22 ~ Sunset, with electric illuminations
1
The story of the intimate friendship between Henry Ford and Edison forms an important chapter in both men’s later careers and strongly illuminates the special qualities of each. They were similar in social origin and background, shared many interests in common, and yet were strikingly different in mind and temperament. Ford was extremely sentimental; he kept the most trivial memorabilia of his boyhood days, loved rustic dances, old tunes and country folkways, interest in which he tried to revive among the helots of the assembly lines. Though one of the chief architects of the Machine Age, he amused himself by re-creating, at immense cost, an old-fashioned country village in Dearborn, such as he had known in his youth. He was endowed with a fine engineering talent as well as a fierce will to power; nevertheless he was an exceedingly simple being at bottom, and dangerously ignorant. Edison’s was a complex personality, but a unitary one; if limited on some sides, he gave himself a tremendous education on others; far from being sentimental, he was by disposition a realist and in his thinking showed great detachment and critical power.
Since their first encounter in 1896, which had been so inspiring to Ford, the automobile magnate had regarded Edison with a reverence that was almost superstitious. Their next meeting came about in 1909, when Ford was embroiled in his long court fight to break the monopoly of the Detroit manufacturing group which owned the automobile engine patents of G. B. Selden. At a critical point in this affair, Ford is said to have walked in on Edison at his laboratory unannounced and sought his advice. The Model T was under way, and the future of his mass production plans depended on his decision. Edison advised him to stay out of the automobile trade association and fight their licensing monopoly. It was counsel that reflected Edison’s objectivity, for he himself was then partner to a motion picture monopoly, based, however, on his own patents. When Ford triumphed over his opponents in court in 1911, he felt again that the uncanny old inventor had guided him well.
Edison called him “Henry”; but Ford never addressed the inventor save as “Mr. Edison.”704 Edison was quick of thought and speech, while Ford was a dull talker. At first the older man had felt the other to be something of a simpleton, but after a while he said he was “afraid of him, for I find him most right where I thought him most wrong.”705
When the automobile manufacturer achieved world fame early in 1914 by announcing the $5 minimum wage, Edison (who was still paying $2.50 a day) after some soul searching, ended by expressing approval of Ford’s program, which he said was equivalent to “an industrial revolution” in itself. Edison never professed to be a lover of mankind en masse. Ford did, in those early days; but, on the other hand, he had no intention of losing money because of his high-wage policy. His plants were equipped with the world’s most advanced assembly lines and used electric motors on a very large scale. The whole scheme of “rationalization,” he said, was inspired by Edison’s pioneering.706
Ford was a latter-day prophet proclaiming the new gospel of cheap goods and high wages for labor; his volume output and winnings became fabulous. Unlike the Protean Edison, he was single-minded, in fact, a one-invention man. It has been suggested that Edison, sometimes badly frustrated in his attempts to become a big industrial captain, envied the ruthless business efficiency and vast commercial triumph of Ford.707 If this was true, the emotion of envy did not remain with him very long; he could never have been happy in Ford’s manner.
On the other hand Ford could be most generous in friendship. Late in 1912, he decided to equip his austere black Model T, up to then started by a hand crank, with a storage battery, self-starter, and electric lamps. His first thought was to use Edison batteries, and he soon contracted for a big supply of them. “I will design a starter, new dynamo, motor, new rigging and proper battery,” Edison wrote in a letter of agreement in 1914. If tests proved the mechanism satisfactory, the Edison Storage Battery Company was to manufacture 100,000 battery-generator sets especially patterned for the Ford car. To finance this undertaking, the Ford Motor Company advanced altogether $1,150,000 on account.708
The alkaline battery, however, showed a relatively low voltage and did not function well in circuit with an automobile self-starter, Ford being as keenly disappointed as Edison in these results. Then, still eager to help his friend (after the West Orange fire), Ford undertook to build a small electric car powered by the Edison batteries he had already ordered. After visiting Edison in Florida in the winter of 1915, he returned to Detroit to find his engineers experimenting with an electric car designed to be driven by ordinary lead-acid batteries. According to his assistants, “he raised the devil... They weren’t to build a car for lead batteries; they were to use Edison batteries, he insisted.”709 But the nickel-iron model proved to be inadaptable for such use and, by mutual agreement, was abandoned.
Their relations, however, continued to be increasingly intimate on other than business grounds. In February, 1914, Mr. and Mrs. Ford had first come to Edison’s winter retreat in Fort Myers for a long visit. Under the tutelage of John Burroughs, Ford had become so enamored of nature studies that on returning from a recent journey to England he had brought with him a collection of 380 songbirds, with which he hoped to stock America’s forests. On this occasion Burroughs was invited to join Edison and Ford in southern Florida. “We’ll go down to the Everglades and revert back to Nature,” the inventor promised. “We will get away from fictitious civilization. If I get an idea I will leave my companions temporarily and go to my laboratory there to work it out.”710
Between them Edison and Ford had done more perhaps than any other living men to foster, if not a fictitious civilization, then a highly mechanized one and its mass culture. There was a touching incongruity, therefore, in their tour of the Everglades and the cypress forests, under the guidance of John Burroughs, in their bird watching and their examination of exotic flowers. In those days the tall, thin, bearded Burroughs, “a philosopher who worshiped God’s truth in Nature,” by his pen and his example led mankind to the outdoors. Ford enjoyed himself so heartily that not long afterward he bought a winter home of his own near Edison’s Seminole Lodge and next winter came back to the enchanting southern wilderness.
The Edisons had a boat dock on the Caloosahatchee River. Ford had the whim to send for fiddlers from rural Michigan and proceeded to hold square dances and Virginia reels on the dock in moonlight, while he prevailed upon Mrs. Edison and her grown children to go rustic.
Several months later, when Edison and Ford were visiting the Panama-Pacific Exposition at San Francisco, Ford took Edison, together with Harvey Firestone, out to Luther Burbank’s plantation at Santa Rosa. The inventor had long admired the work of the California botanist and now conceived the idea of “botanizing” for himself in the beautiful gardens surrounding his Florida home. As with other wise old men, it was to be the happy recreation of his late years.
His own methods of experimentation, he pointed out, were similar to those followed by Luther Burbank. “He plants an acre and when it is in bloom he inspects it and picks out a single plant, of which he saves the seed. He has a sharp eye and can pick out of thousands a plant that has promise of what he wants.” From this Burbank could propagate an improved variety with fair certainty of success. That was the essence of Edison’s empirical method in chemical research.711
During the California trip, Edison, who found touring the countryside in an open automobile a splendid distraction, made plans with Ford, Burroughs, and Firestone, Ford’s supplier of rubber tires, to go on a long camping trip by automobile through New England and New York State during the following summer. According to Firestone, the idea — inspired by Burroughs’ preachments — was “to lure us away from the busy world of material and business developments.” Curious, that Firestone should have described their plan in such spiritual terms, for he was the kind of man who could not stop selling rubber tires even when he was dreaming.
Edison himself made all the logistical arrangements for their tour in the summer of 1916, providing for a “six” touring car to carry the party and a Model-T Ford truck to follow it, bearing tents and camping equipment, camp servants and drivers. At the last moment, owing to the pressure of business affairs, Ford found himself unable to join that first expedition, which was a fairly short and simple affair. Edison, accompanied by Firestone, left West Orange on August 28, 1916, and stopped overnight in the Catskill Mountains, after covering 82 miles of unpaved country road; then joining Burroughs the next day at his homestead in Roxbury, New York, he went on with him along the shore of Lake George, over the Adirondacks, to upper Vermont, and returned home after ten days on the road. Edison always sat up in front with the driver. No matter how rough the road or how deep the holes, he enjoyed bouncing along at speeds up to forty miles an hour and never showed fatigue. The “shaking-out” was good for him, he believed. Burroughs, who was seventy-nine and very bony, pointed out, however, that Edison could bear the jolts easily because he was “well-cushioned.”
