It didn’t take long for Edison to establish himself as an inventor and entrepreneur in New York City, the capital of both finance and communications. At the Gold & Stock Reporting Company, Edison implemented improvements to the gold price indicator; with the addition of an alphabetical wheel and a printer, the machine could now deliver and print stock prices as well as gold prices.

In early August 1969, Franklin Pope, the telegraph expert who had welcomed the destitute Edison to Gold & Stock, resigned his position as superintendent of the company and Edison took his place. “Mr. Pope, like a wise man, thinks health worth more than money, and has started west to breathe Superior air,” read the notice in the Journal of the Telegraph. “Mr. Edison is like his predecessor, a man of genius and skill. Few men are better posted than he.”

Pope’s sojourn west lasted about as long as Edison’s tenure in his new job. Within weeks, Edison, again ready to strike out on his own, sold his patent for the Electrical Printing Instrument to Samuel Laws, who then sold to Western Union as part of his decision to liquidate his company and leave the industry. As a result, Edison received the princely sum of $30,000.

As he wrote later, “This caused me to come as near to fainting as I ever got.” He reportedly carried the check around for days, gloating over it. He wrote his father, saying, “I am now in a position to give you some cash . . . Write and say how much . . . Give Mother anything she wants.”

In October 1869, Edison joined forces with the reinvigorated Franklin Pope to form Pope, Edison & Company. The new firm also had the backing of J.L. Ashley, publisher of The Telegrapher, who provided Pope and Edison free advertising.

In its introductory ad, the Telegrapher announced that Pope, Edison, & Company would consist of “electrical engineers” and “constructors of various types of electrical devices and apparatus.” The firm offered a variety of services, among them “the application of electricity to the Arts and Sciences . . . for Fire Alarms, Thermo-Alarms, Burglar Alarms.” In an accompanying news article, the Telegrapher sang the praises of the business’s co-founders. Pope was lauded for his “superior abilities and acquirements, as a practical telegrapher and electrician.” Edison was “a young man of the highest order of mechanical talent, combined with good scientific electrical knowledge and experience.”

Pope, Edison & Company was the first of its kind in America - an engineering services company. Its operations would include making custom electrical equipment, installing and maintaining private telegraph lines, as well as conducting experiments for clients. The firm’s first lab was in Jersey City, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.

To save money, Edison stayed with Pope’s mother at the family home in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Concerned about his emaciated appearance, Mrs. Pope plied the 135-pound Edison with enormous meals when he was there, which wasn’t often. Edison commuted by train to Jersey City and worked long hours, regularly returning to Elizabeth well after midnight.

In Jersey City, Edison developed an improved version of his printing telegraph for gold and silver prices, which Pope, Edison & Company rented to subscribers for $25 a week. The service was so successful that Western Union purchased it for $15,000; Edison’s share was $5,000.

In February 1870, Pope, Edison & Company moved to more spacious quarters in nearby Newark, New Jersey. Newark, a prosperous town filled with manufacturers of iron and brass castings, chemicals, and machine tools, suited Edison’s needs perfectly. Across the river in lower Manhattan - only a ferryboat ride away - stood the high-rise headquarters of a host of corporations competing for Edison’s services.

After years of working in tiny rented or borrowed cubicles, Edison finally had a lab of his own. Now, with sufficient work space, he hired machinists to transform his ideas into marketable products. One was the automatic telegraph, which converted long dispatches into perforated tape that could transmit messages at speeds up to 1,000 words per minute, lightning speed compared to the twenty-five to forty words per minute typical for manual messages.

With Edison’s telegraph, an operator used a keyboard to prepare the tape by punching in the message utilizing the dots and dashes of Morse code. Because of the preparation time required, automatic telegraphy made the most sense for longer messages, since the gain in speed would offset the extra minutes needed to perforate the tape. At the receiving end, the telegraphic signals produced an electric discharge through a metal stylus that etched the dots and dashes on chemically treated recording paper. Edison sold the patent for his automatic telegraph to a new company called Automatic Telegraph Company, which became a steady customer for Edison’s inventions.

Edison again offered to share his new-found wealth with his parents, telling them in a letter in May 1870: “Write me and say how much money you will need till June and I will send that amount on the first of that month.” In October, he was ready to help them buy a piece of property they were hoping to purchase: “If you have your eye on it still, write me, describing it, and why you think it valuable. I can send you the money for it.”

