Henry Ellis Warren, a clock maker, noting the change in electric power service from direct current to 60-cycle alternating current, set about to build a motor to operate at 60-cycle speed but found that the 60-cycle frequency did not always hold to form, and when applied to running a clock, did not hold correct time.

The following excerpt, from The Romance of Time,[8] tells of Warren’s activities which led to synchronizing 60-cycle alternating current to exact time:

Synchronous Electric Time

One of the most important of all contributions to horology is the work of an American who has earned the title, “Father of Electric Time.”

Henry Ellis Warren was graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1894. In 1907 he married and settled in Ashland, Massachusetts. Here it was that he began to work out his idea for electrically operated timepieces.

His first product was an ingenious battery-operated clock. In 1914 he organized the Warren Clock Company and set up production in a barn on his farm. Yet he knew the battery clock was not his goal, for direct current offered no means of accurate regulation. Direct current flows constantly in one direction only, like water down a river or like the passage of time. On the other hand, alternating current changes direction regularly, like the oscillation of the balance wheel in a watch. But instead of the usual five times a second of the balance wheel, most alternating current completes its trip forward and backward sixty times a second. Obviously, a clock “geared” to such a frequency would run as reliably as the current.

In 1916, after several years of extensive experimentation, Warren developed a motor which would start by itself, run on alternating current, and carry without difficulty the load of reduction gears driving the clock hands. It could also handle the cams and contacts of an alarm clock or set in motion a striking or chiming mechanism.

Then came the test. He plugged the clock into the power socket. It commenced to run. Weeks of observation and checking showed an irregular error of as much as ten to fifteen minutes a day.

Convinced that his clock was right, Warren discovered that the alternating current frequency delivered to his barn factory was off half a cycle per second—59½ and not 60 cycles. This slight deflection would produce that much time loss in a 24-hour run. When he informed the electric company of this error, he was met at first with polite disbelief. Yet he showed such a comprehensive knowledge of the subject that the company began to recheck their standards.

Warren built several more synchronous clocks and a master regulator of his own design for power-station use. On one dial of his master clock there were two hands, black and gold. The black hand was connected to an accurately adjusted pendulum clock, beating seconds. The gold hand was driven by the gear train of one of his electric clocks. As long as the two hands revolved together, the current cycles were exactly 60 per second. Set up in a power station, this allowed the operator to adjust the turbine generators as needed to keep the two hands of the master clock together. Thus all other properly set electric clocks on the same system would keep the same time automatically.

The Edison Electric Illuminating Company of Boston tried out the master clock on October 23, 1916. Since then this regulation has continued.

Other power companies adopted Warren’s master clock. Today virtually all alternating current furnished in America is similarly checked. Practical electric time is available at the light socket almost everywhere. But there are additional benefits.

Standardizing the frequency expanded the market for current to run the increasing number of clocks in use. Yet, from the consumer’s point of view, each clock draws little current, costing but a few pennies a month. Uniform frequency also gave more even speeds in motor-driven machinery, with a resultant improvement in product. It made easier the joining of one power station to another. Synchronous motors used in certain meters and recorders produced better, more accurate records at lower cost.

The Warren enterprise expanded rapidly. The battery clock was discontinued. The red barn was no longer large enough, and new space was acquired. The trade mark “Telechron,” meaning “time from a distance” (from two Greek words), was used to identify all products of the company. The firm name was changed to stress the name Telechron, and in 1952 a merger was made with the General Electric Company. Plants are now operated in Worcester as well as in Ashland, Massachusetts.

And now back to the telegraph field....

CHAPTER 4
Morkrum-Kleinschmidt Corporation
(later renamed “Teletype Corporation”)

During and after the first world war, both the Morkrum Company and the Kleinschmidt Electric Company were progressively developing and producing telegraph apparatus and bringing out new and improved operating devices to a point where conflicting patents were at issue. This meant infringement litigation which might destroy both companies. Neither company could obtain orders in sufficient quantity to make the manufacturing of apparatus profitable, and, with costly development work at hand, more capital investment was a continuous requirement.

The following excerpts from the March 1932 issue of Fortune[9] tells of the final joining of the two companies.

The Morkrum Co. had no profits to show for its efforts, and one can be fairly safe in assuming that no other maker of telegraph printers made profits. There were competitors, of course. Even the first telegraph invented by Samuel Morse had a printer, but it printed in dots and dashes instead of in letters of the English alphabet. That original Morse printer was abandoned as far back as 1844 because a man who could be trained to read dots and dashes could just as easily be trained to listen to them. The problem of getting a printer to print the alphabet was faced by inventors more than half a century ago, and it was not really a difficult problem. The difficulty was to invent a printer that was not too complicated and delicate to be reliable, that was simple enough to be manufactured for a few hundred instead of a few thousand dollars.

