6 ~ “A bloated eastern manufacturer”
1
In the winter of 1871 Edison wandered about the industrial section of Newark, New Jersey, looking for a good location for the manufacturing shop he was to establish. He had received from Western Union orders for 1,200 stock tickers, to be manufactured over a period of several years — orders totaling nearly half a million dollars. After climbing many stairs in dingy buildings having “To Rent” signs, he found what he wanted, at his price, on the top floor of a three-story structure at 4-6 Ward Street. Soon horse-drawn vans arrived with a quantity of machinery he had purchased. Many mechanics came to Ward Street in response to advertisements he had inserted in the newspapers. To their surprise they found the proprietor to be a young man of only twenty-four. In this district of small shops, it was rumored that he had struck it rich.
“Mine was too sanguine a temperament,” he said, “to keep money in solitary confinement.” Within thirty days he had spent virtually all the fortune he had just won for equipment of all sorts.107
His mood, nevertheless, was of the highest optimism, as shown by his one letter to his parents in that winter of 1871. He would help them with much money. But his great anxiety was on the score of his mother, reports of whose ill health reached him. He had not been home in three years and did not know when he would find time for a visit. Perhaps he even dreaded to return and find his mother so sadly changed, her mind clouded in the last years of her illness.108 Her life, in fact, had been filled with tragedy; three of her seven children had died in infancy, and a fourth, Harriet Ann, in youth. Tom Edison’s letter ended on an apologetic note:
... I have a large amount of business to attend to. I have one shop which employs 18 men and am fitting up another which will employ over 150 men. I am now what ‘you’ Democrats call a “Bloated Eastern Manufacturer.”109
Indeed, he longed to see his mother once more — the woman who “was the making of me,” as he said — and show her that her hopes in him had not been misplaced. But that winter he was unable to go to her, and after that it was too late. On April 11, 1871, amid the rush of his new affairs, a telegram arrived from Port Huron telling him that Nancy Edison had died two days before. He hurried home to Michigan to attend her funeral, and kneel beside her grave in the cemetery by Lake St. Clair; then he returned quickly to Newark to lose himself in work.
Later he learned that a few weeks after his mother’s death, his father, aged sixty-seven, had formed a connection with one of the local dairymaids, aged seventeen, whom he was eventually to marry.
The allusion to himself as a “Bloated Eastern Manufacturer” in his last letter to his parents reminds us that the inventor’s background was that of Western agrarian radicals, who still reflected the Jacksonian Democrats’ mistrust of the “Eastern money power,” and of the monopolistic organizations rising in the railroad and telegraph industries. Sam Edison, the old nonconformist and political firebrand, was always “agin”; he was opposed to Lincoln and the War for the Union, as he had been opposed to the King’s rule in Canada. On one occasion, early in the Civil War, Sam had had to run away on his long legs from an infuriated mob of Unionists in Detroit. He hated the Grand Trunk Railway, one of whose locomotives had killed a cow belonging to him (owing, as it was said, to his fences being neglected); for ten years he stubbornly conducted a lawsuit against the railroad for the price of that cow, though in vain. After the war, rural Michigan became a hotbed of the radical Greenback and Antimonopoly movement; but the son of that old rebel Sam Edison was the protégé of the Western Union Telegraph Company, the nation’s prime example of an all-powerful monopoly. It then owned 25,000 miles of telegraph wires; its reputed control of newspaper wire services, through affiliation with the Associated Press, also gave it a sinister fame that was augmented by public scandals over its finances and high rates. Small businessmen feared its secret power, and leading members of Congress urged that Western Union should be nationalized and made part of the Post Office system, as had been done in Europe. The company’s directors, however, argued that their industry functioned “naturally” as a unified organization, and they reinforced their political arguments, during the General Grant era, by the widespread distribution of complimentary books of telegraph franks to members of state legislatures and of Congress.110
Young Edison knew something of the repute of Western Union, to whose services some of his most skillful inventive labors in the telegraphic medium, during the next seven years, were mainly consecrated. It used to be said in those days that the telegraph “trust” held Edison in thrall, just as it did various other inventors and technicians; and there is a core of truth in the assertions of Lancelot Hogben and other popular historians of applied science that Edison gave some of the best years of his life to advancing the efficiency of the monopolized communications system.
At this period after the Civil War, as Henry Adams has said, the whole nation seemed to turn its energies to the task of building up its industrial plant, its factories, its transport net, and its modern communications system. The railroad “barons,” driving for monopoly, not only violated the law by engaging in wholesale political bribery, but sometimes were even involved in violent combat with each other’s organizations. The telegraph “barons” (often linked with the railroad people) were apparently no less unscrupulous in their drive for complete control of their field. But ruthless and unconscionable though they might be in the pursuit of gain, these new industrial potentates presided over a brilliant period of economic and technological expansion. America needed heavy industries and a continental railway system and got it in its own reckless fashion. Likewise the country needed a unified telegraph network, then most vital to all commerce — the “nerve” of industry. The job of Thomas A. Edison and other technicians was to see to it that the system was the most efficient that current scientific skill could produce.
