18 ~ Breaking rocks
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For two years prior to the consolidation of G.E. Edison had been, in truth, very far away from things electrical. During those long-drawn-out negotiations over the exchange of stocks or notes, of money and power, he was never among the conferees. One would not have seen him very often in the Edison Laboratory, nor at the lamp works (which had been his pride), nor at the other shops; nor was he absorbed in experiment in his old way. Instead, current report placed him in a remote and forbidding region of the New Jersey highlands, those low mountains in the northwest corner of the state overlooking the Delaware River valley. There he was engaged in a most unusual engineering operation, which was quite literally of the earth-shaking, or, at least, earth-moving variety. By 1892 the G.E. affair was behind him; he was already well advanced in this new undertaking that was to be so different and “so much bigger” than anything he had attempted before.
Occasionally a curious journalist — or one of the many Edison idolators — wandered out to the village of Ogdensburg, New Jersey, some sixty miles west of Newark, to learn what the great electrical inventor was really doing. It was rumored that he was carrying on some sort of “revolution” in mining; he was devising new machinery and processes for extracting valuable metals from lean ores, which some people imagined he was going to apply to the recovery of gold itself!
Those who pursued Edison to the wilderness scene of his new enterprise journeyed past Lake Hopatcong by a narrow-gauge branch line of the Jersey Central, up the steep spurs of the Musconetcong Mountain, through an area of old worked-out iron mines over which forest had grown up again, and up to the 1,200-foot level near Ogdensburg. Here an industrial village called “Edison” was coming into being, its center a nest of tall, red-painted mills that already boomed and clanked with their multifarious activities.
A partial view of the iron mine and ore-processing plant at Ogdensburg, New Jersey, in the nineties. Photograph by Edison’s assistant W. K. L. Dickson.
Edison had gathered together some enormous pieces of machinery, in order to take down whole mountains. Here was the largest steam shovel in America, the very one that recently had done the excavating for the Chicago drainage canal; here was a giant traveling crane with a span of 210 feet; here were miles of metal-and-wood conveyors, and an arrangement of huge rock-crushing machines. As a visiting engineer described the scene:
On all sides the roar and whistle of machinery, the whir of conveyors, and choking white dust... The workmen look like millers, so coated do their clothes become with the flying white particles, and everyone wears a patent mask with pig-like snout. Big wheels revolve in the engine-houses; big dynamos transmit their heavy currents through overhead wires to the various parts of the plant. Little narrow-gauge locomotives puff their way in and out between the buildings... with shrieking and whistling wheels and brakes.
This is “Edison,” the mining village. Edison, the man, is always seen patrolling the ground of battle in his familiar linen duster and his great country hat. Usually you can find him watching the steam-shovel. The workmen say that he is always somewhere near it, as if it fascinates him. Follow the water-pipe through the cut, and you will find him, one is advised.579
Thus the young would-be inventor Thomas A. Robins, riding up the open gondolas of the branch line, finds his idol one day in 1891 at the scene of excavation. Edison’s strong, round face looks happy. None of the earsplitting uproar bothers him for a moment. He is absorbed in everything going on; but he gives you his broad smile when you come to him. A whistle blows suddenly, and Edison shouts, “Look out, they are going to blast!” He pushes his visitor around the corner of a shed, and crouches down with him in the shelter of its wall.
The steam shovel has cleared off a ledge, preparatory to the blasting, the inventor himself having first staked out the ground precisely with a heavy magnetic “dipping” needle and with diamond drills. There is the roar of the dynamite charge, and segments of rock weighing five or six tons and about the size of a piano break off and are gathered by the shovel into a narrow-gauge train, from which they are moved by skips into the jaws of a huge crusher, to be reduced to stones, then pellets, and finally powder.
“We are making a Yosemite of our own here,” he yells above the unearthly din. “We will soon have one of the biggest artificial canyons in the world.”
