7 ~ The inventor and the Barons

 

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In 1873 America was on the threshold of an era of unrivaled material progress. The resourcefulness of her engineers and inventors, among whom Edison was one of the younger figures, was to be bravely displayed only three years later at the great Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Here were giant Corliss steam engines of 1,400 horsepower, two crude examples of the electric arc light, George Westinghouses air brake for railway trains, automatic printing and multiplex telegraphs by Edison, new gas stoves, fifty-ton locomotives, and new devices for cultivating the land, mining the earth, and making shoes, cloth and buttonholes. Surely if men of past times could have foreseen the coming of such engines, mechanisms, and workshops, as Henry George wrote, they would have imagined that all these muscles of iron and sinews of steel would abolish drudgery, make the laborers life a holiday, and realize the golden age of which mankind have always dreamed.

The country, nevertheless, was in dire straits in 1873; neither its natural riches nor the industry of its population spared it the hard times which periodically recurred. At such periods capital seemed to disappear, and not even the strongest of financiers seemed to have money to invest in the wealth-creating discoveries of inventors.

Edison at this time was on the verge of disaster. It was always difficult for him to manage the exact costing of new products, partly because of his peculiar ideas of bookkeeping. Nor did he easily brook criticism or interference by partners and associates. After having opened a third small factory in Newark in 1871, in partnership with George Harrington, for the manufacture of automatic printing telegraphs, Edison had designed an improved model of this instrument, hired men, and arranged for its production. But within a few months he discovered that Harrington had placed a man above him as superintendent of the Edison & Harrington shop. This was more than Edison could take and he walked out. As he told Joseph Murray, he had terminated his partnership with Harrington because he felt like an old coat that had been used until it was worthless and then hung up.140

At about the same period, in the summer of 1872, he also wound up the firm of Edison & Unger, which had been producing stock tickers, giving Unger $5,000 in cash, and notes for $7,100, in satisfaction of all claims. His partners in business ventures had their troubles owing to Edisons unorthodox and whimsical procedure; he, on the other hand, often became suspicious and angry, believing (with good reason) that he was being gulled by some of them. Meanwhile heavy debts weighed upon him again in those lean years.

Fortunately, Harrington offered to patch things up with him, promising that he would not interfere with Edison in the future, or allow him to be interrupted while engaged in experimental work. On these terms Edison resumed working for Harrington in 1873 and permitted himself to draw small sums of money on Harrington whenever he was hard pressed. His only regular business partnership now was with Joseph Murray, whom he trusted.

One of a series of minor inventions with which he strove to keep himself afloat was that of a district messenger call box system. Along with E. A. Callahan, Edison was one of the early arrivals in this field. In the early seventies he formed a concern called the Domestic Telegraph Company, which made and rented signal boxes of his design. Such devices gained a passing popularity because they seemed to offer protection against fire, burglary, and sudden illness. Sensational newspaper stories of how a deranged maid servant in a mansion on Brooklyn Heights had held a woman and child prisoner, without food or water, for twenty-four hours, threatening to kill them if any one entered, caused much excitement at this period. This brought in several hundred subscribers to the signal-box service Edison had launched, with the result that he and his backers were soon able to sell it out for a few thousand dollars to the Automatic Telegraph Company.

Another minor, though diverting, invention of 1874 was the Edison Electric Pen, a by-product of the perforating machine he had devised a year or two earlier. The pen was operated by a small electric motor of the impulse type, powered by a battery of two wet cells. As he described it in his patent application it rapidly punctured a sheet of paper with numerous small holes, filling such holes with a semi-fluid ink, and pressing this same upon the surface to be printed... against a steel plate.141 The advantage was that after letters or records had been thus written in perforations, many copies could be made. The pen cost eight dollars, the battery five, and a roller three dollars. In the days before the Remington-Sholes typewriter came into commercial use, the electric pen (later modified into a stencil pen) achieved a considerable popularity, some sixty thousand being used in government and business offices for rapid copying. On a few occasions Edison even ventured to appear in public and give demonstrations of the working of the pen. It had a tiny motor, about the size of an egg, fastened to its top, and a long wire running to the battery. This is said to have been the first small electric motor ever manufactured and sold in large quantities. In using this device many Americans received their first lessons in applied electrical science.

While experimenting with chemically prepared telegraph tape Edison tried paraffin paper; he may well have been the first to perceive how effectively such material could serve for stenciling purposes. He also relates that toward the latter part of 1875 I invented a device for multiplying copies of letters called the Mimeograph. It was a simple machine for automatic stencil duplication using paraffin paper, and he later sold it for a modest sum to A. B. Dick, of Chicago. Out of it grew one of Americas largest office equipment industries.

He was, above all, prolific. A score of new devices or refinements upon others inventions would be under way in his shops at the same time. In the seven years after he came to New York he applied for and was awarded two hundred patents, and in consequence he was described as the young man who kept the path to the Patent Office hot with his footsteps. But while small sums ventured by small businessmen helped him in the initial development stages, there were usually long delays before profits were realized from these minor inventions.

 

Though the times were bad, his heart was set on a truly big invention, that of a multiplex telegraph that would surpass all that had been done before in this field. After about a quarter century of exploitation the Morse circuit was still essentially a single-track affair operating at the speed of manual sending; but traffic swelled year by year, and it was difficult to keep pace with it.

The importance of the telegraph in 1850 to 1880 (before the day of the telephone), the mighty impetus it gave to the American economy, can scarcely be measured nowadays. It was commonly said that it broke down isolation and conquered distance; it hastened the rescue of many who met with some disaster, or who needed prompt medical attention, while performing a vital service to all trade, including agriculture. Yet control of this key industry fell into the wrong hands at a period when inventors, Edison in particular, could have extended its usefulness and cheapness. It was not in itself wholly a force for good, a scholarly historian, Dr. R. L. Thompson, concludes in his modern survey of its early history. Its control was to be linked to the control of great railway systems, newspapers and press wire services; and thus it became in time, as Thompson relates, a means to foster selfish monopolies detrimental to the interests of the American people.142

Edison, however, thought only of realizing the full technical potential of the telegraph. He had great visions of adding phantom wires to the single Morse sending and receiving circuit, doubling and quadrupling volume, while increasing the speed of the operation with the aid of his automatic. The idea, as we have noticed, had haunted him since he was eighteen, working as a second-class operator in Cincinnati and Louisville. Among the noted inventor-scientists who had worked on this problem since the 1850s were Sir Charles Wheatstone and Lord Kelvin in England, Werner Siemens in Germany, and, lately, J. B. Stearns in America. Edison thoroughly familiarized himself with all their devices by reading abstracts of their patents. Yet he felt that discontent with the current solutions which is one of the strongest stimuli to further inventive struggle. None of the others had really mastered the problems involved, not even Stearns, who had finally made the duplex telegraph operable. The opportunity was still open to invent a truly multiplex telegraph. What was galling to the impetuous Edison was the technical conservatism of those who controlled the telegraph industry. Though the telegraph was his first love, the financial and scientific reactionaries in the end would drive him from the field.

