Edison has shown the calibre of his mind in a score of different ways. He has been showing it ever since the days when he was a newsboy on the trains of the Canadian Grand Trunk Railroad and the Michigan Central. Then he fitted up a corner of the baggage-car of his train as a miniature laboratory, and filled it with the bottles and retorts that had been discarded at the railroad workshops. Among his treasures was a copy of Fresenius’s “Qualitative Analysis,” engaging reading for a boy only twelve years old. But he was not only a chemist. When he was not working on the train he would be hanging about machine shops, listening and watching and considering. One day the manager of the _Detroit Free Press_ told him he might have some three hundred pounds of old type that had been used up. The newsboy found an old hand-press and began to print a paper himself, called the _Grand Trunk Herald_, and sold it to the employees and regular passengers on his line. Usually he would set the type before the train started, and print it in the spare moments of his trip. Sometimes one of the station-masters on the run, who was also a telegraph operator, would get a piece of important news, write it down, and hand the paper to Edison as the train stopped. Then the boy would go to his shop in the caboose, set up the item, print it, and sell it, beating the daily newspapers that might be awaiting the passengers at the end of the ride. The new invention of the telegraph, and the great possibilities of its use, early caught his attention. About the time the Civil War began the newsboy adopted a new idea in his business. He had always found it difficult to know how many newspapers to carry on each trip. If he had too large a stock some would be left on his hands, if he carried too few he would be sold out early and lose a good profit. He made a friend of one of the compositors of the _Detroit Free Press_, and got him to show him the proofs of the paper. That gave him some idea of the news of the day, and he could judge how many papers he would probably need. One day the proof-slip told him that there had been a terrific battle at Pittsburg Landing, or Shiloh, and that sixty thousand men had been killed and wounded. He knew that this would sell the paper. All he needed was to let people get an inkling of what the news was. Edison dashed to the telegraph-operator and asked if he would wire a message to each of the large stations on the railroad line requesting the station-masters to chalk up a notice on their train bulletin-board, giving the fact that there had been a great battle, and that papers telling about it would reach the station at such an hour. In return he offered the operator newspaper service for six months free. The bargain was made, and the boy hurried to the newspaper office.