209. Ibid.; New York Sun, 10 Sept. 1878; Papers, 4.469.
210. Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 211.
211. Papers, 4.469; New York Sun, 20 Oct. 1878.
212. Papers, 4.470, 473–487; TE to William Wallace, 13 Sept. 1878, PTAE.
213. “Edison’s Newest Marvel,” New York Sun, 16 Sept, 1878. The entire interview is printed in Papers, 4.503–5.
214. “Edison’s Newest Marvel.”
215. Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 16; Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 241, 235; TE Patent 214,636; TE Patent 214,637, “Thermal Regulation for Electric-Lights.”
216. Strouse, Morgan, 183.
217. Hughes, Networks of Power, 48–49; Papers, 4.551; DeGraaf, Edison and Innovation, 50.
218. Papers, 4.586.
219. New York Sun, 20 Oct. 1878.
220. Ibid.
221. Papers, 4.648, 642–43. New York Herald announced that “A New Talking Machine Makes Its Appearance in Menlo Park.”
222. Papers, 4.664.
223. McPartland, “Almost Edison,” 117; Papers, 4.657–58, 664.
224. Lowrey to TE, 10 Dec. 1878, PTAE; Gall, “Edison: Managing Menlo Park,” 40.
225. Francis Upton, 12 Dec. 1878, PTAE.
226. Strouse, Morgan, 230–31; TE in New York Sun, 19 Dec. 1878; Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 19–21. The boilers were fed with piped water from a nearby brook. Jehl, “TAE – MP,” 26.
227. Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 29–30; Bright, Electric Lamp Industry, 47–53.
228. Lowrey to TE, 25 Jan. 1879, quoted in Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 31.
229. TE quoted in Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 197; Papers, 4.756.
230. Papers, 4.756; TE reminiscence in Papers, 4.864.
231. Papers, 4.507–8, 561–62, 235, 125; Scientific American, 26 Apr. 1878.
232. Papers, 5.149, 124.
233. London Times, 22 Mar. 1879.
234. Papers, 5.126.
235. Papers, 5.126, 157; Francis Upton to Elijah Upton, 23 Feb. 1879, PTAE.
236. “Edison’s Electric-Light Inventions,” Appleton’s Cyclopedia 1879 (New York, 1880); Papers, 5.53, 5.55.
237. Quoted in Israel, Edison, 172. McPartland, “Almost Edison,” 218, points out that TE was unconsciously restating Joule’s law of resistance, W=V2 / R.
238. Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 33, 53–57; Israel, Edison, 182.
239. Upton addressing the Edison Pioneers, 11 Feb. 1918, Biographical File, PTAE.
240. W. S. Andrews to E. H. Mullin, 4 Apr. 1898, Meadowcroft Collection, TENHP; Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 58; Israel, Edison, 182; Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, “Edisonia,” 28–29. See also TE Patent 227,229.
241. Journal of Gas Lighting, 20 Jan. 1880.
242. TE quoted in Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 58; TE in Mar. 1882, quoted in Israel, Edison, 182.
243. Francis to Elijah Upton, 6 July 1878, PTAE.
244. Papers, 5.161, 227, 242–43.
245. Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 325–27; New York Herald, 10 Dec. 1880; Öser, “Wizard of Menlo Park.”
246. Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 250–51. See also Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 45ff.; Papers, 5.4.
247. Papers, 5.277, 195–96; Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 63. Seven of the five hundred volumes Edison ordered for his library in 1879 were mineralogy studies.
248. Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 46; Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1880), 173ff. See also Papers, 5.347–54; Francis to Elijah Upton, 31 Aug. 1878, PTAE.
249. Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 62–63.
250. “Edison and the Electric Incandescent Lamp,” The Street Railway Bulletin, 14 (Oct. 1914).
251. Jones, Edison: Sixty Years, 252; Edwin M. Fox, “A Night with Edison,” New York Herald, 31 Dec. 1879.
252. Fox, “Night with Edison.”
253. Ibid.
254. Ibid.
255. Ibid.
256. Ibid.
257. Ibid.
258. Ibid.
259. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 30 Dec. 1879; New York Tribune, 1 Jan. 1880.
PART SEVEN · TELEGRAPHY (1860–1869)
1. “Sunday 1 Mr. Edison’s Interview” galley, E.Bio, TENHP. See also Dyer and Martin, Edison, 40–41. Note: The most important source of information about TE’s teenage years remains his series of dictated or jotted reminiscences, prepared in 1908–9 at the request of his official biographers, Dyer and T. C. Martin. Volume 1 of The Papers of Thomas A. Edison reprints all the memoranda relevant to TE’s childhood and early youth as Appendix 1, pp. 627ff. Except where otherwise indicated, the following narrative through 1869 is based on this appendix. TE’s memory often has to be taken on trust, for lack of supporting evidence, throughout the 1860s. Whenever possible, slips in his recall have been corrected in text. For example, when he recalls driving the locomotive “62 and a half miles,” he is remembering the full length of the Grand Trunk Railway from Port Huron to Detroit. It was more likely 47 ½ miles, because he also says that the engineer drove “fifteen miles” first.