On his return, Burroughs wrote Firestone and Edison:
That was a fine trip you gave us. John Muir would have called it a glorious trip. You arranged the weather just right and you begot in all of us the true holiday spirit. We were out on a lark... My health had been so precarious during the summer that I feared I could not stand more than two or three days of the journey. But the farther I went the farther I wanted to go.712
Though Burroughs had suffered from the bad roads and the vibrations of the automobile, thanks to Edison’s stories, he said, he had enjoyed “vibrations and convulsions... in the diaphragm around the campfire at night.” He gives a diverting picture of Edison in the Adirondack Mountains playing prospector, pottering about with a little hammer with which he broke up pieces of granite and feldspar. Ah, there was a possible source of potash, if only it could be extracted economically! Burroughs continues in his letter:
It was a great pleasure to see Edison relax and turn vagabond so easily, sleeping in his clothes and dropping off to sleep like a baby, getting up to replenish the fire at daylight or before, making his toilet at the wayside creek or pool... and practicing what he preaches about excessive eating, taking only a little toast and a cup of hot milk. The luxuries of the “Waldorf-Astoria on Wheels” that followed us everywhere had no attractions for Mr. Edison. One cold night, you remember, he hit on a new way of folding his blankets; he made them interlock so and so, got into them, “made one revolution” and the thing was done. Do you remember with what boyish delight he would throw up his arms when he came upon some particularly striking view? I laugh when I think of the big car two girls were driving on a slippery street in Saranac... and when they put on the brakes suddenly, how the car suddenly changed ends and stopped, leaving the amazed girls looking up the street instead of down. Mr. Edison remarked: “Organized matter sometimes behaves in a strange manner.”713
The next “gypsy” tour took place two years later, in the summer of 1918, after the war had taken a favorable turn. This time Ford made it his business to join Edison, Burroughs and Firestone and was very much present at all their subsequent trips to what they called “Nature’s laboratory.” Why, one asks, did these millionaire industrialist-inventors turn “vagabond”? Edison’s idea of these vacation trips was expressed in a fragment of manuscript he wrote in 1916:
Mr. Ford has asked me to write something to be placed in the cornerstone of his new bird fountain (at Fairlawn in Dearborn), which cornerstone is to be laid by that lover of nature, John Burroughs.
I am greatly pleased to do so, because, while mankind appears to have been gradually drifting into an artificial life of merciless commercialism, there are still a few who have not been caught in the meshes of this frenzy and who are still human, and enjoy the wonderful panorama of the mountains, the valleys and the plain, with their wonderful content of living things, and among these persons I am proud to know my two friends, John Burroughs and Henry Ford.714
Unfortunately the newspapers, with hue and cry, soon followed the wanderings of America’s Most Useful Citizen and his friend the Flivver King from one camp site to another, on that second trip. To Edison’s annoyance, reporters persistently intruded themselves between him and the panorama of mountains and valleys, to press their queries about his war machines, or to describe or photograph him as he cooked potatoes over the fire, or took a siesta under a tree.
That second camping tour had been organized by Ford and Firestone on a much more elaborate scale than the first, and its itinerary had been publicly announced in advance! The “irrepressible boy of seventy-one,” eager for his annual “shaking-up,” hurried off to pick up John Burroughs in the Catskills, then sped on to Pittsburgh to meet Ford and Firestone. The itinerary for this journey was longer and took them through the Great Smoky Mountains.
Clad in linen dusters and soft caps they roared along in their motor caravan, startling the sleepy mountain hamlets of West Virginia and North Carolina. Soon they were in deep forgotten valleys where the country people sometimes gathered in little knots to stare at them as they stopped. Some of these people had never seen an electric light, but they knew and recognized Edison as “Mr. Phonograph.” On one occasion Henry Ford was evidently discomfited when no one seemed to have heard of him or even to have seen any motorcars before. “Good,” said Edison, “we shall have a good time here.”
When they pitched their camp in an open meadow, Firestone and the bustling Ford would sometimes engage in a scything match or a “cradling” contest. Edison, however, as Burroughs recalled, was content to settle down in his car and read or meditate, while Ford swung an ax to cut wood for their campfire. To be sure there were numerous attendants about them now, a luxurious kitchen truck and several supply trucks, providing a sybaritic fare the like of which poor John Burroughs had never known on his own camping trips.
Edison, at any rate, was without affectation; in the morning, one would see him washing in the brook, with his coat off, in his braces, but still wearing his black string tie. “He is a good camper-out and turns vagabond easily,” Burroughs remarks, “for he slept soundly in all his clothes, as his unkempt appearance in the morning revealed. He can rough it week in and week out and be happy.”
In contrast with the fiercely energetic but undereducated Ford, Edison seemed to Burroughs, as he so often appeared to others in the Indian summer of his life, genial, relaxed, philosophical, going off by himself to read a book at every halt; “a trenchant and original thinker” to whom the other members of the party “instinctively deferred,” while delighting in his witty sayings.
Yet like many other philosophers he could be found acting in complete contradiction to his own professed doctrines. In his journal for the 1919 camping trip, Burroughs wrote:
O Consistency, thy name is not Edison! Ten a.m. Edison not up yet — the man of little sleep! He inveighs against cane sugar, yet puts two heaping teaspoonfuls into each cup of coffee, and he takes three or four cups a day. He eats more than I do, yet calls me a gourmand. He eats pie by the yard and bolts his food.715
When their lead car broke down in some remote corner of West Virginia, it was Ford who took off his coat and repaired the radiator, using only some old metal obtained from a village blacksmith. Out of this incident, the journalists who followed in their trail worked up an apocryphal story, the burden of which was that when their car broke down, some village mechanic suggested that the trouble might be with the motor. “I am Henry Ford,” spoke up the tall man, “and I say the motor is running perfectly.” Then the rustic suggested that the electric spark distribution might not be working. “I am Thomas A. Edison,” spoke up the stout man in the front seat, “and I say the wiring is all right.” Whereupon the village mechanic, pointing to John Burroughs and his long white beard, remarked, “And I suppose that must be Santa Claus.”
Though Ford was usually brief-spoken, he was easy to draw out on mechanical problems, which he discussed as a master of his art, and with unfailing enthusiasm. On the other hand he seemed much less interested in the natural beauty or historical associations of the countryside than Burroughs or even Edison. To Ford, a pretty waterfall was a potential hydroelectric site. Around this time he conceived his plan to develop small rural power stations to serve village factories and craftsmen’s shops; the idea, according to Burroughs, was implanted in his mind originally by Edison. When he dilated on such schemes, Ford talked as if he had “taken the people into partnership with him,” and meant to put all sorts of inventions and conveniences within the reach of the common man.
Around the campfire at night they talked of war and politics, of industry and labor and public life. It was plain to see that, having conquered the world of industry, Ford thought of crowning his career by winning some high political office. In 1918 there was much talk of Ford’s intention to run for the Senate, as a step toward higher office still. Touching on this matter one evening, Edison (who often teased his friends) indicated that he held a poor opinion of Ford’s political talents. “When Ford goes to the Senate,” he remarked wryly, “he will be mum; he won’t say a damn word.” As for himself, Edison wanted no political honors, but, like Faraday, who had refused ennoblement, declared that as he was born “plain Thomas A. Edison” so he would die.
For a man who aspired to be the country’s Chief Magistrate, Ford was decidedly lacking in mental stability. Only the year before he had spoken forth as a pacifist who vowed that he would never produce the materials of war. At that time, in 1917, Edward N. Hurley, a high official in President Wilson’s Administration, had written Edison urging that he use his good offices in having Ford’s great factories enlist for war service. In reply Edison wrote:
You ask where is Ford? Let me explain. He is an inventor. Inventors must be poets so that they may have imagination. To be commercially successful they must have the practicability of an Irish contractor’s foreman and a Jewish broker.
