THE BIOGRAPHIES OF EDMUND MORRIS
THE RISE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
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EDISON
EDMUND MORRIS
PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE THEODORE ROOSEVELT TRILOGY
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He could imagine that at least in terms of his own observation, Arey years before of the thermionic emission of carbon electrons in a bulb after evacuation a mysterious darkening since known av the "Balkon in "It was about as far as he ever got in his search for Sew Arce" in extrochemistry, Disparaged at the time by his pows, he now knew that he had discovered, if not recognized, the phenomenon of radio waves eight years before Heinrich Herts.
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Edison had once teased a science fiction writer with the notion of interchanging atoms of himself with those of a rose. He noted that Einstein envisaged particles in space with common axes converging into solidly constituted "rings," while others remained ethereal Hence the "primal ring" of the solar system, with its interplanetary
We now have matter in a form which is polar o capable of prodes ing what we call Magnetion of Electricity
The religion boys, of course, would protest that what drew parti cles together was the will of God. Edison was as ready as Einstein to believe in a "Supreme Intelligence" made manifest by the order and beauty of the stars, and equally reluctant to personalize its "I canno conceive such a thing as a spirit." The furthest he would go in the direction of metaphysics was to imagine the subcellular particles of a human being as "infinitesimally small individuals, each itself a unit of
described in his annotated copy of The Nature of Matter and Electricity by Daniel Cor stock and Leonard Troland (1919k
A T SEVENTY-THREE, WITH his wartime career as president of the Naval Consulting Board behind him, Edison tried to make sense of a new intellectual order that challenged every thing he had learned of Newtonian theory. Abstract thought did not come easily to him. "My line of sorrow," he wrote, "lies in the realm of technical science." He needed to feel things come together under his hands, see the filament glow, smell the carbolic acid, and-as far as possible for a near-deaf man-hear the "molecular concussions" of music.¹
Laws such as those of Faraday's electromagnetic induction and Ohm's relation of current, voltage, and resistance he understood, having applied them himself in the laboratory. But now, if only to slow as much as possible the entropy of his own particles (the fate of all systems, according to Lord Kelvin), Edison studied Einstein's general theory of relativity. The recent solar eclipse had persuaded him, along with the academic scientists he mocked as "the bulge headed fraternity," that the theory was valid-even if it failed to suggest any correlation between his attempt to measure the total eclipse of 1878 and his subsequent perfection of incandescent elec tric light.³
The urtext of the theory, as translated by Robert Lawson, defeated him after only eleven pages. "Einstein like mind," he scrawled in the margin his every copy, other mathematical "has not the slightest capacity to impart to the lay mind even an inkling of the subject he tries to explain." He turned for help to an interpretive essay-Georges de Bothezat's "The Einstein Theory of Relativity: A Glance into the Nature of the Question"-and filled thirty-one notebook pages with scrawled paraphrases of its main points.
press room set up over Glenmont's garage. Others hung around the laboratory downtown, as if half-expecting its founder might still emerge in the small hours, silver-stubbled, reeking of chemicals, spat tered from collar to cuffs with tobacco juice and beads of wax, and saying with a wink that he had to go home to save his marriage, 20
The mansion filled up with family. Notwithstanding the ancient split between Mary's and Mina's children, they clung together in the den downstairs. The sickroom upstairs glowed through dawn, as Dr. Howe and a relay of nurses kept watch over their patient. The of Llewellyn Park were closed to motor traffic. Neighbors refrained from entertainments, forgetting that Edison had never been aware of gates
Howe gave up hope on the fifteenth, when his patient briefly opened his eyes-large, blue, and blind-then slipped into a final coma. From time to time his hands made kneading movements, as if he were still testing the malleability of rubber. "Father can't last much longer," Charles told reporters. An urgent call came from Henry Ford, asking for the great man's last breath to be preserved in a test tube.21
Mina and all the children were at Edison's bedside when he died at 3224 A.M. on Sunday 18 October.
TWO MINUTES LATER, the high wall clock in his laboratory library stopped ticking, 22 Its pointers maintained their acute angle for the next three days while Edison, clad in an old-fashioned frock coat, lay beneath in an open coffin. Ten thousand mourners filed past to stare at his waxen profile. "A marvelous, powerful face," the sculptor James Earle Fraser remarked. "The beautiful, full forehead, the nose, the mouth, the chin... The hands, too, are wonderful. Delicate, sen sitive nails and fingertips, yet withal they show great power."
To gawkers less fixated on flesh, the surrounding gallery could be seen as a sort of wooden cranium, packed with evidence of Edison's searching intellect. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Staired book stacks, rising to triplex height above the floor, held thousands of scientific and technological tomes, along with runs of periodicals al phabetically devoted to aeronautics, automobiles, chemistry, construc tion trades, drugs, electrical engineering, hydraulic power, mechanics,PROLOGUE 1931 | 9
crushed by the weight of their sire's overpowering celebrity. Only Madeleine had given him any grandchildren-four sons, who bore his name secondarily.16
Not that it was likely to be forgotten. Edison had always, with fa natical thoroughness, identified himself with every business he founded, from 1869 on: Pope, Edison & Co., Edison's Electric Pen and Duplicating Press Company, Edison Ore-Milling Company, Edi son Telephone Company of London, Ltd., Edison Machine Works, Thomas A. Edison Central Station Construction Department, Edison Phonoplex System, Edison Wiring Company, Edison Phonograph Company, Edison Iron Concentrating Company, Edison Manufac turing Company, Edison Industrial Works, Edison Ore-Milling Syndi cate, Ltd., Edisonia, Ltd., Edison Portland Cement Company, Edison Storage Battery Company, Edison Crushing Roll Company, Edison Kinetophone Company, and Thomas A. Edison, Inc.-not to mention such polysyllabic affiliates as Compañía chilena de teléfonos de Edi son, Société industrielle et commerciale Edison, Société Kinetophon Edison, and Deutsche Edison-Gesellschaft.¹7
A separate constellation of lighting firms blazed his name around the world, some in characters too strange for Western eyes to read.18
IN THE SECOND week of September his health began to fail again. He sensed that he was dying and said goodbye to his wife and children. Dr. Howe issued daily pessimistic bulletins. One stated that Edison had Bright's disease, and stomach ulcers complicating his uremia and diabetes. He was having dizzy spells and losing his sight as well as the last of his hearing. The only voice he seemed to recognize was that of Mina yelling "Dear, how are you?" into his right ear, her hand cupped against his cheekbone. By early October he was ingesting only milk, although one morning Dr. Howe got him to swallow a few spoonfuls of stewed pear. After that he lay inert, except for the obstinate beating of his pulse.1⁹
Word spread that he could die at any moment. President Hoover asked to be kept informed. Pope Pius XI cabled twice to express his concern. A woman in Kansas offered her own blood, if it would keep the old inventor alive. Newsmen began an around-the-clock vigil in a8 | EDISON
nological literature. Throughout his career he had demonstrated an almost dissociative ability to function in different disciplines, moving on a typical day between chemistry, radiography, mineralogy, and electrical engineering. For the last eight years he had been obsessed with botany, struggling to produce rubber from domestic laticiferous plants, including Solidago edisonia, a variety of goldenrod developed by himself. It was a project financed by his good friends Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, both of them wholly dependent on foreign rub ber. After testing seventeen thousand native plant species, ranging from tropical ficus to desert shrubs, Edison had fixed on goldenrod as the most promising source, and been encouraged by Maj. Dwight Eisenhower, U.S. Army, to develop it as a strategic war reserve. How ever, impurities in the weed's watery latex kept frustrating his at tempts to concentrate its polyisoprenic particles. Now at last, four chunks of springy coagulum vulcanized by his Florida research team were pressed into his hand. 13
Charles Edison, president of Thomas A. Edison, Inc., announced that the Old Man was "very happy to receive them."
THERE HAD BEEN a time when Thomas A. Edison, Jr., hoped for Charles's title. As Edison's eldest son by his first wife, Mary, Tom claimed it by right of primogeniture-only to be slapped down as unworthy. William, Tom's brother, also nourished a sense of early rejection, its sting sharpened now, in middle age, by what he took to be his father's "intense dislike."15 Marion, the elder sister of both men, was only slightly less starved for paternal affection. For a while, after Mary's mysterious death in 1884, she and Edison had been of comfort to each other. But that intimacy had not lasted much longer than the year and half it took him to marry a girl straight out of fin ishing school.
The three children he proceeded to have with Mina-Madeleine, Charles, and Theodore-were better mothered if not better fathered. "He is so shut from away us, "Madeleine complained. When Edison took enough time off his work to notice them, he felt they were an improvement on Mary's brood. Theodore in particular was a scientist of considerable brilliance. But to varying extents, all six siblings werePROLOGUE 1931 | 7
bined his discoveries of etheric sparking, thermionic emission, ex tended induction, and rectifying reception into the wireless technology of radio.
His lifelong policy (adopted at age fourteen, when he wrote, printed, and published an onboard train newspaper) had been to cre ate only what was practical and profitable. But in aspiring to be pri marily an entrepreneur, with over a hundred start-up companies to his credit, he did not have to admit that his need to invent was as compulsive as lust. Each of his honeymoons had triggered a concur rent flood of technological ideas. On a single day, when he was forty and full of innovative fire, he had jotted down a hundred and twelve ideas for "new things," among them a mechanical cotton picker, a snow compressor, an electrical piano, artificial silk, a platinum-wire ice slicer, a system of penetrative photography (presaging radiology by twelve years), and a product unlikely to occur to anyone else, ex cept perhaps Lewis Carroll: "Ink for the Blind." At fifty-nine, he solved in two hours a hygroscopic problem that
had baffled a professional chemist for eleven months.10 Only when old age advanced upon him did his shafts of perception slow. He executed a mere 134 patents in his sixties, less than half that number in his seventies. He filed just two in 1928-a year more mem orable for the award of a Congressional Gold Medal to the "Father of Light"-and none at all in 1929 or 1930. His final successful applica tion-a mount for the electroplating of precious stones-had come in the early days of this, the last year he would see."¹
AFTER A WEEK in bed, Edison rallied enough to read a textbook on insulin therapy, as if erudition might help him fix the workings of his pancreas. Although he did not claim to be a pure scientist, he had al ways kept abreast of the latest professional literature, arguing that expertise should precede experiment. The doctors dispersed. But the chief of them, his personal physician, Dr. Hubert S. Howe, was only guardedly optimistic. "I do not think he will ever be out of danger."12 By mid-August Edison was ambulatory and talking, with little con viction, of returning to his laboratory. He had an old rolltop desk there, in a library filled with a lifetime's worth of scientific and tech6 | EDISON
spots; a recording horn so long it had to be buttressed between two buildings; bone earbuds that could be shared by two or more listen ers, and a voice-activated flywheel.
