Edison, His Life and Inventions | Page 4

daily comfort could be secured
with it. But the little battery with its metal plates in a weak solution
proved a perennial reservoir of electrical energy, safe and controllable,
from which supplies could be drawn at will. That which was wild had
become domesticated; regular crops took the place of haphazard
gleanings from brake or prairie; the possibility of electrical starvation
was forever left behind.
Immediately new processes of inestimable value revealed themselves;
new methods were suggested. Almost all the electrical arts now
employed made their beginnings in the next twenty-five years, and
while the more extensive of them depend to-day on the dynamo for
electrical energy, some of the most important still remain in loyal
allegiance to the older source. The battery itself soon underwent
modifications, and new types were evolved--the storage, the

double-fluid, and the dry. Various analogies next pointed to the use of
heat, and the thermoelectric cell emerged, embodying the application of
flame to the junction of two different metals. Davy, of the safety-lamp,
threw a volume of current across the gap between two sticks of
charcoal, and the voltaic arc, forerunner of electric lighting, shed its
bright beams upon a dazzled world. The decomposition of water by
electrolytic action was recognized and made the basis of
communicating at a distance even before the days of the electromagnet.
The ties that bind electricity and magnetism in twinship of relation and
interaction were detected, and Faraday's work in induction gave the
world at once the dynamo and the motor. "Hitch your wagon to a star,"
said Emerson. To all the coal-fields and all the waterfalls Faraday had
directly hitched the wheels of industry. Not only was it now possible to
convert mechanical energy into electricity cheaply and in illimitable
quantities, but electricity at once showed its ubiquitous availability as a
motive power. Boats were propelled by it, cars were hauled, and even
papers printed. Electroplating became an art, and telegraphy sprang into
active being on both sides of the Atlantic.
At the time Edison was born, in 1847, telegraphy, upon which he was
to leave so indelible an imprint, had barely struggled into acceptance by
the public. In England, Wheatstone and Cooke had introduced a
ponderous magnetic needle telegraph. In America, in 1840, Morse had
taken out his first patent on an electromagnetic telegraph, the principle
of which is dominating in the art to this day. Four years later the
memorable message "What hath God wrought!" was sent by young
Miss Ellsworth over his circuits, and incredulous Washington was
advised by wire of the action of the Democratic Convention in
Baltimore in nominating Polk. By 1847 circuits had been strung
between Washington and New York, under private enterprise, the
Government having declined to buy the Morse system for $100,000.
Everything was crude and primitive. The poles were two hundred feet
apart and could barely hold up a wash-line. The slim, bare, copper wire
snapped on the least provocation, and the circuit was "down" for
thirty-six days in the first six months. The little glass-knob insulators
made seductive targets for ignorant sportsmen. Attempts to insulate the
line wire were limited to coating it with tar or smearing it with wax for

the benefit of all the bees in the neighborhood. The farthest western
reach of the telegraph lines in 1847 was Pittsburg, with three-ply iron
wire mounted on square glass insulators with a little wooden pentroof
for protection. In that office, where Andrew Carnegie was a messenger
boy, the magnets in use to receive the signals sent with the aid of
powerful nitric-acid batteries weighed as much as seventy-five pounds
apiece. But the business was fortunately small at the outset, until the
new device, patronized chiefly by lottery-men, had proved its utility.
Then came the great outburst of activity. Within a score of years
telegraph wires covered the whole occupied country with a network,
and the first great electrical industry was a pronounced success,
yielding to its pioneers the first great harvest of electrical fortunes. It
had been a sharp struggle for bare existence, during which such a man
as the founder of Cornell University had been glad to get breakfast in
New York with a quarter-dollar picked up on Broadway.
CHAPTER II
EDISON'S PEDIGREE
THOMAS ALVA EDISON was born at Milan Ohio, February 11, 1847.
The State that rivals Virginia as a "Mother of Presidents" has evidently
other titles to distinction of the same nature. For picturesque detail it
would not be easy to find any story excelling that of the Edison family
before it reached the Western Reserve. The story epitomizes American
idealism, restlessness, freedom of individual opinion, and ready
adjustment to the surrounding conditions of pioneer life. The ancestral
Edisons who came over from Holland, as nearly as can be determined,
in 1730, were descendants of extensive