AT SEVENTY-THREE, WITH his wartime career as president of the Naval Consulting Board behind him, Edison tried to make sense of a new intellectual order that challenged everything he had learned of Newtonian theory. Abstract thought did not come easily to him. “My line of sorrow,” he wrote, “lies in the realm of technical science.” He needed to feel things come together under his hands, see the filament glow, smell the carbolic acid, and—as far as possible for a near-deaf man—hear the “molecular concussions” of music.1

Laws such as those of Faraday’s electromagnetic induction and Ohm’s relation of current, voltage, and resistance he understood, having applied them himself in the laboratory. But now, if only to slow as much as possible the entropy of his own particles (the fate of all systems, according to Lord Kelvin), Edison studied Einstein’s general theory of relativity.2 The recent solar eclipse had persuaded him, along with the academic scientists he mocked as “the bulge-headed fraternity,” that the theory was valid—even if it failed to suggest any correlation between his attempt to measure the total eclipse of 1878 and his subsequent perfection of incandescent electric light.3

The urtext of the theory, as translated by Robert Lawson, defeated him after only eleven pages. “Einstein like every other mathematical mind,” he scrawled in the margin of his copy, “has not the slightest capacity to impart to the lay mind even an inkling of the subject he tries to explain.” He turned for help to an interpretive essay—Georges de Bothezat’s “The Einstein Theory of Relativity: A Glance into the Nature of the Question”—and filled thirty-one notebook pages with scrawled paraphrases of its main points.4

Gravitation is due to the retardation in velocity of the ultimate particle in passing through the fixed aggregates of matter. Ultimate particles fill the whole of space and proceed in every direction….

He could imagine that at least in terms of his own observation, forty years before, of the thermionic emission of carbon electrons in a lightbulb after evacuation—a mysterious darkening since known as the “Edison Effect.” It was about as far as he ever got in his search for a “new force” in electrochemistry. Disparaged at the time by his peers, he now knew that he had discovered, if not recognized, the phenomenon of radio waves eight years before Heinrich Hertz.

Wireless waves cannot proceed thru space but thru Matter in combination with the ultimate particle….From this, if true, all matter is formed of the same material.

Edison had once teased a science fiction writer with the notion of interchanging atoms of himself with those of a rose. He noted that Einstein envisaged particles in space with common axes converging into solidly constituted “rings,” while others remained ethereal.^*1 Hence the “primal ring” of the solar system, with its interplanetary nothingness.

We now have matter in a form which is polar & capable of producing what we call Magnetism & Electricity.

The religion boys, of course, would protest that what drew particles together was the will of God. Edison was as ready as Einstein to believe in a “Supreme Intelligence” made manifest by the order and beauty of the stars, and equally reluctant to personalize it: “I cannot conceive such a thing as a spirit.” The furthest he would go in the direction of metaphysics was to imagine the subcellular particles of a human being as “infinitesimally small individuals, each itself a unit of life.”5

These units work in squads—or swarms, as I prefer to call them—and…live for ever. When we “die” these swarms of units, like a swarm of bees, so to speak, betake themselves elsewhere and go on functioning in some other form or environment. If the units of life which compose an individual’s memory hold together after that individual’s death, is it not within the range of possibility…that these memory swarms could retain what we call the individual’s personality after the dissolution of the body?

Having thus anticipated by more than a century both swarm intelligence and DNA inheritance theory, Edison gave up trying to understand relativity and returned to the more tangible universe he preferred.

A BIG BUMP FOR COOKIES

As he saw it, his first order of business in the new decade was to reimpose his own—highly individual—personality upon Thomas A. Edison, Inc., the sprawling industrial conglomerate that he had been forced to neglect during the war. He chose not to notice that it had thereby done much better than it had in earlier years, when he had run its manifold activities—phonograph and record production, movie making, cement milling, storage battery development, and laboratory research—with such autocratic willfulness as to make his executives despair of ever influencing him.

Edison was not an easy man to advise, being a combination of twinkling charm and bruising imperiousness. In his youth the charm had prevailed, but now that he was a septuagenarian and almost unreachably deaf, the urge to overbear had become a compulsion, and he had lost much of the bonhomie that had kept thousands of men working for him, and worshiping him, over the past half-century. Long gone was the perpetual hint of a smile flickering around the corners of his mouth, as if he were about to break into thigh-slapping laughter. The artist Richard Outcault remembered its radiance back in ’89, when “the boys” presented “the Old Man” with a gold and silver phonograph for his birthday. “Edison’s smile! [It] sweetened up the atmosphere of the whole building….As long as I live the sweet spirit that pervaded the atmosphere of the laboratory will always remain with me.”6

Edison still moved with the jerky energy that kept him awake, and acting more decisively, than young men unable to match his eighteen-hour-a-day schedule. He regarded exercise as a waste of time, and sleep even more so. Since he was twenty, he had maintained his 175-pound, five-foot-nine-and-a-half-inch frame with only a few lapses, quickly corrected. (“I do believe I have a big bump for cookies.”) The most remarkable thing about his appearance, apart from the brilliance of the blue-gray eyes, was the largeness of his head, amplified by its thick mop of snowy hair. He wore custom-made size eight-and-a-half straw hats, and slashed the bands of his caps for comfort. His handshake was perfunctory and surprisingly cold. Monomaniacally focused on whatever current project interested him, he strode at a forward angle, hands in vest pockets, aware only of his destination and completely unconscious of time. He never wore a watch, and made no distinction between day and night, nodding off when he felt like it and expecting his assistants to follow suit. The same went for waking up. If two hours of rest was enough for him, he did not see why anyone else should want more.7

Lovable as he was—or had been in the past—Edison did not return affection, beyond the occasional beaming familiarity, in which there was often a note of tease. He thought hurtful practical jokes—electrified washbasins, a wad of chewing tobacco spat onto a white summer suit, firecrackers tossed at the bare feet of children—were funny. Having made money easily all his life, thanks to phenomenal energy and the mysterious gift of imagination (his personal wealth, at latest calculation, was almost $10 million),^*2 he was unmoved by the lesser luck or ill fortune of others, and casual about the loneliness of his wives. Now, returning to his laboratory desk in 1920, he was determined to teach Charles Edison a thing or two about running a large corporation.

