while working all day on the railroad.

"Mr. Edison likes to tell of the prevailing ignorance of the science of
telegraphy. He once told a friend:

"'The telegraph men themselves seemed unable to explain how the thing
worked, though I was always trying to find out. The best explanation I
got was from an old Scotch line repairer employed by the Montreal
Telegraph Company, then operating the railway wires. Here is the way he
described it: "If you had a dachshund long enough to reach from
Edinburgh to London, and pulled his tail in Edinburgh he would bark in
London!"

"'I could understand that, but I never could get it through me what went
through the dog or over the wire.'

"It was at Stratford Junction that the Edison boy began his career of
invention. From the first his chief aim was the saving of labor. In
order to be sure that the operators all along the line were not asleep
at their posts, they were required to send to the train dispatcher's
office a certain dot-and-dash signal every hour in the night. Young
Edison was like young Napoleon in grudging himself the necessary hours
of sleep. While the ingenious lad was fond of machinery--to make a
machine of himself was utterly distasteful to him. It was against his
principles and instincts to do anything a mere machine could do instead.
So he made a little wheel with a few notches in the rim, with which he
connected the clock and the transmitter, so that at the required instant
every hour in the night the wheel revolved and sent the proper signal to
headquarters. Meanwhile that wily young operator slept the sleep of the
genius, if not of the just. Of one experience at this little place