These wild children of nature necessarily are a puzzle to a Captain of Industry like yourself. Don’t try to understand him. Get Ford in somehow with the happy shipping board help.
Your trouble will be to get him started. At present he is pushing Liberty Motors.716
By 1917, Ford, with one of his sudden changes of heart, had dropped his pacifism and devoted himself to serving the war industries as the most militant of patriots.
Edison used to describe himself as a “progressive” in politics, one who naturally favored change and experiment in this as in other fields. Yet in old age he seemed to prefer that social change proceed as slowly as possible. Toward 1919 the trade-union movement experienced a cycle of rapid growth; there were many violent strikes; and there were not a few socialist agitators about. Neither Edison nor Ford cared much for the organization of labor, save under paternalistic systems of their own. The struggles of capital and labor, according to Edison, were “inherent”; captains of industry arose through the process of evolution. As for the charges of reformers and socialists that they were “exploiters,” or mere accumulators of wealth, Edison denied this, so far as he was concerned, and Ford echoed his views.
In fact, both these millionaires professed the deepest contempt for mere money-getting, though even “poor” Edison almost in spite of himself earned profits of more than a million dollars annually. In a speech of his that was read for him before a convention of motion picture producers in 1923, he said, “Remember, you must never think of profits, but only of public service.”717 In the margin of a book by an author who expressed wonder at the breathless tempo of American life, and at its continued speed, he wrote: “Yes, with a metronome of money!”
Money was nothing, gold was nothing to him, but commodities, industrial products, inventions represented true wealth. And far from being an exploiter, Edison, as inventor and engineer, regarded himself as a creator of new wealth for all men, new tools, new industries. By 1922 the value of America’s electric light and power industry alone was reckoned at more than fifteen billion dollars, and then people stopped counting.
Ford, the engineer of the poor man’s chariot, ardently embraced Edison’s ideas about the inventor’s mission to create wealth. He said in 1930:
Our prosperity leads the world, due to the fact that we have an Edison. His inventions created millions of new jobs... Edison has done more toward abolishing poverty than all the reformers and statesmen.
At all events, Ford fully shared Edison’s abiding mistrust of the “money-changers,” and his earnest wish that they should some day be dethroned. Like Edison, he thought of himself as a wealth creator and of the bankers and the “money men” as parasites who fed upon the productive elements in society. Both men, it must be remembered, had grown up in rural Michigan and may have absorbed the emotional prejudices of that former center of Greenback agitation against “Eastern bankers” and “goldbugs.” The monetary radicals of the farm belt, in earlier times, also tended to associate the Jews, who were proverbially active in commerce and as middlemen, with their enemies the “goldbugs.” A mild form of anti-Semitism has sometimes been traced in this country to the followers of “Coin” Harvey and William J. Bryan. But with Ford, anti-Semitism soon became rabid.
As time went on, Ford, according to his most recent biographers, tended to attribute his extremely frustrating experiences in the Peace Ship enterprise of 1915-1916 to the machinations of “the International Jew.” After having played the liberal and humanitarian, he suddenly turned bigot. In May, 1920, The Dearborn Independent, a daily newspaper that was the house organ of the Ford Motor Company, suddenly launched a sensational anti-Semitic campaign and achieved nationwide distribution. This new “crusade” earned the owner of the newspaper much public ignominy, and led to his being exposed in public court, during suits for damages and libel, as one of the most abysmally ignorant of men. After two years Ford abruptly halted his anti-Jewish propaganda, paid damages to persons libeled, and retracted all the charges against the Jews that had been published in his newspapers.
Some reproaches have been directed at Edison, Ford’s most esteemed and influential friend at the time, for not having counseled the automobile magnate against such unwisdom. It has been suggested also that Edison condoned, if he did not encourage, this misbegotten agitation.718 It has been remarked that in December, 1920, when E. G. Liebold, managing editor of The Dearborn Independent, sent Edison some of its anti-Semitic articles and invited his comments, Edison wrote briefly, as if indicating approval, “Liebold — they don’t like publicity.”719 But to deduce from this that Edison himself was ever a fanatic of race prejudice or “racial supremacy,” or that he “inspired” Ford in this undertaking, seems wholly unreasonable.
In his eighth decade, as an aging man, to be sure, he showed many crotchets; like other gifted men he permitted himself on occasion thoughtless utterances in public, and seemed to enjoy provoking controversy. Several years earlier, in October, 1914, Edison, after having outraged many Christians by his frank professions of agnosticism, seems to have offended the Jews also by some unconsidered reflections that were quoted in the newspapers. He remarked then that an underlying cause of the outbreak of world war was the rising commercial power of Germany, which threatened England, and added that the Jews were largely responsible for Germany’s commercial prosperity. The German military, he suggested, were influenced by the men of business in their country.
These opinions evoked strong protests, one of them by Jacob H. Schiff, the eminent New York banker and philanthropist. In replying to Schiff, Edison denied that he had meant to accuse the German Jews of any wrongdoing, or of having “started” the war. What he had meant was that the Jews deserved greater credit than they had been given as yet for Germany’s industrial ascendancy. Then he went on to insist that “the military group that ruled Germany had the brains to take the advice of the great Jewish bankers and businessmen and give the captains of industry a free hand.”720 Such a view was, of course, the direct antithesis of official anti-Semitic doctrine of the Hitler type which always insisted that the Jews, far from aiding Germany, “betrayed” or “stabbed her in the back.” In any case such unguarded ruminations on Edison’s part, though they may have been inept and in poor taste, are in no sense to be equated with the monstrous, genocidal dogmas propounded many years later in Nazi Germany — which Edison would have abhorred with all his heart.
He was — outbursts of temperament aside — predominantly rational and humane; although bias against Catholics as well as Jews was openly professed in his time in business and social life by many Americans, who did not regard themselves as barbarians for that reason, Edison employed Jews in his laboratory as assistants.
It happened that about six months before he gave the interview touching on Germany’s industrial ascendancy, in March, 1914, the case of Leo Frank, a citizen of Georgia who was hastily convicted of rape, was being widely debated in the press. There had been strong evidence given attesting to his innocence, and to the intimidation of the court by Ku Klux Klan mobs — which later broke into the jail and lynched him. But while Frank had been alive and waited for his case to be appealed, Edison, who was then in Florida, was asked for his opinion of this affair. In reply, he stated publicly his belief that “Frank should have a new trial.”721 Though, at times, he entertained some very queer notions about medicine, diet, education, women, and even science — in which he showed a decided “spirit of contradiction” — Edison was nothing like the superstitious Ford; he had far more detachment, as well as intelligence, and would never have set off on a crusade to save all America from one of her minority groups.
And while Henry Ford trembled at the alleged menace of the “mercenary” Jews, and pretended to flee “the artificial life of commercialism,” in a motor caravan out in the open country, a spirit of crass commercialism, day by day, pervaded his well-advertised camping tours. Movie news cameras and publicity agents, who carried on promotion stunts of all sorts, gathered in the train of the Edison-Ford-Firestone motor caravan, which, by 1919, boasted fifty cars. Politicians arrived — even President Warren Harding, on one occasion — to bask in the limelight of its campfire. Trucks followed behind, bearing large placards reading: “Buy Firestone Tires.” When the caravan arrived in some community the festive occasion was exploited by dealers as an opportunity to sell more Ford cars. Henry Ford and Firestone seemed to enjoy it all. But in 1921, John Burroughs died; after that, Edison, who was greatly bothered by the crowds, the dust, and the ballyhoo, decided to come no more.
