All before he was fifteen years old.
But one day Edison's career as a traveling newsboy came to a sudden end.
He was at work in his moving laboratory when a lurch of the train jarred a stick of burning phosphorus to the floor and set the car on fire.

The irate conductor ejected him at the next station, giving him a violent box on the ear, which permanently injured his hearing, and dumped his chemicals and printing apparatus on the platform.
Having lost his position, young Edison soon began to dabble in telegraphy, in which he had already become interested, "probably," as he says, "from visiting telegraph offices with a chum who had tastes similar to mine." He and this chum strung a line between their houses and learned the rudiments of writing by wire.

Then a station master on the railroad, whose child Edison had saved from danger, took Edison under his wing and taught him the mysteries of railway telegraphy.

The boy of sixteen held positions with small stations near home for a few months and then began a period of five years of apparently purposeless wandering as a tramp telegrapher.

Toledo, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Memphis, Louisville, Detroit, were some of the cities in which he worked, studied, experimented, and played practical jokes on his associates.