Al the telegrapher was a quick study, and like most of his passions-turned-occupations, the majority of his skill and talent came about by teaching himself through trial and error. But he could only learn so much on his own. He hung around the telegraph office to pick up what he could, but the boy who had a million questions as a toddler had just as many when it came to telegraphy.
Fate intervened and set Al on the path toward his ultimate destiny one day while he was standing among the tracks at a train station. As a boxcar was given a push to move it in the desired direction, a lone boy appeared on the tracks, playing without a care in the world. Al threw down his things and rushed toward the boy, scooped him up, and brought him to safety.
Turns out, the boy was the child of the station telegrapher, James Mackenzie, who had wandered away to receive a message and had lost track of his son. To repay his son’s savior, Mackenzie offered to take Al under his wing and teach him professional telegraphy.
Al became addicted with his first lesson from Mackenzie, and after ten days he retreated to his cellar with a collection of equipment and succeeded in building his very own telegraph key, a device that actually sends the telegraph. His years watching the machinists and mechanics around the railway had served him well, and Al became even more dedicated. After five months, Al had learned enough from Mackenzie to become a professional telegrapher, called a “plug.” This classification essentially gave him a badge to work anywhere along the rail line, even though he was only sixteen years old. Al began roaming the country as an itinerant (traveling) operator, taking jobs all over and gaining valuable experience. It was around this time that he decided to drop his childhood name of “Al” and began introducing himself as “Thomas” at each site.
Thomas Edison preferred night shifts for a couple of reasons. First, he had always felt nighttime was the period of greatest concentration, not just for him but for those of the critical-thinking and inventive ilk. And second, he wanted to work night hours to allow himself more time to read, since there was less traffic over the wire, and also to have time to learn about the telegraph itself through inspection and experimentation. This method allowed Edison to advance his knowledge on telegraph technology and electrical science while he worked.
For five years Edison worked all over the country and became a first-rate itinerant telegraph operator. He was chummy with his fellow operators, which was more like a fraternity than a group of coworkers, and he enjoyed the friendly competition and also engaged in being quite the prankster. Things were good for Edison. The problem was: his hearing loss was getting worse with each passing day. Although he considered his deafness a benefit to his work as a telegraph operator because it drowned out the external noises and focused him on the clicks over the wire, his hearing needed to be good enough to pick up even the faintest transmission. His degenerating hearing was making his job more difficult. But, like when he’d saved the young Mackenzie child, fate stepped in and set Edison on the proper course.
After a group of men had seen an advertisement claiming telegraph operators were in demand in Brazil, they chartered a steamer and invited Edison to come with them. Edison abruptly quit his job and set out to join them. Not much is known about why Edison made the decision to leave the country. Perhaps his hearing loss was worse than he had let on. In the end, though, his plans changed when a riot in New Orleans delayed the trip. There, as young Edison waited to continue his trek to another lifestyle, a man told him that only in the US could someone bring out his full worth and achieve greatness. The man continued his commentary by saying any man who believed some other place had a better life in store for him was a “damned fool.” Young Thomas Edison left the steamer and returned to Port Huron, the man’s voice echoing in his head.
Soon after, Edison moved to Boston, which was considered the center of American science and invention, where he secured a job at the Western Union office, thanks to his close friend Milton Adams, whom Edison had met years prior while working as a telegrapher in Cincinnati. The roaming telegrapher was now stationary for the first time in half a decade, setting up shop in Boston.
It was in Boston that Edison read Michael Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity. He took in each word wide-eyed, captivated by the principles and theory behind this little-known science. While he wouldn’t immediately give himself over to learning about and experimenting with electricity, Faraday’s book gave his mind the jolt it needed to focus on not just using technology but improving existing devices and inventing his own.
In 1868, the first in a long line of patents in Edison’s name appeared in the form of an automatic vote counter, utilizing a complex mechanical system. It worked well, by all accounts, to the point where recording votes became an easy, accurate task. For this very reason, though, politicians despised the invention, saying they would never use such a device. When Edison gave them a blank stare, he was told, “Young man, if there is any invention on earth that we don’t want down here, it is this.” These congressmen had the opinion that voting should be slow, drawn-out, and complicated, because they intended to doctor the results in their favor. If a system without any delay or hiccups were set up, there’d be no opportunity to rig elections. “It was a lesson to me,” Edison would conclude later in life. From that point on he decided to “never invent anything which was not wanted, or which was not necessary to the community at large.”
In the January 1869 issue of the Journal of the Telegraph, an announcement read: “Thomas A. Edison, former operator, would hereafter devote his full time to bringing out his inventions.” It then referenced an article from the June 1868 issue, in which it had been stated that Edison had created a “mode of transmission both ways on a single wire,” which was now, the announcement claimed, for sale at Charles Williams Jr.’s machine shop. Thomas Alva Edison had become the first-ever inventor by trade.