NOTHING’S RIGHT AND ALL IS CHANGE

For four years Charles had been under the impression that he, not his father, was the chief executive of Thomas A. Edison, Inc. His formal titles were chairman of the board and general manager, but now that the Old Man had come home from the navy, reasserting command and firing off orders like grapeshot, he felt demoted. There was little he could do about it, since Edison had never relinquished the title of president.8

Charles Edison, circa 1920.

Charles was nearing thirty, married but childless, an oddly divided personality. At work he was the quintessential businessman, cautious, courteous, efficient, and fair. The patrician manners of Hotchkiss and MIT sat easily on his sober-suited shoulders. Small and wiry (Edison called him “Toughie”), he was a handsome man, with heavy-browed eyes of the palest blue. In later life he would develop a startling resemblance to his father.

At home or in the Greenwich Village cafés he loved to frequent, Charles was a bohemian. For two years he had helped run an avant-garde theater off Washington Square, commuting back nightly to West Orange on the “owl” train. He spoke fluent French, composed songs with titles like “Wicky Wacky Woo,” attracted squads of young women, and wrote quantities of light poetry under the nom de plume “Tom Sleeper.”9

He had displayed all the forceful spirit of extreme youth when he became chairman in June 1916. Until that moment, Edison’s skinflint, union-busting management style had made the West Orange complex “the last place at which men desired to work.” Charles had taken advantage of his father’s naval appointment to bring in some younger, more progressive executives, while decentralizing Edison Industries into a web of largely independent divisions, serviced by an administration in charge of communal interests. He prided himself on having “put the business on a little more humane basis,” and expanding it so judiciously that by 1920 Thomas A. Edison, Inc., with eleven thousand employees, was admired for its generous pay, medical, and social policies.10

Charles’s dread was that the returned Commodore, already harrumphing that the company was too large and too loose, would move to dismantle his “beautiful organization” and reestablish totalitarian control. If so, there was bound to be blood on the boardroom floor. The prospect was enough to make Charles, whose health tended to be psychosomatic, sick with apprehension. He revered Edison as “Father, Boss & Hero,” and half-welcomed his reassumption of power at the plant.11

“When he is here,” he wrote Mina, “I always feel that there is a safe harbor to go into if the weather gets too rough for me on the open sea.”12

WE ARE ALONE

March found Edison, as usual, at Seminole Lodge, his winter estate in Fort Myers, Florida. What was less usual was the absence of any children to stay. “Papa and I are sitting under the trees, just where Charles was married,” Mina wrote her second son, Theodore, a freshman at MIT. “It is blissfully quiet and we are alone….It has never happened in 34 years.”13

To her pleased surprise, Edison showed no inclination to start another of his countless experimental notebooks. The failure of Washington paper-pushers to adopt a single one of his forty-five inventions and plans as the navy’s top defense adviser seemed to have crushed his creativity—for how long, she could not tell. He was particularly hurt by their transformation of his pet project, a naval research laboratory to be located far from Washington and staffed by civilian scientists, into a service facility just downriver from the capital, where “mentally inbred” career officers were sure to suppress any innovative ideas.14

Aerial photograph of Thomas A. Edison, Inc., 1920s.

Edison had come to despise government bureaucrats, seeing them as a blight on democracy. In his disgust he had just turned down a medal for his defense work, arguing that he deserved it no more than any other member of the Naval Consulting Board. He said he had lost interest in weapons of war—not to mention respect for the patent and copyright clause of the U.S. Constitution, “and the other 27,946 books filled with laws.”15

Mina luxuriated in her husband’s company. Normally, unless guests were around, she had to settle for birdsong. A passionate amateur ornithologist (“My dream is a natural aviary”), she rarely went out of doors without binoculars. Her curiosity about all feathered things extended to their habitat, and she was as schooled in the Latin names of trees and shrubs as she was with those of birds. Early on, it had been a frustration to her that biology was the one natural science Edison ignored—beyond scouring the world for bamboo fibers to carbonize in his lamps, or rare resins to bake into his phonograph records. But in later life he had begun to study botany, collecting and identifying specimens on rural jaunts and taking pleasure in the variety of plantings around Seminole Lodge. He talked now of setting out some groves of red and black mango and Louisiana cup oak, for a possible sideline in veneer cutting. To prepare, Edison read academic papers on the vegetation of Florida, and made sure that his estate manager understood the fine art of squashing the “slippery lumps” in wet humus.16

A LOOSE PIECE OF LEATHER

With the insensitivity that characterized his dealings with all his children, he upstaged Charles at a conference of “Ediphone” dictating-machine distributors in West Orange that summer.17 Nobody expected Edison to address the audience personally, since it was well known that he never spoke in public. Instead, he gave Charles a speech he had written and asked him to read it from the podium.

