14 ~ “Science and dollars...”
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At 65 Fifth Avenue, the New York “showroom” of the Edison Company, Edison was very much in the public eye during most of five years, meeting all and sundry who came to make inquiry about his system, explaining and demonstrating it. During this period the brownstone mansion also served as a busy social center, where financiers, politicians, artists, inventors, and “cranks,” too, arrived in a constant stream to see and enjoy the “genius of electricity.” One of the callers chanced to be the Hungarian Ede Remenyi, one of the world’s most celebrated violinists. Remenyi was so greatly intrigued by the creator of the phonograph that on one occasion he played his violin for him all night long — “two thousand dollars’ worth,” as the calculating Edison figured it. But the most constant callers were journalists who came virtually every day to interview him. And these gentlemen of the fourth estate were most liberal smokers of the cigars Edison always kept in a box on his desk.
“I could not keep a cigar,” the inventor used to complain of those days. Even if he locked them up in a desk, safe from newspaper men, his own associates would break it open to get at them. Thus he conceived the idea of teaching these people a lesson, and ordered a box of trick cigars — made of old paper and hair — which he left on his desk. Two months later the tradesman who had sold him these false cigars happened to come in and ask how their hoax had worked. The preoccupied Edison, however, confessed that he had forgotten all about the cigars and no longer remembered what had happened to them. They were all gone. “On coming to investigate, it appeared... that I had smoked them all!”
The first of the myth-making biographies of Edison had begun to appear in 1879; they were followed by a spate of articles, books, and pamphlets of the Samuel Smiles category, drawing lessons from his singular career. Edison was not a money lord, nor one of the new railroad kings, nor a soldier, nor a statesman; and yet (unusual in the case of a scientific worker) he was widely accepted as one of the great men of the age. It was said that he typified “Yankee inventiveness” and the American’s “materialistic optimism”; thanks to him, “Science was marching onward with giant strides.” The whole world felt so much the stimulating power of his creativeness that men asked themselves, “What is there that cannot be? Where are the limits of human investigation? What next?”416
Was it possible that there were barriers, insurmountable to ordinary mortals, that might delay or resist the progress of the modern “king of inventors?” It was possible. In fact, the pity of it was that affairs were not going at all as well as appeared on the surface for the Edison Electric Illuminating Company, upon whose fortunes the inventor had staked everything he had. In its first years, the Pearl Street central station lost money. Its business grew steadily, to be sure, until it had 508 consumers using 10,164 lamps in 1884. But Edison had promised a whole chain of such light and power stations; yet years passed, and no other central station was built in New York, while the Pearl Street center remained limited in capacity.
The difficulty was that heavy investment in plant and machinery was needed in relation to output of electric energy and light. In this respect the electric light industry was wholly different from that of the telegraph, where some wire, batteries, and cheap sounders brought big revenues. The large capital needed for the rapid spread of the Edison system was simply not forthcoming. The directors of his company, having backed him on a limited scale, showed what the inventor called “the characteristic timidity of capital.” There were many lines where men could make money rapidly; but in electric power the process seemed slow and costly.417
It seemed to Edison that he alone “could take hold and push the system,” as he said in 1883. He added:
I have come to the conclusion that my system of lighting having been perfected should be promoted... It is all so complicated that I do not like trusting it to new and untried hands; because science and dollars are so mixed up in it.418
Now that his prototype of an electric power and light station had been produced, one would think that other and lesser men could be left to duplicate it elsewhere, rather than that his unique talents should be wasted in such routine work. Yet this was what he felt compelled to do.
“I’m going to be a business man,” he told a friend in the summer of 1883. “I’m a regular contractor now for electric lighting plants, and I’m going to take a long vacation in the matter of inventions.”419
Though the newspapers might call him the “millionaire inventor,” he described himself as “machine-rich and cash-poor.” Most of his days were spent in managing his electrical equipment factories, overseeing the installing of new central stations himself, and promoting new Edison companies — which left him little leisure for experimentation. Most of Edison’s workers then had still to learn their trade. And so he must have eyes everywhere; he must be literally in twenty places at the same time, lest some disastrous accident occur.
In 1882 and 1883 preparations were under way to establish central lighting stations in a dozen or more large cities, such as Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, and Detroit. But to Edison’s surprise it was the demand for small, independent, or “isolated,” lighting plants, such as he had built two years ago for the S.S. Columbia, that provided the largest part of his company’s business at the outset. Factories, department stores, hotels and even ranches called for such lighting installations in ever increasing volume. To meet this growing demand, the Edison Company for Isolated Lighting had been set up at the end of 1881, as a subsidiary of Edison Electric Light, a majority of its stock being allotted to the parent company. In addition to furnishing such plants for private concerns the Isolated Lighting company also installed them in many small towns where there was as yet no gaslight. To supply this demand a large stock of dynamos, conducting wires, lamps, and appliances of many kinds was needed.
The customers for isolated plants who flooded the Edison organization with their orders also needed credit, as a rule, in order to establish their local facilities. Edison therefore set up another subsidiary to expedite this business, naming it the T. A. Edison Construction Department. Young Samuel Insull was placed in charge here. The local capitalists in a small town would offer Edison’s organization their notes and bonds, or sometimes stock in the local power company under construction (as well as lesser sums in cash); and central station equipment would be supplied to them by Edison’s manufacturing companies. But such securities were not easy to convert into cash. As Insull relates, some of the plants were too hastily built; thus the Construction Department handling the business acquired the unsavory name of “Destruction Department.” After a few years it was dissolved and its business turned over to another company in the Edison group.420
In the early period Edison insisted that everything of moment connected with his enterprises be brought to his personal attention by his assistants, and be subjected to his own scrutiny. It was impossible to handle the affairs of his sprawling organization in such wise; yet he attempted it, hastening from one place to another, going by train from Boston, to Louisville, to Chicago, and thence to a small town in Pennsylvania, for example, in one tour of inspection in 1883.
