 Chapter 7 of Edison, His Life and Inventions. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Ray Christensen. Edison, His Life and Inventions by Frank Louis Dreyer and Thomas Comerford Martin. Chapter 7, The Stock Ticker. The letters and figures used in the language of the tape, said a well-known Boston stock speculator, are very few, but they spell ruin in 99 million ways. It is not to be inferred, however, that the modern stock ticker has anything to do with the making or losing of fortunes. There were regular daily stock market reports in London newspapers in 1825, and New York soon followed the example. As far back as 1692, Hooten issued in London a weekly review of financial and commercial transactions, upon which McCallay based the lively narrative of stock speculation in the 17th century, given in his famous history. That which the ubiquitous stock ticker has done is to give instantaneously to the news of what the stock market is doing, so that at every minute, thousands of miles apart, brokers, investors and gamblers may learn the exact conditions. The existence of such facilities is to be admired rather than deplored. News is vital to Wall Street, and there is no living man on whom the things in Wall Street are without effect. Financial history of the United States and of the world, as shown by the prices of government bonds and general securities, has been told daily for 40 years on these narrow strips of paper tape, of which thousands of miles are yearly run through the tickers of the New York alone. It is true that the record of the chattering little machine made in cannibalistic abbreviations on the tape can drive a man suddenly to the very verge of insanity with joy or despair. But if there be blame for that, it attaches to the American spirit of speculation and not to the ingenious mechanism which reads and registers the beating of the financial pulse. Edison came first to New York in 1868 with his early stock printer, which he tried unsuccessfully to sell. He went back to Boston and quite undismayed, got up a duplex telegraph, toward the end of my stay in Boston, he says, I obtained a loan of money amounting to $800 to build a particular kind of duplex telegraph for sending two messages over a single wire simultaneously. The apparatus was built, and I left the Western Union ploy and went to Rochester, New York to test the apparatus on the lines of the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph between that city and New York. But the assistant at the other end could not be made to understand anything. Notwithstanding, I had written out a very minute description of just what to do. After trying for a week, I gave it up and returned to New York with but a few cents in my pocket. Thus he who has never speculated in a stock in his life was destined to make the beginnings of his own fortune, but by providing for others the apparatus that should bring to the eye all over a great city the momentary fluctuations of stocks and bonds. No one could have been in dire poverty than he when the steamboat landed him in New York in 1869. He was in debt and his few belongings in books and instruments had to be left behind. He was not far from starving. Mr. W. S. Mallory, an associate of many years, quotes directly from him on this point. Some years ago, we had a business negotiation in New York which made it necessary for Mr. Edison and me to visit the city five or six times within a comparatively short period. It was our custom to leave Orange about 11 a.m. on arrival in New York to get our lunch before keeping the appointments, which were usually made for two o'clock. Several of these lunches were at DeMonaco's, Sherry's, and other places of similar character. But one day while en route, Mr. Edison said, I have been to lunch with you several times now today, I am going to take you to lunch with me and give you the finest lunch you have ever had. When we arrived at Hoboken, we took the downtown ferry across the Hudson, and when we arrived on the Manhattan side, Mr. Edison led the way to Smith and McNeils opposite Washington Market and well known to old New Yorkers. We went inside and as soon as the waiter appeared, Mr. Edison ordered apple dumplings and a cup of coffee for himself. He consumed his share of the lunch with the greatest possible pleasure. Then as soon as he'd finished, he went to the cigar counter to purchase cigars. As we walked to keep the appointment, he gave me the following reminiscence. When he left Boston and decided to come to New York, he had only money enough for the trip. After leaving the boat, his first thought was a breakfast, but he was without money to obtain it. However, in passing a wholesale tea house, he saw a man tasting tea. So he went in and asked the taster if he might have some of the tea. This the man gave him and thus he obtained his first breakfast in New York. He knew a telegraph operator here and on him he depended a loan to tide him over until such time as he should secure a position. During the day, he had succeeded in locating this operator but found that he also was out of the job and that the best he could do was loan him one dollar which he did. This small sum of money represented both food and lodging until time as work could be obtained. Edison said that as a result of the time consumed and the exercise and walking while he found his friend, he was extremely hungry and that he gave most serious consideration as to what he should buy in the way of food and what particular kind of food would be most satisfying and filling. The result was that at Smith and McNeils, he decided on apple dumplings and a cup of coffee, that which he never ate anything more appetizing. It was not long before he was at work and was able to live in a normal matter. During the Civil War, with its enormous increase in the national debt and the volume of paper money, gold had gone to a high premium and, as ever, by its fluctuations in the price of the value of other commodities, it was determined. This led to the creation of a gold room in Wall Street where the precious metal could be dealt in. While for dealings in stock there also extended the regular board and the open board and the long room. Devoted to one but the leading object of speculation, the gold room was the very focus of all the financial and gambling activity of the time and its quotations govern trade and commerce. At first notations in chalk and on blackboard sufficed, but seeing their inadequacy, Dr. S.S. Laws, Vice President and actual presiding officer of the Gold Exchange, devised and introduced what was popularly known as the gold indicator. At first notations in chalk on the blackboard sufficed, but seeing their inadequacy, Dr. S.S. Laws, Vice President and actual presiding officer of the Gold Exchange, devised and introduced what was popularly known as the gold indicator. This exhibited merely the prevailing price of gold, but as its quotations changed from instant to instant, it was in a most literal sense the sonors of the neighboring eyes. One indicator looked upon the gold room, the other opened toward the street. Within the exchange the face could easily be seen high up on the west wall of the room and the machine was operated by Mr. Mersasol, the official registrar of the gold board. Dr. Laws, who afterward became president of the State University of Missouri, was an inventor of unusual ability and attainments. In his early youth he had earned his livelihood in a tool factory and apparently with his savings he went to Princeton, where he studied electricity under no less a teacher than the famous Joseph Henry. At the outbreak of the war in 1861, he was president of one of the Presbyterian synonical colleges of the South, whose buildings passed into the hands of the government. Going to Europe he returned to New York in 1863 and became interested with a relative in financial matters. His connection with the gold exchange soon followed when it was organized. The indicating mechanism he devised was electrical, controlled at central by two circuit closed keys, and was a prototype of all the later and modern step by step printing telegraphs upon which the distribution of financial news depended. The fraction drum of the indicator could be driven in either direction, known as the advantage and retrograde movements, and was divided and marked into eighths. It geared into a unit drum, which as do speed indicators and cyclometers. Four electrical pulsations were required to move the drum the distance between the fractions. The general operation was simple, and in normally active times the mechanism and the registrar were equal to all emergencies. But it is obvious that the recorder had to be carried away to the broker's office and other places by messengers, and the delay, confusion, and mistakes soon suggested the doctor laws the desirability of having a number of indicators as such scattered points, operated by a master transmitter, and dispersing with the regiments of noisy boys. He secured this privilege of distribution, and residing from the exchange devoted his exclusive attention to the gold reporting telegraph which he patented, and for which at the end of 1866 he had scarcely 50 subscribers. His indicators were small oblong boxes in the front of which was a long slot, allowing the dial as they traveled past inside to show the numerals consisting the quotation. The dials or wheels being arranged in a row horizontally overlapping each other as in modern fare registers which are now seen on most trolley cars. It was not long before there were 300 subscribers, but the very success of this device brought competition and improvements. Mr. E. A. Callahan, an ingenious printing telegraph operator, saw that there were unexhaustible possibilities in the idea, and his foresight and inventiveness made him the father of the ticker in connection with which he was thus, like laws, one of the first to grasp and exploit the underlying principle of the central station as a universal source of supply. The genius of this invention, Mr. Callahan was told in an interesting way, in 1867 on the site of the present mills building on Broadway Street, opposite the stock exchange of today was an old building which had been cut up to subverse the necessities of his occupants, all engaged in the dealing of gold and stocks. It had one main entrance from the street to a hallway from which entrance to the offices of two prominent broker firms was obtained. Each firm had its own army of boys, numbering from 12 to 15, whose duties were to ascertain the latest quotations from the different exchanges. Each boy devoted his attention to some particularly active stock, pushing each other to get into those narrow quarters, yelling out the prices at the door, and pushing back for later ones. The hustle made this doorway to me a most undesirable refuge from an April shower. I was simply whirled into the street. I naturally thought that