10 ~ Toward the light of the world

 

1

In the late spring of 1878, to his own and everyone else’s surprise, Edison felt very tired and ill. He had been working at the development of a dozen or more inventions at the same time. In seven years, since his brief honeymoon journey to Niagara Falls, he had had no real vacation. When an invitation came to him, through Professor George F. Barker, to join an expedition of scientists going to the Rockies to observe the total eclipse of the sun that summer, he gladly agreed to make the trip.

In his intervals of “serious play” he had invented a “tasimeter,” an instrument for measuring minute changes in temperature. It was so sensitive that Edison believed he could measure changes in heat down to one-millionth of a degree Fahrenheit. It was his intention to test an improved model of his tasimeter by trying to record changes of heat from the sun occurring during the eclipse.

To go west to a point near the Great Divide, at Rawlins, Wyoming, the rendezvous of the group of scientists and government officials, was then still a diverting adventure. With a crowd of astronomers from many nations, the inventor journeyed in a special car of the Union Pacific, his traveling companion being Marshall Fox, the well-known correspondent of the New York Herald, who often wrote about Edison’s doings. Arriving late in the night at Rawlins, a mere flag stop on the railway, they found the place flooded with scientific visitors and were quartered together in a small room at the only hotel there. Edison relates:

 

After we retired and were asleep a thundering knock on the door awakened us. Upon opening the door, a tall, handsome man with flowing hair, dressed in western style, entered the room. His eyes were bloodshot and he was somewhat inebriated. He introduced himself as “Texas Jack”... and said he wanted to see Edison as he had read about me in the newspapers.²⁴⁸

 

The two visitors were fairly disconcerted when Texas Jack, in his efforts to entertain them, drew a Colt revolver and, aiming through the window at a weather vane above the depot down the street, neatly shot it off. Only by pleading that he needed sleep and agreeing to see the man in the morning could the inventor be rid of his unruly admirer. In this frontier country with its high-spirited, free-shooting citizenry, fame could have its drawbacks.

The next day, July 29, 1878, the day of totality, Edison, though heavy-headed for lack of sleep, went out with the astronomers — who did not forget to take their rifles along — to observe the eclipse. The astronomers busied themselves for hours determining their exact location on the earth and filling big sheets of paper with mathematical calculations which, as the incredulous practical inventor said, “looked like the timetable of a Chinese railroad.” Edison meanwhile made himself ready for his own test, installing his tasimeter apparatus in a hen house. The hens, he noticed, “all went to roost just before totality.” A storm arose, and the shelter began to disintegrate, while Edison struggled to level a telescope at the sun and hold on to his other instruments. The heat from the sun’s corona proved to be many times beyond the index capacity of his tasimeter, and so the trial was marked “no results.”

After the eclipse, he joined a hunting party for a day or two, then decided to visit the California coast together with Barker. Thanks to his celebrity, Edison was given permission by the local officials of the Union Pacific to ride the cowcatcher of the locomotive as it bumped along over the mountain grades. As he later described this boyish adventure:

 

The engineers gave me a small cushion, and every day I rode in this manner, from Omaha to Sacramento Valley, except through the snowshed on the summit of the Sierras, without dust or anything else to obstruct the view.²⁴⁹

 

The much-needed vacation lasted two months, after which he returned to Menlo Park greatly refreshed and ready to undertake a new enterprise that was more difficult by far than anything he had ever tried.

 

During their journey together, Professor Barker, who had become passionately interested in the possibilities of electric lighting, talked long and earnestly with Edison of recent developments in this field and urged him to investigate it for himself. “Just at that time I wanted to take up something new...” Edison recalled.²⁵⁰

The problem of turning electric current into illumination had haunted men of science throughout the nineteenth century, ever since Sir Humphry Davy’s famous demonstration before the Royal Society of London in 1808, when he ran a strong electric current (furnished by a battery of two thousand cells) through a small gap between two carbon rods. As the carbon was oxidized by the current, it created a brilliant blue-white light in that gap, in the form of an arc. But for many years after, progress in this field was slow for want of an abundant source of electrical current. The dynamo of Faraday, invented in 1831, and based on his discovery of the principle of induced electricity, converted mechanical power into electrical energy as a conductor was passed or rotated through the field of a magnet. It seemed to provide the answer to the problem of a cheap supply of electric current. Then the dynamo, driven by steam engines, gradually underwent improvements by many hands so that by the 1860s lighthouses began to be illuminated by big arc lights along England’s coast. In America, somewhat later, at the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876, Moses G. Farmer exhibited three glaring arc lights, burning in the open air, powered by his own rude dynamo. A year later Edison received a report on the new “electric candles” which Paul Jablochkoff, a former Russian officer of engineers, had successfully introduced as street lamps in Paris. This report Edison pasted in his scrapbook.²⁵¹

At the time (1877), he himself set to work experimenting with open arc lights having carbon strips as burners. He also investigated incandescent lights, such as many early investigators had tried to perfect. The incandescent light was entirely different from the arc light in principle: it used a slender rod or pencil enclosed in a glass globe from which the oxygen had been exhausted, more or less. Electric current heated the pencil to incandescence, the absence of oxygen preventing the metallic or carbon rod from burning out or melting. As yet, only poor results had been obtained with incandescent lamps, after fifty years of desultory experimenting. Baffled by the perplexities of the task, Edison had dropped his electric-light experiments to devote himself to the phonograph.

On his return from the West, at the end of August, 1878, he found a file of papers sent him by Grosvenor P. Lowrey, general counsel to Western Union, reporting on the Paris Exposition that summer and especially on the new electric candles of Jablochkoff. By now a half mile of the Avenue de l’Opéra had been illuminated by those big arc lights; they were said to have provided the finest artificial light ever seen. According to the testimony of the American physicist, Professor Benjamin Silliman, Jr., new dynamos invented by Z. T. Gramme were used to provide a source of constant current; as the carbon rods, or “candles” burned out they were replaced by hand or by an automatic feeding mechanism.²⁵²

Now Lowrey joined Barker in urging Edison to undertake an investigation of the electric light. In the United States, Charles F. Brush of Cleveland, as well as Moses Farmer, had already begun to introduce arc lights on a commercial scale for street lamps and for illuminating factories and shops — Wanamaker’s store in Philadelphia already used arc lights. Early in September Edison agreed to go with Professor Barker to Ansonia, Connecticut, to visit the brass-manufacturing shops of William Wallace, partner of Moses Farmer and coinventor of the first American electric dynamo. After receiving the inventor and his party warmly, Wallace exhibited eight brilliant arc lights of 500 candlepower each as well as the Wallace-Farmer dynamo of 8 horsepower that supplied them.

As an eye-witness related:

 

Edison was enraptured... He fairly gloated... He ran from the instruments to the lights and then again from the lights back to the electric instruments. He sprawled over a table and made all sorts of calculations. He calculated the power of the instruments and the lights, the probable loss of power in transmission, the amount of coal the instrument would use in a day, a week, a month, a year...

 

He then turned to Mr. Wallace and said challengingly, “I believe I can beat you making the electric light. I do not think you are working in the right direction.” They shook hands in friendly fashion and, with a diamond-pointed stylus, Edison signed his name and the date (September 8, 1878) on a wine goblet served by his host at dinner.²⁵³

 

2

He had merely played with the idea of making electric lights before this time — at Newark in 1876, and at Menlo Park in the fall of 1877. Now he was on fire. After examining the Wallace-Farmer arc lights, he relates, “I determined to take up the search again. On my return home I started my usual course of collecting data...”²⁵⁴

What made him feel in such fine fettle leaving Wallace’s place, as he said shortly afterward, was that

 

I saw for the first time everything in practical operation. I saw the thing had not gone so far but that I had a chance. I saw that what had been done had never been made practically useful. The intense light had not been subdivided so that it could be brought into private houses. In all electric lights theretofore obtained the intensity of the light was very great, and the quantity (of units) very low. I came home and made experiments two nights in succession. I discovered the necessary secret, so simple that a bootblack might understand it. It suddenly came to me, like the secret of the speaking phonograph. It was real and no phantom... The subdivision of light is all right...

