Edison, His Life and Inventions | Page 7

Edison as a youth was so clever with his pencil that it was proposed to
send him to Paris as an art student. In later life he was manager of the
local street railway lines at Port Huron, Michigan, in which he was
heavily interested. He also owned a good farm near that town, and
during the ill-health at the close of his life, when compelled to spend
much of the time indoors, he devoted himself almost entirely to
sketching. It has been noted by intimate observers of Thomas A.
Edison that in discussing any project or new idea his first impulse is to
take up any piece of paper available and make drawings of it. His
voluminous note-books are a mass of sketches. Mrs-Tannie Edison
Bailey, the sister, had, on the other hand, a great deal of literary ability,
and spent much of her time in writing.

The great inventor, whose iron endurance and stern will have enabled
him to wear down all his associates by work sustained through arduous
days and sleepless nights, was not at all strong as a child, and was of
fragile appearance. He had an abnormally large but well-shaped head,
and it is said that the local doctors feared he might have brain trouble.
In fact, on account of his assumed delicacy, he was not allowed to go to
school for some years, and even when he did attend for a short time the
results were not encouraging--his mother being hotly indignant upon
hearing that the teacher had spoken of him to an inspector as "addled."
The youth was, indeed, fortunate far beyond the ordinary in having a
mother at once loving, well-informed, and ambitious, capable herself,
from her experience as a teacher, of undertaking and giving him an
education better than could be secured in the local schools of the day.
Certain it is that under this simple regime studious habits were formed
and a taste for literature developed that have lasted to this day. If ever
there was a man who tore the heart out of books it is Edison, and what
has once been read by him is never forgotten if useful or worthy of
submission to the test of experiment.
But even thus early the stronger love of mechanical processes and of
probing natural forces manifested itself. Edison has said that he never
saw a statement in any book as to such things that he did not
involuntarily challenge, and wish to demonstrate as either right or
wrong. As a mere child the busy scenes of the canal and the grain
warehouses were of consuming interest, but the work in the
ship-building yards had an irresistible fascination. His questions were
so ceaseless and innumerable that the penetrating curiosity of an
unusually strong mind was regarded as deficiency in powers of
comprehension, and the father himself, a man of no mean ingenuity and
ability, reports that the child, although capable of reducing him to
exhaustion by endless inquiries, was often spoken of as rather wanting
in ordinary acumen. This apparent dulness is, however, a quite
common incident to youthful genius.
The constructive tendencies of this child of whom his father said once
that he had never had any boyhood days in the ordinary sense, were
early noted in his fondness for building little plank roads out of the

debris of the yards and mills. His extraordinarily retentive memory was
shown in his easy acquisition of all the songs of the lumber gangs and
canal men before he was five years old. One incident tells how he was
found one day in the village square copying laboriously the signs of the
stores. A highly characteristic event at the age of six is described by his
sister. He had noted a goose sitting on her eggs and the result. One day
soon after, he was missing. By-and-by, after an anxious search, his
father found him sitting in a nest he had made in the barn, filled with
goose-eggs and hens' eggs he had collected, trying to hatch them out.
One of Mr. Edison's most vivid recollections goes back to 1850, when
as a child three of four years old he saw camped in front of his home
six covered wagons, "prairie schooners," and witnessed their departure
for California. The great excitement over the gold discoveries was thus
felt in Milan, and these wagons, laden with all the worldly possessions
of their owners, were watched out of sight on their long journey by this
fascinated urchin, whose own discoveries in later years were to tempt
many other argonauts into the auriferous realms of electricity.
Another vivid memory of this period concerns his first realization of
the grim mystery of death. He went off one day with the son of the
wealthiest man in the town to