8 ~ Menlo Park

 

1

In the early spring of 1876 residents of the tiny hamlet of Menlo Park, New Jersey, saw with some surprise a new and rather oddly shaped building going up in an open pasture on a hill overlooking the main railway line between New York and Philadelphia. It was a plain wooden structure of two stories, rectangular in form and looking for all the world like a country meeting house or tabernacle. A tall white-haired man with a long nose directed the building operation; he was our old friend Sam Edison, the father of the inventor, who had been called from Michigan for this purpose. On weekends a slightly built, negligently dressed young man with a silk hat perched on his big head used to drive out to see how the work was going here.

By the end of May the barnlike structure was all but completed; it was 100 feet in length by 30 in width, with white-painted clapboard sides, tall windows, and a porch in front. Surrounding it was a stout picket fence to keep out cows and pigs. Before the paint was dry, great horse-drawn trucks thundered up from Newark, bringing equipment and more equipment — boxes of chemicals, rolls of wire, loads of books, a Brown steam engine, and a gasoline converter that would supply gaslight. Finally the younger Edison came to install himself in the new building; and with him came his faithful retinue, Batchelor, Kruesi, John Ott, and a dozen other manly looking, full-bearded workers.

 



Edison’s laboratory at Menlo Park in the winter of 1880-1881. The main laboratory is in the center of the yard, with the machine shop behind it, and the glass blower’s shed set diagonally in the angle between them. To the left is the carbon shed, where the lampblack carbon was produced; in the foreground is the library and office; to the right is the electric railway.

 

Edison had obeyed a sudden whim: to move to an isolated spot in the country about twenty-five miles southwest of New York, and set up a new laboratory there. He would give up his manufacturing interests in Newark and devote himself entirely to the “invention business,” in the seclusion of a rural village of only a half-dozen dwellings.

The remove of Edison to the country, his establishment of a lavishly equipped research laboratory as a sort of “factory” for inventions of all sorts, aroused passing notice in the press. Some predicted that the venture would turn out badly; Edison, it was pointed out, lacked the formal education that would enable him to conduct exhaustive investigations of scientific problems. A few newspaper reporters made pilgrimages to Menlo Park to look at the place and describe it. In that homely barnlike structure, the inventor had partitioned off a small office, a little library, and a drafting room on the lower floor; the floor above was a single long room furnished with many tables covered with instruments, machines, and batteries, the walls being lined with shelves holding a great variety of materials and chemical jars of every color.

 



The second floor of the laboratory, early in 1880. In the photograph, Edison sits at left center wearing a cap; Francis Jehl, with knees crossed, sits reading a book at right center; at the far right is Edison’s friend and early teacher of telegraphy, J. L. McKenzie. The organ in the background was given to Edison by Hilborne Roosevelt.

 



The engraving is of the other end of the laboratory, and shows clearly the cabinets containing the instruments and chemicals along the walls, and the electric lights strung from the gas fixtures. Courtesy New York Historical Society.

 

On this floor there was a force of thirteen skilled mechanics working with fine steel and brass instruments, or electrical products of every kind. At their head, bent over a table, was Edison. A journalist wrote:

 

There is a general appearance of youth about his face, but it is knit into anxious wrinkles, and seems old. The hair beginning to be touched with grey, falls over his forehead in a mop. The hands are stained with acid, his clothing is “ready-made.” He has the air of a mechanic, or, with his peculiar pallor, of a night-printer... When he looks up his attention comes back slowly as if it had been a long way off. But it comes back fully and cordially. A cheerful smile chases away the grave and somewhat weary look. He seems... almost a big, careless schoolboy.¹⁷⁹

 

Why had he removed himself to this isolated place? There is no doubt that he strongly wished for a certain measure of solitude and an atmosphere of repose and security. He had the habit of meditation; the distractions of life in a large industrial suburb of New York were enemies to sustained analysis and reflection. In Newark, moreover, he was vexed by disputes with thievish landlords; his business ventures were unrewarding; he was often hounded by creditors. As soon as he had found himself with a modest accumulation of capital, his debts paid off and some twenty thousand dollars to the good, he had thought at once of building a place of his own from which he could never be dispossessed.

As he told a friend of this period, “the combined work of manufacturing and inventing” taxed even his superhuman energies. Indeed, the two occupations proved irreconcilable; if a new idea struck him he felt it had to be tested at once, with the help of every man and instrument within call. But this could hardly be done in a factory run on a regular time schedule, where his impromptu laboratory work held a minor place.¹⁸⁰ At the end of 1875 he therefore decided to wind up the last of his manufacturing shops, Edison & Murray, commissioned his father to look for a good site in the country, and there set up his own laboratory. There, in effect, he hung out his shingle, announcing to the world that he, Thomas A. Edison, would undertake research and development work on any and all inventions.

It will be recalled that on first coming to New York he had formed the partnership of Pope, Edison & Company, as consultants in electrical engineering, perhaps the first concern of its kind. The establishment at Menlo Park was more ambitious; it was, in fact, the first industrial research laboratory in America, or in the world, and in itself one of the most remarkable of Edison’s many inventions.

As a scientific worker with accumulating experience, Edison appreciated the need for fine and precise instruments of measurement; he acquired a costly reflecting galvanometer, several powerful induction coils, photometrical equipment, a finely contrived electrometer, and, all in all, a stock of tools and materials the cost of which, a year or two after his arrival at Menlo Park, amounted to forty thousand dollars. With equipment he was always extravagant. At that time, though interest in scientific education in the United States compared well with that in Europe, there were only a few poorly equipped laboratories at some of the leading universities or at the new engineering colleges such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, devoted mainly to teaching purposes. There was, to be sure, the all-important laboratory Joseph Henry had created at the Smithsonian Institution, but this was for purely scientific research. Like Faraday, Henry considered it infra dig for a true scientist to pursue primarily practical inventions, or even to bother with patenting them; he labored only to “increase the sum of human knowledge.” We were still then at the period of (misguided) controversy between the amateurs of “pure” science and the practical or “empirical” inventors — such as Edison believed himself to be — who applied their scientific skills to making things of use and convenience to mankind.