 

A reporter for one of the leading New York dailies had “shadowed” him to Wallace’s at Ansonia and had obtained a startling interview with the inventor. With soaring imagination, Edison communicated to the reporter his vision of a central station for electric lighting that he would create for all New York, and from which a network of electric wires would extend, delivering current for small household lights, unlike the blinding arc lights made by Farmer and Brush. In some way (as yet unknown) the usage of electric light would be measured, that is, metered, and sold. He said he hoped to have his electric light invention ready in six weeks! He was building additional shops adjacent to the Menlo Park laboratory in which to carry out this large undertaking. Then he would erect posts along the roads there, connect lights with all the residences, and hold “a grand exhibition.”²⁵⁵

He had an air of supreme confidence, with which he sought to imbue everyone around him (including interested capitalists). In truth, he had decided to enter the field rather late; other able inventors had begun long before him: Farmer, Brush, William E. Sawyer, Hiram Maxim, and in England, Joseph W. Swan and St. George Lane-Fox, were all then at work inventing electric lights. But who could move faster than Edison?

The plans he announced were, in breadth and originality of conception, far in advance of anything earlier attempted in this field. As he had lately become a national figure, newspaper reporters besieged him at every step, and he fired off many interviews, often indiscreet but sometimes quite revealing, so that we may follow the stages of his progress almost day by day in the newspapers, as well as in his laboratory notes and correspondence. His records at this period are also more complete and explicit, possibly a legal precaution.

During the visit with Wallace the intuition had come to him that he must somehow “subdivide” the intense light given by the arc light into many small, mild lights for domestic use, which could be controlled individually. At the same time the image of the central gashouse and its distributing system, of gas mains running to smaller branch pipes and leading into many dwelling places, had flashed into his mind. With the gas system a man could turn a single jet in one room on or off, or do so with a hundred jets. Why could not Edison do as much with an electrical distributing system having a central power station? In the case of electric current there would be far more difficult problems of distribution, those of resistance and consequent loss of pressure in the conductors; but Edison was confident that he could work them out quickly.

The possibility that big carbon arc lights could be subdivided into small ones, mild and safe enough to be installed in private houses and regulated independently of each other, had already been discussed by Edison and Barker in the course of their recent western journey. Arc lights ran as high as 3,000 candle power, but they gave an almost blinding glare, burned in open globes emitting noxious gases, and could only be employed high overhead, in streets or in high-ceilinged factories or shops. Moreover they used large amperages and were wired to the dynamo “in series,” so that all the lamps had to be turned on or off together. Their inventors had not yet learned how to make smaller lights, nor how to connect them in specially adapted circuits so that they could be controlled individually. But how such subdivision of the current was to be achieved Barker, of course, did not know; though a good fellow, he was only, in Edison’s estimation, a college professor. Edison, however, thanks to his telegraph work, had enormous experience in the engineering of electrical circuits. The subdivision of current for a circuit with multiple branches, so to speak, supplying a large number of outlets with small amounts of current for each, had never been done and was considered an “impossibility,” or at least only theoretically possible, and prohibitive in cost. Moreover, the small lights would have to be entirely different in principle from those subject to the experiments of contemporary inventors. The kind of light he had in mind — at first, only vaguely, as an intuition — one that used very little current, had never been invented. So much the better! Edison was willing.

Seeing the Wallace-Farmer arc light apparatus with his own eyes had given him the inspiration. He saw what they had not done. Only two weeks after the whole idea had come to him, he cabled a European agent, who handled foreign patent negotiations for him, “Have struck a bonanza on electric light — indefinite subdivision of light.”²⁵⁶

From the first his plan to devise a system of many small lights having the mildest of ordinary gas jets (8 candle power), was entirely different from that which the arc light inventors, such as Jablochkoff, Farmer, and Brush were working out. Edison was aiming to duplicate the gas-distributing industry — with electricity! Gaslighting in the past half century had reached the stature of a major industry in America, with annual revenues of 150 million dollars. It was centered in the cities, while three fourths of the population then lived in rural districts by the dim glow of oil lamps or candles. About 10 per cent of the gas business was in street lamps, now threatened by the electric arc light. Edison now proposed to replace the remainder (90 per cent) of the gaslighting facilities, those used for private and business illumination.

“If you can replace gaslights, you can easily make a great fortune,” a New York newspaper reporter remarked to him when these plans were announced.

“I don’t care so much about making my fortune,” Edison replied tartly, “as I do for getting ahead of the other fellows.”²⁵⁷

There was the man, very much himself. To have more money meant little; he had enough, he said, for his needs. But to stand as leader among the world’s foremost inventors, to make again and again a great impact on society and industry — even to “change the world,” if possible — meant everything.

First, he stated the problem for himself as clearly as he could, setting down his notes while ruminating in solitude:

 

Electricity versus Gas as General Illuminant

Object: E. to effect exact imitation of all done by gas, to replace lighting by gas by lighting by electricity. To improve the illumination to such an extent as to meet all requirements of natural, artificial and commercial conditions. Previous inventions failed — necessities for commercial success and accomplishment by Edison. Edison’s great effort — not to make a large light or a blinding light, but a small light having the mildness of gas.²⁵⁸

 

His attention is riveted, at the beginning, not so much upon the search for an improved type of incandescent light as upon the analysis of the social and economic environment for which his invention is intended. He studies the organization of the gaslight industry itself. Gas had its inconveniences and dangers. “So unpleasant... that in the new Madison Square theater every gas jet is ventilated by small tubes to carry away the products of combustion.” But whatever is to replace gas must have “a general system of distribution — the only possible means of economical illumination.”

Gathering together scores of volumes bearing on gas illumination, and all the back files of gas industry journals, he studies the industry’s operation, habits, its seasonal curves of consumption, and even its geographical character. He draws charts and tables covering such information, then maps out in his mind a network of electric light lines for a whole city, making the shrewd judgment: “Poorest district for light best for power — thus evening up whole city.” He sees that in slum districts, for example, there will be more demand for small motors by business firms. His calculations cover the cost of gas conversion from coal, and the comparable cost of converting coal and steampower into electrical energy with existing dynamos. An expert gas engineer, whose services Edison engaged at this time, observed that few men knew more about the world’s gas business than Edison.

Edison had a homo economicus within him, a well-developed social and commercial sense — though he might be careless of money itself and was no bookkeeper of the John D. Rockefeller type. Before experimental work on the invention itself was under way, he had formed a clear notion of what its object must be, stated in economic terms. This pragmatic concept guided his search and determined the pattern of his inventive work, so that its result would be no “scientific toy,” but a product useful to great masses of people everywhere.

By his initial costing and careful quantitative calculations of power and raw materials, such as machinery and copper for a whole system of light distribution, he was led to define exactly both the kind of light he sought and the kind of circuit he needed. Indeed, the scheme of a central power station with a network of thousands of small lighting units in many dwelling places was his ruling concept almost from the hour when he saw the crude Wallace-Farmer apparatus. It was well understood by him, from the start, that the development of a new and different circuit would be necessary in place of the series circuit used by the arc light systems. In order that the current might be “divided” and that his lights might each be used independently, Edison concluded that those small lights must be connected in a parallel, or multiple, circuit.

