To see as a boy the greatest inventor of the age, we shall have to cross the Atlantic and take a journey to the United States of America. England has done wonders in the way of discovery and invention, but it is to New England, as we call it, because she is a daughter of the old Mother Country, that we must go for a brightness and a sharpness of wit that sometimes make us think of the flash of polished steel.

We all know the name of Edison. It is not a name of history, for he is living to-day, a man still in his prime, still sending out from that wonderful brain of his things that astonish men, and have won for him the name of the “wonder-worker of the modern world.”

I have before me as I write the picture of a square, brick house, with outside shutters hooked back, a white paling half encircling it, and a couple of bare, leafless trees before it. The house is plain and poor, and has a strangely unfamiliar look to our English eyes, but it is of the deepest interest to us as the birthplace of Thomas Edison.

The boy first saw the light in 1847, and though he came into the world with but a poor provision waiting him, he found himself welcomed with a very wealth of love and tenderness. Mrs. Edison had Scotch blood in her veins, and she was a mother in a thousand. It is a common thing in history to find that a son draws his greatness, many of his best qualities, from his mother, and this son took many of his from Mrs. Edison. She was his constant companion, his loving nurse, his gentle teacher during those early years of life that leave so deep an impress on the “afterwards.”

The child was seven years old when the Edison family moved to a place called Port Huron, and there he began to spend every spare moment in reading. So earnest was he that he set himself to read through the Detroit Free Library, and had devoured a close row of volumes before his attempt was discovered.

Strange and solemn sound some of the titles of the books he read when he was twelve years old—a time when most boys are lightly dipping into newspapers and magazines and books of adventure. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Hume’s History of England, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

In 1862, when he was barely fifteen years old, he came out more fully from the shelter of home and mixed with the busy world, making a place in it for himself by his own young wits. He was a newspaper boy, and sold his papers like other boys, not stopping still in one place, but going on the train to different stations along the line, and selling as he went.

About this time there was a great fever and ferment in America. The North were fighting with the South, and people panted for news of each battle as it took place. Papers with reports were devoured as soon as printed.

“Now,” thought Edison, “is my chance,” and there began to work in the brain of the boy a big scheme. As the first step to carrying it out, he betook himself to the station telegraph clerk.

“If,” he said, “you will let me wire the war news on a few stations ahead, and have it written up on the blackboard, I will promise you some papers, and now and then a magazine.”

He repeated his request to the different clerks along the line. His eager face and twinkling eyes and earnest words won all hearts, and his request was granted. He next went to the editor of a well-known paper.

“Give me a thousand copies,” he begged, “and I will pay out of the proceeds of my venture.” Here, again, he succeeded. And now it remained but to get the engine-driver to promise him a few minutes at the different stations, and he started on his venture.

At the first stopping-place he had been wont to sell some half-dozen papers. That day, as he looked out, the platform was strangely crowded, and it suddenly dawned on him, from the eager faces of the people and their excited gestures, that it was papers they wanted! He dashed on to the platform, and in a few minutes had sold forty at five cents each, or about a penny of our money. It was much the same at the next station. The people had read the headings on the station blackboard, and they crowded on to the platform, an excited, hustling mob, for papers! It dawned on the boy, here was a chance to raise his prices, so he doubled them, and sold 150 where he had used to sell a dozen! It was the same all along the line. At the last station—Port Huron—his home, the people were most excited of all. The town was a mile from the station. Edison started off with his papers, but was met half-way by an eager, hurrying crowd. They all wanted news. He stopped, drawing up in front of a church where a prayer-meeting was being held. Presently the people poured out and surrounded the boy, willingly paying him five times the usual price of his paper. He began “to take in,” as he expressed it, in his own terse, telling words, “a young fortune.”

After this the busy boyish brain began to look eagerly ahead, to face life seriously. He did not start off on a fresh tack. He took hold of what was nearest to his hand, and he bent his mind on improving that. He had found people were in a hurry for news. The quicker they got it the better they were pleased. Nothing could surely be quicker than that they should get it damp from the press! So it flashed into his brain—why not print a paper on the train?

The question was no sooner asked than answered.

