4 Chapter 3 Tom and His Boys

Chapter 3 Tom and His "Boys" In 1869 Tom arrived in New York without a job. But Tom had no trouble finding one. He was already known and respected as a smart young man with exciting, original ideas. He was someone who could make things.

Tom had no problem finding work. After a while, he and a fellow worker started their own business. Making and developing new machines—that's what they would do. The company's most successful machine was called the universal stock printer. All day long it sent the changing price of gold to businesses on Wall Street. Tom had developed the printer, and he sold the patent for it to Western Union for thirty thousand dollars.

With this money and two investors, Tom started his own company in 1870. He found a large building in Newark, New Jersey, for his Newark Telegraph Works. He continued working on his inventions. But the company also manufactured, or made, machines to sell. Tom was always working to improve any kind of machine. And companies like Western Union came to him to make a machine they needed, or to fix problems with machines they already used. Working for Tom meant working long hours. He was at the office in Newark all the time. He knew everything that was happening. He kept detailed notes. He made sketches of his new ideas. He worked harder than anyone. Tom believed from his own experience that doing something

yourself, like making a machine, was the best way to learn. One day a young woman named Mary Stilwell came to work at the company. She and Tom fell in love. She was sixteen. He was twenty-four. Three months later, they married on Christmas Day. But even on that day, Tom went to work for a few hours, and Mary quickly found out that Tom would spend much more time at work than at home.

Over the years the Edisons had three children. First came Marion and Thomas Jr. Their father fondly called them Dot and Dash, after Morse code. Then came another son, William. Tom loved his family, but still he spent more time at work than at home. This was not so easy for Mary and the children. Often his wife was lonely and frustrated. Most inventors worked alone. Tom was different. He liked working with a team as long as

he was the boss. He hired the best men he could find. He needed draftsmen who could draw his ideas on paper, machinists who could make things from his sketches, and men who understood what he was trying to do and who could come up with improvements of their own. Tom called them "The Boys." They called him "The Old Man," even though he was only twenty-four years old and younger than many of them. A few of his "Boys" worked with Tom for twenty or thirty years. In these early years, Tom figured out a way to send four telegraph messages at once—two in one direction and two in the other. Someone else had already figured out how to send and receive two messages, but four meant twice the messages in less time. He called it the quadruplex.