Becoming a full-time inventor was a risky move, one that didn’t result in immediate success since his inventions had failed to sell, but Edison decided to double down on his risk-taking and move to the hottest spot for business, invention, and money.
A twenty-two-year-old Thomas Edison arrived in New York broke and jobless. He had a dollar, which he spent on food, and then accepted an offer from friend Franklin L. Pope to hole up on a cot in the battery room of the Gold Indicator Company, where Pope worked. Fate, as it had before, stepped in once again and rerouted Edison’s life.
Edison’s lucky break involved the stock market, the place where people buy and sell stakes in a business, company, or product. A stock is a share of ownership, and the more units a person has, the more invested they are in the company or product. As more stock is bought, the higher the value of the business or product.
Days after Edison arrived at the Gold Indicator Company, the central transmitter that ran the stock ticker—which displays changes, called “ticks,” in the reported up or down movement of a company, business, or product—stopped working. Completely. This ticker was an essential component in knowing the gold prices to help properly advise the Gold Indicator Company’s many clients. No one could fix the transmitter, even as bodies accumulated alongside the device and heads were put together. The owner, Dr. Samuel Laws, saw his business crumbling right before his eyes.
Amid the panic, a calm, composed Thomas Edison walked up to Laws and said he could probably fix it if the many frantic workers would clear a path and let him get to it. Laws all but shoved Edison toward the transmitter, the sea of confused experts parting before him.
Edison had spent a good deal of time watching and studying the contraption during his temporary residence in the building. He’d studied its inner workings, so he had an idea what might be wrong. Edison took the cover off the transmitter and picked out a spring that had fallen in with the gears, and it was fixed. The hum of the machinery picked back up, sighs and laughter sprinkled the room, and Thomas Edison was made the chief technical advisor for Dr. Laws.
In this new post, Edison let his gift for
making things better shine. From those early days tinkering in his cellar laboratory to selling sweet treats on the rails as a candy butcher to his lesson learned with his creation of the unwanted vote recorder, the young man knew that the key was taking something—whatever it was—and making it more useful to the public. Not because he wanted to better society, but because there was more profit in making something more useful.
Edison took this approach at the Gold Indicator Company when he invented a unison correcting device that stopped all stock tickers along a line and reset them at regular intervals. Such a device was direly needed in the industry because mechanical problems happened every so often, with all tickers. This resulted in misreading the code on the line, which in turn hurt profits and created a higher likelihood of suffering losses. This correcting device was quickly bought by Gold and Stock Telegraph Company for a lofty forty-thousand-dollar price, which was paid to Edison by check. However, when Edison brought the check to the bank and they claimed it could not be cashed, he angrily went back to Gold and Stock to complain. Marshall Lefferts, the president of Gold and Stock, kindly informed Edison that it was necessary to sign the back of the check to endorse it first. The red-faced inventor nodded and accepted his valuable lesson from Lefferts.
Things picked up in earnest for Edison as he also sold, to Western Union, what would become a widely used device in the form of a type-printing telegraph that would record and print prices of gold and silver.
With another fifteen thousand dollars in his pocket thanks to the sale of the type-print telegraph—after endorsing the check, of course—Edison set up a factory in New York. But that exciting news was quickly followed by sad news from his old home in Port Huron: his mother had passed. His mother’s death hit him hard, but Edison had a different way of dealing with grief. He threw himself into his work. With a constantly growing staff of workers by his side, Edison put in long hours and slept sparingly. He was a good boss, most said, the type who didn’t ask from his workers what he didn’t put forth himself.
In the early 1870s, with his New York factory humming with activity, Edison and company produced a slew of inventions, including a telegraph that printed messages on a strip of paper, and a failed attempt at an underwater telegraphy system for the British post office.
While some inventions flourished and some floundered, Edison’s mind-set remained the same: work harder and invent more; learn from failure and use it to improve. One factory grew to three and then four, and never was there a lull in the process, as once an invention had reached a point of stagnation, Edison and his crew directed their efforts to a new project to help maintain consistency without losing productivity.
Finding time to have a family—phrased intentionally, as Edison viewed a wife and children and a home as “things” one should “have,” akin to furniture and household supplies—twenty-four-year-old Thomas Edison married sixteen-year-old Mary Stilwell on Christmas Day in 1871. They would go on to have three children together, despite the fact that Edison rarely went home, instead opting to sleep at the factory most days and nights.
Telegraphy remained a focus for Edison, leading to the invention of the quadruplex, a telegraph that sent simultaneous messages over the same wire—something it seemed every inventor was trying to do at the time. Edison also invented and developed the very useful automatic telegraph, which allowed the telegrapher on the receiving end to record the message on a long strip of paper.
Indeed, Thomas Alva Edison had built himself up from the ashes—literally, from the barn fire in Milan, Ohio—but he was not content with remaining where he was. This man had had a taste of success, and he wanted more.
