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.