9 ~ The legend of the “Wizard”
1
The years at Menlo Park, from 1876 to 1881, were by all odds the happiest and most fruitful of Edison’s life. He was in his early thirties and at the very height of his creative power. The business of inventing was humming along; the combats of great Wall Street money men, as he called them, for possession of his patents testified to their importance to the industrial system.
The alarums of those “wars” over his telegraph and telephone patents, however, did not seriously affect the atmosphere of peace and freedom he enjoyed at Menlo Park. Here, at any rate, he was in the happy condition of being at liberty to absorb himself in a whole variety of inviting studies. Here he could allow himself to meditate, permit his mind to wander, even to “play,” without fear of interruption. In other words he could work, if he wished, at the leisurely pace of a man of the study and the laboratory; he could be now reflective and dreamy, now energetic and rapid in his pursuit of an objective. Despite his professions of being only an empirical and practical inventor, he had a disposition that drove him repeatedly to be more than that; he was immitigably curious about the secrets of nature, and his mind often turned toward untrodden paths, as fresh insights into experimental science came to him. He possessed naturally a great power of concentration and at the same time was highly conscious of all the movements of his imagination. Thus he encountered sometimes unexpected and unwonted illustrations of natural law hitherto unknown.
There was a charm about life in this village of applied science that many who came here noticed. “Edison is always absolutely himself,” one visitor writes, and “possessed by the joie de vivre.” When he wished to inform himself on some special subject of moment to him, he would sometimes gather together a great mass of books, lay them out on the floor of his library and, flinging himself down among them, “pore over them for hours on end... after which he would go back, refreshed, to the manual part of his task.”217
His life here was simple and yet complete. His co-workers were sworn friends and disciples who shared in his devotions. Moreover, his wife and children were close by. The eldest, Marion, as a girl of five or six, often played in the laboratory at her father’s feet. On evenings when he returned home early for supper — rarely enough — he sometimes entertained his family and the young children with mechanical or musical toys. One day, to amuse his wife, he connected one of his loud-speaking chalk telephones through his private wire to Western Union headquarters in New York, which in turn was connected to a concert hall. The music was clearly heard in Menlo Park, twenty-three miles away.
In his laboratory it was noticed that his mind was so compartmented that he was capable of pursuing a large variety of inventions under development at the same time. At one period, early in the eighties, there were said to have been forty-four of these under way, with different assistants in charge of each. Edison would study their progress daily, passing rapidly from one to another as he inspected them. In 1877, for example, we know that technical improvements were being worked out for various telegraph and submarine-cable devices; different types of telephone were being improvised; electric pens and mimeograph machines were being made; various sound-measuring instruments were being developed; many chemicals and drugs were under investigation; even a crude incandescent lamp was contrived, with much trouble, in the autumn of that same year, but was abandoned when it burned out in a few moments.
Thomas Edison at about the age of thirty-four.
Did his mind wander off, losing itself, when so many different paths were offered? The lack of direction may seem to us to reflect uncertainty in the mind of the searcher; yet while seeming to stray, and failing to reach what he is seeking directly, he may come upon something else that is, after all, even more valuable.
This indirect or apparently wandering course of investigation, often leading to important scientific discoveries, has been defined as “serendipity” — the gift of “finding valuable or agreeable things not originally sought for.” The term was originally coined out of an expression used in a letter of Horace Walpole, alluding to the old Persian fairy tale of “The Three Princes of Serendip” (Ceylon), which described those mythical travelers as “making discoveries, by accident or sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” In his paper “The Role of Chance in Discovery,” the American physiologist Dr. Walter B. Cannon has recently revived interest in this suggestive idea, which illuminates the importance of that reservoir of the subconscious mind where facts, experiences, fancies, and memories, seemingly confused and long-submerged, generate some novel, unexpected thought or combination of ideas.
As Edison himself was quoted as saying:
“Look, I start here with the intention of going there” — drawing an imaginary line — “in an experiment, say, to increase the speed of the Atlantic cable; but when I have arrived part way in my straight line, I meet with a phenomenon, and it leads me off in another direction — to something totally unexpected.”218
Edison, at any rate, appears to have sensed clearly the dependence of invention and discovery upon the total accumulation of knowledge, including that which seems forgotten. He was forever collecting curious and miscellaneous facts, and squirreling them away in his memory, in the many folds of his large brain, which was, in truth, a capacious storehouse of such miscellanies. In his work, to be sure, we find all the evidence of methodical and close-gripping deduction. But he himself also stressed the important role played by chance or accident in discovery. Pasteur, who had a deep understanding of the mental processes of discovery, said, “Chance favors the mind that is prepared.”
