CHAPTER XXI
EARLY STRUGGLES
The receiving outfits were completed; the aerials had been put up, oneinstalled at the garage, the other at the mansion. Grace naturally hadall, the say about placing the one in her home. The aerial, of fourwires, each thirty feet long and parallel, were attached equi-distant,and at each end to springy pieces of ash ten feet long, these beinginsulators in part and sustained by spiral spring cables, each dividedby a glass insulator block, the extended cables being fastened to amaple tree and the house chimney. The ground wire went down the side ofthe house beside a drain pipe.
The house receiver, in a cabinet that had cost the boys much painstakinglabor, was set by a window and, after Grace and Skeets had beeninstructed how to tune the instrument to varying wave lengths, they andgood Mrs. Hooper enjoyed many delightful periods of listening in, allzealously consulting the published programs from the great broadcastingstations.
The other outfit made by the boys, which, except the elaborate box andstand, was an exact duplicate of the Hooper receiver, was taken to theBrown cottage. Gus insisted that Bill had the best right to it, and asthe Griers and Mrs. Brown had long been the best of friends and livedalmost next door to each other, all the members of the carpenter'sfamily would be welcome to listen in whenever they wanted to. The littleevening gatherings at certain times for this purpose were both mirthfuland delightful.
The boys' aerial was a three-wire affair, stretching forty feet, anderected in much the same way as that at the Hooper house, except thatone mast had to be put up as high as the gable end of the cottage, whichwas the other support, thirty-five feet high.
Then, when the announcement was made that the talks on Edison were to berepeated, Bill and Gus told the class and others of their friends, sothe Hoopers came also, the merry crowd filling the Brown living-room.Mr. Hooper's absence was noted and regretted from the first, as hiseagerness "to be shown" was well known to them all.
The first lectures concerning Edison's boyhood were repeated. The secondand third talks were each better attended than the preceding ones. Cora,Dot, Skeets and two other girls occupied the front row; Ted Bissell andTerry Watkins were present. Bill presided with much dignity, mostcarefully tuning in, making the announcements, then becoming the mostinterested listener, the theme being ever dear to him.
On the occasion of the third lecture, Bill said:
"Now, then, classmates and other folks, this is a new one to all of us.The last was where we left off in June on the Professor's receiver. Youcan just bet this is going to be a pippin. First off, though, is aviolin solo by--by--oh, I forget his name,--and may it be short andsweet!"
After the music, the now well-known voice came from the horn:
"This is the third talk on the career and accomplishments of Thomas AlvaEdison:
"In a little while young Edison began to get tired of the humdrum lifeof a telegraph operator in Boston. As I have told you, after thevote-recorder, he had invented a stock ticker and started a quotationservice in Boston. He opened operations from a room over the GoldExchange with thirty to forty subscribers.
"He also engaged in putting up private lines, upon which he used analphabetical dial instrument for telegraphing between businessestablishments, a forerunner of modern telephony. This instrument wasvery simple and practical, and any one could work it after a fewminutes' explanation.
"The inventor has described an accident he suffered and its effect onhim:
"'In the laboratory,' he says, 'I had a large induction coil. One day Igot hold of both electrodes of this coil, and it clinched my hands onthem so that I could not let go!
"'The battery was on a shelf. The only way I could get free was to backoff and pull the coil, so that the battery wires would pull the cellsoff the shelf and thus break the circuit. I shut my eyes and pulled, butthe nitric acid splashed all over my face and ran down my back.
"'I rushed to a sink, which was only half big enough, and got in as wellas I could, and wiggled around for several minutes to let the waterdilute the acid and stop the pain. My face and back were streaked withyellow; the skin was thoroughly oxidized.
"'I did not go on the street by daylight for two weeks, as theappearance of my face was dreadful. The skin, however, peeled off, andnew skin replaced it without any damage.'
"The young inventor went to New York City to seek better fortunes. Firsthe tried to sell his stock printer and failed in the effort. Then hereturned to Boston and got up a duplex telegraph--for sending twomessages at once over one wire. He tried to demonstrate it betweenRochester and New York City. After a week's trial, his test did notwork, partly because of the inefficiency of his assistant.
"He had run in debt eight hundred dollars to build this duplexapparatus. His other inventions had cost considerable money to make, andhe had failed to sell them. So his books, apparatus and other belongingswere left in Boston, and when he returned to New York he arrived therewith but a few cents in his pocket. He was very hungry. He walked thestreets in the early morning looking for breakfast but with so littlemoney left that he did not wish to spend it.
"Passing a wholesale tea house, he saw a man testing tea by tasting it.The young inventor asked the 'taster' for some of the tea. The mansmiled and held out a cup of the fragrant drink. That tea was Thomas A.Edison's first breakfast in New York City.
"He walked back and forth hunting for a telegraph operator he had known,but that young man was also out of work. When Edison finally found him,all his friend could do was to lend him a dollar!
"By this time Edison was nearly starved. With such limited resources hegave solemn thought to what he should select that would be mostsatisfying. He decided to buy apple dumplings and coffee, and in tellingafterward of his first real 'eats' in New York, Mr. Edison said he neverhad anything that tasted so good.
"Just as young Ben Franklin, on arriving in New York City from Boston,looked for a job in a printing office, the youthful modern inventorapplied for work in a telegraph office there. As there was no vacancyand he needed the rest of his borrowed dollar for meals, Edison foundlodging in the battery room of the Gold Indicator Company.
"It was four years after the Civil War and, besides there being muchunemployment, the fluctuations in the value of gold, as compared withthe paper currency of that day, made it necessary to have gold'indicators' something like the tickers from the Stock Exchange to-day.Dr. Laws, presiding officer of the Gold Exchange, had recently inventeda system of gold indicators, which were placed in brokers' offices andoperated from the Gold Exchange.
"When Edison got permission to spend the night in the battery room ofthis company, there were about three hundred of these instrumentsoperating in offices in all directions in lower New York City.
"On the third day after his arrival, while sitting in this office, thecomplicated instrument sending quotations out on all the lines made avery loud noise, and came to a sudden stop with a crash. Within twominutes over three hundred boys---one from every broker's office in thestreet--rushed upstairs and crowded the long aisle and office wherethere was hardly room for one-third that number, each yelling that acertain broker's wire was out of order, and that it must be fixed atonce.
"It was pandemonium, and the manager got so wild that he lost allcontrol of himself. Edison went to the indicator, and as he had alreadystudied it thoroughly, he knew right where the trouble was. He wentright out to see the man in charge, and found Dr. Laws there also--themost excited man of all!
"The Doctor demanded to know what caused all the trouble, but his manstood there, staring and dumb. As soon as Edison could get Laws'attention he told him he knew what the matter was.
"'Fix it! Fix it! and be quick about it!' Dr. Laws shouted.
"Edison went right to work and in two hours had everything in runningorder. Dr. Laws came in to ask the inventor's name and what he wasdoing. When told, he asked the young man to call on him in his officethe next day. Edison did so and Laws said he had decided to place Edisonin charge of the entire
plant at a salary of three hundred dollars amonth!
"This was such a big jump from any wages he had ever received that itquite paralyzed the youthful inventor. He felt that it was too much tolast long, but he made up his mind he would do his best to earn thatsalary if he had to work twenty hours a day. He kept that job, makingimprovements and devising other stock tickers, until the Gold and StockTelegraph Company consolidated with the Gold Indicator Company."