Presented at the Annual Symposium on Telecommunications History,
Canadian Armed Forces Museum, Kingston, Ontario. September, 1997.
Throughout history great achievers have often reached that station
primarily by being at the right place at the right time. When a
convergence of forces presents an opportunity to lead, the person with
an ability to take the broader view can achieve immortality. Of course
the process is a bit more complicated since in every situation factors
that determine who will ultimately rise to the occasion are diffe
rent. And, the title "Great Achiever" is rarely applied
until the passing of time provides a context for doing so.
With that in mind, one could argue that the title of this paper is an obvious exaggeration. On the other hand, one could also argue that a serendipitous symbiosis involving personalities who have brought unique insights and associations to bear in overcoming technological, economic and social barriers to progress has often occurred in the history of telecommunication. The story of the Vails of Morristown, New Jersey, is a fascinating tale about how three individuals with unlikely credentials made significant contributions to the evolution of telecommunications.
I will be discussing the contributions of Alfred E. Vail, partner of Samuel F. B. Morse in the refinement and introduction of the telegraph, and his father, Stephen Vail, patriarch of the Vail clan during the first half of the nineteenth century. Stephen Vail was a well-connected tinkerer, inventor, lawyer, community leader, and investor in trailblazing schemes. I will also discuss contributions by Theodore Newton Vail, kin to Stephen and Alfred, founder of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) and the first well-known personality to be dubbed the "Great Communicator" by his contemporaries. Each through his contributions to the evolution of telecommunications laid the groundwork for the establishment of operational conventions that continue to inform the ways in which telecommunications is capitalized, deployed, operated and regulated.
Alfred and Theodore Vail were not close contemporaries. Alfred Vail and Samuel Morse had already made history with the telegraph when Theodore Vail was born in Ohio in 1845. Theodore Vail's father, Davis Vail, was a cousin of Alfred Vail. Davis Vail brought the family to Morristown, New Jersey in 1847 to take a job at the Speedwell Iron Works, Stephen Vail's enterprise that was well-known for its high quality craftsmanship and innovative manufacturing techniques. Among the many projects successfully undertaken by the Speedwell Works was the casting and assembly of the first steam engine installed on an ocean-going ship, the legendary U.S.S. Savannah. On its maiden voyage to Europe the ship was shadowed for an entire day by a fire-fighting launch off the coast of Ireland. Never having seen a steam-powered ship before, the Irish Navy thought the Savannah was ablaze. The Ship operated only a short time before breaking up after running aground off Long Island. Ironically, while the Savannah lives on as a popular example of nineteenth century American technical prowess, it was a big-time money loser. Stephen Vail was never paid for the great engine that powered the ship. The record shows, however, that the Speedwell engine worked flawlessly (Rolston, 1983 p. 31).
The history of the Speedwell Iron Works supports the contention that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Stephen Vail was the archetypical 1990s-style entrepreneur; intelligent, resourceful, creative, a risk taker with access to capital. He was well-connected politically and market-oriented in his manufacturing operations. Many of his projects were "cutting edge" at the time. No project was too small or too large. Speedwell introduced many innovations in the manufacture of the steam engine, and Stephen Vail became a founding partner of the famous Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia that once also bore the Vail name. His Speedwell Works had manufactured many parts for the first American-made locomotive, the diminutive 'Tom Thumb,' built by Peter Cooper in 1829 (Dempsey, 1930). The firm had government contracts dating to the Revolutionary War and built sophisticated manufacturing tools and appliances including nail stamping machines and lathes. It was, in essence, the prototype for the "tech tank" approach to research and development later embraced by the Bell Telephone System when Bell Laboratories were created.
Stephen Vail was a practical innovator and a shrewd businessman who recognized an opportunity when it came along. He was the main source of venture capital for the Alfred Vail - Samuel Morse partnership. He provided funding and work space for the ongoing development of the telegraph, first demonstrated successfully at Speedwell in 1838 after Alfred Vail strung more than two miles of wire along support beams under the building housing the Speedwell workshop. Both Stephen Vail and Alfred Vail understood the potential impact the telegraph could have on communication over distance, and they set out to make it a marketable device.