How wonderful is a steam shovel! It is like a huge primordial beast. “Look at this fellow,” Edison exclaims in delight. “Wouldn’t you think he is alive? Always seems to me like one of those old-time monsters or dragons we read about in children’s books. I like to sit and watch it.”580
The steam shovel is eating its way through a section of the mountain toward the group of mills about 5,000 feet distant. It will take about a year to reach its destination, and it will carry about 600,000 tons of rock. Edison’s imagination for mechanical engineering has run away with itself. Everything here is planned and carried out on a colossal scale, for the success of the operation in all this “breaking of big rocks into little ones,” depends on the machinery’s crushing-capacity of 6,000 tons a day, said to surpass that of all the stamp mills in California at that date.
At noon the work stops, and Edison invites his visitor to take “hash” with him and several officers and foremen in charge of the concentrating mill. At a ramshackle cottage nearby, which he calls the “White House,” a plate of lukewarm greasy food is served up, for there are no luxuries available here. There is little or no conversation. After lunch the inventor goes to sleep in his chair for about an hour, at the end of which a somewhat idiotic-looking fellow named Friday comes and wakes him by shaking him roughly.
“What does Friday do?” Edison is asked.
“Nothing. I have him with me because he never falls asleep. That’s what I pay him for — just to keep me awake.”581
He is on his feet, wide-awake, and proceeds amiably enough to show his visitor all about the works.
It is indeed a fabulous, a Titan’s world Edison has made here for himself. Among his huge jaw crushers, among the highly ingenious earth-moving machines and the two miles of conveyors, he moves about explaining everything freely, good-humoredly, more than ever the child of nature.
The blasting and crushing was not all fun, however. There were many accidents, many breakages. On one of his first visits Robins saw a workman being carried out on a litter, with both legs broken. “Edison looked on grimly and said nothing.” He was ever on the move to repair breakdowns himself, sharing all the risks of his laborers, five of whom were killed during the years of these operations. At night, in the early days, before living accommodations were provided, he used to sleep in his clothes in the warm oven room below the separating mill, with a heap of nut coal as his bed. He would often be up during the night to inspect the processing of his concentrate. For years he would remain here all week, returning home to Llewellyn Park only after the whistle blew on Saturdays, grimy and weary.
After the formation of General Electric he had lost his place at the head of America’s electrical industry, but he was still a very rich man for those days. He might have rested on his laurels and grown even richer by doing nothing. Instead he was now pushing into the mainstream of American industrial life; he was bent on winning a commanding position in a new field, that of the country’s vital iron and steel trade, by virtue of his new ore-milling process which would recapture economically the pure iron of exhausted mines in the Appalachian region.
Men believed at the time that iron ore was growing scarce. Edison declared confidently that in the acreage he owned or had leased, some 19,000 acres in the vicinity of Ogdensburg, New Jersey, alone, he had “over two hundred million tons of low-grade iron ore,” enough to keep the United States supplied for seventy years.
Iron ore was in growing demand; but this new supply, and greater deposits still, of billions of tons of magnetite, could only be obtained by Edison’s process.
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The idea of this bold undertaking had come to the inventor’s mind more than ten years earlier, when he was buying much iron for his first dynamos and found it high-priced. The iron mines along the East coast were virtually exhausted, and heavy transport charges raised the cost of ore shipped to Eastern mills from northern Michigan. One day in 1882, during a fishing trip with his laboratory assistants, he had landed on the shore of Long Island. There, on what should have been a white beach he noticed immense deposits of black sand “spreading for miles” and amounting to “hundreds of thousands of tons.” Taking a magnet from his pocket he perceived how the particles of black sand swarmed toward it like tiny ants. They were particles of magnetite iron, the ancient “lodestone” eroded from Connecticut’s shore of primal rock, finely divided by the action of the sea, and carried by currents across Long Island Sound. Examining his specimen of black sand on his return to Menlo Park, he found that it had a pure iron content of about 20 per cent.