2
In the autumn of 1922, Edison visited the General Electric Company’s huge plant and laboratory at Schenectady after an absence of twenty-five years. The factories that had grown up out of the old Edison Machine Works now extended “for miles” and employed 18,000 workers who, at the order of President Gerard Swope, assembled to welcome and cheer Edison. A little ceremony was made of putting up a bronze plaque in his honor at the door of the great laboratory he had initiated. Here “hundreds” of scientists and technicians were at work in fields of technology that Edison had only dimly imagined. Dr. Steinmetz showed him around the laboratory and demonstrated his “lightning bolts,” which were capable of discharging 120,000 volts at a bar of tungsten, causing it to “vanish” and turn into gas. Edison got along well with Steinmetz, he said, because “he never mentioned mathematics when he talked to me.” W. R. Whitney, director of the laboratory, showed him the new process, perfected by General Electric’s W. D. Coolidge, for converting tungsten into lamp filaments. The aged inventor sighed, and recalled what great troubles he had encountered in his own attempts to experiment with tungsten. Dr. Irving Langmuir also displayed new vacuum tubes for long-distance transmission; also a 100,000-candle-power lamp, and photoelectric mechanisms that reproduced sound on tape for motion pictures and phonographs. Edison declared that he had greatly enjoyed seeing “the old place, and the old boys,” but admitted that it had changed, had grown up.722
Some time after his visit to the General Electric Laboratory, Edison, old free lance that he was, shook his head and declared that the “corporation laboratory” would not do. The inventor was now a “hired person” for the corporation, assigning to it all his patents; such men now worked in large groups and held many conferences. The “weight of organization” was too great, Edison observed shrewdly; and the results, he predicted, would not be as rich as in the case of individual inventors working in small organizations. In truth, inventive and development work at the great corporate laboratories of the United States between 1900 and 1940 has been judged unremarkable by scientists themselves. However, the richest results seem to have been reached where some leading personality, both inspired and tenacious, directed a small group toward the objective.
In his late seventies Edison gave most of his attention to the improved phonographs, business machines, and secondary and primary batteries. The fortunes of the Edison Industries were at full tide during the postwar boom, toward 1923, then ebbing as radio came into general use and competing manufacturers placed on the market newly invented electronic phonographs, or even phonographs and radio receivers in combination. The creator of the mechanical phonograph, however, could not abide the new recording instruments first developed by a team of Bell Laboratory physicists. Nor would he concede that such instruments were acoustically superior to his 1913 phonograph. Instead, he announced, as late as 1925, that T. A. Edison, Inc., would market an improved mechanical phonograph adapted for long-playing records running twenty minutes.
As for radio, he detested it, predicting that the people would want to hear music of their own choice and not that which was imposed on them by the limited repertory of the broadcasting stations. The “radio craze” would soon pass, he said. “The present radio... is certainly a lemon... It will in time cure the dealer of any desire to handle any kind of radio,” he stated in a memorandum addressed to his staff in 1925.
The old phonograph business, however, was falling off rapidly; Edison’s nationwide organization of 13,000 phonograph dealers, built up during forty years, threatened to disappear. His sons, Charles — who by then was playing a leading role in the family business — and Theodore both begged him to allow them to try new ideas and make both radio receivers and electronic phonographs. According to Theodore Edison, his father opposed the new ventures until it was too late to enter upon them.
His youngest son, Theodore, considered the most talented of his children, he regarded with mixed feelings of puzzlement and respect. There had been, at times, some lively disputes between them on the score of Theodore’s addiction to mathematics and the method of theory and calculation. On one occasion, when no agreement seemed possible, the young man had packed his trunks and prepared to leave West Orange to look for a job somewhere else; but his father capitulated and agreed to have him work in his own way.723 To this end, an old shed was first turned over to Theodore for use as a laboratory. After a while his work appeared impressive enough to warrant his transfer to a fully equipped laboratory, and eventually — two years after his father’s retirement — to the post of Technical Director of the Edison Laboratory.
What the younger Edisons were especially eager to undertake was the development of a new electronic phonograph under the Edison label. They were alarmed at the lead their company’s competitors had taken in this field and, therefore, in the autumn of 1925 began to conduct experiments on an electronic phonograph model in an old building in the “compound,” this work being done in secret and without their father’s approval. A while later, after the Old Man had got wind of their activities, he decided to start an electronic phonograph project of his own, in competition with his sons!
The aged Edison had as his helper, early in 1926, a gifted young Swedish engineer named Bertil Hauffman, who, after having won high honors in his country and a traveling fellowship, had come to the United States to work at the Edison Laboratory. Hauffman, by his fine experimental and theoretical work, helped the Edison Company’s radio engineers to perfect a phonograph reproducing electronically recorded sound, and having a greatly expanded volume and frequency range. But the young engineer pursued modern scientific and mathematical methods in his experiments, such as he had been taught. Edison, however, insisted on handling their problems in his old “empirical” way. Though he could now hear almost nothing, he tried to test their phonograph models with the aid of an earphone; but found the effects of sound, to his ear, “distorted” and “terrible.” He therefore ordered that Hauffman be fired at once.
Such punishment would have meant disgrace in his own country for the visiting engineer, and the younger Edisons were aware that he was actually doing brilliant work which the Old Man could not follow. Therefore, Theodore Edison arranged for the young Swede to continue his experimental work secretly during the rest of his stay in America, in a part of the Edison Storage Battery Plant which the old inventor was not likely to visit.724
“My father’s past experience had simply got in his way,” the youngest son said of this incident. After considerable delay, an electronic phonograph of clear and powerful tone, and almost completely free of surface noise, was brought out at the end of 1928, as the last product of the Edison Phonograph Works.725
Meanwhile, Charles Edison finally brought his father around to the idea of manufacturing radio receivers. The Old Man had given his consent very reluctantly, warning his son that he would lose “millions” and “make a damn fool of himself.” Owing to long delays in obtaining licenses from the patent owners, principally the General Electric, Westinghouse and Bell Telephone group, and their common “patent pool,” the Radio Corporation of America, Charles Edison was unable to enter the radio field before the end of 1928, on the eve of a great depression.
In the autumn of 1926, when he was well along in his eightieth year, Edison at last announced that he had decided to retire and would limit himself thereafter to laboratory experiments. His son Charles now succeeded him as the head of Thomas A. Edison, Inc.; three years later, Theodore was made a member of the company’s Executive Board as well as its chief technical officer.726
Thomas A. Edison’s heart was never in the radio receiver or electronic phonograph business. In 1930 the Edison Company, after producing phonographs successfully for more than forty years, announced that it would shut down all manufacture of both phonographs and records, confining itself to radio receivers and business machines. But after another year of profound business depression, the venture in radio manufacturing, which had lost about two million dollars, was also abandoned.
For several years before that, the interest of the Old Man himself had been directed to a new field of operations, one that was entirely different from those he had formerly cultivated in his ivy-clad laboratory at West Orange. It was to be a last “campaign” of experimentation to which he would surrender himself with all his unfailing enthusiasm. “I have had sixty years of mechanics and physics,” he remarked on the occasion of his eighty-first birthday, and he was now turning to another science, as much for his own pleasure and amusement as for any profit that might come of it.727
3
In those last years the white-haired Edison might have been found more often than not in the gardens of his Florida home, where he remained for a much longer season than formerly. In addition to the thousands of tropical plants set out in the ground around Seminole Lodge, there was a special botanical laboratory filled with potted plants that he and a staff of botanists were developing from crossbred strains. He too was botanizing; but as always there was a practical object in view.
Rubber had recently become one of the most important commodities for the modern industrial world, thanks to the automobile. It was produced in distant tropical regions and in wartime became scarce and extremely dear; during the recent war its price had risen from about twenty cents to more than two dollars a pound. While visiting Burbank’s plantation in California with Ford and Firestone in 1915, Edison had remarked that if the United States entered the war, rubber would be the first product to be cut off. Ford had asked him to do something about creating a domestic supply, or a substitute, to which Edison replied, “I will — some day.”728
When rubber became costly again toward 1924-1925, owing to the British Far Eastern rubber-restriction scheme, Ford and Firestone renewed their pleas that Edison undertake a serious investigation of domestic sources of rubber, which they offered to finance. The Edison Botanic Research Company was thereupon organized in 1927, with the Ford Motor Company and the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company each advancing $93,500 to cover the costs of research, while Edison agreed to contribute his labor. Thus he was engaged once more in one of his famous “hunts” for some plant, either existing or to be developed by crossbreeding, which contained sufficient rubber to be processed on a large scale.