Experiments had recently been made in Europe with an improved parallel circuit that assumed the form of a ladder set down horizontally along the ground, with outlets connected at each “rung” and the electric current flowing along the “legs” of the “ladder” and through its “rungs.” If one light were turned off, or broken, it would not affect the others on different “rungs”; whereas in the straight-line series, as with a string of beads, if one unit broke, all would go. The new circuit (but little tried as yet) would need much study and calculation.

Edison had a very strong feeling, as he began this investigation, that the existing techniques of electric lighting were inadequate and did not even take full advantage of available scientific knowledge. He saw, for example, that he would need a light so constructed that it used little current, one made on entirely different principles from those contrived by other inventors, which were, in almost all cases, of low resistance and consumed much current. His own plans had come to him at first only in vague outline; none of the details had been worked out in terms of actual ohms, volts and amperes. He would be striking off into unexplored ground — but surely great opportunities beckoned there. Hence his initial outburst of optimism, exuberant and, seemingly, excessive.

 

There were two main avenues which experimenters seeking to develop the electric light had followed: that leading to the big arc light, and that of the small incandescent unit, the enclosed glow lamp. Though the arc light had recently been brought to the commercial stage, Edison struck out for the incandescent light in a vacuum — the ignis fatuus, the will-o’-the-wisp, which so many inventors had pursued in vain during a half century. But then Edison’s projected lighting circuit for popular domestic use demanded a small illuminating unit that would consume little current.

Progress in this field had been terribly slow. As far back as 1820, De La Rive, in France, had tried to make such a glow lamp in a vacuum enclosed in glass. Then De Moleyns, in 1841; after him the young American inventor J. W. Starr, in 1845, among others, had used metallic or carbon “burners” in more or less exhausted glass vessels or tubes, with indifferent results. In England, Joseph W. Swan, a skilled chemical scientist, had made glow lamps with platinum or carbon conductors over a period of twelve years, then had abandoned his experiments as failures in 1860. More recently, the Russian inventors, Konn and Lodyguine, had contrived promising models of incandescent lights in vacuum globes; and several Americans had done as much, notably William E. Sawyer, who enclosed carbon rods in a vessel of inert gas, such as nitrogen. All in all, as Edison found, the “state of the art” was still unsatisfactory: none of his predecessors had succeeded in making an incandescent lamp that would burn for more than a few moments; the variables they had encountered proved to be too baffling.

In making his decision to choose the incandescent light over the arc light he was “refusing a path that looked very promising,” and “putting aside the technical advance that had brought the arc light to the commercial stage.”²⁵⁹ For the problems of the incandescent light were entirely different from those of the arc light; it would need a different type of dynamo and a different kind of circuit, not to speak of many new safety devices. Edison was, in fact, going against the stream, was undertaking a far more difficult investigation, than that of the adapters of arc lights.

Meanwhile it remained for him also to find the right vessel for his idea, an incandescing substance that would endure a fierce heat, yet would not fuse or melt and burn out within a few minutes — the very thing that scientists had been seeking for fifty years.

 

He naturally turned to carbon in his first experiments, since he was very familiar with that wonderful material and knew that it had a very high melting point. Strips of carbonized paper were tried as “burners,” or partial conductors; they were made incandescent in the open air and quickly oxidized, merely to ascertain how much current was required. Then he used some glass jars, partially evacuated of air by means of a hand-worked pump, and managed to keep his carbon strips (a sixteenth of an inch in breadth) incandescent for “about eight minutes” before they went out. He was now inclined to accept the prevailing view that carbon was easily destructible and laid it aside for the time being.²⁶⁰

He seems also to have tried making a rapid tour d’horizon (over an already well-traveled area) so as to familiarize himself as quickly as possible with this new subject. For his incandescing substance he tested various infusible metals that others had long experimented with. Out of a whole group of refractory metals he chose platinum; to be sure, its melting point was somewhat lower than carbon’s, being about 3,191 degrees Fahrenheit. On introducing a spiral of platinum wire into a globe partially exhausted of air, he was able to bring it to incandescence and achieve a brilliant light. However, at high heat the platinum burner quickly melted and the light went out. Therefore, after the first week or two of experimenting, he contrived a little shunting device by connecting a straight rod, also of platinum, to the burner; when the temperature rose too high the additional rod quickly expanded enough to short-circuit the burner and allow it to cool off. After the rod cooled off, it contracted and, within a fraction of a second, reopened the circuit. What he had was a lamp that blinked instead of going out entirely. Though there was nothing exactly new in this thermostatic regulator, and it worked unreliably, Edison quickly signed a first application for a patent on October 5, 1878.²⁶¹

He then humped himself over his laboratory table and designed a second platinum-wire lamp with a more sensitive regulator, having a tiny diaphragm that responded to the heated air within the glass globe. After that he tried a third lamp using an iridium-platinum composition for his incandescing substance. These early experimental lamps played exasperating tricks on the inventor, who studied them for long hours, brooding, distracted, letting his cigar go out, lighting it, letting it go out again.

To be sure, he was learning a good deal as he went on. The earliest notes on the electric light experiments of September 11-26, 1878, show him already keenly aware of the importance of obtaining a higher vacuum, which he achieved by cementing the bottom of his leaky glass container. He was also trying to measure exactly the resistances of various incandescing materials in ohms and, in the early autumn of 1878, was beginning to make his first rough calculations of a multiple, or parallel, circuit — which would permit him to “subdivide” his electric current for many small units. It was going to be a long, hard job, he realized, requiring added equipment, a larger staff, and a good deal of money.

 

Grosvenor Lowrey had kept in close touch with him in those early weeks. He had promised that if Edison undertook to invent a practical electric light, he would approach the Western Union directors, who were his clients, for funds to finance Edison’s research work. Lowrey, an informed patent attorney and also one of the leading corporation lawyers of New York, had fallen completely under the spell of the self-taught inventor and regarded him much as an ardent collector of paintings regards a great artist whose works he believes are destined to become immortal. On receiving assurances that Edison would actually undertake the work on the electric light, Lowrey began to form a syndicate of capitalists to back his inventive research. From the start of the lamp experiments, the lawyer went about buttonholing his well-heeled clients among the Vanderbilt-Morgan clan, assuring them that “Edison has discovered the means of giving us an electric light suitable for every day use, at vastly reduced cost as compared with gas.”²⁶²

After the first brush with the new subject, Edison really had nothing of practical value; he had only a platinum burner with a shunt device that worked for about ten minutes. This did not prevent him from calling in the metropolitan newspaper reporters and declaring that he had “already discovered” how to turn electricity into a cheap and practical substitute for illuminating gas. After the sensation made by his phonograph the leading New York dailies, especially James Gordon Bennett’s Herald and Charles A. Dana’s Sun, made it their business to treat everything that Thomas A. Edison said or did as “copy.” Knowing this, Edison initiated a full-scale press campaign aimed at assuring the public that the success of the electric light invention was already assured.

Was there ever such effrontery? Here the showman in the applied scientist certainly revealed himself. In numerous press interviews authorized by him and printed in the New York Sun, the New York Herald, and the New York Tribune, from mid-September to mid-October, he announced the early arrival of the age of electric light. In somewhat mystifying style he remarked:

 

Singularly enough I have obtained it [the light] through an entirely different process than that from which scientists have sought to secure it. They have all been working in the same groove. When it is known how I have accomplished my object everyone will wonder why they never thought of it... I can produce a thousand — aye, ten thousand lights from one machine.