He was even more legendary for his creation of the long-burning incandescent lightbulb, accompanied by two hundred and sixty-three other patents in illumination technology. That number could be in creased by one, had he not made his X-ray fluoroscope available without license to all medical practitioners. Most spectacularly, Edi son had designed, manufactured, powered, and built the world's first incandescent electric lighting system. At the flick of a switch, one Sep tember evening in 1882, he had transformed the First District of lower Manhattan from a dimly gaslit warren into a great spread of glowing jewels.
Out of his teeming brain and ever-mobile hands (the rest of him rigid with concentration, as he hunched over his tools and flasks) came the universal stock ticker, the electric meter, the jumbo dynamo, the alkaline reversible battery, the miner's safety lamp, slick candy wrappers, a cream for facial neuralgia, a submarine blinding device, a night telescope, an electrographic vote recorder, a rotor-lift flying ma chine, a sensor capable of registering the heat of starlight, fruit pre servers, machines that drew wire and plated glass and addressed mail, a metallic flake maker, a method of extracting gold from sulfide ore, an electric cigar lighter, a cable hoist for inclined-plane cars, a self starter for combustion engines, microthin foil rollers, a sap extractor, a calcining furnace, a fabric waterguard, an electric pen, a sound operated horse clipper, a moving-sphere typewriter, gummed tape, the Kinetograph movie camera, the Kinetoscope projector, and moving pictures with sound and color. He built the world's first film studio, the world's biggest rock crusher, tornado-proof concrete houses. scores of power plants, and an electromagnetic railway complete with locomotive, trolleys, brakes, and turntable. He dreamed up a Gold bergian set of variations on the theme of telegraphy, including du plex, quadruplex, and octoplex devices that transmitted multiple messages simultaneously along a single wire, "grasshopper" signals that leaped from speeding trains, and receivers that chattered out fac similes or turned dots and dashes into roman type. If he had not been so busy inventing other things in the early 1880s, he could have comPROLOGUE 1981 | S
appeared at the front door, dressed for a country excursion, only to collapse and be carried upstairs to bed. Three physicians arrived in a hurry, one of them by chartered plane. That night they announced that their patient was "in failing health," afflicted by chronic nephritis on top of his metabolic disorder. Aware that Wall Street would react negatively to this news, they added, "The diabetic condition now is under control, and the kidney condition seems improved."
NEWSROOMS AROUND THE world hastened to update the obituary of Thomas Alva Edison. They had been doing so for fifty-three years, ever since his self-proclaimed greatest invention, the phonograph, won him overnight fame. Then and now, journalists marveled that such an acoustic revolution, adding a whole new dimension to human memory, could have been accomplished by a man half deaf in one ear and wholly deaf in the other.
Even the most text-heavy periodicals lacked enough column inches to summarize the one thousand and ninety-three machines, systems, processes, and phenomena patented by Edison." (Not to mention an invention impossible to protect, yet as seminal as any-his establish ment of history's first industrial research and development facility, at Menlo Park, New Jersey.) Although his disability was progressive-"I haven't heard a bird sing since I was twelve years old "-he had in vented two hundred and fifty sonic devices: diaphragms of varnished silk, mica, copper foil, or thin French glass, flexing in semifluid gas kets; dolls that talked and sang; a carbon telephone transmitter; para phenylene cylinders of extraordinary fidelity; duplicators that molded and smoothed and swaged; a pointer-polisher for diamond splints; a centrifugal speed governor for disk players; a miniature loudspeaker utilizing a quartz cylinder and ultraviolet light; a dictating machine; audio mail; a violin amplifier; an acoustic clock; a radio-telephone receiver; a device that enabled him to listen to the eruptions of sun
* Edison averaged one patent for every ten to twelve days of his adult life. The complete list, arranged by number and execution date, is available online at edison.rutgers.edu/ patents. It does not include inventions, such as the X-ray fluoroscope, that he chose to leave patent-free.
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*My message to you be advised his fellow citizens in a valedic tury radio broadcase from his botanical library, "is to be courageous. I have lived a long time. I have seen history repeat itself time and again. I have seen many depressions in business. Always America has
home at winter's end to New Jersey, he prayed to some gewer ocher than God (whose existence he denied) to be spared long enough to finish his current round of botanical experiments. "Give me five more years, and the United States will have a rubber can be utilized in twelve months' time."
It was clear, however, when he arrived at the station in Newark, that he would not see another spring. He was frail and stooped under his thick fall of white hair, and needed help to walk. Three of his six children were on hand to greet him. Outside, a warm thunderstorm was pounding down. Mina threw a protective rug over her husband's shoulders as he tottered toward a waiting automobile for the short
drive to West Orange. Next morning, employees at his vast laboratory complex up
Main Street waited for the Old Man-as he had been known since his twenties-to punch in early as usual. But for the rest of June and all of July, he uncharacteristically remained at Glenmont, his mansion in the gated confines of Llewellyn Park. On the first day of August he
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1931
T OWARD THE END, as at the beginning, he lived only on milk. When he turned eighty-four in February, and pretended to be able to hear the congratulations of the townspeople of Fort Myers, and let twenty schoolgirls in white dresses escort him ander the palms to the dedication of a new bridge in his name, and shook his head at being called a "genius" by the governor of Florida, and gave a feeble whoop as he untied the green-and-orange ribbon, and retreated with waves and smiles to the riverside estate he and Mina co-owned with the Henry Fords, he declined a slice of double-iced birthday cake and instead drank the fourth of the seven pints of milk, warmed to nursing temperature, that daily soothed his abdominal pain.¹
From earliest youth he had half-starved himself, faithful to the dic tum of the temperance philosopher Luigi Cornaro (1467-1566) that a man should rise from the table hungry. It was not always a matter of choice. At times during his teenage years as a gypsy telegrapher, he had wandered the streets of strange cities, unable to afford a cheekful of tobacco. But even in early middle age, while earning big money and enabling two successive wives to fatten on haute cuisine, he would eat no more than six ounces a meal-generally only four-and drink nothing except milk and flavored water. "A man can't think clearly when he's tanking up." His one indulgence was cheap Corona cigars, which he smoked, or rather chewed, by the boxful and liked not for their price but for their strong, coarse taste? These "long-toms" jazzed his already hyperactive metabolism to the point that he could work fifty-four hours at a stretch. Until about two years ago, he hadMann
634 EPILOGUE 1931
that the crunch and thump of logs in the St. Clair River; and before that his mother's voice calling "Alva" as she summoned him to his lessons; and earlier still, among school bells and church bells, the songs of shipyard workers he had memorized in Milan-his first recordings! and farther, even subliminally back, whatever outside sounds penetrated the encompassing dark of his first nine months of life.
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ONE OF THE imponderables cha bying menos come's the water wound the bed can never be sure what dreams of face or imag ton may be playing inside his motionless, white hared full, When is, on top of everything, some deak, that makes his last concurs ses even more private? Bee it Edison's asal memory in Oescher es was capable of reaching back beyond his mystations interest alment at age twelve, who knows but when he heard again the har xions scises that made for Creation such a haven of natural sounds e the lead actual of Grand Trunk Railroad wine the working of des on the grade youts, and before than the upling chems of bak and blackbird and quall around the house in the grove, and store that the humming of Port Haron's seves sawmills, and beforeable
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Spe spokEVENTY-TWO YEARS 199 gested to President dooxer that the b the United States should be sur of his interment. But 119over th mobilize the nation and quite possib would be countenance an alternative tion of all public lights at that mo it was impossible that America could onds, the dark that bad prevailed in 24 was born,
The president emphasized this na "The dependence of the country on es re health is itself a monument to Mr however, that there was a universal de to the old man as a benefactor of humaninge individuals and organizations so put out for 19:01 P.M., Fastern time, the following be, appropriately, the anniversary of the g achieved his first viable lamp?
He was buried at dusk in Poster un hombre sey. The sun went down behind tage Rot was the che lowered into the grave. Across the Nat crowd began to assemble along Broadway won Forty third streets. At two minuses on the radio networks broadcast an advance amintes stations playing Haydn's setting of the words of Contes,PART SEVEN 1861 | 585
accessible wire into Port Huron, Al was able to "read" some of the results to fellow urchins by putting his tongue to it and came down an tasting the tiny shocks of each dot and dash. From that moment on, between the states was inevitable. Fort Gratiot awoke from its slumbers, and recruits began to drill on the parade ground. war
He was fourteen by the time Fort Sumter fell, and for most of 1861 no more aware than any Michigan youth his age of the catastrophe unfolding in the South and East. The state sent regiment after regi ment to the distant battlefields, but was otherwise peaceful as ever.³ Al his grocery and news businesses prospered to such an extent that he for lowa and Minnesota-than he did men in uniform. Meanwhile saw more immigrant Norwegians-daily trainloads of them heading began to employ other boys. One sold bread, tobacco, and stick candy aboard the immigrant "special." Another loaded baskets of market Vegetables onto the morning express to Port Huron, where a German lad collected them and sold them on commission downtown. Al him self continued his lucrative commute, buying butter and, in season, immense quantities of blackberries from farmers en route, and pur veying them at either end of the line.