In the same letter, Edison boasted about his growing enterprise: “I have one shop which employs 18 men and am fitting up another which will employ over 150 men.” To his populist father, he wryly commented, “I am now what you Democrats call a ‘Bloated Eastern Manufacturer.’”

Despite his success, Edison again was growing restless. While Pope, Edison was thriving, the inventor thought that his lion’s share of the work merited greater rewards. Accordingly, in December 1879, he broke up his partnership with Pope and Ashley. As he later recalled somewhat sarcastically: “I got tired of doing all the work with compensation narrowed down to the point of extinguishment by the superior business abilities of my partners.”

The break-up wasn’t exactly amicable. In the burgeoning telegraphic business, fights over who owned the rights to intellectual property were becoming common, and the former partners would continue to snipe at each other. Ashley called Edison a “professor of duplicity and quadruplicity,” a play on words mocking Edison’s efforts to create duplex and quadruplex telegraphic systems that carried multiple messages. “Every person who had had dealings heretofore with Edison knows that he is utterly unreliable,” Ashely grumbled, adding “that it is a well-known characteristic of his to systematically and deliberately ‘go back’ on every person who has ever endeavored to aid or cooperate in his inventions or business.”

By this time, Edison’s new company, New Telegraph Works, was getting a steady stream of projects from the industry giant, Western Union. His biggest client was Marshall Lefferts, a Western Union executive who now headed Gold & Stock, which, while owned by Western Union, continued to do business under its own name.

In April 1871, Edison took a brief hiatus from work to travel to Michigan to attend the funeral of his mother, Nancy, who died after a long struggle with mental illness. By May, he was back in New Jersey, ready to move his company, which he rechristened Edison and Unger, to a larger laboratory in Newark. His new partner, William Unger, a Newark machinist turned entrepreneur, took care of the finances while Edison ran the lab.

As an employer, Edison demanded the same level of dedication and hard work from his staff as he required of himself. He was a tough boss and a perfectionist. He double-checked everything, scrutinized every piece of machinery as it was built, and expected his employees to work long hours as the need arose. Predictably, his practices didn’t sit well with some of his workers, and those who quit or got fired spread his reputation as a tyrannical boss. But those who stayed developed intense loyalty to Edison and his work ethic and marveled at his prolific inventiveness.

The burden on Edison, as well as the magnitude of his output, is obvious from a letter he wrote at the end of 1870: “Besides a thousand small details in the manufacture of 150 printing Machines, I have also in process the manufacture of 12 Universal Printing Machines, a Regulating Temperature Machine, two other perforating Machines - a New screw slotting machine, a wire straightening machine, and a polishing machine, and other things. . . .”

Despite his methodical, scientific brain, Edison often acted on impulse and instinct when it came to hiring men - and marrying women. When Edison interviewed a young man named John Ott for a job in his Jersey City machine shop, he pointed to pile of disassembled parts from a stock printer and asked Ott to put them back together. Liking what he saw, Edison hired him and put him in charge of the shop.

In October 1871, Edison hired a sixteen-year-old girl named Mary Stillwell, one of several young women he employed to punch holes in ticker tape at his News Reporting Telegraph Company, another venture started by Edison and Unger. Mary was tall, blond, full-figured, and shy. Edison was smitten.

According to J.B. McClure, author of the book Thomas A. Edison and His Inventions, the twenty-four-year-old inventor came up to Miss Stillwell and said, “What do you think of me, little girl, do you like me?”

Mary didn’t know what to think or what to say.

“Why, Mr. Edison, you frighten me. That is - I-”

“Don’t be in a hurry about telling me. It doesn’t matter much, unless you would like to marry me.”

Mary let out a nervous laugh.

“Oh I mean it,” Edison continued. “Don’t be in a rush, though. Think it over, talk to your mother about it and let me know as soon as convenient; Tuesday, say. How will Tuesday suit you? Next week, Tuesday, I mean.”