On a number of occasions Edison discussed the role of “accident” in his life of systematic inventive research. It seemed as if accidental discoveries were recurrent, though he sometimes tried to differentiate between these and inventive work, saying:
Discovery is not invention, and I dislike to see the two words confounded. A discovery is more or less in the nature of an accident. A man walks along the road intending to catch the train. On the way his foot kicks against something and... he sees a gold bracelet imbedded in the dust. He has discovered that — certainly not invented it. He did not set out to find a bracelet, yet the value is just as great.219
In the achievements of men of science, chance discovery seemingly played a big part. Edison believed, for instance, that Bell had discovered the principle of the telephone when he was looking for “something else.” But had not Bell’s mind also been alerted to greater opportunities? And chance, as Edison thought, played an important role even in discoveries concerning natural law, as in the case of Newton. But, he concluded, “Newton had been at work on the problem [of gravitation] for many years” — which shows that Edison was in accord with Pasteur’s view that such magnificent “accidents” come often to those who are prepared.
Edison, too, was all attention when, as he confessed, he met, “by the merest accident,” with the opportunity for a fundamental invention, the most original he had ever conceived, one that would open up a wholly new and marvelous art to mankind.
2
Bell’s telephone invention had drawn many minds to the problems of the reproduction of speech. The study of sound fascinated Edison — all the more in that he was partially deaf. At this time, he has said, “my mind was filled with theories of sound vibrations and their transmission by diaphragms.” He knew something of the important studies by Helmholtz analyzing the nature of sound and hearing, which inspired the various experiments in acoustical and “speaking” telegraphs, from Reis to Bell; he knew of Leon Scott’s “phonautograph” (1857) which used a diaphragm and hog bristle to trace a record of sound vibrations on lampblacked paper, though without reproducing any sound itself. In working with Bell’s telephone he also became familiar with the elastic properties of disks, which enabled them to vibrate in tune with the vibrations of the voice.
Some time before he had worked out the carbon transmitter, on February 3, 1877, he applied for a patent covering “An Improvement in the Automatic Telegraph” (No. 213,554), which was designed to permit the recording and repeating of telegraph messages at speeds of two hundred words a minute. This device consisted of a disk of paper laid on a revolving platen and rotating around a vertical axis, quite like the modern phonograph disk. The armature of a telegraph receiver was connected to an embossing point at the end of an arm, which traveled over the disk, embossing on it the dots and dashes of incoming telegraph messages in a volute spiral. When this disk was removed and put on a similar machine provided with a contact point, the indentations of the embossed record caused the signals to be repeated on another telegraph wire. Here we have several features of the disk-record contrivance, used to reproduce telegraphic impulses.
Later on, in the summer of 1877, while working with Bell’s telephone receiver, he noticed how its diaphragm vibrated in tune with the voice. On studying the amplitude of these vibrations, he observed that they were of considerable size and could be made to do mechanical work. Since he could not judge amplitude with his own faulty hearing he used to test a diaphragm by attaching a short needle to it, resting his finger on the needle, and speaking into the diaphragm, with the result that the needle pricked his finger. To illustrate the power of the diaphragm, he made a little toy at this time which was vastly amusing to his daughter Marion. It was a mechanical doll with a funnel on top of its head.
When you recited loudly into the funnel, [it] would work a pawl connected to the diaphragm; and this, engaging a ratchet wheel, served to give continuous rotation to a pulley... connected by a cord to a little paper toy representing a man sawing wood. Hence, if one shouted, the paper man would start sawing wood.220
Returning later to the embossing telegraph repeater, he tried to improve its performance by changing over to an arrangement using continuous rolls of paper tape, paper that was coated or paraffined; he also introduced a steel spring in proximity to the paper tape, to keep it moving in better adjustment. When this instrument raced along at high speed, the indentations of dots and dashes striking against the end of the spring sometimes gave off a noise, “a light musical, rhythmical sound, resembling human talk heard indistinctly.” Working over his new telegraphic repeater in June, 1877, he made a memorandum in his notebook to use “thin copper or other metallic foil,” and to make the grooves wider.
These indistinct mutterings in the machine haunted him; the sounds it made were almost human, like those issuing from the first weak Bell telephones. He was working on other jobs at the time, trying ways of strengthening the hissing sounds over his own telephone transmitter; he was also trying to discover what made a vowel sound, or trying to reproduce one mechanically. E. H. Johnson, who was then in Philadelphia demonstrating the Edison transmitter to Professor George Barker, of the University of Pennsylvania, wrote his chief that summer:
Now as to the latest idea of mechanically speaking the letters of the Alphabet, Professor Barker is delighted and says: “It looks as if you might reach the end sought by scientists for ages...”221
He had been thinking of repeating devices since he was a boy telegraph operator in Canada. In following the development of his sound-reproducing studies we note that he pursued both the method of deduction and that of chance trials. His reasoning was that if he could record the movements of a diaphragm and attached point on some sort of disk or strip and then use the indentations thus made to set another diaphragm in motion, the second diaphragm should reproduce the sounds which had struck upon the first. And yet his direction was set neither by deductive reasoning nor by chance alone, he recalled later, but by something of both. When, in the course of an experiment, “You come across anything you don’t thoroughly understand,” he would say, “don’t rest until you run it down.”