much of this noise and confusion might be dispersed and that the prices might be furnished through some system of telegraphy which would not require the employment of skilled operators. The conception of the stock ticker dates from this incident. Mr. Callahan's first idea was to distribute gold quotations and to this end he devised an indicator. It consisted of two dials mounted separately, each revolved by an electromagnet so that the desired figures were brought to an aperture in the case in closing the apparatus as in the law's system. Each shaft with his dial was provided with two ratcheted wheels, one the reverse of the other. One was used in connection with the propelling lever which was provided to a pawl to fit into the teeth of the reversed ratcheted wheel on its forward movement. It was thus made impossible for either dial to go by a momentum beyond its limit. Learning that Dr. Laws with the skillful aid of FL Pope was already active in the same direction, Mr. Callahan with ready wit transformed his indicator into a ticker that would make a printed record. The name of the ticker came through the casual remark of an observer to whom the noise was the most striking feature of the mechanism. Mr. Callahan removed the two dials and substituting type wheels turned the movement's face to face so that each type wheel could imprint its characters upon a paper tape in two lines. Three wires stranded together from the central office to each instrument. Of these one furnished the current for the alphabet wheel, one for the figure wheel, and one for the mechanism that took care of inking and printing on the tape. Callahan made the further innovation of insulating his circuit wires. Although the cost was then 40 times as great as Adam Bear wires, it will be understood that electromagnets were the ticker's actuating agency. The ticker apparatus was placed under a neat glass shade and mounted on a shelf. 25 instruments were energized from one circuit and the quotations were supplied from a central at 18 New Street. The Gold and Stott telegraph company was promptly organized to supply to brokers the system, which was very rapidly adopted throughout the financial district of New York at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. Quotations were transmitted by Morse telegraph from the floor of the stock exchange to the central and then distributed to the subscribers. Success with the stock news system was instantaneous. It was at this juncture that Edison reached New York and, according to his own statement, found shelter at night in the battery room of the Gold Indicator Company, having meantime applied for a position as an operator with the Western Union. He had to wait a few days and during this time he seized the opportunity to study the indicators and the complicated general transmitter in the office, controlled from the keyboard of the operator on the floor of the Gold Exchange. What happened next has been the basis of many inaccurate stories, but is dramatic enough as told in Mr Edison's own version. On the third day of my arrival and while sitting in the office the complicated general instrument for sending on all the lines and which made a very great noise suddenly came to a stop with a crash. Within two minutes over 300 boys, a boy from every broker in the street, rushed upstairs and crowded the long aisle and office that hardly had room for 100. All yelling that such and such a broker's wire was out of order and to fix it at once, it was pandemonium and the man in charge became so excited that he lost control of all knowledge he ever had. I went to the indicator and having studied it thoroughly knew where the trouble ought to be and found it. One of the innumerable contact springs had broken off and fallen down between two gear wheels and stopped the instrument, but it was not very noticeable. As I went out to tell the man in charge what the matter was Doctor Laws appeared in the scene, the most excited person I had seen. He demanded of the man the cause of the trouble, but the man was speechless. I ventured to say that I knew what the problem was and he said fix it, fix it, be quick. I removed the spring and set the contact wheels at zero and the line, battery and inspecting men all scattered through the financial district to set the instruments. In about two hours things were working again. Doctor Laws came in to ask my name and what I was doing. I told him and he asked me to come to his private office the following day. His office was filled with stacks of books all relating to metaphysics and kindred matters. He asked me a great many questions about the instruments and his system and I showed him how he could simplify things generally. He then requested that I should call next day. On arrival, he stated at once that he had decided to put me in charge of the whole plant and that my salary would be $300 per month. This was such a violent jump from anything I had ever seen before that it rather paralyzed me for a while. I thought it was too much to be lasting, but I determined to try and live up to the salary. If 20 hours a day of hard work would do it, I kept this position, made many improvements, devised several stock tickers until the gold and stock telegraph company consolidated with the gold indicator company. Certainly few changes in fortune have ever been more sudden and dramatic in any notable career than this which thus placed an ill-clad, unkempt, half-starved, eager lead in a position of such responsibility in days when the fluctuations in the price of gold at every instant meant fortune or ruin to thousands. Edison barely 21 years old was a keen observer of the stirring events around him. Wall Street is at any time an interesting study, but it was never at a more agitated and sensational period of its history than at this time. Edison's arrival in New York coincided with an active speculation in gold which may indeed be said to have provided him with an occupation and was soon followed by the attempt of Mr. J. Gould and his associates to corner the gold market precipitating the panic of Black Friday September 24th 1869 securing its important duties and the precious metals and thus assisting to create an artificial stringency in the gold market. The government had made it a practice to revive the situation by selling a million of gold each month. The metal was thus restored into circulation. In some manner President Grant was persuaded that general conditions and the movement of the crops would be helped if the sale of gold were suspended for a time and this put into effect. He went to visit an old friend in the Pennsylvania remote from rail aeros and telegraphs. The gold pool had acquired control of 10 million dollars in gold and drove the price upward rapidly from 144 toward their goal of 200. On Black Friday they purchased another 28 million dollars at 160 and still the price went up. The financial and commercial interests of the country were in panic but the pool persevered in its effort to corner gold with a profit of many millions contingent on success yielding a frantic request. President Grant who returned to Washington caused Secretary Bultwell of the Treasury to throw four million dollars of gold into the market. Relief was instantaneous. The corner was broken but the harm had been done. Edison's remarks shed a vivid sidelight on this extraordinary episode. On Black Friday he says we had a very exciting time with the indicators. The gould and fist crowd cornered gold and had run the quotations up faster than the indicator could follow. The indicator was composed of several wheels. On the circumference of each wheel were the numerals and one wheel had fractions. It worked in the same way as an ordinary counter. One wheel made 10 revolutions and at the tenth it advanced the adjacent wheel and this in its turn having gone 10 revolutions advanced the next wheel and so on. On the morning of Black Friday the indicator was quoting 150 premium whereas the bids by gould's agents in the gold room were 165 for five millions or any part. We had a paper weight at the transmitter to speed it up and by one o'clock reached the right quotation. The excitement was prodigious. New York as well as Broad Street was jammed with excited people. I sat on top of the Western Union Telegraph booth to watch the surging crazy crowd. One man came to the booth grabbed a pencil and attempted to write a message to Boston. The first stroke went clear off the blank. He was so excited that he had the operator write the message for him and made great excitement. Spire the banker went crazy and it took five men to hold him and everybody lost their head. The Western Union operator came to me and said, shake Edison we are okay we've got a scent. I felt very happy because we were poor. These occasions are very enjoyable to a poor man but they rarely occur. There is a calm sense of detachment about this description that has been possessed by the narrator even in the most anxious moments of his career. He was determined to see all it could be seen and quitting his perch on the Telegraph booth sought the more secluded headquarters of the pool forces. A friend of mine was an operator who worked in the office of Belden and Company 60 Broadway which were headquarters for Fisk. Mr. Gould was uptown in the Erie office in the Grand Opera House. The firm on Broad Street Smith and Gould and Martin was the other branch. All were connected with wires. Gould seemed to be in charge Fisk being the executive downtown. Fisk wore a velvet corduroy coat and a very peculiar vest. He was very chipper and seemed to be lighthearted and happy. Sitting around the room were about a dozen fine-looking men. All had the complexion of cadavers. There was a basket of champagne. Hundreds of boys were rushing and paying checks all checks being payable to Belden and Company. When James Brown of Brown Brothers and Company broke the corner by selling five million gold all payments were repudiated by Smith, Gould and Martin but they continued to receive checks at Belden and Companies for some time until the street got wind of the game. There was some kind of conspiracy with the government people which I could not make out but I heard messages that opened my eyes as to the ramifications of Wall Street. Gould fell to 132 and it took us all night to get the indicator back to that quotation. All night long the streets were full of people. Every broker's office was brilliantly lighted all night and all hands were at work. The clearing house for Gould had been swamped and all was mixed up. No one knew if he was bankrupt or not. Edison in those days rather liked the modest coffee shops and mentions visiting one. When on the New York number one wire that I worked in Boston there was an operator named Jerry Brost at the other end. He was a first-class receiver and rapid sender. We made up a scheme to hold this wire so he changed one letter of the alphabet and as