There was trouble-shooting without end. For the power station at Brockton, Massachusetts, a superintendent who was a former locomotive engineer had been selected because of his reputed steadiness of nerve. But when a smoldering fire started under the floor of the powerhouse as a result of a short circuit, he simply took off and ran. At another small station a “wire man” dropped an oil can between two conductors, and was astonished to find both oil and can melt away. Even a brilliant young engineer like Frank J. Sprague, on being put in charge of a small steam-dynamo unit at Sunbury, Pennsylvania, at first showed himself unfamiliar with the oiling mechanism of the new Armington-Sims steam engine. “I... did not know how it worked,” he related, “with the result that we soon burned up the Babbitt metal in the bearings and spent a good part of the night getting them in order.” The next day Edison himself appeared at Sunbury and “there followed remarks that would not look well in print.”421
Whether he promoted his system at the Fifth Avenue mansion, or hustled about to distant trouble spots, Edison was always without constraint or airs. On December 12, 1882, the Bijou was to open in Boston, the first American theater to use incandescent lights, and the inventor himself hastened there to supervise the installations. The Governor of Massachusetts and his military aides were on hand in full uniform at the première to hold a fête in Edison’s honor in one of the theater boxes. The curtain duly rose on the operetta Iolanthe; but in the second act the lights went dark red and kept turning dim. Edison and Edward Johnson, who accompanied him, immediately rushed down to the cellar of the theater, where they discovered that a leak in the steam boiler had caused the fire to go down. Casting aside their swallowtail coats and silk hats, Edison and Johnson went to work at once shoveling coal into the fire so that steam pressure might be maintained. The ceremony and speechmaking scheduled for the entr’acte were held up indefinitely, much to Edison’s satisfaction, for it was well known that he heartily disliked all such formalities.
A similar incident occurred a few months later, at the opening of the Southern Exposition in Louisville, Kentucky, for which Edison’s company had arranged an important display of his (improved) electric locomotive and of a circuit of 4,600 lamps that was to create veritable “fountains of light.” The city’s Board of Trade had ordered a splendid banquet in his honor, to begin immediately upon the arrival of the great man by train from New York. The table was set, the toastmasters waited. No Edison. Wiring trouble had developed down in the generating plant below the exposition hall. On being informed of this, immediately upon his arrival at the gate, Edison had disappeared into the cellar to direct workmen trying to repair the power plant. One of the electricians present was H. M. Byllesby who, in later years, like Insull, was to become one of America’s leading public utility magnates. To the young electricians it was “wonderful” to see Edison working by their side, all covered with grease and soot, while the sybaritic banquet prepared for him by Louisville’s leading citizens grew cold. What they enjoyed most was “his attitude of caring nothing for what others thought of him, and paying no attention to frills and fancies.”422
Back in New York, he might be working over the specifications for some new lighting plant, or snatching time to make some experiment in his little laboratory at Goerck Street. But glancing through the window for a moment and seeing the sky turn dark with an approaching storm reminded him at once that the Pearl Street station might be overloaded. In 1883 they had put the whole New York Stock Exchange, with its many lights, on that small station. Edison must telephone at once to the superintendent at the station and ask him about the load. “We are up to the muzzle and everything is running all right,” was the reply. They had at that time only an “indexlike steam gauge, called an ampere-meter, to indicate the amount of current going out,” Edison relates. When the sky grew so black that he could not see across the street, he telephoned again and learned that “Everything is red-hot and the ampere-meter has made seventeen revolutions. It’s spittin’ copper!” The Stock Exchange did go dark one of those days, and much of Wall Street with it, though Edison’s emergency crew struggled to replace burned-out junction boxes as soon as possible.423
He was promoter and engineer in one; but there was also the Edison who was an irrepressible showman, a “histrionic” character, as his detractors put it. In any case, he would not have been Thomas A. Edison if he had not, betimes, indulged in horseplay or even downright clowning.
Niblo’s Garden, an old music hall that was long the center of New York’s night life, was a place he often enjoyed visiting. On one occasion the proprietor, who always showed him marked favor, conceived of a new pantomime, “a great Mimical Dramatic Ballet” entitled “Excelsior,” which was to do honor to Edison’s incandescent light. Through the cooperation of the inventor, a 55-volt dynamo, supplying five hundred small lamps, was obtained, and the drama of electricity was depicted. A high point in the affair was an electrically illuminated model of the recently completed Brooklyn Bridge; the concluding number featured a troupe of stout ballet dancers, Niblo’s version of the Beef Trust, who were each to wave a wand with an Edison lamp at the tip of it. But what if the connections were broken by the animated movements of the girls? The great inventor himself was therefore called upon to supervise the installation of the lighting effects and check the wiring of the electrified costumes at the final rehearsals.
It was thus that the theatrical reviewer of one of the metropolitan dailies happened to observe Edison “moving about among the girls and adjusting their corsets,” while inserting a little battery in the bosom of each member of the ballet. At a given signal, during the dance, electric lights flashed merrily from each girl’s forehead, as well as from her wand. Niblo’s program of 1883 proudly advertised “novel lighting effects by the Edison Electric Light Company under the personal direction of Mr. Thos. Edison.”424
During his four years’ sojourn in New York, Edison kept his usual late hours, and enjoyed a fair amount of night life, although more often than not this was of a quite serious order. After working in the impromptu laboratory at Goerck Street up to midnight, he would set off on a walk to some restaurant for a late supper. Often people stared at him, as his appearance was familiar to many. Since his city clothes were usually a sober black, others who did not recognize him lifted their hats, mistaking him for a priest. Often he would go to the home of Sigmund Bergmann, who lived nearby, and call him out, however late the hour: “Bergmann, get dressed and come down... I want to speak to you on a matter.” When Bergmann joined him they would repair to a German café on Second Avenue. While eating and drinking, Edison would make notes and draw rough sketches on the menu card; these were schemes for improved electrical appliances that he would turn over to Bergmann for production.425
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He could pretend that he was giving up inventing for some years because of the pressure of business affairs. But he could no more stop observing things, or experimenting, than he could stop breathing. Under the stress of serious business troubles, and the nervous tension of life in the midst of New York, he seemed to grow not fatigued, but all the more stimulated; he fairly bubbled with new ideas.