It may have been accident (such as some additional current thrown into the motor he was using for his telegraph recorder) that caused the musical sound in the telegraph repeating instrument. But diaphragms were very much in his mind now. One day he took a tape of paraffined paper and placed it underneath a diaphragm having a small blunt pin attached to its center. As he related:
I rigged up an instrument hastily and pulled a strip of paper through it, at the same time shouting “Halloo!” Then the paper was pulled through again so that its marks actuated the point of another diaphragm, my friend Batchelor and I listened breathlessly. We heard a distinct sound, which a strong imagination might have translated into the original “Halloo.” That was enough to lead me to further experiment.222
They had heard the first strangled cries of the infant talking machine struggling to be born.
The laboratory notebooks (under the heading “Telephone”) contain a note scribbled by Edison on July 18, 1877, saying:
Just tried experiment with a diaphragm having an embossing point and held against paraffin paper moving rapidly. The speaking vibrations are indented nicely and there is no doubt that I shall be able to store up and reproduce automatically at any future time the human voice perfectly.223
There have been legendary accounts of this historic experiment that describe him as having worked in his most impetuous fashion for several days and nights on end to make a talking machine; and that in one all-night session he managed to perfect the thing, then, on the next morning, rushed forth to make a public demonstration of the machine before newspaper reporters.
The little-known true facts are more fully in accord with Edison’s own later definition of genius as being “99 per cent perspiration and one per cent inspiration.” He was in truth engaged for about four months in a patient search for a device quite different in purpose from that of the magnificent invention he would actually contrive. Edison’s friend Johnson has indicated that the inventor at the time was working on a commercial project: to record and reproduce sound coming over Bell’s telephone. As he described it to Johnson, “it would be a telephone repeater — it would transmit, repeat, be of great practical value, like the telegraphic repeater.” It did not dawn upon him that what he was contriving was a talking machine.224
This work was kept somewhat secret. There is evidence that he approached the Western Union people with his idea of reproducing and recording the human voice, but they saw no conceivable use for it! By late October, rumors of his experiments on a strange new machine, nevertheless, were reaching some of Edison’s business friends. From Washington, General Ben Butler wrote him:
My dear Edison:
Tell me something about your wonderful invention in recording the human voice. I need not say that you had better keep it perfectly secret. It is so remarkable that I do not understand it at all...
Butler still referred to some means of recording the voice “on paper” that might be of great commercial value in preserving telephone conversations.225 There was gossip of the forthcoming “phonograph” in a New York newspaper on November 5, 1877.
Then, Edison’s exuberant “advance agent” Johnson sent out the first public announcement of a “talking machine,” which was published as an article in the Scientific American for November 17, 1877. It told of Mr. Edison’s original idea of recording the human voice on a strip of paper, without an electromagnet or current, and by mechanical means solely. The object was to record telephone messages and transmit them again by telephone. Edison was still said to be meeting with difficulties in reproducing the finer articulations, but the first crude results indicated “that he will have the apparatus in practical operation within a year.” The accompanying drawing showed a strip of paper tape traveling under a needle extending from one diaphragm that embossed it, and then passing on to a second diaphragm that reproduced sound — it was a replica of the telegraph repeater, with diaphragms instead of electromagnets.
It is under the date of August 12 that we first come upon an entry in Edison’s notebooks using the word “phonograph” (from the Greek for “sound” and “writing”); and by early November there were indications of the pristine form of the talking machine:
I propose having a cylinder... 10 threads or embossing grooves to the inch... cylinder 1 foot long.
I have tried wax, chalk, etc.226
A fortnight later, November 29, 1877, the first accurate sketch in his own hand of the original talking machine is entered into the notebooks. While he was mistaken or confused about the actual time of the invention, he recalled incidents accompanying it with great vividness:
Instead of using a disc I designed a little machine using a cylinder provided with grooves around the surface. Over this was to be placed tinfoil, which easily received and recorded the movements of the diaphragm. A sketch was made and the piecework price $18 was marked on the sketch.
Here it should be noted that Edison paid his mechanics according to a minimum-wage and piece-work system. If the job cost more than was estimated for it, the mechanic received the minimum wage; if it took less time and cost less, he received in addition to his wage the difference saved.