 

Together with light, he would transmit energy for power and heat, to cook food, to run an elevator, a sewing machine, or anything requiring a motor.²⁶³ A few weeks after his first forecast, he admitted that while there would be “no difficulty about dividing up the electric current” he was still looking for a good “candle” which would give a pleasant light. He had quit experimenting with carbon and was now using platinum wire, though he still hoped for something better. He concluded his remarks to the press that day in a challenging tone: “I have let the other inventors get the start of me in this matter... but I believe I can catch up to them now.”²⁶⁴

Those first Barnum-like trumpetings in the press made a sensation. But greater still was that which followed a public interview of October 18, wherein he solemnly declared that he had found just the kind of light he wanted. The reporter asked:

 

“Are you positive?...

“There can be no doubt about it.

“Is it an electric light?

“An electric light and nothing else... We simply turn the power of steam into electricity. The greater the steam power we obtain, the more electricity we get.”

 

To be sure, the inventor now conceded, he needed time, perhaps several months, or a year, to “get the bugs out.” Nevertheless he put on a show of his platinum-wire lamp. As a reporter described the scene, he turned on the Wallace-Farmer 8-horsepower dynamo and

 

touched the point of a wire on a small piece of metal near the window casing... there was flash of blinding white light... “There is your steam power turned into an electric light,” he said. Then the intense brightness disappeared, and the new light came on, cold and beautiful... The strip of platinum that acted as a burner did not burn. It was incandescent... set in a gallows-like frame; but it glowed with the phosphorescent effulgence of the star Altair. A turn of the screw, and... the intense brightness was gone; the platinum shone with a mellow radiance through the small glass globe.²⁶⁵

 

But if the artful Edison had not turned off that screw, the light would have gone out by itself within a few minutes.

The boast made on this occasion that he would soon light up the entire downtown area of New York with 500,000 incandescent lamps, powered by a few steam dynamos, created excitement on both sides of the Atlantic. In London as well as New York, electrical scientists promptly stigmatized Edison’s claims and half-revelations as bombast. In a leading scientific journal Professor Silvanus P. Thompson asserted that anyone who tried to invent an incandescent electric light was “doomed to failure”; that Edison’s talk of subdivision of currents showed “the most airy ignorance of the fundamental principles both of electricity and dynamics.”²⁶⁶ In New York a rival electrical inventor, Sawyer, predicted that Edison would fail not only in his scheme of subdividing the electric light current but also in his attempts to make a burner of platinum — for Sawyer himself had proved that platinum was useless.

Nonetheless, the repute of the Wizard of Menlo Park was so formidable that his published claims created a fair-sized financial panic on both the London and New York stock exchanges. “Owing to the publication of Professor Edison’s discovery of the distribution of electric light,” a cabled dispatch from London reported, all gaslight securities within a few days had lost about 12 per cent of their value. It was now widely believed that, thanks to Edison’s entrance into the field of electric lighting, the whole flourishing gaslight industry might soon enter into a decline.

Edison himself showed less concern than anyone else at the economic convulsions his advance advertising had provoked, or over the current attacks upon his capacity as an applied scientist. Was it part of wisdom to start out with so much publicity upon such a hazardous series of experiments? One of the inventor’s closest associates of that period remarked, long afterward, “I have often thought that Edison got himself into trouble purposely, by premature publication... so that he would have a full incentive to get himself out of trouble.”²⁶⁷

It was the forehanded Lowrey, however, who had encouraged Edison to make these premature public statements; and it was at the lawyer’s advice that Edison maintained silence thereafter and gave orders that the Menlo Park Laboratory be kept closed to all visitors.²⁶⁸

The idea of a press campaign was not at all foolish under the circumstances. It was designed to kindle the hearts and loosen the purse strings of the Wall Street capitalists whom Lowrey now eagerly solicited in behalf of his talented protégé.

Grosvenor Lowrey was intelligent and handled Edison with much skill. A New Englander by birth, he had lived through a romantic and adventurous youth, having gone to Kansas to fight against slavery under the banner of John Brown; in the Civil War he had risen to be a major in the Union Army, and afterward had returned East to establish himself as one of the leading members of the New York Bar, with wide political and business connections.

On October 1 Lowrey wrote Edison that he had approached the son-in-law of W. H. Vanderbilt, Hamilton M. Twombly, and told him that the inventor “was willing to sell half of this invention [the electric light] for $150,000.” Edison noted on the back of this letter, “All I want at present is to be provided with funds enough to push the light rapidly.”²⁶⁹

On the following day Lowrey was closeted for an hour and a half with Twombly and W. H. Vanderbilt in the latter’s great mansion on Fifth Avenue, discussing capital subscriptions and royalties to be paid Edison. That night he wrote Edison that he hoped to get for him a “clear $100,000” from the powerful group of Western Union directors. Lowrey also solicited the interest of the partners of Drexel, Morgan & Company. He urged Edison to be discreet, to avoid negotiating directly with anyone, or promising anything, without his (Lowrey’s) counsel. To which Edison replied with a short message, “I shall agree to nothing, promise nothing and say nothing, leaving the whole matter to you.”²⁷⁰

In heartening fashion Lowrey wrote the next day:

 

Give your whole mind to the light. I will see that not only do you get what you ought to have, but that every reasonable expectation of those you have spoken to is satisfied. I want the Western Union people to have first chance at this because both you and I know whom we are dealing with.²⁷¹

 

Evidently the spate of sensational stories in the New York newspapers about Edison’s new plans had helped the Western Union people to make up their minds. They had narrowly missed buying the telephone patent of Bell and now could not get it at any price. They would not pass over the chance of Edison’s light. On October 12, 1878, Lowrey was able to report that he had a contract ready and would send Edison a first check for $30,000, which arrived a few days later.

The contract, drawn up by Lowrey between Edison and the syndicate of capitalists who were to finance his researches, was one of the most noteworthy in all the annals of American industry. In effect the Western Union people were buying rights, not in an existing invention, but in an unknown quantity, a promise. “Their money,” Edison said, “was invested in confidence of my ability to bring it back again.” Undoubtedly these financiers were taking risks with their capital, though if we read the roster of the initiating group it will be seen that for such grandees as Vanderbilt (“the richest man in America”) and his associates it was “only peanuts.” The original investing group, who became directors of the new company, figured prominently in the Social Register and the New York financial district: Vanderbilt, Twombly, President Norvin Green of Western Union, Eggisto Fabbri (a partner of J. P. Morgan), Lowrey, and also Tracy Edson and James Banker, both important capitalists and associated with Western Union. Each of these men, under a preliminary agreement of October 15, 1878, invested a few thousand dollars cash by subscribing altogether to five hundred shares of the proposed company’s stock, amounting to $50,000, which was paid over to Edison in installments. The new company was to be known as the Edison Electric Light Company, and was originally to have 3,000 shares ($300,000 capital stock), of which 2,500 shares were to be given to Edison. For his part, he agreed to assign to the company all his inventions and improvements in the electric lighting field for a five-year period. If Edison’s future inventions were successful, his stock would be worth a good deal; if he failed, it would be worthless. All that the backers risked was their original $50,000 cash — in return for which they had the chance of controlling all of Edison’s patents in this field and of developing, by investment of added capital, a world-wide patent-holding and licensing company profiting from the inventor’s patents in electric lighting.²⁷²

Behind the whole venture stood the figure of J. Pierpont Morgan, already the country’s outstanding banker, who kept his name off the board of directors but had his partner Fabbri serving as director and treasurer of the new company. Its banker was also to be Drexel, Morgan and Company. At the time, Edison believed that the chances of ultimate success of his project were “vastly greater” because of the Morgan connection.²⁷³

To have gained support for such a novel undertaking from America’s leading financiers was decidedly a feather in the cap for Thomas A. Edison’s little all-purpose “invention factory” at Menlo Park. He was simply given a blanket order to create an electric lighting and distributing system, and to develop a pilot plant, or model, of that system.