The ten years from 1873 to 1883, or from age twenty-six to thirty-six, constitute the most productive phase of Edison’s career. It is not unusual that scientific workers reach their peak in young manhood. The period that began with his multiplex telegraph, and then witnessed the arrival of the talking machine, ended with scores of incandescent-lighting inventions and new processes, one or two of which alone might have made the reputation of an ordinary inventor. In the one year 1882, he is recorded as having applied for 141 patents — this at the height of his intense activity in engineering and promoting the Edison system. Many of these patents covered new manufacturing processes for accessories, as well as refinements in his lamp, dynamo, and electrical circuits; others were entirely dissociated from his electric lighting work, reflecting some sudden shift of interest; such was a magnetic ore-separator patent, applied for on April 3, 1880, providing a new method for the extraction of low-grade iron ore. Still other contrivances were not even patented by him, but kept as trade secrets. More than one writer on the history of modern invention has remarked that Edison’s inventive fertility during this period is without parallel.
The enormous creative activity of this decade is climaxed, in 1883, by a purely scientific discovery of an unknown, or hitherto unobserved, effect — as physicists call any fact of nature or group of natural phenomena not explainable or classifiable according to existing scientific theory. It was a discovery whose future importance none then could estimate, neither Edison, who came upon it “by accident,” nor the scientists of his time, whose curiosity was drawn to it momentarily.
As was his habit, Edison was “looking for things,” when he unexpectedly opened a door leading to the still unknown world of electronics, which was to become the familiar purlieu of the twentieth century’s men of science. He did not understand the nature of the phenomenon he had discovered; but that it was a “peculiar” phenomenon and not in accord with existing knowledge, he did realize; he also grasped that it might conceivably be of importance. At that time men still thought in terms of molecules as the smallest unit of material; the electrons he was actually experimenting with were unknown and were to remain unknown for a good many years.
The discovery of the phenomenon later named by scientists “Edison effect” came as a by-product of the inventor’s unceasing efforts to extend the life and efficiency of his incandescent lamp. This work went on intensively after he moved to New York, in the room he had equipped as a laboratory at the Goerck Street works.
He had noticed, as indicated by his laboratory notebook entries for February 13 and February 18, 1880, that his light bulbs became blackened, apparently through the collection of particles of carbon deposited on the inside of the glass bulb. As this accumulation of an opaque deposit shortened the life of the bulbs, he made patient efforts to determine what caused it. The deposit turned out to be particles or atoms of carbon that were evidently being discharged or “carried” (as he wrote) from the fine carbon filament, under high heat, to the inside surface of the globe.
On further study, Edison and his associates made two significant observations about this black deposit that so baffled them. In the first place, there was always, after a while, a narrow white streak on the inside of the glass bulb, a sort of negative “shadow” falling in the plane of the horseshoe-shaped carbon filament. It appeared that one leg of the filament obstructed the flight of atoms from the other leg so that not all of them reached the inside surface of the bulb; hence the shadow area in that line of direction. A second important observation Edison made was that the shadow was always cast by the leg of the filament connected to the positive side of the d-c circuit supplying the lamp. Therefore, he reasoned, the tiny particles of carbon were being shot off in straight lines from the negative leg of the filament.
These studies suffered long interruptions, while Edison pioneered the first central lighting stations; then, in the summer of 1882, we find him back on the same trail, puzzled but persistent. Was it electrical current that “carried,” or deposited, those carbon particles? But how could this occur in such a high vacuum?
To be sure, it had been known, since experiments of two hundred years before, that the air in contact with red-hot metal had peculiar electrical properties as regards the dissipation of an electrical charge.426 For years Edison had been aware that some sort of electrical discharge went on within his vacuous bulb, creating a blue glow at the stage when he sent a current through the carbon filament to eliminate its occluded gases. Now it occurred to him that the carbon particles “carried” from his electrically charged filament might themselves be charged, and therefore could perhaps be deflected, or collected, by means of an extra pole, or positively charged electrode, inserted inside the bulb. This idea is set forth and signed in a notebook entry for July 5, 1882; a first rough sketch by Edison of a two-element vacuum bulb was drawn by him, showing the added electrode, and his explanatory comment, “Prevent electrical carrying.” The two-electrode bulb made after this sketch bears a striking resemblance to a diode, or two-element vacuum tube.
After some interruptions, extending for several months, he was back again at his laboratory table, in March, 1883, studying the problem of the discolored lamps. Perhaps the added electrode might serve to eliminate those black deposits? The experimental bulb that he began to test at this time had a platinum wire inserted vertically in the half-inch space between the legs of the horseshoe carbon filament. When the bulb was exhausted of air and sealed, and the added electrode connected to the positive side of the circuit, he found that a current flowed and gave a good deflection to the galvanometer; when it was connected to the negative side no current flowed. This was exciting: there was current passing through the vacuous space of the bulb, without wires, as he carefully noted. This lamp was tested during many experiments. Various metals were tried, such as tin foil, and in diverse forms, in his attempts to get more galvanometer deflection, until the Edison-effect lamp had a metallic plate as its second electrode, set between the legs of the carbon filament but not touching them.427 (Here was the primitive vacuum tube that others, in the early 1900s, were to use for wireless telegraphy.)
Edison had discovered some of the fundamental facts about thermionic currents. They flowed through the vacuum of the lamp. We must have this trick patented, he tells himself, and so on November 15, 1883, he files application for a voltage-regulating device using the two-electrode bulb (Patent No. 307,031):
I have discovered that if a conducting substance is interposed anywhere in the vacuous space within the globe of an incandescent electric lamp, and said conducting substance is connected outside the lamp with one terminal, preferably the positive one of the incandescent conductor, a portion of the current will, when the lamp is in operation, pass through the shunt-circuit thus formed, which shunt includes a portion of the vacuous space within the lamp. The current I have found to be proportional to the degree of incandescence of the conductor or candle power of the lamp.
