff. “He is from Canada—reported to be a very dishonest man,” Hartsuff wrote the War Department. “His sympathies are intensely secession[ist] which renders his presence here very odious.”27

  Sam, who delighted in confrontation, could be relied on to resist eviction. Al in contrast wanted nothing so much as a paid post not too far from home, with lots of spare time to continue his self-education in chemistry and electricity. Stratford Junction promised all this. By pleasant coincidence, it was located in the same general area of Ontario where his parents had spent their early married life. His ninety-six-year-old grandfather, Samuel Ogden Ediso
n, Sr., still lived in Elgin County, along with sundry other paternal and maternal relatives. So when Al’s job application was accepted, Nancy need not feel her youngest son had entirely left the bosom of the family.28

  A BOY FREE FROM FEAR

  Although he persuaded himself that working as a night operator for twenty-five dollars a week would give him the whole day for experimenting, Al was still a teenager who needed more sleep than he would in adulthood. The Stratford depot was a quiet one between dusk and dawn. Were it not for a standard security procedure that required him to flash dah-di-di-di-dit down the line every hour, he could have enjoyed long periods of repose. This nuisance precipitated his first invention, an automatic sender. It consisted of a notched wheel driven by his office clock and attached to the transmitter in such a way that on the hour, a wooden hammer would rise and fall on the key in the precise rhythm required. The device worked well until a dispatcher came to investigate why “Stratford” was sometimes impossible to “raise,” despite the regularity of its signal.29

  Al incurred further disapproval one night when he almost succeeded in getting two freight trains to collide head on. He responded affirmatively to a call asking if he would stop one of the trains, so as to let the other one through. But by the time he descended from the telegraph office to the yard and looked around for the signalman, a rush and a roar told him that the wrong train had gone through. He dashed back upstairs and wired ahead that he had been unable to “hold it.” The reply from the next station was “Hell.”30

  Fortunately the track was straight, and the converging trains saw each other in time to brake to a halt. Next morning the general superintendent of the Grand Trunk Railroad ordered the Stratford agent to bring Al to his office in Toronto and explain why a sixteen-year-old had been permitted to hold such a responsible position after dark.

  He took me in hand and stated that I could be sent to Kingston States Prison, etc. Just at this point, three English swells came into the office. There was a great shaking of hands and joy all around; feeling this was a good time to be neglected I silently made for the door, down the stairs to the lower freight station, got into the caboose going to the next freight…and kept secluded until I landed a boy free from fear in the U. S. of America.31

  Al was also a boy rich in platinum. During his brief stay in Canada he had heard about a stash of old Grove battery cells at the Grand Trunk depot in Goderich, and slyly asked the agent if he might strip them of their “tin” cathodes. Some of those precious metal strips, amounting to several ounces of reworked scrap, would be used in his laboratory experiments forty years later.32

  NEVER HEARD YOU ON HERE

  He now became a “tramp” telegraph operator, in common with hundreds of other youths, skilled or semiskilled, who rode the nation’s rails in the latter days of the Civil War. They were in such demand, as the wires thrummed with news from the front, that train conductors often let them travel free to whichever town they liked.

  Although Morse code had ended the historic dependency of communication upon transportation, the two fields were still intertwined, in that telegraph companies needed rights of way for their wires, and railroads needed wire stations to control the movements of their trains—ideally staffed by personnel who could be relied on to stay awake.33

  Not a few of the young “sparkers” or “lightning slingers,” as they called themselves, were seeking to evade the draft. In the late summer of 1863 Al was still a year and a half from that dread fate. Meanwhile the wandering life suited him, as did the glamour of working in an industry at the forefront of modern technology. Every issue of The Telegrapher magazine carried the front-page motto “Is it not a feat sublime? Intellect hath conquered time.” There were so many job opportunities across the country that any qualified candidate stood a chance of being hired, for decent money, the moment he stepped off the train.*6 Often as not his immediate predecessor would be stepping on, in search of a town that had prettier girls or served better corn whiskey.34

  All but the smallest of small-town branches had a number of operators working together, sharing digs and dirty jokes (many of which would go on the lines in “blue” Morse code) with the exaggerated camaraderie of theater folk during the course of a limited production.35 It was unlikely that any pair of temporary buddies would meet again, after deploying in different directions from a six-month partnership in Carson City, Nevada, or Cleveland, Ohio—although for years they might weirdly recognize each other’s “fist” in interchanged, unsigned signals, gibberish to the outside world.36

  BOSTON: Your next number is 1.

