Chapter III: Part 3

His boyhood was over. Manhood lay before him--rough places at first in the world, puzzles, difficulties, trials, but in the end name, fame, riches. If we could follow him past boyhood and just peep at the future, I should like to tell you how he let some of these fancies his brother had despised have free play; how he invented a new green earthenware, forming plates in the shape of ornamental leaves; how he coloured snuff-boxes and toilet vessels to imitate precious stones, and how the London jewellers eagerly bought these up. How he made flowered cups and saucers, familiar enough to us to-day, but strange and beautiful to people then. Under him things took a step forward. People even at their meals saw things of beauty. These became an education to them--an art. Besides this they found other improvements. Lids fitted, spouts poured, handles could be held! These were small beginnings, but from these Josiah made great strides.

And one of the secrets of these strides was that he bent his _whole mind_ upon his work. At night, after a day of hard work, he would sit down and write out every smallest detail of his experiments and discoveries. No pains were too great for him to take. Neither would he trust to memory, so often in pain and weariness, but with a perseverance that was never daunted, he would make his evening notes.

To him no trouble seemed too great, no detail too small. The boyhood rarely fails to show the stuff the man is made of, and it was no ordinary stuff the great potter was made of. So we are not surprised that step by step he moved upwards and onwards. Hands and brain were never idle. Often prostrate with pain and weakness, he would still read and think and plan. Indeed, so much did he get into the habit of planning that many a night it robbed him of his sleep, for he never lay down at nights without making in his head a programme for the coming day.

Another secret of his success was his courage. Was it long familiarity with pain--for his knee broke out again and again, and gave him weary hours of suffering--that taught him to endure and resolutely refuse to be overcome? Was it this made him say with Napoleon, "Nothing is impossible"?

He met all difficulties alike with patience and with a steadfast purpose to overcome them. He had two special ones. His workmen--often lazy, indolent, drunken--were a trouble to him, as were also the furnaces, where the heat had to be of a certain degree to fire his ware, and where sometimes the work and labour of months would be destroyed in a few hours. By patience he won the hearts of the first, and they came to trust him, and by patience, too, he gradually righted the second. He pulled down and he built up till the kilns were right.

"It must be done," he used to say of any difficult enterprise, "let what may stand in the way."

He had great ambition for his beloved calling. He wanted to make it an art. England had been long famed for cheapness but not for beauty, and so he set himself to study the designs of the ancients and of the Greeks, copying them on china and porcelain.

And yet it seemed that even as he took step after step there were ever on each round of the ladder new difficulties. There was a long-standing one--the wretched state of the roads in Staffordshire, and the difficulty of getting the ware carried to other places for sale, and of getting necessaries for the work brought into the county.

The backs of horses and donkeys, these were the only mode of conveyance--miserable underfed creatures that tottered and stumbled along and not seldom stuck in the muddy lanes or fell in the ruts and rugged roads, and often broke their legs and their wares, and had to be shot where they lay--a happy release for the poor animals. Josiah saw all this, and realised that something must be done to remedy the evil. So in the midst of his watchful care and constant thought for his beloved potteries he made time to push the grand scheme of a canal that began gradually to see daylight. It was not pack-horses that would labour slowly to Birmingham and Sheffield, but a broad waterway to carry goods to Liverpool and other seaports. This was what his native county wanted. And so he subscribed largely to this, and helped to push a Bill through Parliament.

"I scarcely know," he wrote, "whether I am a landed gentleman, an engineer, or a potter, for indeed I am all three and many other characters by turns."

In time Burslem, to which he had come back after absence, could hold him no longer, so he bought a place near and called it Etruria, because for long he had admired the beautiful work of the Etruscans away north of the Tiber in Italy.

By his wonderful enterprise he made this bare place blooming and fruitful, and from a lonely wilderness converted it into a place with thousands of flourishing houses and workmen. And he himself was the mainspring of it all--the moving spirit.

Now the inventions of his brain were selling all over the country, and indeed all over the world. His delicate china had attracted the notice of the Queen--Charlotte, the wife of George III. It was the full development of that "cream" ware whose first beginnings had dawned on his brain as a boy. She ordered a set of it, and henceforth it was known the "Queen's Ware," and she sent to Josiah Wedgwood and said he might call himself "Potter to the Queen."

And now his name was made, and soon a fortune followed. He discovered a "jasper dip," and he invented a special kind of ware of which he made vases, and for a time it seemed as if the country went mad for Wedgwood's vases. "A violent vase mania," he called it himself. The mania spread to Ireland and the Continent. Before this he had opened showrooms in London, and the Wedgwood vases were wont to draw crowds as great as the pictures in the Royal Academy. Nor did he confine himself to vases. He made portraits in china of great men, and fashioned beautiful chimney-pieces. His heart went out in burning indignation against the curse of slavery, and he produced a model of a negro chained in a supplicating attitude, with this motto round the figure: "Am I not a Man and a Brother?"

