9781422277669

old son of J.U. Mackenzie, the stationmaster, playing on the track. A loose wagon was rolling toward him. Edison hurled himself across its path, knocking the boy to safety. As a reward, Mr. Mackenzie offered to teach him telegraphy. Thomas seized his chance eagerly. Four nights a week, he stayed with the Mackenzies while an assistant took over the rest of his candy route between Mount Clemens and Port Huron. This left his evenings free for instruction. It is typical of him that he arrived for his first lesson with his own set of instruments, which he had made in the workshop of a friendly gunsmith. Telegraphy at Mount Clemens consisted mainly of sending and receiving messages about the arrival and departure of trains. At the end of five months, Thomas had learned all that Mr. Mackenzie could teach him. It was enough to

qualify him for a thirty-dollar- a-month job as an operator at a Port Huron bookshop that ran a public telegraph service as a sideline. In these early days of telegraphy, operators drifted from job to job. Thomas was no exception. During the next four years, he tapped his key in almost a dozen offices from Memphis, Tennessee, to Boston, Massachusetts. He lived in cheap rooms,

spending his salary on equipment for his never- ending experiments. He

became a brilliant operator, but was repeatedly fired for playing pranks or neglecting his work so that he could study

Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872) is best known for his invention of the telegraph in 1837 and the development of Morse code the following year.

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