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Lot 442
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Thomas Edison Writes 1878 Autograph Letter Signed to Western Union President
Thomas Edison Writes 1878 Autograph Letter Signed to Western Union President
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Description:

Thomas A. Edison
Menlo Park, NJ, February 28, 1878
Thomas Edison Writes 1878 Autograph Letter Signed to Western Union President
ALS

THOMAS ALVA EDISON, Autograph Letter Signed, to William Orton, February 28, 1878, Menlo Park, NJ. 1 p., 7.5" x 9.75", slabbed to 9.5" x 13". Expected folds; scattered staining; bold signature; very good.

In this letter to William Orton, the president of the Western Union Telegraph Company, Edison delivers some business updates. Orton became infamous for refusing, late in 1876, to purchase all of Alexander Graham Bell's patents relating to Bell's telephone for $100,000. Since they are considered to be the most valuable patents ever issued by the U.S. Patent Office, Orton's decision has gone down as one of the worst in business history.

Although Orton saw no value in Bell's telephone, he had a close business relationship with Thomas A. Edison. Orton's Western Union eventually controlled many of Edison's telegraph patents. Even after Edison sold a new telegraph patent to Jay Gould, annoying Orton, the Western Union president continued to champion Edison's work against the jealousy of Western Union's internal electricians. When Orton died suddenly on April 22, 1878, six weeks after Edison wrote this letter to him, Edison lamented, "If I get to love a man he dies right away. Lefferts went first, and now Orton's gone, too." Marshall Lefferts, the president of Gold and Stock Telegraph Company, for whom Edison had worked as a consulting electrician in the early 1870s, had died in July 1876.

On the same day Edison wrote this letter, he executed three patent applications—for telephone stations and call-signal apparatus, for preventing interference between telephone lines, and for the aerophone. In mid-April, the New York Daily Graphic dubbed Edison the "Wizard of Menlo Park." Over the course of his career, Edison received 1,093 patents.

In this brief letter, Edison mentions technical assistants James Adams and Henry Bentley, who were conducting telephone tests in Philadelphia. A few weeks later, Edison sent Adams to London with telephone transmitters and receivers to be tested on British Post Office lines. He also mentions leading patent attorney Lemuel Serrell (1829-1899), with whom Edison worked for more than a decade, and Frank L. Pope (1840-1895), an electrical engineer, telegrapher, and patent attorney for Western Union, with whom Edison had partnered briefly in 1869.

Complete Transcript
Menlo Park, N.J. Feby 28.
Wm Orton Esq
Dear Sir
Mr Bentley has heard from me because I have written him three letters since Monday. Mr Adams will go to Philadelphia tomorrow. The assignments were all delivered to Serrell today. Mr Pope is over zealous about them
Yours
T. A. Edison

Historical Background
Despite losing much of his hearing when he was a child, Thomas A. Edison invented the "phonogram" in 1877 to record sounds and play them back. After he designed it, he asked his employee, John Kruesi, to make the machine from his sketch. When Kruesi asked what it was for, Edison told him, and Kruesi thought the idea absurd. When it was finished, Edison put tin foil on a cylinder, which would record the movements of the diaphragm with a stylus. He shouted into the mouthpiece, "Mary had a little lamb," and when he adjusted it for playback, the machine reproduced the sound perfectly, startling both Edison and his craftsman.

Edison's relationship with Western Union began when he worked as a telegraph operator in Kentucky, and he eventually sold several inventions to the company, including the stock ticker. In 1874, Edison invented the quadruplex telegraph, which could transmit four messages simultaneously over a single wire. Before Western Union could finalize a contract for the device, Jay Gould offered Edison $100,000 for it. When Edison accepted Gould's offer, Western Union sued Gould for the patent. The court found for Western Union, giving the telegraph company the patent, but it strained the company's relationship with Edison, though he continued to work with them on inventions like the telephone, for which he developed a competing transmitter to Bell's, and the electric light.

Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) was born in Ohio and grew up in Michigan. A bout of scarlet fever and untreated ear infections caused him to lose most of his hearing as a young child. He became a telegraph operator, and as a teenager began a newspaper for the Grand Trunk Railway in Canada and in northern states. Over the course of his career, Edison founded fourteen companies, including General Electric, which grew into one of the largest companies in the world. In 1866, he moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where he worked for Western Union on the Associated Press news wire. He experimented in his spare time and obtained his first patent in 1869 for an electric vote recorder. He began a partnership in New Jersey in 1869, working as an inventor and electrical engineer. After developing a quadruplex telegraph that he sold to Western Union, he used the proceeds to open an industrial research lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876. There, he and his team conducted experiments on the telephone, phonograph, electric railway, iron ore separator, and electric lighting. Many of his inventions were improvements on existing technology, but the phonograph was the first device to record and reproduce sounds. Ultimately, he registered 1,093 patents.

William Orton (1826-1878) was born in New York and trained as a printer. He graduated from the State Normal School (now State University of New York at Albany) in 1847 and was certified as a teacher. In 1852, he became a partner in a publishing company in Buffalo, and in 1858, he moved to New York City, where he became a partner in another publishing company. The firm went out of business in 1860, and Orton became a managing clerk for another publishing company. He served one term on New York City's Common Council in 1860 and served as Collector of Revenue for the 6th district of New York (1862-1865). In the autumn of 1865, he became president of the United States Telegraph Company. The next year, it merged with Western Union, with Orton as the new company's vice president. He studied law and gained admission to the bar in 1867. That year, he also became president of Western Union. He also served as the president of three other telegraph companies.

This item comes with a Certificate from John Reznikoff, a premier authenticator for both major 3rd party authentication services, PSA and JSA (James Spence Authentications), as well as numerous auction houses.

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  • Dimensions: Document: 9.75" x 7.5"; Overall: 9.5" x 13"
  • Medium: ALS

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