The Stock Ticker - 6

The Stock Ticker - 6

Thus in an inconceivably brief time had Edison passed from poverty to independence;

made a deep impression as to his originality and ability on important people, and brought

out valuable inventions; lifting himself at one bound out of the ruck of mediocrity, and

away from the deadening drudgery of the key. Best of all he was enterprising, one of the

leaders and pioneers for whom the world is always looking; and, to use his own criticism

of himself, he had "too sanguine a temperament to keep money in solitary confinement."

With quiet self-possession he seized his opportunity, began to buy machinery, rented a

shop and got work for it. Moving quickly into a larger shop, Nos. 10 and 12 Ward Street,

Newark, New Jersey, he secured large orders from General Lefferts to build stock tickers,

and employed fifty men. As business increased he put on a night force, and was his own

foreman on both shifts. Half an hour of sleep three or four times in the twenty- four hours

was all he needed in those days, when one invention succeeded another with dazzling

rapidity, and when he worked with the fierce, eruptive energy of a great volcano,

throwing out new ideas incessantly with spectacular effect on the arts to which they

related. It has always been a theory with Edison that we sleep altogether too much; but on

the other hand he never, until long past fifty, knew or practiced the slightest moderation

in work or in the use of strong coffee and black cigars. He has, moreover, while of tender

and kindly disposition, never hesitated to use men up as freely as a Napoleon or Grant;

seeing only the goal of a complete invention or perfected de- vice, to attain which all else

must become subsidiary. He gives a graphic picture of his first methods as a

manufacturer: "Nearly all my men were on piece work, and I allowed them to make good

wages, and never cut until the pay became absurdly high as they got more expert. I kept

no books. I had two hooks. All the bills and accounts I owed I jabbed on one hook; and

memoranda of all owed to myself I put on the other. When some of the bills fell due, and

I couldn't deliver tickers to get a supply of money, I gave a note. When the notes were

due, a messenger came around from the bank with the note and a protest pinned to it for

$1.25. Then I would go to New York and get an advance, or pay the note if I had the

money. This method of giving notes for my accounts and having all notes protested I kept

up over two years, yet my credit was fine. Every store I traded with was always glad to

furnish goods, perhaps in amazed admiration of my system of doing business, which was

certainly new." After a while Edison got a bookkeeper, whose vagaries made him look

back with regret on the earlier, primitive method. "The first three months I had him go

over the books to find out how much we had made. He reported $3000. I gave a supper to

some of my men to celebrate this, only to be told two days afterward that he had made a

mistake, and that we had lost $500; and then a few days after that he came to me again

and said he was all mixed up, and now found that we had made over $7000." Edison

changed bookkeepers, but never thereafter counted anything real profit until he had paid

all his debts and had the profits in the bank.

The factory work at this time related chiefly to stock tickers, principally the "Universal,"

of which at one time twelve hundred were in use. Edison's connection with this particular

device was very close while it lasted. In a review of the ticker art, Mr. Callahan stated,

with rather grudging praise, that "a ticker at the present time (1901) would be considered

as impracticable and unsalable if it were not provided with a unison device," and he goes

on to remark: "The first unison on stock tickers was one used on the Laws printer.[2] It

was a crude and unsatisfactory piece of mechanism and necessitated doubling of the

battery in order to bring it into action. It was short-lived. The Edison unison comprised a

lever with a free end travelling in a spiral or worm on the type-wheel shaft until it met a

pin at the end of the worm, thus obstructing the shaft and leaving the type-wheels at the

zero-point until released by the printing lever. This device is too well known to require a

further description. It is not applicable to any instrument using two independently moving

type-wheels; but on nearly if not all other instruments will be found in use." The stock

ticker has enjoyed the devotion of many brilliant inventors-- G. M. Phelps, H. Van

Hoevenbergh, A. A. Knudson, G. B. Scott, S. D. Field, John Burry--and remains in

extensive use as an appliance for which no substitute or competitor has been found. In

New York the two great stock exchanges have deemed it necessary to own and operate a

stock-ticker service for the sole benefit of their members; and down to the present

moment the process of improvement has gone on, impelled by the increasing volume of

business to be reported. It is significant of Edison's work, now dimmed and overlaid by

later advances, that at the very outset he recognized the vital importance of

interchangeability in the construction of this delicate and sensitive apparatus. But the

difficulties of these early days were almost insurmountable. Mr. R. W. Pope says of the

"Universal" machines that they were simple and substantial and generally satisfactory,

but adds: "These instruments were supposed to have been made with interchangeable

parts; but as a matter of fact the instances in which these parts would fit were very few.

The instruction-book prepared for the use of inspectors stated that `The parts should not

be tinkered nor bent, as they are accurately made and interchangeable.' The difficulties

encountered in fitting them properly doubtless gave rise to a story that Mr. Edison had

stated that there were three degrees of interchangeability. This was interpreted to mean:

First, the parts will fit; second, they will almost fit; third, they do not fit, and can't be

made to fit."

[2] This I invented as well.--T. A. E.

This early shop affords an illustration of the manner in which Edison has made a deep

impression on the personnel of the electrical arts. At a single bench there worked three

men since rich or prominent. One was Sigmund Bergmann, for a time partner with

Edison in his lighting developments in the United States, and now head and principal

owner of electrical works in Berlin employing ten thousand men. The next man adjacent

was John Kruesi, afterward engineer of the great General Electric Works at Schenectady.

A third was Schuckert, who left the bench to settle up his father's little estate at

Nuremberg, stayed there and founded electrical factories, which became the third largest

in Germany, their proprietor dying very wealthy. "I gave them a good training as to

working hours and hustling," says their quondam master; and this is equally true as

applied to many scores of others working in companies bearing the Edison name or

organized under Edison patents. It is curiously significant in this connection that of the

twenty-one presidents of the national society, the American Institute of Electrical

Engineers, founded in 1884, eight have been intimately associated with Edison--namely,

Norvin Green and F. L. Pope, as business colleagues of the days of which we now write;

while Messrs. Frank J. Sprague, T. C. Martin, A. E. Kennelly, S. S. Wheeler, John W.

Lieb, Jr., and Louis A. Ferguson have all been at one time or another in the Edison

employ. The remark was once made that if a famous American teacher sat at one end of a

log and a student at the other end, the elements of a successful university were present. It

is equally true that in Edison and the many men who have graduated from his stern

school of endeavor, America has had its foremost seat of electrical engineering.