As did Alexander Graham Bell fifty years later, Samuel Morse had trouble envisioning how to exploit his invention. Recognizing that some form of commonly understood cipher needed to be created so that information could be transformed into a mode that could then be transmitted over wire, Morse devised elaborate codes that involved complicated numerical notation. Alfred Vail took a different approach, recognizing that success would come only if the code was simple, easily understood, easily learned, and capable of being transmitted at high speed. Working with the twenty-six characters of the alphabet he came up with an elegant scheme now known as the "Morse Code" whose dots and dashes foreshadowed the zeros and ones of computer era software code. The fact that the Morse Code is still employed today in military and maritime communication attests to its fundamental practicality. It's impact on the marketability of the telegraph was on a par with the advent of software in that it made the processing of information transparent to the user.
Whether Alfred Vail was the actual inventor of the Morse Code has been debated since the earliest days. According to much of the literature on the subject Vail was indeed the actual inventor, although Morse and his descendants claimed otherwise. In fact Alfred Vail, who was sickly much of his relatively short life, never cashed in. There was a contract between the two but Morse carried the day with the royalties and speaking engagements that brought fame and fortune. In an article that appeared in The Century Illustrated in 1888 William Baxter, Alfred Vail's technical assistant at Speedwell during the time when the code was perfected, corroborated Vail's claim (Pope, 1888). Alfred Vail spent much of his time in his final years assembling a Vail family genealogy that is remarkable in its detail and an excellent resource on seventeenth and eighteenth century emigration to Long Island, Orange and Westchester counties in southeastern New York State. It was captured in a later work that was significantly enhanced by Theodore Vail's hiring of a professional researcher who was charged with tracking the Vail lineage to modern times (Vail, 1937).
One of the philosophical underpinnings of telecommunication in the U.S. emerged from efforts by Morse and Vail to find a client for telegraphy. Initially it was marketed to the Federal Government. In 1842, several years after making the initial approach, Morse and Vail convinced Congress to fund a demonstration of telegraphy over a long wire connecting Washington, D.C. to Baltimore, Maryland. The demonstration, conducted in 1844, was a success. However, after initially investing in the technology, Congress decided to get out of the telecommunications business. That fateful decision had a profound impact on the evolution of telecommunication and represents an exception to the government monopoly model typically employed around the World until very recently.
Most European nations opted to retain governmental control and oversight under the supervision of agencies that also operated postal services and broadcasting. By turning telegraphy over to the private sector a key dynamic was introduced that greatly expanded diffusion of the technology in the short term. Private operators, in need of revenue streams, were forced to look for ways to expand the use of telecommunications technology at the consumer level. The same convention has been applied to the telephone, radio, television, and now the Internet, although the latter is a unique and fascinating new wrinkle precisely because it knows no conventional boundaries of time or space. Whose laws govern the Internet? That is yet to be sorted out. What we do know is that the commercial marketplace has, over the past one-hundred fifty years, been a boon to the development of telecommunications in the U.S.
Congress did not stay out of the telecommunication game entirely. In the days before regulation the U.S. government provided important non-cash support by enacting legislation that provided vast tracts for rights-of-way so that telegraph lines could be built where there were already property ownership interests. Many telegraph lines piggybacked the railroad rights-of-way. The railroads soon became important and reliable clients and, eventually, business partners. At one point Congress, working with the czar of Russia, agreed to fund the creation of a globe-spanning telegraph line meant to reach Europe by way of an eastern route across Russia, Siberia, the Bering Straits and the coastline of the then Russian territory of Alaska, eventually connecting with the transcontinental telegraph circuits in California. Submarine cables under the Atlantic Ocean had proven problematic and unreliable. The overland route was designed to require as little underwater cabling as possible. Since much of the northwestern U.S. had not yet been explored, a delegation of scholars, map makers and explorers joined the expedition, documenting exotic species of flora and fauna and noting exploitable resources as they went along. The project was stopped at the point where only the underwater cable spanning the narrow Bering Straits had yet to be placed. A new Atlantic cable was proving more reliable than its predecessors, and the trans-Asia cable was no longer deemed cost effective. Abandoning the project was not a total disaster, however, as it was the dialogue between the U.S. and Russia surrounding this project that led to the sale of Alaska by Russia to the U.S. in 1867.
