Joseph Barker Stearns

Background

Joseph Barker Stearns was born in Weld, Maine, the son of Edward Ray and Eliza Tyler Barker Stearns. He worked on a farm as a youth before studying telegraphy in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he became manager of the office. From 1855 to 1869, he served as superintendent of the Fire Alarm Telegraph Company of Boston, and was the first to patent the use of reversed currents in connection with fire alarm signal systems.

Stearns served as president of the Franklin Telegraph Company from 1869 to 1871, during which time he invented the first practical duplex telegraphy system. The system was successfully applied to the English, French, and Belgian lines, and two years later was used for the Atlantic cables. He sold rights under his duplex patents to Western Union Telegraph and Cable Companies, and received large royalties from governments in England, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Russia, and India, as well as from several submarine cable companies.

From 1879 to 1880, Stearns worked as an engineer for the Mexican Telegraph Company, helping to make, lay, and put into operation cables between Galveston, Texas, and Veracruz, Mexico. In 1881, he performed similar work for the Central and South American Telegraph Company on cables extending from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico to Callao, Peru—between 4,000 and 5,000 miles of cable—completed in 1882. He retired in 1885 and settled in Camden, Maine, where he maintained a library of 10,000 volumes, a collection of Chiriquí Province pottery exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution, and a collection of carved ivories exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He died in Camden.