“My first thought was that it would be a very easy matter to concentrate this, and I found I could sell the stuff at a good price,” he said afterward. In 1882 he had William H. Meadowcroft, then employed as secretary to President Eaton of the Edison Electric Light Company, go out and put up a small concentrating plant for him on the beach at Quogue, where he would use strong electric magnets to separate the iron particles from the sand. Somewhat similar methods were in use, during the eighties, though in a small way, in Sweden and elsewhere in the United States.
Edison designed a magnetic separator of his own. It consisted of a hopper, shaped like an inverted cone, with a group of magnets below; by causing a thin stream of the magnetite particles to fall past the magnets, the iron particles would be deflected by a partition into one bin, while the waste sand would fall straight down into another bin.582 But just before the apparatus could be put to work, Edison said, a tremendous storm came up, and every bit of that black sand went out to sea.583
By the late 1880s iron ore of Bessemer quality was in greater demand than ever, though found abundantly only in the Great Lakes region. Much occupied at the time with the electromagnets of his generators, Edison became convinced that he could use them on a large scale to separate the low-iron-content ores still found in the Eastern states.
In 1889, when he came into a large sum of money (with the formation of the Edison G.E.), he had a team of prospectors make an extensive survey of the magnetic iron ore deposits, or magnetite, to be found in the chain of the Appalachian Mountains running from Southern Canada to the Great Smokies in North Carolina. They used the magnetic dipping needle to guide them, and also managed some diamond-drilling in the terrain they covered, a strip twenty-five miles in width by some five hundred in length. Enormous masses of low-grade ore, in the form of magnetite rock, were located, one of the most promising regions being that along the New Jersey-Pennsylvania border where Edison bought and leased a large acreage.
Thus he had come to center his operations in Ogdensburg, New Jersey. The place, as it happened, had been named after one of the family of English Puritans who had settled in New Jersey two centuries ago, and of whom Thomas A. Edison himself (through his great-grandmother) was a direct descendant. The rich ores had long ago been taken from the old workings; only the lean magnetite rock was there to be processed.
The inventor had always been fascinated by the problems of mining engineering, to which he now gave long study. Extensive preparations were necessary; the ordering and manufacture of heavy machinery consumed much time. Two years passed before Edison was ready to begin operations on the “Ogden Baby,” as he called his novel enterprise.
The site, a high ridge in the New Jersey highlands, was a bleak wilderness. Teams of men who had worked at quarrying or construction were brought in, until they numbered about 145. But there were no living quarters here, and it was hard to keep them. Thus Edison was led to expand his plans until they included eventually the construction of a whole village of fifty wooden frame cottages, with running water and electric light. Another difficulty was that the men were used to hard drink and went on sprees on Saturday nights. By setting up a company store that sold good beer at low prices, Edison weaned them away from strong liquor.
Tests of the magnetite rock near the site of the old Ogden mines showed its content as being about 18 to 20 per cent pure iron. Edison saw that everything would depend on the economy of his operations; he would have to organize things so that rock and earth in the thousands of tons could be “treated” each day, in contrast with the few hundred tons handled in rich ore fields elsewhere. Dynamite was very costly; therefore he planned to use it sparingly, and grind up huge chunks of rock by mechanical means instead of blasting. To one of his technical men Edison wrote in 1890, “In view of the extent in which I am going into mining... I want to learn the business from actual experience.”584
The job to be done was essentially one of quarrying, rather than mining. Experienced mining engineers assured him that machines for crushing rock of the size he proposed to handle could never carry such a load. Their mathematical tables of materials and stresses showed that the shock of big boulders moving upon them would tear apart any driving engines connected with the crushing machines — would, in fact, “crush the crushing machine.”585
That was all Thomas A. Edison needed to hear. He went to work with some of his own laboratory mechanics at West Orange and designed what he called the Giant Rolls, a crushing machine of 100 horsepower, driven by a Corliss engine. It was an adaptation of the familiar Cornish rolls long used in quarrying operations. Edison said, “I shall bring the rollers up to a high speed, and then just before the boulder is dropped in, cut the engine loose.”586
The Giant Rolls, which used the momentum of two large rollers to break up ore-bearing rocks as large as pianos.
