Automatic, Duplex, And Quadruplex Telegraphy - 2

Automatic, Duplex, And Quadruplex Telegraphy - 2

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 as- sistants 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 onesixteenth

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.[3] 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."

[3] See illustration on opposite page, showing reproduction of the work done with this

machine.

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.