Shortly after the Civil War, William Orton had become the president of Western Union; though not a telegrapher, he was a man of considerable education and of an impressive, even puritanical, mien. In former times he had shown business ability in publishing religious books on a large scale. His methods in running the Western Union monopoly, however, were not noticeably more refined than those of his predecessors, who had brought disrepute upon the company. The distribution of complimentary books of telegraph franks to politicians was continuedas before, in thirty-seven states and nine territoriesand it paid off politically, as Orton frankly avowed.143

Armed with a letter of introduction, Edison had first approached Orton in 1871, to suggest that Western Union back his experiments in duplex telegraphy. But nothing was done for him; a year later the company, instead, bought the patent rights to Stearnss duplex service. Then, early in 1873, Edison again wrote to Orton, saying he had had some further thoughts on the duplex that might be of value. Orton thereupon invited Edison to come to his office in the granite headquarters of Western Union at 145 Broadway and asked him what he could do to improve on Stearnss devices. The truth was that the Stearns apparatus, though workable, had not turned out to be a profitable affair. In discussing it with Orton, Edison referred to it with scorn.

He had a good deal of the Gascon in him; on occasion he would expand, he would swagger even in the presence of the imposing President Orton. He treated the business of making the duplex as a very trifling affair, Orton testified. He said he could make a dozen, he could make a bushel. Very well, I said, Ill take all you can makea dozen or a bushel.’” A few days later, Edison was back with a little book of drawings, containing twenty-one sketches of a duplex machine, saying of one of them, Here is one you can have for five dollars. I made it the night before. Was he expected to avoid infringement on Stearnss patent, he asked? Orton replied that if he could make improvements without infringing on Stearns that would be just as well. Edison then asked that he be allowed to use the facilities of the Western Union headquarters so that he could make experiments over their wires, and that several telegraphers be assigned to help him. This was agreed upon, with the understanding that such inventions in the duplex as developed from these experiments be sold by Edison to Western Union.144

All the winter and spring of 1873 the young inventor worked like a madman at a whole series of duplex devices in a large room in the basement of the Western Union building in New York, often staying there all through the night when the wires were free. Edison recalled afterward: 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...145

The Western Union building was heavily guarded. Edison wanted to feel free to come in at all hours to test his contrivances. Want order go in W.U. night to feel the pulse of my patients, ran one of his telegrams to Ortons secretary.

It was in his character to report the difficulties he encountered with frankness. He ran down a whole series of duplex telegraphic combinations and, though admitting they were not workable yet, suggested they might have a negative value for Western Union, as protection against others who might turn up with a new duplex. He wrote:

 

If I run across another duplex I will take steps to confine it to the patent office immediately, so that duplex shall be a patent intricacy and the intricacy owned by the W.U.

EDISON146

 

Although Tom Edison invariably posed as a country boy who knew little about the ways of the wicked world, he already appreciated how inventors patents, even if without operational value, could be used as pawns or bargaining counters by the moneyed patrons of applied science.

He was working, however, on a new principle, entirely distinct from those of his predecessors, such as Stearns, whose device could send two messages on one wire only in opposite directions. Early in 1873, Edison (according to Orton) asked if a duplex that sent two messages in the same direction would or would not be as desirable as one that sent two messages only in opposite directions. Orton replied that it would be more useful, as with streetcars, everybody wants to go downtown in the morning and uptown at night. To be able to double traffic flowing in one direction when needed would be a vast improvement over Stearnss device.

After two months Edison announced promising results:

 

I experimented 22 nightstried 23 duplex systems, 9 failures, 4 partial success, 10 all right, 1 or 2 badSeveral experiments made on Washington wire after heavy rainplayed-out wire...

 

Or again he reported tersely that he had tried seven makeshift instruments, and that six of them work charmingly, while the seventh was a satisfactory failure. But there were fifteen more combinations to be tested.

Another of his communications runs:

 

I have been sick in bedhave had the most interesting features of 4,000 nightmares in the daytime. Cause: root beer and duplex. EDISON147

 

At some time during the series of 1873 experiments, when Edison discussed them with Orton and George B. Prescott, who was the chief engineer of Western Union, the idea came up that if he succeeded in sending two messages in one direction, why would it not be as easy to duplex both [transmitters] as it would be to duplex one? And then there would be four? Edison expressed the opinion that if one could be done the other could be done. Thus the real possibility of the quadruplex, which he had vaguely outlined for himself in earlier years, arose again and fairly haunted him.

His laboratory notebooks of 1873 contain a rough drawing (undated) labeled by him Fourplex, No. 14, and bearing the interrogatory remark in his handwriting, Why not?

As he told an associate some years later, none of the difficulties he encountered in later experiments, even with incandescent light, proved as tantalizing as the quadruplex telegraph. He said:

 

This problem was of the most difficult and complicated kind, and I bent all my energies to 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.148

 

In the spring of 1873 Edison interrupted his experiments on the diplex to make his first trip to England, in an attempt to demonstrate and help sell patent rights to the British for his other important invention, the automatic printing telegraph. Just before leaving for England on April 23, 1873, he filed application for a patent (issued later as No. 162,633), which covered all the work he had done thus far toward perfecting a new type of duplexor rather, diplex, as he called it.

