Edison had never received a check before and he had to be told how to cash it.
Edison immediately set up a shop in Newark and threw himself into many and various activities.

He remade the prevailing system of automatic telegraphy and introduced it into England.

He experimented with submarine cables and worked out a system of quadruplex telegraphy by which one wire was made to do the work of four.

These two inventions were bought by Jay Gould for his Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company.
Gould paid for the quadruplex system thirty thousand dollars, but for the automatic telegraph he paid nothing.

Gould presently acquired control of the Western Union; and, having thus removed competition from his path, "he then," says Edison, "repudiated his contract with the automatic telegraph people and they never received a cent for their wires or patents, and I lost three years of very hard labor.