By Jim Hagarty
Sorry to go on and on about this, but I am a little obsessive sometimes.
We are used to famous people in our little city of Stratford, Ontario, Canada. We have four popular live theatres here that draw a million-plus tourists every year and it is not uncommon to find yourself standing in line behind a famous actor at a soft ice-cream window in the summer.
But years ago, when I learned that famous U.S. inventor Thomas Edison actually lived and worked here for about a year when he was 18, my fascination meter hit ten and its is stuck there. This was more than having an eventually famous person drop in. He actually lived here and had a job with a railroad company.
I’ve been blabbing on and on about this for many years, often in the newspapers I worked for, and recently, the city’s heritage society affixed a nice plaque to a downtown building where Edison lived in 1863, one of the two places he is known to have rented when he was here.
It has always been one of those stories that sort of flew under the radar, in spite of my yelling on and on about it. A few years ago, I toured one of Edison’s factories that was moved to the wonderful Greenfield Village and Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. I attended an outdoor lecture about Edison by a nice young man and afterward, approached him with my Stratford story. He had never heard it. I don’t know how interested he was.
The story is this. Edison worked as a night watchman for a railroad company while here. His job entailed warning incoming trains in time for them to slow down when they reached the town. Being an inventor, however, he came up with a small device he installed on the tracks which automatically tripped the warning signals when the train got close enough to town. The reward for his ingenuity was the chance to catch some shuteye on the overnight shift.
However, one night the little gizmo failed to work and a train rushed through town at full speed. When investigators showed up to see what happened, there was no sign of the young Edison who had invented, in his mind, a very good reason to take off.
Now, after all these years of milking the story, someone has finally decided to cash in. They are opening a cafe and inn at the spot where Edison lived while here. It is called, appropriately, Edison’s, and if you visit our city, you can stay overnight in the same lodgings that the inventor of the light bulb stayed in all those years ago.
I think that’s cool.