Now he had made his fortune, but the man remained the same, much as he had been as a boy--hard-working, conscientious, painstaking. As a grand foundation to all his work he had made the surface of the earth a mighty study, and when he died he left 7,000 specimens of soils and clays labelled and classified.

Even when rich and famous he still took minute note of details. He would visit each department of his works himself. He would have nothing "scamped." Well did the workmen know the "thud" of his wooden leg on the floor that announced his coming, and with his stick he would break any article he did not think perfect.

"That won't do for Josiah Wedgwood!" he would say.

As life advanced, while it brought him joys, it brought him also clouds and sorrows. His knee grew so tormenting that he was forced to have it taken off. After this he used a wooden leg, or rather many wooden legs, for he was very particular about having it often renewed. Partial blindness attacked him, general ill-health, but his pluck, his perseverance never failed.

As he withdrew a little from active life he took to gardening, but his family noted his failing powers--not of mind, but of body. Asthma was added to his other sufferings.

"I am becoming an old man," he wrote. "Age and infirmity overtake me, and more than whisper in my ear that it is time to diminish rather than increase the objects of my attention."

The end came very suddenly, and while he was yet not old. A pain in his jaw was the beginning. Fever and insensibility followed, and in his sixty-fifth year Josiah Wedgwood closed his eyes on a world that he left the better for his passage through it.

He had scaled the ladder to its highest height. He was born in a humble potter's cottage. He died in a mansion, surrounded by a population he had gathered together and made to flourish. He left half a million, but he had used his riches well. He had given of them to suffering and distress. He made a poor depressed trade into one of the flourishing industries of Great Britain, and for himself a world-wide name. He was a great pioneer, and he accepted with patience the difficulties, the thanklessness, the buffetings that confront the man who in anything attempts the first beginning.

But while we admire his splendid qualities, it is the singular beauty of his nature--a nature doubtless softened and sweetened by trial--his uncomplaining bravery, his thought for others, his simple, steadfast determination to carry through his life-work, in spite of the burden of weariness and sickness and bodily pain, that most of all speak to our hearts.

GEORGE STEPHENSON.

If a town, or even a village, is of any importance nowadays it is sure to have within it or alongside it a railway station, a place that brings it into touch with the great outside world. Some seventy-five years ago there were no railways or railway-stations in Great Britain, or anywhere else, and people were content to post or coach along roads behind horses. But now times are changed, and it is not wonderful that the name of George Stephenson, the man who has opened up the country and spread lines upon it like a mighty network, is a name to-day that people look up to as one of the greatest inventors the world has ever known.

Most of us are fond of seeing the small beginnings of great endings, so it is natural enough that for us the tiny village of Wylam should be of deepest interest, for here George Stephenson first saw the light.

We cannot visit Wylam without feeling at once that we are in the heart of the colliery country. Newcastle's lofty chimneys tower some eight miles off, and chimneys closer at hand belch forth great volumes of smoke and smut, and flaming furnaces shoot out lurid lights by night far across the country.

In a common little wayside house, just a labourer's cottage, standing on the roadside, some 120 years ago a baby opened his eyes on a world that was to be rough enough at first for his young feet, though at last they were to land on the very topmost round of the ladder.

The second child of the fireman of the old pumping-engine of the colliery of Wylam, little George was born to grinding poverty. Time as it passed brought other children besides George to the Stephensons, and soon it came to be a question how the fireman and his wife and six children were to live on 12_s._ a week!

It was indeed a problem to solve and a struggle to face. When food had been got for the little mouths, what was left for clothes and schooling? Very little for the first, nothing for the second. No schooling certainly for little George, and so he spent his childhood between running errands for his mother and standing by his father's engine fire, where the boys and girls of the village loved to gather to listen to old Robert's wondrous tales, or to see the birds fed, for the old man loved birds of all kinds, and would save the crumbs from his own scant dinner to feed the robins. Here it was that baby George learned that early love of birds that lasted as long as life. As a boy he would catch and tame the blackbirds, and these would fly about the cottage all day, and at night come and roost at his bed-head. Years after, when he was an old man, he used to tell how, walking with his father one day, he parted some thick branches overhead and lifted the child in his arms that he might peep at a nest full of young blackbirds. It was a sight he never forgot.

But, baby though he was, his days were not all spent in play. At home there were seven younger brothers and sisters to be nursed and watched and kept out of the way of the heavy waggons that were dragged by horses along the tram-road in front of the house, and much of this fell to George's share.

As the years passed the Stephenson family, obliged like other colliers "to follow the work," moved to a place called Dewley Burn, and now as George had reached the age of eight he was ready to earn some money!

To show how smart and quick the child was for his years there has come down to us a pretty story.

