an hour being usually spent in the work. One August morning, in 1862,
while the shunting was in progress, and a laden box-car had been pushed
out of a siding, Edison, who was loitering about the platform, saw the
little son of the station agent, Mr. J. U. Mackenzie, playing with the
gravel on the main track along which the car without a brakeman was
rapidly approaching. Edison dropped his papers and his glazed cap,
and made a dash for the child, whom he picked up and lifted to safety
without a second to spare, as the wheel of the car struck his heel; and
both were cut about the face and hands by the gravel ballast on which
they fell. The two boys were picked up by the train-hands and carried
to the platform, and the grateful father at once offered to teach the
rescuer, whom he knew and liked, the art of train telegraphy and to make
an operator of him. It is needless to say that the proposal was eagerly
accepted.

Edison found time for his new studies by letting one of his friends look
after the newsboy work on the train for part of the trip, reserving
to himself the run between Port Huron and Mount Clemens. That he was
already well qualified as a beginner is evident from the fact that he
had mastered the Morse code of the telegraphic alphabet, and was able
to take to the station a neat little set of instruments he had just
finished with his own hands at a gun-shop in Detroit. This was probably
a unique achievement in itself among railway operators of that day or of
later times. The drill of the student involved chiefly the acquisition
of the special signals employed in railway work, including the numerals
and abbreviations applied to save time. Some of these have passed
into the slang of the day, "73" being well known as a telegrapher's
expression of compliments or good wishes, while "23" is an accident
or death message, and has been given broader popular significance as
a general synonym for "hoodoo." All of this came easily to Edison, who