In its heyday, the great Western Union was an outstanding example of the marriage of capital and applied science; it was indeed the principal initiator of the new electrical industry in this country. Among all the capitalist groups who participated in America’s industrial progress, Western Union’s directors distinguished themselves in the two decades following the Civil War by subsidizing scientific invention more actively than did any other industrialists. The company encouraged inventors by paying them; but while thus sponsoring their work it also took control of their products. The valuable patents of Edison, as of other men, became the property of the giant telegraph company. And when Edison went off to Newark to manufacture stock printers for the company, Marshall Lefferts saw to it that the young man took as his partner one William Unger, said to have been Lefferts’ business associate.111 The firm name was, therefore, Edison & Unger.
If Edison’s condition was that of a “captive scientist” — as was sometimes said of him in the early stages of his career — it is doubtful that he worried about it very much at that time. His ruling idea was to function in his own field, to do his own part as well as he could, and to be paid for it. Toward the political and social issues involved he felt then a detachment amounting almost to indifference. In any case, the relations of inventor and patron, like those of the artist and patron, are often ambivalent. While it was good to have financial supporters (and Edison had had his troubles finding such) they could also be irksome; the motives of the scientific worker and the money man were by no means the same, as Bentham had said. In the privacy of his notebooks and correspondence Edison sometimes gave vent to his dislike of “small-brained capitalists” — as if in revenge for their repeated complaints against “harebrained” inventors.
Now began an intensely active and happy period of Edison’s life, lasting about five years, when he worked at the Newark shops as both inventor and manufacturer of diverse electrical products. This period also, especially in its earlier phases, was one of schooling for him. Although his main task was to perfect — often by simplifying — the crude inventions of others, his telegraphic work required scientific and technical knowledge and a growing experience of the industrial arts. Beginning thus as a sort of master technician who refined upon, or added minor innovations to, others’ devices, he developed within two or three years, with increasing resourcefulness, into an original creator with a flair for truly strategic inventions.
At Edison & Unger’s he began assembling about fifty men to turn out stock tickers, serving as their foreman himself. In hiring workers Edison looked above all for skilled craftsmen, advertising especially for men who had “light fingers.” The electrical industry was then in its infancy; the workers he first drew into it had had previous training mostly as clockmakers and machinists.
There was, for example, John Ott, a youth of twenty-one whom he had engaged as an assistant at the smaller shop he had in Jersey City. When Ott was first interviewed, Edison pointed to a heap of the disassembled machine parts of a stock printer on the floor and said, “Can you make this machine go?”
Ott said, “You needn’t pay me if I don’t.” When he was done, Edison exclaimed impulsively, “Here, you come and take charge of this place.” Ott thereafter served as a sort of assistant foreman at Newark.
A more remarkable mechanic still was Charles Batchelor, a genial, black-bearded young Englishman who had been sent to the United States to install special machinery at the Clark Sewing Thread Mills in Newark. Having decided to remain in this country, and hearing of the new electrical equipment factory, he came to Edison and was promptly engaged when he demonstrated his manual skill and his ability as a mechanical draftsman. Another hard-working and well-loved member of the original force was John Kruesi, a Swiss clockmaker, who had undergone a long and varied apprenticeship in Europe and who could construct almost any form of instrument or machine he might be called upon to make. Then there was Sigmund Bergmann, a German, who could then scarcely speak English, but who showed himself a keen and diligent mechanic. When Bergmann’s want of language was remarked upon, the young master exclaimed, “What difference does it make? His work speaks for him!” Bergmann and another of Edison’s Newark mechanics, Johann Schuckert, in later years returned to their native Germany to found two of the largest electrical manufacturing concerns in Europe, the latter becoming head of Siemens-Schuckert of Berlin.
These skilled men made up the core of the original crew who learned to manufacture electrical equipment under Edison, who was himself still in the learning stage; they, in their turn, trained great numbers of other workers. They made products that were both solid and finely contrived, which Edison always delighted in. Though their wages were average, usually on the piecework basis, they worked hard and long hours under the command of him whom they already called the “Old Man.”
He was only twenty-four, younger than most of his men, yet he directed his people and assumed complete responsibility for everything going on in his plant. For Edison by now had a sense of the uniqueness of his inventive talent. Like his obstinate ancestors, he was decidedly the egoist, but one who knew how to ally the devotion of other men with his ego drives, for he had an intuitive knowledge of human psychology.
John Ott’s first impression of young Edison was of one “who was as dirty as any of the other workmen, and not much better dressed than a tramp. But I immediately felt that there was a great deal to him.”112 He was like no other shop boss those men had ever known; approachable to all and sundry, full of humorous sallies, and yet, in the next breath, very severe with them, and bent on keeping them “hustling” perpetually.
His intuitive powers and his endless curiosity about everything also amused and intrigued his co-workers. If he were suddenly struck by some new idea, all hands would be shifted from making stock printers to something entirely different. Or a visitor might come in with a new product — the first crude model of a typewriter by Sholes was brought to Edison’s shop in Newark — and he would forget everything else to experiment with this mechanical novelty and determine whether it could not be improved. His shop was a theater where the scenery was constantly changing.
It was said of Pasteur that he showed “great impetuosity” in his experimental work. Now that he was his own master in his own shop, Edison likewise showed an irrepressible enthusiasm, like that of a child. He kept his men at work long hours, but he himself would work even longer, and his own dedicated efforts were a challenge to them.