soon as I got used to it and finally we changed three letters. If any operator tried to receive from Brost he couldn't do it so Brost and I always worked together. Brost did less talking than any operator I ever knew. Never having seen him I went while in New York to call upon him. I did all the talking. He would listen, stroke his beard, and say nothing. In the evening I went over to an all-night lunch house in the printing house square in a basement, Oliver's. Night editors included Horace Greeley and Henry Raymond of the New York Times took their midnight lunch there. When I went with Brost and the other operator they pointed out two or three men who were then celebrated in the newspaper world. The night was intensely hot and close. After getting our lunch and upon reaching the sidewalk Brost opened his mouth and said that's a great place, a plate of cakes, a cup of coffee, and a Russian bath for ten cents. This was about 50% of his conversation for two days. The work of Edison on the gold indicator had thrown him into close relationships with Mr. Franklin L. Pope, the young telegraph engineer then associated with Dr. Laws, and afterward a distinguished expert and technical writer who became president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1886. Each recognized the special ability of the other and barely a week after the famous events of Black Friday the announcement of their partnership appeared in the telegrapher of October 1, 1869. This was the first professional card, if it may be so described, ever issued in America by a form of electrical engineers and is here reproduced. It is probable that the advertisement, one of the largest in the telegrapher, and appearing frequently was not paid for at full rates as the publisher Mr. Jay and Ashley became a partner in the firm and not altogether a sleeping one when it came to the division of profits, which at times were considerable. In order to be near his new friend Edison boarded the Pope at Elizabeth New Jersey for some time, living the strenuous life and the performance of his duties. Associated with Pope and Ashley, he followed up his work on telegraph printers with Mark's success. While with them I devised a printer to print gold quotations instead of indicating them. The lines were started and the hole was sold out to the Gould and Stock Telegraph Company. My experimenting was all done in that small shop of Dr. Bradley, located near the station of the Pennsylvania Railroad in New Jersey City. Every night I left for Elizabeth on the 1 a.m. train, then walked half a mile to Mr. Pope's house and up at 6 a.m. for breakfast to catch the 7 a.m. train. This continued for all winter and many were the occasions when I was nearly frozen in the Elizabeth Walk. This Dr. Bradley appears to have been the first in this country to make electrical measurements of precision with a galvanometer but was an old school experimenter who had worked for years on an experiment without commercial value. He was also extremely irascible and when on one occasion the connecting wire would not come out of one of the binding posts of a new and cost the galvanometer, he jerked the instrument to the floor and then jumped on it. He must have been, however, a man of originality as evidenced by his attempt to age whiskey by electricity, an attempt that has often been made. The hobby he had at the time I was there, says Edison, was the aging of raw whiskey by passing strong current through it. He had arranged 20 jars with platinum electrodes held in place by hard rubber. When all was ready he filled the cells with whiskey, connected the battery, locked the door of the small room to which he had placed and gave positive orders that no one should enter. He then disappeared for three days. On the second day we noticed a terrible smell in the shop as if from some dead animal. The next day the doctor arrived and noticing this smell asked what was dead. We all thought something had gotten into his whiskey room and died. He opened it and was nearly overcome. The hard rubber he used was, of course, full of sulfur and this being attacked by a nauseous hydrogen had produced sulfide hydrogen gas in torrents, displacing all the air in the room. Sulfuride hydrogen is, as is well known, the gas given off by rotten eggs. Another glimpse of this period of development is afforded by an interesting article on the stock reporting telegraph in the electrical world of March 4th, 1899 by Mr. Ralph W. Pope, the well-known secretary of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, who had as a youth an active and intimate connection with that branch of the electrical industry. In the course of his article he mentions the curious fact that Dr. Laws at first in receiving quotations from the exchanges was so distrustful of the Morse system that he installed long lines of speaking tubes as a more satisfactory and safe device than the telegraph wires. As to the relations of that time, Mr. Pope remarks, the rivalry between the two concerns resulted in consolidation. Dr. Law's enterprise being absorbed by the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company, while the Law's stock printer was relegated to the scrap heap and the museum competition in the field did not, however, cease. Miser's Pope and Edison invented a one-wire printer and started a system of gold printers devoted to the recording of gold quotations and sterling exchange only. It was intended more specifically for importers and exchange brokers and was furnished at a lower price than the indicator service. The building and equipment of private telegraph lines was also entered upon. This business was subsequently absorbed by the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company, which was probably at this time at the height of its prosperity. The financial organization of the company was peculiar and worthy of attention. Each subscriber for a machine paid in $100 for the privilege of securing an instrument for the service he paid $25 weekly. In case he retired or failed, he could transfer his right and employees were constantly on the alert for purchasable rights, which could be disposed of at a profit. It was occasionally worth the profit to convince a man that he did not actually own the machine which had been placed in his office. The Western Union Telegraph Company secured a majority of its stock and General Marshall Leferetz was the elected president. A private line department was established and the business taken over from Pope Edison and Ashley was rapidly enlarged. At this juncture, General Leferetz as president of the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company requested Edison to go to work on improving the stock ticker. Furnishing the money and the well-known universal ticker in widespread use in this day was one result. Mr. Edison gives a graphic picture of the startling efforts of his fortunes. I made a great many inventions. One was the special ticker used for many years outside of New York in other large cities. This was made exceedingly simple as they did not have the experts we had in New York to handle anything complicated. The same ticker was used on the London Stock Exchange. After I had made a great number of inventions and obtained patents, the general seemed anxious that the matter should be closed up. One day I exhibited and worked on a successful device whereby if a ticker should get out of unison in a broker's office and commenced to print wild figures it could be brought in unison from the central station which saved the labor of many men and much trouble to the broker. He called me into his office and said, now young man I want to close up the matter of your inventions. How much do you think you should receive? I had made up my mind that taking into consideration the time and the killing pace I was working at I should be entitled to five thousand dollars but could get along with three thousand. When the psychological moment arrived I hadn't the nerve to name such a large sum so I said well general suppose you make me offer then he said how would forty thousand dollars strike you? This caused me to come as near fainting as I had ever got. I was afraid he would hear my heartbeat. I managed to say that I thought it was fair. All right I will have a contract drawn come around in three days and sign it and I will give you the money. I arrived on time but had been doing some considerable thinking on the subject. The sum seemed to be very large for the amount of work for at that time I determined the value by the time and trouble and not by what the invention was worth to others. I thought there was something unreal about it however the contract was handed to me I signed without reading it. Edison was then handed the first check he'd ever received won for forty thousand dollars drawn on the bank of New York at the corner of William and Wall Street. I'm going to the bank and passing in the check of the paying teller some brief remarks were made to him which in his deafness he did not understand. The check was handed back to him and Edison fencing for a moment that in some way he had been cheated went outside to the large steps to let the cold sweat evaporate. He then went back to the general who with his secretary had a good laugh over the matter told him the check must be endorsed and sent him with the young man to identify him. The ceremony of identification performed with the paying teller who was quite merry over the incident. Edison was given the amount in bundles of small bills until there certainly seemed to be a one qubit foot. Unaware that he was the victim of a practical joke Edison proceeded gravely to stow away the money in his overcourt pockets and all his other pockets. He then went to Newark and sat up all night with the money for fear it might be stolen. Once more he sought help next morning when the general laughed heartily and telling the clerk that the joke must be not carried any further and enabled him to deposit the currency in the bank and open an account. Thus in an inconceivably brief time had Edison passed from poverty to independence made a deep impression as to his originality and ability on important people and brought out valuable inventions lifting himself at one bound out of the ruck of mediocrity and away from the deadening drudgery of a key. Best of all he was enterprising one of the leaders and pioneers for whom the world is always looking and to use his own criticism of himself he had too sanguine a temperament to keep money in solitary confinement quiet self-possession he seized his opportunity began to buy machinery rented a shop and got to work moving quickly into a larger shop numbers 10 and 12 Ward Street Newark, New Jersey he secured large orders from general leperates to build stock tickers and employed 50 men as business increased he put on a night force and was his own foreman on both shifts half an hour of sleep three or four times in