Al was twelve when his father helped him get a job on the Grand Trunk Railroad. The train traveled back and forth between Port Huron and Detroit, Michigan, every day.
Al was a newsboy. Along with other boys, he sold newspapers, magazines, and snacks like candy and peanuts or sandwiches. The train didn’t have a dining car. The passengers had to bring their own food or buy it from the boys.
The train left Port Huron at seven in the morning and returned at nine in the evening. It was a three-hour journey each way. Al had lots of time in Detroit before the trip back home.
Al was not a boy to sit around and do nothing. He spent time at the library reading, mostly science books. He also began to dream up other ways to make money on the train. He bought things from the Detroit market and sold them to train riders on the way home to Port Huron. In Port Huron he took vegetables from his family’s farm and sold them at the station.
Then in Detroit he noticed that a newspaper was throwing out ink, paper, and old pieces of type. Al bought a small printing press and started a weekly newspaper. He called it the Grand Trunk Herald. A subscription cost eight cents a month. He sold about two hundred copies a week. People liked it because it carried local news, train schedules, ads—and gossip.
Al set up his printing press right there in the baggage car on the train. He also set up a simple lab. He wrote. He printed. He did experiments. The conductor didn’t mind.
Then one day, one of his chemical mixtures caught fire. The conductor did mind now! He was really angry with Al. He picked him up and threw him off the train along with all his stuff. But Al didn’t lose his job as a newsboy. He just couldn’t have a lab on the train anymore.
In 1861, the Civil War broke out between the North and the South. Michigan was on the side of the North, the side of the president, Abraham Lincoln. People were particularly anxious for news. It was not long before Al saw a way to sell even more newspapers. He got a telegraph operator in Detroit to wire the war news of that day ahead to the stations on the way to Port Huron. Operators wrote the news on a chalkboard at the station. By the time the train arrived, people had heard what was happening, and they wanted to read more about the events of the day in the newspaper. Al usually sold about a hundred papers. On the day when the sad news came of the terrible battle at Shiloh, Tennessee, where more than 23,000 men were killed or wounded, he sold one thousand newspapers.
Al was a teenager now, and he decided he wanted to be called Tom. From then on he was known as Tom or Thomas.
One day Tom saw a train about to hit the stationmaster’s three-year-old son, Jimmy. He dashed onto the tracks and pulled him to safety.
As thanks, the stationmaster offered to teach Tom about telegraphy. Tom was thrilled. He already knew Morse code. Here was a chance to learn how to become a real telegraph operator.
By now telegrams were not only sent from railroad stations, but from offices owned by a company called Western Union. Tom worked hard and soon he had a new job. He was just sixteen when he went to work for Western Union in Port Huron.
Later, Tom took jobs with Western Union in other cities. He went from one place to the next. He was getting faster and faster at sending and receiving messages. A good telegrapher could send or receive about forty-five words a minute. Tom wanted to be the best. He practiced at night in his room. He liked to tap out plays, like Hamlet, by William Shakespeare.
One day a friend told Tom about a job at Western Union in Boston, Massachusetts. It was 1868. The Civil War had ended three years before. Now Tom was twenty-one years old. Off he went.
Tom worked at night. During the day he worked on his inventions. He spent time at a machine shop where they could make the parts he needed to build whatever he was working on. This meant that Tom didn’t get much sleep. This habit stayed with him all his life.
Tom always carried a small notebook in his pocket so he could jot down ideas. The first invention he made that he thought he could sell was an electric voting machine. He had noticed how long it took lawmakers in the Massachusetts legislature to vote. Each vote was written by hand. An electric machine would make voting much faster.
Tom applied for a patent from the U.S. government in Washington, D.C. A patent protects the owner of an idea for an invention. It stops someone else from copying it and selling it. The owner gives the date, time, and place where the idea began. The patent also includes a description and sketches of the idea. It stays on file whether the owner makes the invention or not. Over sixty years’ time Tom was granted 1,093 patents—more than anybody else, even to this day.
Tom tried to sell his voting machine to the state. But the lawmakers didn’t want it. They were glad that voting took a long time. This way, they could try and persuade others to change their vote before the voting was over.
Tom even went to Washington, D.C., to see if the U.S. Congress wanted it. For the same reason, they didn’t.
Tom couldn’t believe it. He decided right then that he would never make any invention unless he was sure people wanted it. It was the only way to make money. Tom didn’t want to be an inventor to become rich. But he understood that it took money to make his ideas happen.
Tom wrote articles about telegraphy. People read them and admired the young inventor. Many called him a genius. Some even wanted to give him money to help him invent things. They were called investors.
So Tom quit his job at Western Union. Now he would spend all of his time inventing. He wanted to figure out how to send more than one message over a wire at a time so that more telegrams could be sent. But after only a year, Tom had run out of money. He decided it was time to leave Boston and move to New York City. |