BOYHOOD OF EDISON, THE INVENTOR.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XVI, Issue 5358, 18 January 1879, Page 7

BOYHOOD OF EDISON, THE INVENTOR.

At twelve be began the world aq train-boy on the Grand Trunk Railroad of Canada and Central Michigan. To one who has noted the precocious se'fpossession, the flippant conversational powers and the sharp financial dealings of the young persons who for the most part abound in it, it does not seem a pr f- ssion for the cultivation of a spirit of quiet research or the most thorough acquirement «<f the sciences and arts But it is fair to presume that Master Edison at this timn had no very comprehensive scheme of development prepared. It offered the most available means of a livelihood. He went into it with su ?h a will that in course of time he became an employer of labour, having four assistants umler him for the disposal of his wares. Me is not averse to recur to the humours of this part of his life. " Where you one of the kind of train boys," he has been asked, li who sell figs in boxes with bottoms half an inch thick ?" "If I recollect right," he replied, with a merry twinkle, "the bottoms of my boxes were a good inch." There exists a daguerrotype of the traiu-boy of this epoch. It shows the future celebrity as a chubbyfaced fellow in a glazed cap and mulller, with papers under his arm. The face has an expansive smile— not to put too fine a point upon it, a grin. Yet there is something honest and a little deprecating iti it, instead of impudence. He was, as will be shown, an eccentricity among train-boys, and was no doubt sensible of it. He looks like a fellow whose glazed cap a brakernau would touzlc over his eyes io passing, while thinking a good deal of him all the same. «iis peculiarity consisted in having established in turn, in the disused smoking section of a spriogless old baggage car which served him as headquarters for hie papers, fruit and vegetable ivory, two industries little known to train - boys in general. He surrounded himself with a quantity of bottles and retort stand*—made in the railroad shops in exchange for papers —procured a copy of M Freseuius' Qualitative Analysis," and, while the car bumped rudely along, conducted the experiments of a chemist. By hanging about the office of the Detroit Free Press in some spare hours, he acquired an idea of printing. At a favourable opportunity he purchased from the office three hundred pounds of old type, and to the laboratory a printing office was added. It seems to have been by a peculiar, goodnatured, hanging around process of his own, with his eyes extremely wide open and sure of what they wauted to see, that his practical information ou so many useful subjects was obtained. He learned something of mechanics and the practical mastery of a locomotive in the railroad shops, and acquired an idea of the powers of electricity from telegraph operators. With his printing o/lice he published a paper—the Grand Trunk Ilerald. It was a weekly, twelve by sixteen inches, and was noticed by the London Tunca, to which a copy had been shown by I some traveller, as the only journal in the \ world printed on a railway train. The impressions were taken by the most primitive of all means-—that of pressing the sheets upon the type with the hands, and were on but one side of the paper. Baggage-men and brakemen contributed the literary contents. In ISG2,'during the battle of Pittsburg Lauding, the enterprising manager conceived the idea of telegraphing on the head-lines of bin exciting news, and having them pasted on bulletiu boards at the small country stations. The result was a profitable venture, and the first awakening of inte rest on his side in the art of telegraphing, in which he was destined to play such a remarkable part. During this time he continued his reading with unabated industry. His train carried him to Detroit, where there wore advantages he had never enjoyed before. Au indication of his thirst for knowledge, of a naive ignoring of enormous difficulties, and of the completeness with which the shaping of liis career was in hig own hands, is found in a project formed by him to read through the whole public library. There was nc one to tell him that all of human kuowledge may be found in a certain moderate number of volumes, nor to point out to him approximately what they are. Each book was, in his view, a distinct part of the great domain, and he meant to lose none of it. He began with the solid treatises of a dusty lower shelf, and actually read, in the accomplishment of his heroic purpose, fifteen feet in a line. He omitted i no book, and skipped nothing in the book. The list cuntained among others Xewton's ' " Principa," Ure's scientific dictionaries, and ; Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy." — Scribuerfor November. i