Background
Stephen Dudley Field was born in Stockbridge, Berkshire County, Massachusetts, the son of Jonathan Edwards and Mary Ann (Stuart) Field.
Stephen Dudley Field was born in Stockbridge, Berkshire County, Massachusetts, the son of Jonathan Edwards and Mary Ann (Stuart) Field.
His education was directed at first toward law, and he attended Williams Academy and then Reid Hoffman’s School in Stockbridge.
Completed schooling at Dutchess County Academy, Poughkeepsie, New York.
When, however, through the efforts of his uncle, Cyrus West Field, the first Atlantic cable was successfully laid in 1858, and a telegraph office was opened at Stockbridge in his father’s law office, Stephen, then twelve years old, became intensely interested in telegraphy.
In 1863 he went to California as a telegraph operator for the California State Telegraph Company, and after two years in this service spent three more with the Collins Overland Telegraph in British Columbia. He then was made an inspector with the San Francisco Fire Alarm Telegraph Company in which capacity he served until 1872 when he organized the California Electrical Works to develop his original ideas for electrical improvements.
He then turned his attention to the electric railway. He was without capital, however, and returned to Stockbridge in 1879. Shortly thereafter he imported from Germany several Siemens electric motors and built an electric locomotive which he operated on a special track near his home in August 1880.
Having covered his improvements by patents, Field next turned his attention to the stock ticker. He soon designed one surpassing in speed anything of its kind then in use, which led to the organization of the Commercial Telegram Company.
During the three years he devoted to this work, however, other inventors became active in the electric railway field and when it seemed that his own patents would be involved in litigation, Field sold them to a group of large electrical interests.
Field obtained over one hundred patents covering nearly every branch of electrical engineering. He was a charter member and later fellow of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and was a manager of the Institute’s first board of directors.
The following year he designed and subsequently perfected a dynamo as a substitute for the galvanic battery in the generation of electric current for telegraph apparatus, and after solving the problems of using this equipment in combination with the quadruplex telegraph, he sold the system to the Western Union Telegraph Company.
He was a charter member and later fellow of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.
He married Celestine Butters of San Francisco on September 30, 1871, who with a son and daughter survived him at the time of his death in Stockbridge.