Pages from Edison’s notebook when he was experimenting with the “Edison effect,” an outgrowth of electric-light research which foreshadowed the development of the electron tube.
A report written at the time, at Edison’s order, by one of the laboratory assistants, covering the work they had done on this lamp, or “tube,” shows that the inventor realized he certainly had something strange there. “This is a recent discovery,” the memorandum begins. It outlines the form and structure of the Edison-effect lamp and describes experiments made at different candle powers, so that at twenty-five candle power “a very powerful current” is achieved, one that is “perfectly continuous and capable of supplying a telegraph wire of 200 miles in length with current to work the instrument, notwithstanding that the globe is exhausted to a millionth of an atmosphere and the current must pass a space of at least half an inch.”428
The Edison-effect lamp was, in fact, the first electronic instrument; its creation made Edison “the father of modern electronics.” That it functioned through the generation and movement of free electrons in space none knew as yet. No one then dreamed of what it would mean for the future of radio, for long-distance communication without wires, for sound amplification, television, radar, and many other thermionic devices.
What Edison was concerned with was how to put this discovery to some practical or “commercial” use. His thought was that the Edison-effect lamp might be used as a sensitive indicator of changes in lamp filament voltages. He therefore had his faithful draftsman, John Ott, make a precise drawing of an Edison-effect lamp utilized in a circuit of ordinary incandescent lights, connected in parallel, so that it served as an indicator of change in voltage. It was not only the first instance of an electronic application, but it incorporated, at that early day, Edison’s appreciation of a basic characteristic of the thermionic tube, its “immense responsiveness,” as shown in the relatively high rate of variation of electron emission from a hot filament with variation of voltage of the filament.429 Later inventors would find, long afterward, that the charges of electrons in a thermionic tube were so exceedingly small that they could regulate even the very rapid and irregular increases or decreases of current needed to reproduce music or the human voice with complete accuracy.
The Edison-effect lamp, mounted in a circuit as an indicator of incandescent-light voltages, was exhibited at the International Electrical Exposition held in Philadelphia in September, 1884. The inventor recalls that be also put a telegraphic sounder in circuit with the Edison-effect lamp, and it worked very well. Actually it did not operate efficiently as an instrument for indicating voltage changes as Edison had hoped; perhaps because the vacuum of the two-element bulb was not high and constant enough as yet. For various reasons he did not pursue these investigations. Many years later he explained his inaction by saying, “As I was overworked at the time in connection with the introduction of my electric light system I did not have time to continue the experiment.”430
This first attempt at an electronic instrument aroused a serious, though passing, interest among a gathering of scientists who examined it in Philadelphia in 1884. Professor Edwin J. Houston, the associate of Elihu Thomson, who had ridiculed Edison’s gropings with electromagnetic waves almost a decade earlier, now called attention to the extremely curious and mystifying “high vacuum phenomena observed by Mr. Edison,” as something potentially important. “I am inclined to believe,” he said in a quite prophetic passage, “that we may possibly have here a new source of electrical excitement.”431
The learned British engineer Sir William H. Preece (also a repentant adversary) made it his business to visit America and arrived in Philadelphia to study the imposing display of Edison’s recent electrical creations. The Edison-effect lamps aroused his curiosity more than anything else. He obtained several models and brought them back to England. In his subsequent paper on the subject, read before the Royal Society in 1885, Preece originated the term “Edison effect.” As William D. Coolidge wrote in 1950, looking back on this episode, men were baffled because “they knew — or thought they knew — that no current could flow through a vacuum.” They did not know, of course, that a hidden area of the natural world was now being opened to them.432
Ambrose Fleming, in London, also pursued lengthy experiments with an Edison-effect bulb which, as he afterward related, he desired to improve upon so that it could be used, as Edison had hoped, as a voltage-indicating instrument for generators. After a while he gave up these studies, scarcely comprehending what was under foot.
There followed a “dark period,” or relapse of investigation in this field, such as often occurs in the history of science. Hertz’s production and detection of electromagnetic waves still lay several years in the future. It was not until 1897 that J. J. Thomson, the British physicist, after intensive study of the Edison effect, demonstrated that it was caused by the emission of negative electricity, or electrons, passing from the hot element to the second, or cold, electrode inserted in the bulb.433 Thus Edison’s discovery, when finally accounted for, constituted an important step toward the unveiling of the electron.
Meanwhile, to return to the period of the Philadelphia Exposition in the autumn of 1884, Edison’s attitude toward his own discovery was something like blank puzzlement, as suggested by some occasional correspondence he had then with interested scholars. A few months before the Philadelphia Exposition, he remarked in one of his outspoken interviews, this time with a writer for a technical journal, “In experimenting, I find a good many things I never looked for”; and he added that he had lately been running into a “lot of things I dared not touch,” a possible reference to his experiments with the baffling two-element bulb.434 He habitually assumed a pose of studied indifference to the work of theoretical scientists and mathematicians — eggheads to him! — revealing some sense of inferiority about his own lack of academic knowledge, as shown in the following note to one inquiring correspondent:
I have never had time to go into the aesthetic part of my work — never have — done very little with it. But it has, I am told a very important bearing on some laws now being formulated by the Bulged-headed fraternity of the Savanic World [sic]. I will send you a half-dozen lamps if you want to have a little amusement.435
Then he completely lost interest in those elusive, pulsating electrons and his thermionic tube. Thus he also lost a marvelous opportunity to play a leading role in the new electronic field of wireless telegraphy, and all the other technical developments based on free electrons.
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Nevertheless, the problem of obtaining “distant effects” through nonclosed electrical circuits had held his attention for a good many years, and he studied it again after 1884. Had he not, when bringing forth his black box to exhibit the so-called “etheric force” in 1875, predicted that telegraphic communication would one day be carried on without the “useless encumbrance” of wires? In the 1840s Morse had sent electrical impulses, by induced current, for a mile or so through a body of water, or through several hundred feet of earth without wires. In the early eighties, William H. Preece in England, John Trowbridge, the Harvard University physicist, and Edison, among others, studied the same problem of inductive telegraphy. Lately an old friend of telegraph days, Ezra T. Gilliland, who had flourished a little as an engineer of telephonic devices, had begun to work with Edison over such experiments in the small laboratory at Goerck Street.
