FROM NEWSBOY TO FAMOUS INVENTOR.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 261, 25 March 1911, Page 9

FROM NEWSBOY TO FAMOUS INVENTOR.

THE STORY OF EDISON'S BOYHOOD. "An addle-pated boy." For three months Thomas Edison, the famous inventor, had attended the public school at Port Huron, Michigan, where his parents lived; and at the end of that time his teacher thus described hini, And Edison himself has confessed that he was always at tho loot of iho class, and had come almost to regard himself as a dunce, While !iis father entertained anxieties as to his stupidity. Mrs. Edison, however, had faith in the intellect of her boy, She insisted on taking him away from the school and teaching Him herself, with the result that before he had reached the age of twelve he had read, with his mother's help, such works as Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," and the "Dictionary of Sciences."

But before he reached this age, according to Frank Lewis Dyer and Thos. Comerford Martin in their "Edison: His Life and Inventions," he had begun experiments in chemistry. And much mysterious work did he do in the cellar of the house; but he found himself handicapped by want of pocket-money. He therefore became a newsboy, overcoming the reluctance of his parents, particularly that of his mother, by pointing out that he could, by this means, earn all he wanted for his experiment, and got fresh reading in the shape of papers and magazines free of charge.

The Grand Trunk railroad had been extended from Toronto to Port Huron, and he was successful in getting permission to go on the local train as a newsboy. " After being on the train for several months," to quote Edison's own words, "X started two stores in Port Huronone for periodicals and the other for vegetables, butter, and berries in the season. These were attended by two boys who shared in the profits. The periodical store I soon closed, as the boy in charge could not be trusted. The vegetable shop I kept up for nearly a year After the railroad had been opened a short ' time they put on an express, which left Detroit in the morning and returned in the evening. I received permission to put a newsboy on this train." It was about this time that the Civil War broke out, and as the war progressed Edison found that the daily newspaper sales grew so rapidly that he could give up the vegetable store.

A NEW USE FOR SMOKING-CARS. In those days no use was made of the smoking compartment, as there was no ventilation, and it was turned over to young Edison, who not only kept papers there and hi« stock of goods as a "candy butcher," but soon had it equipped with an extraordinary variety of apparatus. There was plenty of leisure on the two daily runs, even for an industrous boy, and thus he found time to transfer his laboratory from the cellar and re-estab-lish it on the train. Surely the country could have presented at that moment no more striking example of the passionate pursuit of knowledgo under difficulties than this newsboy, barely fourteen years of age, with his jars and test tubes installed on a railway baggage-car. But alas 1 one day, while conducting his experiments in the smoking-car, young Edison nearly set the train on fire, with the result that he was bundled off at the next station with his entire outlit—laboratory, newspapers, and everything else—and left on the platform tearful and indignant. It was through this incident that Eddison acquired the deafness that he has suffered from all through his life, a severe box on the ears from the scorched and angry conductor of the train being the direct cause of the infirmity. Hard times followed his ejectment, from the rolling stock of the Grand Trunk Railroad, and he was down to his last cent when he succeeded, in 1869, in getting a job with a telegraph company in New York.. And such good use did he make of his opportunity that he was able to remedy a big breakdown in the system when he had only been in the situation a short time, the result being that he was put in charge of the whole telegraph plant at a salary of £6O a month.

This enabled him to give more scope to his inventive faculties, and, after a little while, the manager of the telegraph company called him into his office one day and said: "Now, young man, I want to close up the matter of your inventions. How mucli do you think you should receive?" "I had made .up my' mind," said Edison, "that, taking into consideration the time and killing pace I was working at, I should be entitled to £IOOO, but could get along with. £6OO. When the psychological moment arrived I hadn't the nerve to name such a large sum, so I said to the manager, "Well, suppose you make me an offer." Then he said, "How would £BOOO strike you?" Tims, in an inconceivably brief time Edison passed from poverty to independence, made a deep impression as to his originality and ability on important people, and brought out valuable inventions. He then set up in business on his own account, and soon wis employing fifty men. *

How he ultimately developed the telephone, the. phonograph, the incandescent light, and a hundred and one other inventions has often been told, and the extent of his achievements may be gathered from the fact that a list of Mr. Edison's patents alone occupies twenty pages of this latest biography.