The workman who got the sketch was John Kruesi. I didn’t have much faith that it would work, expecting that I might possibly hear a word or so that would give hope of a future for the idea. Kruesi when he was nearly finished, asked what it was for. I told him... He thought it absurd.227
In explanation Edison had said laconically: “the machine must talk.” Kruesi scratched his head to indicate disbelief. Others present bet the “Old Man” cigars that the contraption would not work. When the thing was completed, it was a solid job of brass and iron, with a three-and-a-half-inch cylinder on a foot-long shaft and a hand crank to turn it; two diaphragms, each with stylus, were mounted in adjustable tubes at opposite sides of the cylinder. Edison deliberately fixed a sheet of tin foil around the cylinder, began turning the handle of the shaft, and shouted into one of the little diaphragms:
Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go.
Then he turned the shaft backward to the starting point, drew away the first diaphragm tube, adjusted the other in position to reproduce sound, and once more turned the shaft handle forward. Out of the machine came forth what everyone recognized as the high-pitched voice of Thomas A. Edison himself, perfectly, or “almost perfectly,” reproduced, reciting the little Mother Goose rhyme. Kruesi turned pale and made some pious exclamation in German. All the onlookers were dumfounded.
Edison declared afterward, “I was never so taken aback in all my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time.” After that, he tells us, they sat up all night fixing and adjusting it so as to get better and better results — talking into it and singing, testing different voices, then listening with unending amazement to the words coming back.
From instructions issued for the use of the first phonograph, it is plain that it needed skill to keep its tin foil under control and its styluses in adjustment. “No one but an expert could get anything intelligible from it,” the inventor admitted.
On December 6, 1877, Edison was satisfied with the performance of the “talking machine.” Batchelor’s diary of that date states: “Finished the phonograph. Made model for the P.O. [U.S. Patent Office]” and relates also that Edison and he took the machine to New York the next day and brought it to the office of the editor of the Scientific American. Unwrapping his package, Edison declared that he had “a machine that would record and reproduce the human voice.” Numerous persons gathered around to watch him, while he set up the phonograph, recited into it, and then played it back. “They kept me at it until the crowd got so great that Mr. Beach was afraid the floor would collapse. The next morning the papers contained columns.”
The original phonograph, built at Edison’s direction by John Kruesi on December 6, 1877. The recording surface was tin foil, wrapped around the brass cylinder, and embossed by a needle protruding from a flexible diaphragm in the mouthpiece.
The first demonstrations of Edison’s phonograph made most people believe either that they had taken leave of their senses or that it was all a ventriloquist’s trick. What made it uncanny was that the apparatus was so utterly simple.
The first informed account of the phonograph, published in the Scientific American for December 22, 1877, indicates that Edison’s visit occurred on December 7, the day when he executed his patent application. The editor states that “the machine began by politely inquiring as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial good night.”228
The iconic “first phonograph” as built by John Kruesi, illustrated in Scientific American magazine, December 22, 1877.
There had been various prophecies of such an invention, principally by men and women of a literary imagination. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for one, had said long years ago, “We shall organize the echoes!” Within a brief period, Bell had overcome distance in transmitting the human voice; and now Edison recorded and reproduced the fleeting sounds of the human voice so that even the dead might speak or sing to us from the grave.
When, on December 15, 1877, he filed a patent for the phonograph, his most original invention, nothing remotely resembling such a machine was ever found to have been mentioned in all the voluminous records of the United States Patent Office, and the grant of patent was made in the unusually brief time of fifty-seven days.
It is noteworthy that Edison, like the Three Princes of Serendip, was willing to go “off course” when he came upon some unusual phenomena; and that he often encountered such unusual phenomena because “he conducted his laboratory work so that he was directly in touch with all the details of work done, and did not leave this to be carried on, unobserved, by his assistants.”229
The 1877 phonograph, it has been often said, is a superb example of the practical and original applications of scientific knowledge of sound dynamics up to that date. As one commentator wrote in a popular family journal at the time, the invention was not a tenth as intricate as the sewing machine, and in truth was “so simple in its construction, so easily understood, that one wonders why it was never before discovered.”230 But as R. C. McLaurin, considering the phonograph invention nearly forty years later, observed, “one of the most impressive things about Edison, beside “the enormous range of his activities [is] the wonderful simplicity of many of his devices. After all, simplicity of device is always the sign of the master, whether in science or art.”231
When he had finished with his invention, Edison hardly knew what to do with it. These days his inventions were usually made on order; but no one had ordered this. Was it only a scientific toy, a curiosity? Yet the first raucous croaks of “Professor” (so he was honorifically titled in the press nowadays) Edison’s phonograph were heard round the world. People did not yet understand the 1876 telephone; and the next year they were confronted with the phonograph, which seemed even more astounding.
