Delany, Patrick Bernard (1845–1924), electrical engineer and inventor, was born 28 January 1845 in Killavilla, King's County (Offaly), son of James Delany and Margaret Delany (née White). In 1854 his family moved to Hartford, Connecticut, USA, where he attended parochial schools for five years. Working as an office boy in a telegraph office, he displayed a great aptitude for telegraphy and at 18 he was appointed press telegraph operator at Worcester, Massachusetts. He moved in 1865 to Albany, NY, where, as night telegraph circuit manager, he had responsibility for all lines out of New York and Buffalo. In 1868 he became chief operator of the Franklin Telegraph Company at Philadelphia, and in 1870 he moved to Washington and eventually became superintendent of the Automatic Telegraph Company. There he developed the highly popular idea of dispatching the scores of professional baseball games to newspapers and stations along the company lines. Moving to journalism (1876), he briefly edited the Old Commonwealth in Virginia, but by 1880 had decided to devote his time to electrical invention, specialising in his former field of telegraphy.
In 1869 he had married Annie Ovenshine of Philadelphia, and with their only son they moved to South Orange, New Jersey, where he became a neighbour and lifelong friend of Thomas Edison. Receiving over 150 patents, among his most prestigious inventions were a synchronous multiplex telegraph by which numerous messages could be sent simultaneously along a single wire, adopted by the British post office; telegraphic keyboard apparatus; a sound-reproducing machine; a talking-machine recorder and reproducer; and the method for manufacture of a talking machine, known as ‘Vox humana’. The introduction of his automatic cable telegraphy system brought an increase of 30 per cent in speed over hand signalling, and his ‘Telepost’ system was capable of transmitting 3,000 words a minute. His innovations and improvements brought huge advances in telegraphy.
During the first world war he turned his inventive powers to devices for submarine detection and the general location of submerged metallic objects. Using these inventions he located the steamship Laurentic, which had been torpedoed off the coast of Ireland by a German submarine, and recovered $35,000,000 worth of gold bullion for the British government. The Franklin Institute awarded him the Elliott Cresson gold medal on two occasions and the John Scott legacy medal, while his inventions also claimed gold medals at the Buffalo and St Louis exhibitions. He received the two highest awards, the Queen's gold medal and diploma, at the National Inventions Exhibition in London. He was a member of both the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He died 19 October 1924 at South Orange and was buried at Nantucket, Massachussetts.