He arranged his two Giant Rolls so that they revolved in opposite directions; rock segments lifted by skips were dropped between them; the rolls were speeded up to 700 r.p.m., but just as they were to crash against the rocks, power was disengaged by an ingenious friction clutch mechanism. While the engine was freed from shock, the rocks crashed into each other at high momentum. Under this treatment those big rocks were usually reduced to about the size of a man’s head, and dropped through an opening to a conveyor line below the crusher that carried them off to the intermediate rolls; from this stage they were passed on, as pellets, to another crushing device called the “three-high rolls,” which reduced them to powder. The whole process was carried on quite rapidly so that a rock of six tons or so would be reduced to fist-sized stone in half a minute.587
A complex of conveyors in an endless chain moved the ore in baskets to a dryer, then rushed it off to the “refining mill,” that is, the ore separator. This was a towering structure that formed the heart of the whole system. Hoisted to the top of this building by an elevator, the powdered rock fell through several screens in a fine curtain of sand past a line of 480 large magnets, which ranged gradually from weak to full deflecting power. The nonferrous sand fell straight downward to be carried off and sold as useful building material. The iron ore was deflected by the magnets into partitioned bins, and then moved on to a last processing stage.
Edison soon discovered that iron oxide in powdered form could not be smelted in blast furnaces, for without a “binder” much of it would be blown away as dust while being transported and handled. He therefore moved the “pure” ore by conveyors into a big oven chamber, where it was given a final treatment: mixed with a sticky binding material, it was molded under heavy pressure into porous cakes, or briquettes; these were baked, and then shipped off in open railway cars.
Thus the inventor lavished a considerable mechanical art upon his ore-separating project in the hope of bringing about profitable operations at prevailing prices in the East Coast market. He also kept improving his conveyor line, introducing rubber belting, with the help of Thomas A. Robins, who sold it to him. Robins was inspired by Edison to perfect and promote rubber conveyor belting, and thus became one of the key figures in the transition to assembly-line methods in industry. Henry Ford, the great engineer of automobile mass production, on being shown the site and the plans of the Ogdensburg project many years later, declared that it encompassed the most complete automatic conveyor system of material handling that had been designed up to that period, 1892-1897. Ford also recalled that it was his reading of articles on the Edison project of the 1890s (rather than the earlier example of the Chicago packinghouse conveyors) that inspired the idea of his first “beltline” system for the model-T Ford.588
At a time when Eastern smelters were closing down their mills for want of economical iron ore, Edison stood ready to provide concentrate taken from billions of tons of magnetite rock located only seventy-five miles, on the average, from the iron mills at Eastern seaports. Thus the iron and steel industry of the Atlantic Coast cities might still be saved from its disadvantageous position in regard to transport costs.
Edison in front of the office of the ore-processing plant.
Nothing, however, went according to plan in this operation. There were constant breakages in the crushing machinery. A workman might carelessly drop a sledge hammer into the intermediate crusher, which would prove to be an irreducible object, and all the works would stop until Edison himself came running up to find the cause of trouble. Other laborers would sometimes drop boulders of indigestible size into the Giant Rolls, as if to challenge its magnificent slugging power — “Let’s see if it will crush that!” they would say. Dan Smith, the expert head rigger, who had charge of the steam shovel and traveling crane, said later that the “Old Man” not only worked, ate, and slept with his men, but “would never send a man anywhere he wouldn’t go himself.”589
One day, the big dryer tower became choked up. Though Edison was warned not to go in, he and Walter S. Mallory, the plant superintendent, crept in at the bottom of the shaft through a manhole, to examine the situation. Suddenly a mass of about sixteen tons of ore within the eighty-foot tower was dislodged and slid down on them. He emerged, with Mallory, none the worse for wear. Telling of the incident later, he remarked that, anyway, the men knew he and Mallory were inside and “had a great time digging us out.”