When undertakings of unusual moment absorbed him, he would go about his shop “laying bets with the men” or offering them prizes to continue their work without stopping until some experimental model he had assigned them was brought to working order. When the results of some prolonged period of labor were unusually pleasing to him, he might declare a holiday and invite all hands to go fishing with him. At moments of good fortune he showed a “joyous nature,” or indeed “a boyish hilarity,” as one of his assistants said. One day, after having completed successful negotiations with some New York capitalists, he “entered the workshop with a whoop, fired his silk hat into an oil pan, and was preparing to send his fine coat after it, when someone laughingly pinned him down...”113
He could be the complete eccentric, too, in his business methods. “I kept only payroll accounts. I kept no books. I preserved a record of my own expenditures on one hook, and the bills on another hook, and generally gave notes in payment. The first intimation that a note was due was the protest; after that I had to hustle around and raise the money. This saved the humbuggery of bookkeeping, which I never understood, and besides, the protest fees were only one dollar and fifty cents.”
His allergy to bookkeepers had begun, he claimed, after he had employed one to balance his accounts at the end of a twelve-month period and learned that he had a clear surplus of $7,500. Thereupon, in the highest spirits, he announced that there was to be a “jamboree” for all hands in his shop. But the day before the party he looked over the bookkeepers’ report himself and had some afterthoughts, recalling certain large recent expenditures that were not included. After a whole night of figuring, he arrived at the chilling certainty that there was no surplus, but a deficit of several thousand dollars. The order for the festivities was therefore abruptly canceled. Henceforth Edison held to the belief that life was simpler without the torment of double-entry bookkeeping.114
From time to time, after neglecting his contractual work for Western Union in favor of some other experimental undertaking, Edison would find himself out of funds. Then he would turn back to making more of his Universal Stock Printer, working his people on two shifts, night and day, to realize cash.
On one occasion in the early 1870s he had a rush order for thirty thousand dollars’ worth of the Edison stock printers, then being manufactured according to a much improved model he had lately developed. But these new instruments turned out to have “bugs” in them and refused to perform as they were supposed to. Edison then called together a half dozen of his devoted helpmates, among them Batchelor, “Honest John” Kruesi, Bergmann, and Ott, and informed them that he intended to shut himself up with them in the laboratory on the top floor of the Ward Street factory until they had located the cause of the trouble. “Now, you fellows,” he declared determinedly, “I’ve locked the door, and you’ll have to stay here until this job is completed. Well, let’s find the ‘bugs’.”115
During sixty hours of physical and mental exertion, without sleep and with little food, they all stayed at their task until the new machine ran smoothly again. His laboratory, as Edison later told the story, was thus “turned into a prison.” Several of the workers had affectionate wives who pined for their husbands and came to the barred doors, wailing, or tried to convey parcels of food for them through the windows. It was of no avail; the young master was relentless.
In recalling those busy years of his youth in Newark Edison used to say, “At least I did not have ennui.”
2
Only a few months after he had organized the shop at Ward Street, he set aside a room on the top floor as his laboratory, which he provided with far more elaborate equipment than he had ever possessed before. During much of the day he might be busied with his duties as a manufacturer, yet he could not give up the habit of experimental investigation in many different departments of applied science. As before, curiosity drove him to research; to this he now brought a more extended knowledge, based on much reading as well as practice. At Newark, where he was his own master, experimentation became a daily and systematic, rather than intermittent, pursuit.
Printing telegraph or stock ticker, with a keyboard of letters only, manufactured by Edison at his Newark factory around 1871.
From the summer of 1871 he began to keep a laboratory notebook, setting down almost day by day the exact record of his investigations, ideas, and even random reflections. On its first page he wrote:
Newark, N.J., July 28, 1871
This will be a daily record containing ideas previously formed, some of which have been tried, some that have been sketched and described, and some that have never been sketched, tried or described.
Among the first entries are the subjects of work on hand, all relating to printing telegraphs and type-wheels, such work being done under contract with Gold & Stock Telegraph over the next five years. But he stipulates:
Reserving to myself any ideas contained in this book which I do not see fit to give to said Gold & Stock Telegraph.116
There follow descriptive notes accompanied by rough sketches for a variety of proposed electrical inventions, including one of a multiplex telegraph, which he designates as being for his own exclusive use and profit:
Invented by & for myself and not for any small-brained capitalist.117
In the years at his Newark shops, Edison the electrical instrument manufacturer gradually developed into one of the most accomplished technicians of the telegraph industry. The Edison Universal Stock Printer, improved by him over a period of several years and incorporating the earlier patents of Callahan and others, came into use in almost all financial offices and security exchanges in Europe as well as in America, speeding up the process of all speculation and investment.
When the devices of others were brought before him for inspection, it was seldom that he could not contribute his own technical refinements or ideas for improved mechanical construction. As he worked constantly over such machines, certain original insights came to him; by dint of many trials, materials long known to others, constructions long accepted, were “put together in a different way” — and there you had an invention. This would follow usually upon an extended period of patient observation and testing that ended with some act of insight coming “suddenly,” as it appeared, but in reality derived from an accumulated body of technical knowledge stored in the searcher’s subconscious mind.
Because he worked at this time in a highly competitive field, often adding his innovations to the patented devices of other men, the idea got about that Edison did a good deal of borrowing and “using” of other inventors’ work. But those inventors also built upon the many investigations that others had done before them. It may be said that all invention is wrought within the continuum of man’s total technical and scientific knowledge; hence the regular recurrence of parallel or simultaneous invention and of identical scientific discoveries by different men in different lands.
