But Edison's mother had been trained, practically, as an instructor of youth. He had hints from her in the technical portions of a boy's primary training. He is not an ignorant man, but, on the contrary, a very highly educated one. But it is an education he has constructed for himself out of his aptitudes, as all other actual educations have really been. When he was ten years old he had read standard works, and at twelve is stated to have struggled, ineffectually perhaps, with Newton's _Principia_. At that age he became a train-boy on the Grand Trunk railroad for the purpose of earning his living; only another way of pioneering and getting what was to be got by personal endeavor. While in that business he edited and printed a little newspaper; not to please an amateurish love of the beautiful art of printing, but for profit. He was selling papers, and he wanted one of his own to sell because then he would get more out of it in a small way. He never afterwards showed any inclination toward journalism, and did not become a reporter or correspondent, or start a rural daily. While he was a train-boy, enjoying every opportunity for absorbing a knowledge of human nature, and of finally becoming a passenger conductor or a locomotive engineer, something called his attention to the telegraph as a promoter of business, as a great and useful institution, and he resolved to become an "operator." This was his electrical beginning. Yet before he took this step he was accused of a proclivity toward extraordinary things. In the old "caboose" where he edited, set up, and printed his newspaper he had established a small chemical laboratory, and out of these chemicals there is said to have been jolted one day an accident which caused him some unpopularity with the railroad people. He was all the time a business man. He employed four boy helpers in his news and publishing business. It took him a long time to learn the telegraph business under the circumstances, and when he was at last installed on a "plug" circuit he began at once to do unusual things with the current and its machines and appliances. This is what he tells of his first electrical invention. There was an operator at one end of the circuit who was so swift that Edison and his companion could not "take" fast enough to keep up with him. He found two old Morse registers--the machines that printed with a steel point the dots and dashes on a paper slip wound off of a reel. These he arranged in such a way that the message written, or indented, on them by the first instrument were given to him by the second instrument at any desired rate of speed or slowness. This gave to him and his friend time to catch up. This, in Morse's time, would have been thought an achievement. Edison seems to regard it as a joke. There was no time for prolonged experiment. It was an emergency, and the idea must necessarily have been supplemented by a quick mechanical skill.