Inventing Madness

New York City

"By the time I resigned from my position at Western Union in Boston, I had spent most of my money trying to invent and improve various machines. I was now deeply in debt. I borrowed thirty-five dollars from Bredding to purchase a steamship ticket to the city of New York.

"I moved to New York in the middle of 1869. A friend, Franklin L. Pope, allowed me to sleep in a room at Samuel Laws' Gold Indicator Company where Pope was employed. When I managed to fix a broken stock-ticker machine there, I was hired to manage and improve their machines. My salary was three hundred dollars per month . . . an amazing sum of money.

"In 1871, at the age of twenty-four, I sold for the first time one of my inventions, a universal stock ticker, to General Lefferts, head of the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company. Of course I didn't invent the stock ticker. The credit for that invention goes to Edward Calahan who devised the first stock ticker in 1867 for the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company in New York. My improved stock ticker included my key contributions to printing telegraphy. My most significant improvement was a mechanism that enabled all of the tickers on a line to be synchronized so that they printed the same information in unison.

"I was hoping for the huge sum of five thousand dollars. Instead, Lefferts offered me forty thousand dollars. I didn't hesitate to take his offer. I had never had so much money in my life. I actually didn't think any bank would honor so large of a check so I just walked around New York City for hours. The next day a friend advised me to deposit the check in a bank."

ion,GG݉