Once more the Old Man had a happy look in his eyes as he began his new studies at Fort Myers in the winter of 1927. He commenced as usual by collecting an extensive library on the subject. For four centuries, ever since the Spanish conquerors had brought back balls of wild rubber from the South American jungle, some of the world’s greatest scientists had been fascinated by this extraordinary plant. Faraday, for one, in 1826 had made extensive studies of the chemical formula of India rubber, which was a step toward the ultimate invention of a synthetic rubber compound. Was it mere coincidence that Edison took up the same study pursued by his idol, Faraday, a century before him?
In addition to his own reading, a member of his staff named Baruch Jonas, who could read in a dozen languages, was assigned to search for information available in Spanish, Portuguese, German, and other tongues. A chief chemist and a staff of six botanists were engaged for the duration of the project; and, according to his usual custom, emissaries were sent forth to discover and collect specimens of latex-bearing plants native to this and other countries, not omitting the Everglades close to his Florida home and botanical laboratory.
Of the period that followed, Mrs. Edison said afterward, “Everything turned to rubber in the family. We talked rubber, thought rubber, dreamed rubber. Mr. Edison refused to let us do anything else.”729 He was enjoying himself, he was doing “something different.” Hitherto he had dealt with things physical, chemical, and mineral, but not much with things vegetable, save for his “flier” in bamboo. Unlike other inventors of his age, he had a mind of infinite variety which turned from electrical work to sonic and optical problems, to mining engineering, to chemistry, and now to the biochemical mysteries of plant life. Now he was busily “ransacking the world,” as his associates reported, gathering and dissecting every class of weed, vine shrub and bush that grew, not only in warmer climates but also in the North Temperate Zone. It was a large assignment, and one calling primarily for Edison’s empirical method of work — which may have been why he enjoyed himself so greatly.
Prior to a severe illness suffered in 1929, his mental powers showed no perceptible decline. He “got the whole subject of rubber into his head” so he could see every phase of his problem. The main source of supply was the Hevea brasiliensis, a tree native to Brazil, but successfully transplanted on a large scale to Malaya, Ceylon, and Africa. Coolie labor in the moist equatorial lands had made rubber cheap and abundant, though the rubber tree required five years to mature and give forth its milky fluid.
It was well known to scientists that numerous other plants, even those common to the North Temperate Zone, contained caoutchouc latex in varying quantity: the giant milkweed, the Southern honeysuckle vine, and shrubs such as the Mexican guayule, already being cultivated in Southern California. But the rubber extracted from the guayule was unsatisfactory, being of a highly resinous quality. What Edison hoped to find was a “sowable and mowable” crop native to the United States, and capable of being cultivated, harvested, and processed within a year or eighteen months, so as to provide a source of supply in the event of war or other emergency. There was never any prospect of surpassing the economy of colonial labor in Far Eastern rubber, save when the market was artificially high.
In less than a year Edison reported to Henry Ford that he had collected 3,227 wild plants and shrubs from points ranging between New Jersey and Key West, and from various arboretums, and that 7 per cent were found to have rubber in various quality and amounts. “Everything looks favorable to a solution...” he concluded with his unvarying cheerfulness.
At the end of a second year’s search, when some 14,000 plants had been examined and tested, of which about 600 contained some rubber, Edison, after flirting with honeysuckle and milkweed, fixed on the domestic goldenrod as the most promising plant of all. Remembering that goldenrod used to grow in empty lots near the railroad depots where he worked as a telegrapher in his youth, he had the notion of sending a questionnaire to thousands of railway station agents throughout North America, inviting them to mail him specimens. A mountainous mail, filled with dried weeds, soon engulfed him; but it was a way of covering the ground.
Goldenrod yielded about 5 per cent rubber. Edison selected the varieties that seemed most promising, divided the roots, planted them separately, divided them again, and crossbred. It was time-consuming; but a giant goldenrod about fourteen feet tall yielding about 12 per cent latex was ultimately developed. Ford was so greatly encouraged by Edison’s reports that he purchased an extensive acreage in southern Georgia for the raising of goldenrod.
Edison worked on at his Florida botanical laboratory even in the heat of spring and early summer. Under his supervision a botanist would train a small hose on the anthers of selected plants in order to wash off the pollen; then taking pollen from another species he would place it on the dry pistils of the first flower in order to effect crossbreeding. This work had to be controlled under a microscope, with infinite care. Planted in January, a variety of goldenrod could be harvested from May to November. The crop was processed by means of a small still. The plant having been ground up and turned into a liquid solution, the tiny rubber particles separated themselves from the solid matter, and rose to the surface of the tank. Edison hoped eventually to be able to produce 100 to 150 pounds of rubber from an acre of goldenrod, and to process it economically by special machinery. But thus far such rubber could not be made for less than two dollars a pound; moreover, it was inferior to the rubber imported from the tropics.
In the late summer of 1929, while at West Orange again, Edison fell ill; his whole digestive apparatus seemed affected and there was some indication of kidney malfunction and of diabetes. But he rose from his bed saying, “Give me five years and the United States will have a rubber crop.” But who, now, could give Edison five years?
Oddly enough, not only Edison, but Henry Ford, the Dupont Company, and Standard Oil of New Jersey, after 1925, received information about the new German chemical process for converting coal or petroleum derivatives into synthetic rubber of the butadiene and sodium type perfected by I. G. Farben around that time. But large-scale operations were not to be carried out until a decade later, prior to World War II. Edison also might have turned his eyes in this direction — which was to be the most profitable for systematic research — but for the fact that the synthetic process was known to require an enormous investment in a special chemical plant, which even our biggest rubber tire and chemical corporations refused to risk at that period. In 1940, Federal government subsidies alone would make synthetic rubber production feasible. In that year government scientists also thoroughly explored the possibilities of using vegetable materials available to us, such as Edison’s variety of goldenrod and guayule, but reached the conclusion that processing such plants would be more difficult and costly than making synthetic, and would yield a product inferior to natural India rubber or the new synthetics.
Edison’s goldenrod rubber project, therefore, was foredoomed; it was one more of the forlorn hopes of his later years. If Henry Ford suspected this — and his busy factotum Liebold seems to have been aware of the truth — the motor king would not have moved a hand to stop Edison’s dying effort. Where Edison was concerned, the ruthless Ford was all sentiment
In 1929, Harvey Firestone, having received a shipment of the costly goldenrod latex from Fort Myers, obligingly turned out four rubber tires for the inventor’s Model-A Ford touring car.
Edison did not recover quickly from his illness of that year. He was suffering from uremia, yet worked on in his botanical laboratory, turning a smiling countenance to the world and assuring all and sundry that the solution of the rubber supply problem was at hand. “We are just beginning...” he said.730
4
The ninth decade of the inventor’s life was a time for the erection of monuments in his honor, a time for the bestowal of medals, ribbons, decorations, and other honorific ornaments, that came to him from all quarters of the world. He was touched with bronze; he was as a walking monument himself, in fact, an immortal. People used to come and address him with formal eulogies, generally dilating upon his benefactions to the human race. Solemn little delegations arrived frequently in West Orange, bearing their offerings of plaques or medals, and waited patiently in the library until, as often as not, word came to them that the great man was too busy to accept their gifts in person. He used to say that he had a whole bushel basket of such baubles in the mansion at Llewellyn Park. His library at the Edison Laboratory also gradually became cluttered up with sculptures, paintings, old photographs, and other memorabilia of his career. One of the most spectacular of these artifacts was a life-sized bronze figure of a nude youth by Lorado Taft, waving aloft a phonograph record. The veterans of Edison’s motion picture enterprises had it that this bronze statue really represented the custard pie thrower of slapstick days in the movies.
If, perchance, the octogenarian Edison was in good humor, he would send word that he would come out to meet a delegation arriving to pay him tribute, as on the occasion of the award of the John Scott Medal in December, 1929. The award committee and the Edison Industries executives would be drawn up in the library, a ceremonious group, formally attired for the occasion. Then they would hear steps coming along the hall — scuff, scuff, scuff — as one witness relates. “It was someone with shoes too large for him.”
The door opened. “Any rags, bottles, or old medals today?” sang out the famous man, in his high voice, as he beamed upon the visitors, his keen old eyes full of mischief. An ancient, white-haired but elegant figure rose from his desk at the far side of the library and trotted over slowly to greet his chief. This was Meadowcroft, the private secretary and faithful servitor of half a century, nearly blind, but with sharp hearing.
“Good morning, Dr. Johnson,” he said gravely.
“Good morning, Boswell,” Edison replied. It was an allusion to W. H. Meadowcroft’s having written The Boy’s Life of Thomas A. Edison, and to his having been co-author, with F. L. Dyer and T. C. Martin, of an “official” two-volume biography as well. Boswell-Meadowcroft was very loyal and very deferent, and, it was said, he truly loved the role of attendant to a great lion. The lion was also evidently fond of his “keeper,” though on days when he suffered from physical pain, or moral disappointment over some experiment, he would sound as if he were going to make a quick meal of the old factotum. Yet Meadowcroft could be so soothing that he often acted as a sort of buffer between the inventor and his associates, or even some members of the family.
There were always little intrigues among the old-timers in the laboratory, who sought to humor the Chief, or “get around him” by their competitive gestures of solicitude. On this slippery terrain the tactful Boswell-Meadowcroft usually maneuvered his way very well. John V. Miller, Mrs. Edison’s brother, who nowadays helped keep watch over the exchequer at the Edison Works and Laboratory, found it useful to operate through Meadowcroft; as even Charles Edison did, at times. It used to amaze people also to see how the old secretary, during an interview, would place his lips close to Edison’s ear and roar at him, then, with perfect composure turn and ask the interlocutor, in a low voice, for his next query.731
Edison was more difficult than ever to his associates in these later years, as he heard almost nothing and his strength declined. When his laboratory assistants came to his desk to report on experiments, he would ply them with question after question, until they became confused. Or it would appear that someone had forgotten something, which was the unpardonable sin; a phonograph, for instance, had not been wound up. Then Edison’s arguments would become fulminations, his eyes flaming, his great brows twitching menacingly, while he pounded the table and shouted. The “opponent” would be driven to raise his voice to the highest pitch, “so that what Edison considered a mild debate sounded like the hottest kind of row.” A visitor to the laboratory recalls Edison pacing up and down his library angrily denouncing certain “boneheaded moves” on the part of his executives, while the latter, unheard, vainly shouted their explanations into his deaf ears.732
A signal event in Edison’s old age was Henry Ford’s decision to build an immense museum of the history of industry and invention, as a monument not only to himself but also to his friend Edison, in Ford’s native town of Dearborn, Michigan. Detroit’s man of destiny, now in his middle sixties, neglected his motor business and amused himself in an imperial manner.
The untutored man who had once declared in a public courtroom that “History is the bunk” and that he could hire all the historians he wanted, now seemed wholly dominated by his sense of past times, and especially of his own past. He laid out Greenfield Village in Dearborn as a reconstruction of the rural setting of his early life, stuffing it with nineteenth-century farm cottages, churches, and taverns. Here was the jigsaw-styled frame house of a dentist who had been good to him, the original chapel his wife had attended in girlhood, and the Little Red Schoolhouse of the lady who had first sung “Mary Had a Little Lamb” (probably not authentic). Next to the nineteenth-century Americana was the vast museum of industry and invention holding everything in the line of machinery from ancient looms to the giant locomotives of 1925. But over all this reconstruction of the past there loomed the superhuman figure of Edison, whose glory Ford was bent on preserving in toto. As he told his intimates, he feared that our young people would grow up without knowing what had gone before them. But history to him was mainly industrial history, in fact a hodgepodge so unpredictable in its composition as to make his museum in its way impressive enough.
Hence Ford began to gather up such relics as he could find of the legendary Menlo Park Laboratory, now in ruins. He not only scoured the New Jersey countryside for the very planks that had fallen off Edison’s old sheds, but also gathered together a notable collection of original models of Edison’s inventions, installing them in a section of Greenfield Village that was at first known as the “Edison Institute.” These models were so well restored, or, in some cases, reproduced (with the advice of Francis Jehl, of the original Menlo Park team), that everything worked as before, the paper-carbon lamps as well as the 1882 dynamos. Wherever he found the debris of Edison’s life and labor he went digging — even in Fort Myers, where he removed the small electrical laboratory of 1887, now fallen into disuse.
“Dear me,” Mrs. Edison said plaintively one day, when she spied him from her window, scouring about her grounds at Seminole Lodge, “I do wish Mr. Ford would keep out of our backyard.”733
About three millions were thus lavished by Ford upon his collection of Edisonia alone, the total cost of Greenfield Village being more than ten million dollars. When it was all done, the restored Menlo Park laboratory stood in its native red New Jersey clay (transported thither by train) and even had a heap of old metal junk lying outside. For had not Edison once said that what the good inventor needed was “imagination and a scrap heap”?
From the governments of Japan, Russia, Chile, and many of the nations lying between, honors had been heaped on the old “Titan”; yet no official honors had been awarded him by his own government — save the Distinguished Service Medal, which he had refused. At length, at the suggestion of one of the latterday tycoons of the electrical industry, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon took the initiative in appealing to Congress to make amends for such neglect; and, by a resolution of May 21, 1928, the Congressional Medal of Honor was awarded to Edison. Mr. Mellon himself came to the Edison Laboratory to make the presentation, in a dignified little ceremony held on the anniversary of the lamp invention, in October.
Some twenty years earlier an association had been formed that was called “Edison Pioneers,” made up of the master’s old associates at the Menlo Park and Orange laboratories, as well as old friends and fellow inventors. Its main function was to hold annual luncheon meetings in honor of Edison on the occasion of his birthday. But for October, 1929, the Edison Pioneers also planned an imposing celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Edison’s incandescent lamp invention. On finding that they lacked funds with which to support a great public festival, representatives of the association approached General Electric and persuaded its officers to take over the whole program.
The General Electric Company, which had long ago absorbed and vastly expanded Edison’s lamp business, still invoked his name in its advertising matter as founding father of the industry. Since this company, as well as its chief competitor, Westinghouse, had recently been under Congressional attack for alleged monopolistic practices, it was considered good public relations policy to sponsor a grand program in celebration of Edison’s miracle, to be known as “Light’s Golden Jubilee,” ostensibly in honor of America’s most famous inventor, but also with a view to stimulating the sale of light bulbs. The site selected for the staging of this pageant was originally supposed to be the headquarters of General Electric at Schenectady, New York. A rising young publicity man, Edward L. Bernays, was drafted for the duration of the campaign, and began to draw up impressive plans for public banquets in various cities, to be concluded with a “colossal” affair at Schenectady, on October 21, at which the venerable Edison would reenact the 1879 invention and lighting of his first lamp.
The trouble was that Edison himself had not been consulted, in the first place, about these elaborate plans, but was simply informed that he was to appear at certain public gatherings and play the part assigned to him. Moreover, he saw no reason why he should be called upon to furnish so much publicity and free advertising for General Electric.
The heads of that great corporation, Chairman Owen D. Young and President Gerard Swope, were of the generation that came after Edison’s and had had no part in the old controversies of 1892, when his lamp business and machine works were taken over. But in the recent matter of the Edison Industries’ negotiations for radio patents General Electric, as one of the principal patent owners, had scarcely been sentimental or helpful to the old inventor.