During the discourse, Edison sat unhearing and apparently unaware that he was the focus of all eyes. His own attention became fixed on his right shoe. He bent down to unlace it, then, in the words of a reporter present, “took it off and pruned a loose piece of leather from the sole with a jackknife.” Discovering that the sole itself was detached, he peered and poked at it as if he were back at his workbench in the laboratory.

By now the only person in the room not fascinated by the shoe was Charles, still gamely speaking. Edison sensed the stare of the crowd, looked up, and received an amused ovation. He felt obliged to explain, in a voice overriding his son’s, “I went over to New York to buy a pair of shoes, and found they were asking $17 and $18 a pair—”

Charles had no choice but to let him proceed.

Edison said he would not pay that kind of money for pointy-toe footwear. Instead, he had gone to a bargain basement and bought a pair of Cortlands for six dollars. He then launched into a harangue on extortion by haberdashers that segued somehow into a demand for greater productivity from his employees.

By the time he allowed Charles to go on reading, it was evident to the audience that the Old Man was back in charge.

HIRIN’ AND FIRIN’

Edison’s complaint about inflated prices was not entirely the affectation of a rich man. The shoe he held in his hand may have represented inventory that the Cortland Company was desperate to unload.18 Overproduction during the postwar boom, stimulated by rapacious consumption, easy credit, and addictive speculation, had caused such a rise in the cost of living that men of his age, remembering the panics of ’73 and ’93, could see that the American economy was again a bubble close to bursting. In fact, it had burst already, manifesting itself in millions of canceled orders and a recent 25 percent increase in railroad rates that made cash-poor farmers slaughter their horses for hog feed. Salaried city dwellers felt the inrushing cold air of a major depression, and reacted with a halt to optional purchases. Luxuries like phonographs (until now the topmost item on the Edison profit sheet) stacked up unsold. Shabbiness became the new chic. Women recycled last year’s dresses, and men had their suits “turned,” shiny side in. William McAdoo, President Wilson’s former treasury secretary, publicly sported trouser patches. For once in his life, even Edison began to look fashionable.19

On 16 September a wagon bomb packed with shrapnel exploded opposite the headquarters of J. P. Morgan & Co. on Wall Street, killing thirty-two pedestrians and injuring hundreds of others. Investigators blamed the disaster on anarchists. But to financiers, a coincidental sharp drop in the Dow Jones industrial was an even louder inducement to panic. Henry Ford slashed the price of his basic Model T, hitherto hard to keep in the showroom, from $575 to $440. General Motors followed suit. The Chicago billionaire Samuel Insull—Edison’s former private secretary—had to borrow $12 million in personal funds to keep his web of power companies together. Deflation set in, at a rate unparalleled in American history.20

Edison waited no longer than October to initiate a purge of most of the employees his son had hired during the war. He believed that the slump left him no choice but to trim the payroll and increase automation—in both cases, if necessary, by half. He did not scruple to fire some of his own long-serving aides as well. “Poor Charles I fear is pretty much crushed,” Mina wrote Theodore.21

As diplomatically as she could, she tried to persuade her husband to give up his lifelong habit of command. She had to do so in writing, rather than shout in his right ear:

My darling—

It is beautiful to see you a tower among the young men—Charles, John, Fagan, Mambert, Maxwell, etc —and I do love to see you quietly counselling with them, giving them the benefit of your wisdom and experience.

I and all have so admired your giving the work over to Charles and backing him up in his efforts….

You have made a success of your life—built up tremendous industries successfully so you have nothing more to prove to the world that you are capable—All know it—Can’t you be happy in just letting the boys struggle along, with you to guide them….Charles is all for you—He stands by you at all times and is with you, wanting to please you in every way. He always puts up your side and will never let any one say a thing contrary to your praise—Don’t misjudge him.

Success makes success—and if you will only let Charles feel that you do appreciate him you will make him and all happier. Forget a little bit that you are Charles’s manager and be a father—a big father!22

Mina might have shouted into Edison’s other deaf ear, for all the notice he took of her letter. Charles, he declared, needed to have the “conceit” knocked out of him. The tension between father and son grew to the point that Mina forbade them to talk business during a family lunch. As a result, she told Theodore, “Papa never opened his mouth during the whole meal.”23

There was a temporary truce in November after Edison and Charles both voted, as Republicans, to send Warren Gamaliel Harding to the White House. Harding’s huge win over James L. Cox (announced that night by a tiny startup station calling itself “8ZZ” in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) repudiated the cloudy idealism of the war years. But for as long as the stroke-enfeebled Woodrow Wilson remained in office, the election did nothing to bolster consumer confidence. By late December bank presidents were committing suicide, homeowners losing their all to sheriffs (Edison knew what that felt like), and “Billy” Durant, the founder of General Motors, was out of a job.24

Edison had no intention of sharing Durant’s fate. Working eighteen hours a day and often not returning home until dawn, he increased the savagery of his purge, dismissing the whole of Charles’s personnel department before Christmas (“Hell, I’m doin’ the hirin’ and firin’ round here”) and laying off 1,650 employees of the Phonograph Works. He jettisoned five-sixths of the engineering force and a like proportion of bookkeepers, clerks, artists, copywriters, salesmen, and talent scouts. Those who survived had their wages slashed and were told to forget about Christmas bonuses. In the process, Edison destroyed his old image as a benevolent autocrat, and Charles lapsed into despair.25