There are many specific accounts of how the telegraph revolutionized society. As an example it was reported that Union General Ulysses S. Grant complained bitterly about how Wall Street speculators were using the telegraph to track army movements during the Civil War. Military campaigns in the South often resulted in wholesale destruction of crops and other commodities, and market traders could profit from such information. Grant complained that they often knew the outcomes of important battles before he did. The telegraph also brought a new dimension to war reporting, making it possible for newspapers in New York, Boston and Chicago to report events in a much more timely manner. Since railroads were making it possible for newspapers to be delivered more quickly outside of their local areas, access to timely information was becoming available to previously isolated communities for the first time. By mid-century the speed of telecommunication was already changing the social landscape across North America and parts of Europe.
Theodore Vail began making his mark in telecommunication at a young age as a telegraph operator in Morristown and later in what was then the western frontier at Pinebluff, Wyoming, along the not yet completed Union Pacific railroad. When his family decided to move from Morristown to Waterloo, Iowa, to take up farmsteading Vail went on ahead to begin breaking up the virgin sod of uncultivated prairie. The 80 acre farm was named 'Speedwell Grove.' Not long after he left the farm to join the Union Pacific, and while working as an agent at Pinebluff may have established the first public electronic news service. He was granted permission to tap into telegraph lines used internally by the railroad to transmit general news and information so that he could provide up-to-date news and information for rail passengers (Paine, 1929 p.41).
Theodore Vail gained valuable insights into the subtleties of information flow working for the Railway Mail Service (he eventually became General Superintendent). The whole process of distributing information in a timely way seemed to become an obsession. He worked to streamline the Service and bring new innovations that cut down on the time it took to deliver mail, not just from city to city, but to individual postal customers in isolated areas and urban communities. He spent hours reading railroad maps, looking for ways to reroute the mail in order to create efficiencies. He claimed to have been the one who developed the technique of bundling mail for individual towns and cities while a train was en route.
Before the Railway Mail Service became a fixture on the American scene mail delivery was a haphazard affair. Mailbags were often tossed onto stage coaches and carried to the next stop where they were handed to a station master or innkeeper who then took out the local mail and handed the bag back to the driver. If there was outgoing mail it was tossed in the bag for everyone along the line to handle. Sometimes mail bags were dropped at a doorstep for anyone who happened by to sort through and they often sat for days or weeks before being placed back onto passing coaches. Local residents had to come by the station to check for personal mail, and there was little assurance that a letter would ever get to its eventual destination (Paine, 1921 p. 56). Another major innovation generally attributed to Theodore Vail was the establishment of a service called the "Fast Mail" that ran between New York and Chicago over the New York Central, Hudson Valley, Lakeshore, and Michigan Southern railroads beginning in 1875. The Fast Mail was described by one enthusiastic observer as a 'Checkmate to Time.' (Paine, 1921 p.77; Milwaukee Journal, 1925).
A successful economy requires an effective pricing scheme, access to venture capital, a fair and effective judicial and regulatory system, and an educated work force. The rise of the consumer culture has shown that efficient channels of distribution for moving information, goods and services are also important. Mass marketing began to develop when provisioners were able to reach the public with commercial messages using newly emerging mass media. The so-called 'Penny Press' of the 1830s refers to cost efficiencies that accrued to the newspaper publishing industry when the steam press was first put into service. It sped up the printing process to the extent that volume distribution lowered the cost of an individual newspaper to the point where it could be sold to the consumer for just pennies a day. And, the telegraph made it possible to report up-to-the-minute news from anywhere for next-day delivery to consumers in far flung places newly connected via 'high speed' rail lines. Because Theodore Vail found ways to significantly enhance communication flow to the public during his tenure at the Railway Mail Service his star rose quickly, bringing him to the attention of Bell telephone interests who, in the late 1870s, were looking for someone who could turn this new invention into a profitable business.
Theodore Vail was recruited by Gardiner G. Hubbard, Alexander Graham Bell's father-in-law and a well-connected political and business figure of his time who had invested heavily in the telephone. Vail brought a number of important things to the enterprise that would help launch the American Telephone and Telegraph Company and move the telephone industry on the road to what he, Vail, envisioned to be the only viable configuration; 'one policy, one system, universal service.'
Accomplishing that was a messy business, however. There were the famous patent fights with Elisha Gray and Thomas Edison, among others, over the Bell telephone design, and there were battles with independent companies that popped up across the U.S. Vail saw a missing link in the lack of long distance connectivity and set out to establish a franchise in that business. Perhaps his experience in the Railway Mail Service had given him a vision of how interconnecting communities was a potent force for expansion and revenue growth, because when independents either refused to connect or wanted to charge high fees to do so, Vail became convinced that his company needed to buy out those companies that controlled access to major population centers. He also determined to be aggressive in establishing service first where there was none. He became a shrewd deal-maker and earned a reputation for being a tough and sometimes ruthless competitor. The order of the day was consolidation, and Vail was the right person at the right time to take on the role of consolidator.