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uring the playing a man with a crumpled felt hat, a white silk hand chief at his throat, his coat hanging carelessly and his vest half toned, came silently in, and, with his hand to his ear, sat close by glass blower, who, wrapped up in his music, was back perhaps in s native Thuringja again,
"That's nice," said he, looking around. It was Edison. The glassblower played on, and the scene was curious. Standing a blazing gas furnace he had lighted, Van Cleve," with bare folded ms, listened or else shifted the hot irons [of the filament furnace) with his pincers, but he did it gently, Edison sat bent forward. The hers who had taken up one tool or another moved them slowly. Far sack through the half-darkened shop young Jehl might be seen h ne heavy bottles of gleaming quicksilver at the vacuum pumps, A the soft music was delicately thrilling through it all. It was the wed King of spirit and matter, and impressed Condive Vas Cleve, a carbonizer married to Mary Edison's half-sister me strangely. lifting and
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EDISCBART SIX 1878 1574
Edison reacted both defensively and humorously, telling the The Daly Ciraphic that he had never before read a statement containing so many lies." However, the Times had done him a favor: its false I thinned out the crowd of visitors who constantly en emached on his time at Menlo Park: "1 have prayed for an earth quake of something of the sort to keep some of them away." Far from being bothered by abuse from overseas, he said, "I rather like it, and it wouldn't bother me a particle if they kept up the cry-at least until I am ready y to show what I have accomplished,"234
He also insisted that his employees were "as happy as clams," but that was not altogether true. Francis Upton, for one, was losing heart. "The light does not yet shine as bright as I wish it might." After work ing long nights all through the winter at Edison's side, he foresaw no imminent success, if indeed subdivision of the light could be achieved at all. What the Times had to say about the nondurability of platinum lamps was true, and his boss seemed to be the only man in the lab (apart from the inscrutable Batchelor) who refused to accept that, 235
Upton was a brilliant young man of mathematical and statistical bent, and because of those qualities, he was slow to comprehend the way Edison's mind worked. To him, four months of failed experi ments on one intractable thing meant that the thing was no good. To Edison, failure itself was good. It was the fascinating obverse of suc cess. If studied long enough, like a tintype image tilted this way and that, it would eventually display a positive picture.
He almost blinded himself by peering through a microscope at the incandescence of platinum, iridium, and nickel burners, observing-as if he were still focusing on the sun's corona-that they mysteriously began to throb "with the pains of hell," but he was able to confirm cracked and popped just before melting. After seven hours his eyes the Russian physicist Alexander Lodygin's discovery that certain ases, including, oxygen, seeped out of fusible metals at white heat. This made the maintenance of any kind of vacuum in a lightbulb im possible after sealing."
But having only a hand pump in the laboratory, he could never suck Edison understood from the start of his experiments that oxygen in any appreciable quantity decomposed a wire even as it incandesced. more than a token amount of air out of his experimental lamps. Gas
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"He is an untiring genius," the R. G. Dun & Co, credit assessor wrote in his latest report on. Edison, "apt to run from one effort at invention to another without fully completing the work he is on," That was less true in 1879 than in previous years, for his pursuit of
THE BUSIEST MAN IN AMERICA
universal electric light-what William Preece in Britain publicly called "an absolute ignis fatuus"-preoccupied him to a degree that soon became obsessive. "I think there is no doubt I am the busiest man in ," he informed a more sympathetic English friend, the otolo gist Clarence Blake. "The phonograph gets very little consideration America, "229 from me nowadays.'
Yet his fascination with sound persisted, especially after Blake gave a lecture on the telephone in London and closed with a tribute to Al exander Graham Bell without mentioning Edison's carbon button transmitter. George Gouraud, who was desperate to open a telephone company in England before Bell attained a full monopoly there, kept beseeching Edison to finish and send over a receiver he had invented some months before, in the hope that it would circumvent Bell's Brit ish patents. It was a startlingly loud device based on the motograph principle of a reproducing point traveling over an electrosensitive surface in this case, a thimble-size cylinder of hard chalk, slicked with water and rotated by hand. If it was spun fast enough, a person calling in normal tones from New York could have his voice amplified in Menlo Park to a field outside the laboratory,230
Edison had handed the receiver over to his nephew Charley to de velop. Now, with his competitive instincts aroused by Gouraud's pleas, he ordered Sigmund Bergmann to make him two wall-mounted telephones with the new instrument boxed inside. The handle pro truded on the right, a central lever pressed a wet roller up against the chalk, and a mouthlike orifice, complete with what looked like lips, emitted the vibrations of a hidden diaphragm. An erectile transmitter est instrument Edison produced in a life generally unchastened by tube curved aesthetics. But its speaking volume and almost stereoscopic fidelity o from below the box for outgoing calls. It was the ugli up put the phonograph Tyndall postponed to shame. No less a British authority than John a lecture he was due to give on Edison acousticSeard)
feer by Charles Watchelor a matter of fact man not given The first experiment, As i remember it, was made in this way: Me
Een had a teleptione diaphragm mounted in a mouthpiece of feating the vibration of the center of the diaphragm with his finger me and said, "Watch, if we had a point on this, we could make ord on some material which we could afterwards pull under th pant, and it would give us the speech back." I said, "Well, we ca my # in a very few minutes," and I had a point put on the die in the center We got some of the old automatic tel graph paper coated it over with was, and I pulled it through d growwe, while Mr. Edison talked to it. On pulling the paper throug the second time, we both of us recognized we had recorded t speech. We made quite a number of modifications of this the sai night, and Mr. Edison immediately designed a machine whis would be better adapted for giving us better talking t*t
jer how "immediately" that design ensued, neither man cou are for ninety one years another signed document was take good ther Thomas Edison saw the phonograph whole, in three d 466,0m 12 August 1877. it was his order to Kruesi to "make th
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med in an iron ring and warmed with the heat of his hand, it are off creaty, harmonic tones that he called "molecular music." #so oversensitive then, surely carbon could not be too much se 2016 when he was looking for a relay that would accommodate the grations of the human voice-even to the nonvocal breath coughs, and hesitations that punctuated speech?¹31
The question was how compressed the texture of his button shoul or how loose to give the widest resistance range. Carbon can e variety of forms, from softest lampblack to rocklike a He would have to compound and test most of them for res wwce and porosity, with the aural help of Batchelor and Adams. a so dear that I am debarred from hearing all the finer articulatic & Ane to depend on the judgment of others. "132
VETERANCES
The May Edison was in the midst of sketching some devices for oppure of sibilants when Rep. Benjamin Butler of Massachus challenged him to invent a telephone recorder that would con und into text. Edison brooded for a day or two, then came up the opposite idea. 183 He drew what looked like a xylophone floa in space and scrawled:
I propose to have a long shaft with wheels on having breaks (ie ell cal) so arranged with a Key board that by depressing say the let THIS simultaneously that contact springs will one after anot send the proper vibrations over the wire to cause the Emg & pigem to speak plainly the word this.... No difficulty will be in obtaining the hissing consonants and as the break wheels & at springs may be arranged in any form and as many as requ used the overtones harmonics of the parts of speech can easil obtained Thurn this over in your mind Mr E & hoop it up." 134
That of anthracite coal, for example, varied from 300 to 1,700 ohms, yet Edi ained that it was good only for the o in coach and failed to register "the lisps
a receiving opera
nds of times as a
instrument really
his efforts to int
thought he might
ariable resistance
Le electrification of
d Batchelor made
ers or pins along
-ak clearly through
y returned to Ed
ragm, and molded
they achieve a dre
Batchelor recorded
distinguish clearly
enlo Park. "
vas a major discor
hile constructing #
trical resistance of
ve a rogue barome
en a carbon buttonB
in
b
16
Edison's embossing recorder repeater, February 1877.
the other end-words intended to be heard only by a receiving opera tor, who would then (as Edison had done thousands of times as a youth) copy out the message for delivery. Hence the instrument really was, for all its crackly noise, telegraphic in function.