In any case, no one had ever heard of a man setting up a center of research, a sort of “scientific factory” in which investigation by a whole group or team would be organized and directed solely toward practical inventions. Such things came, in those days, by chance, and by the happy “accidents” of feats of technical skill performed in attics or cellars or at some bench in the corner of a factory. Moreover, the hazards of the inventor’s profession were all too well known. Alexander Graham Bell, struggling with his “speaking telegraph,” found himself in 1875 on the verge of ruin. “The cares and anxieties of being an inventor,” he wrote to a friend, “seemed more than flesh and blood can stand.” Yet, before he departed from Newark, Edison told the physicist Dr. George Beard, in all seriousness, that he proposed to turn out at Menlo Park “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so.” At the time, Beard had been dumfounded and had thought Edison was blowing. But the recent list of his patents ran to about forty a year. A number of them, covering the stock printer and quadruplex, had already brought him sizable revenues; there were others under way; and he knew in addition that leading capitalists of New York would seek him out deep in the country, if only for the purpose of hiring him to test, improve, or perfect someone else’s invention.

In the spring of 1876, for example, he was being paid a monthly retainer of five hundred dollars by Western Union, to do research on the “speaking telegraph” with which Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell had been occupied for several years.

He was truly happy, he felt a blessed sense of freedom, when at last he found himself in the country in the month of June; and in this spirit he wrote to a patent lawyer of his acquaintance about his “brand-new laboratory... at Menlo Park, Western Div., Globe, Planet Earth, Middlesex Country, four miles from Rahway, the prettiest spot in New Jersey, on the Penna. Railway, on a High Hill. Will show you around, go strawberrying.”¹⁸¹

What of his devoted assistants, his acolytes, whom he led as a little flock of the faithful to that isolated hilltop at Menlo Park? The best of his workers in Newark had come with him to the country. But there were no amusements here; only a few farmhouses and one saloon with a billiard room down by the railway depot, where old Sam Edison used to hold forth when he visited the place. It was going to be a fairly monastic existence for the staff. But Edison, after all, was a dedicated being; he had his “religion” of scientific work. His own wife, Mary, born and bred in a large town, hated the silence and the dark nights of the tiny village. Nonetheless Edison purchased a plain farmhouse of six rooms, hard by the site of his laboratory, and installed her there with his two children, “Dot” and “Dash.” Two of the other six houses in the village were occupied by his principal assistants, Batchelor and Kruesi, who also had families. The one boardinghouse in the place, a Mrs. Jordan’s, adjacent to the laboratory, was soon filled with those laboratory mechanics who were bachelors. In effect, the whole small hamlet became a community devoted to experimental science. Edison Village, it was humorously called. Here Edison was, in fact, monarch of all he surveyed.

What would these people do to entertain themselves here in this quiet backwater? They would invent things, he told them. And after that? They would invent more things.

Despite Edison’s materialistic principles, the older inhabitants of Menlo Park persisted in believing that the spirit of magic hung over his laboratory. Even one of his assistants, describing the picturesque appearance of the array of scientific and chemical apparatus, the many-colored jars and phials of chemicals and cases of semi-precious metals, wrote, “When evening came, and the last rays of the setting sun penetrated through the side windows, this hall looked like a veritable Faust laboratory.”¹⁸²

As at Newark, his men worked long hours, starting with the whistle at seven in the morning, sometimes sleeping on benches or on the floor during all-night vigils. On occasions when they worked late at night, a pleasant midnight collation was sent in by Mrs. Edison, and they would make merry, the place resounding with laughter.

Not only did the young man with the old head exert a powerful attraction upon his co-workers, but the ambitious program of the next five years gripped their imagination more and more. Young workers, hearing of the remarkable deeds performed in this place under the leadership of the young inventor, eagerly came to apply for jobs. Thus William J. Hammer, then a boy in years, later to be a power in the electrical industry, appeared one day before Edison.

The inventor remarked to him gruffly that almost everyone who applied for a job “wanted to know only two things: how much we pay and how long we work. Well, we don’t pay anything, and we work all the time.” Young Hammer promptly agreed to work on these terms.

John Ott, the machinist and draftsman, who served under Edison for half a century, at the end of his life described the “sacrifices” some of Edison’s old co-workers had made, and he commented on their reasons for so doing.

“My children grew up without knowing their father,” he said. “When I did get home at night, which was seldom, they were in bed.”

“Why did you do it?” he was asked.

“Because Edison made your work interesting. He made me feel that I was making something with him. I wasn’t just a workman. And then in those days, we all hoped to get rich with him,” he added wryly.¹⁸³

 

At this period of the onrushing industrial revolution, the engineers and the practical inventors were truly coming into their own. The theoretical scientists, to be sure, still assumed an attitude of condescension toward the practical men of science, as did James Clerk Maxwell toward Alexander Graham Bell, when he characterized him as a mere elocutionist who, “to gain his private ends [money], has become an electrician.” A distinguished American physicist such as Professor Henry A. Rowland of Johns Hopkins would say (as he did in 1879) that “he who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before” might be a benefactor of society, but “he who labors in obscurity to find the laws of such growth is the intellectual superior as well as the greater benefactor of the two.” Nevertheless, Edison, the epitome of the practical engineer and inventor, proudly declared himself such and also insisted that his standards were frankly “commercial,” that is, aimed at that which was useful. He even nursed some grievances against the “theo-retical scientists,” who were to him dilettantes, playing out their little games in their ivory-tower studies. He saw them much as Charles Dickens satirized them in Little Dorrit, as the futile members of the Mudfog Association (the Association for the Advancement of Science of the 1840s), while identifying himself, no doubt, with the character of Daniel Doyce, “the common-sense craftsman, with the broad thumb of the hand worker... the honest man who is always facing facts or, at any rate, dealing with the facts of science rather than its principles or theories.”¹⁸⁴ Since his contretemps before a scientific club, suffered when he gave his lecture on “etheric force,” Edison overtly showed contempt for all mathematicians and physicists and represented himself, almost defiantly, as “an industrial scientist.”

He showed, however, an increasing devotion to the spirit and discipline of scientific research, especially after the age of twenty-seven. One perceives the sternness and self-critical attitude with which he continues lengthy tests in order to assure himself of the results he sought, and his reluctance, even after years of vain struggle, to leave any work uncompleted. In short, as he comes to the prime of his life, he gives what R. C. McLaurin afterward defined as “a brilliant exhibition of the method of science, the method of experimentation — which embraced all his faith.”¹⁸⁵

As he conducts experimental studies on a larger scale, we note that he works not only with skilled mechanics, but also with expert chemists and even (heaven preserve us!) a mathematical physicist. The latter was Francis R. Upton, who came to Menlo Park in 1878 as a specialist in mathematical physics, after studying at Princeton and for a year in Germany, under the great Helmholtz. Edison enjoyed teasing Upton about the time he “wasted” in precise mathematical calculations; but he fully recognized the aid Upton rendered him in complex investigations. After all, as he said on a later occasion, it was just as well “to have one mathematical fellow around, in case we have to calculate something out.”

