Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [7]
The Grand Trunk left Port Huron each morning at seven and arrived about four hours later in Detroit, where it stopped over until the return journey started in the evening. To fill the long afternoons, Edison joined the Detroit Young Men's Society and pored over the science books in its library. After reading a chemistry text, he bought chemicals, crucibles, and beakers, installed a laboratory in the train's baggage car, and spent many happy hours experimenting—until a broken bottle of phosphorus set the car on fire, and the enraged baggage master dumped the boy's laboratory onto the tracks. Edison later recalled that the baggage master "boxed my ears so severely that I got somewhat deaf thereafter." (Hearing problems would plague him for the rest of his life.)3
Seeking other outlets for his curiosity, Edison practiced on the equipment at railway telegraph offices. In 1862 he plucked a small boy from the path of a rolling freight car, and the boy's father, a telegraph operator, gave Edison formal telegraph lessons as a reward. His training complete, he left home at age sixteen to become a "tramp" telegrapher, moving from city to city in search of new jobs and new experiences. Between 1863 and 1868 he lived in Ontario, Toledo, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Memphis, Louisville, and New Orleans.4
Edison at the age of fourteen, when he worked as a "news butch" on the Grand Trunk Railway in Michigan.
Within the hard-drinking, hard-living fraternity of tramp telegraphers, Edison stood apart. Not content to listen and transcribe, he wanted to understand the principles underlying the devices he used each day. While other men avoided night shifts as an impediment to carousing, Edison embraced them because they left his days open for experimenting on equipment and reading technical journals and books (one of his favorites was Michael Faraday's Researches in Electricity). Even Edison's amusements were scientific. At one point he and a friend acquired a device called an induction coil—which transformed low voltages from an electric battery into painful shocks—and wired it to the metal sink in a railroad roundhouse. As unwitting victims touched the sink, they shouted and jumped into the air. "We enjoyed the sport immensely," Edison said.5
In 1868 Edison landed a job with Western Union in Boston and appeared for his first day of work dressed in a blue flannel shirt, jeans, a wrinkled jacket, and a hat with a torn brim. The finely dressed Boston operators, amused by his rough appearance, took to calling him "the Looney" and hatched a plan to haze him. On his first shift, he was asked to receive press copy from New York. The New York operator, who was in on the plot, began to transmit at the rapid clip of twenty-five words per minute, but Edison kept pace easily. When the speed increased to a dizzying thirty, then thirty-five words per minute, Edison still did not waver. Finally, when the New York operator began to skip and abbreviate words, Edison was forced to break. He tapped a message down the wire to New York: "You seem to be tired, suppose you send a while with your other foot." The Boston operators burst into laughter. The episode "saved me," Edison said. "After this, I was all right with the other operators."6
Despite his receiving skills, Edison was less interested in operating than in experimenting with the equipment. At the time, Boston was second only to New York as a center of telegraphy in the United States. Using contacts forged during his years as an operator, Edison found investors willing to fund his experiments on telegraph printers, fire alarm systems, and a vote recorder. The last device—for tallying votes in legislative houses—never found a market, but it was historic nonetheless: It became Edison's first patented invention, U.S. Patent 90,646, issued June 1, 1869. The lawyer who filed this patent application for Edison described the young inventor as "uncouth in manner, a chewer rather than a smoker of tobacco, but