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.