A little later, when Edison was employed as operator in the railroad office at Indianapolis, he practiced receiving newspaper reports in his spare hours at night. He and a friend named Parmley would take the place of the regular man, who was glad to have them do it. “I would sit down,” said Edison, “for ten minutes, and ‘take’ as much as I could from the instrument, carrying the rest in my head. Then while I wrote out, Parmley would serve his turn at ‘taking,’ and so on. This worked well until they put a new man on at the Cincinnati end. He was one of the quickest despatchers in the business, and we soon found it was hopeless for us to try to keep up with him. Then it was that I worked out my first invention, and necessity was certainly the mother of it. “I got two old Morse registers and arranged them in such a way that by running a strip of paper through them the dots and dashes were recorded on it by the first instrument as fast as they were delivered from the Cincinnati end, and were transmitted to us through the other instrument at any desired rate of speed. They would come in on one instrument at the rate of forty words a minute, and would be ground out of our instrument at the rate of twenty-five. Then weren’t we proud! Our copy used to be so clean and beautiful that we hung it up on exhibition; and our manager used to come and gaze at it silently with a puzzled expression. He could not understand it, neither could any of the other operators; for we used to hide my impromptu automatic recorder when our toil was over. But the crash came when there was a big night’s work--a presidential vote, I think it was--and copy kept pouring in at the top rate of speed until we fell an hour and a half or two hours behind. The newspapers sent in frantic complaints, an investigation was made, and our little scheme was discovered. We couldn’t use it any more.”