William Orton

This article refers to the 19th century New York local politician William Orton. The Utah congressman of the same name can be found under Bill Orton .

William Orton

William Orton (born June 14, 1826 in Cuba , Allegany County , New York , † April 22, 1878 in New York City ) was an American politician and government official and long-time president of the Western Union .

Live and act

After brief training at a general school, William Orton attended a normal school in Albany and then completed an apprenticeship in Geneva . In 1850 he worked in Geneva as a clerk in a bookstore owned by George Hunter Derby (1823-1852); later he took over its management and was a partner in several bookstores. In 1857 Orton became manager of the publisher James G. Gregory & Co.

Politically active, Orton was elected as a Republican to the New York City Council ( Common Council ), where he exposed various fraudulent practices by the city government. In 1862 he was appointed Collector of Internal Revenue by President Abraham Lincoln and, at the instigation of Salmon P. Chase, was appointed to the Department of the Treasury in Washington as Commissioner of Internal Revenue . Due to his poor health, he quit this post soon after.

A little later Orton became President of the United States Telegraph Company . After the reorganization of the Western Union Telegraph Company , he was first Vice President in 1866 and shortly thereafter President of the company. During this time he led, among other things, the payment order ( Money Order System ) and sat through that night sent messages cost only half. In 1878 he founded the Journal of Telegraphy . At the time, Orton was President of the International Ocean Telegraph Company , the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company , the Pacific and Southern Atlantic Companies, and a member of the Union Leaguw Club and the Board of Trade and Chamber of Commerce .

William Orton was married to Agnes J. Gillespie, with whom he had four sons and four daughters.

literature

• Orton, William . In: James Grant Wilson, John Fiske (Eds.): Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography . tape 4 : Lodge - Pickens . D. Appleton and Company, New York 1888, p. 596 (English, Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
• The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography: Being the History of the United States . Volume 7. White, New York ?, p. 502.
• W. Bernard Carlson: Entrepreneurship in the Early Development of the Telephone: How Did William Orton and Gardiner Hubbard Conceptualize this New Technology? h-net.org (PDF) accessed on July 26, 2011, published in William J. Hausmann (Ed.): Business and Economic History , Vol. 23, No. 2, 1994 thebhc.org

Individual evidence

1. ↑ James Cephas Derby: Fifty years among authors, books and publishers . Carleton, New York 1884, pp. 46-47, Textarchiv - Internet Archive .