  ST. LOUIS: Thank you. Number 1, New York 9th to—.

  BOSTON: Please sqe.

  ST. LOUIS: I sign &.

  BOSTON: Never heard you on here before. Where did they dig you out? That’s a hot sig. Ha! Ha!37

  Should one of them, against all probability, go on to become a famous inventor, he would have to endure countless reminders of past intimacy from lonely old tappers with unremembered names. By the same token, there was always a chance that the vagaries of later life would lead to surprise reunions that might be sweet, or turn sour.

  Al’s next roost was Adrian, Michigan, where he bonded with a local boy named Ezra Gilliland.38 He was again employed as a night operator, this time by the Lake Shore & Southern Railroad, at seventy-five dollars a month. His stay there lasted long enough for him to establish a little workshop of his own. But when he made the mistake, one evening, of “breaking in” with an urgent message on a wire occupied by the superintendent, he was obliged to move on to a day job in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The schedule there did not suit him, so in the fall of 1864 he became a “second-class operator” for the Western Union Company at Union Station, Indianapolis.39

  WORDS PER MINUTE

  Here Al turned eighteen and became at least the beginnings of an inventor. His clockwork sender in Stratford had been little more than a toy, but he now devised an instrument of serious purpose that prefigured two of his most important mature achievements, the translating embosser and the phonograph.

  It was a recorder-repeater that satisfied his aesthetic desire to transcribe “press report”—inflowing, often enormously long journalistic dispatches—in script that was both clear and beautiful, while at the same time dealing with the prohibitive speed at which most dispatches came over the wire. He was, for all the elegance of his handwriting, by no means slow as a copyist. But even the most agile taker found it hard to keep up with the forty words per minute characteristic of most transmissions. (Virtuoso senders in New York and Washington took a sadistic delight in forcing provincial operators to beg for the occasional ritardando.) It was an open secret, as a result, that takers often rephrased sentences, or even omitted whole paragraphs, especially late at night when their wrists became tired. Editors complained about patchy press reports but had to make do with what came through.40

  Al lined up two pendulum-driven Morse registers and geared the one to receive fast copy, indenting every dot and dash on a cylinder of paper tape. The tape unspooled into a bin, whence it was drawn up by the other register, and played back through a sounder at whatever speed—usually twenty-five words per minute—a transcriber found comfortable. He invented the machine primarily as a practice instrument to improve his own taking, but when he won permission to use it officially, the high quality of his copy embarrassed the station’s top press man, and he was encouraged to seek employment elsewhere.41

  The waning days of the war found him at the Western Union branch on Fourth Street in Cincinnati, ambitious now to become a top press man himself.*7 An office that could increase the speed and volume of its message handling was an office unlikely to fire any proficient operator, at least at the rate to which Al was becoming accustomed. Putting aside experiments for the moment, he practiced so hard that he acquired the automaton-like trance typical of takers, whereby they heard code, and wrote words
, without absorbing the meaning of either.42

  This was chillingly apparent on the night of 14 April 1865, when he and his fellow operators became aware that a huge crowd was gathering half a block away, outside the headquarters of The Cincinnati Enquirer. They sent a boy to inquire about the excitement, and he came back shouting, “Lincoln’s shot.”43

  The newspaper must have gotten its story from a Western Union telegram, which meant that someone in the room—who?—had received, automatically transcribed, and messengered the century’s biggest news down the street without paying attention to its contents. “Look over your files,” the office manager said. After a short search the scribbled report was found and held up. Al, reminiscing forty-four years later, chose not to identify its author.44

  His current salary was eighty dollars a month, only five dollars more than he had earned in Adrian and not enough to support much recreation in a large, expensive city. He economized by sharing digs with a pair of actors and a pair of office friends—Ezra Gilliland, who had followed him to Cincinnati, and Milton Adams, a sophisticated dandy uncomplimentary about Al’s hickish demeanor. “The boys did not take to him cheerfully, and he was lonesome.”45

  Influenced as much, perhaps, by the dramatic circumstances of Lincoln’s death as by the profession of his roommates, Al developed a taste for plays and playacting and showed occasional signs of wanting to tread the boards himself. He attended performances at the National Theater in Cincinnati whenever he could afford to, and memorized chunks of Shakespeare to quote aloud, notably the opening soliloquy in Richard III (performed with a limp and hunched back). For the rest of his life he would write Now is the winter of our discontent when he wanted to show off his calligraphy.46