8. CHAPTER VIII
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 notion of his ceaseless
activity may be formed from the fact that he started no
fewer than three shops in Newark during 1870-71,
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. "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 Berdan. 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 twenty-four 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 pay-roll, 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 work-bench,
sleep twenty or thirty minutes, and wake up fresh.
As this was just what I could do, I naturally conceived
a 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 clothes 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.''
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 thirty-two every
year, and one about every eleven 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 seventy-five 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 actual 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 an ink-writing
recorder as dots and dashes, or even as typewriting
letters; but in many of the earlier systems, like that
of Bain, the record at the higher rates of speed was
effected by chemical means, a tell-tale stain being
made on the travelling 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 two hundred and eighty miles between
New York and Washington. This is believed to have
been the first "compound'' wire made for telegraphic
or other signalling 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 parties in interest turned to Edison.
Mr. E. H. Johnson tells of the conditions: "Gen.
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
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 Col.
Josiah C. Reiff, 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 Lefferts, 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 at Newark, 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—
viz.,
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 a man
with ideas.' Mr. Johnson was accordingly given
three months' leave from Colorado railroad-building,
and has never seen Colorado since.''
Applying himself to the difficulties with wonted
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 lengths. 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 electrosensitive
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.
This 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 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, three thousand words
were sent in one minute and recorded in Roman type.
Mr. D. N. Craig, one of the early organizers of the
Associated Press, became interested in this company,
whose president was Mr. George Harrington, formerly
Assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury.
Mr. Craig brought with him at this time—the early
seventies—from Milwaukee a Mr. Sholes, who had a
wooden model of a machine to which had been given the
then new and unfamiliar name of "typewriter.'' Craig
was interested in the machine, and put the model in
Edison's hands to perfect. "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.
[8.1]
Some were made and used in the office of the Automatic
company. Craig was very sanguine that some day 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.''
A very interesting picture of Mr. Edison at this time
is furnished by Mr. Patrick B. Delany, 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 at Philadelphia. His
remark about Edison that "his ingenuity inspired
confidence, and wavering financiers stiffened up when
it became known that he was to develop the automatic''
is a noteworthy evidence of the manner in
which the young inventor had already gained a firm
footing. He continues: "Edward H. Johnson was
brought on from the Denver & Rio Grande 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
wire being hitched up to one of the Southern &
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's
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 $4,000,000 in stock
for the patents. The contract was never completed so
far as the $4,000,000 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 Harrington,
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 "any inventions or
improvements that may be useful or desired in
automatic telegraphy.'' Mr. Harrington 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 $15 to $17 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, "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. Harrington, 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.'' They all led up to the quadruplex.
Flattered by their success, Messrs. Harrington and
Reiff, 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 Col. George E. Gouraud, who had been
an associate in the United States Treasury with Mr.
Harrington, 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 Wright, 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. "At the table,'' says Edison, "there
were never more than ten or twelve 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.''
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 one thousand words per minute,
five hundred 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:
"You are not going to have much show. They are
going to give you an old Bridgewater Canal wire that
is so poor we don't work it, and a lot of `sand batteries'
at Liverpool.''
[8.2]
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. "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 Holborn Street and filled up. My imagination
got all right. Early in the morning I saw
Gouraud, 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 that he had
was Tyndall's Royal Institution battery, which he
supposed would not serve. I saw it—one hundred
cells—and getting the price—one hundred guineas—
hurried to Gouraud. He said `Go ahead.' I telegraphed
to 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.''
The test under these more favorable circumstances
was a success. "The record was as perfect as copper
plate, and not a single remark was made in the `time
lost' column.'' 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, twenty-two hundred miles of Brazilian
cable then stored under water in tanks at the Greenwich
works of the Telegraph Construction & Maintenance
Company, near London, was placed at his
disposal from 8 P.M. until 6 A.M. "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 one-thirty-second of
an inch long. Instead of that it was twenty-seven 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.'' While he was engaged on
these tests Colonel Gouraud 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 inn near by, frequented by longshoremen and
employees from the soap-works and cement-factories
—a rough lot—and there at daybreak they went as
soon as the other customers had left for work. "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 Gouraud.
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 men came, and
telegraphed for a carriage. He lost all interest in
the experiments after that, and I was ordered back
to America.'' 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
"has never had a cent from them.''
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 twenty-seven feet long. A clue to his activity
is furnished in the fact that in 1872 he had
applied for thirty-eight patents in the class of telegraphy,
and twenty-five 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: "T. A. Edison has resigned his
situation in the Western Union office, Boston, and will
devote his time to bringing out his inventions.''