the 24 hours was all he needed in those days when one invention succeeded another with dazzling rapidity and when he worked with the new fierce eruptive energy of a great volcano throwing out new ideas incessantly with spectacular effect on the arts to which they related it has always been a theory with Edison that we need sleep altogether too much but on the other hand he never until long past 50 knew or practiced the slightest moderation in his work or in the use of strong coffee and black cigars he has moreover while a tender and kindly disposition never hesitated to use men up as freely as a napoleon or grant seeing only the goal of a complete invention or perfect device to attain which all else must become subsidiary he gives a graphic picture of his first methods as a manufacturer nearly all of my men were on piecework and i allowed them to make good wages and never cut until the pay became absurdly high as they got more expert i kept no books i had two hooks all the bills and accounts i owned i jabbed in one hook and the memorandum of all who owed me i put on the other when some of the bills fell due and i couldn't deliver tickets to get a supply of money i gave a note when the notes were due a messenger came around from the bank with the note and a protest pinned to it for a dollar 25 then i would go to new york and get an advance or pay the note if i had the money this method of giving notes for my accounts and having all notes protested i kept up for over two years yet my credit was fine every store i traded with was always glad to furnish goods perhaps an amazed admiration of my system of doing business which was certainly new after a while Edison got a bookkeeper who his vagrancies made him look back with regret on the earlier primitive method the first three months i had him go over all the books to find out how much we made he reported three thousand dollars i gave a supper to some of my men to celebrate this only to be told two days afterward they didn't made a mistake and we had lost five hundred dollars and then a few days after that he came to me again and said he was all mixed up and now he found we've made over seven thousand dollars Edison changed bookkeepers but never thereafter counted anything real profit until he had paid all his debts and had the profits in the bank the factory work at this time related chiefly to stock tickers principally the universal of which at one time 1200 were in use Edison's connections with this particular device was very close while it lasted in a review of the ticker art Mr. Callahan stated with rather grudging praise that a ticker at the present time 1901 would be considered as impractical and unsalable if it were not provided with the unison device and he goes on to remark the first unison on stock tickers was one used on the lost printer footnote two it was a crude and unsatisfactory piece of mechanism and necessitated doubling of the battery in order to bring it into action it was short-lived the Edison unison compromised a lever with a free and traveling uninspiral or worm on the type wheel shaft until it met a pin at the end of the worm thus obstructing the shaft and leaving the type wheels at the zero point until released by the printing lever this device is too well known to require a further description it is not applicable to any instrument using two independently moving type wheels but on nearly if not all other instruments will be found in use the stock ticker has enjoyed the devotion of many brilliant inventors GM Phelps H. Van Hoevenberg A. A. Knudsen G. B. Scott S. D. Field John Burry and remains in extensive use as an application for which no substitute or competitor has been found in New York the two great stock exchanges have deemed it necessary to own and operate a stock ticker service for this whole benefit of their members and down to the present moment the process of improvement has gone on impelled by the increasing volume of business to be reported it is significant of Edison's work now dimmed and overlaid by later advances that at the very outset he recognized the vital importance of the interchangeability in the construction of this delicate and sensitive apparatus but the difficulties of these early days were almost insurmountable Mr. R. W. Pope says of the universal machines that they were simple and substantial and generally satisfactory but adds these instruments were supposed to have been made with interchangeable parts but as a matter of fact the instances in which these parts would fit were very few the instruction book prepared for the use of the inspector states that the parts should not be tinkered or bent as they are accurately made and interchangeable the difficulties encountered in fitting them properly doubtless gave rise to a story that Mr. Edison had stated there were three degrees of interchangeability this was interpreted to mean first the parts will fit second they will almost fit third they do not fit and can't be made to fit footnote two this I invented as well t-a-e this early shop affords an illustration of the manner in which Edison has made a deep impression on the personnel of the electrical arts at a single bench there were three men since rich or prominent one was Sigmund Bergman for a time partner with Edison in his lighting developments in the United States and now head and principal owner of the electrical works in Berlin employing tens thousand men the next man adjacent was John Krusey afterward engineer of the great general electric works at Schenectady a third was Schuckert who left the bench to settle up with his father's little estate in Nuremberg stayed there and founded electrical factories which became the third largest in Germany their proprietor dying very wealthy I gave them good training as to working hours and hustling says their quadrum master and this is equally true as applies to many scores of others working in companies bearing Edison's name or organized under Edison patents it is curiously sufficient in this connection that of the 21 presidents of the national society the american institute of the electrical engineers founded in 1884 eight have been intimately associated with Edison namely Norven Green and FL Polk as business colleagues of the days of which we now write while Messers Frank J Sprague T.C. Martin A.E. Kenley S.S. Wheeler John W. Leib Jr. and Lewis Ferguson have all been at one time or another in Edison Employee the remark was once made that if a famous american teacher sat at one end of a log and a student at the other end the elements of a successful university were present it is equally true that in Edison and the many men who have graduated from his stirring school of endeavor America has had its foremost seat of electrical engineering end of chapter seven end of Edison his life and inventions by Frank Lewis Trier and Thomas Cromford Martin this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Edison his life and inventions by Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Cumberford Martin chapter eight automatic duplex and quadruplex telegraphy work of various kinds poured in upon the young manufacturer busy also with his own schemes and inventions which soon began to follow so many distinct lines of inquiry that it ceases to be easy or necessary for the historian to treat them all in chronological sequence some notions of his ceaseless activity may be formed from the fact that he started no fewer than three shops in Newark during 1870 and 1871 and while directing these was also engaged by the men who controlled the automatic telegraph company of New York which had a circuit to Washington to help it out of its difficulties quote soon after starting the large shop 10 and 12 Ward Street Newark I rented shop room to the inventor of a new rifle I think it was the burden in any event it was a rifle which was subsequently adopted by the British army the inventor employed a tool maker who was the finest and best tool maker I had ever seen I noticed that he worked pretty near the whole of the 24 hours this kind of application I was looking for he was getting $21.50 per week and was also paid for overtime I asked him if he could run the shop I don't know try me he said all right I will give you $60 per week to run both shifts he went at it his executive ability was greater than that of any other man I have yet seen his memory was prodigious conversation laconic and movements rapid he doubled the production inside three months without materially increasing the payroll by increasing the cutting speeds of tools and by the use of various devices when in need of rest he would lie down on a workbench sleep 20 or 30 minutes and wake up fresh as this was just what I could do I naturally conceived great pride in having such a man in charge of my work but almost everything has trouble connected with it he disappeared one day and although I sent men everywhere that it was likely he could be found he was not discovered after two weeks he came into the factory in a terrible condition as to close and face he sat down and turning to me said Edison it's no use this is the third time I can't stand prosperity put my salary back and give me a job I was very sorry to learn that it was whiskey that spoiled such a career I gave him an inferior job and kept him for a long time unquote Edison had now entered definitely upon that career as an inventor which has left so deep an imprint on the records of the United States patent office where from his first patent in 1869 up to the summer of 1910 no fewer than 1328 separate patents have been applied for in his name averaging 32 every year and one about every 11 days with a substantially corresponding number issued the height of this inventive activity was attained about 1882 in which year no fewer than 141 patents were applied for and 75 granted to him or nearly nine times as many as in 1876 when invention as a profession may be said to have been adopted by this prolific genius it will be understood of course that even these figures do not represent the full measure of active invention as in every process and at every step there were many discoveries that were not brought to patent registration but remained trade secrets and furthermore that in practically every case the actual patented invention followed from one to a dozen or more gradually developing forms of the same idea an Englishman named George Little had brought over a system of automatic telegraphy which worked well on a short line but was a failure when put upon the longer circuits for which automatic methods are best adapted the general principle involved in automatic or rapid telegraphs except the photographic ones is that of preparing the message in advance for dispatch by perforating narrow strips of paper with holes work which can be done either by hand punches or by typewriter apparatus a certain group of perforations corresponds to a Morse group of dots and dashes for a letter