A TRIO OF THORNS

Among those caught short by the depression were Edison’s children by his first marriage. Disdained by Mina as genetically inferior to her own brood, they had been for more than thirty years a trio of thorns in their father’s side. Marion at least had done him the favor of settling in Europe and marrying a German army officer. But now, at forty-seven, she wrote to complain that Oberst Oscar Öser was an unfaithful, abusive husband. She was hiding from him in Switzerland, and if Edison did not send the money she needed for a divorce, she might throw herself into the Rhine.26

Thomas Alva Edison, Jr., forty-four, was a sad ne’er-do-well, perpetually broke and ailing. Although he ran a mushroom farm, he had long tried to market inventions under his famous name. The latest was a fuel-saving automotive device that he wanted his father to sponsor. Earlier in the year Mina had been terrified that Tom’s wife might give birth to a Thomas Alva Edison III. “Poor papa and poor us!” The pregnancy, like others of Beatrice’s, had mysteriously evaporated. She claimed to be a nurse, but there was reason to believe that she had once practiced a much older profession.27

William, forty-two, was a jock turned clubman, large, loud, defensively jovial. Like Tom, he was a would-be inventor who settled for a malodorous variety of farming—in his case, poultry. William admitted to his father’s secretary, Richard Kellow, that he owed Edison $8,347.36 for a tractor and other items of machinery. “Tell him to cheer up, all is not lost, that I’m not dead yet.” In the meantime he needed further funds: his wife Blanche was facing a $500 medical procedure.28

Edison gave Marion a monthly allowance of $200, agreed to test but not endorse Tom’s Ecometer, and told Kellow to deny William’s appeal. “Find out why he don’t sell the tractor.”29

HAIL THE MASTER

In the new year of 1921 Edison, alarmed by a free fall in phonograph sales, went on a rampage of additional firings that had even well-wishers questioning his stability. “The Old Man is certainly out of his mind,” Miller Reese Hutchison, the company’s former chief engineer, wrote in his diary. “Breaking up his organization and seems pointing to a ‘bust up.’ ”30

Edison showed no sympathy for dismissed employees who had failed to save for hard times. “I do not believe in unemployment insurance.” Mina reported the new purge to Theodore in anguished letters, sometimes two a day. “What can we do to have father dear see that he is crushing all the spirit throughout the plant?…I wish he would calm down and let Charles manage things.” A few days later: “Papa is tired to death and Charles is just about at the end of his string.”31

She did not know how near Charles was to resigning over the closure of another of his creations, the Power Service Division. He wrote a bitter poem on the theme of one of Edison’s favorite maxims, “Nothing is permanent but change.”32

Changes bring but other changes;

Progress runs in Error’s ring;

Plans are made, but Change deranges;

Hail the master; Change is king.33

Charles later admitted to wanting to leave the company rather than tolerate the humiliations his father heaped on him. One of these was Edison’s public remark that Thomas A. Edison, Inc., had lost efficiency during the war “due to the negligence of those who were supposed to be watching it.”34

Charles could not deny that the company’s profit sheet, substantial in 1919 and 1920, was reddening toward a loss of more than $1 million this year. But the depression, not his own management, was at fault: nationwide, corporate profits plummeted by 92 percent. One of the Phonograph Division’s biggest competitors, the Columbia Company, had to float a $7.5 million bond issue, at ruinous interest, just to pay for a forest’s worth of cabinets it could not sell. U.S. Steel, the nation’s first billion-dollar trust, was in the process of firing one hundred thousand workers.35

Edison saw, with eyes older and colder than his son’s, the necessity of similar action at a time when industrial wages were draining eighty-five cents out of every budgeted dollar. He kept pointing out that he had started out in business at age eleven. “I’ve been through half a dozen of these depressions. I know how they work, and it’s got to be this way or we’ll go broke.” By February Charles’s protests had weakened into second guesses that Edison, who often made a convenience of being deaf, ignored.36

One night, brooding in bed, Charles heard himself say, “There’s a possible chance that he may be right and I may be wrong.”37

A SHAKER LIKE RAPPOLD

Edison’s preoccupation with staff and wage cuts did nothing to assuage his inventive drought.38 The only patent applications he had filed since 1919 were for improvements to his elegant alkaline storage battery of a decade before. Now, revisiting another old technology, he spent every available hour in the experimental recording studio Charles had built on Columbia Street across from the plant, trying for the fifth time in his career to perfect the sonics of Edison music products.

To most ears, the Phonograph Division’s new take of Marie Rappold and Carolina Lazzari singing Puccini’s “Tutti i fior” had remarkable fidelity, with flutes and tinkling percussion complementing the tessitura. When the two women went into duet, their voices seemed to shimmer. Edison could not stand it. Deaf as he was, he persisted in thinking he heard perfectly if he jammed the right side of his head close to the amplifier. “How could anyone who pretends to understand Music record such a Record,” he scribbled in his notebook. “All out of balance too loud wrong instruments, 2 singers can’t sing together & putting a shaker like Rappold in.”39

It was too late for him to prevent the disk’s release, but he could at least wage war on what he saw as lapsed standards throughout the division, from studio to point of sale. He ordered fresh rosin to be applied to the horsehair of string instruments for every four hours of playing time. This would prevent the ribbons from wearing “square,” a phenomenon he had detected under the microscope. Plastic dust adhering to the grooves of any pressing should be whisked out with a sweep of the finest white Chinese bristles (an idea that came to him when he was brushing his teeth), and the phenolic varnish glossed with stearin for extra slickness under the reproducer.40

Edison listening to phonograph records at home, 1920s.