Edison soon began calling on Mary at her parents’ home in Newark, where he quickly received their consent to marry their daughter, perhaps encouraged by the fact that Mary’s father was a machinist and an inventor himself. The two were wed on Christmas Day 1871. After the wedding, Edison took Mary to the house he had just bought and promptly left for the lab where he repaired some malfunctioning stock tickers. He returned home to his bride after midnight. They left for a short honeymoon to Niagara Falls the next day.

The Edisons’ first child, Marion, was born in February 1873. Tom nicknamed her Dot in homage to the Morse Code. A son, Thomas Jr., known as Dash, arrived in 1876, and another boy, William, followed in 1878. When they were young, Edison managed to spend some time with his wife and children, especially on Sundays, but he remained obsessed by work. As his sons grew older, he occasionally took them fishing. That was his only hobby, and he seldom indulged in it.

As his enterprises continued to grow, Edison formed some fluid business arrangements that at times overlapped. In early 1872, he teamed up with machinist Joseph T. Murray to manufacture telegraphic equipment, and a few months later, dissolved his partnership with William Unger. All the while, orders were rolling into Edison’s various companies and not just from the United States. In the spring of 1872, Edison sold a shipment of stock printers to Exchange Telegraph Company of London.

In the spring of 1873, seeing the potential for more business overseas, Edison’s associates at Automatic Telegraph Company sent him to London for six weeks in an attempt to sell the British Post Office the rights to his inventions in the United Kingdom. In London, he demonstrated his high-speed telegraph printer, but the device, which was meant to record as many as 500 words per minute, malfunctioned, likely, Edison surmised, because the wires he was forced to use were substandard. He also was competing against existing British patents for similar technology. In any event, the British Post Office turned him down.

While the British trip was a failure, it did make Edison aware of his limitations - and his competition. In many respects, British inventors were ahead of him, particularly regarding the electrical and chemical aspects of telegraphy. He came back to Newark determined to make researching in those areas a priority.

But first, he had to deal with some financial issues. Edison had a habit of not paying his bills on time. Some of his tardiness was a result of absent-mindedness, but some of it was deliberate. He strung out payments to suppliers and used the funds he had on hand to invest in his next invention.

While Edison was in London, a creditor sued him and won a judgment against him. An officer of the court threatened to shut down his Newark shop and sell off his equipment. Edison’s distraught wife appealed to Joseph Murray, who came up with enough cash to keep the sheriff at bay. They also were paying the sheriff a daily administrative fee, the legality of which was unclear. It didn’t help Edison’s situation that the country was in the throes of what would become a sustained depression known as the Panic of 1873.

For Edison, the creditor’s case was a distraction, but it also served as an incentive to speed up work on his next project, a telegraph system capable of sending four signals simultaneously, two in each direction. Edison recounted his perilous condition years later to William H. Meadowcroft, his personal assistant and official biographer: “I was paying the sheriff five dollars a day to withhold execution of judgment which had been entered against me in a case I had paid no attention to; and if the quadruplex had not worked . . . I knew I was to have trouble and might lose my machinery.”

Edison had fabricated a working prototype of the quadruplex, which he urgently wanted to sell to Western Union. In 1872, William Orton, Western Union’s president, had commissioned Edison to invent a new version of the duplex telegraph that the company could use as an alternative to its existing duplex technology, which had been patented by Joseph Stearns, one of Edison’s rivals. While working on Orton’s assignment, Edison, who had been experimenting with duplex systems since his time in Boston, realized he could send four messages at a time, not two.

He figured he could combine two different methods of transmitting in each direction. One technique involved varying the strength of the signal, the other involved varying its polarity. He managed to get the two methods to work in unison through an ingenious series of magnets and switches, including a sort of electric speed bump he called a “bug trap.”

“This problem was of the most difficult and complicated kind, and I bent all my energies toward its solution,” Edison said. “It required a peculiar effort of the mind, such as imagining eight different things moving simultaneously on a mental plane without anything to demonstrate their efficiency.”

The quadruplex would become Edison’s first major invention, but he initially had trouble getting Western Union to commit to it. He demonstrated the technology to company executives in New York in October 1873, but at the time, Western Union, like many companies, was feeling the impact of the country’s economic crisis. Edison was ready to sell his quadruplex patent to Western Union, but Western Union wasn’t ready to buy.

Then Edison found a way in. In July 1874, he struck a deal with Western Union’s chief electrician, George Prescott, to share the royalties of his invention.