of the alphabet when the tape thus made ready is run rapidly through a transmitting machine electrical contact occurs wherever there is a perforation permitting the current from the battery to flow into the line and thus transmit signals correspondingly at the distant end these signals are received sometimes on ink writing recorder as dots and dashes or even as typewriting letters but in many of the earlier systems like that of bane the record at the higher rates of speed was affected by chemical means a telltale stain being made on the traveling strip of paper by every spurt of incoming current solutions of potassium iodide were frequently used for this purpose giving a sharp blue record but fading away too rapidly the little system had perforating apparatus operated by electromagnets its transmitting machine was driven by a small electromagnetic motor and the record was made by electrochemical decomposition the writing member being a minute platinum roller instead of the more familiar iron stylus moreover a special type of wire had been put up for the single circuit of 280 miles between new york and washington this is believed to have been the first compound wire made for telegraphic or other signaling purposes the object being to secure greater lightness with textile strength and high conductivity it had a steel core with a copper ribbon wound spirally around it and tinned to the core wire but the results obtained were poor and in their necessity the party's in interest turned to Edison mr. e.h. johnson tells of the conditions quote general w.j. palmer and some new york associates had taken up the little automatic system and had expended quite a sum in its development when thinking that they had reduced it to practice they got tom scott of the pennsylvania railroad to send his superintendent of telegraph over to look into and report upon it of course he turned it down the syndicate was appalled at this report and in this extremity general palmer thought of the man who had impressed him as knowing it all by the telling of telegraphic tales as a means of whiling away lonesome hours on the plains of colorado where they were associated in railroad building so this man it was i was sent for to come to new york and assuage their grief if possible my report was that the system was sound fundamentally that it contained the germ of a good thing but needed working out associated with general palmer was one colonel josea c reef then eastern bond agent for the kansas pacific railroad the colonel was always resourceful and didn't fail in this case he knew of a young fellow who was doing some good work for marshall leferts and who it was said was a genius at invention and a very fiend for work his name was Edison and he had a shop out of new york new jersey he came and was put in my care for the purpose of a mutual exchange of ideas and for a report by me as to his competency in the matter this was my introduction to Edison he confirmed my views of the automatic system he saw its possibilities as well as the chief obstacles to be overcome vis the sluggishness of the wire together with the need of mechanical betterment of the apparatus and he agreed to take the job on one condition namely that johnson would stay and help as he was the man with ideas mr johnson was accordingly given three months leave from colorado railroad building and has never seen colorado since unquote applying himself to the difficulties with wanted energy Edison devised new apparatus and solved the problem to such an extent that he and his assistants succeeded in transmitting and recording one thousand words per minute between new york and washington and thirty five hundred words per minute to philadelphia ordinary manual transmission by key is not in excess of forty to fifty words a minute stated very briefly Edison's principal contribution to the commercial development of the automatic was based on the observation that in a line of considerable length electrical impulses become enormously extended or sluggish due to a phenomenon known as self induction which with ordinary morse work is in a measure corrected by condensers but in the automatic the aim was to deal with impulses following each other from twenty five to one hundred times as rapidly as in morse lines and to attempt to receive and record intelligibly such a lightning like succession of signals would have seemed impossible but Edison discovered that by utilizing a shunt around the receiving instrument with a soft iron core the self induction would produce a momentary and instantaneous reversal of the current at the end of each impulse and thereby give an absolutely sharp definition to each signal this discovery did away entirely with sluggishness and made it possible to secure high speeds over lines of comparatively great links but Edison's work on the automatic did not stop with this basic suggestion for he took up and perfected the mechanical construction of the instruments as well as the perforators and also suggested numerous electro sensitive chemicals for the receivers so that the automatic telegraph almost entirely by reason of his individual work was placed on a plane of commercial practicability the long line of patents secured by him in this art is an interesting exhibit of the development of a germ to a completed system not as is usually the case by numerous inventors working over considerable periods of time but by one man evolving the successive steps at a white heat of activity the system was put in commercial operation but the company now encouraged was quite willing to allow Edison to work out his idea of an automatic that would print the message in bold roman letters instead of in dots and dashes with consequent gain in speed in delivery of the message after its receipt in the operating room it being obviously necessary in the case of any message received in morse characters to copy it in script before delivery to the recipient a large shop was rented in newark equipped with 25 000 dollars worth of machinery and Edison was given full charge here he built their original type of apparatus as improved and also pushed his experiments on the letter system so far that at a test between new york and philadelphia 3000 words were sent in one minute and recorded in roman type mr dn kreg one of the early organizers of the associated press became interested in this company whose president was mr george herrington formerly assistant secretary of the united states treasury mr kreg brought with him at this time the early 70s from milwaukee a mr shoals who had a wooden model of a machine to which had been given the then new and unfamiliar name of typewriter kreg was interested in the machine and put the model in Edison's hands to perfect quote this typewriter proved a difficult thing says Edison to make commercial the alignment of the letters was awful one letter would be one sixteenth of an inch above the others and all the letters wanted to wander out of line i worked on it till the machine gave fair results some were made and used in the office of the automatic company kreg was very sanguine that someday all business letters would be written on a typewriter he died before that took place but it gradually made its way the typewriter i got into commercial shape is now known as the remington about this time i got an idea i could devise an apparatus by which four messages could simultaneously be sent over a single wire without interfering with each other i now had five shops and with experimenting on this new scheme i was pretty busy at least i did not have ennui unquote a very interesting picture of mr edison at this time is furnished by mr patrick b delaney a well-known inventor in the field of automatic and multiplex telegraphy who at that time was a chief operator of the franklin telegraph company in philadelphia his remark about edison is that quote his ingenuity inspired confidence and wavering financiers stiffened up when it became known that he was to develop the automatic unquote is a noteworthy evidence of the manner in which the young inventor had already gained a firm footing he continues quote edward h johnson was brought on from the denver and rio grand railway to assist in the practical introduction of automatic telegraphy on a commercial basis and about this time in 1872 i joined the enterprise fairly good results were obtained between new york and washington and edison indifferent to theoretical difficulties set out to prove high speeds between new york and charleston south carolina the compound wires being hitched up to one of the southern and atlantic wires from washington to charleston for the purpose of experimentation johnson and i went to the charleston end to carry out edison's plans which were rapidly unfolded by telegraph every night from a loft on lower broadway new york we could only get the wire after all business was cleared usually about midnight and for months in the quiet hours that wire was subjected to more electrical acrobatics than any other wire ever experienced when the experiments ended edison system was put into regular commercial operation between new york and washington and did fine work if the single wire had not broken about every other day the venture would have been a financial success but moisture got in between the copper ribbon and the steel core setting up galvanic action which made short work of the steel the demonstration was however sufficiently successful to impel jay gould to contract to pay about four million dollars in stock for the patents the contract was never completed so far as the four million dollars were concerned but gould made good use of it in getting control of the western union one of the most important persons connected with the automatic enterprise was mr george herrington to whom we have above referred and with whom mr edison entered into close confidential relations so that the inventions made were held jointly under a partnership deed covering quote any inventions or improvements that may be useful or desired in automatic telegraphy unquote mr herrington was assured at the outset by edison that while the little perforator would give on the average only seven or eight words per minute which was not enough for commercial purposes he could devise one giving fifty or sixty words and that while the little solution for the receiving tape cost fifteen dollars to seventeen dollars per gallon he could furnish a ferric solution costing only five or six cents per gallon in every respect edison made good and in a short time the system was a success quote mr little having withdrawn his obsolete perforator his ineffective resistance his costly chemical solution to give place to edison's perforator edison's resistance and devices and edison's solution costing a few cents per gallon but continues mr herrington in a memorable affidavit the inventive efforts of mr edison were not confined to automatic telegraphy nor did they cease