Audibility was key, and he had failed so far in his efforts to im prove on the wretched Bell magneto transmitter. He thought he might achieve full vocability through the principle of variable resistance within a closed circuit, which he held essential to the electrification of speech.129 Working often through the night, he and Batchelor made transmitters out of membranes that shifted rollers or pins along graphite tracks in circuit, but when they tried to speak clearly through them, got only "a mumbling sound." Not until they returned to Edi son's old idea of a wired button held against a diaphragm, and molded it out of crushed black lead instead of rubber, did they achieve a dra matic increase in clarity. "With this apparatus," Batchelor recorded on 12 February, "we have already been able to distinguish clearly (known) sentences well between New York and Menlo Park, "130
The excitability of pure carbon under pressure was a major discov ery or rather, rediscovery. Four years before, while constructing a tubular rheostat, Edison had found that the electrical resistance of packed, powdered graphite shot up and down, like a rogue barome ter, "with every noise, jar or sound." Eerily, when a carbon button
C
t
11PART SIX 1877 1 589
t beautiful, and technologically pregnant, instrumenta come out of all this speculation was the Edison translating, coboy The most of 3 February 1877. Despite its name, it was not a linguistic deys merely sped up the distribution, or "translation," of enormous gu tities of telegraphic text, such as presidential addresses, downlo distance wires, #127 Nor was it acoustic in operation, but its de was so sleekly geometric, with twin turntables and twin SEAT arms reproducer s tracking volute grooves, that it would look s90L porary to audio engineers a century later,
The machine held blanks of oiled paper (Edison found that lubricated best) under its circular clamps, pressing them at ay the grooved platen of each turntable, Incoming electromagnetic sations caused a lightly sprung embossing point to indent the PAL the first turntable, rotated by an electric motor, while the res arm, wormed to the platen's degree of spiral, made sure the. stayed on track. A hidden double lever started the second sur the moment the first was full, Repetition (to use the current ter reproduction) was a simple process of letting the sprung poin again at high speed over its own indentations, sending the re signals on to as many subsidiary stations as could be connecte sounder in the embosser's circuitry, 128
MOLECULAR MUSIC
In that same February that saw Edison turn thirty and show streaks of silver hair, he and Batchelor began a new series of ments on what they called, variously, the "telephonic telegram "speaking telegraph," and the "talking telephone." This conf names was common in the communications industry, and w as long as Americans took to adjust to the starting notion electrically transmitted message did not necessarily have to day use his invention just to chat, As far as Edison was conc scribed. It was telephone beyond even Bell's imagination that people in e was a device to speed up the process of turning w
pulsations of current, then turning the pulsations back into telegraph, which on 5 December 1876 transmitted President Grand's 12 nual message from Washington to New York in just over an hour Edison meant it to o improve on the already impressive performance of
aks ago
me-acoustic telegra
ng, or even if he was
n and again cylinders
ht be an empty drum
ic receiver, or a roller
ng electromagnet,* or
se, precisely, the "col
other hissing sounds"
I be stiff waxed paper
ter," taking a message
the perimeter, or an
lephone receiver, or a
uching the vibrant tin
t promising, but unac
ttings to the notion of an arti al of attar.grounding for the specialized research he now undertook in the field of sound, 124 While still working on multiple telegraph technology, he conducted a series of experiments in telephone transmission, sure he could im
the weakness of Bell's short-range signal. By speaking into a "How do magnetized brass diaphragm held under pressure of a damp fel prove on washer, he succeeded in getting a parchment receiver to say" you do." But that nonsibilant phrase hardly matched the complexity of "Mr. Watson-come here-I want to see you," a message Bell t coherently four months before. Edison proceeded claimed to have sent c to stick tiny tacks to diaphragms at various degrees of the curve to e where best he might cut in for particular pitches, and explore the acoustic potential of his electromotograph, which he found acti gauge vated tuning forks as well as electromagnets. If this discovery was still e relevant to telegraphy than telephony, it at least taught him more something about Helmholtz's use of forks and magnets to study the mechanics of speech.125
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments-reeds, forks, bells, taut strings, tin tubes-would hum about his ears:
and sometimes voices:
ePART SIX 1875 | 529
erimental
ies." The
er with an
t but ran
he month
the paper
e jabbed
a bed of
led, with
by clock
stationery, and ink-rolled to print as many sharp duplicates as re At first the electric pen was a cumbersome instrument, for all the quired.
mobility of its point, but Edison progressively miniaturized the drive components, making it lighter and less vibrant in the hand. Even so, it required considerable skill to use: an O, for example, would drop right out of the paper if inscribed too slowly. He assigned the manu facturing rights to Ezra Gilliland, and it became the showcase product of his Newark laboratory, ubiquitous in businesses and government offices as far away as Russia. Over the next ten years it would sell e sixty thousand units and be remembered as "the grandfather of automatic stencil duplication."* Edison gratefully gave Batchelor and some Adams a percentage of the profits, 101
Helping him develop the pen gave Batchelor an education in elec tricity, which he had understood imperfectly hitherto. It also intro duced him to the charms of nocturnal labor. "We work all night experimenting & sleep till noon in the day," he wrote his brother in England. "We have got 54 things on the carpet.... Edison is an inde fatigable worker & there is no kind of a failure however disastrous affects him. He stands today the foremost inventor & electrician in this country by far."102 He showed his respect for the Old Man (who was more than a year his junior) by never addressing him as "Al" or "Tom," as a few old friends were allowed to do. It was always "Edi son" or "Mr. Edison," while he in return was "Batch."
TRUE UNKNOWN FORCE
By now Edison had lost interest in the multiplex and automatic as pects of telegraphy. Instead, he became fascinated by the "acoustic" or "harmonic" telegraph, which Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell were separately developing. It involved the transmission of Morse sound signals along a single wire by several differently pitched "reeds," similar to tuning forks. If an identical array of reeds was mounted at the receiving end, each pair would vibrate at their mutual
is often misattributed solely to Edison. See Bruce Watson, "A Wizard's Scribe,"Sithso One of the electric pen's satisfied customers in 1877 was Lewis Carroll. nian, August 1998.
lus with a
's tongue.
etic motor
quous line,
shapes he
inst blank
motor. It was
graph, whichThey began work on 1 June with a list of nineteen experimental projects, including "a copying press that will take 100 copies." The first sach press was a messy device that saturated tissue paper with an ink of violet aniline dye and apple pomade. It was fragrant but ran slow, needing frequent blotting. Then on the last day of the r Batchelor noted, "We struck the idea of making a stencil of the paper month by pricking with a pen & then rubbing all over with ink."99
The "pen" was nothing but a platina point that had to be jabbed manually at the paper while it lay, like a flattened fakir, miniature nails. "It is not much good," Batchelor conceded, with English understatement. "Resolved to make a machine to go by clock work or engine to prick as we write."100 on a bed of
The Edison Electric Pen with batteries and press, 1875.
Thus was born Edison's electric pen, a battery-wired stylus with a needle point that flickered in and out faster than a snake's tongue. Held as steeply as possible, to balance the tiny electromagnetic on its top, it pricked a sheet of stencil paper in a near-continuous line, allowing the penman to write-or draw-any cursive shapes he pleased. The resulting perforate was framed, pressed against blank motor
Edison's electric pen was the first consumer product to use an electric motor. It was also the first mass-copy duplicator and the precursor to A. B. Dick's mimeograph, which
it
r
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Onegance and precision. Most of them violated normal telegraphic p dure by counterposing a neutral relay at one end of the line and a polarized relay at the other. He boasted that given enough funding could invent any number of such machines. "Very well," William Orton told him, "I'll take all you can make-a dozen or a bushel Huge as Western Union was, its size meant that it handled the bulk of the nation's message traffic, and it was constantly on the lookout for devices that would speed up transmission. More than that, it was willing to buy patents of any sort that would cramp innovation among its competitors. Edison responded with twenty-one further designs some penciled while he was waiting in Orton's anteroom, all probing past duplex toward what he called "diplex" messaging. It was a method that dispatched signals the same way in pairs. He intimate that if he were allowed to use Western Union lines to test both kind of transmission, he might even succeed one day in coordinating d plex and diplex signals to create quadruplex telegraphy, with e mous savings of copper and time.7
This idea was so audacious that Orton did not comprehend is import. He gave Edison permission to run night tests on a loop wie between New York and Boston, to occupy experimental space in the Western Union building for the duration, and to use the company own factory to fabricate necessary equipment. In return, Orton
work plydredaj
batty, off revents
A freehand sketch by Edison of his quadruplex system, 25 November 1875.
which wiky an
serve
NIGH
Mure
meal
passe
th
Be
48
him
expe
ing v
plexi
H
Engla
ing to
ment
Edis
but noSon Mumay workforce, Ward Street, Newark, 1873.
at roman capitals, and punctuation marks besides. "TO MR HAR RINGTON," the instrument rattled out, by way of demonstration. THIS IS A SPECIMEN DONE ON THE PRINTING MACHINE-DO YOU THINK IT ANY IMPROVEMENT OVER THE LAST SPECIMEN, IT IS NOT SO VERY MARKED AS TO KNOCK A MAN DOWN BUT STILL A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION.
During the fall and early winter Edison (buoyed by a $4.000 devel pment deal from Josiah Reiff) attained a high degree of sophistica on in duplex telegraphy. It was a process, pioneered by Joseph Steams and much pondered by himself, of sending simultaneous mes ages along a single wire. While one stream of signals dot-dashed its way from A to B, another stream did the reverse. The idea was to Ragger the streams, so that going pulses would not collide with com ng ones, just as another as they headed downtown or uptown. pedestrians on a New York sidewalk avoided one Edison's initial duplex designs were sketched rapidly, yet with ele
ter to pay for Paul, was under theand a roll of paper. The wik wonde dical imples coming through the point work w does that formed letters, in an entry de 199 mod affer"), he drew a batch ch al band as it flowed over the paper onshore *****
to bude of year of Menn warns wensieve mending to my hen when Sock wakkerer che quest of
sem chemical printer spelling out the word "BOSTON,"
Mon was doslodess unconscious that somewhere in the near f wewe atakow of these drawings thrown on an unseen wall, w wees, the toll, the cylinder, and the stippling vibrations
ideas that loo512 EDISON
Mary Stilwell Edison, circa 1871.
= Mary Edison My wife Dearly Beloved Cannos inventore !"48
certainly could not say that of himself. During the first year arriage, and particularly in the months before Mary conc st child, he executed thirty-nine successful patents printings , typewheels, perforators, chemical papers, rocosomes ments, electromagnetic adjusters, transmitters, union m ic batteries, circuits, and signal boxes, ** These were ampl dreds of notebook notions, some to do with a wordpre at had come to him on the eve of his wedding that of me
- point, notice might be taken of the remarkable cady paralice beweer
s. In both cases h464 | EDISON
hay up an instrumat which class for the bye what the phones graph form five the ster which is the routing and continction of things in mathon amit in such Cinetons "Muring how In the first diction of the wetical matter that i to say of a continuous our th pont nepradiation for chick of will be of moet wee to the pu a series of pictures at internate which internals un porta these series of prote in a continua. plate in the the phone proph cut the otant the chemont action on the the Explanda is at rest und matem takes pla.. lili the fight went off by a shutter practically restation of the cylinder but it
Edison's first Kinetoscope caveat, 8 October 1888.
be a camera big enough to contain a photosensitive cylinder,
reel of film, either of which would advance in a stop-start m
rapid as to seem continuous. The essence of his invention was
ion: each unbelievably short stop would be enough to phot
h to expose another frame to the light. That would necessita
a slice of action, and each unbelievably fast jump f
ter just as kinetic, or mobile, as the advancing cylinder, able
at least eight pictures a second (hur preferably twenty-five
off the
to flom
formal
phor
phen
perioe
As an
calend
was the
his reve
Le Prinqualified, but as when arguing theology with Mina, he could not She in turn could not help feeling lost in the primitive environment of help himself. *
e stripped of jungle growth and only partially replanted. The twin houses were attractive enough, in a raw-looking, just a riverside estate carpentered way, and it was comforting to have Lillian Gilliland at hand to help her deal with Marion, but she looked askance at the cowboys and colored people-"nearly every one of the darkest shade," she wrote home that constituted the lower ranks of Floridian society. They were not what her schoolmates in Boston might call de notre monde.