Edison has been called the last of the “independent” inventors of the nineteenth-century school. But as Norbert Wiener has written so perceptively, this is not true; he was in no sense a lone-wolf inventor of the old school, but was a “transitional figure” who pointed the way toward the systematic research of the technological age. The significance of the Menlo Park laboratory was that its master worked with a whole team, comprising not only machinists and technical men but also several persons with formal scientific training. He still adhered to his cut-and-try methods. But at Menlo Park, industrial invention depended not on the insights of the shopworker alone, but on a careful comprehensive search by a whole team under him. It is for this reason that his little organization in the country served as a pilot model for the huge industrial research laboratories organized in later years, such as that of the Bell system and General Electric.

The young Edison thus takes his place as a central figure in the new age of technology that began in the United States after the Civil War. It moved, to be sure, in step with industrial and scientific progress in Europe, especially in Germany. In steel, mining, transport, and electrical communication, big industry increasingly adopted scientific standards and depended on scientific methods as showing the way to profits. Science and engineering, on the other hand, had reached a stage where new practical experimenters like Edison were required and could find their fullest play. In more than one field of industry he had already offered his services, and those of his organization — his “invention factory” — in making inventions to order. The Germans, who were the world’s most advanced technologists in the latter part of the nineteenth century, recognized that, as the eminent German economist Werner Sombart said, “Mr. Edison was, perhaps, the outstanding example of a man who made a business of invention itself.”¹⁸⁶

The traditional view of invention assumed that it was something like an act of God, a “divine accident”; like “the poet, in a fine frenzy rolling,” the inventor and the scientist were supposed to discover things by a stroke of genius. Had not Alexander Pope written, “God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.”

Edison was a genius who held that there was no such thing as genius. With his bustling organization at Menlo Park he worked to dispel all the old myths about the accomplishments of inventors. Like a good Darwinian, he believed that inventions arose out of man’s developing culture, his environment, his social and industrial relations. His busy workshop was turned by him into something far removed from those elegant laboratories of the earlier epoch, often placed in a pavilion in some formal French garden, where aristocratic amateurs of science demonstrated their superior intellectual capacities or their “superhuman cleverness,” without regard to the needs of industry or human welfare.

Edison’s decision not to undertake inventions unless there was a definite market demand for them was of great historical importance, as a modern commentator, James G. Crowther, has written in a very discerning paper: “He was the first great scientific inventor who clearly conceived of invention as subordinate to commerce.” In thus dedicating his work to the advancement of industry, in making his inventions conform to “commercial demands” as to the necessities of human use and convenience, he also established a social and democratic criterion for applied science. Under a capitalist system, market acceptance was the standard of the useful and the practical in the industrial arts; therefore, he would make his inventions meet that standard. He was par excellence the inventor of the democratic era.

To be sure his social thinking was far less original than his workmanship and seemed to stop at the belief, so prevalent in those times, that the acquisitive were the fittest to survive and that the rights of capital, as well as those of the individual, were sacred. Nevertheless his work tended to destroy the old traditions about undirected inventive or scientific inspiration. As Crowther observes, “He began the advance toward a democratic theory in which invention would be cultivated in order to increase human happiness...”¹⁸⁷

In choosing the “commercial” standard, Edison was by no means being “vulgar” or mercenary, as compared with such fastidious characters as Faraday, or Joseph Henry, or Willard Gibbs. He was determined to make his formerly hazardous profession, so to say, both businesslike and respectable. But no one was more satisfied than he, once there was a little money on hand, to make that little do for his needs and to live for the joy of inventive work.

How little Edison, the new type of inventor, depended on Providence or “luck,” and how much on systematic search, may be judged by the way in which he attacked new problems posed for him after coming to Menlo Park.

 

2

Since July of the preceding year a wholly new field of investigation had absorbed him: that of the acoustic, or harmonic telegraph, which by use of tuning forks or reeds transmitted musical notes over a wire. For years the experts of the telegraph, such as Stearns, Elisha Gray, G. W. Phelps (scientific director of Western Union), and Edison, had been “educating” the Morse instrument so that it performed all sorts of tricks, printing, repeating, sending double and, finally, quadrupled messages. By 1875, Elisha Gray, after years of experimenting, had contrived an acoustical, or “harmonic” telegraph that carried nine to sixteen different musical notes, taken from tuning forks and transmitted to a receiving instrument the parts of which were attuned to respond separately and distinctly to each of those different notes. But if different musical notes could be sent over an electric wire, why not the sound of the human voice — why not a speaking telegraph? the restless searchers asked themselves. Gray, in fact, called his harmonic telegraph a “telephone” in lectures delivered early in 1875. Alexander Graham Bell, a well-educated Scottish immigrant residing in Salem, Massachusetts, who was Edison’s age, had had the same idea, and for several years struggled with the problem of making a metal disk, vibrating in response to sounds, convey and reproduce those sounds over an electrified wire.

The convergence of numerous “parallel” inventors at about the same time upon a common problem is now an old story. Bell was an elocutionist who, like his father, had studied phonetics and was skilled in teaching deaf-mutes to talk; at the outset of his experiments he had no knowledge of electrical science. “If I can make a deaf-mute talk, I can make metal talk,” he is reported to have said; and so for five years he experimented with harps, disks, and mechanical ears.

At the beginning of 1875, Bell came to New York to test his harmonic telegraph on the wires of Western Union, with Orton’s permission — but learned, to his disappointment, that Elisha Gray had already patented such a device and assigned it to Western Union. After that Bell concentrated his efforts, more or less secretly, on the speaking telephone.

In the meantime, Orton seems to have been alerted about the promise of the experiments pursued by Gray, Phelps, Bell, and others. He now called in the young “professional,” Edison — of whom it was already said, “He never fails in anything he seriously undertakes” — and invited him to investigate acoustic telegraphy for Western Union. By the summer of 1875 Edison had severed his relations with Jay Gould and his enterprises. Whatever hard feelings the Western Union millionaires may have entertained toward him during their recent legal battle, they swallowed them; Orton and his associates were gratified to have this talented fellow detached from the dangerous Gould and back in their own stable of inventors.

The records indicate that Western Union had assigned Professor Phelps and Gray to the same investigation. By 1875 it seems to have been assumed by technical men that a speaking telegraph was a distinct possibility within “the next ten or twenty years.” In fact, as long ago as 1861, a German, Johann Philipp Reis, had demonstrated at Frankfurt-am-Main a primitive telephone made of wood and a vibrant membrane of pig’s bladder.

