At the time Edison was born, in 1847, telegraphy, upon which he was to
leave so indelible an imprint, had barely struggled into acceptance by
the public. In England, Wheatstone and Cooke had introduced a ponderous
magnetic needle telegraph. In America, in 1840, Morse had taken out his
first patent on an electromagnetic telegraph, the principle of which
is dominating in the art to this day. Four years later the memorable
message "What hath God wrought!" was sent by young Miss Ellsworth over
his circuits, and incredulous Washington was advised by wire of the
action of the Democratic Convention in Baltimore in nominating Polk.
By 1847 circuits had been strung between Washington and New York, under
private enterprise, the Government having declined to buy the Morse
system for $100,000. Everything was crude and primitive. The poles were
two hundred feet apart and could barely hold up a wash-line. The slim,
bare, copper wire snapped on the least provocation, and the circuit
was "down" for thirty-six days in the first six months. The little
glass-knob insulators made seductive targets for ignorant sportsmen.
Attempts to insulate the line wire were limited to coating it with
tar or smearing it with wax for the benefit of all the bees in the
neighborhood. The farthest western reach of the telegraph lines in
1847 was Pittsburg, with three-ply iron wire mounted on square glass
insulators with a little wooden pentroof for protection. In that office,
where Andrew Carnegie was a messenger boy, the magnets in use to receive
the signals sent with the aid of powerful nitric-acid batteries weighed
as much as seventy-five pounds apiece. But the business was fortunately
small at the outset, until the new device, patronized chiefly by
lottery-men, had proved its utility. Then came the great outburst of
activity. Within a score of years telegraph wires covered the whole
occupied country with a network, and the first great electrical industry
was a pronounced success, yielding to its pioneers the first great
harvest of electrical fortunes. It had been a sharp struggle for bare