with the opening of that line to washington unquote they all led up to the quadruplex flattered by their success mr's herrington and reef who owned with edison the foreign patents for the new automatic system entered into an arrangement with the british postal telegraph authorities for a trial of the system in england involving its probable adoption if successful edison was sent to england to make the demonstration in 1873 reporting there to colonel george e guraud who had been an associate in the united states treasury with mr herrington and was now connected with the new enterprise with one small satchel of clothes three large boxes of instruments and a bright fellow telegrapher named jack right he took voyage on the jumping java as she was humorously known of the cunard line the voyage was rough and the little java justified her reputation by jumping all over the ocean quote at the table says edison there were never more than 10 or 12 people i wondered at the time how it could pay to run an ocean steamer with so few people but when we got into calm water and could see the green fields i was astounded to see the number of people who appeared there were certainly two or three hundred i learned afterward that they were mostly going to the vienna exposition only two days could i get on deck and on one of these a gentleman had a bad scalp wound from being thrown against the iron wall of a small smoking room erected over a freight hatch unquote arrived in london edison set up his apparatus at the telegraph street headquarters and sent his companion to liverpool with the instruments for that end the condition of the test was that he was to send from liverpool and receive in london and to record at the rate of 1000 words per minute 500 words to be sent every half hour for six hours edison was given a wire and batteries to operate with but a preliminary test soon showed that he was going to fail both wire and batteries were poor and one of the men detailed by the authorities to watch the test remarked quietly in a friendly way quote you are not going to have much to show they are going to give you an old bridge water canal wire that is so poor we don't work it and a lot of sand batteries at liverpool unquote footnote the sand battery is now obsolete in this type the cell containing the elements was filled with sand which was kept moist with an electrolyte the situation was rather depressing to the young american thus encountering for the first time the stolid conservatism and opposition to change that characterizes so much of official life and methods in europe quote i thanked him says edison and hoped to reciprocate somehow i knew i was in a hole i had been staying at a little hotel in covent garden called the hummums and got nothing but roast beef and flounders and my imagination was getting into a coma what i needed was pastry that night i found a french pastry shop in high whole born street and filled up my imagination got all right early in the morning i saw go road stated my case and asked if he would stand for the purchase of a powerful battery to send to liverpool he said yes i went immediately to apps on the strand and asked if he had a powerful battery he said he hadn't that all he had was tindall's royal institution battery which he supposed would not serve i saw it 100 cells and getting the price 100 guineas hurried to grode he said go ahead i telegraphed the man in liverpool he came on got the battery to liverpool set up and ready just two hours before the test commenced one of the principal things that made the system a success was that the line was put to earth at the sending end through a magnet and the extra current from this passed to the line served to sharpen the recording waves this new battery was strong enough to pass a powerful current through the magnet without materially diminishing the strength of the line current unquote the test under these more favorable circumstances was a success quote the record was as perfect as copper plate and not a single remark was made in the time lost column unquote edison was now asked if he thought he could get a greater speed through submarine cables with this system than with the regular methods and replied that he would like a chance to try it for this purpose 2200 miles of brazilian cable then stored under water in tanks at the greenish works of the telegraph construction and maintenance company near london was placed at his disposal from 8pm until 6am quote this just suited me as i preferred night work i got my apparatus down and set up and then to get a preliminary idea of what the distortion of the signal would be i sent a single dot which should have been recorded upon my automatic paper by a mark about 1 32nd of an inch long instead of that it was 27 feet long if i ever had any conceit it vanished from my boots up i worked on this cable more than two weeks and the best i could do was two words per minute which was only one seventh of what the guaranteed speed of the cable should be when laid what i did not know at the time was that a coiled cable owing to induction was infinitely worse than when laid out straight and that my speed was as good as if not better than with the regular system but no one told me this unquote while he was engaged on these tests colonel garode came down one night to visit him at the lonely works spent a vigil with him and toward morning wanted coffee there was only one little in nearby frequented by long shoremen and employees from the soapworks and cement factories a rough lot and there at daybreak they went as soon as the other customers had left for work quote the place had a bar and six bare tables and was simply infested with roaches the only things that i ever could get were coffee made from burnt bread with brown molasses cake i ordered these for garode the taste of the coffee the insects etc were too much he fainted i gave him a big dose of gin and this revived him he went back to the works and waited until six when the day man came and telegraphed for a carriage he lost all interest in the experiments after that and i was ordered back to america unquote Edison states however that the automatic was finally adopted in england and used for many years indeed is still in use there but they took whatever was needed from his system and he quote has never heard a scent from them unquote arduous work was at once resumed at home on duplex and quadruplex telegraphy just as though there had been no intermission or discouragement over dots 27 feet long a clue to his activity is furnished in the fact that in 1872 he had applied for 38 patents in the class of telegraphy and 25 in 1873 several of these being for duplex methods on which he had experimented the earlier apparatus had been built several years prior to this as shown by a curious little item of news that appeared in the telegrapher of january 30 1869 quote t.a. Edison has resigned his situation in the western union office boston and will devote his time to bringing out his inventions unquote oh the supreme splendid confidence of youth six months later as we have seen he had already made his mark and the same journal in october 1869 could say quote mr. Edison is a young man of the highest order of mechanical talent combined with good scientific electrical knowledge and experience he has already invented and patented a number of valuable and useful inventions among which may be mentioned the best instrument for double transmission yet brought out unquote not bad for a novice of 22 it is natural therefore after his intervening work on indicators stock tickers automatic telegraphs and typewriters to find him harking back to duplex telegraphy if indeed he can be said to have dropped it in the interval it has always been one of the characteristic features of Edison's method of inventing that work in several lines has gone forward at the same time no one line of investigation has ever been enough to occupy his thoughts fully or to express it otherwise he has found rest in turning from one field of work to another having absolutely no recreations or hobbies and not needing them it may also be said that once entering it mr. Edison has never abandoned any field of work he may change the line of attack he may drop the subject for a time but sooner or later the notebooks or the patent office will bear testimony to the reminiscent outcroppings of latent thought on the matter his attention has shifted chronologically and by process of evolution from one problem to another and some results are found to be final but the interests of the man in the thing never dies out no one sees more vividly than he the fact that in the interplay of the arts one industry shapes and helps another and that no invention lives to itself alone the path to the quadruplex lay through work on the duplex which suggested first by moses g farmer in 1852 had been elaborated by many ingenious inventors notably in this country by sterns before Edison once again applied his mind to it the different methods of such multiple transmission namely the simultaneous dispatch of the two communications in opposite directions over the same wire or the dispatch of both at once in the same direction gave plenty of play to ingenuity press scots elements of the electric telegraph a standard work in its day described quote a method of simultaneous transmission invented by t.a. Edison of new jersey in 1873 unquote and says of it quote its peculiarity consists in the fact that the signals are transmitted in one direction by reversing the polarity of a constant current and in the opposite direction by increasing or decreasing the strength of the same current unquote herein lay the germ of the Edison quadruplex it is also noted that quote in 1874 Edison invented a method of simultaneous transmission by induced currents which has given very satisfactory results in experimental trials unquote interest in the duplex as a field of invention dwindled however as the quadruplex loomed up for while the one doubled the capacity of a circuit the latter created three phantom wires and thus quadruplex the working capacity of any line to which it was applied as will have been gathered from the above the principle embodied in the quadruplex is that of working over the line with two currents from each end that differ from each other in strength or nature so that they will affect only instruments adapted to respond to just such currents and no others and by so arranging the receiving apparatus as not to be affected by the currents transmitted from its own end of the line thus by combining instruments that respond only to variation in the strength of current from the distance station with instruments that respond only to the change in the direction of current from the distance station and by grouping a pair of these at each end of the line the quadruplex is the result for sending and for receiving operators are kept busy at each end or eight in all