aspects. Speaking of that time, Mr. Adams says: "I can well recall when
Edison drifted in to take a job. He was a youth of about eighteen years,
decidedly unprepossessing in dress and rather uncouth in manner. I was
twenty-one, and very dudish. He was quite thin in those days, and his
nose was very prominent, giving a Napoleonic look to his face, although
the curious resemblance did not strike me at the time. The boys did not
take to him cheerfully, and he was lonesome. I sympathized with him, and
we became close companions. As an operator he had no superiors and very
few equals. Most of the time he was monkeying with the batteries and
circuits, and devising things to make the work of telegraphy less
irksome. He also relieved the monotony of office-work by fitting up the
battery circuits to play jokes on his fellow-operators, and to deal with
the vermin that infested the premises. He arranged in the cellar what he
called his 'rat paralyzer,' a very simple contrivance consisting of two
plates insulated from each other and connected with the main battery.
They were so placed that when a rat passed over them the fore feet on
the one plate and the hind feet on the other completed the circuit and
the rat departed this life, electrocuted."

Shortly after Edison's arrival at Cincinnati came the close of the Civil
War and the assassination of President Lincoln. It was natural that
telegraphers should take an intense interest in the general struggle,
for not only did they handle all the news relating to it, but many of
them were at one time or another personal participants. For example, one
of the operators in the Cincinnati office was George Ellsworth, who was
telegrapher for Morgan, the famous Southern Guerrilla, and was with him
when he made his raid into Ohio and was captured near the Pennsylvania
line. Ellsworth himself made a narrow escape by swimming the Ohio
River with the aid of an army mule. Yet we can well appreciate the
unimpressionable way in which some of the men did their work, from an