Mina's doubts about having married Edison were compounded by his incessant jocularity. 348 She was devoid of humor herself and flinched at the way he teased both men and women, sometimes in a rough way that made her wonder what kind of language he used when closeted with men only. Just as hard to get used to was his need to control ev eryone and everything around him. Even so personal a task as plan ning the gardens around their winter home had to be executed to the last detail by himself:
Sander
Lay out the stret
1000 Pour apple. Mi, Penuti e te
Garden Truck.
Love Lomella que
Royal porcions hodetrees
back
side
stical,
Trees
Threet
Trees
Busher
Trees Bushes
Elison
Gilli
LAWN
Lawn
LAWN
Lawn
Hamm
LAWN
Lawn
Flowers
Lower Terrace-shells bank sodded.
Edison's plan for his Fort Myers estate, spring 1886. Laboratory to
Sea wall whir washed.
The editors of The Papers of Thomas A. Edison have concluded that Edison was fa miliar with the nonmathematical aspects of James Clerk Maxwell's classic Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism and with all of Oliver Heaviside's papers on "Electromagnetic Induction and Its Propagation," recently published in The Electrician (UK).
the left of the twin houses.him from fill boks with enough drawings and specifications to keep a re had busy for the rest of the century. One or two sketches pre ism, such as a piano that produced speech instead of m a rubber larynx, or a bust of Mina of keys "playing" red, hanging upside down from an airborne clock. BL entries were so precisely conceived, dated, and signed ar he had set up a laboratory in his mind.343 book number one began with three images that on an oon might be considered phallic
March 18-1856 3.
X
200 volt
X Lo 1st seated Vacun obtained then wire to shaved in x 200 volte Change given it while changing sealed & whe chawn away leaving the cylinder worde of gelobe. Changed 200 volt Contrary
175 volls,
300 Volte
MATequip them was destroyed by ligh ute, he sent another with duplicate cargo. Looking further a he laboratory, work he would be doing after settling into Glenmont, he several elevations of his northern laboratory and con , massively built in beaux arts style around a quadrang red, to the right of its gates, by a library,336
Edison's Magritte-like sketch of Mina as an airborne clock.
and Lillian Gilliland opted to go to Fort Myers in ad ding, to prepare the compound for his arrival. Th with them. Tom and William stayed in school. On 20 Menlo Park "boys" gave the Old Man a stag party Lahnson. Ins Deln
C**RT FIVE **** ( 487
as the later prise precisely as planned Stow he had to plota of other extensions, which would become the geometry of Ins life Fine, from Gak Place to Fort Myers, where he wanted to his ride on honeymoon, and where he and Calliland were build mwis houses and a winter laboratory to shares then back to wher in the New York area Mina wanted to settle (he would give her des of diy or comty) then the shortest possible connection dat base to the location of a new superlaboratory that would e all memories of Menlo Park
Mina disse Llewellyn Park, an exclusive, gated, hillside enclave in The Orange, New Jersey, le was far enough from the railroad station wow Orange to se considered roral, yer close enough to municipal forsecar service. Glenmont, the estate's premier resi was lived for sale fully furnished, thanks to the downfall of the com Henry Pedder, in a million dollar embezzlement case, it was lige team the house she had grown up in, a many gabled, twenty denom Queen Anne mansion, red of brick and exterior framing
state, soon after Edison's purchase of it for Mina
RE456 EDISON
she
the
was
boso
ten d
cially
Chau
Ed
Miller
going,
his dia
collecti
middle
Mina Miller dressed as a gypsy, at about the time Edison first met her.
itting promontory gazing out among the worlds & stars he depths of infinity Miles above him circled and swept the onderous wing the imperial condor bearing in his talons a
the y dream changed-Thought I was ly the air was filled with millions of little cherubs as one Shaels pictures each I thought was about the size of a fly looking perfectly formed & seemed semi-transparent, each swept out upon e surface of the sea, reached out both their tiny hands and very small drop of water, and flew upwards where theywith a hundred
It turned out that
m implement patents to his credit, so she had an
chnology and was not likely to be bored when Edison talked to her
understanding of
out electromotographic mirrors. Luxuriating in company with her
d other "fresh invoice[s] of innocence and beauty"
la, Gilliland's beach house in Winthrop, Massachusetts, Edison be
at Woodside
me so infatuated that he sounded like a teenager himself, w
writing
Menlo Park 14.
Sunday july 12 1885
Awakened at 5.15 um. my eyes were embarassed by the sunbeams -turned. my back to them and tried to take another dip into oblivion -suceeded- awakened at 7am. thought of Mina Daroy, and Mamma 4- put aff 3 in my mental kafedescope to obtain a new combination a la Galton, took mina ao a to improve her beauty by discanding and adding certain features borrowed from Daisy and Mamma G. Raphaelized beauty, got into it too deep, mind flew away and I went to sleep again. Awakened at 815 cm. Poweful itching of my head, lots of whits dry dandruff basis, tried a sort of
what is this d-mnable material, Perhaps it's the dust from the dry literary matter I've crowded into my noddle Patoly It's nomadic. gets all over my coat, must read about it in the Encyclopedia, Smoking too much makes me nervous must lasso my natural tendency to acquire such habits holding heavy cigar constantly in my upper lip, it has my a sort of Havan mouth has deformed. anna cuil. Crose at 9 vclock came down stairs expecting twas too late for breakfast-twaint. couldn't eat much, nerves of stomach Too nicotinny.
Through to hell.
The roots of tobacco plants must go clear Satans principal agent Dispepsia
A page of Edison's diary, summer 1885.*
* Edison's references are to Grace "Daisy" Gaston, girls visiting with the Gillilands that summer; Lillian "Mamma" Gillil one of the other and; and the English geneticist Francis Galton (1822-1911).
the
sib
Jul
Mr
hac
ope
his
blu
ang
Du
Mi
mu
sur
ter
int
fro
Ma
he
be
sca
cat
bee
Bo
see
ou:
CFIVE 1883 | 433
$11,000 of and likely to noverish him, extent than it s. For every ney won or ble sixty,235 had to for ved most doodling in ke on a new ked many
sened to the Park?" a agle corre n 29 July. w Edison he out, and no round with in his eye hat on his ore a shiny beaver, gold eye glasses, and looked rhaps too much prosperity-for Edison has made driven all ideas of inventing out of his head, nts of caricature in this description, although Mary y discovered that her abstemious husband had a he was partial to it herself, as well as to expensive which she ate by the pound.237 Her gowns grew borate by the season. She posed in one brocaded her who needed all the focus he could d to her
Mary Edison and feathered friends, 1883.BC
Ec
at
th
be
Ti
M
CO
Elion's "Tumbo dyans at the Paris Electrical Exposition, 1881. Maxim, who exhibited lamps and chandeliers only. "Edison is not a myth, Le Figaro had to admit. Henri de Parville wrote in Le Journal des débats, "Times have certainly changed. All doubts are gone. Those who want physical evidence, like Saint Thomas, can see his lamps now with their own eyes."
Perhaps the most influential of these skeptics was Théodose du Moncel. He published a long article in La Lumière électrique retract ing his former dismissal of Edison as a "pompous" poseur-as well he might, because the Electric Light Company was now paying hima thousand francs a month to represent its interests in Europe. Never theless, an international panel of examiners found in mid-October that Edison's bulbs, boosted by his three-thousand-watt power plant, had an efficiency rating of 12.73 lamps per horsepower. Swan's rated 10.71, little better than those of his compatriot George Lane Fox at 10.61 and Maxim's, at 9.48.165
On 22 October Grosvenor Lowrey, who was in Paris representing the interests of the Electric Light Company, cabled Edison in New
OFFICIAL LIST PUBLISHED TODAY SHOWS YOU IN THE HIGHEST CLASS OF INVENTORS. NO OTHER EXHIBITORS OF ELECTRIC LIGHT IN THAT CLASS, SWAN LANE FOX AND MAXIM RECEIVE MEDALS IN GLASS BELOW. THE SUB-JURIES HAD VOTED YOU FIVE GOLD MED
Ec
af
sa
to
th
bl
at
th
en
W
lu
an
me
int
He
detShell winding for Edison's large magneto dynamo, February 1819
lutions per minune But he made a mistake in amalgamating de commutator and brushes with an excess of mercury, to keep rele tance to a minimum. Those surfaces oxidized in time and threw of such clouds of toxic vapor that attendants at the Works salivad a badly as their mates in the lamp factory."
He sobed the problem by reamalgamating, often and polishing with the case of a silversmick. That lowered resistance to less tha one hundreds of an ohm. But so many other "bugs" required fing that Charles Batchelor, representing him at the exposition, had to fil back on two smaller dynamos to illuminate the Edison rooms. Oper ing day came and were. Visitors hoping to see la grande généra d'Edison were sold they might have to wait another month before could be exhibited
Edison's fanatically dealed, goo-word letter of 8 September 1881, consig dynamo so Batchelor in Paris (I will write you further if I have omitted anything good example of how closely he dominated kis subordinatesLowry was
What he needed from the
ordinance, and knowing the ways of Gay Hall,
champagne party at the tavers, with bondes
of buildings that Henry Ford would in another century.