The therapy of working with sound again revived Edison’s spirits, if not those of the technicians he bullied. “Of all the children of his brain, the phonograph seems to be the one he loves most,” his personal assistant, William Meadowcroft, remarked. Mina rejoiced to see her husband becoming his old jocular self. At such times he affectionately called her “Billy,” the boyish name he had given her in the early days of their marriage. “It puts a bright hue on everything when he is happy and makes love to me as he is doing now,” she wrote Theodore.41

FREE FALL

Warren Harding was sworn in as president on 4 March 1921. A placid, middlebrow, middle-of-the-road midwesterner, he famously personified everything that was “normal” in America. Harding objected to extreme behavior, whether it was too emotional a reaction to the current state of economic affairs, or too precipitous an action to combat it.

His inaugural speech echoed what Edison had been saying to Charles for the last five months. Citing the “delirium of expenditures” that had brought the depression on, Harding declared, “We must face a condition of grim reality, charge off our losses, and start afresh.”42

If this sounded like a warning of governmental intervention, Harding soon made clear that by we he meant the 62 million adult Americans whose buying and selling influenced the economy. He waited for the invisible hand of the market to reassert itself, doing little more than appoint a distinguished group of aides to monitor it. They included Andrew Mellon as Secretary of the Treasury, and Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce. Prices continued their free fall.

WHAT IS COPRA?

Edison congratulated himself that spring on having gotten rid of thousands of “untrained and careless workers”—by one estimate, nearly a third of his eleven-thousand-man payroll—with further pink slips yet to be issued before Edison Industries was, in his opinion, slim and trim again. “You’re going to learn a big lesson out of this depression,” he said to Charles.43

Apparently not caring that he had become the most hated man in West Orange, he worked on a new plan to replace highly paid executives with young men willing to work for less money. This meant a risky investment in recent college graduates. To ensure he got the best out of hundreds of desperate job seekers with degrees, he devised a questionnaire to bring out their general knowledge. Only 4 percent of his initial batch of applicants struck him as worth hiring. “The results of the test are surprisingly disappointing,” he announced in May. “Men who have gone through college I find to be amazingly ignorant.”44

The contempt for higher education implicit in that remark was nothing new for Edison. It betrayed a prejudice much more complex than the anti-intellectualism of a small-town boy who had clawed his way to success with minimal schooling. Although his mother was his primary teacher, at home in Port Huron, Michigan, she had been a woman of enough culture to introduce him to Gibbon and Hume, even as he mastered R. G. Parker’s A School Compendium of Natural and Experimental Philosophy by himself. And his father—radical, randy, secessionist Sam—had “larned” him the complete works of Thomas Paine when he was still a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railroad.

Edison’s reading in the sixty years since embraced few of the humanities but most of the sciences, as well as a wide range of magazines and newspapers. He now claimed to study twenty-seven periodicals, ranging from the Police Gazette and “the liberal weeklies” to the Journal of Experimental Medicine, plus five papers a day and “about forty pounds of books a month.” He was able to maintain this consumption because of his ability to flip pages fast and memorize whatever data appealed to him. “Nearly all my books are transcripts of scientific societies, which will never be republished.”45

He was an energetic margin-scribbler, forever endorsing—or more often disagreeing with—passages that struck him. “This is young metaphysics over a pound of platinum,” he wrote above a chapter of Oliver Lodge’s Ether and Reality, and “Why lug bible sayings in” next to a passage on maternal love in Sherwood Eddy’s New Challenges to Faith. Quotations came easily to him, and he had a transatlantic sense of irony: “As La Rochefoucauld said, our virtues increase as our capacity for sin diminishes.” His erudition was beyond that of many university professors, let alone their graduate students. “From my experience,” the electrical theoretician George Steinmetz remarked, “I consider Edison today as the man best informed in all fields of human knowledge.”46

Hence the frustration of a Cornell man who publicized seventy-seven Edisonian questions that he thought had unfairly disqualified him from a job at West Orange, such as “How is leather tanned?” “Who was Danton?” and “What is copra?” Another rejectee complained that he failed to see any useful connection “between the thyroid gland and selling incandescent bulbs, or between gypsies and talking machines, or attar of roses and sales production.”47

Edison had not meant his questions to be leaked. He was obliged to draft another 113, but they too ended up in newspapers across the country, under such headlines as “IF YOU CANNOT ANSWER THESE YOU’RE IGNORANT, EDISON SAYS.”48

Harper’s Magazine accused him of indulging in “philallatopism,” or pedantic pleasure in exposing the ignorance of other people. But the questions, though difficult, were not condescending:

Which country drank the most tea before the war?

What is the first line of The Aeneid?

Where is the live center of a lathe?

Name two locks on the Panama Canal.

What is the weight of air in a room 20 × 30 × 10?

Who invented logarithms?

What state is the name of a famous violin maker?