3
Fame entered the door of the Menlo Park laboratory at the end of 1877; thenceforth Edison was never to escape the attentions, flattering or irksome, which the great public pays to an accepted national hero. He had gradually become known among men of science and businessmen interested in the new electrical industry, in Europe as well as in America, as one of the most ingenious of practical inventors. But the acclaim suddenly given the phonograph and its author was almost unprecedented. A “phonograph craze” flared up. Newspaper reporters and writers and artists of popular illustrated magazines flocked out to Menlo Park in large numbers, and described the “nineteenth-century miracle” of the phonograph, as Leslie’s Weekly termed it, and its maker. The new talking machine, it was promised, would “turn all the old grooves of the world topsy-turvy and establish an order of things never dreamed of even in the vivid imaginings of the Queen Scheherazade in the 1001 Nights’ Entertainments.”232 This was a fair sample of the mingled expressions of wonder, amusement, and excitement that greeted the invention which “bottled” sound and music and gave it forth again.
Madame Marie Roze “warbling a scena from an opera” into the phonograph, as pictured on the cover of Frank Leslie’s Magazine, April 22, 1878. Courtesy New York Historical Society.
A leading journal in America saluted Edison in an editorial as being conceivably “the greatest inventor of the age,” adding:
We are inclined to regard him as one of the wonders of the world. While Huxley, Tyndall, Spencer and other theorists talk and speculate, he produces accomplished facts, and with his marvellous inventions is pushing the whole world ahead in its march to the highest civilization.233
In England, both the new telephone transmitter and the Edison phonograph were introduced to the public at about the same time, with sensational effect. In January, 1878, Sir William H. Preece, the electrical consultant of the British Post Office, demonstrated the first model of the phonograph and lectured on it before the Royal Institution in London. It is significant that not only common men but persons of learning and cultivation were immensely impressed with the potentialities of this new and undreamed-of machine. In Edinburgh, the brilliant Fleeming Jenkin, one of England’s greatest engineers, having failed to obtain a model of the phonograph, quickly made one of his own after published descriptions of the invention, and demonstrated it before a scientific society in Edinburgh. In Paris, the directors of the International Exposition of 1878 received and accepted an Edison phonograph for display, though the scientific jury could not determine what category of the industrial arts the machine belonged to.
Du Moncel, the electrical scientist, read a paper on the lessons it taught, in which he declared that “cet étonnant Edison” possessed in himself alone “more genius than a whole scientific senate.”
The high estimate of Edison’s achievement among scientists of his day is reflected in an article that appeared in a leading British scientific periodical, Nature:
Mere ingenuity in contriving machines does not add to the sum of human knowledge, and if Mr. Edison were merely a clever inventor and nothing more, I should feel less interest in the man. It is, however, a noticeable feature of his inventions that they, in general, contain some new principles, some original observation in experimental science, which entitles him to the rank of a discoverer.234
After the press had done its duty in telling the millions about the “speaking phonograph,” the crowds who had read about “the New Jersey Columbus” came to Menlo Park to see him and his works. They came from cities and farms, by carriage or wagon and by train; indeed the Pennsylvania Railroad organized excursions bringing hundreds of persons at a time to flood the tiny hamlet that had grown famous overnight as “the village of science.” It became the Mecca of a continuous pilgrimage of scientists and curiosity hunters. Foreigners arriving in New York by transatlantic steamer would ask their way to Menlo Park. Once arrived there they were astonished to find that it was neither a “park” nor a town, but a flag station on the railroad, having only six houses and a laboratory. But some would ask, “What is manufactured here?” And the reply invariably given was, “Nothing.” It was, in truth, a place for spending money rather than making it.235
People crowded into the lower floor of the “tabernacle” and saw nothing but books, blueprints and mechanical designs; then they tramped upstairs and gaped openmouthed at all the array of chemical jars, metals, batteries, and electrical or sonic machines, such as the “aërophone” — a megaphone with great horned ears that would permit a conversation to be held over a distance of two miles. And overhead were tangled lines of telephone and telegraph wires that made strange cobwebs everywhere. Were not all these books, papers, and instruments private matters, some among those who were admitted so freely inquired. “Oh, no,” one of Edison’s staff answered. “Nothing here is private. Everyone is at liberty to see all he can, and the boss will tell him all the rest.”236
The “professor” himself stood among the crowd, a surprisingly young man, smooth-shaven, with a thick mop of hair falling forward over his face, who good-humoredly submitted to being stared at without reserve. He himself demonstrated his invention in an affable, modest, and informal manner. He answered all questions promptly, speaking with a Western twang but making his explanations remarkably clear. It was said that “Mr. Edison’s explanations pleased people greatly. His quaint and homely manner, his unpolished but clear language, his odd, but pithy expressions charmed and attracted.”237
At first Edison, who had been so much alone, enjoyed the “bath in the multitude,” as hundreds and even thousands came to Menlo Park. The exaggerated compliments of rustics, who told him he was the most sought-after man in America, he brusquely waved aside. There were also fools and bores; one man to whom he had explained everything with great patience, said at last, “Yes, I comprehend perfectly,” but then added to Edison’s dismay, “I understand it all, except how the sound gets out again!”
