CHAPTER IV
_Paul Pry_ ON WHEELS
"With all he had to do, young Edison found that he had time on his handswhich he might yet put to good use. One would think being 'candybutcher' and newsboy from 6 A.M. to 9 P.M., and making from $10.00 to$12.00 a day might satisfy the boy's cravings. But contentment wasn'tone of Al Edison's numerous virtues.
"He did not know it, but he was following the footsteps of that othergreat American inventor, Benjamin Franklin, as a printer, editor,proprietor and publisher. In one of the stores where he stocked up withbooks, magazines and stationery for his train, there was an old printingpress which the dealer, Mr. Roys, had taken for a debt. Mr. Roys oncetold the little story of that press:
"'Young Edison, who was a good boy and a favorite of mine, bought goodsof me and had the run of the store. He saw the press, and I suppose hethought at once that he would publish a paper himself, for he couldcatch onto a new idea like lightning. He got me to show him how itworked, and finally bought it for a small sum.'
"From his printer friends on the _Free Press_ he bought some old type.Watching the compositors at work, he learned to set type and make up theforms, so within two weeks after purchasing the press he brought out thefirst number of _The Weekly Herald_--the first paper ever written, setup, proof-read, printed, published and sold (besides all his other work)on a local train--and this by a boy of fourteen!
"Of course, it had to be a sort of local paper, giving train and stationgossip with sage remarks and 'preachments' from the boy's standpoint. Itsold for three cents a copy, or eight cents a month to regularcustomers. Its biggest 'sworn circulation' was 700 copies, of whichabout 500 were _bona fide_ subscriptions, and the rest 'news-standsales.'
"The great English engineer, Robert Stephenson, grandson of the inventorand improver of the locomotive, is said to have ordered a thousandcopies to be distributed on railways all over the world to show what anAmerican newsboy could do.
"Even the _London Times_, known for generations as '_The Thunderer_,'and long considered the greatest newspaper in both hemispheres, quotedfrom _The Weekly Herald_, as the only paper of its kind in the world.Young Edison's news venture was a financial success, for it added $45.00a month to his already large income.
"But _Paul Pry_ came to grief because he tried to be funny in disclosingthe secret motives of certain persons. People differ widely in theirnotions about fun. In a local paper, too, some one's feelin's are likelyto get 'lacerated!' This was the case with a six-foot subscriber to thepaper which was published then under Al Edison's pen name of 'Paul Pry.'One day the juvenile editor happened to meet his huge and wrathy readertoo near the St. Clair river. Whereupon the subscriber took the editorby his collar and waistband and heaved him, neck and crop, into theriver. Edison swam to shore, wet, but otherwise undisturbed,discontinued the publication of _Paul Pry_, and bade good-by tojournalism forever!
"While young Edison was wading through such mammoth works as Sears's_History of the World_, Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and the_Dictionary of Sciences_ (and had begun to wrestle desperately withNewton's _Principia_!) he was showing a rare passion for chemistry. He'annexed' the cellar for a laboratory. His mother said she counted, atone time, no less than two hundred bottles of chemicals, all shrewdlymarked POISON, so that no one but himself would dare to touch them.Before long the lad took up so much room in his mother's cellar with his'mess,' as she called it, that she told him to take it out, 'bag andbaggage.'
"He once stated that his great desire to make money was largely becausehe needed the cash to buy materials for experiments. Therefore, in thisemergency, he took keen pleasure in buying all the chemicals, appliancesand apparatus he wished, and installing them in his real 'bag andbaggage' car. As the railroad authorities had allowed him to set up aprinting press, in addition to his miscellaneous stock in trade, whyshould he not have his laboratory there also? So his stock of batteries,chemicals and other 'calamity' grew apace.
"One day, after several weeks of happiness in his moving laboratory, hewas 'dead to the world' in an experiment. Suddenly the car gave a lurchand jolted the bottle of phosphorus off its shelf. It broke, flamed up,set fire to the floor and endangered the whole train. While the boy wasfrantically fighting the fire, the Scotch conductor, red-headed andwrathy, rushed in and helped him to put it out.
"By this time they were stopping at Mt. Clemens, where the indignantScotchman boxed the boy's ears and put him out also. Then the man threwthe lad's bottles, apparatus and batteries after him, as if they wereunloading a carload of freight there.
"These blows on his ears were the cause of the inventor's life-longdeafness. But there never was a gamer sport than Thomas A. Edison. Once,long after this, he saw the labor of years and the outlay of at leasttwo million dollars at the seashore washed away in a single night by asudden storm. He only laughed and said that was 'spilt milk, not worthcrying over.' Disappointments of that sort were 'the fortunes of war' or'all for the best' to him. The injury so unjustly inflicted on him bythat irate conductor was not a defect to him. Many years afterwards hesaid:
"'This deafness has been of great advantage to me in various ways. Whenin a telegraph office I could hear only the instrument directly on thetable at which I sat, and, unlike the other operators, I was notbothered by the other instruments.
"'Again, in experimenting on the telephone, I had to improve thetransmitter so that I could hear it. This made the telephone commercial,as the magneto telephone receiver of Bell was too weak to be used as atransmitter commercially.'
"It was the same with the phonograph. The great defect of thatinstrument was the rendering of the overtones in music and the hissingconsonants in speech. Edison worked over one year, twenty hours a day,Sundays and all, to get the word 'specie' perfectly recorded andreproduced on the phonograph. When this was done, he knew thateverything else could be done,--which was a fact.
"'Again,' Edison resumed, 'my nerves have been preserved intact.Broadway is as quiet to me as a country village is to a person withnormal hearing.'"
The talk suddenly ceased. Then another voice announced from out of thehorn: "The second installment of the lectures on Edison will be given at3 P.M. next Friday. We will now hear a concert by Wayple's band."