On his return from England, he found the panic on, the sheriff after him, and no money in sight. When he tried to resume his series of experiments on the diplex telegraph at the Western Union headquarters, he could not find Orton infor he was away on a long business tripand could not interest any of the other executives in his experiments. Western Union itself was having financial troubles; its stock was being pounded down in the market. For the time being the Western Union people seemed to have lost all interest in putting money into new inventions.

Finding himself in extremities Edison had gone back to work on other projects for the smaller, rival telegraph company headed by George Harrington and Josiah Reiff. Either he did not know or did not care that these men were really the agents of Jay Gould, the unconscionable war lord of American finance; nor did Edison in the least suspect that he himself was soon to become a central and controversial figure in the great telegraphic war that now began between Gould and the Western Union interests.

 

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Wall Street fully believed that Jay Gould might go under during the Panic of 1873. But out of the depths of depression he rose again, with the mastery of a whole group of big Western railways in his hands: the Kansas & Pacific, the Missouri Pacific, the Wabash, and even the Union Pacific, which made up a sprawling system almost spanning the continent. Along its tracks he gave right of way for telegraph lines to his own Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company, of which the Automatic was a subsidiary. The Gould-controlled telegraph venture was smaller and less profitable than Western Union but gave it increasing competition and cut down its rivals revenues.

Goulds motives in making war upon the Western Union from 1874 on were explained by him as deriving from his conviction that

 

The telegraph and the railroad system go hand in hand, as it were, integral parts of a great civilization. I naturally became acquainted with the telegraph business and gradually... kept increasing my investment.149

 

Indeed, his carefully laid schemes involved capturing not only railroads, but also large newspapers and press wire services, thus to control the very intelligence going to all financial marketsand manipulate them at his willthanks to the telegraph, the nerve of industry. With superb effrontery Gould publicized his war against the giant telegraph company as a crusade against monopoly. His strategy was directed at weakening the financial position of Western Union in order to capture it more easily. He attacked it in the stock market, offered intense competition through his rival company, and then sought ownership of Edisons valuable new patents as a means of defeating the enemy. While engineers and inventors like Edison strove to play a creative, constructive role in society by applying their scientific skills, a Jay Gould functioned mainly as a disturber of the economy, as Thorstein Veblen defined his role.

Early in 1874 there took place in the telegraphic war an early skirmish in which an Edison invention was used by one side as a weapon against the other. The Automatic Telegraph Company boasted of Edisons new automatic printing telegraph as giving it a vast superiority over Western Union, which then had only manual sending and receiving. The Gould-controlled company thereupon challenged the other to a speed contest in which the merits of their different systems would be demonstrated to the public. On one day Automatic Telegraph arranged to transmit an 11,130-word message by President Grant over a single wire, by means of Edisons new printing telegraph. To send this elephantine dispatch from Washington to New York, Ed Johnson, who was in charge of the operation, employed ten clerks to punch paper tape perforations recording the Presidential message; only two Morse operators were needed to run the automatic sender; but thirteen copyists were required to take down the copy as it came to New York. This whole job was performed in the record time of sixty-nine minutes.

On the same day, Western Union raced against the Automatic Company, using old-fashioned manual methods, but opening up eight lines between Washington and New York and employing eight expert operators in each city. They managed to record the whole Presidential harangue in seventy minutes flat. Edisons automatic telegraph had won outbut only by an eyelashand at the higher cost of twenty-five personnel against Western Unions sixteen. The speed contest, as reported in the countrys newspapers, revealed the bottlenecks that handicapped the rapid automatic printer at the tape-perforating and copying end, where the work had to be done manually.

Edisons interest in the outcome of the conflict between the barons was somewhat academic. (Alternately he did work for both sides.) What disturbed him was that Western Union, during the depression and its struggles with Gould, showed a loss of interest in backing his new workand this at a time when he was desperate for money. Thus, a good many months passed during which the tantalizing problems of the diplex and quadruplex were allowed to rest.

But they continued to obsess him. He wrote to Orton complaining that he had received no further cooperation from Western Union officials when he tried to renew these experiments in multiplex telegraphy; but he got no reply. Then, in May, 1874, he wrote to George B. Prescott, chief engineer of Western Union:

 

You will probably think it strange that I have done nothing with the duplex. The fact is Mr. Ortons sudden disappearance took the bottom out of my boat, as I can do nothing without his or your cooperation.150

 

After having studied the problem a good deal in his mind and having worked out some new combinations, he was ready to go to work again, but he wanted to use the facilities of Western Union and eight expert telegraphers as assistants. He now begged that Prescott intervene in his behalf. To gain his support, Edison offered Prescott a partnership in his invention-in-progress. Though the other man was no inventor, his personal influence with the Western Union might be decisive in arrangements to complete the necessary experiments.

Now Orton reappeared and gave orders that the fullest cooperation be extended Edison; he also approved of the idea of Prescott becoming Edisons partnerthough Prescott was his subordinate and a high officer of Western Union, to whom the invention, if successful, would be sold. The conduct of both Prescott and President Orton, who advised him, reflected low standards of business ethics even for those Robber Baron times. It was later stigmatized in court by enemies of Western Union as showing the intention of fraud against Edison.

His own recollection of the affair in some measure bore out this view of the case:

 

I wanted to interest the W.U. Telegraph Company [in the quadruplex] with a view to selling it, but was unsuccessful, until I made an arrangement with the Chief Electrician of the Company, so he could be known as joint inventor and receive a portion of the money. At that time I was very short of funds and needed it more than glory. This electrician appeared to want glory more than money, so it was an easy trade...151

 

In a suit brought in 1877 by the Jay Gould interests against Prescott, Western Union, et al. (for control of the Edison quadruplex patents), evidence was introduced to show that Prescott had no real part in the inventive work, aside from giving Edison some advice and aid in conducting his experiments.

 

After the deal with Prescott, experiment on the new type of duplex conceived by Edison went forward more rapidly, at Western Unions expense and with the help of its personnel. To the basement room at 145 Broadway were brought Edisons queer collection of instruments that were such a puzzle to ordinary telegraphers at the time. As one of his assistants described the proceedings, these would be set out on the floor in everybodys way until

 

Along about midnight Edison came in and, gathering up his paraphernalia, began to arrange it by connecting up the various parts with a fine copper wire which he unwound from a small spool that he produced from his pocket. He was our companion by day and by night for nearly a week, during which time he never went to bed or had any regular meals. When he was hungry he visited a coffee and cake establishment in the neighborhood for what he pleased to call the Bohemian Diet; and, returning with an unlighted cigar between his lips, he would begin his experiments anew. After a while he would throw himself into a chair and doze, sometimes for an hour... He used to say that while thus napping, he dreamed out many things that had puzzled him while awake.152

 

By early summer Edison was sending jubilant notes to Orton.