PATIENCE OF Jos changes but found Edison inha record, William Hammer ran up the laboratory steps bulb in and like an eager knight brandishing the Holy Grail, to share the es with Edison, Batchelor, and Upton. An impromptu conga line veloped behind the four men as they danced in serpentine fashion around the workbenches, then downstairs and out into the night, and cheering vening, it registered
From that day on, the words bamboo and filament were synony mus in the shop talk of Menlo Park,
2
33
EE
Stages of splitting and shearing a splint of madake bamboo into filaments ready for carbonization.The Edison electric train, Charles Batchelor drying
gineer, Stephen Dudley Field, had been awarded letters gavation comotive looking remarkably like his, he reacted with jovial women Field's claim rested solely on the novelty of a wailing atau current from a conductor running between or so one side "It is a curious thing how vague the ideas of the general publica the question of patents.... A man,,, draws an entire machine this 'improvement' in it, and people think he has invented
The good humor and objectivity of remarks like these exemp ng Edison's absolute refusal to be discouraged in any endeav when the Patent Office declared his application an "infiern with Field's), came as a tonic to pessimists like Lowsey, who wen that he was playing with ships and trains when he should be dev all his energies to the light. Portly, bug, eyed, fiftyish, and widowed, the little lawyer had known and loved Edison since He had always felt responsible for protecting his chem from the and pull of too many ideas fighting for precedence at any given Now the timePART FIVE- 1890 1 375
Members of the Menlo Park laboratory team, 22 February 1880. From left, Ludwig Boehm, Charles Clarke, Charles Batchelor, William Carman, Samuel Mott, George Dean, Edison (in skullcap), Charles Hughes, George Hill, George Carman, Francis Jehl, John Lawson, Charles Flammer, Charles Mott, James MacKenzie. (Library of Congress.)
the teenage office boys "Johnny" Randolph and George Hill, as well as neighborhood urchins who hung around the lab hoping to steal cigars or explosive chemicals. Stockton "Griff" Griffin acted as Edi son's private secretary, a job Randolph would one day inherit. Francis Jehl, nineteen, was passionately interested in electricity, but had such bovine strength that the general manager, William Carman, made him responsible for keeping the vacuum pumps topped up with mercury, which was much heavier than lead. Wilson Howell was a bespecta cled youth eager to do odd jobs without pay, as were several other aspiring lab workers hopeful that Edison would eventually take them on.41
A large Germanic quotient affected Menlo Park's habits of dele gated procedure and fanatical record-keeping. Johann ("Honest John") Kruesi, the master machinist, was Schweizerdeutsch; Ludwig Böhm, Edison's leather-lunged glassblower, his assistant blower Wil liam Holzer, and the chemists Otto Moses and Dr. Alfred Haid were all German-born; John and Frederick Ott and Francis Jehl had grownOntract with Bethlehem tros. avy phoenix, must try to the Dod.* *281
1, he would not accept bank ensible to Tom and William ebts. He displayed no embar st of his life would look back y once, on a return visit, was dollars down that hole in the 282
but failed to satisfy Bethlehem spose of its remaining briquettes hel d of that year.
PART FIVE
Light
1880-1889fination at any point along the line-ve immobility. The first disaster occurred in December when devators pit and fell. It necessitated a mai rebuild of the gas complex adjustments to the crushing machines fie The new bricking facility produced, after a number of false reales far had encouragingly high levels of magnetite ar ter were a few and too crumbly, bound to shatter en route to de bundry. In fang weather they absorbed water like sponges. Edi sobliged to shut Ogden down for yer another winter. He or fe construction of a larger, more sophisticated bakery and ser four vetoging a resinous binder, not anticipating that the b wering probien" would arment him for the next several years. 156
Tinice in the early months of 1895 he called on his fellow share mes for cash infusions. Alarmed that the mill was costing Stac0 aduro maintain, they declined to increase their stakes. Gloom Edison's engineers, all of whom regarded the giane nils as a catastrophic folly. He alone remained convinced that when their kinetic action was accelerated to the point that they out sefirmed the explosiveness of dynamite, the plant would usher in a new age of automated magnetic mining.
ARETRA ENOUGH GLORY
holdened and personally enriched-by the rush of peepshow ex Hors around the world to buy Edison machines and show Edison fim, W.K. L. Dickson chose this time to publish History of the Ki rengash, Kinetoscope, and Kineto-Phonograph, a monograph that festet mich glory upon himself as the great man's closest aide. Or seemed to Edison, hypersensitive as ever to any presumption of immacy, He thought that his tribute in The Century Magazine to the Photographic innovations of Dickson, Muybridge, Marié [Marey]
mother conferred more than enough glory to go around, 158 Now he saw that same tribute reproduced, along with a full-page Vore of himself, as the opening spread of a volume that otherwise324 | EDISON
months of gemütlich residence in Neusalza-Spremberg before Mar ion apologized for "the way I acted before I left America." She blamed her old traveling companion, Mrs. Earl, for making her doubt his goodwill to her, Tom, and William. "She it was who told me that you had sertled all your money on Mina so that we would get none of it. "152
THE GREATEST GENIUS OF THIS OR ANY OTHER AGE
In September the Thomas Y. Crowell Company announced the forth coming publication of The Life and Inventions of Thomas Alva Edi son, an imperial quarto volume of nearly four hundred pages with 250 illustrations, co-written by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and his sister Antonia. It was an expanded compilation of the biographi cal articles they had been publishing about Edison in Cassier's Maga zine and was billed as "the first complete and authentic story of his life. reflecting years of collaboration between the authors and their subject.
Edison received an advance copy and gave it a qualified testimo nial: "Although I have not had time to read it through carefully, after a casual glance I must say that it is extremely well gotten up." 153
His glance may not have extended to the final line, which described him as "the greatest genius of this or any other age." He was used to superlative salutations and quite aware of his public stature, but the Dicksons elsewhere gave him enough praise to embarrass an egoma niac. This was unfortunate, since the book contained much biograph ical information derived from Edison himself. The New York Times reviewed it favorably. "No one can help admiring the man who is revealed in these pages. Starting with nothing, he has acquired almost everything that men prize. The boy who sold papers on the Grand Trunk Railway forty years ago is today known and honored in every country in the world. ... The popular notion is that Edison will dis cover everything if he shall live long enough."154
CATASTROPHIC FOLLY
Edison spent lavishly building the new Ogden, liquidating all his Ge eral Electric stock in the process.¹ set to become its designer's dream: a fully automated fons et origo f 155 At first the reopened plant seemed
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Thomas Alva Edison plaster, that appeare the forecourt of the parlor in New York April, two days be two dozen other "r were due for exhil lessor of the premis way was Alfred Ta before him had Edison's private se ety of outside res his brother Bertr Thomas R. Lomba spent the morni Kinetoscopes for c The oak cabinet linked in two row curving rail for pa while moving fro hole. Framed pic the walls, as if to trast between th animated "shows
p=
observe that each picture has a slight change of position as it passes the point of vision"
"The rapid photographing of these different stages of movement at the rate of 46 sec.or 2760
Eugene Sandow The modern Hercules
Holland Bros-Foreign agenly for
The Edison Kineloscope..
Eugene Sandow models for W. K. Dickson's camera, March 1894.
* A word search of American newspapers in 1894 indicate
pictures was first used to describe the illusion of photograph
announced his Kinetoscope on 10 March. Previously it refe
that appealed to the emotions, or to mobile tableaux onstage
Encyclopedic Dictionary annou
"King
194cline in phonograph and record sales, two hat could well humiliate him, bad news from ne he had opened in Pennsylvania, and even ny, where his eldest daughter had been struck
a Dresden
en-year-old
opard only
of Elizabeth
chaperone. Europe for aish her edu ep an ocean na. As far as ch in domes - matter of William had loss of one to another Ty, But Mari ary went fur en hair, the er). She could supplanting unable to fill 's heart, and ecided to go abroad." cost Edison plenty, and now he was faced with
Marion Edison as a teenager.
in medical and recuperating expenses, assuming
ere was some evidence that her case was hemor
iger for the rest of the family also showed infla
uns down for fall attendance270 | EDISON
Edison's A-12 storage battery, 1909.
that ate away the copper. This left 120 nickel flakes, each about -oo inch thick. 159
e subsequent electrode-loading process that had cost Edison so years and $1.5 million of his own money was performed with most delicate machines he had ever designed. One repeatedly e slender rods into the A-cell's perforated steel tubes, packing with seven hundred disks of powdered nickel hydrate and nickel eamless steel rings to withstand the insertion force of two thou The tubes were of spiral-wrapped construction now, s per square inch. Their ends were mashed shur, much as ounds d pinched the evacuation points of his lightbulbs, before they mounted in parallel reinforcedNUOATING RO944
NEGATIVE GRIP
NEGATIVE POCALE
PIN INSULATOR
SIDE INSULATOR
SIDE ROD ANSULATOR
SOUD STEEL CONTAINER
Edison Alkaline Storey Battery The only Storage Battery that stron and sted in its constanding and dements
Edison's A-12 storage battery, 1999
He had done it by returning to flake technology, using nickel led s time, plating it so thin that it floated on the air like gossamer wo ndred and fifty sheets would have to be passed that to match the ckness of a visiting card. They were drawn of eating Grume that dunked, alternately and rapidly, into backs of copper and her Etrolyte. Each deposition ers buildin 41 was washed and dried, the accumulated instantially than expectations.248 EDISON
Edison at Seminole Lodge, early 1900s.
ported destroyed, with damage-excluding lawsuits-estimated at several hundred thousand dollars.*95
It was the worst industrial disaster in Edison's career. He set to work on plans to increase safety at the plant, with no apparent thought of returning north to comfort widows and sufferers. As one of his aides remarked with mock envy, "Mr. Edison is fortunate among other men in having been born without feeling.""