It is interesting that in July, 1875, Orton had put in Edison’s hands a detailed abstract of a report on Reis’s machine, made for the Royal Prussian Telegraph Department at Berlin.

Edison now went to work on his own and constructed a similar machine for himself, in order to study the principle of the thing. It incorporated the initial discovery that the sound-induced vibrations of a diaphragm could open and close an electrical circuit (by the make-and-break contact principle) thus acting on an electromagnet at the receiving station and causing it to give forth a corresponding sound or pitch. Edison found that while words were only indistinctly perceptible on the Reis apparatus, “the inflections of the voice, the modulations of interrogation, wonder, command, etc., attained distinct expression.”¹⁸⁸

He attempted at first some electrochemical experiments with the simple Reis transmitter, then realized that one of the main problems would be to control and balance the variations of current. Shortly before moving to Menlo Park he had devised an apparatus for analyzing the various waves produced by different sounds. It consisted of two hollow metallic cylinders, one inside the other with a metallic base acting as a diaphragm. To this diaphragm was attached a magnet, which ran through the center of a coil and acted as a miniature generator, inducing slight currents in the coil according to the sound vibrations of the diaphragm. On January 14, 1876, he filed a caveat and drawings with the United States Patent Office, giving warning of this invention-in-progress and describing it. Then he put the matter aside, busying himself with other aspects of acoustical telegraphy and with several completely unrelated projects.

Edison was late in entering the race for the telephone; half a dozen expert men had begun the investigation of the speaking telegraph years before him. He also showed great courage in undertaking such work in view of the fact that he was very hard of hearing. His sister-in-law related that at this period the inventor “was a great sufferer from earaches, and I have seen him sit on the edge of the bed and fairly grind holes in the carpet...”¹⁸⁹ Evidently his hearing loss was that of the eardrum and middle ear, for he seemed to be able to hear sound instruments by biting his teeth into them, thus allowing vibrations to be conducted through the bones of his head to the inner hearing nerve. On the other hand, his severe handicap led him to produce an instrument which could transmit sound and speech clearly.

Alexander Graham Bell, meanwhile, had been making rapid progress. One afternoon in June, 1875, his ear had caught a first feeble sound of words, the voice of his assistant speaking to him over the wire of a crude magnetotelephone. This clue was followed up closely until the morning of February 14, 1876, when Bell thought he had invented enough to apply for a patent covering his telephone. A few hours later (or earlier?) that same day, his nearest rival, Elisha Gray, walked into the Patent Office to file a caveat outlining exactly the same invention transmitting human speech. It is probably the most famous example of “parallel” invention made by two men working independently. Both men had proceeded along almost exactly the same path in their investigation; both had taken as their point of departure the harmonic telegraph, and both had been inspired with the same purpose of transmitting human speech. The patent law, however, accorded the entire authorship and rights over one of the most valuable patents ever granted to Bell alone.¹⁹⁰

After the details of Bell’s telephone were made public, in March, 1876, Edison went back and examined his own device for measuring sound waves, described in his caveat of January. He now found that it was capable of transmitting sound, though crudely. (A model of it has been used to transmit speech in modern times.) If only he had had the ears to hear faint sounds of speech, he might have won the race for the telephone. He acknowledged himself fairly beaten. But his physical handicap of deafness did not prevent him from making his own distinctive contribution to telephony, and a decisive one at that.

 

3

The telephone was the direct offspring of the telegraph. Bell, in need of money after the long years of experiment, approached Western Union with an offer to sell his patents at a reasonable price. President Orton, however, turned him down, saying, “What can we do with such an electrical toy?” Bell’s prophecies that telephone lines would one day replace the telegraph system seemed to Orton merely the usual ravings of an exalted inventor. Western Union acted with customary bureaucratic caution in rejecting the letters of patent that might have given them, for $100,000, a monopoly of the world’s future telephone industry. The idea of making heavy investments in developing the new telephone and scrapping their present equipment was also repugnant to Western Union. “Pioneering don’t pay,” was a familiar saying, attributed at the time to Andrew Carnegie, who waited over ten years, until Bessemer furnaces were in profitable operation in this country, before investing in steel mills.¹⁹¹

A powerful corporation, moreover, had many ways of getting control of a new product, once it was proved practicable: by imitation; by evasion; or by the erosive effect on the original inventor of lawsuits conducted at enormous costs, at the end of which, as Edison himself observed, the invention might fall to the corporation.

In July, 1876, at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Bell’s demonstrations of his telephone made a tremendous public sensation. The price of Bell’s patent went higher. Now the Western Union magnates began to feel uneasy, and decided to call in Mr. Edison, of Menlo Park, New Jersey. As he put it simply, they had found the 1876 telephone a crude affair, and “wanted me to make it commercial.”¹⁹² It consisted only of two receivers used alternately for hearing and speaking; while one person talked the other listened. Bell thought it was pretty wonderful when the human voice was carried for a distance of two miles. The man “sending” had to shout each sentence three or four times in order to be heard above a good deal of “interference.”

Bell’s financial backers, nevertheless, were already preparing to establish the first local telephone exchanges. Western Union, therefore, was considering doing the same, if another and better telephone could be invented.

 

The first model of the magnetotelephone was different in principle from Reis’s contact-breaking device in that it communicated speech by varying the current in the line in accordance with the vibrations of a diaphragm. The diaphragm was a thin soft-iron disk, placed near the pole of a permanent bar magnet. Around one pole of the magnet was wound a coil of fine copper wire, one end of the wire being grounded. There was, however, no battery or other electric generator in the circuit. The mere sound waves of the voice striking upon the diaphragm made it vibrate, inducing increased and decreased impulses in the magnetic coil, which caused the current in the line to vary. At the end of the line the receiving diaphragm was set to vibrating in sympathy with the electrical variations in the line. Thus the receiving diaphragm vibrated exactly as the sending diaphragm vibrated, when words were spoken into it, producing sound waves detected by the ear of the listener. In other words, as Bell put it, he first changed sound into an undulating electrical current and then changed the current back into sound. The range of the instrument, however, was extremely limited, as there was not enough electric power in Bell’s first circuit.

During the autumn of 1876 and the winter following, Edison puzzled over the problem of raising the telephone’s volume while still controlling and balancing the current variations it induced. No one then knew more about varying and balancing electrical forces than he. This was one of the main problems he had mastered in his quadruples telegraph. At that time he had devised a carbon rheostat (made up of fine silken disks saturated with particles of graphite and a screw to adjust their pressure) which he used to control the currents of his multiplex telegraph apparatus with great precision. Why could he not vary the resistance of this rheostat by means of voice waves impinging on an attached diaphragm, connect it in series with a battery and a telephone receiver, and so produce a telephone more powerful and different from Bell’s? All through that winter he kept trying an assortment of materials to be incorporated into the “sending” disk.