He looked about till he lighted on an old car, and he rigged it up as a printing-office with old types and stereos he begged from a newspaper office. In this novel press-room he threw off sheet after sheet of what he called The Grand Trunk Herald, the first and last paper ever printed on a train. The boy of fifteen was editor, compositor, and newsvendor in one. The paper “caught on,” and the circulation went up to 400.

But, alas! misfortune was soon to overwhelm the young adventurer. One unlucky day the printing-office—the old car, which grew daily more decrepit and unequal to the jolting of the journey—by a more violent lurch than usual threw over a bottle of phosphorus. The cork flew out, and in a few seconds the car was in flames. They were easily enough got under, but Edison’s venture had received its deathblow. The furious car-conductor would henceforth have none of him. He boxed his ears, and pitched him on to the platform along with his precious belongings—the whole paraphernalia of his craft.

It is a sorry picture that presents itself to our mind’s eye. The boy standing half stunned, the rubbish and dÉbris of his belongings strewn at his feet, and the cherished old jolting car, the scene of his labours, gradually fading into distance! It seemed as if his bright dreams were all extinguished, his golden hopes doomed to come to nothing. As he stood there he faced it all—a mere boy low down in the world, badly fed, poorly clothed, almost penniless, but we do not hear that he either flinched or complained, or that a boyish sob rose in his throat. He was made of the stuff of the Stoic. It is our hearts that are sore and anguished, not chiefly for the hopes and dreams disappointed, but because of a terrible calamity that befell him then, when he was perhaps hardly conscious of it; but that grew darker and weightier as the years rolled on.

When the irritated conductor had boxed the boy’s ears, so brutal had been his onslaught that the delicate nerves were injured for life, and now with the flight of years has come deafness to wrap the great inventor in a partial mantle of silence. It is perhaps we who feel most the infinite pathos of the thing, while the man himself bears his affliction with the same noble patience with which he accepted disappointment long years ago as a boy.

At that time he straightway turned his eyes bravely homewards. He picked up his precious belongings, and carried them to a cellar in his father’s house.

It was about this time that his mind began to bend towards that which has ever held for him a keen interest through life—the Telegraph. A waking ambition in him desired strongly to perfect himself in it. He was poor and friendless, and yet firmly, doggedly resolved to get on somehow. So out of his scant earnings—still as newsboy—he bought a book on Telegraphy, and this he pored over night and day.

And now at this early age I think the great inventor must have touched that mine that was afterwards to yield him so wondrously of its wealth.

The boyish mind was putting out feelers, gropingly at first, in the direction of creation, that divine faculty that is granted to so few of us. We can recognise the seed in its first tiny sproutings. He and a boy friend resolved to make a telegraph. They made a line of wire between their houses, insulated with bottles, and crossed under a busy thoroughfare by means of an old cable found in the bed of the Detroit River. The first magnets were wound with wire and swathed in ancient rags, and a piece of spring brass formed the key. Edison pressed two large and formidable-looking cats into his service, tied a wire to their legs, and applied friction to their backs. But the experiment ended in failure. The cats, frightened and furious, resented the liberty, and parted company with, the wire, dashing off in different directions.

But failure never discouraged Edison, nor stayed the working of his brain. He was a true philosopher, and he was, like an elastic ball, possessed of enormous rebound.

Handed down to us there is a story of the boy which, while it may not throw much light on his brain, throws some on his heart and on his ready courage. He was still a newspaper boy on the trains, and while at most stations a few minutes was the limit of waiting, at a certain station where shunting took place the minutes ran to half an hour. The boy was wont to spend this half-hour with the stationmaster’s child, of whom he was fond, or to loiter about his garden. On this particular day the engine-driver had unlinked the cars in a siding, and one was being sent with a good deal of impetus to join another portion. It came on steadily, no one on it to control it, and right in its path was the unconscious baby smiling in the morning sunshine. Not a moment was to be lost. Edison threw down his papers and his hat on the platform and dashed to the rescue. And not a second too soon. As he threw himself and the child free of the line the car passed and struck his heel. The two fell with such violence on the gravel beyond that the stone particles were driven into their flesh, but they were safe!