At this point one of Edison’s intimates communicated with Henry Ford and informed him of General Electric’s scheme to take over the Edison Jubilee of 1929 and thus “commercialize” Edison’s fame. Ford declared that it was a “shameful action” and vowed that he would do something about it.
The Ford Museum and Greenfield Village were, by then, nearing completion. Ford therefore decided to combine the formal dedication of his own institution with the celebration in honor of the electric light. He ordered his builders to rush the job on the great museum building, a vast replica of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, for it was to be the stage setting of the opening-day banquet. Not long after one of the Edison Industries’ executives had telephoned him in the early winter of 1929, he suddenly appeared in the library of his venerable friend at West Orange, and waited for him, walking up and down restlessly, and muttering to himself: “I’ll show ‘em. I’ll kidnap the whole party.” Edison agreed to be “kidnapped.”734
It was a spectacle indeed to see one giant of industry snatching a “Golden Jubilee of Light” and its hero from the other. Messrs. Young and Swope, greatly taken aback, appealed to Edison and to Ford to accept their original program as scheduled for the Schenectady site. But Edison was stubborn, and Ford was adamant in his determination to have all the trouble and as much of the publicity as possible for himself. In the end a compromise agreement was reached to make the affair appear as a combined operation. However, the site of the main festival was to be Dearborn, Michigan.
When Edison stepped from the train at Dearborn, two days before the Jubilee was to open, he looked, it was noticed, “like a benevolent old wreck,” for he had been so gravely ill, in August, 1929, with pneumonia, that his life was feared for. (In great anxiety, Henry Ford had rushed from Detroit to Edison’s bedside at West Orange to see him.) Now as Edison beheld Greenfield Village and the transplanted “Menlo Park,” he smiled his broadest smile. Here were all the old bulbs, telegraph instruments and stock tickers, the “Long-waisted Mary Ann” dynamos, the old generating plant of Pearl Street, and even an old mortar and pestle he had used and thrown away. There was not only the old “tabernacle,” but also Mrs. Jordan’s plain boardinghouse across the road from it; even the old railroad station at Smith’s Creek, Michigan, where he had worked, and beside it a reproduction of a little Grand Trunk Railway train, including the baggage car with Tom Edison’s little laboratory-on-wheels!
After Ford had shown him this truly monumental restoration and asked for his opinion, Edison said, “Well, you’ve got this just about ninety-nine and one half per cent perfect.”
“What is the matter with the other one half per cent?” Ford asked.
“Well, we never kept it as clean as this!” Edison drawled.735
As one journalist reported, “No emperor could have been more fastidious in the transplanting of an exotic civilization than Mr. Ford has been in assembling nineteenth-century America near the factories that are the world-wide symbol of twentieth-century America.”736 What had started out as an “advertising stunt” by General Electric had turned into an elaborate historical pageant of a most singular character. Henry Ford claimed that he got no advertising benefit out of it. His assistant, Liebold, put it somewhat differently. “Mr. Ford naturally received favorable publicity,” Liebold wrote, “but it had not been done for that purpose.”737
President and Mrs. Hoover, and Secretary Mellon, with attendant secret-service men, arrived on the morning of the twenty-first of October, at the head of a delegation including the nation’s most eminent political and financial personages, among them Owen D. Young, Thomas W. Lamont, J. P. Morgan (the younger), Charles M. Schwab, and Otto H. Kahn; there were also scientists and inventors such as Orville Wright and Madame Curie. As President Hoover approached Detroit in his train, his party was met by Mr. and Mrs. Ford and Mr. and Mrs. Edison at a transfer point, where all changed to a little train of the Abraham Lincoln era, drawn by a wood-burning locomotive. In this they traveled over a spur line for half a mile to the restored “Smith’s Creek Junction,” where, seventy years before, Edison was supposed to have been given the bounce out of his baggage-car laboratory. Here a trainboy came on with a basket of merchandise; Edison took it from him and made an effort to walk about for a few moments, crying, “Candy, apples, sandwiches, newspapers!” — offering them to President Hoover. It was absurd, and yet also sheer symbolic drama; the American Dream reenacted before the world’s newspapers and movie cameras. But the principal actor was now feeble and his voice weak.
At nightfall, after all the sights had been displayed to the distinguished guests, Edison appeared on the second floor of the “Menlo Park” laboratory to demonstrate how he made a carbonized thread and vacuum globe in 1879 and at a given moment turned it on.
His chief associates of that great hour, Kruesi, Johnson, Batchelor, and Upton, were all dead. But fortunately Francis Jehl, one of the few survivors of Menlo Park days, had been found, somewhere in Europe, and brought back to help in the restoration and to assist his old master again with the pumping. As many of the guests as could be crowded into the laboratory were on hand to watch Edison re-create what seemed a scientific fable. But millions more throughout the world were now sitting at their radios, listening to the announcer reporting the event:
The lamp is now ready, as it was a half century ago! Will it light? Will it burn? Edison touches the wire.
Ladies and gentlemen — it lights! Light’s Golden Jubilee has come to a triumphant climax!
As the model of the old carbon filament lamp was turned up, all over “Menlo Park,” all over Dearborn, and Detroit, and in other great cities across the country special lamps blazed up suddenly with an immense yellow refulgence along the main avenues, as the voice on the radio continued:
And Edison said: “Let there be light!”
The excitement had been wearing for the Old Man. But he had more to come. The festival was to be topped off with a banquet for five hundred guests in that inflated model of Independence Hall; Owen Young was to be toastmaster, and President Hoover was to give the principal address in dedication of what was afterward called Ford’s “Old Curiosity Shop.” But at the door of the banquet hall Edison faltered and all but collapsed. Led to a settee in the corridor, he sat down and wept, overcome with emotion and fatigue.
“I won’t go in,” he said to Mrs. Edison. Only she could have overcome his resistance. They brought him some warm milk; he revived a little, entered the hall and took his place at the seat of honor. Messages from many nations were read, tributes were offered, while he heard nothing and ate nothing. President Hoover spoke.
I have though it fitting for the President of the United States to take part in paying honor to one of our great Americans... Mr. Edison... has repelled the darkness... has brought to our country great distinction throughout the world. He has brought benefaction to all of us...
Edison spoke briefly, but with feeling, in reply. He was happy, he said, that tribute was being paid to scientific work.
This experience makes me realize as never before that Americans are sentimental and this crowning event of Light’s Golden Jubilee fills me with gratitude. As to Henry Ford, words are inadequate to express my feelings. I can only say to you, that in the fullest and richest meaning of the term — he is my friend. Good night.
Then he slumped into his chair and turned as white as death. Mrs. Edison and President Hoover’s physician at once helped him to a room in the rear of the speaker’s table, and laid him on a sofa. Drugs were administered, and he came to; then he was taken to the Ford residence and put to bed for several days. “I am tired of all the glory, I want to get back to work,” he said.
EDISON COLLAPSES AT JUBILEE BEFORE NOTABLES AT DEARBORN, the newspaper headlines reported.
During his recent illness in the preceding summer he had permitted doctors, for all his skepticism about them, to examine him thoroughly. They had found that his long-enduring constitution had been completely undermined; he suffered from a combination of uremic poisoning, Bright’s disease, diabetes, and gastric ulcer. It was a mystery to the medical men how he had lasted so long. His days in the laboratory were now definitely over, though none was supposed to mention that to him or anyone else. “Keep him going. Don’t change anything, have the same people, don’t let him stop,” the family doctor advised.
