THOMAS ALVA EDISON lOfi the conventional term. The world was now to take him in hand, and show what it could do with material so unpromising. Before he was twelve years old, the boy had found a place as newsboy on the Grand Trunk Line running to Detroit. In the intervals between his raids upon the helpless passengers with his newspapers, periodicals, novels, and candies, he kept up the habit of reading, and by practice acquired a remarkably clear and finished handwriting. His next step was to secure the sole right of selling news- papers on the train, and he soon had four boys under him to assist him in the work. Having then bought a lot of old type from some printing-office, he rigged up a rude frame in one of the baggage-cars that served as a lumber-room, and then proceeded to set up and print a newspaper which he called the Grand Trunk Herald, and sold with the other newspapers. As he had no press, he was obliged to take off the impressions by rubbing the paper on the inked type with his hands. In some way, a copy of this newspaper found its way to the London Times, and the editor spoke of it as the only newspaper in the world printed on a moving train. During the fighting at Pittsburgh Landing in 1862, Edison printed off abstracts of the telegraphic news, and posted them up at the small country stations, thus rendering a great service to the people anxiously waiting for news from the field. The terminus of his train was Detroit, and here, for the first time, he had access to a library. In his enthusiasm at finding himself in virtual possession of such a treasure, he determined, then and there, to read the whole library through, as it stood, using his time between trains. Beginning at one shelf he read fifteen feet in a line, going through each book solidly from cover to cover. In this first bout, among other books, he read Newton's " Prin- cipia," Ure's "Scientific Dictionary," and Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy." All this time, by hints and suggestions, Nature had been pushing the youth toward the field he was finally to occupy almost by right of eminent domain. As yet, telegraphy was in its infancy, and the powers of electricity only begin- ning to be known. Edison had from the first been interested in the workings of the telegraph line along the railroad, and had made some experiments with a rude line of his own, connecting his father's home at Port Huron a village to which the family had some time before removed from Milan with the house of a neighbor. To do this, he had to make a battery out of odds and ends, old bottles, stove-pipe wire, and nails made out of zinc contributed by his youthful friends, who in their zeal cut pieces out of the zinc mats under their mothers' stoves. He had no one to teach him telegraphy, but an accident if accidents there be was unexpectedly to put him in the way of learning its secrets. The child of the station-master was in danger from a moving train ; young Edison snatched it up and saved its life at the risk of his own, and the grateful father rewarded him by teaching him what he knew of telegraphy. Armed with this rudimentary knowledge, and with what, in addition, he h&d learned by practice, Edison passed the next few years of his life in moving about over the country, seeking employment less, it would appear, for the sake of employment than for the opportunity of increasing his practical knowledge of