In 1892 a first trial run produced a few carloads of ore, one of which Henry C. Frick tested at the Carnegie mills in Pittsburgh. He reported that the first briquettes were of uncertain quality; what did not sift away along the car tracks blew away up the chimney of his blast furnace.
Edison went to work in earnest to perfect the “mix” of his iron ore briquettes, so that their binding material would be effective, resistant to water, and cheap. According to Mallory he carried on “several thousand experiments” to this end, and designed an entirely new briquetting machinery and plant. The great depression of 1893, however, intervened at this point; prices fell, and few orders came for iron ore of any kind. “The mill is not now running,” he reports in the spring of that grim year. “The Ogden Baby is sick.”590
This interlude of depression and stoppage — during three or four years — was used by Edison to tear down whole buildings and reconstruct the plant with a view to more efficient operation. After the victory of the Republicans over Bryan in the Presidential election of 1896, business conditions improved rapidly; by applying to many East Coast iron mills, Edison finally received some orders, including a large one from the Bethlehem Steel Company. Its manager, John Fritz, said to him at the time, “Mr. Edison, you are doing a good thing for the Eastern furnaces... I am willing to help you.”591
In 1897 and 1898 the village of Edison, now populated by four hundred workmen, once more thundered with activity. In newspapers and magazines the herculean operations at Edison, New Jersey, were now reported to be a complete “success.” An admirer wrote him:
After your tremendous feat of the iron discovery and successful production, I see you are going into gold, in which the world knows you will be equally successful... You are... alone of your kind — necromancer, alchemist, warlock, wizard.592
This correspondent was not alone in believing that Edison’s inventive mind was to be applied to the recapture of gold from the tailings of exhausted mines. In any case, it was said that the ore-separating scheme was “an enterprise bound, sooner or later, to revolutionize the world” — by solving the problems of the iron industry. It was widely known that Edison suffered real privations, for he labored for long hours in those bleak Jersey highlands. But another of his admirers wrote to assure him that, like the ancient conqueror Tamerlane, who had once in the vicissitudes of war been forced to hide in a cave, Edison too would emerge one day from his mountain refuge to conquer the world!593
Sometimes crowds of visitors came to see the ore-separating works and to stare at the great man. When their numbers became too great, he would hide in some shack and go on with his job. On one occasion his Irish foreman, Dan Smith, came and begged him to come outside before a crowd “and show them what genius looks like,” if only for a few minutes, so that they might be persuaded to go away. Edison was just then wearing a workman’s cap that he had bought in the local store; his familiar linen duster was torn and stained a good deal, not only with dirt and grease, but with the juice of chewing tobacco he was always spitting through his mask. He was at his untidy best. But he came out of his hiding place and, a good mimic, paced up and down gravely before the gaping crowd, hands thrust deep in pockets, head lowered as if buried in thought — then suddenly, comically, made a dash back into his cabin.594
The myth of Edison as a magician was a long time dying. In 1898 the Hearst newspapers, for example, published a serialized “scientific romance” entitled “Edison Conquers Mars,” which was read by millions. It pictured a war of the future between invaders from our neighboring planet and the men of Earth, who are commanded, naturally, by “General” Thomas A. Edison. In the nick of time, he invents a new flying machine which directs the power of a “disintegrator” upon the hideous enemy.595 Edison made vigorous protests at the use of his name in such a penny dreadful, but to the minds of simple beings everywhere there were no limits to his capabilities.
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In reality the big ore-separating plant, during its entire life of ten years, was a great white elephant; it was kept in operation only intermittently, for brief intervals of trial runs. For years Edison nursed the project along, carrying out repairs and introducing improvements here and there. It was only at the end of 1897, when he finally received the big order from Bethlehem Steel, that he was able to plan for full, large-scale operation of his plant, and could determine even what its costs would be under conditions of volume production of 1,000 to 1,500 tons of briquettes a day. But by then, when he had brought his costs to a reasonable figure, it was too late!
