I was a little scared myself, I must admit. I won that barrel of apples from Batchelor, though, and was mighty glad to get it." To go back to earlier days, the story of Edison's first years as a full-fledged operator shows that from the beginning he was more of an inventor than an operator. He was full of ideas, some of which were gratefully received. One day an ice-jam broke the cable between Port Huron, in Michigan, and Sarnia, on the Canada side, and stopped communication. The river is a mile and a half wide and was impassable. Young Edison jumped upon a locomotive and seized the valve controlling the whistle. He had the idea that the scream of the whistle might be broken into long and short notes, corresponding to the dots and dashes of the telegraphic code. "Hallo there, Sarnia! Do you get me? Do you hear what I say?" tooted the locomotive. No answer. "Do you hear what I say, Sarnia?" A third, fourth, and fifth time the message went across without response, but finally the idea was caught on the other side; answering toots came cheerfully back and the connection was recovered. Anything connected with the difficulties of telegraphy had a fascination for him. He lost many a place because of unpardonable blunders due to his passion for improvement. At Stratford, Canada, being required to report the word "Six" every half hour to the manager to show that he was awake and on duty, he rigged up a wheel to do it for him. At Indianapolis he kept press reports waiting while he experimented with new devices for receiving them. At Louisville, in procuring some sulphuric acid at night for his experiments, he tipped over a carboy of it, ruining the handsome outfit of a banking establishment below. At Cincinnati he abandoned the office on every pretext to hasten to the Mechanics' Library to pass his day in reading. An indication of his thirst for knowledge, and of a _naïve_ ignoring of enormous difficulties, is found in a project formed by him at this time to read through the whole public library. There was no one to tell him that a summary of human knowledge may be found in a moderate number of volumes, nor to point out to him what they are. Each book was to him a part of the great domain of knowledge, none of which he meant to lose. He began with the solid treatises of a dusty lower shelf and actually read, in the accomplishment of his heroic purpose, fifteen feet along that shelf. He omitted no book and nothing in the book. The list contained Newton's "Principia," Ure's Scientific Dictionary, and Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy."