Edison, His Life and Inventions [27]
only finishing the report after 1 A.M. One of the newspapers complained of bad copy toward the end of the report--that, is from 1 to 3 A.M., and requested that the operator taking the report up to 1 A.M.--which was ourselves--take it all, as the copy then was perfectly unobjectionable. This led to an investigation by the manager, and the scheme was forbidden.
"This instrument, many years afterward, was applied by me for transferring messages from one wire to any other wire simultaneously, or after any interval of time. It consisted of a disk of paper, the indentations being formed in a volute spiral, exactly as in the disk phonograph to-day. It was this instrument which gave me the idea of the phonograph while working on the telephone."
Arrived in Cincinnati, where he got employment in the Western Union commercial telegraph department at a wage of $60 per month, Edison made the acquaintance of Milton F. Adams, already referred to as facile princeps the typical telegrapher in all his more sociable and brilliant aspects. Speaking of that time, Mr. Adams says: "I can well recall when Edison drifted in to take a job. He was a youth of about eighteen years, decidedly unprepossessing in dress and rather uncouth in manner. I was twenty-one, and very dudish. He was quite thin in those days, and his nose was very prominent, giving a Napoleonic look to his face, although the curious resemblance did not strike me at the time. The boys did not take to him cheerfully, and he was lonesome. I sympathized with him, and we became close companions. As an operator he had no superiors and very few equals. Most of the time he was monkeying with the batteries and circuits, and devising things to make the work of telegraphy less irksome. He also relieved the monotony of office-work by fitting up the battery circuits to play jokes on his fellow-operators, and to deal with the vermin that infested the premises. He arranged in the cellar what he called his `rat paralyzer,' a very simple contrivance consisting of two plates insulated from each other and connected with the main battery. They were so placed that when a rat passed over them the fore feet on the one plate and the hind feet on the other completed the circuit and the rat departed this life, electrocuted."
Shortly after Edison's arrival at Cincinnati came the close of the Civil War and the assassination of President Lincoln. It was natural that telegraphers should take an intense interest in the general struggle, for not only did they handle all the news relating to it, but many of them were at one time or another personal participants. For example, one of the operators in the Cincinnati office was George Ellsworth, who was telegrapher for Morgan, the famous Southern Guerrilla, and was with him when he made his raid into Ohio and was captured near the Pennsylvania line. Ellsworth himself made a narrow escape by swimming the Ohio River with the aid of an army mule. Yet we can well appreciate the unimpression- able way in which some of the men did their work, from an anecdote that Mr. Edison tells of that awful night of Friday, April 14, 1865: "I noticed," he says, "an immense crowd gathering in the street outside a newspaper office. I called the attention of the other operators to the crowd, and we sent a messenger boy to find the cause of the excitement. He returned in a few minutes and shouted `Lincoln's shot.' Instinctively the operators looked from one face to another to see which man had received the news. All the faces were blank, and every man said he had not taken a word about the shooting. `Look over your files,' said the boss to the man handling the press stuff. For a few moments we waited in suspense, and then the man held up a sheet of paper containing a short account of the shooting of the President. The operator had worked so mechanically that he had handled the news without the slightest knowledge of its significance." Mr. Adams says that at the time the city was en fete on account of the close of the war, the name of the assassin was received by telegraph, and it
"This instrument, many years afterward, was applied by me for transferring messages from one wire to any other wire simultaneously, or after any interval of time. It consisted of a disk of paper, the indentations being formed in a volute spiral, exactly as in the disk phonograph to-day. It was this instrument which gave me the idea of the phonograph while working on the telephone."
Arrived in Cincinnati, where he got employment in the Western Union commercial telegraph department at a wage of $60 per month, Edison made the acquaintance of Milton F. Adams, already referred to as facile princeps the typical telegrapher in all his more sociable and brilliant aspects. Speaking of that time, Mr. Adams says: "I can well recall when Edison drifted in to take a job. He was a youth of about eighteen years, decidedly unprepossessing in dress and rather uncouth in manner. I was twenty-one, and very dudish. He was quite thin in those days, and his nose was very prominent, giving a Napoleonic look to his face, although the curious resemblance did not strike me at the time. The boys did not take to him cheerfully, and he was lonesome. I sympathized with him, and we became close companions. As an operator he had no superiors and very few equals. Most of the time he was monkeying with the batteries and circuits, and devising things to make the work of telegraphy less irksome. He also relieved the monotony of office-work by fitting up the battery circuits to play jokes on his fellow-operators, and to deal with the vermin that infested the premises. He arranged in the cellar what he called his `rat paralyzer,' a very simple contrivance consisting of two plates insulated from each other and connected with the main battery. They were so placed that when a rat passed over them the fore feet on the one plate and the hind feet on the other completed the circuit and the rat departed this life, electrocuted."
Shortly after Edison's arrival at Cincinnati came the close of the Civil War and the assassination of President Lincoln. It was natural that telegraphers should take an intense interest in the general struggle, for not only did they handle all the news relating to it, but many of them were at one time or another personal participants. For example, one of the operators in the Cincinnati office was George Ellsworth, who was telegrapher for Morgan, the famous Southern Guerrilla, and was with him when he made his raid into Ohio and was captured near the Pennsylvania line. Ellsworth himself made a narrow escape by swimming the Ohio River with the aid of an army mule. Yet we can well appreciate the unimpression- able way in which some of the men did their work, from an anecdote that Mr. Edison tells of that awful night of Friday, April 14, 1865: "I noticed," he says, "an immense crowd gathering in the street outside a newspaper office. I called the attention of the other operators to the crowd, and we sent a messenger boy to find the cause of the excitement. He returned in a few minutes and shouted `Lincoln's shot.' Instinctively the operators looked from one face to another to see which man had received the news. All the faces were blank, and every man said he had not taken a word about the shooting. `Look over your files,' said the boss to the man handling the press stuff. For a few moments we waited in suspense, and then the man held up a sheet of paper containing a short account of the shooting of the President. The operator had worked so mechanically that he had handled the news without the slightest knowledge of its significance." Mr. Adams says that at the time the city was en fete on account of the close of the war, the name of the assassin was received by telegraph, and it