Edison’s first sponsors noticed how, given some other inventor’s product to analyze and improve, he usually completed his task promptly, or within a surprisingly short time. In the year 1872 alone he brought out thirty-eight patents for new models or new parts of the stock ticker; there were telegraph type-wheels, various printing devices, relay magnets, unison-stops, and automatic telegraphs. In 1873 he brought forth twenty-five more of such patents, several of them being of marked originality. Our patent laws, to be sure, allowed the issuance of letters of patent for minor improvements or refinements upon existing mechanisms, which was an encouragement to continued technological advance.
Even those early variants of the telegraph, as one of his old-time laboratory assistants wrote long afterward, sufficed to place him above the average inventor of his time.
One can see with what refinement he devises compound-wound electromagnets, and how he creates local circuits through relays; and with what nicety he solves the problem of shifting mechanisms and unison regulation. He displays cunning also in the way he neutralizes or intensifies electromagnets, applying strong or weak currents, and commands either negative or positive directional currents to do his bidding.118
At twenty-four his growing professional repute brought many an important entrepreneur to his Newark shop. Not long after he had begun making stock printers, a young railroad and telegraph engineer named Edward H. Johnson turned up at the Ward Street shop bringing with him a model of a new type of automatic telegraph — invented by one George D. Little — which Edison was asked to examine and test. Johnson explained that he was acting as consultant for a group of financiers who were trying to promote Little’s apparatus. But he himself had found the machine disappointing in its performance and had been unable to improve upon it; after inquiring in Washington and New York for some expert who might help him, he had been directed to Edison as a “young wonder,” who was doing great work for Western Union.
Little’s device used a moving paper tape having perforations corresponding to Morse dots and dashes; when fed into a transmitting instrument the tape’s perforations controlled signals that were sent by wire to a receiving instrument at the far end of a circuit, where the same impulses were printed automatically as dot and dash signals on another ribbon of paper tape. Over a short line, the apparatus apparently worked rapidly and well. In tests over a circuit of two hundred miles distance, however, Little’s automatic instrument had been found to print its messages all too slowly and indistinctly.
Edison tested the machine thoroughly over wires of the Pennsylvania Railroad and diagnosed its weaknesses. Instead of being faster than the ordinary Morse manual sender, it proved to be extremely “sluggish” because it was highly subject to electrostatic interference. The needle at the receiving end dragged or smeared things. Then Edison, after some study, made a number of proposals for correcting the defects of this apparatus. The mechanism, in his judgment, had splendid possibilities, and he appeared to Johnson both confident and very clearheaded in his plans for its “cure.”
The group that had purchased Little’s patent had already formed a stock corporation named the Automatic Telegraph Company to promote the invention. They had been on the verge of abandoning the whole project, in which no one would take any stock, when Johnson delivered an ecstatic report on the young inventor in Newark and on his plans for making their machine practical. Whereupon the company’s directors hurried over to see Edison and, on April 24, 1871, entered into a contractual agreement with him. One of the directors of Automatic Telegraph was George Harrington, formerly Assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury, but reputed to be the financial agent of the sinister Jay Gould. Another director was Josiah C. Reiff, former newspaper correspondent and currently Washington lobbyist for the Gould-controlled Kansas & Pacific Railroad.
These people were all for technical progress, on the one hand; but on the other (though Edison knew nothing about this) they were in hopes that a smart piece of invention could help them carry out a good stock-jobbing venture. Even at this early stage of Edison’s career, it was being said of him, as by Patrick Delany, a well-known expert in telegraphic instruments: “Edison’s ingenuity inspired confidence, and wavering financiers stiffened up when it became known that he was to develop the automatic.”119
Harrington, on behalf of the Automatic Telegraph Company, advanced Edison the sum of forty thousand dollars on account for an assignment of all rights connected with the invention of automatic telegraphs. Edison, thereupon, in partnership with Joseph T. Murray, of Newark (as Edison & Murray), opened another shop in Newark, spent most of the money he received on special equipment and material, hired more men, and set to work. One of his stipulations was that Edward H. Johnson, the railroad engineer, a vivacious and well-spoken character, be assigned to assist him for the duration of this project. Johnson said afterward that he had come only to consult Thomas A. Edison but remained to work with him as an associate for more than twenty years.
Edison’s methods of investigation at this period were described by Johnson as requiring complete knowledge of everything that had ever been done before in such a field as automatic telegraphy. Books and periodicals describing all that Wheatstone and Bain and others had attempted in England, and indeed all records of previous experiments in automatic mechanisms were acquired. Johnson relates:
There were numerous theoretical solutions in French books, but none of them enabled him to exceed the rate of 200 words a minute... I came in one night and there sat Edison with a pile of chemical books that were five feet high when laid one upon another. He had ordered them from New York, London and Paris. He studied them night and day. He ate at his desk and slept in a chair. In six weeks he had gone through the books, written a volume of abstracts, made two thousand experiments... and produced a solution, the only one that could do the thing he wanted.120
A great part of the autumn of 1871 was devoted by Edison to the automatic, or high-speed, telegraph. The transmitting end worked rapidly; it was at the receiving end that trouble was encountered, mainly in the form of electrostatic interference. After much searching, Edison discovered that by using as a shunt around the receiving instrument a coil of wire enclosing a soft-iron core, he brought about a striking improvement in speed over long circuits. Self-induction would produce a momentary reversal of the current at the end of each impulse, so that each signal was very sharply defined; thus the stylus of the receiving instrument was made to function accurately and no longer smeared.