Among the visitors there were a good number who came to see with their own eyes if there were not some prestidigitator’s trick about this new invention. One of these was Bishop John Vincent, cofounder of the Chautauqua Association. After looking sharply all about the laboratory for a hidden ventriloquist, the bishop began to shout into the phonograph’s recording tube a long string of jaw-breaking Old Testament names, doing this with such rapidity that none could follow him. When the tin-foil record was played back to him, he announced emphatically that he was now satisfied there was no fraud by Edison, since not another man in the whole country could recite those Biblical names with such speed as he had used.238
Like a comedian, Edison entertained the crowds by showing them all sorts of tricks the talking machine could perform, if it willed: he whistled popular airs, such as “La Grande Duchesse,” a song hit of the day; or he rang bells, coughed, and sneezed before the recording tube, then reproduced these assorted sounds. Also, by superimposing upon a vocal duet the strident interruptions of angry listeners, he made the phonograph simulate a first-class street brawl, with shouts of “Oh, shut up!” or “Go away, if you can’t sing any better!” and “Help! Police! Murder!” Betimes, the “professor” would pat his machine affectionately and say, “Well, old phonograph, how are we getting on down there?” The apparatus would then growl back at him in harshly metallic tones, uttering scraps of Spanish, German or Latin. Such were the pleasantries that cast a spell over the uninitiated audiences of 1878 during the first “phonograph craze.” As one commentator wrote, Edison might be no man of letters or stage performer, but he was a kind of artist who knew how to “dramatize” his inventions, and his machines were his “characters.”239
Nothing would suffice, after all the newspaper stories of his miracle, but that he must come to the nation’s capital to exhibit his speaking phonograph before the notables of government and science. Since he was not minded to discourage the universal interest in his invention, he accepted urgent invitations to Washington, arriving there April 18, 1878. First he paid a call on Joseph Henry at the Smithsonian Institution and demonstrated the phonograph in the venerable scientist’s parlor. Later in the evening he made his appearance before a large scientific gathering and allowed his machine to introduce itself. As Edison turned the crank its voice was plainly heard saying, “The speaking phonograph has the honor of presenting itself before the American Academy of Sciences.”
Earlier, on that same afternoon, he had exhibited the talking machine before members of both houses of Congress who had gathered at the home of Miss Gail Hamilton, a well-known Washington hostess, who was the niece of Speaker James G. Blaine. Senator Roscoe Conkling, the Republican boss of New York State, a famous dandy, noted for his handsome figure and curly auburn hair and beard, was among those present when Edison slyly played the ditty:
There was a little girl, who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead;
And when she was good, she was very, very good
But when she was bad, she was horrid.
The curls of Conkling, one of the most controversial figures of those stormy Reconstruction days, were regularly featured in newspaper cartoons; and everyone present laughed at the allusion by the phonograph to a point on which the powerful Senator was sensitive. Edison may well have played this record deliberately, for three years earlier, Conkling, as lawyer for Western Union, in a telegraph patent suit, had assailed him as a “rogue inventor.”
The last stop during that triumphal tour of the Capital was at the White House. As Edison relates:
About 11 o’clock word was received from the President that he would be very pleased if I would come... I was taken there and found Mr. Hayes and several others waiting, among them I remember Carl Schurz who was playing the piano... The exhibition continued till about 12:30 a.m., when Mrs. Hayes and several other ladies who had been induced to get up and dress, appeared. I left at 3:30 a.m.240
In April, 1878, when he was thirty-one, Edison went to Washington to demonstrate the phonograph to the American Academy of Science, to members of Congress, and to President Rutherford Hayes. This picture was taken at the studio of the noted Civil War photographer Mathew Brady.
Little known hitherto, except in the circle of his profession, and given to a secluded life, the youthful-looking inventor of the phonograph, during this first season of world fame, was now seen or talked about everywhere. At first sight the great public took him to its heart as it had never done with other men of science or any other inventor — at least since Ben Franklin’s day. Morse had known fame for a time, but he was a Boston Brahmin. The brilliant Henry, a shy and fastidious man, never knew popular acclaim. But Edison was a plain, rough-hewn, democratic type — and yet, as all acknowledged, he certainly “knew his stuff.” Above all, the people of America admired a worker, a “doer,” who had mechanical ingenuity; and he seemed to possess such skill in a measure far above all other men. Henceforth, as he was written about constantly in the press, exaggerated tales were spread of the extreme poverty of his boyhood and youth. Without schooling, without the help of friends or family, the former trainboy was said to have come to New York in his rags and conquered. He was the very type of the Self-made Man, whom so many Americans fervently believed in and sought to emulate. So was that picturesque old Commodore Vanderbilt, who had recently died as America’s richest individual, leaving a fortune of 90 million dollars. But while some envied and others feared Vanderbilt, few loved him.