The launching of the Edison Electric Light Company by such sponsors is noteworthy also in that it inaugurates a phase of increasingly close relations between big business and technology in this country. It is significant that the leading innovators of incandescent electric lighting and arc lights, like Edison, were men who had first acquired their knowledge of electricity through work on telegraphic devices. At the same time it was the capitalists who had the experience of investing in the country’s biggest electrical enterprise of that era, the Western Union Telegraph Company, who originally provided the funds for Edison’s research and development work in electric lighting.

The closing decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the heyday of the practical inventor, or applied scientist; certainly the Yankee inventors were creating much new industry and wealth by their mechanical skills. Yet in the growing field of electrical engineering, during the 1870s, there was a considerable gap between the United States and Europe, where the Germans, Russians, French and British were already making fairly efficient dynamos and setting up brilliant arc lights in their great cities. America, before 1878, had almost nothing of the kind to show. By his new venture Edison hoped to win world leadership in this field.

This whole period of the prime of his life, the twenty years spanning his thirties and forties, happened to coincide with a prosperous postwar cycle in which our capitalists showed a marked appetite for innovations and an unusually progressive spirit. At this time they seemed to grasp thoroughly the importance of investing in scientific research, and in the engineering of new steel furnaces, giant steam engines, locomotives, turbines, high-speed printing presses, and new electric generators and lighting devices. But instead of taking up an invention by chance, as in the past, the Drexel-Morgan and Western Union group of financiers, in the case of Edison’s lighting project, were enlisting the services of a specialized research organization and its scientific captain in an effort to develop a new and revolutionary product.²⁷⁴ On this occasion the group of capitalists backing Edison were showing real vision, though at other periods they were by no means consistently cordial to inventive research.

It is the lawyer Lowrey, however, who must be given chief credit for the original promotion of this enterprise. It was he who generated enthusiasm for the inventor’s plans in high financial circles. Lowrey, in short, assumed that inventor-patron relationship which H. S. Hatfield said “can be as vital as the husband-wife relationship.”²⁷⁵ While the inventor may be obsessed with his one, overruling interest, and unable to follow good business procedure, or give heed to other practical difficulties affecting the realization of his scheme, the patron-capitalist — whether representing a government institution or a speculative group — is in a position to help bring the invention along to the stage of successful exploitation. Lowrey understood Edison’s temperament and at the same time knew the money men very well. After a while the Wall Street group made it their practice to communicate with Edison only through Lowrey, while the inventor did likewise in dealing with them.

The influence of Lowrey showed itself even in the personnel selected for Edison’s expanding staff. The inventor was thought to be careless or temperamental in his business procedure. At Lowrey’s suggestion, S. L. Griffin, a junior executive at Western Union, was assigned to act as Edison’s private secretary and oversee his business affairs. Francis Jehl, a clerk in Lowrey’s office, was also hired, in February, 1879, as a laboratory assistant, at the lawyer’s recommendation. It happened that during two years at Menlo Park Jehl kept a private diary recording some of the remarkable events he witnessed there; it was to be the basis for his Menlo Park Reminiscences, published fifty years later.

Not only were Lowrey and the Western Union group kept fully informed of Edison’s movements, but his progress in experimental work, though ostensibly secret, seems also to have been reported in part to some of his enemies, particularly those connected with the gaslight industry. In November there were rumors in the New York press that the inventor was “ill” or “worn out” by his tremendous exertions; also that he had met with great disappointments. At once Lowrey issued denials of such reports, declaring that “Mr. Edison is in good health and excellent spirits... on the threshold of a new and wonderful development of electrical science.”²⁷⁶

The relations of the inventor and his capitalists continued to arouse comment, sometimes wondering, sometimes invidious, not only in America but in Europe. Thus the Paris Figaro around this time published a rather fanciful article by its New York correspondent:

 

It should be understood that this astonishing Eddison [sic] does not belong to himself. He is the property of the telegraph company, which lodges him in New York at a superb hotel, keeps him on a luxurious footing and pays him a formidable salary, so as to be the one to know and profit by his discoveries.

This company has in the dwelling of Eddison men in its employ who do not quit him for a moment, at the table, on the street, in the laboratory; so that this wretched man, watched as never was a malefactor, cannot give a second’s thought to his personal affairs without one of his guards saying, “Mr. Eddison, what are you thinking?”

 

The facts were quite otherwise. To keep Edison under control of the financiers as a “captive scientist” was no simple matter, as is shown by a clash that came at the very outset of his electric light campaign. As soon as the new project was reported, other inventors, in Europe as well as in America, had become unusually active in this field. In England, the accomplished Joseph W. Swan and St. George Lane-Fox pushed forward with their own experiments in vacuum lamps with carbon rods. Then, at the end of October, the American William E. Sawyer and his partner, Albon Man, claimed that they had “beaten” Edison in the race for the electric lamp when they applied for a patent on their model of a carbon-pencil light enclosed in a glass tube containing nitrogen.²⁷⁷ This invention later proved to be unsatisfactory. But the mere reports of such developments, together with attacks on Edison, created a flutter of panic among his financial backers. At a directors’ meeting of the Edison Company the suggestion was made that they join forces with Sawyer and Man by buying out their patents. Lowrey passed the suggestion on to one of his henchmen at Menlo Park.

The vigor of Edison’s reaction seems to have given his backers pause, judging from a letter (marked “confidential”) written by his new secretary, Griffin, to Lowrey.

 

Menlo Park

November 1, 1878

Dear sir:

... I spoke to Mr. Edison regarding the Sawyer-Man electric light, being careful not to say anything beyond what you told me. I was astonished at the manner in which Mr. Edison received the information. He was visibly agitated and said it was the old story, that is lack of confidence — the same experience he had had with the telephone, and in fact, all of his successful inventions, was being re-enacted! No combination, no consolidation for him. I do not feel at liberty to repeat all he said, but I do feel impelled to suggest respectfully that as little be said to him as possible with regard to the matter. He said that it was to be expected that everyone who had been working in this direction, or has any knowledge of the subject would immediately set up their claims, upon ascertaining that his [Edison’s] system was likely to be perfected. All this he anticipated, but had no fears of the result, knowing that the line he was developing was entirely original and out of the rut.

I was careful to say to him that as far as you were concerned there was no lack of confidence. He will give you his own views in full, so I will abstain at present.

S. L. Griffin²⁷⁸

 

After that there was no further talk of Edison working with Sawyer or any other inventor.

The whole project, of course, turned out to be much bigger and more difficult than anyone had foreseen. Indeed the alliance between the high-spirited inventor and his capitalists might have run even less smooth a course than it did, in the early, arduous years, were not the tactful and patient Lowrey always on hand.

 

3

One reason why Edison believed he would “get ahead of the other fellows” was that he had unbounded confidence in his laboratory, his superior scientific equipment, and his staff. All of this was rapidly expanded that autumn, when three sizable buildings were added to the original “tabernacle.” One was a separate office and library, placed near the gate to his grounds; another, an engine house of brick construction, was set in the rear, to contain two 80-horsepower steam engines; a third was a glass blower’s shed.

