The price of admission to witness the operation of the telegraph was twenty-five cents. This seemed a novel way to secure capital in a great city like New York.
With this embargo, notwithstanding the wonderful character of the invention, there was not visitors enough to pay expenses; everything indicated poverty. The exhibitors were so poor that one of them was glad to use a couple of common chairs for his nightly rest.
It was certainly a strange experience for the future princely founder of Cornell University, making his breakfast out of the proceeds of a shilling picked up, as it were, from the sidewalks of Broadway, and which, he said, were the best meals he had ever enjoyed.
The estimated cost of a line from Fort Lee on the Hudson to Philadelphia was $15,000—a modest sum to ask of the great city of New York, but the men of capital looked over their immaculate collars at the ticking machinery, and into the faces of the hungry exhibitors, and up at the wire straggling among the chimney pots, and then down at the meagre furniture, and said “No;” each man feared to be the first fool. But what capitalists would not do, humbler men did.
One of the first men in New York to invest his money in the new device was the keeper of an eating-house on Nassau Street, and who afterward became one of the directors.
The money needed was finally raised, but chiefly outside of New York. It was provided in this original subscription that the payment of fifty dollars should entitle the subscribers to two shares of fifty dollars each.
A payment of fifteen thousand dollars, therefore, required an issue of $30,000 stock. To the patentees was issued an additional $30,000 stock, or half of the capital, as a consideration of the patent; the capital was, therefore, $60,000 for the first link.
Trustees were appointed to hold the patent rights and property until the organization was effected.
The incorporators were:—
S. F. B. Morse,
B. B. French,
Geo. C. Penniman,
Henry J. Rogers,
John S. McKim,
J. T. Trimble,
W. M. Swain,
John O. Sterns,
A. Sydney Doane.