aside from other material advantages it is estimated that at least from 15 million dollars to 20 million dollars has been saved by the Edison quadruplex merely in the cost of line construction in america the quadruplex has not as a rule the same working efficiency that four separate wires have this is due to the fact that when one of the receiving operators is compelled to break the sending operator for any reason the break causes the interruption of the work of eight operators instead of two as would be the case in a single wire the working efficiency of the quadruplex therefore with the apparatus in good working condition depends entirely upon the skill of the operators employed to operate it but this does not reflect upon or diminish the ingenuity required for its invention speaking of the problem involved Edison said some years later to Mr. Upton his mathematical assistant that quote he always considered he was only working from one room to another thus he was not confused by the amount of wire or the thought of distance unquote the immense difficulties of reducing such a system to practice made it readily conceived especially when it is remembered that the line itself running across hundreds of miles of country is subject to all matter of atmospheric conditions and varies from moment to moment in its ability to carry current and also when it is born in mind that the quadruplex requires at each end of the line a so-called artificial line which must have the exact resistance of the working line and must be varied with the variations in resistance of the working line at this juncture other schemes were fermenting in his brain but the quadruplex engrossed him quote this problem was of most difficult and complicated kind and I bent all my energies toward its solution it required a peculiar effort of the mind such as the imagining of eight different things moving simultaneously on a mental plane without anything to demonstrate their efficiency unquote it is perhaps hardly to be wondered at that when notified he would have to pay twelve and a half percent extra if his taxes in Newark were not at once paid he actually forgot his own name when asked for it suddenly at the city hall lost his place in the line and the fatal hour striking had to pay the surcharge after all so important an invention as the quadruplex could not long go begging but there were many difficulties connected with its introduction some of which are best described in mr. Edison's own words quote around 1873 the owners of the automatic telegraph company commenced negotiations with jay gould for the purchase of the wires between New York and Washington and the patents for the system then in successful operation jay gould at that time controls the Atlantic and Pacific telegraph company and was competing with the western union and endeavoring to depress western union stock on the exchange about this time I invented the quadruplex I wanted to interest the western union telegraph company in it with a view of selling it but was unsuccessful until I made an arrangement with the chief electrician of the company so that he could be known as a joint inventor and receive a portion of the money at that time I was very short of money and needed it more than glory this electrician appeared to want glory more than money so it was an easy trade I brought my apparatus over and was given a separate room with a marble tiled floor which by the way was a very hard kind of floor to sleep on and started in putting on the finishing touches after two months of very hard work I got a detail at regular times of eight operators and we got it working nicely from one room to another over a wire which ran to albany and back under certain conditions of weather one side of the quadruplex would work very shakily and I had not succeeded in ascertaining the cause of the trouble on a certain day when there was a board meeting at the company I was to make an exhibition test the day arrived I had picked the best operators in New York and they were familiar with the apparatus I arranged that if a storm occurred and the bad side got shaky they should do the best they could and draw freely on their imaginations they were sending old messages about one o'clock everything went wrong as there was a storm somewhere near albany and the bad side got shaky mr. Orton the president and William H. Vanderbilt and the other directors came in I had my heart trying to climb up around my esophagus I was paying a sheriff five dollars a day to withhold judgment which had been entered against me in a case which I had paid no attention to and if the quadruplex had not worked before the president I knew I was to have trouble and might lose my machinery the New York Times came out next day with a full account I was given five thousand dollars as part payment for the invention which made me easy and I expected the whole thing would be closed up but mr. Orton went on an extended tour just about that time I had paid for all the experiments on the quadruplex and exhausted the money and I was again in straits in the meantime I had introduced the apparatus on the lines of the company where it was very successful at that time the general superintendent of the western union was general T. T. Eckert who had been assistant secretary of war with Stanton Eckert was secretly negotiating with Gould to leave the western union and take charge of the Atlantic and Pacific Gould's company one day Eckert called me into his office and made inquiries about money matters I told him mr. Orton had gone off and left me without means and I was in straits he told me I would never get another cent but that he knew a man who would buy it I told him of my arrangement with the electrician and said I could not sell it as a whole to anybody but if I got enough for it I would sell all my interest in any share I might have he seemed to think his party would agree to this I had a set of quadruplex over in my shop 10 and 12 Ward Street Newark and he arranged to bring him over next evening to see the apparatus so the next morning Eckert came over with Jay Gould and introduced him to me this was the first time I had ever seen him I exhibited and explained the apparatus and they departed the next day Eckert sent for me and I was taken up to Gould's house which was near the Windsor Hotel Fifth Avenue in the basement he had an office it was in the evening and we went in by the servants entrance as Eckert probably feared that he was watched Gould started in at once and asked me how much I wanted I said make me an offer then he said I will give you 30 000 dollars I said I will sell any interest I may have for that money which was something more than I thought I could get the next morning I went with Gould to the office of his lawyers Sherman and Sterling and received a check for 30 000 dollars with a remark by Gould that I had got the steamboat Plymouth Rock as he had sold her for 30 000 dollars and had just received the check there was a big fight on between Gould's company and the western union and this caused more litigation the electrician on account of the testimony involved lost his glory the judge never decided the case but went crazy a few months afterwards unquote it was obviously a characteristically shrewd move on the part of Mr. Gould to secure an interest in the quadruplex as a factor in his campaign against the western union and as a decisive step toward his control of that system by the subsequent merger that included not only the Atlantic and Pacific telegraph company but the American Union telegraph company nor was Mr. Gould less appreciative of the value of Edison's automatic system referring to matters that will be taken up later in the narrative Edison says quote after this Gould wanted me to help install the automatic system in the Atlantic and Pacific company of which General Eckert had been elected president the company having bought the automatic telegraph company I did a lot of work for this company making automatic apparatus in my shop at Newark about this time I invented a district messenger call box system and organized a company called the domestic telegraph company and started in to install the system in New York I had great difficulty in getting subscribers having tried several canvassers who one after another failed to get subscribers when I was about to give up a test operator named brown who was on the automatic telegraph wire between New York and Washington which passed through my new workshop asked permission to let him try and see if he couldn't get subscribers I had very little faith in his ability to get any but I thought I would give him a chance as he felt certain of his ability to succeed he started in and the results were surprising within a month he had procured two hundred subscribers and the company was a success I have never quite understood why six men should fail absolutely while the seventh man should succeed perhaps hypnotism would account for it this company was sold out to the Atlantic and Pacific company unquote as far back as 1872 Edison had applied for a patent on district messenger signal boxes but it was not issued until January 1874 another patent being granted in September of the same year in this field of telegraph application as in others Edison was a very early comer his only predecessor being the fertile and ingenious Callahan of stock ticker fame the first president of the gold and stock telegraph company Elisha W Andrews had resigned in 1870 in order to go to England to introduce the stock ticker in London he lived in Englewood New Jersey and the very night he had packed his trunk the house was burglarized calling on his nearest friend the next morning for even a pair of suspenders Mr Andrews was met with regrets of inability because the burglars had also been there a third and fourth friend in the vicinity was appealed to with the same disheartening reply of a story of wholesale spoilation Mr Callahan began immediately to devise a system of protection for Englewood but at that juncture a servant girl who had been for many years with a family on the heights in Brooklyn went mad suddenly and held an aged widow and her daughter as helpless prisoners for 24 hours without food or water this incident led to an extension of the protective idea and very soon a system was installed in Brooklyn with 100 subscribers out of this grew in turn the district messenger system for it was just as easy to call a messenger as to sound a fire alarm or summon the police today no large city in America is without a service of this character but its function was sharply limited by the introduction of the telephone returning to the automatic telegraph it is interesting to note that so long as Edison was associated with it as a supervising providence it did splendid work which renders the later neglect of automatic or rapid telegraphy the more remarkable Reed's standard telegraph in America bears astonishing