The grateful father was at a loss how he could show his gratitude to the rescuer of his child. He had little money and no reward to give. At last a plan occurred to him.

“I will teach you telegraphing,” he said to the boy, “and prepare you for the position of night operator at not less than twenty-five dollars a month.”

Edison was delighted. The bargain was struck. The wage seemed, no doubt, a small fortune to the boy—rather more than five of our English pounds.

And now he had got his “toe on the tape,” his foot on the ladder, if it were only on the lowest round. In three months he could teach his master, and the promised situation was got for him. From that he passed to other situations, and gradually he began to make his mark.

He had a mind wonderfully quick to see a difficult situation and to deal with it.

There is a story told of how one winter a severe frost had coated the great river between Port Huron and Sarnia, how the cable was broken, and people could neither get news nor send it to the opposite bank of the river. The spot was crowded with people, baffled and vexed. Edison came along with a brain rarely at fault and faced the thing. Suddenly, to the onlookers’ astonishment, he mounted a locomotive and sent a piercing whistle across the water, imitating by the toots of the engine the dots and dashes of the telegraph system.

In this way he shouted—

“Holloa, Sarnia! Sarnia, do you get what I say?”

At first there was silence on the part of the telegraph man across the water. The people on the bank were breathless with excitement. At last the reply came clear—thrilling. The man on the other side had understood, and the two cities could “talk” again to each other.

After this, people began to hear of Edison’s fame. But the mania for experiments had seized him. The cut-and-dried monotonous routine of work seemed flat and stale to him by comparison. It was as if an enchanted region of fairyland had been opened to the boy. To be allowed to revel in it he denied himself food and necessary sleep. When he was seventeen years old he invented a telegraph instrument that would transfer writing from one line to another without the help of the operator.

There were no want of openings now for him to choose from, but sometimes doors after they had been opened were rudely shut again through envy and evil feeling. In the great world of invention and discovery there are perhaps more “ups and downs” than in any other. Some of Edison’s fellow-workers were kind and generous—others were jealous and detracting. One manager did him an ill turn. He was unequal to completing a discovery he had begun. On the thing being shown him, Edison immediately “saw a light” and brought it to completion, but jealousy crept into the man’s small mind and he dismissed the boy on a false charge.

So at seventeen he was thrown again on the world. Money was still scarce. Books and instruments and calls from home swallowed up the most of it. The boy was chafing under ill-treatment and a sense of injustice. The want of sleep, perhaps of proper food, was telling on him, but he looked forward with a clear, undaunted eye. He wanted to reach a certain town where he believed work awaited him. It meant a walk of a hundred miles. He was weak, disheartened, ill-prepared for it, but he did it. He arrived footsore and weary, with torn shoes and tattered clothes, and his worldly possessions tied in a handkerchief on his back.

In this shabby plight he presented himself at the telegraph office. He was eyed coldly enough at first, but by-and-by when tests were given he stood the tests. There was that in the eager eyes and underneath the shabby clothes that could not but make itself felt as a power. He began work. At first his fellow-clerks laughed at him. In time they were won over, and later he stood out as a workman of the first order.

He began to collect about him materials for printing—machinery without which he never felt quite happy. He did a clever thing one day in the office that brought him into notice. He took a press report at one sitting—a sitting that lasted from 3.30 p.m. till 4.30 a.m.! After that he carefully divided it into paragraphs so that each printer would have exactly three lines to print, and so that a column could be set up in two or three minutes!

It may be that about this time money was rather more plentiful, for Edison began to go to second-hand bookshops and so to gratify his deep-seated thirst for knowledge.

His kindness of heart was well known, and there were many about only too ready to take advantage of it. There were telegraphists who roamed the country in time of war—“tramp operators” they were called, who took short engagements and generally ended their time with a “spree.” These found out Edison—a man who did not drink himself and a man who might be persuaded to lend them money—and these were his worst enemies.

One day he had bought at an auction fifty volumes of the North American Review. Half a dozen men were sponging off him in his rooms when he brought home the books and ranged them unsuspiciously round his walls. Directly he had gone out his guests helped themselves to his purchase, landed them at the nearest pawnbroker’s, and drank the money they brought.

