Modern Practice of the Electric Telegraph; A Technical Handbook for Electricians, Managers, and Operators, with 185 Illustrations
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Franklin Leonard Pope was an American electrician and inventor.
Background
He was born on December 2, 1840 on his father's farm at Great Barrington, Massachussets, United States, eldest son of Ebenezer and Electa (Wainwright) Pope. He was a descendant of Thomas Pope who was living in Plymouth, Massachussets, as early as 1632.
Education
Franklin's education was that of the average New England youth of his day, with the addition of one term at Amherst Academy. He was an ardent student of natural philosophy and geography and possessed a natural bent for drawing, especially of mechanical subjects.
Career
While in his early teens he began earning money by selling sketches of the various locomotives that came to Great Barrington, and, in partnership with a chum, he edited and published a small newspaper. In 1857, when a branch of the American Telegraph Company's line was extended from Pittsfield to Great Barrington, Pope, although but seventeen years old, was selected by the company to learn the operation of the telegraph printer, invented by David E. Hughes, and upon completing the course was appointed the company's operator in his native town. He had charge of the office for two years and was then transferred to Springfield, Massachussets, as the circuit manager of the Boston & Albany Railroad telegraph lines.
In 1860 he resigned this position and went to New York in the hope of finding work as an artist. For a time he was employed by the Scientific American, but at the outbreak of the Civil War he reëntered the telegraph service as an operator for the American Telegraph Company, and spent a year in the Providence office. The following two years he was engaged in New York on the preparation of a series of maps of all the company's telegraph lines from Maine to Virginia.
When, during the draft riots of 1863, the lines between New York and Boston were cut, Pope, disguising himself as a farm laborer, made repairs, reestablishing communication. He also began an investigation for the company with a view to determining standards of telegraph apparatus from the host of equipment then available.
Due primarily to Pope's ill health, this work was interrupted in 1864, and he accepted an appointment as assistant to the engineer-in-chief of the Russo-American Telegraph Company, organized to effect telegraphic communication between the United States and Europe by way of Bering Strait. For the next two years he was engaged in making a preliminary exploration and survey in British Columbia and Alaska, preparatory to laying the line; but before this work was fully consummated the successful completion of the Atlantic cable caused the abandonment of the project.
Returning to New York, Pope was editor of The Telegrapher from August 1867 to February 1868. He published in 1869 Modern Practice of the Electric Telegraph which, between that year and 1892, because of its great value to the electrical world, passed through fifteen editions. Turning his attention to invention, he made valuable improvements in the stock-ticker invented by Samuel S. Laws in 1867.
In 1869 he formed a partnership with Thomas A. Edison and James N. Ashley under the firm name of Pope, Edison & Company. Edison and Pope took out a joint patent (No. 103, 924) on June 7, 1870, for a single-wire printing telegraph, which they sold to the Gold & Stock Telegraph Company. The partners did not get along well together, and in 1870 the firm dissolved. By devising a system in which the track itself acted as the electric conveyor, Pope also made practicable the original automatic electric block signal for railways invented by Thomas S. Hall. In 1875 he was put in charge of all the patent interests of the Western Union Telegraph Company and for six years the whole patent system of this great company was in his exclusive care.
He published The Western Boundary of Massachusetts; a Study of Indian and Colonial History (1886). He was one of the original vice-presidents, and the second president of American Institute of Electrical Engineers (1886 - 87).
In 1881 he began private practice as a patent expert and solicitor. This practice he continued until his death. After 1884 he undertook editorial work for several electrical journals, including Electrician and Electrical Engineer and Engineering Magazine. About two years before his death he retired to his home at Great Barrington, Massachussets, where he served as consulting engineer for the Great Barrington Electric Light Company, and converted its works from a steam to a waterpower plant. To facilitate his labors, he had installed in the basement of his house the transformers of the system, and he was accidentally killed when going to the cellar to investigate some trouble.