2. Runes, Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison, 50.
3. TE’s working day on the Grand Trunk Railway in 1860 was at first shorter than he remembered. The train left from Port Huron at eight A.M. and returned from Detroit at 3:50 P.M. Each journey took about three hours. By the spring of 1862, schedule changes had lengthened his hours from seven A.M. to about ten-thirty P.M. Detroit Free Press, 9 Aug. and 21 Nov. 1859; TE, Weekly Herald, 3 Feb. 1862, HFM; Papers, 1.27.
4. Papers, 1.6–7, 630; Detroit Free Press, 15 Sept. 1859; George P. Lathrop, “Edison’s Father”; TE reminiscing in Lucius Hitchcock to Aunt Sade, 3 Dec. 1930, TENHP.
5. Ballentine, “Early Life of Edison”; map drawn and marked “1860” by TE, reproduced in Stamps, Hawkins, and Wright, Search for the House, 16; Papers, 1.632.
6. Papers, 1.629, 631; Dyer and Martin, Edison, 32; Nancy Wright, “The House in the Grove,” in Stamps, Hawkins, and Wright, Search for the House, 41. This essay is an important source of information about TE’s youth in Port Huron.
7. Detroit Free Press, 19 May 1860; Paul Taylor, “Old Slow Town”: Detroit During the Civil War (Detroit, MI, 2013), loc. 77; Detroit Free Press, 9 Sept. 1860, e.g. Young Al also did a good trade in Lincoln campaign buttons. TE memo, ca. 1929, Biographical Collection, TENHP.
8. Despite the fanatical anti-Lincoln bias of its leading newspaper, Michigan strongly supported the Union cause. Taylor, “Old Slow Town,” chap. 2.
9. Jones, Edison: Sixty Years, 28; Weekly Herald, 3 Feb. 1862.
10. Weekly Herald, 3 Feb. 1862.
11. Ibid.
12. Dyer and Martin, Edison, 33. The story, in this and other biographies, that the British engineer George Stephenson traveled on the Grand Trunk and publicized TE’s newspaper in the London Times is apocryphal. Only one other issue of the Weekly Herald has survived, as a facsimile in Magazine of Michigan 1 (Oct. 1929). It is datelined “June [1862], Published by the Newsboy on the Mixed Train.” See also Battle Creek Evening News, 21 Oct. 1959.
13. Jones, Edison: Sixty Years, 16–17.
14. Papers, 1.629; Detroit Free Press, 9 Apr. 1862.
15. Detroit Free Press, 9 Apr. 1862; Papers, 1.629; TE, Weekly Herald, 3 Feb. 1862. The generally accepted casualty total for Shiloh is 17,854.
16. Lathrop, “Talks with Edison.”
17. Ibid. TE mistakenly recalled that he dealt with the editor’s predecessor, Wilbur F. Storey. Papers, 1.630.
18. Papers, 1.630.
; 19. TE to Willis Engle, 10 Aug. 1862. Papers, 1.27 (“My time is taken up with my business in the cars….I don’t get home until ten in the evening”). For TE’s hearing loss around this time, see Dyer and Martin, Edison, 37; TE to William J. Curtis, 7 May 1920 (“I have been deaf for 60 years”); Ford, Edison As I Knew Him, 20, 24–25; TE Diary; Papers, 1.670; and Israel, Edison, 17. For the scarlet fever theory, see Robert Traynor, “The Deafness of Edison,” Hearing International, 19 Feb. 2013, hearinghealthmatters.org.
20. Dyer and Martin, Edison, 49–51.
21. Telegraph 6, no. 1 (28 Aug. 1869).
22. Dyer and Martin, Edison, 51. Note: It is not clear from the sparse records of this part of TE’s life just when his service with the Grand Trunk ended, or when exactly he took up telegraphy. He seems to have worked the Mount Clemens–Port Huron segment for at least a while in the fall and winter of 1862, delegating the rest of the trip to another boy. Several operators along the line recalled him stopping by to practice on their instruments. According to his own recollection, he sent a few primitive messages along a half-mile stovepipe wire rigged between his house and a friend’s in Fort Gratiot. His serious study of the medium, however, began under Mackenzie. Israel, Edison, 18; Dyer and Martin, Edison, 48–51.