4 A WIZARD IS BORN
While the telegraph served as the springboard device that launched Thomas Edison’s career as an inventor, the electric pen was the invention that removed the chains that had held him tightly to the telegraph. It served as an epiphany that there was more to be had in this game of invention, and when it came to profit, he knew, “There is more money in this [invention] than telegraphy.”
The idea of the electric pen actually came about because of the printing telegraph, which had left a trail of chemical solution on the paper as it recorded messages. Edison determined that if he could use a small needle to perforate the sheet of paper, it would create a stencil of what had been written. Then the stencil was placed in the press and a roller was used to run ink through the holes in the stencil, which created a copy of the document. It was the earliest form of a copying device and went on to be used for the next century, until the birth of the Xerox machine rendered it obsolete. More important to Edison, this innovation was something different from the telegraph, and it signaled to him that there was an opportunity in inventing on a full-time basis. Thomas Edison the full-time inventor was open for business.
Edison’s electric pen
Beginning with about fifteen coworkers—including his dynamic promoter Edward Johnson, chief machinist “Honest” John Kruesi, and right-hand man Charles Batchelor—Edison set up shop in Menlo Park, New Jersey, a place barely listed on the map at the time. Although he was not yet thirty years old, he was often referred to as “the Old Man” by his employees.
Menlo Park became invention headquarters, or as Edison himself called it, his “invention factory.” Edison’s three-story house was where his wife and children stayed, and it was the first building visitors encountered from the railroad station, which in truth was merely a small wooden platform. In time, a series of other buildings would be added to the surrounding Menlo Park estate. But Edison did not reside in the family house as much as he did in the Menlo Park laboratory. Along with his fraternity of inventors, Edison spent most of his time in the bustling lab.
After a few months getting the building into working order—with a reception room, an office, and a machine shop on the lower level, and the laboratory on the upper floor—Edison and his invention factory began working in earnest in May 1876. Averaging some twenty working hours per day, accompanied by catnaps here and there when he reached exhaustion, the trusted leader of Menlo Park championed his method of producing “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so.”
Menlo Park laboratory
And so it went for over a year. Unending work inside the lab, the only downtime the small meals the crew had together, highlighted by the “midnight suppers” they routinely held, which were more about hanging out as a group than a time to have a solid meal.
Minor inventions cropped up, the electric pen continued production, and the automatic telegraph remained a focus. But it was another man’s invention that would lead to the invention Edison would later call his “baby.”
Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, though many historians argue whether it was Bell or Elisha Gray who truly deserves credit, since initial patents were filed within hours of each other. What would ultimately be considered Bell’s creation became a focus for Edison and his group at Menlo Park.
Edison took on the task of trying to improve the telephone—improvement of an existing and successful device sometimes spelled even more profit than the invention itself—and the result was a carbon transmitter that conducted the human voice more impressively than Bell’s magnetic model. The creation of his own type of “musical telephone” allowed Edison to enter into competition with Gray and Bell.
It was at the intersection of the musical telephone and the automatic telegraph that Thomas Edison would meet the invention he would later call his “baby,” the phonograph. Edison’s musical telephone allowed people to hear music even if they weren’t where the music was being played. The automatic telegraph made it possible to record a message—with a stylus and a strip of paper—to be read by the operator at a later time. Those two devices were the primary factors that helped conceive Edison’s phonograph, as it was a fusion of these two inventions. Along with the electric condenser, which included the idea of applying a coat of wax over paper, these inventions would lead to t
he birth of not just Edison’s “baby” invention, the phonograph, but his status as a full-blown celebrity.
* * *
July 18, 1877, 12:45 a.m.
Menlo Park, New Jersey
Midnight supper had just wrapped up. Workers were still hanging around comparing different types of diaphragms for the telephone. Without giving it much thought, the Old Man spoke into a diaphragm mounted inside a rubber mouthpiece. He pressed his finger on the other side of the diaphragm as he spoke. The vibrations tickled his fingertips.
“Batch, if we had a point on this,” Edison said to Charles Batchelor, “we could make a record on some material which we could afterwards pull under the point, and it would give us speech back.”
Edison’s statement of observation was a falling domino that pushed its weight into the next, as John Kruesi soldered a needle to the middle of a diaphragm. The next domino fell when Kruesi attached the diaphragm to a stand that held one of the automatic telegraph wheels, which toppled the neighboring domino: Batchelor cutting some strips of wax paper. From there, the line of dominoes fell quickly, culminating with a contraption that had wax paper inserted on top of a wheel, and a needle resting lightly on the paper.
The Old Man sat and lowered his chin to the mouthpiece. As Batchelor tugged the paper, Edison pronounced what had become the standard phrase the lab used to test different diaphragms: “Mary had a little lamb.”
The Electric War Page 3