 

After an almost infinite amount of experiment I have a duplex working in shoptwo messages in the same direction... I want the loan of three duplex sounders and one Phelps relay for a week. I am ready to put the new duplex in operation between New York and Philadelphia.

 

And again, at about the same period, he announced joyously:

 

I have struck a new vein in duplex telegraphy. Think t will be a success.

Two messages can be sent in same direction.

In opposite directions.

Way stations can work on it...

 

The design of the quadruplex was now completeindeed the very word which was destined to become famous was coined by Edison in 1874. At one of his tests Edison rigged up two rooms constituting the near and far ends of the circuit, with a wire running out to Albany, a hundred and fifty miles distant, connecting them; it worked fairly well. Boys, shes a go! he exclaimed to his assistants. But it was still a new thing and full of baffling perversity at times. It must be used, he said, to find out where the bugs are. He paused significantly. The eight telegraphers working under him enjoyed hearing the exuberant young man, and waited politely for him to continue. Then he said suddenly, in his tone of badinage, or playful crueltyor of both, mixed — “You dont seem to tumble. Every man jack of you is fired after today.153

The turning point had come when Edison got the two messages going in one direction on one wire in that summer of 1874 and combined his own apparatus with the Stearns system, thus transmitting, all together, four messages on one wire (two in each opposite direction) at a rate of 142 telegrams per hour.

Edison, Prescott, and Orton then met at Ortons office, and Edison signed a preliminary agreement dated July 9, 1874, in which he designated Prescott as his coinventor, the patent for the quadruplex to be filed jointly in their names. If the invention proved on further testing to be successful, Western Union was to buy the patent rights from Edison and Prescott on conditions it usually accorded to inventors, with any disputes that might arise over actual terms to be settled by an outside arbitrator.

Now, Edison, for want of money, had had some involved business transactions at about the same period with the rival group in which, it was charged later, he had also promised to sell rights to the multiplex telegraph invention to George Harrington. Before closing the affair with Orton he therefore sent his friend Joseph Murray to tell Harrington that he intended to dispose of his new invention to Western Union. Harrington, extremely angry, made vehement objections to Murray, saying that other parties associated with him in backing Edison would never consent to such an arrangement. The other parties, not named, were obviously the enemy of Western Union, Jay Gould, and the independent telegraph system he controlled.

A small news item reporting the successful trial of Edison and Prescotts quadruplex instrument and its assignment to Western Union appeared in the New York Times for July 10, 1874. The night before, Harrington, having received this news in advance, sent a frantic letter by messenger to Edison:

 

Midnight. I returned this afternoon. Having learned what was going on, have been all evening investigating... Beg of you to see me before you sign any more papers. Come to 80 Broadway. I am in hopes I can relieve you. At the moment, adverse action will cause a loss of $100,000.154

 

Up to this time Edison had received no money from Western Union for the all-important quadruples experiments. He had, however, been drawing advances from Harrington and the Automatic Telegraph Company for performing other tasks for them. Josiah Reiff, another of Jay Goulds henchmen, and president of the Automatic, testified later that he had strongly urged Edison not to take any money from the Western Union people, because his past agreements with the Harrington-Reiff group would be in conflict with these new commitments. From the tangled state of his business as a free-lance inventor, dealing as he did with the two rival interests in the telegraph industry, arose the oft-repeated charge that Tom Edison had harum-scarum notions about his contractual obligations.155

Meanwhile, he was desperately in need of ten thousand dollars to save his home in Newark. His friend Murray is reported to have said to him on such an occasion, pointing to his golden-haired child Marion, If you dont watch out that daughter of yours will be a pauper!

Beside himself with anxiety, the impecunious inventor rushed to President Ortons office to beg him for a loan of ten thousand dollars, against a mortgage on his house and shops or against an assignment of remaining rights to his other concurrent invention, the automatic printing telegraph. But Orton coldly turned him down, holding that there was not sufficient security for such a loan and advising him to go to the Automatic people. Moreover, Orton considered the automatic telegraph a cripple. Edison then obtained the needed ten thousand dollars from Reiff, according to Reiffs later testimony, the money being provided from the treasury of Automatic Telegraph and its parent company, Atlantic & Pacific.156

But the money received from Reiff had really been paid at the order of Jay Gould, who at the time remained behind the scene. Several years later, Gould, in reply to a letter of Edisons complaining of the treatment he had received from Goulds organization, reminded the inventor of the money he had given him in the summer of 1874, saying:

 

I have always felt kindly toward you and assisted you financially, when but for it you would have been ruined, at least so you told me.157

 

These payments, however, were not made out of charity; as far as can be judged from Edisons highly raveled accounts, they were for a new type of telegraph relay. For, just as he was completing work on the quadruplex, the versatile inventor was called upon by the Gould forces to help them in a new battle of the telegraphic war.

In the summer of 1874 Western Union struck a powerful blow at Goulds company, instituting an injunction suit in which it was charged that the Gould telegraph network was infringing upon patents for the Page relay owned by Western Union. The Page relay was then the only known means for stepping up, that is relaying, messages going over long-distance telegraph lines. Essentially it was a standard telegraph receiver, the armature of which acted as a switch in another electrical circuit. Its function was to repeat signals, however weak, over the next section of line by means of renewed battery power.

After long litigation, the assignment of Pages patent to Western Union had been upheld in the Federal courts. Now, by obtaining an injunction for infringement of patent rights against Goulds lines, Western Union hoped to close down all of its adversarys sounders, throughout the country, for seventeen years.