He and his sister Nell had gone to Newcastle one day, and among their little commissions they were bent on buying Nell a new bonnet. They found the very thing she wanted in a shop, but the price was beyond their purse. It was 1_s._ 3_d._ over the mark, and the pair, sadly downcast, had to leave the shop. Standing crestfallen outside the boy suddenly exclaimed, "I have it! Wait here till I come back." Off he darted, and Nell waited while the minutes wore to hours, and still he did not come. Just as she began to think he must either have been killed or run over he dashed up breathless and thrust the coveted 1_s._ 3_d._ into her hand.

"But where did you get it?" she asked, astonished.

"By holding gentlemen's horses," was the reply.

The child's first situation at this time was with a woman who kept a farm and needed a boy to herd her cows and keep them out of the way of passing waggons. For this the little herd-boy was paid 2_d._ a day. How happy he was in long leisure hours to bird's-nest or whittle whistles out of reeds, or in company with another boy--by-and-by, like himself, to be one of the world's great engineers--to model toy engines out of clay, using hollowed corks for corves and hemlock stalks for steam pipes!

Soon George advanced a step in life. His work was still farm-work--hoeing turnips for 4_d._ a day, leading the plough horses when his little legs could hardly stride the furrows, and working in the dawning hours of day when other children slept.

But his heart was really at the engine fire or in the coal shaft. It was "bred in the bone," and he gladly returned to the black, grimy life, and along with his brother became a coal-picker, separating stones and dross from the coal, and so earning 6_d._ a day.

By-and-by he was advanced to driving "the gin-horse," a horse that travels round and round at the pit's mouth drawing up and letting down by means of a rope wound round a drum, baskets of coal or buckets of water, and for this he was paid 8_d._ a day.

Long miles he had to walk every day to and from his work, "a grit-growing lad, with bare legs and feet," and I think we may be sure there was not a bird's nest on that familiar road that the little bird-lover did not know by heart.

His next rise was to a shilling a day. This was a great step up, and for this he had what was called a night shift, lading and unlading the coals as they came to the mouth of the pit, and reversing the rope to go down again. Monotonous enough work it was, but he held on to it for two years. And now another step up was at hand. It was a proud day for the boy--that Saturday afternoon when he was told that his wage had been raised to 12_s._ a week!

"I am a made man now," he exclaimed in great delight.

And now he was seventeen years old. He had really stepped beyond his father both in wage and position. But there was one thing which he had yet to master. It may seem strange to us, but George could neither read nor write. It began to dawn upon him then that things about which he wanted to know--pumps and engines and the great world of mechanics--could only be learned from between the boards of books that were closed to him. But with George to realise an evil was to try at once to mend it. Inside the boy's rough working jacket there beat a manly heart, with a great longing to make the most of his opportunities, to let no chance slip of doing his best.

So he actually went to school at nights--three times a week, spending 3_d._ out of his wages to be taught to read and write. He laboured on and made progress, and in time he wrote and read, and by-and-by he took another step and added to these arithmetic. With marvellous quickness he "caught on" to figures. In the long weary night shifts sitting by the blaze of the fire he would "work" the sums his master had "set" him or write his copies, just as years after, so eager was he to seize every opportunity that offered, he would many a time (in odd moments) chalk his sums on the sides of the coal waggons!

So little by little, by untiring labour and unwearied industry, by "neglecting nothing," he rose. The miners who were his daily companions were, many of them, a rough lot. Their life was a hard one and their pleasures few, and on Saturday afternoons--pay-day--their amusements were cock-fighting, dog-fighting, and drinking in the ale-house, while the future great engineer might be found engaged in pulling to pieces his engine, cleaning it, getting to know it as we know the character, the habits, the face of our dearest friend, all the time laying in such a store of practical knowledge as was to serve him in good stead in time to come.

Not that George did not delight in exercise. Indeed, few of his companions could equal him in athletics. There was nothing he enjoyed like challenging them to feats of strength in throwing the hammer or in lifting heavy weights. And even in comparative old age he loved to engage in a wrestle with a friend.

About this time George had a favourite dog which he taught to fetch and carry his dinner in a pitcher tied round his neck. At the appointed hour the creature used to go straight to his master, turning neither to the right nor to the left. But one day he was beset with danger in the shape of a bigger dog with murder in its eye. George's dog closed with it, and a deadly tussle began, but it beat the bully and came off victorious but bleeding. When he reached his master the pitcher was there, but the dinner was spilt; but George was prouder far, when an onlooker described the fight, of his dog's courage than he would have been of the most sumptuous feast.

But in spite of his larger wage money was scarce, and George beat about in his own mind how he was to earn a few extra shillings. With keen eye ever on the outlook for what lay nearest, he lighted on the _shoes_ of his fellow-workmen! He took to mending these, and he mended them so well that the pitmen soon got into the way of making George their cobbler. And from this he went on to making shoe-lasts for the village shoemaker. In this way it came to pass that in a fortnight's time he would sometimes make as much as L2. When he had by long and careful labour saved his first guinea great was his delight. "I am now a rich man!" he said.