In tests carried out during the winter of 1872 over lines between New York and Philadelphia, he was eventually able to transmit one thousand words a minute in Morse code signals. Meanwhile, he had also greatly improved the chemical preparation of the paper tape at the receiving end — with a cheap ferric solution. Then he perfected the mechanism of the punching machine that made the perforations in the tape. On August 16, 1872, a patent application covering these improvements and additions to the Little apparatus was filed and assigned to George Harrington.
It was Edison’s most skillful performance so far and clearly foreshadowed the early development of a commercially practicable automatic of tremendous speed. Yet he was not satisfied. A big idea had come to him, one that had great logic, and he must work it out at all costs. Since no human being could receive the messages coming at such speed over the lines, why not make the receiving instrument entirely automatic? Why send messages by an automatic transmitter in dots and dashes when they might be printed out at the other end of the line in Roman characters by combining the automatic telegraph with the mechanism of his own Universal Stock Printer? In his laboratory notes for the day he writes:
At the present writing I am inclined to believe that I am the originator of the idea of using perforated paper for controlling or working printing telegraphs. September 15, 1871. Witnessed by Joseph T. Murray [Edison’s partner].
He pushed on with his work, commenting on each experimental trial with expletives such as “N.G.” or “not good enough,” or “damn,” or some plain Anglo-Saxon term in four letters. A happier occasion would be commemorated by notes such as:
A bully experiment by T. A. Edison, assisted by Charles Batchelor... The sentence we took: ‘Now is the winter of our discontent’ — with this we got 250 words per minute, but counting five letters to a word we got 228.121
By the winter of 1873 the Automatic Telegraph people had reason to be jubilant over Edison’s progress. He had performed more than he had promised at the beginning of his investigations. The completed models of the new automatic instrument incorporated at the dispatching end of the system a machine for punching holes in a strip of paper, somewhat resembling a typewriter. A perforated tape, running over a metal cylinder, permitted electrical contacts to be made or broken through the perforations, thus flashing telegraphic signals to the far end of the circuit and guiding the receiving instrument there so that it printed letters on tape.
Before he finished this task he gave the new system tests over long lines for 120 successive nights. The messages were usually dispatched by Edison from a loft on lower Broadway, in New York, to Washington, where Johnson and Patrick Delany handled the receiving instrument. “Each succeeding night Edison opened another bag of tricks,” as Delany recalled. On a number of occasions Edison delivered his automatically transmitted messages as far as Charleston, South Carolina, something of a feat in those days of poor wire. In these experiments he also used some of the newly improved telegraph wire, known as “compound wire,” which was made of a steel core with copper ribbon wound spirally around it. Harrington later testified (in a suit of equity) that in every instance Edison had made good his promises of specified improvements.122 His development of Little’s imperfect apparatus “made high-speed telegraphy over long lines possible, and gave great impetus to the telegraph industry...”123
The automatic had certain limitations: the punching of characters in perforations at the transmitting end had to be done manually, at the speed of manual telegraphy, or twenty to fifty words a minute; it was only then that lengths of combined tape could be fed into the automatic transmitter at two hundred or more words a minute, or about six times as fast as manual dispatching and receiving by Morse code.
An economic revolution of some sort, seemingly, impended for the telegraph industry toward 1873 — when Edison & Murray were given orders to start manufacturing the automatic apparatus. It was at this point that the mysterious Jay Gould, already known as “the destroying angel of Wall Street,” stepped from behind the scenes and took over from Harrington et al. the ownership of the Automatic Telegraph Company, together with its new telegraphic patents that now promised such remarkable achievements.
After his conspiracy to corner gold, and his profitable manipulations of the stock of the Erie Railroad — then at war with the Vanderbilt-owned New York Central — the calculating and ambitious Gould had determined to force his way into the rich telegraphic field. Along the several railroads he controlled, almost spanning the continent, Gould began to build up an independent and competing telegraph system whose real object was to harass and raid Western Union’s empire, until they would be forced to pay him his price — nothing less than a controlling share of that company’s stock. By reimbursing Harrington, the principal stockholder of Automatic Telegraph, for his payments to Edison, and by ultimately acquiring that company, Jay Gould also acquired the services of Thomas A. Edison and rights to his automatic patents, a powerful pawn in the campaign for the conquest of the nation’s telegraph system. Of all this grand design the exalted young inventor probably knew less than anyone else.
3
By 1871, when Edison had first appeared in Newark as a young man of capital, with a top hat and a Prince Albert coat, the former tramp telegrapher certainly seemed to have come up in the world. But there were arrears in terms of private life of which he was increasingly aware. Prosperous though he was, he still lived in a furnished room in Newark; he had neither a home of his own nor a wife. It was said of him in those days that he was “timid in the presence of women” — but clearly not through lack of interest in them. The Edisons were a virile clan. That scapegrace father of his — whose shenanigans, oddly enough, always amused his son — when nearly seventy sired three more children by his young wife.
Three years earlier, when he was in Boston, the Western Union manager had given Edison, one day, the assignment of demonstrating the Morse telegraph before the students of a female academy. Edison went off with Milton Adams and set up a circuit in the auditorium of the school, which was a most elegant establishment. As he had come directly from work he was roughly clad; being also unaccustomed to female company, he was consternated when the door opened and the head mistress led in, no mere children, but twenty full-blown members of the senior class, the handsomest and most beautifully gowned young ladies he had ever seen. According to Adams, Edison “looked as if he were going to faint.” At any rate his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, and his sight swam. The two young men were accustomed to the uninhibited social manners of railroad and telegraph workers, but here they were lost. Edison, at the moment, was on the little stage adjusting his sounder, while Adams was engaged with wiring at the back of the room.
