Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [8]
Within a few months of this announcement, he withdrew from the Boston enterprise and moved to New York, where he formed a partnership with Franklin Pope, a prominent expert in telegraphy, and James Ashley, an editor of Telegrapher. By the end of 1870, the three had developed a telegraph printer and sold the rights to it for $15,000 (roughly the equivalent of $250,000 today). Shortly after the sale, the partnership split apart on bitter terms. Edison claimed Ashley and Pope tried to cheat him out of money, while they accused Edison of violating the partnership agreement by striking his own deals with manufacturers.8
The rift did not slow Edison's career. After the quick success of the printer, his inventing skills were in high demand. He signed contracts to develop inventions for several telegraph firms and, with the money they provided, opened a laboratory and manufacturing operation in Newark that employed more than forty-five hands. (In a letter to his parents back in Michigan, he described himself as a "Bloated Eastern Manufacturer.") A telegraphic news service he started failed after a few months, but it proved important nonetheless: The twenty-four-year-old Edison courted one of the company's employees—Mary Stil-well, age sixteen—and married her on Christmas Day 1871. 9
The main financial backer of Edison's Newark shops was the Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, for whom he developed the Universal stock printer, a device that became the industry standard, ticking out stock prices in brokers' offices all around the world. When Western Union bought control of Gold & Stock in 1871, Edison came under the wing of the industry giant. Western Union was particularly eager to finance Edison's research into duplex telegraphy, which allowed two messages to be sent simultaneously on the same wire, one in each direction. The company expected Edison simply to refine existing duplex technology, but Edison developed something revolutionary: the quadruplex telegraph, which allowed simultaneous transmission of two signals in each direction over one wire. By doubling the capacity of its wires, the quadruplex promised to save Western Union a great deal of money by limiting its biggest cash drain, the need to build and maintain wires. After Edison perfected his quadruplex and patented it, Western Union gave him a $5,000 advance payment and opened negotiations for purchase of full rights.10
Although Western Union had funded Edison's research, he had never signed a formal contract with the company. When the company was slow in coming to terms, the inventor therefore felt free to entertain an offer from Jay Gould. A notorious financier who had nearly cornered the gold market a few years earlier, Gould now wanted to challenge Western Union for control of the long-distance telegraph industry, and Edison's quadruplex was the key to his plan. When Western Union finally tendered a firm offer to Edison in January 1875, it was shocked to learn that the rights were no longer available; two weeks earlier Edison had sold out to Gould's company, Atlantic & Pacific, for $30,000. Western Union's president remarked that Edison had "a vacuum where his conscience ought to be."11*
WITH THE MONEY from the quadruplex and his other inventions, in 1876 the twenty-eight-year-old Edison built himself a new laboratory in the sleepy hamlet of Menlo Park, New Jersey, about twenty-five miles southwest of Manhattan. A few other men operated electrical and telegraphic laboratories at the time: The inventor Moses Farmer, for instance, worked on telegraphic and other electrical equipment from a small laboratory in Boston, and Elisha Gray conducted experiments at the shops of the Western Electric Manufacturing Company. But