Yet another source of earning money was at hand. One day the chimney of his house went on fire, and being drenched with water, the soot and water together succeeded in damaging an eight-day clock that stood in his kitchen. Money was still scarce, and the watchmaker did not work without pay, so George set to work and took the clock to pieces, cleaned it, and put it together again. Rumours of this new "handiness" spread, and colliers from far and near sent their watches and clocks to him to doctor. It was almost as if nothing came amiss to these wonderful hands or, indeed, to that wonderful brain.

A wheezy engine pump, a clock out of gear, a pair of worn-out shoes--he had a remedy for all. Painstaking, conscientious, thorough--the work of the boy shadowed forth the success of the man.

If I had space I could tell you how, after he ceased to be a boy, he became a splendid man. That divine capacity--the creative faculty for making something out of nothing--that had been struggling long within him came to the surface, and he burst on the world as an Inventor.

The boon he gave to men--the thing with which his name will ever be linked in history--is the Locomotive Steam Engine.

What battles he fought for it when the country rose in arms and said they would rather hold by the old post-horses and coaches that had been good enough for their fathers! They were hard to convince. They declared if railways and trains came the country would be ruined. The engines would vomit forth smoke. No bird could live in the poisoned air. Game all over the country would be spoiled. The sparks that came from the engine would set fire to the houses near which they passed. Hens would stop laying! Cattle would cease to graze! The man who said he would send engines flying through the air at the rate of twenty miles an hour was a fool and a maniac!

Then Stephenson showed the same patience--for the world was long of being convinced--as he had done on those long night-shifts, sitting lonely by the engine fire and working out his sums, or as years later, when prospects were very dark and money scarce, he wept bitter tears, "for he knew not where his lot in life would be cast."

But though only a self-taught mechanic, Stephenson stuck to his guns in the face of the most skilled engineers in the land. For two long months the thing hung in the balance. It came before the great House of Commons. George himself was put into the witness-box. Single-handed, undaunted, he faced a world that was all against him. And then he had to bear the great trial of his life. The Bill was thrown out of Parliament. But still he did not despair. He looked into the future, and he saw himself conqueror. The Bill was again brought forward and eventually passed. I could tell you then of his long course of triumphs. How his engine, "The Rocket," won a L500 prize. How really the first seed of the Railway System of the world was sown then. How then he got leave to make a railway between Stockton and Darlington, and in time one between Manchester and Liverpool. How when, in 1830, the line was finished, people flocked in hundreds and thousands to see "a steam coach running upon a railway at three times the speed of a mail-coach."

The people were carried away with excitement! The great steam-horse that we look at half a dozen times a day with indifference was thought to be the world's greatest wonder. And George Stephenson was the hero of the hour. As the train neared Manchester, the people in their excitement broke all bounds, and even the military could not keep order, as they swarmed on the carriage like bees, and hung on to the handles, many of them being tumbled off, while shoutings and cheers went up from a thousand throats.

And now that he was successful, now that people praised where they had blamed, and pandered where they had scoffed, the man remained the same--modest, single-minded, just what he had been as the boy earning his shilling a day by driving the old "gin" horse at the pit's mouth.

And now from the humble labourer's cottage he had climbed to the highest heights of fame. He was the first mechanical genius in the eyes of the world. The greatest in the land rejoiced to honour him. From the depths of poverty he had risen to wealth. Honours flowed in upon him. But the "boy is father to the man," and it was peculiarly true of George Stephenson.

"I never want," he had said long years before, when he was earning L100 a year, and was able to keep a horse, "I never want to be higher."

He was much the same as in those old days. There was no dazzling him with worldly display or worldly honours. He cared little for social distinctions. His instincts all along had been "to dwell among his own people." It gave him the keenest pleasure to have a day at Newcastle among the scenes of his boyhood, looking up the simple friends of his youth. And his tastes, too, remained in many ways just the old simple ones. When he was an old man, and nearing the end of his pilgrimage, when he was surrounded by every luxury of table and otherwise, he would call for a "crowdie," and with the basin of boiling water between his knees, would stir in the oatmeal with his own hands, watching it with great satisfaction, and then sup the whole with sweet milk, pronouncing it "capital."

His last days were very peaceful. He removed from the swirling current of business life into a side eddy, when he was about sixty, to a place called Tapton, where he lived a quiet life, meditating among his beasts and birds and flowers, reading in each something of the beauty of the mind of a Greater Inventor than he. He took no part in business life, leaving it to his son, though now and then he would hear from afar echoes from the old world as the old war-horse scents the smoke of battle.