As Edison related in his own version of this affair, he managed to signal to Adams in code, beseeching him to take the floor. But Adams was so weak-kneed that, as he came forward, he fell over an ottoman, which set all the young ladies tittering. Thereupon, seeing how helpless Adams had become, Edison, after an interval of vocal paralysis, proceeded with his discourse and, once plunged into his subject, “talked and explained better than I ever did before or since.”124
From that day on, whenever those proper young ladies happened to meet Edison on the street, they made a point of greeting him with polite nods or smiles — for he was quite a personable lad — but as this led to his being much ridiculed by his fellow workers, he dared not pursue the acquaintance.
Science, alone, had been his chosen mistress for long years. But now he found himself exposed to the electromagnetic effects of daily contact with a beautiful young girl who worked in his shop. Her name was Mary Stilwell and she was then barely sixteen years of age; but she was tall and full of figure, and had a great pompadour of lovely golden hair. More and more often, his mind was distracted from his experiments by the person of Miss Stilwell.
The accounts of how it all began are conflicting; according to that of his laboratory assistant, W. K. L. Dickson, she was “a member of the inventor’s working force when they first met, and retained always an affectionate interest in her co-workers.”125 Another account holds that the inventor first chanced to meet Mary and her older sister Alice when, in the midst of a summer downpour, they took refuge in the doorway of his shop just as he was going out. He addressed them politely, invited them to come in out of the rain, noticed the beauty of the younger sister, and made it his business to find out her name and seek her acquaintance. The two sisters, he learned, were of a poor but respectable family, and taught Sunday school. Then, after he met her again, the story goes on to say, the young inventor offered her employment in his shop for the pleasure of having her near him. She was one of a number of women engaged in punching perforations into telegraph tape; but Edison did not look at the others. She was then
... a rather demure young person who attended to her work and never raised her eyes to the incipient genius. Edison would stand nearby observing her as she drove down one key after another with her plump fingers, until, growing nervous under his prolonged stares, she dropped her hands idly in her lap, and looked up helplessly into his face.126
On one such occasion (as the people in the shop noticed) when Edison had been standing beside her saying nothing and just breathing down her neck, Miss Stilwell, after having borne this as long as she could, exclaimed timidly, “Oh, Mr. Edison, I can always tell when you are near me!”127
His courtship was conducted in his own odd way and with his own “characteristic humor,” as his laboratory assistants later testified.
Though he had scarcely ever spoken to her before, one day he gave her a sudden smile and inquired rather abruptly, “What do you think of me, little girl, do you like me?”
“Why, Mr. Edison, you frighten me. That is — I — “
“Don’t be in a hurry about telling me. It doesn’t matter much, unless you would like to marry me.”
He had a strange pallor; his eyes were steel-blue, very large, very unusual eyes that some called “fisheyes.”
The young girl was both frightened and disposed to laugh at the same time. But Edison went on impetuously, “Oh I mean it... Think it over, talk to your mother about it and let me know as soon as convenient; Tuesday, say. Next week, Tuesday, I mean.”128
To Edison’s advancing deafness may be attributed some of his odd mannerisms, such as investing the young woman as closely as possible in order to hear her better. But in recalling these amorous maneuvers of his first romance, he has told how he slyly turned his very weakness into a tactical advantage:
Even in my courtship my deafness was a help. In the first place it excused me for getting quite a little closer to her than I would have dared... to hear what she said. If something had not overcome my natural bashfulness I might have been too faint of heart to win. And after things were going nicely, I found hearing unnecessary.129
Soon Edison and his partner Murray were seen riding out in a carriage to call on Mary and Alice Stilwell at the Sunday school — though the inventor cared nothing for church — and at her home as well. When he duly asked her father for her hand, he was told that he would have to wait about a year because of her extreme youth. There is a tradition that Thomas Alva taught his Mary the Morse code, so that while sitting with her in the parlor, in the presence of her parents, he conversed with her in complete privacy by tapping on her palm with a silver coin. They did not wait out the year, but within a few weeks, on Christmas Day of 1871, they were married at a small family ceremony in Newark. After the wedding lunch Edison brought his bride to the solid private house at Wright Street, Newark, which he had bought a few days before their marriage.
Mary Stilwell Edison, Edison’s first wife, around the time of her marriage, December 25, 1871, when she was sixteen.
They were no sooner alone together than some defective stock tickers began preying on his mind. He related that “Just about an hour after the marriage ceremony had been performed,” he could think only of those stock tickers! “I told my wife about them and said I would like to go down to the factory. She agreed at once...” His claim was that he returned around dinnertime.
The more famous legends about Edison’s wedding day, that have been handed down in the family, touch upon his habit of complete forgetfulness when working on some technical problem. It seems that he stayed on at his laboratory throughout the afternoon of his wedding and even far into the night, while his young bride, frightened and tearful, repined alone in her strange new quarters. It was twelve when his friend Murray rushed into the laboratory, exclaiming, “Tom, what are you doing at this late hour?”
“What time is it?” Edison asked vaguely.
“Midnight!”
“Midnight,” he said in a dreamy way. “Is that so? I must go home then, I was married today.” And with that he seized his hat and went off.
