Part 5

The substantial growth of Winnipeg, Portage la Prairie, Brandon, Regina, Calgary, Edmonton and Pacific Coast cities, and the mushroom proclivities of many a lesser burg, has given a marked impetus to the spirit of competition in manufacturing and railway circles. In the face of an exaggerated propaganda about bounding difficulties, and the like, and a strong but diminishing pro-Canadian sentiment, the men behind the gun annually dispatch and receive by way of Rouse’s Point, Suspension Bridge, Port Huron, The Sault, etc., merchandise worth thousands of dollars which our cousins eagerly solicit, working for the haul in conjunction with Canadian railway lines. Eight hundred carloads a year would be, according to some men’s estimate, a modest shewing, but, after all, conditions considered, it is a tidy, “found” business in and out of Canada for an individual “U.S.” line to secure or relinquish. I have known a single railroad’s catch in Ontario to exceed, on several occasions, three hundred carloads a month, 95 per cent. of this tonnage going to Manitoba and British Columbia destinations, the fresh fruit receiving exceptional attention and other commodities making scheduled runs to Winnipeg well within five days, and to Vancouver in twelve days’ time. It is estimated that via the various avenues between the two nations, from Coast to Coast, two carloads of freight a minute pass into the republic to the south as a result of the crusade of its railroad corporations.

In more than one tight pinch “U.S.” railways have come to the fore, furnishing an expeditious alternative when shipper and consignee have been stewing over congested yards, crippled motive power, notorious scarcity of cars, strike and snow disadvantages which trouble every line sooner or later and which are not unknown to the men piloting the Canadian railway interests to success.

Twenty-two foreign railroads, nine operating in the east and central States, and thirteen western companies, each maintain one to six passenger and commercial offices in this country. Affairs pertaining thereto are supervised by Canadian Agents, Division, General and Travelling Agents, Contracting Representatives, Solicitors, City Canvassers and Counter Clerks. The combined staff numbers 100 men. With few exceptions, they are natives of the soil; familiar with local conditions, and are liberal dispensers of a good deal of salary, rentals, incidental expense monies and sunshine. [A]In rounding up traffic the tactics which obtain include direct solicitation with shipper, consignee and traveller; the assiduous cultivation of the man who pays the freight or buys the tickets, and canvass of stationary railway agents, whose judgment often dictates via what junctions and lines unrouted shipments, and passengers without pre-arranged itinerary, should be routed. Prompt dispatch and trains “on time” are cardinal requisites in luring trade and holding a continuance of favor. The personality and perseverance of the foreign road agent has an important bearing on results. Changeable climatic conditions divert certain commodities and influence the warm zone hunter from one channel to another. Warehouse and track facilities play a part in the scheme of convenience, and that indefinite quantity, sentiment, colors calculations, though shifty as smoke. Unsettled claims occasionally rile the temper and switch a lot of business to the lynx-eyed competitor who watches while he works. Friendly, but contending factions, lock horns for the haul of a single carload. San Francisco and Vancouver agents, acting in concert with their confreres at Winnipeg, Halifax or Hamilton, keep the wires sizzling. Perhaps, some of the “big wigs” put a finger in the pie, and to score a point, resort to every permissable ruse save, let us hope, that dishonorable weapon, the bogus telegram.

[A] Owing to exigencies of the war, and responding to a law enforced by W. G. McAdoo, Director General of Railroads, all United States railway agencies have again been withdrawn from Canada.

Necessity has slowly convinced numerous hesitating shippers and travellers that the canvass of those United States railroads, looking to Canada for business, has more behind it than a cloven hoof; that sometimes an extra string to one’s bow is a really effective precautionary measure.

The pack animal, oxen and primitive implements of the pioneer who pierced the wilderness and first scratched the surface of the last west, have steadily given place to the steel ribboned highway and thus, on “easy street” when compared with his progenitor, the modern colonizer is linking the old with the new and accomplishing, by successive stages, the development of our pregnant western heritage.

Nowadays, discriminating tourists, individually or in parties, the banker speculator, merchant prince in his own car, and commercial man having business in Europe, at the Pacific Coast or in Manitoba, more and more frequently requests that the New York or Chicago gateway should figure in their itinerary to permit enjoyment of the unsurpassed service and scenic environment of those routes which justly deserve the public’s endorsement.

Trade relations between United States and Canadian railroads systems constantly grow more intimate and wield an unmistakable influence in the strengthening of those bonds, commercial and sentimental, which make for the good of all concerned. This interchange broadens our knowledge of each other and tends to more completely harmonize the aims and aspirations of the two nations.

A WIZARD WHEN IN BUD

THOMAS A. EDISON

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.

“This is the song of the wire-- The electric wire: The slender thread with a soul of fire, With the wings of light that shall never tire, With a power and grandeur awful and dire; The electric wire.”

