Chapter 25
Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, the incandescent light, and the motion picture camera en route to acquiring almost 1,100 patents in his 84 years. Lost and almost forgotten in this dazzling oeuvre was a great truth: If failure was a form of substance abuse, he would have died higher than the International Space Station. Case in point: his patented system for concrete homes.
Displaying a model at the 1907 Cement Show in the Chicago Coliseum, the Wizard of Menlo Park believed he was paving the way for a mass-produced $1,200 house that would be poured into molds in six hours and would dry in six days.
It was a failure that grew out of prior failure that led to more failure—in fact, it was an M.C. Escher staircase of failure. In the 1880s, Edison had started up the Edison Ore-Milling Co., trying his hand at refining iron ore using potent magnets and monstrous rollers. Despite pumping the effort full of money (in part from selling off shares in General Electric Co.), and injecting it with novel technology, Edison ended up squandering more than 10 years and millions of dollars. Still, he glimpsed fortune in the fiasco.
The manufacturing process Edison Ore-Milling used produced massive quantities of super-fine waste sand, which in turn was used to make a more resilient concrete. So in 1899, Edison promptly threw himself into the cement business, founding the Edison Portland Cement Co., shrewdly repurposing some of the know-how and machinery he had developed for ore milling. Improving cement manufacturing with the same autism-spectrum doggedness he improved the light bulb, Edison devised a long rotary kiln whose 150-foot length more than doubled many of the standard kilns of the era. But the upgraded kiln led to overproduction in the cement industry, a self-inflicted wound that forced Edison to scrounge for other ways to make cement profitable.
One summer night in New York in 1906, Edison sketched his vision in an after-dinner speech. Armed with ideas like Zeus with thunderbolts, Edison described a world of concrete homes that the humblest inhabitant could afford. The homes would resist fire and repulse bugs and came in pre-tinted shades that would never require painting. Floors and partitions would be an armor-like four inches thick. Lastly, the hard-shelled houses would be jam-packed with concrete bathtubs, refrigerators, picture frames, phonographs, and even pianos.
Just as he had dominated an astounding one-third of the space apportioned to all United States companies at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris to hype his phonograph and other products, and used the 1884 International Exposition of Electricity to show off his lighting systems for homes and hospitals, Edison chose to unveil his hardened homes in yet another exposition—the 1907 Cement Show, the inaugural national show for the cement industry.
Attended by 10,000 construction-related professionals from architects to builders, the show filled the Chicago forum that December to witness the crowning of “wood’s successor.” Edison proposed that his two-family houses, placed in the suburbs or countryside, could offer healthy alternatives to tenement dwellers paying $9 or more rent a month for their dismal habitats. The abodes would be designed in the manner of the construction under François I, whose Château de Chambord epitomized the wedding cake elegance of French Renaissance architecture. Philanthropist Henry Phipps, a business partner of Andrew Carnegie, thought the hard-shelled abodes could solve New York City’s eternal housing problems. He professed that he wanted to oversee the building of a whole metropolis of the houses, which the poor and working class would be able to rent for a modest $7.50 per month.
“Idealism is fine,” said William F. Buckley, “but as it approaches reality the cost becomes prohibitive.” The cost for what Edison called “the salvation of the slum dweller” would have required the resources of a François I, too. To actually make the houses, it turned out, Edison would need nickel-plated iron molds containing more than 2,300 parts, which would weigh almost 450,000 pounds, and not the 280,000 he had initially surmised. Their cost: a staggering $175,000, which builders would have to shell out before they could even begin putting up the houses—which, industry publication The Cement Age estimated in 1908, would ultimately cost buyers about double Edison’s original $1,200 estimate. Plus, the invention he boasted was “almost bomb-proof” had an unexpected downside: It would resist any remodeling efforts without the application of dynamite.
Edison abandoned the idea and moved on to producing phonograph cabinets and pianos manufactured from lightweight “foam concrete.” He also promised he could fabricate concrete bedroom sets that would be lovelier than those “in the most palatial residence in Paris or along the Rhine”—and would cost a mere $5 or $6. To test the phonograph cabinets’ ruggedness, Edison shipped a pair of them round-trip to Chicago and New Orleans, respectively. He marked the containers they were dispatched in with an irresistibly challenging “Please drop and abuse this package,” hoping to demonstrate the units’ indestructibility at an upcoming trade show. Like his dreams for the concrete houses, the phonograph cabinets shattered and were rarely spoken of again.
Several of the homes were eventually assembled by builder Frank Lambie and investor Charles Ingersoll in Union, New Jersey. Almost 100 years later, at least ten of the prototypes—of what Edison had once cast as “my greatest invention”—still stand.