The Boyhood of Great Inventors Part 8

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 p.a.w.nbroker's, and drank the money they brought.

But his love for experiments sometimes brought him into sc.r.a.pes 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 s.p.a.ce 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 gra.s.s six miles off could be heard distinctly at Menlo Park! There was the Kinetoscope we all know, which by swiftly pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sing-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 s.n.a.t.c.hing 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 t.i.the 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."

JAMES WATT.

There is perhaps no inventor's name with which the British boy is more familiar than with that of James Watt. In every college of mechanics or engineers we are met in bust or print by the kindly, shrewd, benevolent face of the great inventor of the Condensing Steam Engine.

It is difficult for us to picture what the world must have been before James Watt came into it--before, as it were, steam took its place and while yet men and horses and wind and water struggled feebly to do what steam now does with such apparent ease.

On the west coast of Scotland stands what is to-day the busy, thriving, seaport town of Greenock--the birthplace of James Watt. But in 1736, more than 150 years ago, it was little more than a picturesque fishing-village, looking out on a peaceful, smiling bay, where a few modest fishing-craft were to be seen, and beyond to the hills of Argyllshire, before smoke and funnels blotted the fairness of the landscape.

In an unpretentious little house in a Greenock by-street James Watt first saw the light. His father was by trade a carpenter, an undertaker, a general "merchant," for there was little compet.i.tion in those simple days, and men often "professed" more than one trade. In the course of a few years little James was left the sole surviving child of five, and perhaps on that account was specially precious to his parents. Neither as the years went on did he grow into a st.u.r.dy, l.u.s.ty country boy, but rather struggled up slowly, anxiously overlooked by a mother's care, a prey to ill-health and headache, even in his baby years. So that most of his early education fell to his parents, his mother opening up to him the beginnings of reading, his father those of writing and arithmetic.

School, to which he went by-and-by, proved a failure. Shy and shrinking, he cared little for the play of other children. He was slow at games, perhaps dull in cla.s.s, and the boys and girls laughed at him.

Ill-health, too, made it hard for him to get on. He liked best to be at home. For amus.e.m.e.nt he would draw in chalk on the kitchen floor, and for playthings he would choose his father's instruments. One day a neighbour remarked on the child's drawing.

"He should be at school," she said, "and not trifling away his time."

"Look first," said the father, pointing to the floor, "before you blame him. He is solving a problem in geometry."

The child was then six years old!

We are familiar with the story handed down to us through the centuries of how the dreamy-eyed boy was engaged in watching the steam hiss from the kettle-spout, the while holding a teaspoon below to count and catch the drops of water. Tradition likes to see in this the tiny seedlings of that mighty tree--the Condensing Steam Engine, but we fear that common sense in the shape of his robust-minded aunt was nearer the mark when she exclaimed--