his deep-set eye and musing brow the fire of a suppressed genius. He was then just twenty-one. The friendship of Mr. Milliken, and the opportunity for experiment, rendered the Boston office a congenial one.
His by-hours were spent in a little workshop he had opened. Among his inventions at this period were a dial telegraph, and a 'printer' for use on private lines, and an electro-chemical vote recorder, which the Legislature of Massachusetts declined to adopt. With the assistance of Mr. F. L. Pope, patent adviser to the Western Union Telegraph Company, his duplex system was tried, with encouraging results.
The ready ingenuity of Edison is shown by his device for killing the cockroaches which overran the Boston office. He arranged some strips of tinfoil on the wall, and connected these to the poles of a battery in such a way that when the insects ran towards the bait which he had provided, they stepped from one foil to the other, and completed the circuit of the current, thus receiving a smart shock, which dislodged them into a pail of water, standing below.
In 1870, after two years in Boston, where he had spent all his earnings, chiefly on his books and workshop, he found himself in New York, tramping the streets on the outlook for a job, and all but destitute. After repeated failures he chanced to enter the office of the Laws Gold Reporting Telegraph Company while the instrument which Mr. Laws had invented to report the fluctuations of the money market had broken down. No one could set it right; there was a fever in the market, and Mr. Laws, we are told, was in despair. Edison volunteered to set it right, and though his appearance was unpromising, he was allowed to try.
The insight of the born mechanic, the sleight of