Goulds henchmen fought a delaying action in the courts. But time was running out; in the crisis that faced them, they soon called in Edison. Rescue us, they cried. He must now drop everything else and improvise or invent some substitute, some means of evading Pages patent, in case Western Unions claims were finally sustained in the higher courts. Edison promised that he would attack the problem that very night.158

At the time, something long forgotten flashed back into Edisons mind. In his Newark laboratory, two years earlier, he had discovered, while experimenting with chemically prepared paper for his automatic telegraph, a most curious phenomenon: that a strip of moistened paper, passing under the telegraphic stylus while transcribing a message, ran more quickly and with less friction whenever the current passed from the stylus to the paper, than when no current passed. If he rubbed the stylus with a piece of moistened chalk, he noticed how the friction diminished even more abruptly when the current passed through, and how it increased sharply when the current was cut off.

In the summer of 1874, being confronted with the new problem of evading Pages patent, he recalled the action of that moistened chalk on the telegraphic stylus. I substituted a [drum-shaped] piece of chalk rotated by a small electric motor for the magnet [of the Page relay], and connected a sounder to a metallic finger resting on the chalk. It made the claim of Page worthless.159

What he had here was a differential friction device, in place of the spring and electromagnet relay. At the make or break of the current, the yielding surface of the chalk disk slipped back and forth, making and breaking contact in the secondary circuit and communicating signals precisely as fast as electric impulses passed through the primary circuit. Patent for this device, which Edison called the electromotograph or sometimes simply motograph, was applied for on August 13, 1874, and was granted as No. 158,787, in January, 1875. His chalk-drum apparatus, Edison claimed, could work any form of relay, sounder or telegraph printer.

We have the recollection of an eye-witness, a telegrapher in a downtown office of the Atlantic & Pacific system, of the day in the autumn of 1874, when by court injunction all the keys were silencedand Edison suddenly appeared, grinning confidently, to introduce his new device:

 

First he detached the Page sounder from the instrument, an intensely interested crowd watching his every movement. From one of his pockets he took a pair of pliers and fitted [his own motograph relay] precisely where the Page sounder had been previously connected, and tapped the key. The clickingand it was a joyful soundcould be heard all over the room. There was a general chorus of surprise. Hes got it! Hes got it!160

 

The industrial monopolists at that stage had not settled the boundaries of their empires (as they have today) and were carrying on the fight to the bitter end, for the stakes were high. But then into the breach would come Edison, a sort of scientific soldier of fortune, who in an emergency could improvise any engine neededin order to evade some patent. His services to Gould were of inestimable value; in fact he had saved the Gould telegraph empire from extinction.161

Nevertheless, in the lean summer of 1874 Edison had only ten thousand dollars from Gould on account of the chalk relayjust enough to save the mortgage on his home in Newarkand nothing at all from Western Union. Though he felt bitter at the Western Union officers because of their delay in compensating him, he continued to work hard over the installation and testing of the new quadruplex apparatus on their long lines.

Later that summer preparations were made for a full-dress exhibition before a board meeting of Western Union. Edison relates:

 

Under certain conditions of weather one side of the quadruplex would work very shaky, and I had not succeeded in ascertaining the cause of the trouble... The day arrived, I had picked the best operators in N.Y. and they were familiar with the apparatus. I arranged that if a storm should occur and the bad side got shaky to do the best they could and draw freely on their imagination. They were sending old messagesabout twelve oclock everything was working fine, but there was a storm somewhere near AlbanyMr. Orton, the president, and Wm. Vanderbilt and other directors came in. I had my heart trying to climb up around my oesophagus... But the operators were stars, they pulled me through. The N.Y. Times (get it) came out next day with a full account...162

 

On October 14, 1874, a published report of Western Union showed that the quadruplex device had been in operation over part of its lines, and that results thus far indicated it would double the companys existing facilities and yield economies amounting to many millions. Yet Orton still delayed closing the transaction and paying Edison, who was desperate.

In a letter of early November to his father which bespeaks his mental torment, Edison writes, Everything is approaching a climax, and I expect to get my money from Automatic and Western Union within six weeks.163

As the big deal with Western Union seemed about to be closed, Edison, who was still harassed by creditors, asked Orton for a temporary advance, sending him what Orton termed one of his characteristic and peculiar requests, I would like 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, one thousand, as you may choose to advance. Orton put his finger in the middle, suggesting five thousand, and Edison agreed.164

But it was not enough; the money had to be paid out immediately to creditors. A week later Edison was back urging Orton to draw up their final contract for himself and Prescott. The company, he pointed out, had over 25,000 miles of wire which could be profitably quadrupled. It will create 50,000 miles of wire in addition. There would be large savings, of which a fraction, some 5 per cent, should adhere to the inventor as royalty. Edison therefore asked for $25,000 down, in behalf of Prescott and himself, certain royalties to be paid him on each quadruplex instrument in use, and $25,000 in final payment after six months. The letter was signed by both Edison and Prescott. Orton afterward claimed that he informed Edison he had to leave for a trip of several weeks through the Middle West and would close up the whole matter upon his return. Edisons version is that he was told nothing and, in fact, was led to suspect that he would never get anything at all for his pains. As he recalled these memorable events in his life:

 

At that time General Superintendent of the W.U. was General T. T. Eckert. It seems that there was great friction between Eckert and President Orton... (Eckert was getting ready to resign.) One day Eckert called me into his office and made inquiries about money affairs. 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...165

 

A few days later the news circulated in Wall Street that the able young inventor, Thomas A. Edison, had suddenly gone over with his entire bag of inventions to the camp of Jay Gould and the rival Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company. When Orton returned from Chicago in January, 1875, Edison could not be found. There was panic at Western Union, whose stock was falling in the market to its lowest levels in recent times.

 

3

Edison had a quadruplex set at his Ward Street shops in Newark. On the evening after he had made his strange proposal to the inventor, General Eckert suddenly appeared in Newark accompanied by a small black-bearded man wearing an overcoat whose collar was turned up to conceal all but his dark eyes. It was Jay Gould himself; this was the first time Edison had ever laid eyes on the Machiavelli of American finance. The quadruplex apparatus was exhibited and explained, and the two men departed without making any promises.

 

The next day Eckert sent for me [actually a week later] and I was taken up to Goulds house... In the basement, he had an office; it was in the evening and we went 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 saidmake me an offerthen he said, I will give you $30,000. I said I will sell any interest I have for that money, which was somewhat more than I thought I could get. The next morning I went with Gould to Shearman & Sterlings office and received a check for $30,000, with a remark by Gould that I had got the steam yacht Plymouth Rock, as he had sold her for $30,000 and bad just received the check.166

 

A few days after this secret transaction with Edison, the conniving General Eckert, an old-time telegrapher who had risen from the ranks, resigned from Western Union to become the president of Goulds Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company.