The next day the couple left for Niagara Falls. According to Mary Edison’s daughter, who was born a year later, it seemed her mother “felt so young and inexperienced that she insisted that her elder sister Alice company her on her honeymoon trip.”130
Their first child, fair and blue-eyed, was named Marion, after Edison’s eldest sister. In honor of the telegraph which occupied all his days, he also nicknamed her Dot. The next child, Thomas junior, arriving in 1876, was nicknamed Dash — though on the ground of vivacity the titles should have been reversed. In 1878 a second son was born who was given the name of William Leslie.
For a brief season, reform and a measure of order and comfort were brought into the inventor’s private life. On Sundays he usually managed to rest and often played with the children, becoming wildly gay with them and mischievous almost to the point of cruelty. But as often as not he would be entirely distrait, his mind completely separated from his charming wife and his infant children.
He often returned from work late for supper and, when his work was very pressing, not until the early hours of the morning. Sometimes he would be away from home for two or three days, sleeping on a bench or cot in his laboratory — as in the famous sixty-hour “prison-shift,” which occurred during the first year of his marriage. Then he would appear at last, disheveled, pale, and too utterly worn to speak to anyone; and soiled as he was, he would throw himself upon a couch or bed in all his clothes.
Like one possessed, he would carry in his head the entire plan of some new and elaborate invention, in all its complex details, for days on end. He had the gift of total recall. His memory was so extensive that he would work out many aspects of a difficult problem in his mind, oblivious to his surroundings, forgetting the time, the place, and even his own identity. In short his ability to divert all his faculties from less important considerations and concentrate them on the mental work at hand, his very power of memory made him at times distracted or absent-minded in the extreme.
In the early years of his marriage he was much obsessed by the problems of multiplex telegraphy, which required that he imagine many different mechanisms operating simultaneously in different ways. While thus engrossed, he was once notified that unless he paid his real estate taxes in Newark the next day (the end of a term of grace), he would be compelled to pay a large additional fine. To comply with this stern order he hastened to the city hall the next afternoon and took his place at the end of a long line, with a hundred persons ahead of him. During the wait that followed, the brain-twisting problem that haunted him soon diverted his mind, and he became lost to everything around him. The last hour had struck; he finally found himself before the officer collecting taxes who, having addressed him without receiving any response, said to him gruffly, “Now young man, look sharp. What is your name?”
Edison said later:
I had lost my composure completely, and all recollection of my name as well, for I stared at the official behind the counter in blank perplexity and answered, “I don’t know sir.” Jumping to the conclusion, I suppose, that he had an idiot to deal with, he waved me impatiently aside. Others poured into my place, the fatal hour struck, and I found myself saddled with an extra charge of twelve and a half per cent.131
Mary Edison was scarcely the woman who might have “improved” him. A gentle and affectionate being, whose head was as yet only slightly furnished, she found herself wedded to a “great man” such as she had never imagined. He was older than she by almost ten years, strong-willed, and often transported or exalted by ideas she could never understand. She could be only his “sweet companion.” Indeed she never required that he alter his way of life to conform with the needs of domesticity, but submitted entirely to his wishes. One of Edison’s early associates wrote of Mary Edison, “She was a helpful spouse; she revered her husband and thought him almost a god.”132
For Thomas Alva there were no hobbies nor recreations. On the many nights when her husband was away Mary Edison had only the company of a few women friends and her sister Alice, who lived with the Edisons for several years prior to her own marriage. In this family the rule was that “father’s work always came first.”133
Mary Edison, then, could not “manage” her husband; she could never make a stand against him. He would show a fierce temper when aroused by opposition. Several years after he was married, he happened to write his father inviting him to come and stay at the Edison home in New Jersey. One feels that since his childhood Edison’s attitude toward his father was ambivalent — he resented him, and he also retained a lingering affection for the wayward old fellow who was much bigger physically than he was, and who used to thrash him. It seems, however, that his young wife did not enjoy the company of her father-in-law and had indicated as much. Edison thereupon assured his father, “My wife does not nor never can control me, and you can have anything that I have.”134
In the early months of marriage the enraptured young inventor no doubt made some attempts to explain to his young wife something of what he was doing and what he aspired to do. But he must have found soon enough that he could not draw her attention to his problems. In his laboratory, in the early days, he often thought of her in moments of revery, and as he worked with his notebooks before him, sometimes scribbled affectionate nicknames for her. Thus on one page, among notes of various electrochemical tests, there is the spontaneous and revealing phrase, “My wife Popsy-Wopsy can’t invent.”135
4
The Automatic Telegraph Company had been negotiating for some time with the British postal authorities for the sale of English rights to Edison’s inventions. The prospects of sale seemed promising; but it was thought that only Edison could see to it that the apparatus was properly demonstrated. Thus, on April 29, 1873, in response to the pleas of his associates, the inventor gathered together a trunkful of equipment, kissed his young wife and infant daughter good-by, and hurriedly sailed for London on a journey lasting about six weeks.
On this, his first transatlantic journey, he thought nothing of the beauty of England in the spring; but only of means of overcoming the difficulties in the way of a full demonstration of his automatic instrument. Invited to make a test of a London-to-Liverpool circuit, and to record messages at the rate of one thousand words a minute, he was allowed only some old wire and “sand batteries” (obsolete even then) with which to connect and operate his instruments, although the apparatus needed good conduction and high power.