testimony to this point in 1880 as follows quote the Atlantic and Pacific telegraph company had 22 automatic stations these included the chief cities on the seaboard Buffalo Chicago and Omaha the through business during nearly two years was largely transmitted in this way between New York and Boston 2000 words a minute have been sent the perforated paper was prepared at the rate of 20 words per minute whatever its demerits this system enabled the Atlantic and Pacific company to handle a much larger business during 1875 and 1876 than it could otherwise have done with its limited number of wires in their then condition unquote Mr. Reed also notes as a very thorough test of the perfect practicability of the system that it handled the president's message December 3 1876 of 12600 words with complete success this long message was filed at Washington at 105 and delivered in New York at 207 the first 9000 words were transmitted in 45 minutes the perforated strips were prepared in 30 minutes by 10 persons and duplicated by nine copyists but today nearly 35 years later telegraph in America is still practically on a basis of hand transmission of this period and his association with Jay Gould some very interesting glimpses are given by Edison quote while engaged in putting in the automatic system I saw a great deal of Gould and frequently went uptown to his office to give information Gould had no sense of humor I tried several times to get off what seemed to me a funny story but he failed to see any humor in them I was very fond of stories and had a choice lot always kept fresh with which I could usually throw a man into convulsions one afternoon Gould started in to explain the great future of the Union Pacific Railroad which he then controlled he got a map and had an immense amount of statistics he kept at it for over four hours and got very enthusiastic why he should explain to me a mere inventor with no capital or standing I couldn't make out he had a peculiar eye and I made up my mind that there was a strain of insanity somewhere this idea was strengthened shortly afterward when the Western Union raised the monthly rental of the stock tickers Gould had one in his house office which he watched constantly this he had removed to his great inconvenience because the price had been advanced a few dollars he railed over it this struck me as abnormal I think Gould's success was due to abnormal development he certainly had one trait that all men must have who want to succeed he collected every kind of information and statistics about his schemes and had all the data his connection with men prominent in official life of which I was aware was surprising to me his conscience seemed to be atrophied but that may be due to the fact that he was contending with men who never had any to be atrophied he worked incessantly until twelve or one o'clock at night he took no pride in building up an enterprise he was after money and money only whether the company was a success or a failure mattered not to him after he had hammered the Western Union through his opposition company and had tired out Mr. Vanderbilt the latter retired from control and Gould went in and consolidated his company and controlled the Western Union he then repudiated the contract with the automatic telegraph people and they never received a cent for their wires or patents and I lost three years of very hard labor but I never had any grudge against him because he was so able in his line and as long as my part was successful the money with me was a secondary consideration when Gould got the Western Union I knew no further progress in telegraphy was possible and went into other lines unquote the truth is that general Eckert was a conservative even a reactionary and being prejudiced like many other American telegraph managers against machine telegraphy throughout all such improvements the course of electrical history has been variegated by some very remarkable litigation but none was ever more extraordinary than that referred to here as arising from the transfer of the automatic telegraph company to Mr. J. Gould and the Atlantic and Pacific telegraph company the terms accepted by Colonel Reef from Mr. Gould on December 30 1874 provided that the purchasing telegraph company should increase its capital to 15 million dollars of which the automatic interests were to receive four million dollars for their patents contracts etc the stock was then selling at about 25 and in the later consolidation with the Western Union went in at about 60 so that the real purchase price was not less than one million dollars in cash there was a private arrangement in writing with Mr. Gould that he was to receive one tenth of the result to the automatic group and a tenth of the further results secured at home and abroad Mr. Gould personally bought up and gave money and bonds for one or two individual interests on the above basis including that of Harrington who in his representative capacity executed assignments to Mr. Gould but payments were then stopped and the other owners were left without any compensation although all that belonged to them in the shape of property and patents was taken over bodily into Atlantic and Pacific hands and never again left them attempts at settlement were made in their behalf and dragged wearily due apparently to the fact that the plans were blocked by General Eckert who had in some manner taken offense at a transaction effected without his active participation in all the details Edison who became under the agreement the electrician of the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company has testified to the unfriendly attitude assumed toward him by General Eckert as president in a graphic letter from Menlo Park to Mr. Gould dated February 2 1877 Edison makes a most vigorous and impassioned complaint of his treatment quote which acting cumulatively was a long unbroken disappointment to me unquote and he reminds Mr. Gould of promises made to him the day the transfer had been effected of Edison's interest in the quadruplex the situation was galling to the busy high-spirited young inventor who moreover had to live and it led to his resumption of work for the Western Union Telegraph Company which was only too glad to get him back meantime the saddened and perplexed automatic group was left unpaid and it was not until 1906 on a bill filed nearly 30 years before that Judge Hazel in the United States Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York found strongly in favor of the claimants and ordered an accounting the court held that there had been a most wrongful appropriation of the patents including alike those relating to the automatic the duplex and the quadruplex all being included in the general arrangement under which Mr. Gould had put his tempting bait of four million dollars in the end however the complainant had nothing to show for all his struggle as the master who made the accounting set the damages at one dollar aside from the great value of the quadruplex saving millions of dollars for a share in which Edison received thirty thousand dollars the automatic itself is described as of considerable utility by Sir William Thompson in his juror report at the centennial exposition of 1876 recommending it for award this leading physicist of his age afterward Lord Kelvin was an adept in telegraphy having made the ocean cable talk and he saw in Edison's American automatic as exhibited by the Atlantic and Pacific Company a most meritorious and useful system with the aid of Mr. EH Johnson he made exhaustive tests carrying away with him to Glasgow University the surprising records that he obtained his official report closes thus quote the electromagnetic shunt with soft iron core invented by Mr. Edison utilizing Professor Henry's discovery of electromagnetic induction in a single circuit to produce a momentary reversal of the line current at the instant when the battery is thrown off and so cut off the chemical marks sharply at the proper instant is the electrical secret of the great speed he has achieved the main peculiarities of Mr. Edison's automatic telegraph shortly stated in conclusion are one the perforator two the contact maker three the electromagnetic shunt and four the ferric cyanide of iron solution it deserves award as a very important step in land telegraphy unquote the attitude thus disclosed toward Mr. Edison's work was never changed except that admiration grew as fresh inventions were brought forward to the day of his death lord kelvin remained on terms of warmest friendship with his american co-laborer with whose genius he thus first became acquainted at philadelphia in the environment of franklin it is difficult to give any complete idea of the activity maintained at the new work shops during these anxious harassed years but the statement that at one time no fewer than 45 different inventions were being worked upon will furnish some notion of the incandescent activity of the inventor and his assistants the hours were literally endless and upon one occasion when the order was in hand for a large quantity of stock tickers Edison locked his men in until the job had been finished of making the machine perfect and all the bugs taken out which meant 60 hours of unintermitted struggle with the difficulties nor were the problems and inventions all connected with telegraphy on the contrary Edison's mind welcomed almost any new suggestion as a relief from the regular work in hand thus quote toward the latter part of 1875 in the new work shop i invented a device for multiplying copies of letters which i sold to mr abe dick of chicago and in the years since it has been universally introduced throughout the world it is called the mimeograph i also invented devices for and introduced paraffin paper now used universally for wrapping up candy etc unquote the mimeograph employs a pointed stylus used as in writing with a lead pencil which has moved over a kind of tough prepared paper placed on a finely grooved steel plate the writing is thus traced by means of a series of minute perforations in the sheet from which as a stencil hundreds of copies can be made such stencils can be prepared on typewriters Edison elaborated this principle in two other forms one pneumatic and one electric the latter being in essence a reciprocating motor inside the barrel of the electric pen a little plunger carrying the stylus travels to and fro at a very high rate of speed due to the attraction and repulsion of the solenoid coils of wire surrounding it and as the hand of the writer guides it the pen thus makes its record in a series of very minute perforations in the paper a current from a small battery suffices to energize the pen and with the stencil thus made hundreds of copies of the document can be furnished as a matter of fact as many as 3000 copies have been made from a single mimeographic stencil of this character end of chapter eight recording by Tisto T Y S T O dot com