On January 20, 1877, as his notebooks show, he first “succeeded in conveying over wires many articulated sentences.” This new apparatus had a diaphragm with a small spring attached to the center of it, connected in turn to three platinum points immersed in a dish of loose carbon granules. Current from a battery, passing through the platinum points and the carbon granules, varied in strength as the granules were compressed and released by the vibrations of the diaphragm. “The talking, though poor in quality, was of a sufficient volume, so that it could be heard through the teeth [by Edison] when an ordinary Morse relay magnet, the magnet of which was included in a circuit, was held against the teeth.” His notebooks indicate, however, that the instrument was constantly getting out of adjustment.

At this period he wrote to his father in Port Huron:

 

I am having pretty hard luck with my speaking telegraph, but I think it is O.K. now... I am at present very hard up for cash. Tom and Dot are well and thriving.¹⁹³

 

It was at the end of the first winter at Menlo Park that Edison had his big idea. The Bell magnetotelephone, for many reasons, could not be used effectively as both receiver and transmitter. What was needed was a separate transmitter in circuit with Bell’s receiver, which when used alone for both purposes was too weak.

He came down to New York in March and made his report of progress before the Western Union executives. A memorandum agreement was then drawn up allowing him more money for his experiments. He had already, in crude form, the essentials of a new transmitter, with a metallic diaphragm and disk of graphite, the surfaces of the disk and diaphragm being in contact. He also introduced two electrodes of (partly) carbon composition connected with the diaphragm, against which the sound waves struck, thereby effecting a variation in the current. The idea of using a closed circuit in which a battery current was constantly flowing, thus raising the power, was also a feature of Edison’s first “speaking telegraph transmitter” patent (filed April 27, 1877, but granted, as No. 474,230, only after a delay of fifteen years). He said of this machine to an officer of Western Union:

 

As yet it is not sufficiently perfect for introduction. It is, however, more perfect than Bell’s. You need have no alarm about Bell’s monopoly as there are several things that he must discover before [the telephone] will be practicable. When my apparatus is perfect you will be informed.¹⁹⁴

 

He exuded confidence, an amazing confidence, though the road ahead of him was actually to be quite hard and long.

He had conceived of a second strategic innovation (besides using a separate transmitter) — introducing an induction coil. Thus the battery current flowed not over the line, but through the primary circuit of an induction coil, so that electrical impulses of an enormously higher potential could be sent out on the main line, by the secondary circuit of the coil, to the receiving end. Instead of being limited to a few miles’ range, the sound vibrations of Edison’s transmitter could be heard over long distances.

What was needed at this stage was an improvement in the variable-conducting substance for his transmitter, one that was sensitive and at the same time stable.

Now he began a broad search for the right substance, in line with (what became henceforth) his characteristic method of the drag hunt. He divided this labor among his staff at Menlo Park and, as he related, beginning at the end of his stock of chemicals tried every one of them — some two thousand.¹⁹⁵ If it took all summer, he would continue the search by such methods. And after that, through the autumn and the winter. The signed testimony of the old laboratory notebooks record in thousands of yellowed pages the laborious and patient testing of one model after another — sometimes in vigils of fifty-two hours — while he watched sharply for clues. Once he found a clue, he would “hang on” and work in that area.

Improvement in the articulation of consonants, especially the hissing of sibilant ones, engrosses him. He writes down sibilant phrases which are to be tried on the transmitter under development: “The vibrations of the oscillations”; and “Physicists and Sphynxes in majestical Mists.” (Some of these nonsense words show the persistence in his unconscious mind of the current controversy with the devotees of pure science.) Then occasionally there is a happy exclamation:

 

TELEPHONE — July 17, 1877: Telephone perfected this morning at 5 a.m. Articulation perfect — got 1/4 column newspaper every word. Had rickety transmitter at that. We are making it solid... Hemi-Semi-demi-Quaver...¹⁹⁶

 

But despite this note of triumph there was more work to be done.

He was thoroughly familiar with the wonderful properties of carbon by which variations in the pressure applied to it cause similar variations in its electrical resistance. The rheostat he had used in connection with his quadruplex-telegraph work had particles of graphite, or carbon granules, along with a device for raising or lowering pressure and thus varying its conductivity. His first rude transmitter with its graphite-impregnated electrodes had operated fairly well; but it was no accident that he searched for a purer carbon.

As he related at the time, “At last, on one day, an assistant brought him a piece of broken glass incrustated with carbon black from a smoking lamp chimney. He scraped off the carbon, pressed it into a little cake and tried that.”¹⁹⁷ It was molded in the form of a button and introduced into the transmitter, placed between two metal plates (adjacent to the diaphragm), the metal plates being connected with the battery circuit. That carbon button proved to be wonderfully elastic in varying its resistance in accordance with the pressure exerted upon it by the diaphragm. In progressive experiments he also discarded the tiny spring he had originally placed between the carbon button and the two outer metal disks, and he found that this eliminated some interference. He now made the surprising discovery that this transmitter did not require the vibration of a thin sensitive diaphragm, like Bell’s original goldbeater’s skin. Instead, a metal outer disk, one sixteenth of an inch thick, was fastened tightly to his carbon button. Now the volume of sound was several times larger than in Bell’s telephone and the articulation was sharp. After all, it was all a matter of pressure to be communicated to the carbon granules, he realized. Edison’s carbon transmitter was, in fact, a microphone.

His work had been made all the harder because of the handicap of poor hearing. As he wrote to an acquaintance in the early winter of 1878, when near the end of the trail, Bell had had “a very soft job” compared to his own. Since Bell had first exhibited his telephone at the Centennial Exposition in July, 1876,

 

There ain’t much improvements or change been made [in] over a year; whereas I had to create new things and [overcome] many obscure defects in applying my principle. Besides I am so deaf that I am debarred from hearing all the finer articulations & have to depend on the judgment of others. I had scarcely gotten the principle working before [there] was pressure in New York to introduce it immediately. I made 2 or 3 pair but found they were unhandy... That delayed. I have finished a new pair and they have been working two days without no change or adjustment... I have my man making a model for the Patent Office, which is essential I should get in, and I and Batchelor must go to New York to show it there so you can see I have my hands full — Even working 22 hours per day.¹⁹⁸

 

In February, 1878, he applied for a patent covering the use of a carbon lampblack button in the telephone transmitter (Patent No. 203,015). In his carbon transmitter Edison introduced two radical changes in the magnetotelephone of Bell. Instead of having the sound waves of the human voice generating the electrical impulses as they struck against the diaphragm, as in Bell’s instrument, in Edison’s transmitter the sound waves actuated an “electrical valve,” so to speak, by varying the resistance between two electrodes. His second important innovation was the use of the induction coil which extended the useful length of the telephone line by hundreds of miles.

