Newark, New Jersey was then a growing industrial town not far from New York’s business centre. In 1870 Edison started a new business there, named the Newark Telegraph Works, in partnership with William Unger. They made stock printers, and the business flourished. The team had as its backbone three highly skilled persons – a British engineer named Charles Batchelor, a German mechanic Sigmund Bergmann and a Swiss watchmaker, John Kruesi.
Later in the same year Edison started work on developing an automatic telegraph, forming the American Telegraph Works. Another project he undertook in 1874 was on a multiplex telegraphic system for Western Union. It resulted in the quadruplex telegraph, which could send two messages at the same time in both directions. Edison sold his patent rights on the quadruplex to the Atlantic & Pacific Telegraphic Co., a rival group of Western Union. This caused a legal battle which Western Union won.
Edison also had to spend a lot of time with lawyers, to stop rivals trying to steal his inventions or to fight claims that he had taken ideas from someone else.
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