Part 14

"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."

It was his success with a device for printing stock quotations upon paper tape that finally induced several New York capitalists to accept Edison's offer to experiment with the incandescent electric light, they to pay the expense of the experiments and share in the inventions if any were made. For the sake of quiet Edison moved out to Menlo Park, a little station on the Pennsylvania road about twenty-five miles beyond Newark, and built a shop twenty-eight feet wide, one hundred feet long, and two stories high. It was here that I first made his acquaintance, in January, 1879, soon after the newspapers had announced that he had solved the problem of the electric light. It may be remembered that gas stock tumbled in price at that time, and there was a rush to sell before the new light should displace gas altogether. One cold day I climbed the hill from the station, and once past the reception-room, in which every new-comer was carefully scrutinized, for inventors are apt to have odds and ends lying about that they do not want seen by everyone, I found myself in a long big work-shop. To anyone accustomed to the orderly appearance of the ideal machine-shop, it presented a curious appearance, for evidently half the machines in it--forges, lathes, furnaces, retorts, etc.--were dismantled for the moment and useless. Half a dozen workmen were busy in an apparently aimless manner.

Upstairs, in a room devoted to chemical experiments, I found Edison himself. He is to-day just what he was then. Prosperity has not changed him in the least, except perhaps in one particular. In those days of struggle the inventor was far less affable with visitors than he is to-day. One felt instinctively that he was a man struggling to accomplish some serious task to which he was devoting every waking thought and probably dreaming about it at night. As I strode across the laboratory in the direction indicated by one of the workmen present, a compactly built but not tall man, with rather a boyish, clean-shaven face, prematurely old, was holding a vial of some liquid up to the light. He had on a blouse such as chemists wear, but it was hardly necessary, as his clothes were well stained with acids; his hands were covered with some oil with which his hair was liberally streaked, as he had a habit of wiping his fingers upon his head. "Good clothes are wasted upon me," he once explained to me. "I feel it is wrong to wear any, and I never put on a new suit when I can help it." Edison has been slightly deaf for a number of years, and like all persons of defective hearing, closely watches anyone with whom he talks. His patience with visitors is proverbial, and provided any intelligence is shown, he will plunge into long explanations. As he goes on from point to point, warming up to his subject, he is sometimes quite oblivious to the fact that it is all lost upon his visitor until brought back by some question or comment which shows that he might as well talk Sanskrit. Then he laughs and goes back to simpler matters.

I watched him for a few moments before presenting myself. After a long look at his bottle, held up against the light, he put it down again on the table before him, and resting his head between his hands, both elbows on the table, he peered down at the bottle as if he expected it to say something. Then, after a moment's brown study, he would seize it again, give it a shake, as if to shake its secret out, and hold it up to the light. As pantomime nothing could have been more expressive. That liquid contained a secret it would not give up, but if it could be made to give it up, Edison was the man to do it, as a terrier might worry the life out of a rat.

The secret of his success might well be "Persistency, more persistency, still more persistency." One of his foremen relates that once in Newark when his printing telegraph suddenly refused to work, he locked himself into his laboratory, declaring that he would not come out till the trouble was found. It took him sixty hours, during which time his only food consisted of crackers and cheese eaten at the bench; then he went to bed and slept twenty hours at a stretch. At another time, during the height of the first electric-light excitement, all the lamps he had burning in Menlo Park, about eighty in all, suddenly went out, one after another, without apparent cause. Everything had gone well for nearly a month and the great success of the experiment had been published to the world. If the lamps, with their carbon filaments of charred paper would burn for a month there seemed to be no reason why they should not burn for a year, and Edison was stunned by the catastrophe. The trouble was evidently in the lamps themselves, for new lamps burned well. Then began the most exciting and most exhaustive series of experiments ever undertaken by an American physicist. For five days Edison remained day and night at the laboratory, sleeping only when his assistants took his place at whatever was going on. The difficulties in the way of experimenting with the incandescent lamp are enormous because the light only burns when in a vacuum. The instant the glass is broken, out it goes. Edison's eyes grew weak studying the brilliant glow of the carbon filament. At the end of the five days he took to his bed, worn out with excitement and sick with disappointment. During the last two days and nights he ate nothing. He could not sleep, for the moment he left the laboratory and closed his eyes some new test suggested itself. Neither was there much sleep for his faithful force. Ordinarily one of the most considerate of men, he seemed quite surprised when rest and refreshments were sometimes suggested as in order after fifteen hours' incessant work. The trouble was finally discovered to be one that time alone could have proved. The air was not sufficiently exhausted from the lamps. To add to the discomfiture of the inventor, a professor of physics in one of the well-known colleges declared in a newspaper article widely circulated that the Edison lamp would never last long enough to pay for itself.

"I'll make a statue of that man," said Edison to me one day when he was still groping in the dark for the secret of his temporary defeat, "and I'll illuminate it brilliantly with Edison lamps and inscribe it: 'This is the man who said the Edison lamp would not burn.'"

To go back to Edison, shaking his bottle in the sunlight, his brown study gave way to a pleasant smile of welcome when I had made my business known. "Take a look at these filings," he said, making room for me at the bench. "See how curiously they settle when I shake the bottle up. In alcohol they behave one way, but in oil in this way. Isn't that the most curious thing you ever saw--better than a play at one of your city theatres, eh?" and he chuckled to himself as he shook them up again.

"What I want to know," he went on, more to himself than to me, "is what they mean by it, and I'm going to find out." To me the interesting spectacle was Edison tossing up his bottle and watching the filings settle, and not the curious behavior of the filings.

When he put the bottle by, with a deep sigh, he took me over the whole place, pointing out with particular pride the apparatus for making the paper carbons for the lamps, and the new forms of Sprengel mercury pumps that did better work in extracting air from the lamps than any yet devised.

Looking back to that first visit to Edison, the first of perhaps a score that I have had occasion to make him in the last fifteen years, what impressed me most was the immensity of the field in which he takes an interest. Ask Edison what he thinks will be the next step in the development of the sewing-machine, or the telescope, the microscope, the steam-engine, the electric-motor, the reaping-machine, or any device by which man accomplishes much work in little time, and invariably it will be found that he has some novel ideas upon the subject, perhaps fanciful in the extreme, but practical enough to show that he has pondered the matter. He shares the opinion of the gentleman who insists that whatever is is wrong, but only to this extent: that whatever is might be better. Authority means nothing to him; he must test for himself. For instance, it is well known that he rejects the Newtonian theory in part and holds that motion is an inherent property of matter; that it pushes, finding its way in the direction of least resistance, and is not pulled or attracted. "It seems to me," he said once, "that every atom is possessed by a certain amount of primitive intelligence. Look at the thousand ways in which atoms of hydrogen combine with those of other elements, forming the most diverse substances. Do you mean to say that they do this without intelligence? Atoms in harmonious and useful relation assume beautiful or interesting shapes and colors, or give forth a pleasant perfume, as if expressing their satisfaction. In sickness, death, decomposition, or filth the disagreement of the component atoms immediately makes itself felt by bad odors." It is partly due to this belief in the sensibility of atoms that Edison attributes his faith in an intelligent Creator.