ly, while the seventh man should succeed. Perhaps
hypnotism would account for it. This company was sold out to the
Atlantic & Pacific company." As far back as 1872, Edison had applied for
a patent on district messenger signal boxes, but it was not issued until
January, 1874, another patent being granted in September of the same
year. In this field of telegraph application, as in others, Edison was
a very early comer, his only predecessor being the fertile and ingenious
Callahan, of stock-ticker fame. The first president of the Gold & Stock
Telegraph Company, Elisha W. Andrews, had resigned in 1870 in order
to go to England to introduce the stock ticker in London. He lived in
Englewood, New Jersey, and the very night he had packed his trunk the
house was burglarized. Calling on his nearest friend the next morning
for even a pair of suspenders, Mr. Andrews was met with regrets of
inability, because the burglars had also been there. A third and fourth
friend in the vicinity was appealed to with the same disheartening reply
of a story of wholesale spoliation. Mr. Callahan began immediately to
devise a system of protection for Englewood; but at that juncture a
servant-girl who had been for many years with a family on the Heights
in Brooklyn went mad suddenly and held an aged widow and her daughter
as helpless prisoners for twenty-four hours without food or water. This
incident led to an extension of the protective idea, and very soon a
system was installed in Brooklyn with one hundred subscribers. Out of
this grew in turn the district messenger system, for it was just as
easy to call a messenger as to sound a fire-alarm or summon the police.
To-day no large city in America is without a service of this character,
but its function was sharply limited by the introduction of the
telephone.

Returning to the automatic telegraph it is interesting to note that so
long as Edison was associated with it as a supervising providence it did
splendid work, which renders the later neglect of automatic or "rapid
telegraphy" the more remarkable. Reid's standard Telegraph in America
bears astonishing testimony on this point in 1880, as follows: "The
Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company had twenty-two automatic stations.
These included the chief cities on the seaboard, Buffalo, Chicago,
and Omaha. The through business during nearly two years was largely
transmitted in this way. Between New York and Boston two thousand words
a minute have been