"About this time I invented the quadruplex. I wanted to interest the Western Union Telegraph Company in it, with a view of selling it, but was unsuccessful until I made an arrangement with the chief electrician of the company, so that he could be known as a joint inventor and receive a portion of the money. At that time I was very short of money, and needed it more than glory. This electrician appeared to want glory more than money, so it was an easy trade. 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—and started in putting on the finishing touches.
"After two months of very hard work I got a detail at regular times of eight operators, and we got it working nicely from one room to another over a wire which ran to Albany and back. Under certain conditions of weather one side of the quadruplex would work very shakily, and I had not succeeded in ascertaining the cause of the trouble. On a certain day, when there was a board meeting of the company, I was to make an exhibition test. The day arrived. I had picked the best operators in New York, and they were familiar with the apparatus. I arranged that, if a storm occurred and the bad side got shaky, they should do the best they could and draw freely on their imaginations. They were sending old messages. About twelve o'clock everything went wrong, as there was a storm somewhere near Albany, and the bad side got shaky. Mr. Orton, the president, and William H. Vanderbilt and the other directors came in. I had my heart trying to climb up around my œsophagus. I was paying a sheriff five dollars a day to withhold execution of judgment which had been entered against me in a case which I had paid no attention to; and if the quadruplex had not worked before the president I knew I was to have trouble and might lose my machinery. The New York Times came out next day with a full account. I was given five thousand dollars as part payment for the invention, which made me easy, and I expected the whole thing would be closed up. But Mr. Orton went on an extended tour just about that time. I had paid for all the experiments on the quadruplex and exhausted the money, and I was again in straits. In the meantime I had introduced the apparatus on the lines of the company, where it was very successful.
"At that time the general superintendent of the Western Union was Gen. T. T. Eckert (who had been Assistant Secretary of War with Stanton). Eckert was secretly negotiating with Gould to leave the Western Union and take charge of the Atlantic and Pacific—Gould's company. One day Eckert called me into his office and made inquiries about money matters. 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. I told him of my arrangement with the electrician, and said I could not sell it as a whole to anybody; but if I got enough for it I would sell all my interest in any share I might have. He seemed to think his party would agree to this. I had a set of quadruplex over in my shop, 10 and 12 Ward Street, Newark, and he arranged to bring him over next evening to see the apparatus. So the next day Eckert came over with Jay Gould and introduced him to me. This was the first time I had ever seen him. I exhibited and explained the apparatus, and they departed. The next day Eckert sent for me, and I was taken up to Gould's house, which was near the Windsor Hotel, Fifth Avenue. In the basement he had an office. It was in the evening, and we went in 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 said, 'Make me an offer.' Then he said, 'I will give you thirty thousand dollars.' I said, 'I will sell any interest I may have for that money,' which was something more than I thought I could get. The next morning I went with Gould to the office of his lawyers, Sherman & Sterling, and received a check for thirty thousand dollars, with a remark by Gould that I had got the steamboat Plymouth Rock, as he had sold her for thirty thousand dollars, and had just received the check. There was a big fight on between Gould's company and the Western Union, and this caused litigation. The electrician, on account of the testimony involved, lost his glory. The judge never decided the case, but went crazy a few months afterward."
Mr. Gould controlled the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company and was aiming to get control of the Western Union Company, and his purchase of Edison's share in the quadruplex was an important move in this direction.
Having learned of the success of Edison's automatic system, mentioned in the early part of this chapter, Mr. Gould's next move was to get control of that. It was owned by Mr. Edison and his associates of the Automatic Telegraph Company, and that company was bought by Mr. Gould under an agreement to pay four million dollars in stock. As to this, Mr. Edison says: "After this, Gould wanted me to help install the automatic system in the Atlantic and Pacific Company, of which General Eckert had been elected president, the company having bought the Automatic Telegraph Company. I did a lot of work for this company making automatic apparatus in my shop at Newark."
Unfortunately for the inventor and his associates, the terms of the contract have never been carried out. Mr. Edison remarks in regard to this: "He" (Gould) "took no pride in building up an enterprise. He was after money, and money only. Whether the company was a success or a failure mattered not to him. After he had hammered the Western Union through his opposition company and had tired out Mr. Vanderbilt, the latter retired from control, and Gould went in and consolidated his company and controlled the Western Union. He then repudiated the contract with the Automatic Telegraph people, and they never received a cent for their wires or patents, and I lost three years of very hard labor. But I never had any grudge against him, because he was so able in his line, and as long as my part was successful the money with me was a secondary consideration. When Gould got the Western Union I knew no further progress in telegraphy was possible, and I went into other lines."
One of the most remarkable suits in the history of American jurisprudence arose out of this transaction. Mr. Edison and his associates sued Mr. Gould in 1876 for the recovery of the contract price of these inventions, and, at this writing, thirty-five years later, the suit has not been finally decided. It is now on appeal to the United States Supreme Court.
A busier shop than that of the young inventor during the years 1870 to 1874 would be difficult to find. Not only was he and it engaged on the tremendous problems of the automatic and quadruplex systems, but the shop was also busy making stock tickers. The hours were endless; and on one occasion when an order was on hand for a large quantity of these instruments Edison locked the men in until the job had been finished of making the machine perfect, and "all the bugs taken out," which meant sixty hours of hard work before the difficulties were overcome.
In addition to all this work, Edison gave attention to many other things. One of them was the first typewriter. In the early 'seventies Mr. D. N. Craig, who was interested in the automatic, brought with him 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." Mr. 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 one-sixteenth 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. 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. I now had five shops, and with experimenting on this new scheme I was pretty busy—at least I did not have ennui."