“I made an arrangement with the chief electrician of the company,” Edison told Meadowcroft, “so that he could be known as a joint inventor and receive a portion of the money. At the 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.” Despite Edison’s breezy characterization of the deal, his vague arrangements with Prescott and Western Union would come back to haunt him in court.

At Western Union’s annual shareholders meeting on October 14, 1874, Orton sang the praises of the quadruplex, calling it “an invention more wonderful than the duplex.” He gave joint credit to Edison and Prescott, even though Prescott had played no part in Edison’s discoveries. The company had just begun a promising test of the quadruplex system on the wires between New York and Boston.

Orton predicted the system would be of great value, but he wasn’t yet ready to put a price on it: “Negotiations for the purchase of the quadruplex are pending, but the terms will not be settled until after the character and extent of its capacity for work have been more fully ascertained.”

On December 10, Orton sent Edison $5,000, which Edison thought was the first installment on a full-fledged purchase of the patent. But when Edison tried to contact Orton to hammer out the terms of the contract, he discovered the executive had left for a long business trip.

Edison was desperate for cash. The depression had not lifted, and he was still mired in debt. He had been forced to move his family to an apartment and sell his house in Newark. Panicked, he turned to Jay Gould, the notorious financier, who was scheming to create a telegraph empire that would rival Western Union’s.

Gould’s plans put him into direct conflict with his longtime rival, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Western Union’s principal investor. These two ruthless magnates were cut from the same cloth: Both had made their fortunes in railroads and speculation. As Edison later described Gould, his “conscience appeared to be atrophied, but that may be due to the fact that he was contending with men who were worse.”

Gould was itching to knock Western Union off its near-monopolistic perch. He had already bought a smaller company, the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company, and used it to string wires along his railroad lines in the West. Now he was ready to attack Western Union head-on, and he was eager to get his hands on Edison’s new invention. In preliminary meetings with Gould’s business partners, Edison agreed to sell his company, Automatic Telegraph, to Atlantic and Pacific and become the combined company’s chief electrician.

Late on December 30, Edison and Thomas Eckert, a disgruntled Western Union executive anxious to join the new company, met Gould at his home in Manhattan. To avoid detection, they came in through the servants’ entrance. “Gould started in at once,” recounted Edison, “and asked me how much I wanted. I said, ‘Make me an offer,’ then he said, ‘I will give you $30,000.’” Edison agreed to the terms, including the job of chief electrician at Atlantic and Pacific. They signed the deal on January 4, 1875.

For Edison, hooking up with Gould was strictly business. He was drowning in debt, and Gould threw him a lifeline. He wasted no time in spending the money he received from Gould, first on books and equipment for his laboratory. He then traveled back to Port Huron, where he spent nearly $10,000 to pay off debts incurred by his father and brother Pitt. He also managed to repay William Unger the money he owed as part of the dissolution of their partnership.

In his new position, Edison saw a great deal of Gould, whom he came to like, despite the financier’s sour demeanor. “Gould had no sense of humor,” Edison recalled. “I tried several times to get off a funny story, but he failed to see any humor in them.”

But there was nothing humorous about what came to be known as the Telegraph Wars. Two weeks after Edison inked the agreement with Gould, Orton of Western Union said he was ready to meet Edison’s terms for the quadruplex - $25,000 plus an annual royalty of $233 for each installed circuit. But it was too late. The inventor had already committed to Gould. Edison also applied to the U.S. patent commission to get the rights to his quadruplex jointly assigned to a new business partner, George Harrington, a former assistant U.S. Treasury secretary who was now an associate of Gould’s, instead of to George Prescott, the Western Union electrician.

In late January, Western Union sued Edison, claiming he had “basely betrayed” the company. Edison and Gould argued that the inventor’s vague agreement with Orton had never mentioned the quadruplex. In March, the patent commission rejected Edison’s request that Harrington replace Prescott on the patent. In December, Edison and Western Union signed an agreement settling their differences. While the quadruplex patent went to Western Union, Gould ended up winning in the long run. In 1877, Atlantic and Pacific merged with Western Union, giving Gould effective control of the combined company. By that time, Thomas Edison, the genius of telegraphy, had moved on to a whole new realm of inventions.