Consolidating the existing telephone infrastructure under the Bell name required a heavy investment in capital. Vail fell in with some of the most able and well-known financiers of the period including J.P. Morgan and George F. Baker who arranged financing for a series of stock offerings by the Bell companies. Those offerings were invariably successful, and Vail, Morgan and others became wealthy in the process. Alexander Graham Bell and his collaborator, Thomas Watson, also saw the value of their interests in the system take off, and both were able to retire wealthy.
Vail surprised his colleagues when he announced his retirement in 1893 to pursue the life of a gentleman farmer in Vermont. He had established a large agricultural estate near Lyndonville where he planned to do scientific experiments in order to help farmers learn how to operate more efficiently. It was an idyllic spot where he could pursue other hobbies, too (Keith, 1974 p.1). He named the estate Speedwell Farms after the family manufacturing enterprise at Morristown and Speedwell Grove in Iowa. At one time Vail also had a yacht named "The Speedwell" that plied the eastern seaboard between New York and Jekyll Island in Georgia, a well known wintering site for wealthy capitalists with names like Rockefeller, Morgan, Goodyear, Astor, and Vanderbilt (McCash, 1989). He also sailed to the Caribbean and South America on occasion.
Among his many accomplishments was the building at his expense and direction of the first paved road in the Vermont. He also devised a system for transporting water underground through a conduit that ran from a reservoir to Lyndonville, a distance of some twenty miles. Vail established an agricultural school for boys called the Lyndon Institute and was a generous contributor to various local causes.
By all accounts Vail enjoyed his life at Speedwell Farms immensely, but he was also investing much of the wealth accumulated in the course of his tenure with AT&T, and things did not go well for him as a speculator. He invested heavily in a scheme to heat Boston with steam through a network of underground pipes. The project was a failure, and the investment lost. He bought an interest in an ostrich ranch in California that also failed, as did other investments. Soon he was looking for ways to regroup financially. During the 1890s he brought in European investors to build an electrified trolley system in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He personally oversaw the operation which required that a power station be constructed at Cordoba. That project was successful and Vail did well financially. According to records in the Buenos Aires library the system continues to bear his name. There was a railway station in the City named for him as was a certain model of trolley car that operated well into the 1950s (Magliano, 1992).
But things were not going well at AT&T, either, during the years following Theodore Vail's first retirement, and the financier J.P. Morgan and his partners asked Vail to return. The telephone business was a new and novel enterprise that required huge investments in capital but that also generated a regular, predictable and substantial cash flow. It needed to be managed carefully. Morgan was concerned that the existing management was taking too much cash out of the business and not adequately reserving for maintenance and growth of the technical plant. There had been several market downturns and bank failures during the last decades of the 19th century that injected an air of crisis into the affairs of the huge company. Stockholders wanted someone at the helm who knew his way around Wall Street and understood the technical side, and Vail agreed to return as President. Soon the company was back on track, revenues were up, and innovations like the automatic (self dialing) telephone were coming along, enhancing the value of the service.
Vail also managed to take control of Western Union, AT&T's arch competitor, in what was seen by many to be a violation of anti-trust laws. It was a time when Western Union revenues were in decline, employee morale was low and the company was at risk. Vail saw a way for the two companies to help each other without diminishing competition between the telephone and the telegraph. He startled the telecommunication industry and Wall Street by installing independent management at Western Union and improving employee working conditions dramatically. Differential pricing was developed to encourage use of the telegraph system at odd hours and on weekends. Western Union began to offer special rates for holiday telegrams and other occasions, a strategy that tripled revenues in a matter of months. Employees and managers soon began to exhibit a profound appreciation for Theodore Vail's efforts to turn the company around, which he did. He instituted a pension plan that was both generous and innovative in its approach, and the Company allowed employees to participate in efforts to improve their own working conditions. Western Union was spun off to avoid problems with the U.S. Department of Justice not long after it was acquired by AT&T.
