And that scheme of telegraphy with a steam-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 called to the manager, “The break is two miles below Poughkeepsie—­I’ve ordered the section-boss at Poughkeepsie to take a repairer on his handcar and go and fix it!”

Of course, this plain telegraph-operator had no right to order out a section-boss; but nevertheless he did it.  He shouldered responsibility like Tom Potter of the C., B. & Q.