Edison was discouraged. At his small hotel near Covent Garden, the dull fare of roast beef and fried flounders further depressed him. “My imagination was getting into a coma.” After finding a French pastry shop in High Holborn Street, however, his imagination improved, and he went off to see the London representative of the Automatic Telegraph Company, a Colonel George Gouraud, to whom he applied for help. Somehow Gouraud, a breezy man with influential connections, managed to obtain for his use a powerful battery of a hundred cells that had been used by John Tyndall at the Royal Institution. Thus the unknown American inventor was able to pass a strong current from the sending machine in Liverpool to the receiving end he had set up at the Telegraph Street headquarters in London — where, as he claims, the Automatic recorded swift-running messages in an imprint “as clear as a copper plate.”
He was then asked by the British authorities if he could adapt his automatic for use on submarine cables and obtain a greater speed than by regular methods. There were some twenty-two hundred miles of cable (intended for a line to Brazil) then stored under water near the docks at Greenwich; and there he went to set up his apparatus and make the test. He first sent a dot, and it was recorded, not as a character a thirty-second of an inch high, but a smear “twenty-seven feet long! If I ever had any conceit it vanished from my boots up,” he said in recollecting the experiment. Try as he would, during two weeks of nighttime labor, he could send no more than two words a minute. Edison’s admitted mystification at such phenomena has suggested that he did not fully understand the theory of electrical self-induction. What he did not know at the time was that a coiled cable was far more subject to self-induction than one laid out straight, since the cable wire tended to retain, as an electrical field, a portion of each electrical impulse passing through it.136
Gouraud came down one night to visit Edison at the lonely cable works by the Greenwich docks and at daybreak breakfasted with him at a dreary inn nearby that was frequented by longshoremen. The place was infested with roaches; the coffee and cake were all too evil-tasting for Gouraud. “He fainted. I gave him a big dose of gin and this revived him... He lost all interest in the experiment after that, and I was ordered back to America.”137
Things moved slowly in the British Isles. Though the English were among the first to give recognition to young Edison’s accomplishments, their Post Office eventually adopted another automatic telegraph apparatus that was a variant of the Little-Edison instrument. Edison always felt that, in this instance, they had taken whatever was needed from his system without paying him or his sponsors; but there were a dozen or more British inventors having prior patents in this very field, so that, as often happens in such cases of concurrent technical research, absolute priority is hard to determine.
He returned to the United States in the last days of June with little to show for his long hard voyage. Western Union had also refused to adopt his automatic system, its managers at this period having no faith in it. But Jay Gould soon had it put to the test on the long lines of the Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company. Some of the major cities on its lines, after installing the new apparatus, attained tremendous speeds. A long message of the President of the United States running nine thousand words, for example, was dispatched in one hour and two minutes. According to J. D. Reid, an early historian of the telegraph industry:
The Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company had twenty-two automatic telegraph stations in major cities, such as Buffalo, Chicago and Omaha... The through business during nearly two years was transmitted in this way. The perforated paper was prepared at the rate of twenty words a minute. Whatever its demerits, this system enabled the company to handle a much larger business than it could otherwise have done with its limited wires.138
Nevertheless the automatic was to be abandoned several years later, or used thereafter only as an auxiliary. To Edison it was a grievous disappointment as well as a mystery that telegraphy in America should be allowed, at the will of a Jay Gould, to go back to hand transmission and remain that way for some thirty or forty years thereafter. Nor did Edison (after 1871) receive any further money rewards or royalties for “three years of very hard labor” devoted to Gould’s organization in connection with his invention.
What Edison did not then realize, except dimly, was that the decision as to the commercial acceptance or refusal of inventions, and much of the control of industrial technology, turned not upon the question of merit or usefulness, but upon the outcome of intermittent wars or peace negotiations between the rival “barons” in the railroad and telegraph fields, such as the Goulds and the Vanderbilts. (After 1871 the Morgan-Vanderbilt group played a leading role in Western Union.) In this strange financial warfare, this ceaseless maneuvering and intriguing of the money lords of the Gilded Age, Edison, the technician, would be unwittingly and hopelessly involved — nay pulled hither and thither, as he tried to serve first one side and then the other, until he himself would scarcely know where he was, or if he owned his own soul.
On his return to Newark, from England, he had found his young wife in a state of great mental distress. Thanks to his peculiar ways of doing business — spending what should be reserve funds, and securing credit by postponing payments — the sheriff had threatened to close down Edison’s Ward Street shops and put up a red flag; he promised also to dispose of Edison’s machinery, and even his laboratory equipment, unless creditors were paid.
Once more, in 1873, the country was in the throes of one of its periodic Great Depressions. Hundreds of thousands were being dismissed from their jobs. The New York Stock Exchange itself suspended business for ten days. The Wall Street magnates who had found it profitable to employ Edison were now stony to him. During his absence Mary Edison, by appealing for help to one of Edison’s partners, Joseph Murray, had managed to raise enough money to delay the sheriff and stave off disaster — for the moment.
In this perilous time Edison exerted himself with unheard-of energy to develop new products and raise funds. From day to day, for many months, he faced a desperate situation in which all might be lost. The crisis prolonged itself into 1874. “I was paying a sheriff five dollars a day to withhold judgment entered against me in a case which I had paid no attention to...” he recalled.139
In such times the lot of the free-lance inventor was not an easy one. He had some new ideas for what might prove to be brilliant inventions in the electrical communications field. If he could only come through with one of them he would be afloat again. And in truth, it was by his wits that he was saved.