ve-pipe wire, and nails made out of
zinc contributed by his youthful friends, who in their zeal cut
pieces out of the zinc mats under their mothers' stoves. He had no
one to teach him telegraphy, but an accident--if accidents there
be--was unexpectedly to put him in the way of learning its secrets.
The child of the station-master was in danger from a moving train;
young Edison snatched it up and saved its life at the risk of his
own, and the grateful father rewarded him by teaching him what he
knew of telegraphy.

Armed with this rudimentary knowledge, and with what, in addition, he
had learned by practice, Edison passed the next few years of his life
in moving about over the country, seeking employment less, it would
appear, for the sake of employment than for the opportunity of
increasing his practical knowledge of the art that was to swallow up,
in his mind, all the other arts. But he seems to have succeeded almost
in spite of himself. He was so eager in his chase after knowledge that
he was continually tripping himself up. While still at his trade of
newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railroad, he had come across, at Detroit
probably, a copy of Fresenius' "Qualitative Analysis" and had become
so much interested in chemistry, that alongside his printing-press he
had fitted up a small laboratory with a chance-medley apparatus for
experiments, and one day a bottle of phosphorus was upset, and the car
taking fire was only saved by the energy of the conductor, who
promptly pitched the whole apparatus, with the printing-press to boot,
out at the door, and then gave the young Fresenius-Franklin a
thrashing. Later we hear of him, in the course of his wanderings, set
to watch a telegraph-machine in the absence of the operator, and to
prove that he was on guard he was to send the word six over the line
every half-hour. Not to be interrupted in the book he was reading, he
contrived a device that did the work automatically. In another office
he kept back messages while he was contriving a way to send them more
quickly! Disappearing from this office, he appears again in another,
this time in Memphis, Tenn. But his interest in solving the problem of
duplicate transmission proved so absorbing that he continually
neglected his duties, and on the occasion of a change of officers he
was dismissed as a useless member of the staff. At Louisville he
upsets a carboy of sulphuric acid which ruins the handsome furniture
of a broker's office on th