One of the happiest effects of Lowrey’s personal influence was the engagement of Francis R. Upton as chief scientific assistant and mathematician at Menlo Park Laboratory. Upton, a native of Massachusetts, was a tall black-bearded young man with distinguished manners. As if to compensate himself for his sense of inferiority in formal scientific knowledge, Edison jocularly nicknamed Upton “Culture”; and to put him in his place Edison played one of his typical scientific tricks on the “green” mathematician.

He brought out a pear-shaped glass bulb intended for lamp experiments — according to a story often repeated, with many variations — and gave it to Upton, asking him to calculate its cubic contents in centimeters. Upton drew the shape of the bulb exactly on paper, and got the equation of its lines, with which he was going to calculate its contents, when Edison again appeared and impatiently asked him for the results. The mathematician, after having worked for an hour or so, said he was about halfway through and would need more time. “Why,” said Edison, “I would simply take that bulb, fill it with a liquid, and measure its volume directly.” That is, he would pour the liquid contents of his bulb into a graduated cylinder for measuring volumes, and would get it in five minutes. Apparently Upton had not thought of that one, but only of obtaining the most precise measurements. He was taken aback. The story, which has been repeated in many different ways, is supposed to illustrate the contrast between the practical, “Edisonian” rule-of-thumb method and the mathematical scientists’ different mode of attack on the same problem.²⁷⁹

This work, however, would require a good deal of precise calculating of electrical conductors, resistances and dynamo capacities from now on. Edison found Upton very useful, and strong where he himself was weak. “Any wrangler at Oxford would have been delighted to see Upton juggle with integral and differential equations,” Jehl recalled. Edison would lead the way with his “intuitions,” and Upton would do the checking and calculating. Upton, for his part, later described the astonishment he first felt at the inventor’s “wonderful flow of ideas, which were very sharply defined, as can be seen by any of [Edison’s] sketches, as he evidently always thinks in three dimensions.” The university-educated scientist was also much surprised at Edison’s clear understanding and unusual application of Ohm’s and other electrical laws, which enabled him to choose correct voltage, lamp resistance, and conductor size. Edison’s “guesses,” though seemingly at variance with contemporary interpretation of scientific principle, usually turned out to be right.

 

I cannot imagine [Upton said later] why I did not see the elementary facts in 1878 and 1879 more clearly than I did. I came to Mr. Edison a trained man, with a year’s experience at Helmholtz’s laboratory... a working knowledge of calculus and a mathematical turn of mind. Yet my eyes were blind in comparison with the eyes of today; and... I want to say that I had company!²⁸⁰

 

Upton, nevertheless, proved indispensable to Edison in the second and very important stage of his search, which followed almost immediately upon his decision to use a multiple, or parallel, circuit. This concerned the form of incandescent lighting unit that was to be used in his proposed circuit.

Careful quantitative studies of those first, unsatisfactory lights he had tried, with carbon and platinum burners offering low resistance to the passage of current, had yielded estimates of how much copper wire conductor would be needed for a circuit of such lights, and of what requisite thickness, or cross section. After allowing for a given percentage of drop in voltage in the line at a given distance from his dynamo for a certain number of lights, he found that his circuit would need a fabulous amount of copper in order to connect up a few city blocks. Such a system of low-resistance lights was simply a commercial impossibility! Those first estimates, made with the help of Upton, had been for (low-resistance) incandescent lights consuming about ten amperes of current at ten volts, with a resistance of only one ohm.

It will be recalled that, after September 8, 1878, the idea had come to Edison — perhaps as a “flash of inspiration,” perhaps by way of close reasoning and fresh insights — that he must contrive a light with a very high resistance to the current and using, therefore, but small quantities of it. Yet no other scientist or inventor had attempted this. There was his “secret” that was so “simple.” Now he proceeded to test his idea. Reversing his course, he made estimates for a system of relatively high voltage, supplying lights of very high resistance that would use little current. At his order, Upton, in November and December of 1878, made calculations on the basis of a given number of lights of 100 ohms resistance, consuming only one ampere of current at 100 volts, over the same distance of line and with the same assumed loss of tension. What thickness and total quantity of copper main would be needed for such a circuit? The result was astonishing: only one one-hundredth of the weight of copper conductor would be required for such a system as compared with that of the low-resistance system. And copper was the most costly element involved — really the crux of the problem.

Thus Edison determined both what kind of electric distributing system and what form of incandescent lamp would serve his purpose — and set out to look for it; that is, to devise exactly such an incandescent burner as was needed. He knew that it must be one offering great resistance to the passage of the current, and, therefore, having a small radiating surface, or cross section.

It would seem that Edison even had to reeducate his physicist to a true understanding of Ohm’s law of electrical resistance. Most electricians in 1879 did not thoroughly understand this fundamental formula for measuring the flow of electric current (though it was first made known in 1827) and scarcely were able to calculate in terms of volts and amperes.²⁸¹ Most of the would-be inventors of electric lamps were hunting for some substance that would withstand great heat without melting. They had not yet conceived of a fundamental change in the form of the electrical circuit determining the components of the illuminant, as Edison projected it in his mind.

Up to now, the practical, or applied, scientists had not needed much electrical theory, and the theoreticians had had little contact with practical problems except in telegraphy and arc lighting. The work done at Menlo Park proved to be far in advance of that attempted by other inventors and helped solve key problems in applied electrical science.

Upton was surprised at Edison’s unconventional attack on the problems of electrical distribution. But Edison pounded away at his idea that the low-resistance lights used both in arc lights and in existing glow lamps would not do. The people who were making these things were all wrong, he insisted. Once Upton had grasped Edison’s application of Ohm’s law of resistance, he was able to make the preliminary computations for the new high-resistance incandescent light adapted to a multiple circuit and using very little current.

When they looked at their figures on paper, the practical inventor and the mathematician were thrilled with hope. A new and strategic invention — thanks to Edison’s original insights into the problems of electrical transmission, and his glimpses of new potentials — was now surely within reach. It was a great moment. What did it matter if the university scientists were almost all of them against Edison’s idea; he had had a hunch all the while that they were wrong.

The verdict of all but a few scientific authorities was in condemnation of his announced schemes, which, they declared, violated the laws of conservation of energy. In England, a committee of Parliament, after having investigated the recent crash in gaslight securities and having obtained the advice of British scientists on the reports of Edison’s projects, early in 1879 ruled that while these plans seemed “good enough for our transatlantic friends,” they were “unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men.”²⁸² Adhering to the currently accepted interpretation of Ohm’s law of electrical resistance, it was argued that if an electric light of 1,000 candles’ luminosity were divided into ten smaller lights and connected by ten equal branches, each would carry not one tenth, but “one hundredth only of the original light.”²⁸³

These assertions, supported even by Lord Kelvin and John Tyndall, were right in their way, assuming the old conditions of a fixed amount of current which, divided among many lamps in parallel circuit, would result either in great losses of current, or would require impossibly large and costly copper conductors. Edison was canny enough not to speak in public of his plan for devising a stable, high-resistance incandescent light, which introduced a new factor into the situation. In the second place, he foresaw that with increasing dynamo efficiency, it was possible to increase current units and thus solve his problem of distribution. In an interview of October 20, 1878, he did reveal the fact that he considered the Wallace-Farmer dynamos he had at present of too low power, and “had an intention of constructing a machine of his own... that would carry out his ideas more satisfactorily.” (The dynamo that he was to design for his proposed system would be unlike the constant-current machines used for arc-lighting; it would be a constant-voltage dynamo, adequate for a parallel circuit of independent lights and supplying as much current as was needed.)

