ing," says Edison, "to
make commercial. The alignment of the letters was awful. One letter
would be one-sixteenth of an inch above the others; and all the letters
wanted to wander out of line. I worked on it till the machine gave
fair results. [3] Some were made and used in the office of the Automatic
company. Craig was very sanguine that some day all business letters
would be written on a typewriter. He died before that took place; but
it gradually made its way. The typewriter I got into commercial shape is
now known as the Remington. About this time I got an idea I could devise
an apparatus by which four messages could simultaneously be sent over a
single wire without interfering with each other. I now had five shops,
and with experimenting on this new scheme I was pretty busy; at least I
did not have ennui."

[Footnote 3: See illustration on opposite page, showing
reproduction of the work done with this machine.]

A very interesting picture of Mr. Edison at this time is furnished by
Mr. Patrick B. Delany, a well-known inventor in the field of automatic
and multiplex telegraphy, who at that time was a chief operator of the
Franklin Telegraph Company at Philadelphia. His remark about Edison that
"his ingenuity inspired confidence, and wavering financiers stiffened
up when it became known that he was to develop the automatic" is a
noteworthy evidence of the manner in which the young inventor had
already gained a firm footing. He continues: "Edward H. Johnson was
brought on from the Denver & Rio Grande Railway to assist in the
practical introduction of automatic telegraphy on a commercial basis,
and about this time, in 1872, I joined the enterprise. Fairly good
results were obtained between New York and Washington, and Edison,
indifferent to theoretical difficulties, set out to prove high speeds
between New York and Charleston, South Carolina, the compound wire being
hitched up to one of the Southern & Atlantic wires from Washington to
Charleston for the purpose of experimentation. Johnson and I went to the
Charleston end to carry out Edison's plans, which were rapidly unfolded
by telegraph every night from a loft on lower Broadway, New York. We
could only get the wire after all business was cleared, usually about
midnight, and for months, in the quiet hours, that wire was subjected
to more electrical acrobatics than any other wire ever experienced. When
the experiments ended, Edison's system was put into regu