In a test that was a sort of full-dress rehearsal over a line 107 miles long, between New York and Philadelphia, in March, 1878, in the presence of Western Union’s directors, among them Orton, William H. Vanderbilt, and H. M. Twombly, Edison’s transmitter delivered speech “loudly.” The effect was sensational. Everyone present felt that he had liberated the art of telephony — so hoarse and stuttering in its first two years — and won a tremendous advantage over the limited Bell apparatus. One spoke into the separate Edison transmitter and at the same time also listened, through the receiver held at one’s ear, to the speaker at the other end of the line. On that day in 1878 the telephone received its fundamental form, which was to remain virtually unaltered for almost half a century. In the opinion of present-day Bell System engineers, Edison’s “great and lasting contribution to telephony was his introduction of the variable resistance factor by use of carbon.”¹⁹⁹

 

4

After the summer of 1877 Western Union finally saw in the telephone a future threat. The Bell group had raised some new capital in Boston and began advertising and selling private telephone lines to business concerns (which found them marvelously convenient); soon afterward they began to install the first central telephone exchanges. In November, Western Union, on the strength of enthusiastic reports from Menlo Park and Edison’s first graphite-type transmitter, formally entered the field by organizing a subsidiary called the American Speaking Telephone Company, with a capitalization of $300,000. The new company picked up various telephone patents, besides Edison’s all-important carbon transmitter — the receiver invented by Elisha Gray, and a “condenser” telephone of Professor A. E. Dolbear, of Tufts College. They proceeded at once to install a switchboard at Western Union headquarters in New York and tried to provide a telephone service of some sort over their heavy telegraph wire. Later, they strung up more suitable telephone wire on their telegraph poles, and the “war” for the telephone monopoly was on.

At the beginning of 1878 Western Union enjoyed a tremendous advantage in owning rights to Edison’s loud transmitter. The Bell Telephone Company had nothing to compare with it; unless they obtained a transmitter equally as good they were faced with ruin. But from the depths of despair they were suddenly rescued, several months later, when they came upon an obscure, self-taught inventor residing in Washington, one Emile Berliner, a German-Jewish immigrant who had made a good, clearly articulating telephone transmitter of his own, on the “loose-contact” principle.

Berliner, moreover, had filed a caveat with the Patent Office, giving fair warning of his invention-in-progress (according to the rules in force prior to 1910). Edison, who had been completely ignorant of Berliner’s current work, had filed a full application for a patent on his first carbon-type transmitter, as a complete invention on April 27, 1877, two weeks after Berliner’s caveat was recorded. The Bell people, who quickly bought rights to Berliner’s transmitter, were now in a position to start an “interference” procedure at the Patent Office against Edison and Western Union. This legal action became a deadlock that was protracted for fifteen years, which was why the final grant of patent for Edison’s telephone transmitter was delayed until 1892. At that time a Federal Court decision finally awarded him his full rights, ruling that

 

... Edison preceded Berliner in the transmission of speech... The use of carbon in a transmitter is, beyond controversy, the invention of Edison. The carbon transmitter displaced Bell’s magnetic transmitter... The advance in the art of telephony was due to the carbon electrode of Edison.

 

The Berliner claims to a prior patent were then declared invalid.²⁰⁰

Meanwhile, in the late seventies, long before that tardy court decision on the transmitter arrived, there was another of those “wars” for a patent monopoly that so often centered about Thomas A. Edison. As Edison put it bluntly, “the Western Union [was] pirating the Bell receiver, and the Boston company was pirating the Western Union transmitter” — which Edison had invented.

In the historic suit in Federal court in Boston, beginning in September, 1878, of Bell Telephone Company against Peter A. Dowd, American Speaking Telephone, et al., the issue that created the bitterest dispute was that of the conflicting claims to “priority” in the invention of the receiver by Alexander G. Bell and Elisha Gray (whose invention rights had been assigned to Western Union). After extended trial hearings running more than a year, Western Union’s counsel advised that Bell’s rights would most likely be sustained in the end and that a compromise settlement out of court would be the wisest course.

Under an agreement negotiated between both parties in October, 1879, the validity of the Bell receiver patent was acknowledged by the defendant; and Western Union also agreed to withdraw from the new and already growing telephone field, selling its existing lines to the Bell Company and receiving from it, for seventeen years thereafter, a royalty of 20 per cent of all telephone rentals on the lines it had sold out.²⁰¹

By this shrewd bargain — or so it seemed at the time — Western Union gained 3.5 million dollars in royalties; yet Theodore Vail, the rising managerial head of the Bell System, won for it undisputed control of the future American telephone industry. But whatever strength there was in Western Union’s position in these final negotiations was mainly due to its confident claims on behalf of Edison’s transmitter patent, which, with the settlement, passed to Bell Telephone.

Several months before this happy consummation was brought about, in the spring of 1878, Edison had begun to feel that “he ought to be taken care of... and threw out hints of this desire.” Orton sent for him and asked him how much he wanted. Edison says he thought $25,000 might have been enough, but blandly invited Orton to make him an offer. Orton thereupon said his company would pay the inventor $100,000, a tiny percentage of the wealth his invention was to bring in. Very well satisfied, Edison agreed on condition that the money be paid him in installments, during the life of the patent, of $6,000 a year for seventeen years. Orton had no trouble agreeing to this, since the interest alone on $100,000, at 6 per cent, would have netted the inventor a similar sum. But to Edison it was just as well, since he believed that “inventors didn’t do business by the regular process.” He feared that if he received all the money at once, it might disappear quickly.²⁰²

 

5

Nothing reveals better the technical resourcefulness of Edison than the incidents connected with the sale of his telephone transmitter patent in England — at the time of the great trial in Boston. Early in 1877, Bell had gone to England and demonstrated his telephone, with such effect that a Bell Company was promptly organized to exploit his invention in Great Britain. Very soon after that Edison had his first carbon-type transmitter patented in England, in July, 1877; and a little later filed for patent on his improved, carbon-button transmitter. When this was demonstrated over a line between London and Norwich, a distance of 115 miles, it made a great sensation. In England it was seen at once that Edison had a grip on half of the telephone invention and that his own apparatus held a great advantage over Bell’s in volume and articulation. Venture capital quickly appeared to back a rival telephone company, based on his devices, which was named the Edison Telephone Company of Great Britain, Ltd.²⁰³

The irrepressible Colonel George Gouraud — who was last seen in 1873 at a dreary waterside tavern in Greenwich, together with his young American friend, downing great drafts of gin to dispel the effects of bad weather, worse food and a disappointing trial of the automatic telegraph — now reappears as Edison’s promoter, publicist, and benefactor. A genial transplanted American of the “boomer” type, Gouraud acted as the London representative of American banking groups; and he had useful acquaintances among British capitalists. Thanks to Gouraud’s recent publicity work in connection with another invention by Edison, the master of Menlo Park was known throughout England.²⁰⁴ It was also Gouraud who raised up the British syndicate that backed Edison’s telephone inventions with an initial capital of £100,000.

