10. Edison, Wizard of Electricity

Thomas Alva Edison, the “Wizard of Electricity,” was born in Milan, Ohio, February 11, 1847. His birthplace was located on the canal. As there were no railways, it was a very busy little place. Edison used to spend all his playtime at the shops where the canal-boats were built, learning all about the tools being used. Thus before he was seven he began to show his love of machinery. When he was seven years old his parents removed to Michigan. Edison was already well advanced in education for a boy of his age, for his mother had been his careful teacher and companion. They had read and discussed many books together, especially history, of which he was very fond. Two or three books on electricity had come into his hands and these he read with great interest. As his father was poor, it became necessary, when Thomas was eleven years of age, for him to earn his own living. He applied for a position as newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railroad, and he was soon making from four to five dollars a day. When the Civil War broke out his earnings so greatly increased that he hired another boy, and had a place fixed up in an express car, in which he placed a small printing-press and began to publish a paper of his own. He gathered his news on the train and from agents on the route, often securing the latest news being telegraphed to the great papers. His papers had a good sale. Stevenson, the great English engineer, was so pleased with a copy he bought on the train, and with its editor, that he took one thousand copies, and thus the Weekly and its editor became known and quoted in England. He was reading, studying, and experimenting every moment he could get from his work. But he experimented once too often when a bottle of phosphorus was jerked out of his hand by the jolting of the train and instantly the car was in flames. The conductor helped put out the fire and then deposited the youthful inventor, with his printing-press, on the platform of the next station. This ended his laboratory on the train, but he still continued his work, and coaxed his father to let him fit up a workshop at home, where he experimented with telegraph instruments, stringing wires on trees, insulating them with old bottles, and teaching his boy friends the mystery of their use. He was anxious to learn telegraphy, which he succeeded in doing, being taught by a telegraph-operator whose little child Thomas had saved from being killed by a freight-train at the risk of his own life. He soon secured a night operator’s position, but instead of sleeping in the daytime, young Edison spent his days experimenting, and so was too sleepy at night to do his work well. He lost several night positions, but soon got day-work and continued his experiments. He went from city to city, but he cared more for the wonders of electricity than the routine of office work, though his work was always accurate. In Boston he chanced to buy Faraday’s book on electricity, and at once decided that life was short, and he had so much to do that he must hustle—and he has been hustling ever since.

His first invention was an automatic repeater by which messages could be transmitted without the presence of the operator. Since then his inventions have been many and important, among them the quadruplex telegraph, the printing telegraph, the megaphone, the aerophone, the phonograph, the moving-picture machine, the storage battery, the incandescent lamp and light system, and the kinetoscope. He has received patents for more than seven hundred inventions by which daily life has been made more attractive. Thomas Alva Edison is the foremost genius of his day, and the modern magician who has made “the fairy tales of science” as fascinating as “Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp,” or “Boots and His Brothers.”