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: "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.'' Not bad for a novice of
twenty-two. 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 note-books or the
Patent Office will bear testimony to the reminiscent
outcropping 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 interest 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 Stearns, 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. Prescott's Elements of
the Electric Telegraph, a standard work in its day,
described "a method of simultaneous transmission
invented by T. A. Edison, of New Jersey, in 1873,''
and says of it: "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.'' Herein lay the
germ of the Edison quadruplex. It is also noted that
"In 1874 Edison invented a method of simultaneous
transmission by induced currents, which has given
very satisfactory results in experimental trials.'' 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 quadruplexed
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 distant station, with instruments
that respond only to the change in the direction of
current from the distant station, and by grouping a
pair of these at each end of the line, the quadruplex
is the result. Four sending and four receiving operators
are kept busy at each end, or eight in all. Aside
from other material advantages, it is estimated that
at least from $15,000,000 to $20,000,000 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 on 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 "he always considered
he was only working from one room to another.
Thus he was not confused by the amount of wire and
the thought of distance.''
The immense difficulties of reducing such a system
to practice may be readily conceived, especially when
it is remembered that the "line'' itself, running across
hundreds of miles of country, is subject to all manner
of atmospheric conditions, and varies from moment
to moment in its ability to carry current, and also
when it is borne 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. "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.'' It is perhaps hardly to be wondered at
that when notified he would have to pay 12 1/2 per cent.
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: "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 controlled
the Atlantic & 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 of 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 1, o'clock everything went wrong, as
there was a storm somewhere near Albany, and the
bad side got shaky. Mr. Orton, the president, and
Wm. H. Vanderbilt and the other directors came in.
I had my heart trying to climb up around my œsophagus.
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 $5000 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 mean time 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 Gen. 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 &
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.' 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 & Sterling, and received a check for
$30,000, with a remark by Gould that I had got the
steamboat
Plymouth Rock, as he had sold her for
$30,000 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 afterward.'' 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 & 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: "After this Gould wanted me to help install the
automatic system in the Atlantic & 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 the other, failed to get subscribers.
When I was about to give it up, a test
operator named Brown, who was on the Automatic
Telegraph wire between New York and Washington,
which passed through my Newark shop, 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 & Pacific company.'' 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 & 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 spoliation. 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 twenty-four 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 one hundred 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. To-day 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. Reid's
standard Telegraph in America bears astonishing testimony
on this point in 1880, as follows: "The Atlantic
& Pacific Telegraph Company had twenty-two
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 two thousand words a minute have been sent.
The perforated paper was prepared at the rate of
twenty words per minute. Whatever its demerits
this system enabled the Atlantic & 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.'' Mr. Reid
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 12,600 words
with complete success. This long message was filed
at Washington at 1.05 and delivered in New York at
2.07. The first 9000 words were transmitted in
forty-five minutes. The perforated strips were prepared
in thirty minutes by ten persons, and duplicated
by nine copyists. But to-day, nearly thirty-five
years later, telegraphy 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.
"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 12 or 1 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 I went into other lines.''
The truth is that General Eckert was a conservative
—even a reactionary—and being prejudiced like many
other American telegraph managers against "machine
telegraphy,'' threw out 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. Jay Gould and the
Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company. The terms
accepted by Colonel Reiff from Mr. Gould, on December
30, 1874, provided that the purchasing telegraph
company should increase its capital to $15,000,000,
of which the Automatic interests were to receive
$4,000,000 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 $1,000,000 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 & 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 offence at a transaction effected
without his active participation in all the details.
Edison, who became under the agreement the electrician
of the Atlantic & 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, "which,
acting cumulatively, was a long, unbroken
disappointment to me''; 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 thirty 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 held put his tempting
bait of $4,000,000. 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 $30,000, the automatic itself is described
as of considerable utility by Sir William Thomson
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 & Pacific company, a
most meritorious and useful system. With the aid
of Mr. E. H. Johnson he made exhaustive tests, carrying
away with him to Glasgow University the surprising
records that he obtained. His official report
closes thus: "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: (1) the perforator; (2) the contact-maker;
(3) the electromagnetic shunt; and (4) the
ferric cyanide of iron solution. It deserves award as
a very important step in land telegraphy.'' 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 Newark shops during these
anxious, harassed years, but the statement that at
one time no fewer than forty-five 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 sixty 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: "Toward the latter part of 1875, in the Newark
shop, I invented a device for multiplying copies of
letters, which I sold to Mr. A. B. 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.'' The mimeograph employs a pointed
stylus, used as in writing with a lead-pencil, which
is 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.
The 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 three thousand copies have been
made from a single mimeographic stencil of this
character.
[[8.1]]
See illustration on page 146, showing reproduction of the
work done with this machine.
[[8.2]]
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.