Both the Bell and the Edison companies in England therefore began negotiations with the British Post Office at about the same time for a franchise authorizing the establishment of telephone lines and exchanges. Again industrial warfare impended; the Bell interests threatened suit against the British Edison Company, and the latter accepted the challenge. Fortunately Gouraud retained as counsel the brilliant Sir Richard Webster, who was later to become Chief Justice of Britain; Webster urged that pourparlers be initiated with a view to a peace of compromise between the conflicting parties.

Edison later described the imbroglio over the British telephone venture as a sort of lark:

 

In England we had fun. Neither the Bell people nor we could work satisfactorily without injuring each other. They infringed on my transmitter and we infringed on their receiver, and there we were cutting each other’s throats. Well, of course, this could not go on forever, and consolidation had to come, although a second fight over the terms of consolidation was also bound to come. In a measure, they had the whip hand over us; so I was not surprised to receive one day from our representative in England a telegram the gist of which was that the Bell people wanted more than their fair share of the receipts in case of consolidation, and that our agent was at his wits’ end what to do. I cabled back at once something to this effect: ‘Do not accept terms of consolidation. I will invent new receiver and send it over.’ Then I set to work.²⁰⁵

 

At the time Gouraud had as his secretary a young man named Samuel Insull, who soon afterward came to the United States to work in the same capacity for Edison. He later confirmed Edison’s recollections, saying, “I remember writing the cable [from London] and receiving a reply to it the next day, stating that if we would wait sixty or ninety days he would supply a new form of receiver!”²⁰⁶

Was there ever such self-confidence, one might say cheek, displayed by an inventor before? Bell had worked for at least six years over his receiver. Edison, putting all other work aside, in December, 1878, opened up his whole bag of tricks, and tried “a thousand chemicals,” as his notebooks for Christmas Day, 1878, indicate. Within about three months — not three weeks, as some exaggerated accounts have held — he turned out an entirely new type of telephone receiver which, he claimed, “worked better than Bell’s.”

The condition to be met in this case was that the receiver must absolutely avoid use of a magnet in order not to infringe on Bell’s patent. The idea of his nonmagnetic, or “electromotograph,” relay, which in a similar emergency he had contrived for Gould’s telegraph lines in 1874, now came back to him, and was put to use in a new form. He wrote:

 

I had recourse again to the phenomenon discovered by me years previously, that the friction of a rubbing electrode passing over a moist chalk surface was varied by electricity. I devised a telephone receiver... afterward known as the “chalk receiver.” There was no magnet, simply a diaphragm and a cylinder of compressed chalk about the size of a thimble. A thin spring connected to the center of the diaphragm extended outwardly and rested on the chalk cylinder, and was pressed against it... The chalk was rotated by hand. The volume of sound was very great. The voice, instead of furnishing the power, merely controlled the power, as an engineer working a valve could control a powerful engine.²⁰⁷

 

Headquarters of the Edison Telephone Company of Great Britain had been opened in Cannon Street, London. Gouraud wrote in mid-January:

 

My dear Edison:

Receiver. Pray do not lose a moment unnecessarily in forwarding this, as until it is received I can make no substantial progress with my negotiations... The moment I have this new receiver I shall move with vigor and have no doubt of satisfactory results.²⁰⁸

 

The first chalk receivers made brave sounds, but they had bugs in them. The moment a prospective customer for Edison Telephone stock arrived in Gouraud’s office, the new receiver would behave in silly or balky fashion. Gouraud arranged to have John Tyndall lecture on the chalk receiver and demonstrate it before the Royal Society; but the lecture had to be postponed twice, until an improved instrument arrived in the spring.

At Menlo Park Edison had his nineteen-year-old nephew, Charles P. Edison, son of his brother Pitt, and a very clever electrician, working under him on the telephone. “Charley” was therefore dispatched to London in charge of six of the improved receivers. The first tests were most promising. The affair began to seem so important that Edison also sent Edward H. Johnson, his principal business lieutenant, and Charles Batchelor, his cleverest mechanic, to help manage things at the London end.

Skilled men were urgently needed in England to install and operate private telephone lines, already in demand for business use; but there were none there, and almost none in America who knew the telephone. Edison, thereupon, hastened to New York, engaged about sixty likely subjects, brought them back with him to Menlo Park, and began to train them. A telephone exchange was set up in the laboratory; its wires ran from wall to wall, upstairs and downstairs, connecting ten of his “loud-speaking” telephones. After having trained the men to become expert with the instruments, Edison says:

 

I would then go out and get each one out of order in every conceivable way, cutting the wires of one, short-circuiting another, destroying the adjustment of a third, putting dirt between the electrodes of a fourth, and so on. A man would be sent to each to find out the trouble. When he could find the trouble ten consecutive times, using five minutes each he was sent to London. About sixty men were sifted to get twenty.²⁰⁹

 

The laboratory thus was turned into a perfect bedlam, with all this strenuous testing and shouting into the instruments going on at the same time. “Being hard of hearing, Edison went on with his work undisturbed,” one eye-witness has related, “while the rest of us were nearly deafened as ‘Hello — Hello — Hello’ echoed from corner to corner.”²¹⁰

The demonstration of the new chalk receiver in London on March 15, 1879, was a complete success, as cabled reports showed. Charley Edison had kept the still moody apparatus running in fine form while the Prince of Wales and the Prime Minister, Mr. Gladstone — thanks to Gouraud’s able public relations work — appeared to speak over it before an admiring public. The London press was enthusiastic; even the conservative Times described Edison’s chalk receiver as far superior to Bell’s and as being, in fact, a “microphone-receiver” or “loud-speaking telephone.” “Every inflection of the voice is audible,” reported the London Standard. To be sure, there were some amusing contretemps. When Mrs. Gladstone, who accompanied her husband, was invited to speak over the line, “she asked the man at the other end whether it was a woman or a man at our end, and the reply came in loud tones that it was a man!”²¹¹

 



Replica of the telephone developed by Edison in 1879, employing a carbon transmitter and a chalk receiver. The small crank on the receiver (right) had to be wound continuously while the instrument was in use.