There was no long illness to mar the end of his splendid energetic life. Those who had known him in the full tide and flush of health had not the pain of noting either physical or mental decay. He was at a meeting in connection with engineering in July. Some weeks later he took a severe fever, and after ten day's illness, without much suffering, the end came. On the 12th August, in his sixty-seventh year, George Stephenson, the great engineer, passed away.

The whole civilised world bewailed his going. He had lived long enough for it to realise and appreciate the mark he had made on the age. But most of all did the colliers mourn him--the men to whom he had been as a kindly father, a leader, a hero. They laid him in the quiet little churchyard at Chesterfield, and they raised monuments to him all over the country, as a grateful people will do,--erected statues and memorial schools, and painted portraits. But a man like George Stephenson needs no memorial of stone. He has left an undying work to speak for him, and a character that has moved men to admiration everywhere for its simplicity, combined with its greatness, its manliness, that made it possible for him, the poor collier's son, to meet on equal ground--himself also being a man--men of the highest rank in the land.

We cannot, any of us, imitate his genius or his power of invention, or his splendid physical strength, but it is within the scope of all of us, however young or insignificant, to copy his conscientious, unwearied hard work.

"Ah, ye lads," he used to say to young men when he was himself an old one, in his broad, honest Doric, "there's none o' ye know what _wark_ is!"

He has left us a splendid example of patience, content, courage, attention to detail. But most precious of all, of a heart that beat as kindly in old age as in youth, that made him dearly loved by his workmen, and that never turned away from hearing and helping those in trouble.

Riches and success and prosperity, crowding upon him in later years, had no power to spoil the simple beauty of his character, for the Wylam collier's son, besides being the world's honoured inventor, was also "one of Nature's gentlemen."

THOMAS ALVA EDISON.

To see as a boy the greatest inventor of the age, we shall have to cross the Atlantic and take a journey to the United States of America. England has done wonders in the way of discovery and invention, but it is to New England, as we call it, because she is a daughter of the old Mother Country, that we must go for a brightness and a sharpness of wit that sometimes make us think of the flash of polished steel.

We all know the name of Edison. It is not a name of history, for he is living to-day, a man still in his prime, still sending out from that wonderful brain of his things that astonish men, and have won for him the name of the "wonder-worker of the modern world."

I have before me as I write the picture of a square, brick house, with outside shutters hooked back, a white paling half encircling it, and a couple of bare, leafless trees before it. The house is plain and poor, and has a strangely unfamiliar look to our English eyes, but it is of the deepest interest to us as the birthplace of Thomas Edison.

The boy first saw the light in 1847, and though he came into the world with but a poor provision waiting him, he found himself welcomed with a very wealth of love and tenderness. Mrs. Edison had Scotch blood in her veins, and she was a mother in a thousand. It is a common thing in history to find that a son draws his greatness, many of his best qualities, from his mother, and this son took many of his from Mrs. Edison. She was his constant companion, his loving nurse, his gentle teacher during those early years of life that leave so deep an impress on the "afterwards."

The child was seven years old when the Edison family moved to a place called Port Huron, and there he began to spend every spare moment in reading. So earnest was he that he set himself to read through the Detroit Free Library, and had devoured a close row of volumes before his attempt was discovered.

Strange and solemn sound some of the titles of the books he read when he was twelve years old--a time when most boys are lightly dipping into newspapers and magazines and books of adventure. Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Hume's _History of England_, Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_.

In 1862, when he was barely fifteen years old, he came out more fully from the shelter of home and mixed with the busy world, making a place in it for himself by his own young wits. He was a newspaper boy, and sold his papers like other boys, not stopping still in one place, but going on the train to different stations along the line, and selling as he went.

About this time there was a great fever and ferment in America. The North were fighting with the South, and people panted for news of each battle as it took place. Papers with reports were devoured as soon as printed.

"Now," thought Edison, "is my chance," and there began to work in the brain of the boy a big scheme. As the first step to carrying it out, he betook himself to the station telegraph clerk.

"If," he said, "you will let me wire the war news on a few stations ahead, and have it written up on the blackboard, I will promise you some papers, and now and then a magazine."

He repeated his request to the different clerks along the line. His eager face and twinkling eyes and earnest words won all hearts, and his request was granted. He next went to the editor of a well-known paper.

"Give me a thousand copies," he begged, "and I will pay out of the proceeds of my venture." Here, again, he succeeded. And now it remained but to get the engine-driver to promise him a few minutes at the different stations, and he started on his venture.

At the first stopping-place he had been wont to sell some half-dozen papers. That day, as he looked out, the platform was strangely crowded, and it suddenly dawned on him, from the eager faces of the people and their excited gestures, that it was _papers_ they wanted! He dashed on to the platform, and in a few minutes had sold forty at five cents each, or about a penny of our money. It was much the same at the next station. The people had read the headings on the station blackboard, and they crowded on to the platform, an excited, hustling mob, for papers! It dawned on the boy, here was a chance to raise his prices, so he doubled them, and sold 150 where he had used to sell a dozen! It was the same all along the line. At the last station--Port Huron--his home, the people were most excited of all. The town was a mile from the station. Edison started off with his papers, but was met half-way by an eager, hurrying crowd. They all wanted news. He stopped, drawing up in front of a church where a prayer-meeting was being held. Presently the people poured out and surrounded the boy, willingly paying him five times the usual price of his paper. He began "to take in," as he expressed it, in his own terse, telling words, "a young fortune."