How fast does sound travel per foot per second?49

The last item was too much even for Albert Einstein. Sounding defensive when it was put to him, the father of relativity said through an interpreter that he saw no point in cluttering his mind with data obtainable from any encyclopedia. “The value of a college education,” Einstein huffed, “is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.”50

Nicola Tesla, Einstein’s rival in popular “genius” rankings, agreed. “Edison attaches too great a value to mere memory.” A professor of psychology at Boston University wrote Edison to suggest that all college students were intelligent, to the extent that they had qualified for higher education. Any questionnaire designed to contradict this must therefore be incorrectly framed—if not an exercise in personal vanity. “Are you not perhaps setting a standard for others by means of your own accomplishments, and yet we have but one Edison in the United States?”51

It was a shrewd thrust, to which Edison could reply only that his questionnaire was “in the nature of a rough test” to bring out the executive quality he prized most—curiosity. In a public statement, he added that he was not trying to measure “intelligence, logic, or power of reasoning.” He merely wanted to hire young men^*3 who displayed “alertness of mind…power of observation, and interest in the life of the world.”52

This protestation did nothing to quell the delight with which humorists, professional and amateur, satirized his “Ignoramometer.” The length of a short circuit, the number of stripes on a zebra, and the provenance of “jazz” bow ties were urgently discussed, as was the etymology of the Mephistopheles mosquito. One cartoonist lampooned Edison as Diogenes, making tiny ignoramuses scurry from the glare of his intellectual flashlight. A group of Wellesley girls sent him a five-foot-long list of their own questions, including “What are the chemical properties of catnip?” and “When you turn off the electric light, where does the light go?”53

Edison groused that the newspapers “have balled me all up,” and threatened lawsuits if any more of his questions were published. Yet part of him—the attention-loving side—relished the sensation he had provoked. The New York Times published almost forty articles on the subject of “the Edison brainmeter,” while magazines of the caliber of Literary Digest, Harper’s, and The New Republic began a debate on intelligence tests that promised to continue for years. Edison’s multiphasic questionnaire was not the first such probe—in 1917 a War Department aptitude test had alarmingly suggested that almost half of America’s white population was “feeble-minded”—but it was deliberately unscientific and sought to illuminate character over cognition.54

As such, it was discounted, even mocked, by most professionals, and when it eventually proved ineffective, he abandoned it. But in time it would be seen as a reproof to the nonverbal, overquantified tests that thousands of corporations adopted in the age of Babbitt. The World remarked that at a time rendered dismal by depression and Prohibition, “Mr. Edison with his questionnaire has contributed to the gaiety of life but also to the dissemination of knowledge.”55

WHO’S GOT THE JULEP?

“Things look dark as far as business goes and Papa seems quite worried,” Mina wrote Theodore at the beginning of July. “There is a strangeness about everything—It seems like something sinister in the air. I wonder what is to happen.”56

What was, in fact, about to happen was an upturn in the national economy, thanks to President Harding’s willingness to let the depression run its precipitous course. Prices were at last so low that money had regained its fair weight in gold. But the recovery was not yet apparent to Edison—nor for that matter to Harding, who on 12 July made an appeal to Congress to vote down a popular bill awarding bonuses to veterans. In words that could have been uttered in the boardroom at West Orange, the president spoke of “the unavoidable readjustment, the inevitable charge-off” consequent to any period of overexpansion. Cost cutting was “the only sure way to normalcy.” Harding earned a standing ovation and widespread praise for his courage. The New York Times declared that he had risen above patronage politics and proved himself to be “President of the whole people.”57

Two weeks later Edison could judge this for himself in a meadow in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone corralled him, as they did almost every summer, into joining an automobile camping trip that purported to be recreational, but served as excellent advertising for Ford cars and Firestone tires. Since 1918 these “Vagabond” excursions had become more and more elaborate, the line of tourers and supply wagons lengthening and the two magnates looking ever sleeker—in contrast to Edison, whom they paraded as a shabby, overworked genius in need of fresh air. This year Firestone supposed that because Harding and Edison were, like himself, native Buckeyes, they would get on well.58 If a meeting between them could be arranged at some location convenient to the president, the Vagabonds would score their greatest publicity coup yet.

Harding was pleased to get out of Washington, if only for a couple of days. Congress was still in extraordinary session, debating economic policy. Apart from occasional workouts in a White House closet, he had enjoyed few diversions from affairs of state since his inauguration. His acceptance of Firestone’s invitation to camp out on the weekend of 23–24 July near Peckville, Maryland, caused the motorcade to swell to its largest size yet, with wives, children, about seventy servants, and even a Methodist Episcopal bishop, the Rev. William Anderson, in attendance. Firestone rounded up six thoroughbred horses in case Harding wanted to ride, Ford provided a refrigerator truck with three hundred dressed chickens, and Edison, ever the technologist, set up a “wireless” radio telephone for communications with the capital.59

The president arrived at noon on Saturday morning, trailed by bodyguards, aides, and reporters. Edison seemed determined not to be seduced by Harding’s good-natured charm and declined his offer of a cigar. “No, thank you, I don’t smoke.”

This was so patently untrue that Firestone boggled. But Harding took no offense. “I think I can accommodate you,” he said, pulling a big plug from his pocket.

Edison helped himself to a large cheekful. Later Firestone heard him say, “Harding is all right. Any man who chews tobacco is all right.”60

Ford’s cooks prepared lunch. Soon the humid air was fragrant with the fumes of roasted Virginia ham, lamb chops, and sweet corn. Edison ambled off into the woods and returned with a fistful of mint. “Who’s got the julep?”61

When the company sat down to eat, at a round table whose inner hub rotated for condiment delivery, Harding found it impossible to talk into Edison’s deaf left ear. He had no better luck later, when the men adjourned to a “smoking parlor” of camp chairs beneath a giant sycamore. Reporters cordoned off thirty yards away heard the president’s stentorian attempts at conversation:

Q. What do you do for recreation?

A. Oh, I eat and think.

Q. Ever take up golf? [Louder] Ever take up golf?

A. No. I’m not old enough.62

Harding gave up after that and retreated behind a newspaper. Edison elected to take one of his famed on-the-spot naps. Careless of his white linen suit, he flopped down on the grass and slept like a child. Harding continued reading, and then, in an oddly tender gesture, rose and laid the newspaper over the old man’s face. “We can’t let the gnats eat him up, now can we?” he said to a little girl watching.63

Edison napping in front of Harvey Firestone and President Harding at Vagabond camp, 23 July 1921.