It is not surprising that Edison, the self-taught mechanic, showed greater resourcefulness than the Victorian-era scientists in applying Ohm’s law of resistance, which they held he contravened. Like Faraday, he had little mathematical knowledge but a profound experience in handling and using electrical currents; moreover, he had his “intuitions,” his fresh insights.

Tyndall, though concluding that Edison’s announced plans would be impracticable, had the wit to make some reservations in his adverse opinion because of his genuine respect for the American inventor:

 

Edison has the penetration to seize the relationship of facts and principles, and the art to reduce them to novel and concrete combinations. Hence, though he has accomplished nothing new in relation to the electric light, an adverse opinion as to his ability to solve the complicated problem... would be unwarranted... Knowing something of the practical problem, I should certainly prefer seeing it in Mr. Edison’s hands to having it in mine.²⁸⁴

 

One is astonished at how little was known then about the transmission of electrical energy. No incident shows more clearly than this electric light controversy the real interdependence of work in applied science and the theoretical studies of “pure” scientists; in this case the practical experimenters were gathering experience that would eventually serve to correct or modify the interpretations of electrical laws that the theoreticians had long relied upon.

As a modern commentator has summed up this old controversy,

 

Edison knew he wanted a small light which could be independently controlled. Independent control implied a parallel circuit where, with a constant-voltage generator, the current units could be multiplied as desired. But the increase in current could mean either heavy current loss in transmissions or excessive copper cost. To avoid these the light would have to be of high resistance. That conclusion is easily reached by an elementary application of Ohm’s law. But in Edison’s time it was an important achievement which placed him far ahead of the other incandescent-lighting inventors and scientists...²⁸⁵

 

All that autumn, and through the winter of 1879 that followed, Edison studied the problems of high-resistance lamps and multiple circuits, as his notebooks show.²⁸⁶

As he himself confessed, this investigation of electric lighting required a most arduous program of research: Edison and his staff made lengthy studies of the electrical resistances of various substances, and examined them also for their heat radiation, recording their specific heats. The effect of increasing or lowering resistance, and of changing voltage or amperage on such materials, and of using them in different forms, was also measured carefully.

Contrary to the prevailing impression, Edison was not primarily “the great tinkerer,” but was remarkable rather for his power of observation, his imagination, and clear-cut reasoning faculty. The delicate mechanical tinkering was handled by Charles Batchelor, who was literally Edison’s “hands”; Kruesi served as a superb machine maker; while John Ott did the drafting work after Edison’s rough sketches. One day Ott drew attention to the inventor’s hands; though usually soiled or acid stained, they were soft, white and beautifully formed — the hands of an artist, of a man who imagined things, not those of a workman or a craftsman.²⁸⁷

In the period 1878 to 1881, more and more university-trained scientists and engineers were added to the staff at Menlo Park: such were the electrical engineers, William S. Andrews (trained in England) and Charles L. Clarke, both of whom rose to high posts in the electrical world. There was also E. G. Acheson, the future inventor of carborundum, and Frank J. Sprague, afterward a leading inventor of traction motors. These men usually surpassed Edison in theoretical knowledge, but he was the conductor of the “symphony orchestra” at Menlo Park.

At an early stage of this campaign, Edison in a very revealing letter of November, 1878, admitted that all sorts of unexpected difficulties were turning up.

 

It has been just so in all my inventions. The first step is an intuition — and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise. — This thing gives out and then that — “Bugs” — as such little faults and difficulties are called — show themselves and months of anxious watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success — or failure — is certainly reached... I have the right principle and am on the right track, but time, hard work and some good luck are necessary too...²⁸⁸

 

On a later occasion, he also explained of his method that, after the intuition had come, he would settle into purely deductive labors. In this investigation, during several years, the role of chance was small, the accidental discoveries few.

 

I would construct a theory and work on its lines until I found it untenable, then it would be discarded and another theory evolved. This was the only possible way for me to work out the problem...²⁸⁹

 

In January, 1879, Edison designed and completed his first high-resistance lamp, having a very thin spiral of platinum wire as its incandescing substance set in a globe that was as effective a vacuum as he could get with an ordinary air pump. A second, improved model of this lamp dated from April, 1879. The results so far were encouraging; those first lamps burned “an hour or two.”²⁹⁰ He then tackled the dual problem of getting a higher vacuum and also improving the incandescing element (with which inventors had struggled for more than a generation).

Here the conditions for success were rather narrowly defined. The incandescing substance (burner) must resist a tremendous heat before it could give light; if the heat were too great it would fuse or melt. Carbon had the highest melting point: 3,500 degrees C. But when he attempted to maintain a heat of no more than 1,500 to 1,700 C. in his first vacuum globes, the carbon incandescing substance tended to burn out around that level. He tried other materials, and in fact “everything”: platinoiridium, boron, chromium, molybdenum, osmium — virtually every type of infusible metal. (He thought of tungsten, but could not use it with existing tools.) A thin wire of nickel seemed to offer promise, during a month of troublesome tests — then gave rise to an accident that almost ruined his eyesight. In his notebook for January 27, 1879, the entry occurs: “Owing to the enormous power of the light my eyes commenced to pain after seven hours’ work, and I had to quit.” On the next day he wrote: “Suffered the pains of hell with my eyes last night from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. when got to sleep with a dose of morphine. Eyes getting better...” But he was mortified at losing a whole day recovering!

Giving up the troublesome nickel, he came back to platinum, which, though having a lower melting point than carbon, seemed to show a longer life when incandescent. After having tried inert gas in his globes, such as nitrogen, he resumed efforts to obtain a higher vacuum, which was a shrewd judgment for that time. In England, Sir William Crookes had lately made great progress toward very high vacuums by means of an improved type of pump, called the Sprengel pump, whose flow of mercury trapped air bubbles and expelled them to the outside atmosphere. On learning of this, Edison decided to get hold of one of the first of these new vacuum pumps to reach America, which was then at the laboratory of Princeton College. Upton was sent to Princeton by train and buggy to borrow it until Edison could obtain one of his own from England; on his return, late at night to Menlo Park, broken with fatigue, he found Edison waiting up for him, so ravished at the sight of the new instrument that he was resolved to try it out at once and kept his assistants pumping until dawn. Now a vacuum was obtained that came within one or two millimeters of full exhaustion of air; in a globe having such a high vacuum the thin platinum wire gave forth a brilliant light of 25 candle power and continued to do so for some time, whereas in the open air it melted at once when raised only to 4 candle power.

At this stage, in the late winter of 1879, Edison also made an important chemical discovery that would stand him in good stead. He noted, “I have discovered that many metals which have gas within their pores have a lower melting point than when free from such gas.”²⁹¹ He had been observing the action of occluded gases within the glass bulb, absorbed within the metallic “burner” elements, then released when they were heated to incandescence, and he noticed their destructive effect. With the aid of the new Sprengel pump he devised a method of expelling these occluded gases from the burner element by sending a current through it and heating it, while air was being pumped out of the bulb. (The same process was devised independently by Joseph Swan, during his concurrent electric light experiments in England). The platinum wire, or coil, within the globe thereupon became extremely hard and achieved a greater resistance to high temperatures. Edison himself, reviewing his work later, felt that at this stage he “had made the first real steps toward the modern incandescent lamp.” On discovering that the platinum had been made more infusible by driving out the occluded gases, he was induced to try for a still higher vacuum, on the supposition that this would make for still greater infusibility in the incandescing coil. He would find that this step was of the greatest importance in his later experiments, when he turned to a more rewarding substance than platinum.²⁹²

By now he had reason to congratulate himself, having made considerable progress beyond the stage which, as he knew, had been reached by others attempting to perfect an incandescent lamp — though it was also true that he seemed to be meeting with fresh difficulties at every step. On April 12, 1879, at any rate, he executed a new patent application for his first high-resistance platinum lamp having an improved vacuum (Patent No. 227,229).