Gould had been informed by the inventor about his contract with George B. Prescott as coinventor of the quadruplex. The great financier expressed the opinion that this was an outrageous fraud upon the real inventor; he had been entrapped, but Jay Gould would save him. In any case Edison conveyed to Gould (actually to one of Goulds agents) only his own half interest in the quadruplex invention in return for those thirty thousand pieces of silver. Gould, the head of the rival Atlantic & Pacific, now held equal ownership rights with Western Unions Prescott in the patent on the vital quadruplex invention.

Gould was the last man in the world that Orton, Vanderbilt, and company would have cared to have as their partner, for obviously he would seek only to obstruct and torture them in the courts. No one was more adept than he when it came to harassing ones financial opponents by litigation; he retained for such work the nations strongest lawyers and continued until the enemy cried for mercy and paid up. It was said at the time that, when the news came out that Edison and the disgruntled Eckert had been lured into Goulds camp, the stock of Western Union fell sharply under heavy short-selling by Jay Gould, so that he was believed to have gained in a single day twenty or thirty times that which he paid the young inventor.

The famous telegraphic war between the Gould and Vanderbilt interests raged for about seven years, between 1874 and 1880, and was fought mainly in the courts. Western Union opened hostilities by entering suit to have the assignment to Gould of Edisons patent rights in the quadruplex canceled by court order. Before the suit was begun, however, President Orton had made belated offers to Edison to pay him what had been agreed upon, to which the inventor had answered in a letter of January 26, 1875, that he rescinded his agreement with Prescott and Western Union.

As a free lance Edison had a right to sell his professional services or patent rights to anyone he pleased, even to a financier who was notorious for his betrayals of associates in Wall Street deals. Edison owed no special loyalties to Western Union, which despite his great efforts on their behalf had thoughtlessly delayed compensating him for his quadruplex workthe small installment of five thousand dollars given him in December, 1874, had not even covered his expenses in manufacturing twenty quadruplex instruments for their recent tests. In short, as he remarked on one occasion, he had found that the Western Union people, who were regarded as Americas financial aristocracy, could be as pitiless, in business dealings with him, as any other money men.

One cause of his bitterness toward them was undoubtedly the mean bargain, forced upon him under duress, by which their man Prescott was to share both credit and money rewards as coinventor. Edison had labored like one of the Titans of old, for three years, to develop his quadruplex invention, while Prescott had contributed virtually nothing. Moreover, Tom Edison was never one to share the glory he believed rightfully due himself with another and lesser manand this was a work he considered the crowning achievement of his career. He foresaw the commercial importance of this device. But was it not also for love of such labor and for his own sense of glory that he had struggled so long with its difficulties?

The court battles of 1875 were exceedingly unpleasant for Edison, caught in the crossfire of the warring factions. The eminent attorneys of Western Union, United States Senator Roscoe Conkling and Grosvenor P. Lowrey, called him to the witness stand and publicly stigmatized him as one who had basely betrayed his kind patrons, the officers of the Western Union, and who made agreements to sell the same patent rights to others twice or even three times over. He was assailed as a rogue inventor and a professor of duplicity and quadruplicity.167 On the other side, Goulds counsel charged that Western Union had attempted a conspiracy to defraud Edison, so that, like a simpleton, he assigned away half of his rights without valuable consideration.

Why did these great barons contend with each other in the courts for possession of Edisons quadruplex? It was not only a superb invention, but one of the most important contributions to the telegraphic art and would bring dominance of the great industry to whoever owned it.

 

4

During the modern era of electronics the applied science of old telegraph days has been all but forgotten; the industry itself, in unsuccessful competition with the telephone, suffered a decline. Nonetheless, Edisons quadruplex was a strategic invention in its time and impresses us, as it did his contemporaries, as the masterwork of his youth. Up to now the twenty-seven-year-old inventor had been known to a small circle of clients who appreciated his budding talents. But when reports of his perfected quadruplex were published in newspapers and technical journals in the autumn of 1874, his reputation began to spread among a mainly scientific public abroad as well as at home. An English technical journal now commented:

 

Americans are maintaining their ground for ingenuity and enterprise in the electrical world, especially in telegraphic inventions... The benefits arising from the Duplex System bid fair to be multiplied still further by the joint labors of G. B. Prescott and T. A. Edison.168

 

(How galling it was for Edison to have Prescotts name coupled with his own, hereafter, in all references to this invention!)

The quadruplex was surely the most complicated job Edison had done thus far, and therefore marks a decided jump in his own intellectual capacity. He had never been one of your precocious young men of science. Growing slowly in his own undisciplined way, Edison by now had reached a stage where his mind functioned in scientific work with great clarity as well as ingenuity. He had to use the most elaborate circuitscombining strong and weak currents with rapid changes in the direction of their flowthat were ever attempted in the era before electronic science was born. The quadruplex apparatus, though now obsolete, appears to us as a wonderfully ingenious system of sounders, circuits, condensers, batteries, relays of both differential and polarized type, and pole changers effecting reversals of polarity. Yet all this array of telegraphic paraphernaliawhich may be described with accuracy of detail only in terms of a detailed diagramworked precisely, harmoniously and unfailingly.

Edison himself had the utmost difficulty in working out in his head a scheme of electrical currents moving in two directions at the same time and using four different modulations of the current. He had really very little power of abstraction and had to be able, above all, to visualize things, one of his sons said of him in later years.169 In order to see the thing with his own eyes he constructed an analogue, or a model hydraulic apparatus using a pump to force fluid backward and forward through pipes and valves, in the pattern of the wires and controls planned for his quadruplex system.

The duplex telegraph of J. B. Stearns employed a differential or neutral relay, as a means for registering variations in the strength of the current. The differential relay connected at each station would not respond to signals sent out of the home station, but would respond to signals sent from the other end of the line. The receiving instrument at each end of the circuit would respond to incoming signals, but not to outgoing signals, and so messages could be sent in opposite directions at the same time.