Edison had it in mind to devise an instrument by which a man traveling across the Western prairies could telegraph messages and receive replies while riding in a train. The plan involved the installation of a special telegraph line, strung on poles of car height and parallel to the track. Along the top of one or more railway carriages he would install an insulated metallic strip, connected in series with a telephone receiver and the secondary circuit of an induction coil through the wheels and rails to the earth. For transmitting, the system would include a battery, key, and high-pitched “buzzer” in the primary circuit, and a switch for changing from “send” to “receive.” Duplicate apparatus, connected between wire and ground, would be installed at each wayside telegraph office. By such means Edison proposed to span by induction the 30 to 50 feet between metal strips on the cars and the telegraph wires and so communicate between moving cars and dispatchers’ stations. Impulses at both ends would be received as musical buzzes of short and long duration.436 Such was the space telegraph, or “grasshopper telegraph,” as it was called. (Patent was applied for on May 14, 1885, granted as No. 465,971.)
Edison and Gilliland tried out their space telegraph on a small railway in Staten Island, New York, with very curious results. The operator reported that he could send messages all right when the train was going in one direction, but not when it was going in a contrary direction. In a spirit of raillery, Edison tells how he made a long list of suggestions, without avail; finally he asked the operator if he had any to make himself. “I received a reply that the only way he could propose was to put the island on a pivot so it could be turned around.”437
After a while the bugs were eliminated and the system tried on another railroad, the Lehigh Valley, with considerable success. Then, according to Edison’s droll but apocryphal account, the patents, which he held jointly with Gilliland and L. J. Phelps, of Western Union, were supposedly sold to a wealthy but highly eccentric individual who would neither promote the invention nor answer letters appealing to him to do so. He was a spiritualist and used it himself, no doubt, to listen to voices from another world!
A variant of this system was devised by Edison, using electrostatic induction to “broadcast” telegraph messages without wires, for distances of up to three miles. (At Menlo Park, in 1880, he had rigged up a similar inductive telegraph without wires that “sent” about 580 feet.) This was accomplished by means of masts a hundred feet tall, atop which he installed metallic plates. The height of his masts enabled him, presumably, to overcome a little of the curvature of the earth’s surface and permitted signaling or telegraphing over the sea between distant points. His patent specifications also suggested that the masts of ships could be similarly utilized for signaling to other ships, and thus prevent collision in fogs.
Essentially, Edison had an electrostatic machine, creating no high-frequency oscillations, but using an arrangement for discharging an induction coil into the metal plate at the top of the mast. No aerial wires or antennae were involved. The electrostatic charge on the plate atop the sending mast induced a similar charge on the metal plate on the distant receiving mast, which sent a current through its own circuit and caused a click in the chalk-disk telephone receiver.438
“This was the forerunner of wireless telegraphy,” Edison said ruefully many years later in recollection of his train telegraph and marine-aerial device. It is all very interesting and suggestive, but it is not so. Moreover, there is no evidence that his seagoing inductive telegraph was practically operative.
The inventor is also recorded as having said regretfully many years later:
What has always puzzled me since, is that I did not think of using the results of my experiments on “etheric force” that I made in 1875. I have never been able to understand how I came to overlook them. If I had made use of my own work I should have had long-distance telegraphy.439
His role in leading the way to the development of radio and electronic science has, however, been accepted by modern historians as significant. A year or two after he dropped his studies of the inductive telegraph, Heinrich Hertz, in Germany, using a condenser discharge, created and shot forth electromagnetic waves which were detected by tiny sparks in a resonator at the other side of a large room. The use of “radio waves,” or electrical oscillations of high frequency, for wireless telegraphy now became a distinct possibility, as the young Marconi perceived several years after Hertz’s experiment. The older methods of inductive telegraphy were thereupon abandoned.
After Hertz’s world-renowned demonstration, Fleming was induced to examine again the possibilities of the Edison-effect lamp; in 1888 he finally devised a little metallic cylinder — instead of the plate formerly used — as the second electrode, which he inserted into the vacuum bulb to enclose the negative leg of the carbon filament. Now the improved Edison-effect tube could be used to rectify, or convert, an alternating or oscillating current into a unidirectional current.
Marconi’s primitive wireless apparatus of 1895-1896 employed the so-called “coherer” of Edouard Branly to detect radio signals; it was a glass tube filled with loose iron filings (in a closed circuit with a galvanometer and battery). But some years afterward, in 1897, there came the important discoveries of J. J. Thomson concerning the physical properties and velocity of electronic charges; then Fleming, who began to work as a consultant for Marconi, finally conceived of the idea of using his refined Edison-effect vacuum tube, or “Fleming valve,” as he called it, to detect high-frequency radio currents. It proved to be far more sensitive and reliable than the coherer; in consequence, after 1904, the Marconi Telegraph Company adopted what was really the Edison-Fleming vacuum tube as a detector of radio waves, obtaining a greatly increased range of communication.440
Thus, after more than twenty years, Edison’s old two-electrode tube, or Edison-effect lamp, came into its own as one of the basic elements of all electronic communication. Two years later, the Edison-Fleming device was to be improved still further by the American engineer Lee De Forest, whose strategic invention of the triode — with its platinum grid as a third electrode — gave the world a perfected vacuum tube that could amplify radio signals as well as detect them.
But it must be remembered that it was Edison who discovered what has been called by scientists the best source of thermionic emission, the current of electrons flowing through a highly exhausted vacuous space. Moreover he had had the wit to stop and demonstrate the unexplained phenomenon and, in the form of a first electronic device, to call the attention of scientists to it. On the other hand, experimenting with and studying free electrons was foreign to his type of mind. He could not visualize the minute electron, which, in the words of Sir Oliver Lodge, “stood in relation to the atom as a fly to a cathedral.” He could not hope, with his own knowledge of science, which was wide though in some ways limited too, to measure and calculate waves of charged particles as did J. J. Thomson; or catch electrons “by ones, twos, and threes,” as did Robert A. Millikan later on, and so measure the forces exerted upon them by an electric field.
