Mr. Edison tells us that his son never had any boyhood in the ordinary
sense, his early playthings being steam-engines and the mechanical
powers. But it is like enough that he trapped a wood-chuck now and
then, or caught a white-fish with the rest.
He was greedy of knowledge, and by the age of ten had read the PENNY
ENCYCLOPAEDIA; Hume's HISTORY OF ENGLAND; Dubigne's HISTORY OF THE
REFORMATION; Gibbon's DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, and Sears'
HISTORY OF THE WORLD. His father, we are told, encouraged his love of
study by making him a small present for every book he read.
At the age of twelve he became a train-boy, or vendor of candy, fruit,
and journals to the passengers on the Grand Trunk Railway, between Port
Huron and Detroit. The post enabled him to sleep at home, and to extend
his reading by the public library at Detroit. Like the boy Ampere, he
proposed, it is said, to master the whole collection, shelf by shelf,
and worked his way through fifteen feet of the bottom one before he
began to select his fare.
Even the PRINCIPIA of Newton never daunted him; and if he did not
understand the problems which have puzzled some of the greatest minds,
he read them religiously, and pressed on. Burton's ANATOMY OF
MELANCHOLY, Ure's DICTIONARY OF CHEMISTRY, did not come amiss; but in
Victor Hugo's LES MISERABLES and THE TOILERS OF THE SEA he found a
treasure after his own heart.
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