Theodore N. Vail was probably the first "Cybermogul." Like the computer barons of the latter half of the twentieth century, He recognized that advances in communication technology would bring society to a new plane. He knew that as those fundamental barriers to instantaneous interaction between individuals - time and distance - were being negated by the telephone and its older sibling, the telegraph, nothing would ever be the same. The economy, already going through reorganization at the close of the 19th century, would be altered in ways hard to predict, just as has been the case with the advent of ubiquitous computer processing and digitization of information at the close of this century. He recognized before others that scaling back the amount of time it took to distribute information over distance would change social, political and professional relationships and so would impact the economy, the social order, even the World order. In a published interview in 1915 he asserted that instantaneous 'intercommunication' would change the world for the better (Marshall, 1915 p.9). Ever the optimist, he waited out a takeover by the U.S. government of AT&T during the First World War, repeatedly insisting that the system would be operated more efficiently and effectively if left in the hands of its owners, which turned out to be correct. The Company was returned to its owners a year later, in 1918. Throughout the ordeal he made sure AT&T engineers and other technical staff were available to government operators to keep the system functioning. Vail also encouraged regulation of the telephone industry and worked to make sure that the process was decentralized. He preferred that it be handled primarily by state rather than federal agencies. This approach was good for both AT&T and the public in that regional issues could be dealt with without impacting the whole system unnecessarily. He also pressed for the subsidization of rural telephone service by urban customers for whom the cost of providing service was much lower. This "universal service" model vinsured that the telephone system would become an inclusive and ubiquitous channel of communication. The result is that over time the telephone has remained affordable and accessible, even for those in the sparsely populated areas of the U.S. Vail's legacy is apparent in the way the telecommunication system is organized and operated in the U.S.
There are many interesting stories that can be told about the Vails of Speedwell, and fortunately the historical record is fairly voluminous. Much of the Speedwell Iron Works has been preserved as part of a museum called Speedwell Village on Speedwell Avenue in Morristown, New Jersey. Exhibits related to the invention of the telegraph and other materials dealing with the life and times of the Vails and Samuel Morse are on display, including portraits of Stephen Vail and his wife, Bethiah, painted in 1837 by Morse.
Samuel Morse is an interesting study in his own right. His first life, and last life, was that of an artist. He was a professor of Art at the University of the City of New York when Alfred Vail first encountered him, and he wrote and lectured widely on that subject. He dabbled in politics, running for Mayor of New York City at one point. He was also the first president of the American Academy of Design.
Morristown has a working monument to Theodore Vail in the form of City Hall. During the decade before his death in 1920 Vail built an Italianate mansion in the center of the city that was intended to become his home as well as a showcase for much of the valuable art he had collected during his lifetime. He planned to live on the second floor and use the first floor as a gallery. He never did move in, however, and at his death willed the structure to the City of Morristown. Among its many imposing features is a series of bronze panels on huge entrance doors depicting the inventors of the telephone and telegraph, visits to the area during the post-Revolutionary War era by George and Martha Washington, and pastoral scenes involving the Vail family. In nearby Parsippany is the Presbyterian cemetery where Vail and his immediate family are buried. The cemetery superintendent lives in the Righter house next door which was the birthplace of Theodore Vail's mother. Vail endowed the cemetery, creating a fund that is still supporting its maintenance and upkeep. The Morristown Public Library has a number of files on the Vail family that include early family history and genealogical records that are remarkably complete and fascinating in their detail.
Speedwell Farms in Lyndonville is no longer standing. During his lifetime Vail gave the property to the State of Vermont with the hope that a public college of agriculture would be created. Lyndon State College occupies the site today. Vail's massive wooden house, used for many years as a main campus center, was demolished by the College in the 1970s after falling victim to vandals and the ravages of time. One of its unique features was a three story Aeolian organ built right into the house that Vail enjoyed playing for visitors. Portions of a second organ installed for a time in the Morristown mansion are now in the home of a Bruce Courter in that city and in working order (Courter, 1992). Historical records and publications related to Speedwell Farms are located in the special collections section of the Lyndon State College Library.
