9781422277669

From Port Huron, he crossed over to Canada and took a job as a night operator at Stratford Junction railway station some forty miles away. To make sure he stayed awake, he had to send a brief signal to headquarters at regular intervals. Traffic was light and he much preferred to take catnaps so that he would be fresh for his private experiments next day. He rigged up a clock mechanism to trigger a device that sent off the signals automatically. Headquarters failed to get a reply when they called his station immediately after one of these signals. A supervisor was sent to investigate and the game was up. Thomas was given another chance. Shortly afterward, he was told to stop a train at his station. He should have stopped it and then telegraphed confirmation. Instead, he sent the confirmation first. When he tried to stop the train, he was too late. It had passed through. Meanwhile, a train traveling in the opposite direction had been allowed to leave the next station down the single-track line. If the drivers had not seen each other’s lights and pulled up in time, he would have been responsible for a serious accident. Realizing that his negligence was a serious offence under Canadian law, he crossed back into the United States. Frustrated Inventor Thomas Edison was still only seventeen. He worked for short periods as a telegraphist at Adrian, Michigan, Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Indianapolis before graduating to the press desk of the Western Union office at Cincinnati—all in a single year. Western Union was the giant company that ran most of America’s telegraph services. By now, Thomas was a first-class operator and could work at forty-five words per minute. He simplified his style of handwriting so that he could take down messages quickly and legibly. He was earning $105 a month. Nothing could dampen his zest for invention. He devised electric rat traps and cockroach killers to get rid of the vermin that infested his rooms. In Cincinnati, as a prank he wired up the basin in which railway workers washed. As soon as they dipped their hands in the water, they got a violent shock.

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