m-whistle was Edison's first
invention.

* * * * *

Instead of going to college Edison started a newspaper--a
kind of amateur affair, in which he himself wrote editorials, news-items
and advertisements--this when he was seventeen years old.

The best way to become a skilled writer is to write; and if there is a
better way to learn than by doing, the world has not yet discovered it.

Also, if there is a finer advantage for a youth who would be a financier
than to have a shiftless father, it has not been recorded.

When nineteen, Edison had two thousand dollars in cash--more money than
his father had ever seen at any one time.

The Grand Trunk folks found that their ex-trainboy could operate, and so
they called on him to help them out, up and down the line. Then the
Western Union wanted extra good men, and young Edison was given double
pay to go to New Orleans, where there was a pitiful dearth of operators,
the Southern operators being mostly dead, and Northern men not caring to
live in the South.

So Edison traveled North and South and East and West, gathering gear. He
had studied the science of telegraphy closely enough to see that it could
be improved upon. One message at a time for one wire was absurd--why not
two, or four, and why not send messages both ways at once!

It was the general idea then that electricity traveled: Edison knew
better--electricity merely rendered the wire sensitive.

Edison was getting a reputation among his associates. He had read
everything, and when his key was not busy, there was in his hand a copy
of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall."

He wrote a hand like copperplate and could "take" as fast as the best
could send. And when it came to "sending," he had made the pride of
Chicago cry quits.

The Western Union had need of a specially good man at Albany while the
Legislature was in session, and Edison was sent there. He took the key
and never looked at the clock--he cleaned up the stuff. He sat glued to
his chair for ten hours, straight.

At one time, the line suddenly became blocked between Albany and New
York. The manager was in distress, and after exhausting all known
expedients went to Edison. The lanky youth called up a friend of his in
Pittsburgh and ordered that New York give the Pittsburgh man the Albany
wire. "Feel your way up the river until you find me," were the orders.

Edison started feeling his way down the river.

In twenty minutes he