Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [6]
Morse built an experimental line from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., and on May 24, 1844, transmitted his telegraph's inaugural message—"What hath God wrought!" His next transmission—"Have you any news?"—proved prophetic, as within a few years a torrent of information gushed down the slender copper wires. Whereas all previous long-distance communication depended on transportation-horses, ships, or trains carrying words on paper—the telegraph carried messages at the blazing speed of electricity. Newspapers, ever eager to scoop their rivals, were quick to embrace the technology, as were railways. Trains dispatched according to timetables tended to get off schedule and collide with each other; telegraphs allowed railroad managers to coordinate traffic safely. Telegraph lines followed railroad rights-of-way, and the two technologies advanced in tandem, copper wires stretched out alongside iron rails.14
At the end of the Civil War the Western Union Telegraph Company, the industry leader, owned more than 44,000 miles of telegraph wire, more than the combined total of its two strongest rivals, American Telegraph and U.S. Telegraph. At that time long-distance transmission between cities remained the core of the industry, but new telegraph-based services began springing up rapidly—most notably, fire alarm call boxes on city streets that allowed citizens to report the location of fires, and stock and gold quotation systems that linked banks and brokerage houses with central exchanges. Competition was fierce in the young industry, and companies were eager to gain an edge through technical innovation. The situation created rich opportunities for ambitious young inventors.15
* Although Franklin was the first to propose this type of experiment, he was not the first to perform it. He described a lightning experiment in a letter published in England in 1751. In May 1752 French experimenters followed his instructions and confirmed that lightning was electrical in nature. A month or so later—probably before he had heard of the French success—Franklin flew his kite into the storm.
CHAPTER 2
The Inventor
THOMAS ALVA EDISON began his working life in i860, at the age of thirteen, when he took a job as a "news butch" selling newspapers and candy on the Grand Trunk Railway that ran between Detroit and his home in Port Huron, Michigan. The job did not pay well, but he found ways to supplement his income. On April 6,1862, the Detroit Free Press was filled with news of the Civil War battle at Shiloh. Before the train started its return trip to Port Huron, Edison acquired 1,000 instead of his usual 100 papers and bribed a telegraph operator to wire news of the battle to stations along the line. At each stop the train was greeted by crowds of men eager for details of the battle, and Edison made a small fortune selling copies of the Free Press at five times the usual price.
Even as a boy, Edison displayed the skills that would serve him well for the rest of his life: an eye for the main chance, a knack for publicity, and a grasp of the possibilities of the latest technology.1
The young Edison—Alva to his mother, Al to his friends—never received much formal education. Born in February 1847, he spent the first seven years of his life in Milan, Ohio, before his father, a shingle maker, moved the family to Port Huron, where he attended school for less than a year. "Teachers told us to keep him in the streets, for he would never make a scholar," Edison's father