Exercises

Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison was born in 1847, the seventh child of Sam and Nancy Edison. His head was so large that everyone thought his brain must have been damaged at birth. He was often ill and, even when he was well, he seemed both naughty and stupid.

One day in 1853, Sam Edison was seen beating little Tom in front of his neighbors. The child had burnt down his father's chicken house.

    "I just made a little fire," he said, "just to see what it would do."

    The boy seemed to have no common sense. "I can make nothing of him," said Sam in disgust.

    But, as soon as he could talk, the boy began to ask questions, "Why is that chicken sitting on her eggs, Mother?"

    "To keep them warm, and to make them come out of their shells."

Later the boy was found sitting on a nest of eggs, hoping to produce some chickens himself. In 1855 Tom went to school, but he did not stay long. He used to say, "I never got along at school. I was always at the bottom of my class." Tom ran out of the school house and never returned. He got the rest of his education from his mother.

    Nancy Edison succeeded where the school had failed. She introduced him to literature, reading from Shakespeare and Dickens. She showed him that history could be exciting. Soon Tom was a great reader.

When he was ten, Nancy showed him his first science book. After that, Tom spent all his pocket money on things for his experiments. Soon he had a large collection of bottles and jars, all marked POISON to make sure none touched them.

    Tom was deeply interested in the telegraph which had been invented just before he was born. By the time he was eleven , he had set up a home-made telegraph and was practicing the Morse Code.

    He needed more money for his experiments, so he and his friend grew vegetables to sell. Meanwhile the railway came to town and twelve-year-old Tom got a job selling newspapers on the train.

    Suddenly he became deaf. Probably the deafness was caused by an illness he had had as a child. In any case, he could soon hear only a little with one ear, and not at all with the other. He could hear best when people shouted to each other above the noise of the train.

    His deafness made him lonelier and quieter than before. He turned to books and began to educate himself. He found a public library, started with the first book on the first shelf, and read his way through the whole library.

    He could still hear the Morse on the telegraph, and background noise did not disturb him as much as it did people with normal hearing. He decided that he wanted to become a telegraph operator—but how could he afford to pay for the training?

    Then, one day, a station-manager's small son wandered onto the railway track. Tom Edison rushed out and rescued the child. His grateful father, who was a trained telegraph operator, offered to teach fifteen-year-old Tom to become an operator too. By the winter of 1862, he had learnt all that the station-manager could teach him, and he returned to Port Huron to be the town's telegraph operator in a little office at the back of a book shop.

   Soon people were complaining that the young operator was doing experiments and reading the shop's books in between sending and receiving messages. The telegraph manager wondered why, although young Edison always gave the "ready" signal at the right times, he was often difficult to reach on the telegraph. At last he discovered that the young operator had made a small machine to send the "ready" signal at fixed times, while Edison slept for a while! Edison used to stop sending Morse in order to write down any idea that came into his head. But he was such a good operator—by the time he was nineteen he was winning competitions for speed—that everyone always forgave him.

    But he wasn't willing to spend his life becoming the fastest telegraph operator in the world. When he was twenty-one he read about Michael Faraday's experiments in electricity. That was an important day for him. "I am now twenty-one", he wrote. "Can I get as much done as he did? I have got so much to do, and life is so short. I must hurry." And he decided to become an inventor.

    By August 1869 Edison had taken out a patent on a telegraph which could print out messages automatically. This was his first important invention. The telegraph remained his first great love. For a long time all his inventions had to do with telegraphy.

    He accepted a number of jobs from big companies. Western Union, the big telegraph company, asked Edison to produce an improved stock ticker for them. Edison did not hesitate. He hired fifty workmen, all with quick, light fingers. He made them work hard, but he worked hardest of all. If he was pleased with his men he gave them a holiday and they all went fishing. When a particularly difficult problem came up, Edison locked himself and half a dozen of his best men in the laboratory until they had solved the problem. Sometimes the men's wives came and beat on the door. "At times like this," confessed Edison, "my deafness is an advantage."
    Meanwhile he found time to marry a pretty sixteen-year-old Sunday School teacher called Mary Stilwell. Edison spent their wedding night in the factory, working on a difficult problem!
    Mary did not understand this husband of hers. He could carry in his head, for days on end, the plan of a new invention, until he had time to put it down on paper. She watched how he worked, forgetting everything but the job he was doing. But she loved him dearly, and brought up their three children almost without his help, for Edison hardly ever had time to play with them.

    At last, tired of city life, Edison built a big new factory, a laboratory and several homes at Menlo Park, New Jersey. Menlo Park was in the country but while Edison was there it was never peaceful.

    About this time Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell both invented telephones. Western Union called in Edison to see if he could develop a better instrument, without copying those for which the other men held patents. It was a very difficult thing for a deaf man to do. Edison had to hold the instrument in his teeth and "hear" the sound through the bones of his head.

    But he succeeded and, in 1877, he took out a patent for a "Speaking Telegraph Transmitter". Working without stopping for several days at a time, he developed an improved instrument, which contained the world's first microphone. Western Union paid Edison a hundred thousand dollars for that invention.

    Edison's private life at Menlo Park did have its happy, peaceful moments. Once he set up a microphone at a concert hall, and connected it to their home, so that Mary could enjoy the music. And he made a wonderful talking doll for his children, long before the days of the phonograph.

    Edison was always deeply interested in the human voice and how it was produced. He wondered if it was possible to record voices. There must be some way. He sat down and made a little drawing, then passed it to one of his workmen.

    "Make it, and we'll see," said the inventor. When the little instrument was finished, it looked like a cylinder with a small microphone at each end. Edison carefully fixed a sheet of tin foil around the cylinder. He turned a handle, and the cylinder, with its sheet of tin foil , went round while he shouted these words into the microphones:

    "Mary had a little lamb,

    As pure and white as snow,

    And everywhere that Mary went,

    The lamb was sure to go."

    A few moments later Edison turned the handle again. Out of the odd little instrument came his own voice, saying the poem. Everyone was astonished. They could hear every word.

    He showed the phonograph to the Scientific American magazine. The next day the newspapers were full of this wonderful new invention. People came to Menlo Park from far and near. Edison was invited to the White House to show his invention to the president.

    Edison kept on inventing for more than sixty years. Most famous people are remembered for one thing. Henry Ford made the motor car cheap enough for the ordinary family to buy. John Logie Baird invented the first television set. But what made Edison's reputation? The phonograph was only one of the great inventions he made. There were also electric light, the early cinema, the improved telephones and many others. And, when the great man died, it was suggested that all the electric power in the country should be turned off for a short time in his memory. But by this time the country depended so much on electricity that it was not possible to turn it off completely. Instead, for a moment, on the day they buried Thomas Alva Edison, all the lights in the country burned low.

(1,558 words)

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