The grim truth was that Edison was losing thousands of dollars on each day’s shipment of his concentrate. The gargantuan Ogden Baby was simply eating up his resources. Though he had greatly improved his crushing and briquetting processes and at last had some chance of winning a market in the East, the continual fall of iron ore prices doomed his venture. Certain technical writers, who did not believe in Mr. Hearst’s newspaper fictions, were already beginning to guess the truth and to speak of this affair, by 1898, as “Edison’s Folly.” The magazine Iron Age remarked that expert mining engineers were aghast at Edison’s methods of ore treatment. It was indeed a grandiose engineering project for those days and was not to be imitated again until the time of World War II, with its recurrent scarcities in raw materials.
He had hoped to operate profitably when the market price for iron ore at Eastern points was at a level of $6.00 to $7.50 a ton; but he was able to get from Eastern mills only $3.50 to $4.00, after 1893. An experienced mining engineer, recommended by Henry Villard, came up to Ogdensburg in 1898, studied the problem, and advised Edison that his only hope resided in a very large-scale processing of 10,000 tons of earth and rock each day.
This was why, after having hung on in this losing venture for nearly a decade, Edison made elaborate preparations for a whole year, and then, in the autumn of 1898, began to work his plant at full capacity on the order from Bethlehem Steel for 10,000 tons. That autumn and during the winter that followed he remained buried in the wretched hamlet named after him, utterly absorbed in the operational difficulties of carrying a whole mountainside, through an ever-widening cut, down to his separating mill.
In November his wife, Mina, visiting her parents in Ohio, wrote him a letter bearing news from the outside world: a beloved sister of hers had just died. Edison in reply addressed her as “Darling Wife,” also “Billie,” earnestly commiserating with her upon her loss. “The thing we call Nature seems very cruel at times,” he observed. In fact it was being extremely unkind to him just now, as he explained:
This is the first chance I have had to answer, I scarcely get any sleep as everything has to be attended to by me. We have a great Blizzard... as you have doubtless learned from the newspapers. The snow has drifted in great piles at the mills, everything has been blocked here as well as frozen up, and so a great number of my men could not reach the Mills from their homes... For 4 days we have not run the mills. Today I got the crushing plant started, tomorrow the other mills will start... 400 men are here and all depends on myself. To attend the funeral in Ohio it would be necessary to shut down at a most critical time technically and financially. Had I an intelligent assistant I could have come... I expect that until the whole thing is systematized and the men well trained, it will be impossible to find a man.596
He became so absorbed in the crushing of rocks that he never got home for the holiday season. His ever-thoughtful wife, however, sent him a large cake shaped somewhat in the form of Edison’s ore mill.
“What, is it Christmas, already?” exclaimed the distracted inventor. For him it meant only that work would have to stop for a few days while his men were given time off — and there were so many difficulties still to be overcome. He was making his first big production run at last in the heavy winter of 1899; everything depended on its outcome.
The faithful Charles Batchelor, who had also retired recently from General Electric, was one of the few of the old guard who worked with him on this enterprise; he constantly inspected the works and reported to Edison what the men were saying and doing. One day he brought him a newspaper clipping about recent developments in the Mesabi Range in Minnesota. In that region, where the most fabulous high-grade iron deposits in the world had been discovered some years before, John D. Rockefeller and W. H. Oliver, of Pittsburgh, had recently bought the bulk of the acreage, and arranged for large-scale extraction of the ore at open-face mines, and for its economical transport in special ore trains and then in huge ore vessels plying the Great Lakes. Anticipating a torrential flow of Bessemer iron, the market price had lately fallen to $2.65 a ton f.o.b. Cleveland.
On reading this dispatch, Edison burst out laughing. He had sunk about two million dollars in his ore-separating venture, and his company was in debt to the tune of several hundred thousands more. “Well, we might as well blow the whistle and close up shop,” he exclaimed.