Significantly enough, three of the most vital elements of radio telephony were actually in his possession around that time: the microphone, invented by him several years earlier; the Edison-effect bulb; and finally, the elevated aerial mast he was to contrive in 1885. Yet he passed them all by, and pursued other interests. Had he applied himself seriously to study of this new field, it is conceivable that, with his unrivaled inventive talent, he might have advanced radio communication by some fifteen years. But the history of science is full of such tremendous near misses. The brilliant French scientist Ampère, teetering on the edge of discovery of induced electricity ten years before Faraday, missed it completely.
No, the empire of radio was not to be Edison’s — though his carbon filament lamp of 1879 and his two-element vacuum tube of 1883 were the direct ancestors of De Forest’s marvelous radio tube of 1906. It has, in fact, been used, by way of demonstration, in modern radio receivers. Edison’s empirical studies in electromagnetic, sonic, and incandescent-lighting phenomena swelled the stream of scientific knowledge, just as James Watt’s practical inventive work on the early steam engine led the way to a wider knowledge of thermodynamics. But the old order of technical and scientific work belonging to the “heroic age” of inventors was to change drastically as the nineteenth century drew to its close; the interaction of invention and scientific activity was to assume a wholly different relationship, in which theoretical scientists, grouped in “teams” with technicians, around large research institutions, were to become preeminent in advancing the technology of radio and electronics and, later, of atomic energy, while the older type of individual or free-lance inventor played a lesser role. Paradoxically, it was Thomas A. Edison, the foremost of that older type, who himself invented the organized research laboratory which would tend to eliminate his own kind.
After he read of Hertz’s famous experiments, Edison said to one of his intimates: “Well, I’m not a scientist. I’m an inventor. Faraday was a scientist. He didn’t work for money... Said he hadn’t time to do so. But I do. I measure everything I do by the size of the silver dollar. If it don’t come up to that standard then I know it’s no good.”441 In 1884, incidentally, Edison could scarcely raise enough silver dollars to promote his already practicable electric light system — let alone experiment with unknown and, to him, incalculable free electrons.
It is, however, true that he continued to maintain his pose of méfiance toward the theoretical scientists and to snipe at mathematicians. After Upton had become absorbed in managerial work for Edison, he was succeeded, in 1887, as scientific consultant, by a truly distinguished mathematical physicist, Dr. Arthur E. Kennelly, of Anglo-Irish descent and education, then in his young manhood. Kennelly was patient and charming with Thomas A. Edison and showed a real appreciation of his qualities. One day Edison’s private secretary, A. O. Tate, heard Kennelly, while Edison was in his office, roaring with laughter. When the inventor came out, Tate inquired what the fun was about. Edison exclaimed impatiently, “Oh these mathematicians make me tired! When you ask them to work out a sum they take a piece of paper, cover it with rows of A’s, B’s, and X’s and Y’s... scatter of mess of flyspecks over them, and then give you an answer that’s all wrong!”
Kennelly, however, was to play a notable role in twentieth-century science and one day, with his pencil and paper, was to discover — concomitantly with Oliver Heaviside — the ionosphere, since known to science as the Kennelly-Heaviside layer.
The same witness who quoted Edison on his acceptance of the silver dollar as his standard of scientific currency also goes on to remark (as did so many others) that he actually never seemed to care for the possession of money itself, nor even know how to hold on to it. “In the expenditure of money for experimentation... it made no difference to him what the cost might be.” It was his religion of experiment, his passion for more exact knowledge and superior results, his extravagances in research, that used to frighten his own capitalist patrons. Though he was admittedly no “pure scientist,” he was no “mere” mechanical inventor either.442 His prodigious and watchful activities in so many branches of scientific work, as well as his “intuitions,” contributed to the advancement of knowledge itself. It was because Edison was “always looking for things,” as Charles F. Kettering said, that he inserted a straight wire into an incandescent light bulb and found he could pull a current of electricity out of a vacuum, “thus discovering an inexhaustible source of free electrons.” W. D. Coolidge remarks that the greatest credit was due Edison for both discovering and publishing this new fact of science. “Other men have studied the Edison effect... applied the underlying principle, but it was Mr. Edison’s work which opened the door to this whole field.”443 It was at any rate a scientific discovery of the first class, though only acknowledged as such rather tardily in scientific histories.
4
In those hurried years of the earlier half of his career Edison had virtually no private life as other men usually know it; the relaxed enjoyments of home, a sweet and personable wife, his young children, were things he tasted quickly and sparingly, as if in haste to be back in his “man’s world.” There, in a domain where women were excluded, where all were masculine and bearded fellows — but for the smooth-shaven “chief mucker” — and where his associates worked long and late and swore hearty oaths while they worked; there he was most himself and knew his greatest pleasures.
In his boyhood and youth he had seemed rather solitary; many able inventors have been rather lonely and difficult personalities. Edison, however, had grown accustomed to working with fairly large groups of people and keeping them attached to him through the sheer force of his personality. He seemed to enjoy best of all the company of the veterans of his laboratory, who had marched in many a campaign with him, such as Batchelor, Upton, and the voluble Johnson. But in the middle years new favorites shone in the master’s circle. The diligent young Insull became more and more his confidant, his fidus Achates. Then his friendship of earlier years with Ezra T. Gilliland, the former telegrapher of Cincinnati, was renewed after 1881. Gilliland, a sleek man of large frame, sporting a thick walrus mustache, was now his constant laboratory associate and most trusted friend — Damon to his Pythias, as Edison said. It was Gilliland who drew him a little toward the amenities of social life; Gilliland’s wife, who was intelligent as well as pretty, became a close friend of the Edisons, and her parlor was one of the few that Edison cared to visit.