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.

A GIGANTIC HUMAN HIVE

Is the Canadian Pacific Railway Headquarters

To have one’s activities in office or household likened to the alertness and foresight of the bee is equivalent to a pronounced compliment. From time immemorial the beehive has ever been regarded by the peoples of Occident and Orient as the storehouse and base of the busiest little folks in the animal kingdom--as the distinctive emblem of concentrated industry, where laggards do not abound.

In Windsor Street, opposite the fine cathedral of St. Peter, Montreal, Quebec, stands a spacious stone castle, the handsome, towering Canadian Pacific Railway hive, and verily, it is alive with endeavor and swarms with the spirit of enterprise. Inhabited chiefly by king bees--and a few queens--this host of 2000 flaunt no iron crosses for inefficiency and here drones have no place.

From the pinnacle position in the steeple, ably filled by a shrewd, democratic nobleman, down the scale through a labyrinth of departments to the youngster affixing postage and dreaming of the Vice-Presidency, every official and employee in that busy headquarters of the greatest transportation corporation within the world’s ken, plays his part in the drama “making hay while the sun shines.” Feeling that they are an integral part of a gigantic organization, they play tick, tack, toe with $153,000,000 in rolling stock and participate with sincerity in the annual round-up of 30,000,000 tons of freight that require 95,000 cars of divers shapes to transport, in addition to moving 16,000,000 passengers for $30,000,000 necessitating a string of equipment that would reach forty miles from Toronto to Hamilton. 2255 locomotives pull this traffic. When all hands and the cooks on the dining cars are intensely occupied in harvesting the golden honey, then is the management in clover.

Concealed in the brains of this directorate of specialists, or tableted in the company’s archives and records, repose secrets pertaining to matters, methods and men, of crowned heads, governments and undercurrents of commerce, finance and future intention which, if given publicity, would make the listener gasp in wonderment and likewise aid him to roll in riches.

Apart from an extensive, intermediate network, (totaling 15,000 miles) her unbroken chains of trains span an additional 3,600 miles of continent from the cod banks of the Atlantic to the salmon spawning beds along the Pacific Ocean, dovetailing there with some of the splendid units of a fleet of a hundred vessels valued to-day at $65,000,000, which circumvent the seven seas carrying “Canadian Pacific” prestige, influence, secret service and international communications between all races and temperatures. There are no fields of production in any clime on the planet known to civilized man that this dynamo of energy, trade and travel has not investigated and if, through development or encouragement, a modicum of reciprocal traffic is extracted or the sweets of industrial success can be promised, rest assured that exploring bees will return to the hive with documentary proof or Marconigrams, cable and mails will herald most recent results.

It is a marvelous modern reality, smacking of the magic of Bagdad caliph eras, that the Windsor Street cabinet of individually expert cosmopolitans, with their teeming clusters of resourceful understudies, command a metaphorical view of the surface of all hemispheres, like a submersible’s captain seated beside the disk of camera obscura scanning the ocean’s bosom. It is, however, only with the searchlights of peace, of barter and trade and commercial expansion, which spell security and comfort for mankind, that the “C.P.R.” sweeps the horizons, feels the universe’s pulse and keeps in touch through the medium of the electric spark, with the aspirations of the world’s brown, yellow and Caucasian children. She underestimates no detail and quietly assumes any legitimate task of magnitude, transferring one unaccompanied child or 100,000 Orientals by sea and land from non-essential avocations in this place or that to other environment and back again without mishap, fuss or feathers.

Composed of forty-five acquired, leased or controlled railways, this immense, corporate body, holding the keys of access to almost any domain and caucus of the sons of Babel, this syndicate that has the _entree_ to exclusive circles and “inside information,” that is rich in agricultural lands and demonstration farms, in timber and tie reserves, rich in gas rights and petroleum areas, that controls coal collieries, smelters and hotels and banks much specie of the realm, has a soul.

In her scattered, flourishing family many are called but few are chosen to attain the exalted places, which are easily memorized. If her sway is uncongenial or her pay seems not enough, you may withdraw and the ranks close up, but for those who remain--and they are 80,000--she offers standards of remuneration far from the foot of the column. Her pensions department, with a fund of $900,000 and a yearly contribution of $500,000 to the reserve, even now protecting 850 former employees, is generous, and I could cite you instances where employees resuming duty partly convalescent, have been relieved indefinitely for recovery, under salary. Several others, permanently incapacitated, have reason to be grateful to the Canadian Pacific Railway for gratuitous aid and acts of thoughtfulness seldom attributed to big interests.

Official Ottawa, Washington and the Court of St. James do not think it judicious to lay bare for public perusal at present, what the Canadian Pacific Railway Company may or may not have accomplished in the realm of finance and loans, apropos the great international struggle of humanity and democracy.