But his love for experiments sometimes brought him into scrapes and disaster, as when he moved a bottle of sulphuric acid one day, strictly against rules, and the bottle spilt, the contents eating through the floor to the manager’s room below and there eating up his floor and carpet, the unlucky accident bringing Edison his dismissal.

And now, at the age of twenty-one, after many different situations and different experiences, Edison turned his steps to Boston. His openhandedness had left him short of money. As was often the case with him, he was sailing very close to the wind. His dress was poor and shabby, and four days’ and nights’ travelling had not improved his appearance. When he presented himself at the office where he was to be taken on, the other clerks ridiculed him as “a jay from the woolly west.”

They made up their minds to play a practical joke on him. They took the New York telegraph man into their confidence. It was arranged he should send a despatch which Edison was to receive. By this time Edison had so perfected himself in receiving messages that he could write from forty-six to fifty-four words a minute—quicker than any operator in the United States.

Not knowing his man, the sender began slowly—then quickened his pace. So did Edison. Quicker still he worked. Edison was in no way discomfited. Soon the New York man had reached his highest speed, to which Edison responded with ease, cool, collected, and stopping now and then to sharpen a pencil between.

By this time he had discovered that the others were trying to get “a rise” out of him, but he went on steadily with his work. Then he stopped and spoke quietly through to the New York man.

“Say, young man,” he said, in his dry humorous way, “change off and send with your other foot.”

But the New York man had reached the end of his tether and had to get someone else to finish, and so Edison won his laurels, and “the jay from the woolly west” was regarded ever after with enormous respect.

After that his place was in the front rank. Now he had reached the threshold of manhood, and a long, dazzling vista of achievement and success stretched before him had he known it. About this time a great, strong conviction of his responsibilities and of the opportunities life held out to him swept over him.

“Adams,” he said to a friend, “I’ve got so much to do, and life is so short, that I’m going to hustle.”

And if we try to look at what he has crowded into a life not long, we must allow he has indeed “hustled” to some purpose. As we briefly glance at the bent of his manhood, his doings fairly dazzle us. He read enormously all sorts of works on telegraphy and electricity, and he produced from his brain that which makes him the greatest inventor of the age. If we tried to enumerate his inventions the names alone would fill pages. We can do little more than name a few. Among the first of these was how to send four messages at the same time over one telegraph wire.

But even after he had embarked on the glorious sea of discovery, what “ups and downs”—what sea-saws of fortune were in store for him! Hunger at times, torn clothes, and battered shoes. But from depths and half-drowning up again he always came to the surface. He rose grandly, relying on his own indomitable will. About this time good fortune befell him. For inventing some telegraphic appliances he got 50,000 dollars, or rather more than £10,000. He could hardly believe his good luck, and it was with this he immediately rigged up for himself a workshop.

And now he was rapidly rising, and the field before him was gradually opening up wider and wider. He started a laboratory at a place called Newark, and from this time onwards his inventions seemed to flow from his brain in a well-nigh continuous stream.

His workmen were devoted to his service. His genial good-humour and kindliness, the absence of all harshness in his manner, and his love of fun could not but endear him to them. They caught the infection, too, of his earnestness. When he had an idea in his brain he worked at it, as it were, red-hot, almost without rest or cessation, and they were rarely reluctant to help him.

“Now, you fellows!” he would say, shutting himself and his workmen up in a room on the top flat, “I’ve locked the door, and you’ll have to stay here until this job is completed.”

During sixty hours, perhaps, he would take no sleep and little food, while his brain would work at highest pressure until the thing was wrought. Then he would relax, and sleep for as long as thirty-six hours at a stretch.

And now his fame had spread far and wide. The people at Menlo Park, to which he removed—some twenty-four miles from New York—began to look upon him as a wizard—a man possessing magical powers. It seemed to them there was nothing he could not do. Exaggerated tales of his wonderful powers spread over the country.

“If people track me here,” he said (he had been besieged at Newark), “I shall simply have to take to the woods.”

Child after child was the offspring of the inventor’s brain. At one time, within the space of a few years, as many as forty-five were born.

