Background
Patrick Bernard Delany was born on January 28, 1845 in Killavilla, Kings County, Ireland. He was the son of James and Margaret Delany.
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Patrick Bernard Delany
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Patrick Bernard Delany was an American electrical engineer and inventor, who devoted years to improving cable telegraphy. He was charter member of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, founded in 1884, and was one of its vice-presidents, and was also a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Education
Until Delany was nine years of age he lived in Ireland and attended private school there, but in 1854 his parents came to the United States with their children and settled in Hartford, Connecticut, United States.
Here Delany continued his education, attending parochial schools for the next five years.
Career
Delany then went to work as an office boy in a telegraph office in Hartford. He had always been greatly interested in electricity and took every opportunity to learn telegraphy. By the time he was sixteen years old he had the reputation of being a good telegraph operator. Making this his chosen profession he progressed rapidly and at eighteen was appointed press telegraph operator at Worcester, Massachusetts.
Two years later he was given the position of night telegraph circuit manager at Albany, New York, for all wires between New York and Buffalo, and three years later became chief operator of the Franklin Telegraph Company at Philadelphia.
About 1870 he left Philadelphia to become assistant general superintendent of the newly organized Southern & Atlantic Telegraph Company at Washington, D. C. , whose wires began there and spread out through the Southern states to New Orleans, Memphis, and Louisville.
About five years later he resigned this position to accept one of superintendent of the Automatic Telegraph Company, also of Washington. His association during these years with George H. Grace, to whom the success of the Southern & Atlantic Telegraph Company was largely due and who was one of the originators of the American Press Association, influenced Delany to abandon telegraphy about 1876 and become a newspaper correspondent. Subsequently, but only for a short time, he was editor of the Old Commonwealth, a newspaper at Harrisonburg, Virginia, but in 1880 he gave up this work to devote his whole time to electrical invention, particularly telegraphy.
In that year he moved North with his family and settled in South Orange, New Jersey, where he became a neighbour and close friend of Thomas Edison for the rest of his life.
During the World War Delany’s experimental work in his laboratory at Nantucket, Massachusetts, was concerned principally with the invention of devices for submarine detection and the general location of submerged metallic objects. With these latter inventions, for which he received patents between 1916 and 1918, and with apparatus based on them, it is said that a valuable shipment of gold bullion sunk with the liner Laurentic off the coast of Ireland during the war was recovered for the British government.
Credit is also given Delany for the recovery in 1923 of a large quantity of copper buried in nine feet of mud on the floor of New York Harbor.
Achievements
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All told, in the course of his inventive career Delany received a hundred and fifty or two hundred patents. Of these inventions the most prominent were the anti-Page relay; anti-induction cables; a synchronous, multiplex telegraph by which six messages could be sent simultaneously over a single wire and which was subsequently adopted by the British Post Office Department; a perforator for telegraphic transmitting tapes; telegraphic keyboard apparatus; a sound-reproducing machine; a talking-machine recorder and reproducer; as well as the method for manufacture of a talking-machine, known commercially as Vox Humana. He devoted years to improving cable telegraphy, the reward of which was that his automatic system for cables when put in service showed an increase of thirty per cent in speed over hand signaling. He received the Elliott Cresson gold medal on two separate occasions and also the John Scott legacy medal, both awarded by the Franklin Institute. At both the Buffalo and St. Louis expositions he was awarded gold medals for his inventions.
Works
Connections
Delany married Annie M. Ovenshine of Philadelphia on March 31, 1869.
