George Bartlett Prescott

Background

He was born on September 16, 1830 in Kingston, New Hampshire, United States, of which town his earliest American ancestor, James Prescott, was an incorporator in 1694. He was the third child of Mark Hollis and Priscilla (Bartlett) Prescott.

Education

He received his primary education in Kingston, and later attended private schools in Portland, until he was sixteen years old. From his youth he had shown a keen interest in electrical science, and had followed very closely the introduction of the electro-magnetic telegraph by Samuel F. B. Morse. While still in school he learned the Morse code and the methods of sending messages and maintaining telegraphic equipment.

Career

Upon completing school, he made his way to New York, where on March 6, 1847 he entered the service of the New York & Boston Magnetic Telegraph Company as telegraph operator and assistant at New York. Three months later he was transferred to the Boston office of the company and made assistant manager. After another three months, he was placed in charge of the newly opened office at New Haven, Connecticut.

In 1850 he joined the New York & New England Telegraph Company, which organization had just become the owner of the Bain Chemical telegraph system. For two years Prescott was chief operator for this company in Boston, but on November 1, 1852, resigned to take the managership of the New York & Boston, or "Commercial, " Telegraph Company at Springfield, Massachussets. In the course of the following three years a number of individual submarine telegraph companies were established along the Eastern seaboard.

In 1855 Prescott was made manager of the group with headquarters in Boston. While he was serving in this capacity, the American Telegraph Company was established. Prescott was appointed general manager of this company at Boston in 1859. Two years later he became superintendent of all of the American Telegraph Company's lines in eastern New York, Connecticut, and Vermont. In 1866 the American and the Western Union telegraph companies were consolidated and Prescott was appointed electrician of the new organization, which was thereafter called the Western Union Telegraph Company. In this position he had to act as barrier to a flood of inventions brought to the company for attention.

Meanwhile, the question of private or government ownership of the telegraph began to be seriously discussed both in Congress and in the country generally. Because of his great experience and his keen analytical mind, Prescott was called to New York in 1869, given the title of statistician, and assigned the work of studying the relative merits of the two systems. As a result, he became the expert witness of his company before various congressional committees in the succeeding ten years, and probably did more than any other single individual to prevent the proposed acquisition of the telegraph by the government. In 1877 the Western Union Telegraph Company obtained control of the telephone patents of Elisha Gray and Thomas A. Edison, and organized the American Speaking Telephone Company as a rival to the Bell Telephone Company. Prescott, who had made a thorough study of the telephone, was active in the organization of this subsidiary, and was an original member of the board of directors.

He became in 1878, vice-president and a member of the board of the Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, which was the largest of the organizations maintaining private telegraph lines throughout the country. He was also one of the incorporators of the Metropolitan Telephone & Telegraph Company in New York, but in 1882 he resigned all active connections with his many communication interests and devoted the remainder of his life to literary work.

He began his writing about 1852 when he published in Boston an account of his discovery that the aurora borealis is of electrical origin. He died in New York.

Achievements

• George Bartlett Prescott controlled all of the telegraph innovations of the time, such as the duplex and quadruplex systems, were put into practical operative shape under his immediate direction; subject to his supervision, also, was all the construction and reconstruction work of the Western Union Telegraph Company. Chief among his works on electrical subjects are History, Theory and Practice of the Electric Telegraph; Electricity and the Electric Telegraph, in which his printed descriptions of his many experiments attracted much attention throughout the world, being reproduced in all the leading scientific journals of Europe and America.

Works

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• book

  • History, Theory, and Practice of the Electric Telegraph

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Dynamo-electricity: its generation, application, transmission, storage and measurement

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

Connections

Prescott was married at Springfield, Massachussets, on December 9, 1857, to Eliza C. Parsons. They had one daughter.

Father:

Mark Hollis Prescott

Mother:

Priscilla (Bartlett) Prescott

Spouse:

Eliza C. Parsons

ancestor:

James Prescott