Author: Sarah Laskow / Source: Atlas Obscura
In 1878, Thomas Edison’s star was on the rise. A few years before, when he sold his quadruplex telegraph design—an industry-changing innovation that allowed four signals to go over one wire—he had used the proceeds to build his lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Soon enough, he would start work on his lightbulb and the motion-picture camera, the work that would make him one of America’s most lauded scientists.
But already newspapers had started hailing him as a genius, after he debuted the phonograph in 1877.Now, though, Edison was focused on improving the telephone—a job he took on for Western Union, which was eager to rival Alexander Graham Bell’s new communications company. In March, Edison wrote to William Orton, Western Union’s president, updating him on a conversation they’d had in person about a new telephone design:
“You were partly correct, I did find a ‘bug’ in my apparatus, but it was not in the telephone proper. It was of the genus ‘callbellum.’ The insect appears to find conditions for its existence in all call apparatus of telephones.”
This letter, at auction next week at Swann Galleries, is one of the earliest examples of this use of…
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