This difficulty occupied many minds other than the Morton-Krum intelligences. The most noteworthy of Morkrum Co.’s rivals in printer-making was Edward Kleinschmidt, an inventor who had all the inventor’s legendary devotion to his task and to nothing else. His creations included a vaccination shield, an automatic fishing reel, and the perfection of the Wheatstone perforator. He had been tinkering with a telegraph printer in one form and another since the beginning of the century. In 1917 his project was revamped. It had the financial backing of Charles B. Goodspeed, of the Buckeye Steel Casting Co.; Paul M. Benedict, assistant to the president of the C. B. & Q.; Edward Moore, son of Judge Moore of American Can fame; Eldon Bisbee, a New York lawyer; and one of Mr. Bisbee’s legal clients, Albert Henry Wiggin, then president of the Chase National Bank. It was Mr. Goodspeed, a quiet, retiring gentleman, who supplied most of the corporate (as distinct from inventive) energy of the Kleinschmidt Electric Co....

In the years from 1917 to 1924 the Kleinschmidt and the Morkrum companies became the leading makers of telegraph printers, but they did not have an easy row to hoe. Their only possible customers were the two great telegraph companies, the Telephone company, the railroads, and an occasional outside business such as a press association. The competition was disheartening, and it became keener with the elevation of Sterling, son of Joy Morton, to the presidency of the Morkrum Co., an elevation that was mainly a War-time accident, for Sterling Morton had resigned from his father’s company to enlist in the Army, had been rejected because of a small steel plate in his anatomy, and had chosen the Morkrum Co. as an alternative. Engineering progress was made, sometimes under ludicrous circumstances.

There was one occasion when Sterling Morton, about to sail for Europe, heard that the Kleinschmidt Co. was about to bring out a simplex printer. Up to that time both companies had been making printers for use with multiplex machines. Mr. Morton was afraid that Mr. Kleinschmidt was about to anticipate him in the simplex development which was the forerunner of the present teletypewriter. This was a contingency which Mr. Morton could not well permit. On the spur of the moment, he called on Howard Krum, who happened to be in New York. They bought a drawing board, hired a room at the Princeton Club, and worked for twenty-four hours trying to design such a machine. Completely baffled by one small detail, they gave up and took a bus for Coney Island. On the way, Howard Krum doubled up in sudden ecstacy and inspiration. They rushed from the bus at Coney Island, entered a soda fountain, and on the spot designed the machine on the back of an envelope. This simplex machine of the Morkrum Co. and the one developed by Kleinschmidt at the same time are the machines which make Teletype commercially important, the substance of the business today.

But engineering progress was not business progress. Both companies from the standpoint of profits were failures. Their few customers played them off against each other. In despair, they were both willing to sell out. At one point Mr. Goodspeed offered the Kleinschmidt company to Mr. Newcomb Carlton of Western Union for $412,000, the amount invested in it. Mr. Morton sold his company in all but fact to Mr. Charles G. du Bois, then president of Western Electric, but Mr. du Bois went off to Europe, and his substitute refused to see any merit in the deal. So it fell through. Unable to sell themselves to their customers, they tried selling themselves to each other. In 1923 Messrs. Goodspeed and Morton came to terms. The Morkrum Co. signed the agreement and, everything arranged, Mr. Goodspeed went off to bicycle with his wife in South Africa—whereupon his company suddenly changed its mind.

That was the situation of these two unfortunate companies in 1924 when Mr. Morton started a suit for patent infringement against his rivals. A counter suit was promptly filed. Mr. Goodspeed was quite right when he said the suits would ruin both—there was every prospect that by the time the courts had settled things, the patents would have been in such a snarl that neither could do anything. The suit, in fact, was Sterling Morton’s way of bringing matters to a head. So, figuratively speaking, on the courthouse steps they merged.

The terms of the merger as embodied in the six-line agreement (it was later made over into a twenty-five-page legal document which concluded by saying that in case of dispute the six-line agreement should be the final authority) were these: each of the old companies received a half interest in the common stock (10,000 shares) of the new company; 15,000 shares (callable at 105) of the new company’s preferred stock should be divided according to the assets of the old companies. Actually, 13,979 shares of preferred were issued, the majority going to the Morkrum group.

And so it was that the agreement to join both companies under the name Morkrum-Kleinschmidt Corporation was consummated and chartered in the State of Delaware on December 29, 1924, with Sterling Morton as President, Howard L. Krum as Vice President in charge of manufacturing, and Edward E. Kleinschmidt as Vice President in charge of development, patents and foreign sales.

One of the first decisions to make was whether the Kleinschmidt plant in Long Island City or the Morkrum plant in Chicago would be the headquarters for the new company. The Kleinschmidt company was on a 27,000-foot leased floor in a building which R. H. Macy Company had just purchased to use for a warehouse, and negotiations had been going on for some time for the purchase of the Kleinschmidt lease—the sum of $25,000.00 having been offered. When the union of the two companies was decided upon, an agreement to vacate on the terms offered was signed, and the Kleinschmidt firm moved to the Morkrum-owned plant in Chicago.