The boys' life of EdisonMeadowcroft, Wm. H. (William Henry)
General
The boys' life of Edison
Meadowcroft, Wm. H. (William Henry)
Edison, Thomas A. (Thomas Alva), 1847-1931 -- Juvenile literature
"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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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