Edison’s was a success story of another and more admirable sort. His exploits and the fortune he had won were much magnified by popular rumor. Fables were made for children about his habits of work, his indifference to rest or sleep, and his repeated triumphs through his sheer wits. Did not men who had worked closely with him say that “Edison can evolve from his own brain any invention required”? Was it not said of him in the press that he cared only for his work and would not stop even to attend a banquet in his honor if he were paid $100,000! As one of his old acquaintances of telegraph days wrote him from Michigan, in the terms of that universal homage that was accorded him by millions of Americans, “At least you have made your success by virtue of your hard work and brains, and not by exploiting other men’s work.”
Popular traditions about great inventors and discoverers have long been woven around old race memories or legends of “magicians” or beings endowed with superhuman powers, from the ancient Titans in their caves to the witches and sorcerers of medieval times. In effect, a kindred folklore grew up in the popular imagination around Edison, though he exhibited no transports, had a plain, down-to-earth manner, and embraced principles that tended to confound all such mystifications.
“Aren’t you a good deal of a wizard, Mr. Edison?” a metropolitan newspaper reporter asked him one day.
“Oh no!” he answered with a laugh. “I don’t believe much in that sort of thing.”241
Nevertheless the rustic neighbors of Menlo Park and nearby Metuchen gossiped about his having machines that could overhear farmers talking or even cows munching the grass in the fields a mile away. It was said that he had another machine which was supposed to measure the heat of the stars; and that illuminations of meteoric brilliance were seen blazing up through the windows of his laboratory and were extinguished as suddenly and mysteriously as they had appeared. Catching glimpses of figures gliding about the fields near his laboratory at midnight with lights and equipment, bent on missions none of them could understand, the simpler inhabitants of the region, according to one reporter recording “A Night with Edison,” “were minded of the doings of the powers of darkness.”242
The appellation of “Wizard” was affixed to him; henceforth he was to be the Wizard of Menlo Park. As one of his laboratory assistants said of this period, “A species of glorified mist soon enveloped [Edison],” thanks to the grotesque and exaggerated reports of his powers. He was
regarded with a kind of uncanny fascination, similar to that inspired by Dr. Faustus of old; no feat would have been considered too great for his occult attainment. Had the skies been suddenly darkened by a flotilla of airships [bringing] a deputation of Martians, the phenomenon would have been accepted as a proper achievement of the scientist’s genius.243
That Edison had some of the spirit of the actor and the showman was plain enough; like Barnum he was not afraid to advertise his wares. But on the other hand he also relished his solitude and was sometimes irked by the inconveniences of glory. For a time he considered wiring his picket fence with a strong battery, saying, “I shall blow somebody up yet!”
For a season the “professor” seemed never to tire of experimenting with his phonograph, it was observed. “You have made so many inventions,” a newspaper man remarked to him in 1878. “Yes,” he replied, “but this is my baby, and I expect it to grow up and be a big feller and support me in my old age.”244
Meanwhile there was widespread speculation, both fanciful and serious, on the future usages of his invention. Actors, statesmen and orators rejoiced at the thought that their mortal voices could now be preserved after they had been turned to dust. Other more diverting suggestions were set forth: that life-sized statues of great personages, such as Henry Ward Beecher, might have phonographs stuffed inside them with which to address crowds in public squares. Clergymen, as some wag proposed, might take their rest while their sermons were repeated for them automatically. Illustrated periodicals showed organ-grinders bearing phonographs instead of barrel organs; or dying men recording their last wills and testaments before lawyers and family; and the Statue of Liberty with a phonograph established in her torchbearing arm, giving “salutes to the world” at the entrance to New York’s harbor. At this period the illustrated periodicals often represented the typical American family seated in an overstuffed parlor, with bewhiskered men and women in bustles all gathered in a devout circle to attend Mr. Edison’s phonograph.
Edison himself caused an article to be prepared and published in his name in a leading magazine, in which he outlined his own ideas of the future usefulness of his machine:
1) Letter writing, and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer.
2) Phonographic books, which will speak to blind people without effort on their part.
3) The teaching of elocution.
4) Music. — The phonograph will undoubtedly be liberally devoted to music.
5) The family record; preserving the savings, the voices, and the last words of the dying members of the family, as of great men.
6) Music boxes, toys, etc. — A doll which may speak, sing, cry or laugh may be promised our children for the Christmas holidays ensuing.