There was the Microphone, which is much like the Telephone, except that in the Microphone the sound is magnified. There was the Megaphone, which brings far-away sounds near, so that cattle crunching grass six miles off could be heard distinctly at Menlo Park! There was the Kinetoscope we all know, which by swiftly passing pictures—as many as forty-six a second—seems to give us a single person in motion, somewhat on the lines of that toy of our childhood, “The Wheel of Life.” And there was the grand king of inventions—the Phonograph—that overtops all the rest.

We know it, all of us, by this time. We have listened to it, with the tubes at our ears, while the voice of someone speaking at a distance is distinctly borne to us, or the strains of a song sung by some great singer.

In 1888 Edison sent his first phonogram by steamer to England. His friend here had only to take out the wax cylinder, put it into his machine, and set it in motion, and lo! it seemed to him as if Edison himself were in the room talking to him!

Great men all over the world recorded their astonishment and their praises of the wonderful invention. The Queen sent him a message of congratulation. People flocked to every exhibition to see it—to the French one from countries all over Europe. They saw it and straightway went into raptures. Edison himself, looking into the future, seemed to see volumes it might yet be brought to do. It might be used to write letters merely from dictation. It might be used to make clocks speak—to tell when it was time to come to meals. It might be used for toys. A tiny phonograph might be placed inside a doll, and it would straightway “talk”; or in a toy animal, and it would grunt and growl!

What a strange thing that in this world of passing-away and change we should be able to preserve from destruction such treasures sheltered in a wax cylinder—some great man’s words of wisdom, or the silver tones of a sweet musician!

The more Edison’s brain accomplished the more did it seem able to do. As a man he showed himself untiring as when a boy. He went on discovering. He invented a way of telegraphing from a moving train. He invented an Electric Railroad, that drew delighted thousands at the Chicago Exhibition.

In 1879 his attention turned to lighting, and he bent all his energies on inventing an Incandescent lamp for electric light. He spent days working at a sort of white heat. He began on the 16th October, but mishaps and accidents seemed to threaten his invention.

“Let us,” he cried to his partner in a ferment of excitement—“let us make a lamp before we sleep, or die in the attempt.” On the morning of the 21st it was done!

It astonished the world. It opened up possibilities for miners and divers, and for men everywhere.

On the occasion of its exhibition people flocked from all parts of the United States. Special trains were run. The same furore over the marvel reigned at the Paris Exposition, and at every other exhibition. And through it all—a fame, a popularity enough to turn the head of most mortals—the man remained the same—modest, simple, unpretentious.

From Menlo Park he went to Orange. His laboratory there was fitted up with everything conceivable that an inventor red-hot and eager might want at a moment’s notice. And yet often the workrooms presented the strangest appearance of disorder. Workmen sometimes stretched on benches or floor after a heavy strain, the great master himself thrown down—a stick under his head, a coat wound round it for a pillow, and so snatching a short interval of sleep! He will not be interrupted by visitors. In this great world of his own he seems at times to live a sort of separate existence.

We are amazed, dazzled, astonished by the tremendous results one man in his lifetime has achieved. He has not been content to take some thing and modify and improve it and set it to a new purpose as men whom we call inventors have done in all ages. But he seems to have called upon the very forces of nature to do his bidding. It is almost as if he had harnessed the winds, the air, sound, electricity, for his purposes.

A man after a single discovery not seldom rests on his laurels for life. This man is still in his prime, and we cannot tell yet what product of his brain will still astonish us, and we cannot touch here on a tithe of what he has done. He lives sometimes in his northern home, in New Jersey, sometimes at Orange.

As a man he shows the same genial, kindly sympathy which, as a boy, never failed to win the hearts of his fellow-clerks, the same modesty that disarmed their jealousy. These things chain his workmen to him to-day with links of love. Now that men praise and laud him all over the world he shows the same good-natured indifference to name and fame he has shown all through. And he has lost nothing of the tireless energy that used to support him through hard work and long night-sittings as a boy—this man who, as someone has it, “has kept the path to the patent office red-hot with his footsteps—this wonder-worker of the modern world.”