After this the busy boyish brain began to look eagerly ahead, to face life seriously. He did not start off on a fresh tack. He took hold of what was nearest to his hand, and he bent his mind on improving that. He had found people were in a hurry for news. The quicker they got it the better they were pleased. Nothing could surely be quicker than that they should get it damp from the press! So it flashed into his brain--why not print a paper on the train?

The question was no sooner asked than answered.

He looked about till he lighted on an old car, and he rigged it up as a printing-office with old types and stereos he begged from a newspaper office. In this novel press-room he threw off sheet after sheet of what he called _The Grand Trunk Herald_, the first and last paper ever printed on a train. The boy of fifteen was editor, compositor, and newsvendor in one. The paper "caught on," and the circulation went up to 400.

But, alas! misfortune was soon to overwhelm the young adventurer. One unlucky day the printing-office--the old car, which grew daily more decrepit and unequal to the jolting of the journey--by a more violent lurch than usual threw over a bottle of phosphorus. The cork flew out, and in a few seconds the car was in flames. They were easily enough got under, but Edison's venture had received its deathblow. The furious car-conductor would henceforth have none of him. He boxed his ears, and pitched him on to the platform along with his precious belongings--the whole paraphernalia of his craft.

It is a sorry picture that presents itself to our mind's eye. The boy standing half stunned, the rubbish and _debris_ of his belongings strewn at his feet, and the cherished old jolting car, the scene of his labours, gradually fading into distance! It seemed as if his bright dreams were all extinguished, his golden hopes doomed to come to nothing. As he stood there he faced it all--a mere boy low down in the world, badly fed, poorly clothed, almost penniless, but we do not hear that he either flinched or complained, or that a boyish sob rose in his throat. He was made of the stuff of the Stoic. It is our hearts that are sore and anguished, not chiefly for the hopes and dreams disappointed, but because of a terrible calamity that befell him then, when he was perhaps hardly conscious of it; but that grew darker and weightier as the years rolled on.

When the irritated conductor had boxed the boy's ears, so brutal had been his onslaught that the delicate nerves were injured for life, and now with the flight of years has come deafness to wrap the great inventor in a partial mantle of silence. It is perhaps we who feel most the infinite pathos of the thing, while the man himself bears his affliction with the same noble patience with which he accepted disappointment long years ago as a boy.

At that time he straightway turned his eyes bravely homewards. He picked up his precious belongings, and carried them to a cellar in his father's house.

It was about this time that his mind began to bend towards that which has ever held for him a keen interest through life--the Telegraph. A waking ambition in him desired strongly to perfect himself in it. He was poor and friendless, and yet firmly, doggedly resolved to get on somehow. So out of his scant earnings--still as newsboy--he bought a book on Telegraphy, and this he pored over night and day.

And now at this early age I think the great inventor must have touched that mine that was afterwards to yield him so wondrously of its wealth.

The boyish mind was putting out feelers, gropingly at first, in the direction of creation, that divine faculty that is granted to so few of us. We can recognise the seed in its first tiny sproutings. He and a boy friend resolved to make a telegraph. They made a line of wire between their houses, insulated with bottles, and crossed under a busy thoroughfare by means of an old cable found in the bed of the Detroit River. The first magnets were wound with wire and swathed in ancient rags, and a piece of spring brass formed the key. Edison pressed two large and formidable-looking cats into his service, tied a wire to their legs, and applied friction to their backs. But the experiment ended in failure. The cats, frightened and furious, resented the liberty, and parted company with, the wire, dashing off in different directions.

But failure never discouraged Edison, nor stayed the working of his brain. He was a true philosopher, and he was, like an elastic ball, possessed of enormous rebound.

Handed down to us there is a story of the boy which, while it may not throw much light on his brain, throws some on his heart and on his ready courage. He was still a newspaper boy on the trains, and while at most stations a few minutes was the limit of waiting, at a certain station where shunting took place the minutes ran to half an hour. The boy was wont to spend this half-hour with the stationmaster's child, of whom he was fond, or to loiter about his garden. On this particular day the engine-driver had unlinked the cars in a siding, and one was being sent with a good deal of impetus to join another portion. It came on steadily, no one on it to control it, and right in its path was the unconscious baby smiling in the morning sunshine. Not a moment was to be lost. Edison threw down his papers and his hat on the platform and dashed to the rescue. And not a second too soon. As he threw himself and the child free of the line the car passed and struck his heel. The two fell with such violence on the gravel beyond that the stone particles were driven into their flesh, but they were safe!