Now Edison proceeded to add his own distinctive diplexing device to Stearnss apparatus, so that he could send two messages simultaneously in the same direction over one wire, as well as two in opposite directions. To accomplish this he introduced as a wholly new feature a second relay, called a polarized relay, which responded only to changes in the direction of the current passing through it. With this he combined a mechanism called a pole-changer, which was used in place of the regular sending key and brought about instantaneous reversals in the direction of flow of the current as it was pressed and released.

The Edison quadruplex system thus doubled the capacity of the Stearns duplex; it consisted of two sets of sending instruments at each terminal, one of the pair working to vary the strength of the current, the other to vary the direction of its flow; at the far terminal a pair of operators did likewise in sending messages over their two instruments. The two pairs of receiving instruments at each terminal were so constructed and adjusted that one set would respond only to a change in the strength of the current, while the other set responded only to a change in direction of current.170

The beauty of Edisons device was that it not only solved a difficult problem in applied electricity (which famous inventors of Europe had wrestled with for many years) but also doubled traffic facilities for peak loads of dispatches moving in one direction. After the apparatus was fully installed on Western Union lines, in 1876, the companys report showed economies of over $500,000 annuallywhich amounted, with growing volume, to over $20,000,000 in the next thirty years. It is therefore no surprise that the Gould and Western Union interests were locked in conflict for control of Tom Edisons patent.

Experts of telegraphy in the decade that followed this invention regarded it as the chief product of Mr. Edisons genius; so James G. Reid characterized it in his authoritative manual on the subject. Other specialists in this field paid tribute to his beautiful combinations of currents... so quickly made, broken up and reformed.171

To revert to the great telegraphic war. Soon enough Edison discovered what almost everyone who ever worked for Jay Gould learned to his sorrow: that the inscrutable financier swindled his associates no less than his opponents, whenever it suited him to do so. Early in 1875, Gould took steps to merge the several telegraph companies under his control. By a written agreement drawn earlier, the Automatic Telegraph Companys stockholders were to exchange their shares, at a valuation of about four million dollars, for Atlantic & Pacific securities. Edison had been promised payment for his services in stock, which was supposed to total about $250,000 in new securities. That is, he had been assured in writing that he would receive one-tenth of the benefits accruing to the Automatic Telegraph from his inventions, and also that he would be named the chief electrician of the new amalgamated company at a good salary. To his chagrin, none of these promises was kept. Jay Gould made cash payments only to Harrington, his lieutenant, and then by some legal chicane discriminated against the other stockholders of the Automatic Telegraph, allowing them nothing for their stocks. Among those who were thus defrauded was Edison. His former patron, Harrington, simply took the money he got from Gould and fled to England to avoid the expected lawsuits.

By the summer of 1875 Edison was through with Jay Gould forever. About two years later, having received none of the compensation promised him, Edison addressed Gould an impassioned letter protesting at the treatment he had received, which, acting cumulatively, was a long unbroken disappointment to me. He had to live somehow, he said, and so had gone back to work for Western Union, which was only too glad to get him back.172

No reply came from the great man. Edison, with other creditors and stockholders of the Automatic company, all of whose assets had been taken away, joined in a suit against Jay Gould which dragged itself along for nearly thirty years and ended only in 1906! At that time a Federal court judge finally ruled for the plaintiffs and ordered an accountingGould was then long deadbut the referee who made the accounting set the damages to the plaintiffs at only one dollar!

For a quarter of a century, Gould was one of Americas most brilliant money lords and best hated individuals. A fanatic for power, driving for supreme monopoly over rail transport and wire communications, Gould epitomized the Robber Baron era; he was the prototype of Theodore Roosevelts malefactors of great wealth. The telegraph workers who waged a series of fierce strikes against his company used to march to such songs as Well Hang Jay Gould to a Sour-apple Tree!

In January, 1881, after William Orton had died, the younger Vanderbilt, who lacked the starch of his father the Commodore, sent Gould a brief note inviting him to a conference at the Vanderbilt residence. It was really the white flag of surrender. An exchange of stock between Atlantic & Pacific and Western Union assured Goulds dominant control of the entire amalgamated telegraph system. Soon afterward Gould moved his office to the massive headquarters of Western Union and ruled over his industrial empire from that place of vantage up to the time of his death in 1892.

In his reminiscences Edison left some discerning observations on this singular man. Gould had a peculiar eye, Edison noticed, and he was convinced there was a strain of insanity somewhere in him.

 

He 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... with which I could usually throw a man into convulsions.

 

What was impressive about Gould, however, was the way in which he seemed to collect every kind of information and statistics possible, before entering upon some venture. He was without doubt a hard worker. His connection with men prominent in official life, of which I was aware, was surprising to me, Edison remarks; and he adds, in objective spirit:

 

Gould took no pride in building up an enterprise. He was after money, and money only. Whether the company was a success or failure mattered little to him.

His conscience seemed to be atrophied, but that may have been due to the fact that he was contending with men [of Western Union] who never had any to be atrophied...173

 

Though Gould had swindled him of large sums, Edison, surprisingly enough, concluded his remarks by saying, I held no grudge against him, because he was so able in his line. All that Edison cared about was that his own part, as engineer, should be successful, while the money with me was a secondary consideration. The last statement, made in his late years, seems sincere; no one to whom money was the primary consideration would have spent his whole life tormenting himself to invent things.

When Gould got the Western Union, he said in conclusion, I knew no further progress in telegraphy was possible, and I went into other lines.

 

5

At the impromptu research laboratory on the top floor of the shop at Newark, Edison often permitted himself to be drawn by his curiosity into new and unexplored fields of sciencedespite his resolution to limit himself to commercial inventions. Whenever something unexpected was observed in the course of his experiments, he would stop and examine such phenomena from every aspect. He was still learning, and his assistants were also learning, sometimes at considerable costthere were explosions through careless handling of chemicals, and one fire that needed the Newark Fire Department to extinguish it.

One novel experiment undertaken by Edison on his own account was devoted to making an electric arc light of exposed carbon points that he connected with a battery of thirty-one cells. The light did not last more than a minute or two.174 Edison had been prompted to attempt this experiment by reports, in the autumn of 1875, of successful arc lights being introduced commercially in Russia, Germany, and France. But he soon dropped the arc lights to pursue investigations of a quite different and highly mystifying character.

