his chum strung a line between their houses
and learned the rudiments of writing by wire. Then a station master
on the railroad, whose child Edison had saved from danger, took Edison
under his wing and taught him the mysteries of railway telegraphy. The
boy of sixteen held positions with small stations near home for a few
months and then began a period of five years of apparently purposeless
wandering as a tramp telegrapher. Toledo, Cincinnati, Indianapolis,
Memphis, Louisville, Detroit, were some of the cities in which he
worked, studied, experimented, and played practical jokes on his
associates. He was eager to learn something of the principles of
electricity but found few from whom he could learn.

Edison arrived in Boston in 1868, practically penniless, and applied for
a position as night operator. "The manager asked me when I was ready to
go to work. 'Now,' I replied." In Boston he found men who knew something
of electricity, and, as he worked at night and cut short his sleeping
hours, he found time for study. He bought and studied Faraday's works.
Presently came the first of his multitudinous inventions, an automatic
vote recorder, for which he received a patent in 1868. This necessitated
a trip to Washington, which he made on borrowed money, but he was unable
to arouse any interest in the device. "After the vote recorder," he
says, "I invented a stock ticker, and started a ticker service in
Boston; had thirty or forty subscribers and operated from a room over
the Gold Exchange." This machine Edison attempted to sell in New York,
but he returned to Boston without having succeeded. He then invented a
duplex telegraph by which two messages might be sent simultaneously, but
at a test the machine failed because of the stupidity of the assistant.

Penniless and in debt, Edison arrived again in New York in 1869. But now
fortune favored him. The Gold Indicator Company was a concern furnishing
to its subscribers by telegraph the Stock Exchange prices of gold. The
company's instrument was out of order. By a lucky chance Edison was on
the spot to repair it, which he did successfully, and this led to his
appointment as superintendent at a salary of three hundred dollars a
month. When a change in the ownership of the company threw him out of
the position he formed, with Franklin L. Pope, the partnership of Pope,
Edison, and Company, the first firm of electrical engineers in the
United States.

Not long afterwards Edison br