The grateful father was at a loss how he could show his gratitude to the rescuer of his child. He had little money and no reward to give. At last a plan occurred to him.

"I will teach you telegraphing," he said to the boy, "and prepare you for the position of night operator at not less than twenty-five dollars a month."

Edison was delighted. The bargain was struck. The wage seemed, no doubt, a small fortune to the boy--rather more than five of our English pounds.

And now he had got his "toe on the tape," his foot on the ladder, if it were only on the lowest round. In three months he could teach his master, and the promised situation was got for him. From that he passed to other situations, and gradually he began to make his mark.

He had a mind wonderfully quick to see a difficult situation and to deal with it.

There is a story told of how one winter a severe frost had coated the great river between Port Huron and Sarnia, how the cable was broken, and people could neither get news nor send it to the opposite bank of the river. The spot was crowded with people, baffled and vexed. Edison came along with a brain rarely at fault and faced the thing. Suddenly, to the onlookers' astonishment, he mounted a locomotive and sent a piercing whistle across the water, imitating by the toots of the engine the dots and dashes of the telegraph system.

In this way he shouted--

"Holloa, Sarnia! Sarnia, do you get what I say?"

At first there was silence on the part of the telegraph man across the water. The people on the bank were breathless with excitement. At last the reply came clear--thrilling. The man on the other side had understood, and the two cities could "talk" again to each other.

After this, people began to hear of Edison's fame. But the mania for experiments had seized him. The cut-and-dried monotonous routine of work seemed flat and stale to him by comparison. It was as if an enchanted region of fairyland had been opened to the boy. To be allowed to revel in it he denied himself food and necessary sleep. When he was seventeen years old he invented a telegraph instrument that would transfer writing from one line to another without the help of the operator.

There were no want of openings now for him to choose from, but sometimes doors after they had been opened were rudely shut again through envy and evil feeling. In the great world of invention and discovery there are perhaps more "ups and downs" than in any other. Some of Edison's fellow-workers were kind and generous--others were jealous and detracting. One manager did him an ill turn. He was unequal to completing a discovery he had begun. On the thing being shown him, Edison immediately "saw a light" and brought it to completion, but jealousy crept into the man's small mind and he dismissed the boy on a false charge.

So at seventeen he was thrown again on the world. Money was still scarce. Books and instruments and calls from home swallowed up the most of it. The boy was chafing under ill-treatment and a sense of injustice. The want of sleep, perhaps of proper food, was telling on him, but he looked forward with a clear, undaunted eye. He wanted to reach a certain town where he believed work awaited him. It meant a walk of a hundred miles. He was weak, disheartened, ill-prepared for it, but he did it. He arrived footsore and weary, with torn shoes and tattered clothes, and his worldly possessions tied in a handkerchief on his back.

In this shabby plight he presented himself at the telegraph office. He was eyed coldly enough at first, but by-and-by when tests were given he stood the tests. There was that in the eager eyes and underneath the shabby clothes that could not but make itself felt as a power. He began work. At first his fellow-clerks laughed at him. In time they were won over, and later he stood out as a workman of the first order.

He began to collect about him materials for printing--machinery without which he never felt quite happy. He did a clever thing one day in the office that brought him into notice. He took a press report at one sitting--a sitting that lasted from 3.30 p.m. till 4.30 a.m.! After that he carefully divided it into paragraphs so that each printer would have exactly three lines to print, and so that a column could be set up in two or three minutes!

It may be that about this time money was rather more plentiful, for Edison began to go to second-hand bookshops and so to gratify his deep-seated thirst for knowledge.

His kindness of heart was well known, and there were many about only too ready to take advantage of it. There were telegraphists who roamed the country in time of war--"tramp operators" they were called, who took short engagements and generally ended their time with a "spree." These found out Edison--a man who did not drink himself and a man who might be persuaded to lend them money--and these were his worst enemies.

One day he had bought at an auction fifty volumes of the _North American Review_. Half a dozen men were sponging off him in his rooms when he brought home the books and ranged them unsuspiciously round his walls. Directly he had gone out his guests helped themselves to his purchase, landed them at the nearest pawnbroker's, and drank the money they brought.

But his love for experiments sometimes brought him into scrapes and disaster, as when he moved a bottle of sulphuric acid one day, strictly against rules, and the bottle spilt, the contents eating through the floor to the manager's room below and there eating up _his_ floor and carpet, the unlucky accident bringing Edison his dismissal.

And now, at the age of twenty-one, after many different situations and different experiences, Edison turned his steps to Boston. His openhandedness had left him short of money. As was often the case with him, he was sailing very close to the wind. His dress was poor and shabby, and four days' and nights' travelling had not improved his appearance. When he presented himself at the office where he was to be taken on, the other clerks ridiculed him as "a jay from the woolly west."