7) Clocks, that should announce in speech the hour of the day, call you to lunch, send your lover home at ten, etc.
8) The preservation of language by reproduction of our Washingtons, our Lincolns, our Gladstones.
9) Educational purposes; such as preserving the instructions of a teacher so that the pupil can refer to them at any moment; or learn spelling lessons.
10) The perfection or advancement of the telephone’s art by the phonograph, making that instrument an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent records.245
A surprising number of the inventor’s predictions have been borne out by modern developments. But his own immediate procedure at that period, his first steps in commercializing the new machines, show us that he failed to comprehend or foresee what was to constitute the magnificent destiny of his invention: the introduction of great and serious music, formerly the luxury of a small privileged class, into the everyday life of the common man.
Promptly in January, 1878, a group of venture capitalists had come to Edison and, after a conference, reached an agreement to form the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company, to which sole rights were given by him to exploit, manufacture and sell his apparatus as a music box primarily. C. A. Cheever, Uriah C. Painter, a former newspaper man of Washington, and Gardner G. Hubbard, the father-in-law of Alexander Bell, were among the principal stockholders of the company, which agreed to pay Edison ten thousand dollars to begin with and a royalty of 20 per cent on each phonograph sold. James Redpath, founder of the celebrated Redpath Lyceum Bureau of Boston, a popular lecture service, was chosen to give exhibitions of the machine in various parts of the country, whose territory was to be parceled out to branch managers. Offices were established at 203 Broadway, New York; the instruments themselves were manufactured at the electrical equipment shop of Edison’s old friend, Sigmund Bergmann, on Wooster Street.
In its first advertisement the company announced that since the adaptation of its product to “the practical uses of commerce” had not yet been completed, it would offer the apparatus to the public only in the form of a “novelty.”
The phonograph was, of course, still a crude affair; words were hard to distinguish, and the tin-foil record could be played only a few times. Although the inventor had the belief that the principal future use of the phonograph was to be as a machine for business correspondence, it was at first to be presented mainly as a scientific curiosity. Under Redpath a show business was launched and five hundred phonographs were exhibited around the country at popular entertainment halls or at special amusement centers, where a small admission fee was charged. While the “phonograph craze” lasted, for a year or so, crowds came, and a swarm of old telegraph operators and “barkers” exhibited the machine, which played a few popular airs, or recorded the jokes of music-hall comedians on tin-foil records running a minute and a half. In the first days so much excitement was caused by the exhibitions that Edison’s royalties for one week’s gate receipts in Boston alone ran to $1,800. Then the “bubble” burst; after a large part of the country’s population had seen and heard the tin-foil phonograph, its curiosity seemed satiated and audiences at the music-box parlors dwindled away.
Edison was quite aware that the tin foil was not a satisfactory material for recording, being awkward to install and remove; that some of the consonants came out “soft” or were wanting altogether; and that rotating the cylinder by hand at an even rate of speed was difficult, the sound of speech and notes of a song being wholly altered if the hand turned too rapidly or slowly. The thing gave, in fact, a “burlesque or parody of the human voice,” as William H. Preece reported from London after the first wave of enthusiasm had died down.
As one student of the talking machine’s history has concluded: “The phonograph, in truth, had been launched prematurely. It was all very well to talk about dictating letters... or using it to read Nicholas Nickleby to the blind, but not when a tin-foil cylinder would play for scarcely more than a minute.” As for providing whole concerts of inspiring music, as Edison himself had predicted, the grating quality of the machine forbade that.246
For a while, the inventor at Menlo Park investigated new substances for recording, such as wax, and a new form of record, shaped like a plate, or disk (described in the 1878 patent in England). For the disk records, however, there was a mechanical problem of the stylus being altered in performance as it approached, in diminishing orbits, the center of the circle. A scheme for reproducing cheap copies of records en masse from a master matrix also came to his mind, as well as one for improving the suspension of the needle in relation to the record. In short, the new machine greatly needed development before it could be brought to realize its immense possibilities — which no one foresaw, least of all Edison, who had poor hearing and was unmusical. What troubled him was that the first phonograph could not be quickly adapted for use in business dictation.
Though he loved the phonograph and called it his favorite invention, Edison laid it aside, abandoned it for ten long years, leaving all the potential of this highly original device undeveloped. Here, it has been remarked with hindsight, was one of the inventor’s greatest blunders, one that in the end was to cost him dearly.
Within a year or two the phonograph was regarded only as a scientific curiosity. Edison himself in a newspaper interview described it as “a mere toy, which has no commercial value.” Rival inventors, in his judgment, would not even bother to pirate his invention.247
He had other ideas that engaged his full attention in the summer of 1878. One undertaking particularly gripped his imagination; it was described by one of his intimates as being that of dispelling “night with its darkness... from the arena of civilization.”