23. Papers, 1.10–11.
24. Papers, 1.6, reproduces TE’s society membership card, dated 15 Sept. 1862. Library regulations did not permit the registration of boys younger than eighteen. Papers, 1.7; Detroit—Young Men’s Society, Catalogue of the Library, with a Historical Sketch (Detroit, 1865). All the volumes TE claimed to have read in youth are listed in this catalog with the exception of Fresenius’s Chemical Analysis.
25. Norman Speiden to George E. Probst, 4 Mar. 1959, TENHP; Dyer and Martin, Edison, 51; Papers, 1.631.
26. Papers, 1.10; William D. Wright to TE, 29 June 1900, TENHP; Israel, Edison, 21.
27. Ibid., 3; Henry Hartsuff on 3 Apr. 1863, quoted in “House in the Grove,” 44.
28. Ibid., 44–45; Papers, 1.631; “Edison, Miller, and Affiliated Families,” in Jeffrey, Phonographs to U-Boats, 151ff.
29. Dyer and Martin, Edison, 54–55.
30. Papers, 1.631.
31. TE reminiscing in Papers, 1.632. Note: A number of unverifiable or conflicting stories about TE’s teenage wanderings were published during his lifetime. Francis Arthur Jones, e.g., writing in 1908, has TE working as a railroad night operator in Port Huron before doing so in Canada, and locates the train-convergence anecdote in Sarnia rather than Stratford, Ontario. Jones, Edison: Sixty Years, 39–44. Since so few actual records of the period survive, this biography as far as possible confines itself to accounts TE himself authorized.
32. Papers, 1.661.
33. David Hochfelder, The Telegraph in America, 1832–1920 (Baltimore, MD, 2012), 3.
34. Banner motto of Telegraph in the mid–1860s. See, e.g., Papers, 1.13. TE refers nostalgically to corn whiskey in a letter to Charles Mixer, 24 July 1920, TENHP.
35. Papers, 1.655. TE recalled that only “3 percent” of these jokes were publishable (1.661).
36. Dee Alexander Brown, The Bold Cavaliers (Philadelphia, 1959), 80. Coincidentally, George Ellsworth, the telegrapher whom Brown cites as having this sixth sense, demonstrated it when working with TE in Cincinnati in 1865. Papers, 1.663.
37. W. P. Phillips (a former TE telegraph associate), Oakum Pickings (New York, 1876), 138–39 and passim for stories of life on the telegraph trail in the 1860s.
38. Dyer and Martin, Edison, 65; Ezra Gilliland interview, Cincinnati Commercial, 19 Mar. 1879. This is the only source that specifically states TE moved to Adrian “in 1863.” An old-timer quoted in Papers, 4.452 recalls him arriving there in an “old straw hat, linen coat and pants.”
39. Josephson, Edison, 44; Dyer and Martin, Edison, 65–66; Papers, 4.873.
40. Papers, 1.659.
41. Papers, 1.36–37; Dyer and Martin, Edison, 67–68.
42. Israel, Edison, 29; Papers, 1.661. “This peculiar state of the brain doing intellectual work unconsciously should be investigated,” TE wrote in 1908. It has been, in modern times. See Iwan Morus, “ ‘The Nervous System of Britain’: Space, Time, and the Electric Telegraph in the Victorian Age,” British Journal for the History of Science 33, no. 4 (2000).
43. Dyer and Martin, Edison, 70.
44. Ibid.; Papers, 1.660. See also TE memo, ca. 1929, Biographical Collection, TENHP.
45. Quoted in Phillips, Sketches Old and New, 65; Dyer and Martin, Edison, 68–69.
46. “Tom Edison’s Operating Days,” Operator 9 (1 Apr. 1878); Israel, Edison, 28–29.
47. Papers, 1.637, 660–61; Dyer and Martin, Edison, 73.
48. Papers, 1.661.
49. There is uncertainty about the chronology of TE’s stays in these cities in late 1865 and early 1866. His movements have to be inferred from fragmentary sources, best summarized in Israel, Edison, 30–33.
50. Papers, 1.28.
51. TE to Sam and Nancy Edison, ca. spring 1866, PTAE; Papers, 1.29, 657; Israel, Edison, 32.
52. Papers, 1.650; TE reminiscing in Frank L. Dyer Diary, entry for 20 Feb. 1906, TENHP.
53. Wright, “House in the Grove,” 48, 26, 49.
54. Ibid., 47–48; Papers, 1.17.
55. Dyer and Martin, Edison, 80; Papers, 1.75–76.
56. George Bliss quoted in Papers, 4.875; TE reminiscing in Papers, 1.653, 650; TE quoted in Dyer and Martin, Edison, 80.
57. Papers, 1.653–54; Louisville Courier-Journal, 4 Dec. 1866 and 8 Jan. 1867. The earlier issue contains an editorial reference to “the extraordinary and late rush of telegraphic copy this morning,” whereby space needed for Johnson’s message “has compelled us to exclude many important dispatches.” Papers, 1.75.