Not only had the price gone down too much for him; but it seems that the magnetite rock at the old Ogdensburg mines, which at one end (where he began operations) showed 20 per cent iron content, had, by 1898, run down to about 12 or 10 per cent. This meant that he must crush twice as much rock in order to extract the same amount of ore, now worth only half of what he had hoped to get for it.597
The bountiful Mesabi Range deposits, enough for most of America’s needs over the next sixty years, gave a tremendous geographical advantage to the Midwestern steel mills over the older ones in the East. It meant that Edison’s New Jersey and Pennsylvania Concentrating Works was kaput.
He did not, however, halt the disastrous operations of that steam-belching, rock-devouring Frankenstein, but, during several weeks completed his last big run, filling the order contracted for — at great loss. He was still a man of science, and had to learn for himself what the cost accounting for his iron ore would be at full capacity. Those monster machines went pounding and screaming on for several weeks, while he watched knowing that it was all in vain. Some day plants like his for the reduction of low-grade ore might be needed (as they are now). At last he stopped to take his bearings.
In those last months there were all sorts of evil omens. A whole stock-house, containing four workmen, suddenly collapsed and sank into the undermined ground, killing its occupants. A skilled mechanic, repairing one of the crushing machines, was caught in its iron grip and was mangled to death. This accident, it was said, “greatly unnerved Mr. Edison, who discontinued the work a short time later...”598
He had given fully five years of his life over the last decade to this heartbreaking struggle, while virtually all his other interests were neglected. At the beginning and end of that period two more sons had been born to him: Charles, in 1890, a handsome infant who resembled his father; and Theodore, the child of his late years, who came into the world in 1898. Edison’s own father, Samuel Edison, had died in 1896 at the ripe old age of ninety-two. Meanwhile, Tom junior, the eldest son, pursued an erratic career; he had made an unfortunate marriage, and had got into financial straits from which he had to be rescued with the aid of papa’s checkbook. Finally, the large, athletic Will, during the Spanish-American War, at twenty years of age, had enlisted for service and come down with yellow fever. It all sounded like the lot of joy and sorrow befalling the average American family. But during all those years the baby that gave Edison the greatest concern was the “Ogden Baby.”
It was an unmitigated disaster, the worst he had ever faced; he had lost not only those years of his life but the entire fortune accumulated by his inventive labors. Yesterday a millionaire several times over, today he was “busted.” And yet he told T. Comerford Martin, at about the time he stopped ore-milling: “I never felt better in my life than during the five years I worked here. Hard work, nothing to divert my thoughts, clear air, simple food made life very pleasant.”599 He still had his wits and his laboratory, at any rate.
One day in 1899 he rode back on the train to Ogdensburg with Walter S. Mallory, for the last time, to order the dismantling of the mills and the disposal of the machinery. Where another might have been in a state of despair, he discussed his situation and his prospects in the most jovial spirit, as if he felt no pain. Though now fifty-three he remarked gaily enough that he could always find a job as a telegrapher at $75 a month. Then, in more serious vein, he told Mallory that he had already arranged to put all that costly earth-moving and crushing equipment, and the technical knowledge he had gained, to good use: the establishment of a modern portland cement works according to his own design. He hoped in this way to settle the debt of about $300,000 the ore-milling concern was left with, adding: “No company I was ever connected with has ever failed to pay off its creditors.” This was one case where he had permitted no one else to share his doubtful rewards. It was like him to waste not a moment in vain regrets, to forget the defeat, and with coldly rational courage apply himself at once to new undertakings.
About a year or two after they had dismantled the Ogdensburg plant, Mallory happened to call his attention to newspaper articles of the current boom in Wall Street, during which General Electric stock had risen to $330 a share. Edison asked, “If I hadn’t sold any of mine what would it be worth today?” After some calculation Mallory replied, “About four and a quarter million dollars.” Edison was silent for a moment, plucking at his right eyebrow, as was his habit when lost in thought, then looked up, smiled broadly, and said, “Well, it’s all gone, but we had a hell of a good time spending it!”