He had been working several months over the problems of acoustical telegraphy, under renewed subsidies from his old friends at Western Union, to whose service he had returned following his sad experience with Gould. The objective, also pursued then by Elisha Gray and Alexander Bell, was to transmit sound vibrations of tuning forks over a telegraph wire, in order to achieve new methods of multiple transmission. It was in fact one of the last stages before the invention of the telephone. On November 22, 1875, his laboratory notebooks relate, In experimenting with a vibrator magnet consisting of a bar of Stubbs steel fastened at one end and made to vibrate by means of a magnet, I was astonished to see peculiarly bright, scintillating sparks issuing from the core of the magnet. He had previously noticed such sparks in telegraph relays, and in the loose iron filings between the armature and magnetic core of a stock printer, but, as he relates in his laboratory notebooks, he had always assumed such sparks were caused by strong induction. Yet they seemed so strong that it struck him that they might be caused by something more than induction. His notes read:

 

We now found that if we touched any part of the vibrator or magnet we got the spark. The larger the body of iron touched to the vibrator the larger the spark. We now connected a wire to the end of the vibrating rod, and we found we could get a spark from it by touching a piece of iron to it... By connecting to the gaspipe we drew sparks from the gaspipes in any part of the room...

 

Applying a gold-leaf electroscope he found it unaffected, indicating no electric charge present. Testing of the insulation and connections showed they were perfect. This spark, then, was like no other he had seen, and the whole manifestation seemed to Edison nonelectric. (He had evidently obtained electromagnetic oscillations so rapid that the slow-moving leaves of the electroscope could not follow them.) His notes, dictated to Charles Batchelor, who was always by his side, ended in a tone of high excitement, This is simply wonderful, and a good proof that the cause of the spark is a true unknown force.175

He made many tests of the spark by forming different circuits with the vibrator. In one of them he had his laboratory workers holding hands, while one man touched a wire to the magnet, drawing bright sparks which they saw but did not feel. Edison even brought in our old long-suffering friend the frog, object of Galvanis classical experiments and, after placing it in circuit, could detect no movement. He then had a black box constructed in which there were two carbon points which could be adjusted by micrometer screws. When the dark box was placed in circuit with the vibrating device, the thick sparks jumping across the gap between the carbon points could be observed clearly through an eyepiece at the top of the box.

The name Edison gave to the new type of spark he had observed moving across that gap or space was etheric force or etheric current. Such sparks, however, had been detected years before by Joseph Henry; earlier, Faraday had speculated upon the possibility of such phenomena. James Clark Maxwell in 1863 had predicted theoretically and had outlined exactly the production of electromagnetic waves passing through space and between the atoms of all known substanceswhich Heinrich Hertz, in 1887, was to demonstrate by producing and detecting them, thus opening the road to radiotelegraphy.

It is a pity that Edison, groping with his sparks, or his perhaps not cleanly produced electromagnetic waveswhich were generated without sufficient energy for detectiondid not study the matter further. He was, of course, entirely wrong in concluding that those sparks or oscillations were nonelectric. While his capacity for experimentation was remarkable indeed, he was neither a mathematician nor a theoretical scientist, and he did not attempt to extend his knowledge of the new force. He saw, however, that if such results, the big sparks, were genuine, they denoted the passage of energy through space and implied the possibility of communication without wires. He then rushed to the newspapers with an announcement of his discovery. The New York press had recently begun to see in Mr. Edison an intriguing and picturesque character. Under the heading, Edisons Discovery of a Supposed New Force, a friendly reporter, evidently quoting the inventors statements, made prophecies concerning communication systems of future times that seemed no less remarkable at the time than the laboratory notebooks covering his experiments:

 

The cumbersome appliances transmitting ordinary electricity, such as telegraph poles, insulating knobs, cable-sheathings may be left out... and a great saving of time and labor accomplished. Ocean cables [may be] operated by etheric force.... Wires may be laid in the earth or water. The existing methods or mechanisms may be completely revolutionized.176

 

The Scientific American also opened its pages to discussion pro and con of Edisons discovery in its issue of December 25, 1875. Edison himself appeared before a scientific association of New York, the Polyclinic Club of the American Institute, reporting his observations and giving a demonstration of the black box and the new force. Many challenged him on this occasion, though a Dr. George Beard, a well-known physicist, stoutly defended Edison as one who had observed new principles until now buried in the depths of human ignorance.

In Philadelphia two professors of physical science, Elihu Thomson and E. J. Houston, vigorously assailed Edisons claims. Elihu Thomson reported experiments of his own showing that such excess waves, generated by a Ruhmkorff induction coil, with sparks jumping across gaps, could be opposed or neutralized by the interference of resonators, devices which sent out opposing waves tuned to the same frequency.177

A minor scientific tempest blew up. Even in London, Professor Silvanus Thompson, the physicist, gave a demonstration before a scientific body in June, 1876, which was intended to prove that Edisons etheric sparks could be accounted for by known principles and were therefore spurious. Sir Oliver Lodge, who was later to play a notable role in the development of radio, recalled the brief agitation in scientific circles over Edisons curious claims to have drawn sparks from insulated objects in the neighborhood of an electrical discharge. They were, after all, by no means spurious, but could not be understood by anyone at the time, Lodge explained. Edison did not pursue the matter, for the time was not ripe; but he called it etheric force which rather set our teeth on edge.178 None of Edisons learned critics, either in Philadelphia or London, any more than Edison himself, realized that the possibility of producing and detecting high-frequency electric waves was around the corner. Meanwhile, the experience of being ridiculed by university professors implanted in Edisons mind a long-lasting prejudice against all theoretical scientists.

He had been on the threshold of the hidden world of electronic science and turned back, abandoning those perplexing experiments to devote himself to other, more immediately rewarding investigations. At this stage of his career he was prosperous again, but he was also determined to bring about a sweeping change in his way of life. He must, at all costs, quit business and manufacturing and live in some quiet retreat where he could give himself entirely to the vocation he lovedinventive research. When, not long afterward, he left Newark and woke up deep in the country, etheric force was clean forgotten; there were other things on his mind.