Tom had a sense of that in June, when he signed a formal agree ment to stop using his father's name commercially. He was welcome to do what he liked with "Jr." In exchange he was granted a weekly allowance of thirty-five dollars, every payment requiring a receipt. With typical naïveté he assumed he had been forgiven his peccadillos and the following month asked for a job at the laboratory. Edison was quick to disillusion him. "You must know that with your record of passing bad checks and use of liquor. ble to connect you with any of the business projects of mine," wrote. "It is strange that with your weekly income you that it would be impossi some small business.... William seems to be doing well." "he into can't 197 go
The Edison Portland Cement Company settled with the widows of the dead ment $500 apiece. Injured personnel had to go to court to recover any damages at all.900 | 225
No. 871,214.
PATENTED NOV. 18, 1907.
T. A. EDISON. REVERSIBLE GALVANIC BATTERY. APPLICATION FILED OUT.31, 1300,
Witnesses:
Phones
Inventor A Edison
Illustration from Edison's cadmium-copper storage battery patent application, 15 October 1900.
of residual sulfate, then packed the filaments into the pockets tightly enough to give them "coherence" yet not so tightly that the pocket lost porosity.
Delicate as this operation was, it did not match the difficulty of dividing the copper oxide. Here was where Jungner (or whomever else Edison accused of preceding him) had failed to create an effective depolarizer. All their efforts had been blocked by "the production of a small amount of copper salt, bluish in color, and which was soluble in the alkaline liquid." As the salt circulated and dissolved, it rapidlyPART THREE-1900 1215
Edison's chair and lamp in the sitting room at Glenmont, circa 1900s.
Madeleine shared Charles's adoration of Mina. They realized that her need to be assured of their love, regularly and often, was insatia ble. And yet no amount of hyperbole could stave off her black depres sions, which became more frequent as she grew older. She was the daughter of an inventor married to an inventor and could not shake off the neurosis that Edison cared more for his laboratory than her
At thirty-four, she had long lost the teenage sexiness that had cap tivated him in the summer of '85 ("Got thinking about Mina and came near being run over by a street car"). Her firm contours had softened to plumpness, and her almost Indian "Maid of Chautauqua glow was dulled by too much domesticity and too few winter vaca of eleven to keep the mansion clean, plush, and polished, her table tions. She was by no means an overworked housewife, having a staff loaded with food (but no wine-she disapproved of alcohol), and the estate and greenhouse immaculate. Private schools and French gov
ernesses educated her children, and a coachman and carriage were **We used to speak French quite as fluently as English, Charles recalledcook a temporary office in Washington to confront the area cheets more directly p
The enre Daniels found for him in the Stavy Kuner could not have been more imposing, it was the former sanctum of Adm. George Dewey, the hero of Manila Bay, who had died earlier in the year for fees he tried to cacle Hutchison was no longer available to help the wings were so clipped by the management reforms Charles had West Orange, and by a new compressional fan on conflict of interes lobbying, that it was inevitable he must quit his job but soon as to avoid responsibility for a sheat of corporate laws Miting one of the E-2 disser
FANSON EXPECTED to remain only a few weeks in the capital. His reElon & Wodene Diamond Disc phongph, 19.
and super Blive Amitanl olindersworld tave though : being ong by singes in the moon," one of them wrote, giving an idea for future publicity. A University of Chicago protesic praised the dear articulation, the plastic roundness of none, T fine balance of pans of the hago instrument, and although ma ready possessed a Vicola, he immediately treated himself to
The willingness of such enthusiasts to spend half or a full mo slay on a player that acceped to other records bore our Frant es prophesy that the Diamond Disc would restore the fortunesPART TWO 1913 | 149
All lovers of fine music will be surprised when they hear Mr. Edison's latest invention, the DIAMOND DISC PHONOGRAPH The mechanical tone entirely eliminated. The first instrument to produce perfect music and considered by many to be Edison's greatest invention. Daily recitals at
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Diamond Disc retail advertisement, 23 December 1913.¹ 167
hole, along with his name and signature and the record title, but bewilderingly-no performer credit. "I have very excellent reasons for not putting the names of artists on our records," Edison informed a jobber, without further explanation. 168
The National Phonograph Company's old townhouse at 10 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan was luxuriously refurbished as a four-floor showroom for the new machines, issued in five sizes as models A80, A150, A250, A300, and A450 ("Louis XVI Circassian Walnut, Metal Parts Gold Plated"). When visitors realized that the numerals signified dollars, it was all Edison's chief salesman, Percy Morgan, could do to get them to listen to a sample Diamond Disc. Usually a minute or two was enough to convince even skeptics that the Wizard of Menlo Park had "done again." Their reactions (which Morgan noted verbatim and sent weekly to West Orange) almost unanimously expressed amazement that recorded music could sound so full and sweet, 169 This was also the general opinion of browsers and buyers at thir
teen thousand stores around the country. Audio fanatics-already a
distinct species-agreed that the Diamond Disc phonograph's combi
nation of floating-weight reproducer,* geared tracking, and records
of adamantine smoothness was superior to any other sound system
III line of Amberola players150 | EDISON
Park when he was young himself, and some of his expeti boys. It showed a group of not-yet-exhausted men hamburgers, apple pie, and coffee at two in the needed all the food they could get-fuel for our Edison called it-through mid-October, when he wrote Mana "I have overcome with certainty the principal troubles stoking p morning physical ener
Edison and the Insomnia Squad at midnight "lunch," fall 1912.
On the twenty-sixth he patented three significant disk-molding in provements. One involved a controlled system of Condensite flow onto a rotating transfer plate of polished German silver, which tilted as it slowly spun, causing the varnish to bleed evenly across the plate surface before the rotation became horizontal. Thus Edison, who had not yet read Einstein, showed an instinctive sense of gyroscopic tion in relation to gravity. With equal ingenuity, he used centrifugal force to throw bubbles and dust granules in the varnish outward mo while the stock remained fluid. After it cooled and hardened, the rough periphery could be sliced away. The result, Edison claimed was "a homogenous veneer free from imperfections," and the Patentange blossom, but Edison said he was too busy to go south, www. he seldom slept. "Papa is in the laboratory tonight working away a his disk," she wrote Charles on 6 March. "He cannot get the you tones and it is worrying him greatly." As always, Edison's sho to any problem was to pile experiment upon experiment (mex f two thousand on the reproducer alone) until he dropped from fatigu That same night Hutchison photographed the Old Man napping workbench in the chemistry building
Edison asleep in his laboratory, 6 March 1911. (Photograph by Miller R Hutchison)
If he did not come home at four-thirty A.M., only to bolt back to work after breakfast, he would stay away for days, until Mina w down and forced him to eat, bathe, and shave.
Edison was so driven, in both senses of the word, that when he had dry cleaning to drop off at the Armenian laundry on Valley Road, he would order his chauffeur to maintain speed and, en passant, hurl or his dirty suits. Rose Tarzian, the young immigrant inside the shop, got used to hearing the thump of the bundle on her screen door. Some imes his vests would be virtually uncleanable, being burned by acid or spattered with wax. Beads of Condensite were of course unremo
S
E
ter114 | EDISON
ange blossom, but Edison said he was too busy to 8 599) ** he seldom slept. "Papa is in the laboratory tonight WARRY P his disk," she wrote Charles on 6 March, "He cannor tones and it is worrying him greatly as As always, Edison's solu to any problem was to pile experiment upon experiment more than two thousand on the reproducer alone) until he dropped from f That same night Hutchison photographed the Old Man pappy workbench in the chemistry building:
Edison asleep in his laboratory, 6 March 1911, (Photograph by Miller Hutchison)
If he did not come home at four thirty A.M., only to bol back to work after breakfast, he would stay away for days, until Mine wa down and forced him to eat, bathe, and shave,
Edison was so driven, in both senses of the word, that when he h dry cleaning to drop off at the Armenian laundry on Valley Road, would order his chauffeur to maintain speed and, en passant, hud o his dirty suits. Rose Tarzian, the young immigrant inside the shop used to hearing the thump of the bundle on her screen door Some times his vests would be virtually uncleanable, being burned by ac or spattered with wax. Beads of Condensite were of course unremorPART TWO 1910 1.107
nd John Eyre bespectacled, at to do with cept get up in to go to six dable mother, nviction. She match for the I came to an 2. But since mined Made never marry, ikely.
ething of her he teasingly for Christ believer, she was so essen a refreshing retreat and n the young intelligence" he seemed to lack surged con Except that hers was bottled up by the social mposed on her. "I want to be a free agent," ce to excel at something other than house lite entertaining-which, along with regular Mina's idea of fulfilled femininity. Made
f sins. This Madeleine Edison, circa 1911.
d to act in amateurmond cutters, opticians, machinists, and musicians, down to a little old Greek who did noth ing all day in his lean-to except roast scraps of marble for lithium Edison's commercial holdings extended far beyond the thirty a lapidaries,
of the West Orange complex. He owned, in addition to thousands of acres of mountain minelands upstate, a limestone quarry and the world's largest cement mill in the Delaware Valley, an equally im mense chemical plant at Silver Lake, an electric car shop in Newark, a recording studio and showroom on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and a glass-roofed film facility in the Bronx that was larger than the Met ropolitan Opera and shot two or three movies a week. He maintained agencies in London, Paris, and Berlin to handle the intricate market. ing of his inventions under the patent laws of many countries, plus an
Edison film studio in the Bronx, circa 1910.