He clung, nonetheless, to his old-fashioned notions of women’s mental inferiority. “It is very difficult to make women believe anything that is so,” he used to pontificate. “Women as a class are inclined to be obstinate. They do not seem to want to get out of the beaten path.”444 Such opinions, or prejudices, were perhaps strengthened by his feeling about his first wife, Mary Stilwell Edison, a good and simple woman of limited education, who, as he fully realized, scarcely knew anything of what was going on in her husband’s head.
Their married life might have been unhappy had Mary not been so gentle a person and had she not known how to reconcile herself to her lot. In the small hamlet of Menlo Park, though it had become world-famous, her own life was prevailingly of a “dull loneliness,” as the other residents noted.445 The Edisons lived in a substantial and comfortable home; there was a staff of two Negro servants and a coachman; a barn and stable with horses and carriages in the yard; a summer house on the big lawn. But Mary Edison, while seeing all too little of her husband, had only the wives of his married associates, Batchelor, Kruesi, and Upton, as her occasional companions. Thus the young woman was left much alone with her children. At first her sister Alice Stilwell lived with her and helped with the children; but after several years Alice married William Holzer, a foreman of the lamp factory, and moved to a home of her own.
It was fairly customary for Edison to work in his laboratory eighteen or more hours a day, but at the time of the electric light project, he never came home at all for weeks on end, according to a close neighbor, who saw him finally one morning “coming along the plank path to his house walking as though he were asleep.” Some carpenters were at work in the house at the time, and though her husband would not have heard them, Mrs. Edison sent them away, saying, “He has gone into my spare room and rolled right over on the bed in all his dirt and grease, on my nice counterpane and pillow shams, but I don’t care, as long as he gets rest and sleep.”446
Since she was often alone at night, Mary Edison seems to have been terrified of burglars. As her daughter Marion recalled, “She would often sleep with a revolver under her pillow. One night my father forgot his key and, not wishing to waken the whole place, climbed up the trellis onto the porch roof to the bedroom window. Mother, thinking he was a burglar, almost shot him. She let out a scream which father heard, then he called to her, thus preventing a catastrophe.”447
By the 1880s new honors and dignities clothed her. Was she not the consort of one of America’s first citizens, whose fame overleaped the oceans? Yet she remained modest and self-effacing. Rarely did she appear at the laboratory, only eight hundred feet distant, where she knew her husband was engaged night and day. On the few occasions when she did come there the workmen regarded the beautiful young Mrs. Edison, now grown quite stout, with unconcealed admiration. “She was greatly beloved by the men in Edison’s employ,” relates W. K. L. Dickson. “They were proud of her — for she had been one of their own rank in the Newark shop and yet remained as gracious and friendly to them as ever.”448
When he was minded to do so, the unpolished Edison could be most attentive and charming to women, as when Sarah Bernhardt visited him. Though often quite distrait with his wife, he was far from indifferent; indeed he felt a strong attachment to her. He had courted her passionately; she was (after his mother) the only woman in his life up to that time, his first romance, so far as we know. She had shared the lean years with him. Now he was a rich man, though with him ready money was always lacking and he could not often be extravagant to please her. But when a real windfall came, such as a payment for some important patent, he would bring Mary the most costly gifts. Thus, in her first year of residence in New York, she made an impressive appearance one day at a tea party — all bejeweled, dressed in a gown of the richest brocade, with a bodice of satin, the folds of her skirt looped up in a bustle and then flowing behind her in a long train. On such occasions she not only “dressed to kill,” but saw to it that her growing daughter Marion was also elegantly turned out.
When the pace of work permitted relaxation, Edison would devote his Sundays, at least, to his family, sometimes taking them to a nearby beach. In his lighter moments he could be merry enough, bantering his wife and teasing the children unmercifully; but on those Sunday excursions, as Marion recalled, Mary Edison was always “proudly happy” as she rode off with her husband by her side.
When at home on a Sunday, Edison’s mind would go spinning along, still absorbed in the problems and experiments of the week. He might start by reading the newspapers, then the Police Gazette, but would end up poring through technical and scientific publications such as the Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. At meals he would often say little to his family, eat quickly, and leave the table before the others. Decidedly it was not easy to have such a remarkable father.
The stories of his playing with his children seem to date mostly from the earlier years of his first marriage. By way of toys he would bring a batch of old alarm clocks for them to “experiment” with. Sitting down on the floor, he would take the clocks apart and put them together again, bidding his boys to do likewise, evidently hoping that, like himself, they would become fascinated by the mechanical arts. Disappointingly, his small sons, Tom junior and William Leslie, showed no budding passion for rusty alarm clocks; in fact Willie, the younger one, after having reached the considerable age of nine or ten, persisted in playing with a toy train. Angrily the father took the train away from him, declaring that he was “too old” for such things, while the boy wailed.449 But as toys, old alarm clocks could not compare with the tin-foil phonograph and the talking doll that squeaked out Mother Goose rhymes, which he had brought them earlier, to their great delight.
Usually Edison’s love of mischief — which on occasion showed a vein of playful cruelty — came out in his games with his children. One day he brought home a little glass toy in the form of a swan, made by his glass blower, Boehm, and invited one of the children to put the tail of the swan in his mouth and blow. The child was not amused when, from the neck of the swan, water sprayed all over his face, but to Edison that was fun. On another occasion, Mrs. Edison gave a large birthday party for her daughter Marion. The father himself put in an appearance this time and saw to it that the many electric lamps in his house were all functioning. But at the height of the party he slipped down to the cellar and opened the switch, plunging the whole house in total darkness.450
The children found their father not so much unkind as puzzling, and often “difficult.” Marion, the eldest, being a girl, was not expected to become an inventor. She was tall, blond, pretty, and had her father’s verve. “She seemed to be always dancing rather than walking,” one of his associates said of her.451 Her father tended to be more affectionate with her than with his sons, as fathers often are with their daughters. “I think I must have been my father’s favorite,” she recalls. When only ten or eleven she had her own pony and cart and used to drive all about the village at a fast clip; and she could be a daredevil on the electric railway too. Of the children only Marion was allowed to come into the laboratory, for she often brought her father his lunch at noon. At that hour he would usually be taking his cat nap.