 

Among the contingent of employees engaged in promoting the Edison telephone at the London office, there happened to be a decidedly odd, lanky and red-haired Irishman of twenty-three, named George Bernard Shaw. This was one of Shaw’s first commercial jobs in London. In those days, when he was a poor young man, and before he had begun to write his comedies of manners and morals, Shaw was as much engrossed in physical science as in music or literature. He had read Tyndall and Helmholtz and in consequence believed that he was “the only person in the entire establishment who knew the current scientific explanation of telephony.”

From the memory of his transient connection with the Edison enterprise in England, Shaw some years afterward drew the material for one of his early novels, The Irrational Knot, whose hero was an English inventor of working-class stock. In a characteristic preface to the novel the future playwright indicates that Edison was the inspiration of this work, and then with some humorous exaggeration, describes the Edison telephone apparatus as “a much too ingenious invention... of such stentorian efficiency that it bellowed your most private communications all over the house, instead of whispering them with some sort of discretion.”

Having been hired to demonstrate the operation of the telephone before curious visitors, Shaw, as he declares unblushingly, proceeded to do so in a manner which

 

laid the foundation for Mr. Edison’s London reputation; my sole reward being my boyish delight in the half-concealed incredulity of our visitors (who were convinced by the hoarsely startling utterances of the telephone that the speaker, alleged by me to be twenty miles away, was really using a speaking trumpet in the next room).

 

Shaw’s recollections also yield us some graphic impressions of the high-spirited band of American technical workers dispatched by Edison to install some of London’s first telephone lines and exchanges:

 

Whilst the Edison Telephone Company lasted [Shaw relates] it crowded the basement of a high pile of offices in the Queen Victoria Street with American artificers. These deluded and romantic men gave me a glimpse of the skilled proletariat of the United States; and their language was frightful even to an Irishman. They worked with a ferocious energy which was out of all proportion to the result achieved. Indomitably resolved to assert their republican manhood by taking no orders from a tall-hatted Englishman, whose stiff politeness covered his conviction that they were, relative to himself, inferior and common persons, they insisted on being slave-driven with genuine American oaths by a genuine free and equal American foreman. They utterly despised the artfully slow British workman who did as little for his wages as he possibly could; never hurried himself; and had a deep reverence for anyone whose pocket could be tapped by respectful behavior. Need I add that they were contemptuously wondered at by this same British workman as a parcel of outlandish boys, who sweated themselves for their employer’s benefit instead of looking after their own interests. They adored Mr. Edison as the greatest man of all time in every possible department of science, art and philosophy, and execrated Mr. Graham Bell, the inventor of a rival telephone, as his Satanic adversary; but each of them had (or pretended to have) on the brink of completion an improvement on the telephone, usually a new transmitter. They were free-souled creatures, excellent company; sensitive, cheerful, and profane; liars, braggarts, and hustlers; with an air of making slow old England hum which never left them even when, as often happened, they were wrestling with difficulties of their own making; or struggling in no-thoroughfares from which they had to be retrieved like strayed sheep by Englishmen without imagination to go wrong.²¹²

 

The moistened chalk-drum receiver was a somewhat awkward affair; it had to be cranked by hand as you listened to the apparatus. In England, at any rate, it literally drowned out the Bell telephone. On receiving a later shipment of the “water-chalk” telephones, Ed Johnson reported, “They belched right out. Very loud speaking. I am inclined to think we have reached the goal.”²¹³

Though it was soon to be abandoned, following the settlement with the Bell interests (as being more difficult to manufacture, or less economical than the magnetic receiver) it served its purpose by inducing the opposition group to yield satisfactory terms for a merger of the Bell and Edison companies into the United Telephone Company of Great Britain. Another important factor making for this result was the successful legal defense of the British patent for Edison’s carbon transmitter, conducted by Sir Richard Webster; the British courts promptly and completely sustained Edison’s claim to priority in that invention.

The closing stages of this commercial war were not reached without some serious casualties. James Adams, one of the skilled craftsmen sent from Menlo Park, turned out to be an alcoholic of the extreme type, and amid the strain of the work in London suddenly died. The promising young Charles Edison, one of the inventor’s favorites, after going off to Paris to demonstrate the new telephone apparatus, was also suddenly stricken with illness and, to Edison’s great sorrow, died. The inventor arranged for the transport of his nephew’s remains to Port Huron, Michigan. Then the indispensable Batchelor was taken ill in London, but managed to get back to Menlo Park and recover his health. Finally, Johnson reported from London that he too was sick.

Edison, busy shipping out telephone sets in large wooden cases, took note of all these untoward events, and in the autumn of 1879 wrote to Johnson with a touch of his sometimes macabre humor:

 

... Hope you are not going to “kick the bucket.” If you men are going to die off so, it would be better to have the large boxes made a little longer, so that you can send back the corpses in them...²¹⁴

 

For the inventor himself the final outcome of the British venture was most fortunate. To the end he always maintained the pose of being a simple country boy who was repeatedly dumfounded at finding money come to him like manna from heaven after one of his “commercial” inventions had been completed. To be sure, he was often distracted by his work and in the midst of it gave no thought to finances, but only to the technical objective. Still, at thirty, the telegrapher who had come to New York threadbare ten years earlier was already the highest-paid professional among American inventors, one who, in a pinch, could be trusted to deliver almost any contrivance needed. Such had been the somewhat ephemeral device of the chalk-drum receiver. He has related:

 

One day I received a cable from Gouraud offering “30,000” for my interest. I cabled back I would accept. When the draft came I was astonished to find it was for 30,000 pounds sterling. I had thought it was dollars.²¹⁵

 

It was indeed a golden age for inventors. For “curing” Bell’s “magnetotelephone” (as Edison phrased it) he gathered in altogether a quarter of a million dollars. After the coup in London and the merger, Edison was to abandon this field. Other able inventors, such as Emile Berliner and Francis Blake, around that time contributed very handsome improvements in the telephone transmitter. Then technological progress in the telephone virtually stopped, for some inscrutable bureaucratic reason, for about a quarter of a century, while the industry grew to be one of the world’s greatest privately owned monopolies. Edison himself made public his own explanation in 1890, declaring that

 

many extremely useful improvements on the telephone are in the possession of those controlling the invention, and are safely locked up from the world because of the great extra expense which would attend their application to existing instruments.²¹⁶