In his exuberant fashion, he now indulged in a few more optimistic reports before newspaper men, aimed both to confound his detractors and to give heart to his financial supporters. He claimed that he had a “nearly perfect vacuum,” and also described the working of his proposed multiple circuit, declaring that he had solved the problem of costly copper conductors. Platinum, he held, was just the thing.²⁹³

As the newspapers reported that Edison was sending mining prospectors to search throughout the Rocky Mountains for more abundant supplies of platinum, Professor Barker wrote warning him against the “indiscriminate examination of rocks”; Lowrey also grew worried and wrote begging him not to set off on wild hunts for platinum, as the world supply was known to be very meager.²⁹⁴

Though the tireless inventor had improved the melting action of his platinum coils, his money was now melting away more rapidly than he had expected, as he reported in disconsolate tones. The task he had undertaken looked much longer than was anticipated; moreover, to light up Menlo Park alone, within a half-mile radius, as he planned to do, would need some $18,000 worth of copper.²⁹⁵

The spirits of his financial sponsors, meanwhile, began to droop. Their brilliant inventor, through whom they hoped to win a patent monopoly over a new domestic lighting system replacing gaslight throughout the world, far from having completed anything tangible, was already hinting plainly that he needed more money. Meanwhile the first Brush arc lights, introduced in September, 1878, were already blazing over lower Broadway in New York, and more were being installed elsewhere with impressive effect, so that the bankers now began to have serious doubts whether Edison had pursued the right course in trying for an unproved lighting system.

In very friendly spirit, Lowrey reported to Edison that at a recent meeting of his financial backers at Morgan’s office, some members of the group had expressed serious misgivings about the inventor’s progress. Lowrey, however, had defended him stanchly, declaring that in such a venture “no great end could be obtained without considerable doubt and tribulation... We must all stand by the inventor and the enterprise.” Mr. Morgan, he confided, stood there listening, without saying anything. He was plainly a man “who was not easily frightened”; such brief remarks as he made indicated that “he was perfectly ready to go on.”²⁹⁶

Lowrey urged that instead of trying to conceal any real troubles he faced, for fear that his sponsors might lose courage, the inventor should be as frank as possible. He also proposed that Edison come to New York to confer with Mr. Morgan. When the inventor indicated that he was too busy to leave Menlo Park, Lowrey offered to bring Morgan himself and his partner Fabbri out to Edison’s laboratory for a tour of inspection, “to see the rubbish and rejects, so that they might form some idea of the actual operation and its present difficulties.” But it was not until mid-April of 1879, after much pressure had been put upon him, that Edison agreed to hold a private demonstration at Menlo Park — for the benefit of his financial partners — of his high-resistance platinum lamp.

As Jehl relates:

 

They came to Menlo Park on a late afternoon train from New York. It was already dark, when they were conducted into the machine shop where we had several platinum lamps installed in series... Mr. Morgan and Mr. Lowrey and the others stopped at the library for half an hour or so while our chief reported to them verbally on the results of his experiments so far.²⁹⁷

 

Menlo Park’s scientific community had undergone a considerable physical expansion in the previous six months. About fifty men were still at work constructing the big engine house in back of the laboratory. In front of the laboratory, at the advice of the “stage manager” Lowrey, a neat brick building housing the office and library had been completed, with a clublike reception room equipped with the finest cherry-wood furniture, such as one saw then in Wall Street.

After the conference was over, the group crossed the yard to the laboratory, where the “boss” showed them pieces of platinum coil he was using for his lamps, pointed out the arrangements of lights on brackets along the walls, described the Gramme type of generator he hoped to install soon, as well as the voltage and current characteristics he was trying for. Then, the room having grown quite dark, he gave “Honest John” Kruesi the order to “turn on the juice slowly.”

 

Today, I can see those lamps rising to a cherry-red, “like glow-bugs,” one of the eye-witnesses wrote afterward, “and hear Mr. Edison saying: ‘A little more juice’ and the lamps began to glow. ‘A little more’... and then one emits a light like a star, after which there is an eruption and a puff, and the machine shop is in total darkness. We knew instantly which lamp had failed, and Batchelor replaced that with a good one. The operation was repeated two or three times, with about the same results, after which the party went into the library to talk things over until it was time to catch the train for New York.²⁹⁸

 

The platinum coils consumed a lot of power for the light they gave, were costly and short-lived, and still fused; the Wallace-Farmer dynamos being used temporarily heated up badly. It was a transitional model of a lamp that Edison showed Morgan and the others, for he was bent on obtaining a much better vacuum. Moreover his parallel circuit seems not to have been tried yet, as Jehl indicates, for this could not be demonstrated until he had finished making a new type of constant-voltage dynamo (on which he had also been experimenting at the time).

Edison stated that the system was not yet “practical”; it was not the parallel circuit he envisaged. But one of the visiting magnates, Robert F. Cutting, had been learning something about the early carbon vacuum lamps of Starr, demonstrated in 1845, and, in a tone of keen disappointment, remarked, “I have read Mr. Starr’s book, and it seems to me it would have been better to spend a few dollars for a copy of it and to begin where he left off, rather than spend fifty thousand dollars coming independently to the same stopping point.”

Edison tried to explain that the incandescent light would not be found where Starr had searched and left off; that Starr had “passed over it. So have I. That is why I want to go back over it again.”²⁹⁹

But it was not easy to explain these things to a man of business. It was a gloomy gathering that broke up on that cold, raw April evening and returned to New York. All of Lowrey’s abounding faith would be needed to rally their spirits and persuade them to shell out more cash. Some rumors of the disappointing demonstration of his platinum lamps now leaked out; as a result, Edison Electric Light stock, which had risen to $600 a share, fell sharply, while gaslight securities began to recover.

A leading New York daily chose this time to publish a scathing article entitled, “What has Mr. Edison Discovered?” It reported that though the impulsive young inventor had made many sweeping claims, “well-informed electricians did not believe that Mr. Edison is even on the right line of experiments.” In the opinion of a rival inventor of much experience in this field, W. E. Sawyer, the publication of Edison’s latest lamp patent revealed “nothing new”; and all his efforts were doomed to “final, necessary and ignominious failure.”³⁰⁰

After the delegation of financiers had left, Jehl recalled, his chief walked about the laboratory with a distracted air for a long time, his hands thrust into his side pockets in a characteristic pose, his head down, his hair falling over his face — “like Napoleon on the eve of a battle.”

He had found out a good many things: how to make an improved vacuum; how to raise the resistance of his incandescing coil. But time was pressing. And he realized that there were fatal defects in his first high-resistance light. Platinum, he saw, was really an obstacle in this hunt, and he had expended enormous effort in struggling with it.³⁰¹

Later he said that in trying to perfect some invention he often would run up against “a granite wall a hundred feet high.” If after many trials he could not get over it, he would retreat and turn to something different. Then some day something would be discovered, by himself or someone else, that he saw would help him scale “at least a part of that wall.”³⁰²

In adversity he could be highly philosophical. “Even if you gave much time and labor to learning the hundreds of wrong ways of doing a thing,” he would say, it might lead, in the end, to the right way. But once he became convinced that he had mistaken his path, as with the disappointing platinum light, then he could show great resolution and speed in retracing his steps.

“After that exhibition,” Jehl said, “we had a general house-cleaning at the laboratory, and the metallic (i.e., platinum) lamps were stored away.”³⁰³