They made up their minds to play a practical joke on him. They took the New York telegraph man into their confidence. It was arranged he should send a despatch which Edison was to receive. By this time Edison had so perfected himself in receiving messages that he could write from forty-six to fifty-four words a minute--quicker than any operator in the United States.

Not knowing his man, the sender began slowly--then quickened his pace. So did Edison. Quicker still he worked. Edison was in no way discomfited. Soon the New York man had reached his highest speed, to which Edison responded with ease, cool, collected, and stopping now and then to sharpen a pencil between.

By this time he had discovered that the others were trying to get "a rise" out of him, but he went on steadily with his work. Then he stopped and spoke quietly through to the New York man.

"Say, young man," he said, in his dry humorous way, "change off and send with your other foot."

But the New York man had reached the end of his tether and had to get someone else to finish, and so Edison won his laurels, and "the jay from the woolly west" was regarded ever after with enormous respect.

After that his place was in the front rank. Now he had reached the threshold of manhood, and a long, dazzling vista of achievement and success stretched before him had he known it. About this time a great, strong conviction of his responsibilities and of the opportunities life held out to him swept over him.

"Adams," he said to a friend, "I've got so much to do, and life is so short, that I'm going to hustle."

And if we try to look at what he has crowded into a life not long, we must allow he has indeed "hustled" to some purpose. As we briefly glance at the bent of his manhood, his doings fairly dazzle us. He read enormously all sorts of works on telegraphy and electricity, and he produced from his brain that which makes him the greatest inventor of the age. If we tried to enumerate his inventions the names alone would fill pages. We can do little more than name a few. Among the first of these was how to send four messages at the same time over one telegraph wire.

But even after he had embarked on the glorious sea of discovery, what "ups and downs"--what sea-saws of fortune were in store for him! Hunger at times, torn clothes, and battered shoes. But from depths and half-drowning up again he always came to the surface. He rose grandly, relying on his own indomitable will. About this time good fortune befell him. For inventing some telegraphic appliances he got 50,000 dollars, or rather more than L10,000. He could hardly believe his good luck, and it was with this he immediately rigged up for himself a workshop.

And now he was rapidly rising, and the field before him was gradually opening up wider and wider. He started a laboratory at a place called Newark, and from this time onwards his inventions seemed to flow from his brain in a well-nigh continuous stream.

His workmen were devoted to his service. His genial good-humour and kindliness, the absence of all harshness in his manner, and his love of fun could not but endear him to them. They caught the infection, too, of his earnestness. When he had an idea in his brain he worked at it, as it were, red-hot, almost without rest or cessation, and they were rarely reluctant to help him.

"Now, you fellows!" he would say, shutting himself and his workmen up in a room on the top flat, "I've locked the door, and you'll have to stay here until this job is completed."

During sixty hours, perhaps, he would take no sleep and little food, while his brain would work at highest pressure until the thing was wrought. Then he would relax, and sleep for as long as thirty-six hours at a stretch.

And now his fame had spread far and wide. The people at Menlo Park, to which he removed--some twenty-four miles from New York--began to look upon him as a wizard--a man possessing magical powers. It seemed to them there was nothing he could not do. Exaggerated tales of his wonderful powers spread over the country.

"If people track me here," he said (he had been besieged at Newark), "I shall simply have to take to the woods."

Child after child was the offspring of the inventor's brain. At one time, within the space of a few years, as many as forty-five were born.

There was the Microphone, which is much like the Telephone, except that in the Microphone the sound is magnified. There was the Megaphone, which brings far-away sounds near, so that cattle crunching grass six miles off could be heard distinctly at Menlo Park! There was the Kinetoscope we all know, which by swiftly passing pictures--as many as forty-six a second--seems to give us a single person in motion, somewhat on the lines of that toy of our childhood, "The Wheel of Life." And there was the grand king of inventions--the Phonograph--that overtops all the rest.

We know it, all of us, by this time. We have listened to it, with the tubes at our ears, while the voice of someone speaking at a distance is distinctly borne to us, or the strains of a song sung by some great singer.

In 1888 Edison sent his first phonogram by steamer to England. His friend here had only to take out the wax cylinder, put it into his machine, and set it in motion, and lo! it seemed to him as if Edison himself were in the room talking to him!

Great men all over the world recorded their astonishment and their praises of the wonderful invention. The Queen sent him a message of congratulation. People flocked to every exhibition to see it--to the French one from countries all over Europe. They saw it and straightway went into raptures. Edison himself, looking into the future, seemed to see volumes it might yet be brought to do. It might be used to write letters merely from dictation. It might be used to make clocks speak--to tell when it was time to come to meals. It might be used for toys. A tiny phonograph might be placed inside a doll, and it would straightway "talk"; or in a toy animal, and it would grunt and growl!