ought out the invention which set him on
the high road to great achievement. This was the improved stock ticker,
for which the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company paid him forty thousand
dollars. It was much more than he had expected. "I had made up my mind,"
he says, "that, taking into consideration the time and killing pace I
was working at, I should be entitled to $5000, but could get along
with $3000." The money, of course, was paid by check. Edison had never
received a check before and he had to be told how to cash it.

Edison immediately set up a shop in Newark and threw himself into many
and various activities. He remade the prevailing system of automatic
telegraphy and introduced it into England. He experimented with
submarine cables and worked out a system of quadruplex telegraphy by
which one wire was made to do the work of four. These two inventions
were bought by Jay Gould for his Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company.
Gould paid for the quadruplex system thirty thousand dollars, but
for the automatic telegraph he paid nothing. Gould presently acquired
control of the Western Union; and, having thus removed competition from
his path, "he then," says Edison, "repudiated his contract with the
automatic telegraph people and they never received a cent for their
wires or patents, and I lost three years of very hard labor. But I never
had any grudge against him because he was so able in his line, and
as long as my part was successful the money with me was a secondary
consideration. When Gould got the Western Union I knew no further
progress in telegraphy was possible, and I went into other lines."*

* Quoted in Dyer and Martin. "Edison", vol. 1, p. 164.

In fact, however, the need of money forced Edison later on to resume
his work for the Western Union Telegraph Company, both in telegraphy and
telephony. His connection with the telephone is told in another volume
of this series.* He invented a carbon transmitter and sold it to the
Western Union for one hundred thousand dollars, payable in seventeen
annual installments of six thousand dollars. He made a similar agreement
for the same sum offered him for the patent of the electro-motograph. He
did not realize that these installments were only simple interest upon
the sums due him. These agreements are typical of Edison's commercial
sense in the early years of his career as an inventor. He worked only
upon inventions for which there was a possible commercial dem