Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847, on a cold snowy night in Milan, Ohio. His parents, Nancy and Samuel, named him Thomas after his great-uncle and Alva after Captain Alva Bradley, a good friend of his father. The family didn’t call him Tom or Tommy. They called him Al.
Little Al wanted to find out everything about the world around him. He went about it like a scientist doing an experiment. He didn’t just ask questions; he liked to find out the answers himself.
Once Al broke open a bumblebee’s nest to see what was inside.
Another time he watched birds eat worms and fly off. So Al made a mixture out of water and mashed worms. Then he gave it to a neighbor girl to drink. He wanted to see if eating worms would make her fly. But it just made her sick, and Al got a licking with a birch branch.
Nothing stopped Al—not bees, not a licking, not even falling into a grain-storage bin. He was walking around the rim of the bin when he fell in. Luckily someone pulled him out by the legs just before he was buried under the wheat.
Al’s father owned a small grain and timber mill in Milan. Boats like Captain Alva Bradley’s carried timber down from Canada across Lake Erie, down the Huron River and through the Milan Canal. There it was cut into logs and planks at mills like Mr. Edison’s.
Trucks and cars had not yet been invented, and trains didn’t come to Milan. But one day a railroad line was built. Trains started chugging into town, and the canal wasn’t so important anymore. The railroads were faster and easier to use for carrying things around the country. So when Al was seven, the family moved to a new home in Port Huron, Michigan, more than a hundred miles north of Milan.
They lived in a big house on the St. Clair River. Al’s father did lots of things to earn a living. He worked as a carpenter. He ran a grocery store. He had a vegetable garden. He tried farming. He even built a 100-foot tower overlooking the river. For twenty-five cents, anyone could climb up and watch the boats go by.
The Edisons had only been there a short time when Al caught scarlet fever. It was a serious illness back then without the medicines used today. He ran a high fever. A red rash broke out on his skin. Al got better, but he realized that he couldn’t hear as well as he used to, probably because of the scarlet fever.
In school, the teacher complained that Al didn’t pay attention. He would drift off. Maybe he was bored, or maybe he just couldn’t hear everything.
One day eight-year-old Al heard his teacher telling someone that he was “addled.” He meant Al’s brain was scrambled. When Al told his mother, she was furious. She took him out of school and began teaching him at home.
Al loved to read. How surprised his teacher would have been to see the difficult books his mother gave to him. Books about history, nature, and science. He read them just as fast as he could. One book was a favorite. It was called A School Compendium of Natural and Experimental Philosophy. It was a science book. It talked about electricity, batteries, electrical toys, and a lot more. It had simple experiments.
Al got so excited, he started doing experiments all over the house. He used stuff like feathers, beeswax, and chemicals from the drugstore. His bedroom was full of jars and bottles. Finally his mother sent him to the basement to set up his own lab.
One part in the book interested Al most of all. It was about Morse’s telegraphic alphabet. Morse was the name of a code. It was used to send messages over telegraph wires. There were no telephones yet. You couldn’t talk to someone far away. But you could send messages that reached them quickly.
Samuel Morse made up the code. Instead of using letters and numbers, he used dots and dashes to send messages that became known as telegrams. The railroad played a big part because the telegraph wires that carried telegrams were strung on poles along the railroad tracks. An operator in a railroad station could wire ahead if schedules changed, or if there was an accident or a delay of some kind. Telegraphy made the trains safer.
An operator tapped out a message of dots and dashes with a metal key on a board. The message raced along a wire as electrical pulses to the next station. The dots and dashes were notched, or cut, into a roll of paper. An operator decoded the message using Morse code, and wrote down the message in words.
Telegrams were expensive, so mostly businesses sent them. But people sent them too for news they wanted to get to their families and friends fast, like the birth of a new baby.
Al couldn’t wait to try it. He made a simple telegraph key, and he began learning Morse code. He even set up a wire between his house and a friend’s house nearby. As they learned the code they began sending messages back and forth.
Soon Al would go to work on the railroad. It was there that his interest in telegraphy grew much more serious.
MORSE CODE
SAMUEL MORSE WAS BORN IN CHARLESTOWN, MASSACHUSETTS. HE WAS A PORTRAIT PAINTER FOR THE FIRST HALF OF HIS LIFE.
MORSE WAS ALWAYS INTERESTED IN SCIENCE, ESPECIALLY ELECTRICITY. HE WAS FORTY-ONE YEARS OLD WHEN HE HAD AN IDEA. WHAT ABOUT SENDING MESSAGES IN CODE THROUGH A WIRE? THE IDEA CAME TO HIM WHILE HE WAS ON A SHIP, TRAVELING HOME FROM FRANCE, WHERE IT HAD TAKEN A WHOLE MONTH FOR A LETTER TO REACH HIM FROM AMERICA.
THE SIMPLE INSTRUMENT HE BUILT IN 1837 WORKED THE VERY FIRST TIME. BUT IT WASN’T UNTIL 1844 THAT HE COULD SEND THE FIRST “OFFICIAL” TELEGRAM. MORSE TAPPED OUT WORDS FROM THE BIBLE: “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT?” IT WENT FROM WASHINGTON, D.C., TO BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, THIRTY-FOUR MILES AWAY. IT TOOK LESS THAN A SECOND TO TRAVEL THROUGH THE WIRE. |