Henry O'Reilly (February 6, 1806 – August 17, 1886) was an Irish-American businessman and

telegraph Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages where the sender uses symbolic codes, known to the recipient, rather than a physical exchange of an object bearing the message. Thus flag semaphore is a method of telegraphy, whereas p ...

y pioneer.

Early life

O'Reilly was born in Carrickmacross,

County Monaghan County Monaghan ( ; ga, Contae Mhuineacháin) is a county in Ireland. It is in the province of Ulster and is part of Border strategic planning area of the Northern and Western Region. It is named after the town of Monaghan. Monaghan County C ...

, Ireland. He emigrated with his father to New York City in 1816, where he then changed the spelling of his surname to O'Rielly. With his friend Luther Tucker he went to

Rochester, New York Rochester () is a city in the U.S. state of New York, the seat of Monroe County, and the fourth-most populous in the state after New York City, Buffalo, and Yonkers, with a population of 211,328 at the 2020 United States census. Located in W ...

, and organized the ''Rochester Daily Advertiser''. He was active in Jacksonian politics. The postmaster,

Amos Kendall Amos Kendall (August 16, 1789 – November 12, 1869) was an American lawyer, journalist and politician. He rose to prominence as editor-in-chief of the '' Argus of Western America'', an influential newspaper in Frankfort, the capital of the U.S. ...

, appointed him to the Rochester post office. O'Reilly chose a young Scottish immigrant, James D. Reid, as his assistant. He married Marcia Brooks, daughter of Micah Brooks, in 1830.

Civic accomplishments

O'Reilly was one of the Rochester citizens advocating the deepening and improvement of the

Erie Canal The Erie Canal is a historic canal in upstate New York that runs east-west between the Hudson River and Lake Erie. Completed in 1825, the canal was the first navigable waterway connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, vastly reducing t ...

. He could see that revenues from tolls were not sufficient for major improvements. They advocated borrowing at a time when many considered it immoral. He promoted a change in the Rochester city charter in 1841 to support free public education. This was opposed by many who preferred education only for a privileged class. He was elected to the subsequent Board of Education. He promoted and became president of the Young Men's Association that created the first library open to the public in the city.

Publishing

O'Reilly was one of the first authors to write a survey of Rochester and its immediate surroundings, first with a fourteen-page tract ''Rochester in 1835 : brief sketches of the present condition of the city of Rochester''. He followed that with a massive publication just three years later, describing in great detail, the ''Settlement in the West : sketches of Rochester : with incidental notices of western New-York ...'' (1838, 504 pp., published by William Alling), known colloquially as ''Sketches of Rochester''.

Telegraph entrepreneur

O'Reilly signed an ambiguous contract on June 13, 1845, with Amos Kendall, agent of

Samuel Morse Samuel Finley Breese Morse (April 27, 1791 – April 2, 1872) was an American inventor and painter. After having established his reputation as a portrait painter, in his middle age Morse contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph ...

, for a

telegraph line Electrical telegraphs were point-to-point text messaging systems, primarily used from the 1840s until the late 20th century. It was the first electrical telecommunications system and the most widely used of a number of early messaging systems ...

from the eastern seaboard to the

Great Lakes The Great Lakes, also called the Great Lakes of North America, are a series of large interconnected freshwater lakes in the mid-east region of North America that connect to the Atlantic Ocean via the Saint Lawrence River. There are five lak ...

. With others he formed the Atlantic, Lake & Mississippi Valley Telegraph system composed of six independent units including the Atlantic & Ohio Telegraph Company. Its superintendent was James D. Reid.James D. Reid, ''The Telegraph in America--Its Founders Promoters and Noted Men'', New York Arno Press, 1974 The ambiguity of the contract and O'Reilly's aggressive interpretation led to conflict with Kendall and an acrimonious court action. The subsequent case, '' O'Reilly v. Morse'', has been highly influential in the development of the law of patent-eligibility. When he lost this case, his telegraphy empire declined.

References

External links

Engraved portrait of Henry O'Reilly at Rochester Images

Henry O'Reilly biography

* ttps://archive.org/details/sketchesofroches00orei Public domain.pdf files of ''Sketches of Rochester'' at the Internet Archive {{DEFAULTSORT:OReilly, Henry 19th-century Irish people People from County Monaghan Telegraphy 1806 births 1886 deaths Businesspeople from Rochester, New York Irish emigrants to the United States (before 1923) People from Carrickmacross 19th-century American businesspeople