He would have liked his eldest son and namesake, who resembled him physically, to be keen of mind and aggressive and energetic like himself. The boy, however, turned out to be rather delicate and sickly.
The holiday of the Fourth of July Edison always devoted to his children. He would rise at five in the morning, put a giant firecracker in a barrel out on the lawn and set it off, arousing the whole neighborhood. “He would become a child himself,” one of his children recalls. “He would have us children run around barefoot and would throw those little Chinese firecrackers at our feet, enjoying himself hugely.”
Sometimes he would put up a ten-foot pole and invite his own children and the neighbors’ children to shinny up and win the coins he placed at the top. To the father’s disappointment Tommy would always prove to be the weakest and the last at such games. On one occasion, the inventor thought of rubbing rosin on the poor boy’s knees, so that he managed in the end to climb the pole — to his father’s evident relief.
Tommy also had an unfortunate way of getting into scrapes. When he was about six he wanted above all things to play in the laboratory and machine shop, for the roaring engines and generators fascinated him. Fearing that the boy would hurt himself his father sternly ordered him to keep out of the building. Tommy disobeyed him, and was soon afterward seen by his father sneaking out of the back door of the machine shop. At once the inventor went to his newly installed telephone and called Mrs. Edison, ordering that the boy be thoroughly spanked. Then with one of his laboratory assistants, Edison climbed to the little balcony on the upper floor of the laboratory and looked toward his house to see what would happen. Tommy arrived at the gate and, to his great surprise, found his mother already there, waiting for him with a switch. “The poor boy could never understand how his mother, while at home, saw him in the shop.”452
Edison’s own father had been at best an indifferent sort of father, with little real understanding of his son. Of Thomas A. Edison his children recalled that he could be both warmly affectionate and playfully, unconsciously cruel, but that most of the time “he hardly ever saw us,” or, “he never thought of us.”
Unfortunately, his disappointment in his eldest son, and also in Willie, revealed itself. Their upbringing, he may have felt, was not of the best, possibly because of Mary’s habitual overindulgence with her children, or her own lack of education. He could not be unaware that his wife was, in fact, somewhat self-indulgent. Her daughter remembered seeing her mother spend whole afternoons idly chatting with a woman friend and consuming an entire box of chocolates. It was bad for Mary Edison’s figure — she became tremendously stout — and bad for her health.
Though not unforgiving, Edison could show a fierce temper, as when an assistant in the laboratory was found in error; then his face would turn black and become distorted with emotion. His family knew these moods too. There was, no doubt, a normal amount of anger and grief and forgiveness in his life with Mary. In the fragment of a diary he wrote in 1885 — after she was so suddenly, tragically gone from him — he dropped some hints of his views on the problems of marriage. His daughter, Marion, though only twelve, had for the moment some literary ambitions.
Dot says she is going to write a novel, already started on... Dot just read me outlines of the proposed novel. The basis seems to be a marriage under duress. I told her that in case of marriage to put in bucketfuls of misery. This would make it realistic.453
Mary Edison was delighted at last to leave the dull solitude of Menlo Park for New York in the winter of 1881. After stopping at a hotel for a while, the family settled into an apartment overlooking Gramercy Park, and Mary sent out cards inviting people to tea-and-champagne, though her husband, who detested such parties, never appeared at them. Marion was sent to a private school for girls; the Menlo Park house was still used as their summer home.
In the winter of 1883-1884 Edison, suffering from neuralgia, made a vacation journey to northern Florida with his wife and daughter. The climate of St. Augustine proved so beneficial that, thereafter, he went down to Florida every winter for a few weeks, these intervals of travel being immensely enjoyable to his family. To be sure, as soon as he had recovered from illness or fatigue, his mind would race back to the problems of the central station system; and from Palatka, Florida, he would fire off letters or telegrams by the hour to his factotum, Insull, such as: “Don’t forget to have Tomlinson [his attorney] draw up contract with the engineers”; or “Let me know how the new pressure indicator works... I think I have struck a way of utilizing the surplus power of our stations...”454
After the winter journey to Florida in 1884, the Edisons returned to New York; the following summer, Mary and the children went back to the Menlo Park house, as usual. Edison then was much occupied by work in the city and remained there most of the time. In July Mary contracted typhoid fever, which at first did not alarm her family; but soon she was under the constant care of a doctor and her sister Alice. When suddenly she began to sink, Edison was called, and he hurried back from New York to her bedside. On the morning of August 9, 1884, his daughter Marion recalls, she was wakened by her father, who had been up all the night before. “I found him shaking with grief, weeping and sobbing so he could hardly tell me that mother had died in the night.”455
From that day forward, he rarely came back to Menlo Park; it was as if he hated the place. Moreover, it was a time of much trouble and internal dissension in the Edison Electric Light Company. He was an agnostic, and so could find no solace in praying for Mary’s soul. As was his wont, he buried himself in work, and thus stoically put out of mind the tragedy of his beautiful young wife. She was not yet thirty when she died.
The Menlo Park laboratory, its stores and apparatus removed, fell into disuse. For a while the village people used the “tabernacle” for their local entertainments and dances. Later the lower floor served as a cow-barn; but, when some years had passed, the historic building began to fall apart. A farmer discussing with a neighbor the site of Edison’s memorable experiments was heard to remark, “It’s a shame such a fine farm was allowed to go to ruin!”
With the passing of Mary Edison in 1884 Edison’s way of life seemed to undergo a marked change. At thirty-seven he was no longer a Bohemian nor a hell-for-leather, free-lance inventor, but a man of substance, heading a big industrial enterprise that increased his wealth year by year. He was, in fact, a millionaire. By force of circumstances he assumed an outlook that was more worldly than before. When, not long afterward, he fell in love and married again it was with a woman wholly different from his simple and touching Mary, one more fitted to share and enjoy the high station he now held, and under whose inspiration he would live in a style very different from that of the past.