Radio Boys Cronies. Wayne Whipple
Franklin.
"Young Edison had a friend up in the printing office who let him see proofs from the edition being set up, so that he kept posted as to what was to be in the paper before it came off the press. After the _Free Press_ came out, he had to get an armful and hustle for his train. In this shrewd way the train-boy was better off than 'he who runs may read,' for he _had_ read, and could _shout_ while running: 'All about the big battle!' So he sold his papers in short order. He had learned to estimate ahead how many papers the news of a battle ought to sell, and so he stocked up well beforehand. One day he saw in the advance proofs a harrowing account of the great two-days' battle of Shiloh. He grasped not only the news value but also the strategic importance of that victory.
"Running down to the telegraph office at the Grand Trunk Station in Detroit, he told the operator all about it. Edison has told us himself about the offer he made that telegrapher:
"'If you will wire to every station on my run and get the station master to chalk up on the blackboard out on the station platform that there has been a big battle, with thousands killed and wounded, I'll give you _Harper's Weekly_ free for six months!'
"The operator agreed and that Edison boy tore back to the _Free Press_ office.
"'I want a thousand papers!' he gasped. 'Pay you to-morrow!' This was more than three times as many as he had taken out before, so the clerk refused to trust him.
"'Where's Mr. Storey?' demanded the lad. The clerk snickered as he jerked his head toward where the managing editor was talking with a 'big' man from out of town. Young Edison was forced to break in, but the editor noticed how anxious and business-like he was. When the boy had told him what he wanted, the great newspaper man scribbled a few words on a scrap of paper and handed it down to him, saying:
"'Here, take this. Wish you good luck!'
"Al handed the clerk the order and got his thousand papers at once. He hired another 'newsie' to help him down to the station with them. Long after this, he told the rest of the story:
"'At Utica, the first station, twelve miles out of Detroit, I usually sold two papers at five cents each. As we came up I put my head out and thought I saw an excursion party. The people caught sight of me and commenced to shout. Then it began to occur to me that they wanted papers. I rushed back into the car, grabbed an armful, and sold forty there.
"'Mt. Clemens was the next stop. When that station came in sight, I thought there was a riot. The platform was crowded with a howling mob, and I realized that they were after news of Shiloh, so I raised the price to ten cents, and sold a hundred and fifty where I never had got rid of more than a dozen.
"'At other stations these scenes were repeated, but the climax came when we got to Port Huron. I had to jump off the train about a quarter of a mile from the station which was situated out of town. I had paid a big Dutch boy to haul several loads of sand to that point, and the engineers knew I was going to jump so they slowed down a bit. Still, I was quite an expert on the jump. I heaved off my bundle of papers and landed all right. As usual, the Dutch boy met me and we carried the rest of the papers toward the town.
"'We had hardly got half way when we met a crowd hurrying toward the station. I thought I knew what they were after, so I stopped in front of a church where a prayer-meeting was just closing. I raised the price to twenty-five cents and began taking in a young fortune.
"'Almost at the same moment the meeting closed and the people came rushing out. The way the coin materialized made me think the deacons had forgotten to pass the plate in that meeting!'
"In those days they commonly called trainboys 'Candy Butchers'; the terms 'Newsies' and 'Peanuts' may have been used then also but were not so common. They are not so common on trains nowadays, except in the West and South, but formerly they were even more of an institution than the water cooler or the old-fashioned winter stove. The station-shouting brakemen were no more familiar or comforting to weary passengers than the 'candy butchers' and their welcome stock."
Chapter IV
"With all he had to do, young Edison found that he had time on his hands which he might yet put to good use. One would think being 'candy butcher' and newsboy from 6 A.m. to 9 P.m., and making from $10.00 to $12.00 a day might satisfy the boy's cravings. But contentment wasn't one of Al Edison's numerous virtues.
"He did not know it, but he was following the footsteps of that other great American inventor, Benjamin Franklin, as a printer, editor, proprietor and publisher. In one of the stores where he stocked up with books, magazines and stationery for his train, there was an old printing press which the dealer, Mr. Roys, had taken for a debt. Mr. Roys once told the little story of that press:
"'Young Edison, who was a good boy and a favorite of mine, bought goods of me and had the run of the store. He saw the press, and I suppose he thought at once that he would publish a paper himself, for he could catch onto a new idea like lightning. He got me to show him how it worked, and finally bought it for a small sum.'
"From his printer friends on the _Free Press_ he bought some old type. Watching the compositors at work, he learned to set type and make up the forms, so within two weeks after purchasing the press he brought out the first number of _The Weekly Herald_--the first paper ever written, set up, proof-read, printed, published and sold (besides all his other work) on a local train--and this by a boy of fourteen!
"Of course, it had to be a sort of local paper, giving train and station gossip with sage remarks and 'preachments' from the boy's standpoint. It sold for three cents a copy, or eight cents a month to regular customers. Its biggest 'sworn circulation' was 700 copies, of which about 500 were _bona fide_ subscriptions, and the rest 'news-stand sales.'
"The great English engineer, Robert Stephenson, grandson of the inventor and improver of the locomotive, is said to have ordered a thousand copies to be distributed on railways all over the world to show what an American newsboy could do.
"Even the _London Times_, known for generations as '_The Thunderer_,' and long considered the greatest newspaper in both hemispheres, quoted from _The Weekly Herald_, as the only paper of its kind in the world. Young Edison's news venture was a financial success, for it added $45.00 a month to his already large income.
"But _Paul Pry_ came to grief because he tried to be funny in disclosing the secret motives of certain persons. People differ widely in their notions about fun. In a local paper, too, some one's feelin's are likely to get 'lacerated!' This was the case with a six-foot subscriber to the paper which was published then under Al Edison's pen name of 'Paul Pry.' One day the juvenile editor happened to meet his huge and wrathy reader too near the St. Clair river. Whereupon the subscriber took the editor by his collar and waistband and heaved him, neck and crop, into the river. Edison swam to shore, wet, but otherwise undisturbed, discontinued the publication of _Paul Pry_, and bade good-by to journalism forever!
"While young Edison was wading through such mammoth works as Sears's _History of the World_, Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and the _Dictionary of Sciences_ (and had begun to wrestle desperately with Newton's _Principia_!) he was showing a rare passion for chemistry. He 'annexed' the cellar for a laboratory. His mother said she counted, at one time, no less than two hundred bottles of chemicals, all shrewdly marked POISON, so that no one but himself would dare to touch them. Before long the lad took up so much room in his mother's cellar with his 'mess,' as she called it, that she told him to take it out, 'bag and baggage.'
"He once stated that his great desire to make money was largely because he needed the cash to buy materials for experiments. Therefore, in this emergency, he took keen pleasure in buying all the chemicals, appliances and apparatus he wished, and installing them in his real 'bag and baggage' car. As the railroad authorities had allowed him to set up a printing press, in addition to his miscellaneous stock in trade, why should he not have his laboratory there also? So his stock of batteries, chemicals and other 'calamity' grew apace.
"One day, after several weeks of happiness in his moving