A KALEIDOSCOPE OF RUDE AWAKENING

By the fall of 1921 it was clear that the United States was in a roaring economic recovery. Housing starts doubled, automobile production cranked up by almost two-thirds, and inventory bloat sweated away. But for a reason not yet clear to Edison, the phonograph industry remained stagnant. Cabinet and records sales had always been the most profitable part of his business. So why was Thomas A. Edison, Inc., still encumbered with $2.3 million of recessionary debt? Encouraged all the same by an order from the builders of New York’s Yankee Stadium for forty-five thousand barrels of his patented portland cement, he began to rehire factory and office workers. Charles responded with a letter that came close to grovelling.64

Yours truly has experienced a kaleidoscope of rude awakening. There were times when I felt you had stuck the spurs in so deep that I’d surely bleed to death. [But] since about last January I have not opposed in principle one solitary thing you have wanted to do….

What I want you to believe is that for some time past any pride in the air castle organization I helped to construct during the past few years is gone—completely, absolutely, unequivocally gone….

Also that I look to you for and only to you for leadership.65

---

—

“POOR DEARIE, HE is hurt clean thru,” Mina told Theodore. “Papa does not realize how deep a hurt he has made.”66

Edison realized only that his company had come near to bankruptcy.67 If it had, he as the single largest shareholder would have been wiped out. His personal cash reserve at the end of 1921 was just $84,504.^*4 Although that was more than the average American earned in a lifetime, it still represented a 50-percent loss over the last two years. Admittedly, some of that could be ascribed to the constant appeals of his older children for money (Marion’s Swiss exile allowance; Tom’s medical bills for a two-month recurrence of chronic “brain spasms”; William’s dollar-devouring poultry business; even Madeleine leaning on him to get her car fixed).68

The trappings of wealth meant nothing to Edison. Were he not married to a woman who had been brought up rich and wished to stay that way, he would have been ready to plow every spare cent back into his business and live like a laborer. For a while in the 1890s he had done just that, crashing through more than $2 million, and he looked back on it as a period of acute happiness. His most urgent task now was to return Thomas A. Edison, Inc., to solvency. He had fired some seven thousand employees, and needed to cajole the rest into keeping it at the forefront of chemical and electronic technology.69

Or more precisely, what he perceived to be the forefront, in an age of change that was fast leaving him behind. “Everything is becoming so complex,” he complained, “…so intricate, so involved, so mixed up.”70

CAN YOU GET ME AN OLD INDIAN CYCLE

Edison’s perception excluded the new phenomenon of commercial radio, which by the new year of 1922 was booming nationwide. Station 8ZZ in Pittsburgh had found, after its pioneer coverage of Harding’s election, that its tiny, headphone-hugging audience liked to hear music between news reports. Renaming itself KDKA, it stepped up its biweekly “broadcasts” to an hour every night and greatly strengthened its signal, wildly exciting a schoolboy who picked it up as far away as Dixon, Illinois.^*5, 71 A new magazine, Radio Broadcasting, hailed the “almost incomprehensible” increase in the number of people who spent at least part of their evening listening in. Purchasers of “wireless” equipment, it reported, were standing five feet deep in radio stores, while ready-made sets sold “before the varnish was scarcely dry.”72

Edison could not long ignore the phonograph-threatening radio craze, with station WJZ-Newark starting up just eight miles east of his laboratory. But he discounted the appeal of a medium hampered by a burring, crackly “static” that was the aural equivalent of cataract vision. “Music is considerably mutilated, and always will be on Radio apparatus,” he scoffed. “Can never be a true reproduction.” He was prepared to bet that in the end, music lovers would prefer to hear their own selections in their own time, sans “atmospherics” and through a fine speaker.73

Accordingly, he redoubled his efforts to perfect the acoustic recording process, confident that his infallible sonic and musical instincts would put the Edison Phonograph Division in the black again. The work was bound to be exhausting, given the boneheadedness of everyone he dealt with, and the fact that he was about to turn seventy-five. But he had been through these developmental frenzies before, and invariably succeeded. All that was required was to work harder, sleep less, and starve himself more.

A stream of eccentric record-producer notes began to emit from his office:

Benny

Can you get me an old Indian cycle using one cylinder controlled by a knob

I want the exhaust to beat time in a Jazz Orchestra

Hitting wood is not loud or sharp enough—see me

Edison74

I AM STILL A BOY

“Papa has just come in after working all night,” Mina informed Theodore a few days before Edison’s birthday. “This is the second time in a week, and the trouble seems to be with the [disk] presses. It is just too bad for him to do it as he looks ashen this morning. He has not the strength for that kind of work any more.”75

And a couple of months later, “He is getting to be so very deaf.”^*6, 76

Thomas and Mina Edison on his seventy-fifth birthday, 11 February 1922.