58. Papers, 1.30–31, 36–49, 662; Israel, Edison, 36. Faraday died on 25 Aug. 1867.
59. Z. T. Underwood in Oakland Tribune, 19 Oct. 1931; Papers, 4.874; Phillips, Sketches Old and New, 179; Eugene Baker in Cincinnati Post, 22 July 1929, clipping in Biographical Collection, TENHP.
60. See Israel, Edison, 35–36, for the sophistication of Cincinnati’s telegraph elite at this time.
61. Papers, 1.56.
62. “Edison’s Double Transmitter,” Telegrapher, 11 Apr. 1868, Papers, 1.56–58. Little is known of the approximately six months TE spent in Port Huron between October 1867 and March 1868. It is possible he returned there to help his parents adjust to their new straitened circumstances. He appears to have spent the winter working on telegraph designs and speculative articles. In March, short of money, restless, and hopeful for a job with Western Union in the East, he wrangled a free pass from the Grand Trunk Railway and made a snowbound journey via Montreal to Boston, arriving there around the end of the month. Papers, 1.635–36.
63. Papers, 1.51.
64. TE reminiscing in Papers, 1.636; Dyer and Martin, Edison, 99.
65. Dyer and Martin, Edison, 99–100; Papers, 1.637.
66. Telegrapher, 1 Aug. 1868.
67. Papers, 1.633, 38.
68. Papers, 1.635.
69. Ibid.
70. Dyer and Martin, Edison, 100–1; Josephson, Edison, 62.
71. Journal of the Telegraph, 11 Apr. 1868; Papers, 1.98–100.
72. Papers, 1.61–62.
73. Ibid., 1.77–81, 67. In August 1870 Daniel Craig wrote a letter introducing TE to Farmer, praising him as “a genius only second to yourself” and proposing a collaborative venture on a printing machine. Neither the meeting nor the venture seem to have occurred. Papers, 1.182–84.
74. Papers, 1.67, 83; TE to John Van Duzer, 5 Sept. 1868. TE’s proposed facsimile telegraph was intended for the Asian export market. See Israel, Edison, 43–44.
75. TE Patent 90,646, issued 1 June 1969; Papers, 1.84–86. His whittling marks ar
e still visible on the preserved model of the vote recorder in HFM. Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 38.
76. Dyer and Martin, Edison, 103. TE vaguely implied in 1908 that he took the recordograph to Washington and “exhibited [it] before a committee that had something to do with the Capitol,” but there was no contemporary evidence of his doing so.
77. Papers, 1.60; Israel, Edison, 42–43.
78. Papers, 1.111.
79. TE Patent 91,527.
80. Papers, 1.102–3; Israel, Edison, 45–46. Laws abandoned his Boston venture later in 1869, when the two Gold & Stock companies merged in New York.
81. Papers, 1.113; Israel, Edison, 44–45.
82. Papers, 1.121.
83. Josephson, Edison, 698; Papers, 1.116, 121, 118; Israel, Edison, 48; Charles A. Barnes, former Rochester telegraph executive, in Plainfield (NJ) Courier-News, 25 Oct. 1929; TE to Louis Wiley, 9 Feb. 1925, TENHP; TE to Frank Hanaford, 26 July 1869, PTAE; TE phonograph reminiscence quoted in John W. Lieb, Dinner in Honor of Thomas A. Edison and in Commemoration of Forty Years of Edison Service in New York, 11th September 1922 (New York, 1923), copy in TENHP.
84. Israel, Edison, 48; Papers, 1.121.
85. Dyer and Martin, Edison, 122; Jones, Edison: Sixty Years, 62–63.
86. TE reminiscing, quoted in Dyer and Martin, Edison, 123.
87. James Laws Ricketts to Charles Edison, 3 Feb. 1947, Biographical Collection, TENHP. TE’s memory of being at once put in charge of Laws’s “whole plant” accelerates chronology. That promotion, and consequent “violent jump” in salary, did not occur until the summer.
88. Papers, 1.128; Dyer and Martin, Edison, 123.
89. TE Patent 96,567; Papers, 1.179, 126; Israel, Edison, 50.
90. Papers, 1.114.
91. Papers, 1.163.
92. Papers, 1.136, 138; TE in New York Morning Journal, 26 July 1891; Klein, Life of Gould, 69–70, 109, 112–13; Cornwallis, Gold Room and the Stock Exchange, 15–16; TE reminiscing in Dyer and Martin, Edison, 126.
93. Ashley quoted in Israel, Edison, 51; Papers, 1.132–34; advertisement facsimile in Dyer and Martin, Edison, 128.
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