Another legacy of Theodore N. Vail is the important contribution he made to professional education in his time. Of particular note is the George Edward Dering library that he purchased sight unseen at the suggestion of a bookseller in London at the time of Dering's death in 1913. Dering was a well-known eccentric, inventor and thinker who over the course of his lifetime collected virtually every publication he ever encountered on the subject of electricity. This collection numbered approximately 35,000 books, articles and pamphlets dating to 1508 (Lane, 1923, p. 240). Vail had the entire collection sent to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology along with a generous fund for cataloging and housing it. Forming the core of the Vail Library at M.I.T. it represented the most complete and historically significant collection of documents related to the development of electrical engineering in the World at the time. He also made significant contributions to Harvard, Yale, Middlebury College in Vermont, and Phillips Exeter Academy, among others.
Another recommended publication is the autobiography of Thomas Watson, titled "Exploring Life" (Watson, 1927). Like the Vails, Bell and Morse, Thomas A. Watson was a bit of a renaissance man. After retiring from the telephone business at a relatively early age with plenty of money and time on his hands, Watson followed a life-long dream to Great Britain where he joined a traveling actor's troupe as a member of the chorus, wandering from town to town appearing in the plays of William Shakespeare, always in minor roles. It was fascinating to me that when he was dealing in his book with the invention of the telephone and other matters related to it, the writing seemed tedious and uninspired. But when he began discussing his experiences in Great Britain where he spent years as a peripatetic actor, his writing became animated, colorful, cheery. Clearly many events of his life most dear to him had little to do with the telephone (Watson, 1927). Perhaps the compulsion to link communicators in ways that deny the existence of time and distance is an affliction common to those who seek to communicate on a grander scale. Stephen Vail the social reformer, Alfred Vail the philosopher, Samuel Morse the artist, Thomas Watson the actor, Theodore Vail the enlightened capitalist and philanthropist. Each seemed driven to transcend normal, everyday speech. The magic in those early wires must have had an irresistible appeal not unlike that which has fired the imaginations of the designers of the global internet. In each case the basic premise seems to have been that in the end telecommunication will benefit society by enhancing the capacity for human expression. I doubt that the Vails would be surprised to learn of the abundance and variety of communication modes available to the public at the end of the twentieth century, or that information processing has become the primary currency of the modern economic order. As for its significance in the long run, the question that remains to be answered one day is still the one Samuel Morse asked Alfred Vail in May of 1844 via the telegraph; "What hath God Wrought?"
Notes:
Anonymous (1925). Story of the First fast Mail From New York to Chicago.Milwaukee Journal, November 22, 1925 (appears to have been based on two articles in Harpers Weekly dated October 9, 1875, and November 27, 1875).
Courter, Bruce (1992). Letter to M. S. Ameigh dated March 21, 1992.
Dempsey & Higbie (1930). This document is a letter that appears to have accompanied a mailing of calendars by the firm of Dempsey & Higbie, Morristown, N.J. It is neither signed or titled. A copy of the letter is located in the Vail collection of the Morristown (N.J.) Public Library.
Keith, Steven (1974). T.N. Vail: With Greatness. The Lyndon State Critic, vol. 10, no. 4. Lyndonville, Vt. October 17, 1974.
Lane, Ruth M (1923). The Vail Library at Technology. The Tech-Engineering News: The Professional Journal of the Alumni at Undergraduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Cambridge, Mass. Vol. 4, no. 6, December, 1923. pp. 201-246.
Magliano, Carlos (1992). U. of the Subterraneos do Buenos Aires S.E. Departamento Cultura. Letter to M. S. Ameigh dated February 17, 1992.
Marshall, Edward. What Transcontinental Wireless Phone Means: Theodore N. Vail Discusses Significance of recent Development in Communication When Human Voice Was heard for First Time Across Continent. New York Times Magazine. October 17, 1915. New York, N.Y. p. 9.
McCash, J. H., McCash, W.B. (1989). The Jekyll Island Club: Southern Haven for America's Millionaires. Athens, Ga. University of Georgia Press.
Paine, Albert B. (1929). Theodore N. Vail: A Life. New York, N.Y.. Harper Publishers.
Pope, F. (1888) The American Inventors of the Telegraph, with special references to the services of Alfred Vail. New York, N.Y. The Century: Illustrated Monthly Magazine, April, 1888.
Rolston, Sophie (1983). Unknown Giants of Morris County. Morris County. Morristown, N.J. Spring 1983.
Watson, Thomas A. (1926). Exploring Life: The Autobiography of Thomas A. Watson. New York, N.Y. D. Appleton & Company.
Vail, W. P. (1937). Genealogy of some of the Vail Family descended from Thomas Vail at Salem, Massachusetts, 1640. Privately printed.