In these last days many of the things being said about him were, of course, exaggerated compliments, conceived in the spirit of compassion. Yet much of the growing legend attached to him reflected the innate ideas that many typical Americans of his day had of what was best and strongest in themselves and in the form of civilization they had made, materialistic, and yet also meliorative and charitable. It was after all true, as was so often said on those honorific occasions arranged for Edison in his later days, that no other of our workers in science had appealed so much to the imagination of everyman; no other inventor’s name had become so universally known and popular as his. “He revolutionized industry,” Dr. Le Compte du Noüy observed at the end, and “as one of the greatest of technical geniuses” became “a symbol of our Machine Age, one of the founders of our mechanical civilization, for better or for worse.”738
During the span of his life, another kind of fame was accorded to the purely scientific discoverers, unjustly limited or retarded in the case of the Americans Henry and Gibbs, but imposing enough in that of a Planck, a Rutherford, or an Einstein. Yet their great contributions to the knowledge of nature’s laws were fated to be remote from the understanding of common men, who were so captivated on the other hand by the practical experimenter and contriver Edison. There were other notable American inventors in his time; but they were more usually lonely, troubled, or diffident souls, and his personality outshone theirs. By 1929, two whole generations of Americans had grown accustomed to watching the progress of the self-educated man who worked in a laboratory that had its windows virtually open to all the world. He had known how to dramatize his inventions, had known how to engender interest, faith, and hope in the success of his projects. That the career of this plain-spoken, rough-hewn man made so deep an impression on multitudes of Americans speaks well for them, after all. To modern workers in science, in the corporation laboratories and universities, he typified the independent, lone-handed inventor of the nineteenth-century’s “heroic age of invention.” He had begun his work in the age of gas and kerosene lamps and was leaving it with the cities throughout the world garlanded with his lights, and music and voices sounding everywhere.
5
He absented himself for longer and longer intervals from his laboratory in the two last years that remained, during which it seemed only his will kept him alive, for he ate next to nothing. Often he stayed abed or sat in an easy chair at home, but still kept in close touch with his technical assistants, who daily brought him news of the progress of the goldenrod rubber experiment. Mrs. Edison watched patiently over his rest and diet, and maintained an almost daily routine of motor drives with him along the country roads of New Jersey.
In those last two years of ill health and weakness Edison still tried to work — though usually at his home, in a large room upstairs that served as his den, with Mina Edison always there also, occupied with her own domestic, social, and religious activities, at a large flat-topped desk placed at the other end of the room. Mrs. Edison had two telephones at her desk and a battery of push buttons with which she could “buzz” the servants. She might be working over anything from a program for a future Chautauqua session to the affairs of the School Hoard at West Orange, or those of a local temperance committee seeking to curb Sunday amusements in the town, including beer drinking. She also busied herself in helping to beautify the streets and gardens of the place, and in aiding the Negroes living in slums on the outskirts of the Edisons’ winter home at Fort Myers, Florida. Facing her big desk, there hung on the wall a large framed photograph of Edison in his twenties, a youth with the expression of a dreamer. Beside it was a portrait of her eldest son, Charles, whose features — though softer and less rugged — strongly resembled his father’s.
Edison’s interest in new “campaigns” never flagged. Having recently met Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, he insisted on being taken to Newark Airport to learn something about the problems of airplane landing and take-off. “The aviators tell me that they must find a means to see through a fog,” he said. “I have an idea about it. I am waiting for a real fog — a water fog — and I will see if I can’t penetrate it.” Perhaps a rocket would do the trick?
At about this period he ventured the prophecy that “There will one day spring from the brain of Science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so will abandon war forever...” He was greatly interested in the impact of Albert Einstein’s formulations, but admitted that he couldn’t understand any of it. “I am the zero of mathematics,” he conceded ruefully. In one of his last interviews, he went on to say, “I am much interested in atomic energy, but so far as I can see we have not yet reached a point where this exhaustless force can be harnessed and utilized.”739
On August 1, 1931, he had a sudden sinking spell and lay at the point of death. He could absorb virtually no food at all — but, to the astonishment of his physicians, he rallied and tried to rise from bed again. As the intense summer heat oppressed him, one of the new air-conditioning machines was installed in his bedroom, and he remained indoors, resting and reading. But as soon as he understood the real state of affairs, that he would never be well enough to go back to work, he seemed to lose the desire to live.
Now, for the first time, he ceased to fight; as he lay in bed reading or writing in one of his notebooks, the words or drawings wavered, the notebooks slipped from his hand. Meadowcroft, he was told, was also dying; John Ott, the last of the ancient co-workers, was sinking fast. From Detroit, Henry Ford made a hurried trip in September to look on his idol for a last time. Edison rallied enough to speak to Ford with considerable spirit and ask him many questions.
In October, when the sharp-thrusting hills of the Orange Valley were truly daubed in orange, he sank again. In the great library below the hill, everyone spoke in hushed tones; the big chair at the huge old roll-top desk was empty; the great carved clock ticked on.
Gloom hung over the mansion in Llewellyn Park. Edison slept, waked a little, and drowsed again, he who had resented every moment so lost. As a patient he was both difficult and courageous. There were several eminent medical men attending him, and he persisted in discussing their method of treatment, inquiring of them what medicines they were trying, how his body was reacting — and why. When they prescribed medicine, he insisted on measuring out his own doses. After blood tests were taken he would show the keenest interest, insisting that Dr. Hubert S. Howe, the chief physician, bring him slides and microscope so that he too might examine them. When the chart was set up before him with its stabilized line, he could read it and follow his progress; when the line turned downward, after the first week of October, he could see very clearly how the “campaign” was going. His interest in applied science, one might truly say, never flagged and ended only with the termination of this “last experiment.”
One who ministered to him asked if “he had thought of a life hereafter.”
“It does not matter,” he replied in a low voice. “No one knows.”740
In the early days of October it became generally known that only a short time was left to him. His mind became befogged at last, his great eyes dimmed, and from time to time he sank into a coma. At the brief intervals when he was conscious he was placed in a chair by one of the tall windows of his bedroom, overlooking a great sweep of lawn and handsome beeches. Could he still see? Mina Edison was the last person he appeared to recognize. She bent over the pale invalid and placed her mouth to his ear so that she could communicate with him. “Are you suffering?” she asked. “No, just waiting,” he replied. Once he looked toward the window and the last audible words he uttered were: “It is very beautiful over there.”
Newspaper reporters maintained a deathwatch in the vicinity of Glenmont day and night. The room upstairs was kept dark at night, with a nurse sitting beside the patient; if the lights went on — then all the world must be told. In the last hours many of Edison’s laboratory associates waited in the hall downstairs, while Charles Edison would go up the great stairway, then down, to make his report.
Fifty-two years earlier almost to the day, the men associated with Edison were sitting up with him at night to watch how many hours his carbon filament lamp would live. Now, his son Charles, after his periodic visits to the sickroom, used the same phrase spoken long ago by the watchers at the Menlo Park Laboratory in October, 1879: “The light still burns.”
On October 17 his pulse dropped steeply; in the early morning hours of Sunday the 18th, at 3:24 a.m., the lights of his room went on, and the doctors and nurse came out to announce the end. The electromagnetic telegraph, the telephone, the radio, with all of which his life had been bound up, flashed the news to all the corners of the world. Funeral services were set up for the morning of Wednesday, the twenty-first.
That day some thought was given in high places to the idea of commemorating his passing in some unusual way, in a manner worthy of such a hero’s death; the President of the United States, it was proposed, should order all electric current to be turned off for a minute or two, in streets, factories, public places, and homes throughout the nation. But no sooner was the thought uttered than it was realized that such action was unthinkable. Owing to the very nature of Edison’s contribution to the technical organization of modern society, his now so vital system of electric power distribution — the blood circulation of the community, as it were — would have been arrested; there was risk of incalculable disaster in halting, even for an instant, the great webs of transmission lines, and the whole monster mechanism of power that had grown in a half century out of his discoveries. The idea of a momentary “blackout” was therefore abandoned as entirely impracticable. Instead the President suggested that lights be dimmed for a few minutes, voluntarily, where possible, as in private residences, at 10 p.m. of the day of Thomas A. Edison’s funeral. Many paid this last tribute, silently, and then the lights were turned on again.
Edison on the lawn of Glenmont, around 1917.