* Aside from movie actresses, the only women Edison employed were packagers, and cooks. stenographers,80 | EDISON
riving at a depot that called itself "Smith's Creek" resembled-in fact was the station where he had been dumped age twelve by a conductor infuriated by his onboard chemical expe ments. Memory, however, insisted that in those days the depot hat been a stop on the Grand Trunk Railroad, sixty miles to the nort east. But this paradox was nothing to the experience of being led Ford through a barbed-wire fence, with Mina at his side, and s at some distance ahead the six buildings that had once comprised Menlo Park-the dominant one white, double storied, and windowed. Was he in Michigan or New Jersey? The very earth he many and
Menlo Park reconstructed at Greenfield Village, Dearborn, Michigan, 1929.
now trod-seven carloads worth, trucked in by train-was the same
eastern clay he had walked on fifty years before. 224 Edison's cognition flickered back and forth between place and time. When Mina tried to button his overcoat, he pulled away. all right, I can take care of myself. I'm just as young as I was when I worked there in the old laboratory." He nodded at the white build ing, which everyone else could see was new. "There's the old board ing house, just like it stood." In this case, he was correct-the hostelry where his research team used to live had survived and been transported intact. "And by golly if Henry hasn't moved in the
of
th
27
t
t
Sthe "dry chemistry" of the Soxhlet extractor more
teetery, glass-tubed intricacy, it looked not unlike the Sprengel-Böhm
pumps he had used in his early lightbulb experiments, striving for a perfect vacuum. Both devices used gravity and airlocks. The Soxhlet stood on a hot plate that warmed a flat-bottomed flask of solvent (Edison tried ninety different formulas) enough t the liquid and send it up to a top-mounted, water-cooled condenser, As the vapor reliquefied, it trickled down into a cylinder stuffed with plant pulver and plugged with a thimble of porous paper. The solvent soaked through the pulver, absorbing rubber molecules as it forming a slightly syrupy filtrate that was then siphoned back into the warming flask. There the entire cycle of vaporization, condensation, dissolution, and dribble was repeated until virtually all the rubber had been leached out. Decanted into a porcelain drying dish, the syrup solidified into a "stiff tremulous jelly" that was never dry enough, or elastic enough, to please him. Physics kept violating the purity of his residue. He got different results according to how he stirred, kneaded, or washed the coagulum. Even weather, or the kind of light that played on the Soxhlet during extraction, seemed to affect its molecular structure. 202 But then, on 7 November, after applying some dilute sulfuric acid to the powdered leaves of a black mangrove, Avicennia germinans, Edison joyfully reached for his pencil and wrote went, to vaporize
!!! -HURRAA!!!
THE PLANT OF PLANTS
Success with one solvent on one species of plant, however, did not bring Edison appreciably close to the river of domestic crude that he dreamed of diverting into the nation's strategic reserve. At the begin ning of 1929 he claimed to have examined fifteen thousand plants and gotten nothing better than a 6.91 percent yield from the milkiest. I may say that the patience of Job has been considerably overrated," "I he told a reporter from The Saturday Evening Post. 203 As his eighty-second birthday approached, he could identify with
efficient. In its tall,Mary Childs Nerney, a cataloguer hired by Charles to organ papers of Thomas A. Edison, Inc., had just begun to work upper stacks of the laboratory library when she became awa the founder of the company was below. 197
Never shall I forget my first sight, or rather sound of him. High age invectives winged their way past in mass formation and im flight. I looked over the railing of the gallery. A man of medium height and stocky build stood by the inves desk. He was slightly stooped. He had a magnificent head to
his snow white hair gave a venerable look. His fine eyes flashed
let loose his amazing vocabulary. Could it be-it was-the Ole
The impression of stockiness she got was caused by Edison belief that any clothes that fit too well bruised the microvess skin and caused internal damage. So he wore the largest an possible suits, left his high collar loose, and scuffed around two sizes too big. In winter he declined to wear an overco antithermal theory that stiff sleeves let cold air run up his arm he kept himself warm with two or three layers of underw four in blizzard conditions. Despite the almost invariable s of his vests and trousers, his shirts were spotless. This was due to Mina, yet Edison had an odd love of fine linen, in t black satin string ties, Indian silk handkerchiefs one foot s enormous pongee nightgowns that billowed around him. stop him from bespattering them with tobacco juice, or fr his jackets to serve as pillows when he napped after lun
That meal consisted, these days, of nothing more than a ers washed down with warm milk. 200 Dinner, when he both it all, was equally frugal. He insisted that solid food dulle that he needed all his wits to adapt his extraction techni biochemistry of thousands of specimens.
"I am always defeated by the tenacity of the solvents r the rubber extract," Edison complained, despairing of e precipitate that would toughen enough to vulcanize20 No ing his successful patent for extraction by aqueous flotati
hen all he
the medal
who could
ace of other
aring like a
ot to his likfirmed that Henry Ford was prepared to spend lion on his proposed Edison Institute, and magnate's "desire to make this a very big thing-a national approvingly ded to
A vote was taken, unanimously favoring Ford and Dearborn. la mangaged to negotiate an agreement whereby General Electric wo still sponsor "Light's Golden Jubilee," albeit in Michigan, while Fox simultaneously publicized the opening of the Edison Institute. In time the latter's museum would house the bulk of the Pioneer collection
Edison thus had to brace for apotheosis a year hence, when all wanted to do was produce some homegrown rubber that did not s to his fingers, 12 Already other Greeks sought to ply him with gifts the suggestion of Treasury Secretary Mellon, Congress awarded Ed its Gold Medal for "illuminating the path of progress." He said he wa too busy to visit Washington to receive it, so on 20 October Mel came north with an official party to pin it on him in his laboratory
A radio audience of 30 million heard the secretary praise him as "one of the few men who have changed the current of modern life and set it flowing in new channels." Edison thanked him for the metal but sounded more pleased when presented with an artifact of dulle metal: his first phonograph of 1877, deaccessioned with the utmos reluctance by the Science Museum in London.194
HURRAH!!!
Seventeen days later Herbert Hoover was elected president of the United States. One of his earliest votes came from Edison, who could not be sure that Hoover would support domestic rubber research in the White House. Whatever the case, he himself meant to continue his botanical quest for as long as it took to succeed or until ette his body or brain failed.
The latter organ showed no decline as far as curiosity and retention of complex information were concerned. But its tolerance of othe points of view, never remarkable, was almost gone. Henry Ford's of casional snits were nothing to the spectacle of Edison roaring like blast furnace when he heard-or misheard-something not to his li ing. The bristling brows would contort, the always jerky gestures come spasmodic, and the voice hoarsen, as if he were convinced tha everyone around him was mentally deficient.production line at River Rouge in Detroit. They shot at the Ford himself had been inspired by Edison's "helwax plex in the 1890s. And that, in turn, had owed much the work bench layout at Menlo Park a quarter century before h that Fred Out, looking around the long we har by ***** **** * its twelve double bays of tables and cubes, could be ex nostalgia. Except that this laboratory's cabiners were w seed banks, solvents, slicers, grinders, percolators, Biche screens, pans, and porcelain balls. Soxhlet extractors sprouted the glass reeds from the farthest rables, their bulbs refracting the tall wan dows that overlooked the plantation.
Thomas Edison brooding in chem lab
Mina forbade her husband to work there just ver. The new 1907 was not yet covered with creepers, and she worried abour summer heat beating down on him. It was time, she said to return to New Jersey for the summer
"I don't want to leave, but she makes me" Edison jokeck as they boarded the northbound train on the twelfth, 18
After ten months of organization, the Edison Boramic Research Corporation was now a bipolar but smoothly functioning thHe made full use of his dusty Model T, exploring the wilds of ce tral Florida for specimens. He learned how to pull a leaf apart a examine the "gossamer threads" that dangled from split capillari ("If there is some rubber they will not sag but will stretch out o quarter to one-half inch.") He anointed a freshly slashed Ficus w glycerine and found that it doubled the latex flow. Unfortunately polyol also retarded coagulation. Pine trees were not laticiferous, he tapped one anyway, to see how fast it dripped gum: in this ca one bead every eighty-two seconds.162 By way of relaxation, at nig he studied rubber-industry periodicals, or sat at his desk doodl botanical sketches.
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Edison botanical sketch, 1920s.son cleared ground for the new plantings across the ave Seminole Lodge, where his four-year-old grove of fig and ees already stood tall and deep-shadowed in the humid limate. "I am of the earth, earthy," he exulted. By late s H sixteen species of laticiferous plants under cultivation ac cres, including one hundred Ficus elastica and 350 Crypt adagascariensis. The latter plant thrived to an almost extent, making it difficult to control and impossible to ha nically. Herbaceous things, Edison realized, were less tol
Henry Ford, Edison, and Harvey Firestone in Florida, circa 1928.etter showing he
From the Laboratory Thomas Edison, Crange, NJ.
Teby 15 1927
Wear Mr Ford
The first phonograph in the world was made under my direction by one of the workmen at my Laboratory at Menlo Park New Jeney in the early fall of 1877 Jwas the first person who spow to the phonograph - -and I reched the welf
Mary had a lithe lamb.
th fleece
Gand everythere that many cent The lamb coas sure to
These were the first words ever recorded and reproduced in the phonograph
Yours sincerely
To Henry Ford
gan by purchasing the scrubby hamlet that had o k, New Jersey. Next, he carried off every brick ar ginal complex, and foraged the soil for experiment ina's mounting irritation, he also became a snappHitting
Edison's
I AM STILL A BOY "Papa has just come in after working all night," Mina informed T
odore a few days before Edison's birthday. "This is the second t
a week, and the trouble seems to be with the [disk] presses. It is
too bad for him to do it as he looks ashen this morning. He has
the strength for that kind of work any more." And a couple of months later, "He is getting to be so very deaf. Edison acknowledged that his disability was now almost total he was less bothered by it than those who struggled to commun with him. "Do not mind it in the least," he scribbled on a lett
"975
Thomas and Mina Edison on his seventy-fifth birthday, 11
February 1922.
A silent documentary filmed that summer, A Day with Mr. Edison, can be OuTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep 5 NGVOi6QE. It poignantly s energy, tetchy decisiveness, and extreme deafness.28 | EDISON
Edison listening to phonograph records at home, 1920s.
ge war on what he saw as lapsed standards throughou from studio to point of sale. He ordered fresh rosin the horsehair of string instruments for every four hou me. This would prevent the ribbons from wearing "squ nenon he had detected under the microscope. Plastic to the grooves of any pressing should be whisked out w