Edison acknowledged that his disability was now almost total, but he was less bothered by it than those who struggled to communicate with him. “Do not mind it in the least,” he scribbled on a letter of inquiry, “in fact I consider it an advantage as it has preserved me from the distractions of a noisy world.”77

The “trouble” Mina cited was caused by his determination to maintain his thick, ten-inch Diamond Disc as the standard by which all other records were measured. This was in spite of the fact that most buyers were more interested in “hit” tunes than in high fidelity. (To Edison’s horror, the younger ones often cranked up the r.p.m. of their turntables to make tunes sound zippier.) By quixotically trying to improve sound quality and reduce manufacturing costs at the same time, he succeeded only in slowing production down. He replaced the resinous wood-powder core of his blanks with unwarpable China clay, and then—after glossing them with four coats of varnish that needed time to dry naturally—grooved each under incremental steam pressure of one thousand pounds per square inch. He executed a pair of new patents to reduce blunting of originals in duplication, and water-cooled mold frames so that they would eject every “round” of twelve disks smoothly. The result was a per-press output of only 250 disks a day.78

Edison also tried to stave off the collapse of his Blue Amberol cylinder record business by eliminating its dependence on celluloid, an expensive compound due to the rarity of camphor. Retiring to his private chemistry laboratory, he searched for a new varnish formula. At once he became happy. It occurred to him that this was how he had started out at age ten: juggling flasks and retorts and breathing pungent vapors. “I am still a boy,” he wrote a correspondent, “and still experimenting.”79

A TOUGH RUBBER BAND

In October the British Colonial Office, presided over by Winston Churchill, announced that it would henceforth restrict the supply, and drastically raise the price, of rubber—a commodity over which it enjoyed a near-monopoly worldwide. This move, known as the Stevenson Scheme, was a reaction to a postwar production glut that made such rubbers as Malayan ribbed smoked-sheet crude cheaper than canned figs from California. Edison, with his phonograph and battery factories, was such a large purchaser of the polymer that he was planning to open his own rubber factory in Bloomfield, New Jersey. But his need for pressed jelutong sheeting did not compare with the voracity of Harvey Firestone, whose plant consumed 10 million pounds of crude a month. And the two million Model Ts that Henry Ford expected to sell next year would need four rubber tires apiece just to roll out of the showroom.

Other manufacturers of tires and automobiles were just as dependent on the sap of Britain’s East Indian plantations. Indeed, it was hard to think of an American industry, from transportation to textiles, that did not utilize rubber in some form. The United States consumed more than three-fourths of the world’s entire output. What petroleum would one day be to developed nations, rubber presently was: a raw material essential enough to provoke armed conflict.

Germany’s rubber famine had contributed much to the stasis of the Great War. In 1917 Bernard Baruch of the War Industries Board had rated rubber the most vital commodity that the government should stockpile in an emergency. Ever since then, various Cassandras had repeatedly warned Congress against being lulled into a false sense of security by the renewed abundance of foreign rubber. It was the word foreign, they said, that should give any thinking American pause. As one of them pointed out, “It is the only important commodity to modern warfare which we have not yet learned to produce.”80

The principal alarmist was Firestone. He recognized, as did his fellow moguls at Goodyear, Geneva Tire, and B.F. Goodrich, that if rubber prices fell below seven cents a pound, it would bankrupt many British plantation owners and likely cause an industrial catastrophe. Firestone was prepared to pay any reasonable rate that would prevent that. But he was not optimistic that Britain would always be able to control its centers of rubber production. If the Russian Empire could be toppled by a small gang of Bolsheviks, how stable was Whitehall’s loose clutch of colonies? What if Japan, which already had naval dominance in the Pacific, conquered all of Southeast Asia one day and wound a tough rubber band round the neck of the American economy?

These and similar questions possessed Wall Street and Washington—not to mention West Orange—as the spot market price of rubber tripled to twenty-three cents, and British authorities warned that they would halve the supply, if necessary, to increase it still further. Herbert Hoover, President Harding’s hyperactive commerce secretary and “undersecretary of everything else,” undertook to work through diplomatic channels for repeal of the Stevenson Scheme. Knowing his chances were slim (Britain needed every export shilling it could get, to repay its huge war debts), Hoover backed a legislative proposal by Senator Medill McCormick that the United States should consider establishing its own plantations abroad, and also research the possibility of growing rubber at home.81

Firestone did not altogether trust Hoover, believing him to be more interested in building power than in protecting an American industry. But he agreed that a serious attempt should be made to develop a domestic rubber plant, and he thought he knew the right man to undertake it. Thomas Alva Edison had recently been named “the greatest living American,” in a New York Times poll. Here was a challenge to his legendary powers of discovery.82

COLD ON THE CONVEX

Edison soon received from Akron a large, leather-bound book entitled Rubber: Its History and Development. “I hope it will prove interesting to you,” Firestone wrote in a covering letter.83

The hint was unnecessary, because he knew Edison had always been interested in rubber. During a camping excursion some years before, Firestone had been amazed at his friend’s rubber expertise.84 But until the current crisis, that knowledge was primarily technological. Edison still thought of rubber as something manufactured, rather than seeping from trees. It was the elastomer that protected the conveyor belts of his rock-crusher in mining days, and in its softest, solute form had kept his early records slick and durable. Hardened into lattices, it insulated the electrodes of his storage batteries. A “dark box” of ebonite, polished internally, flashed with the “etheric force” he discovered back in 1875. If he took a sheet of the same material and bent it in his hands, it became cold on the convex and warm in the concave.85

Firestone’s lavishly illustrated volume left Edison little the wiser.86 His laboratory work on a cheaper recording medium had already taught him much about the chemical properties of raw rubber. He knew how to vulcanize it by the Peachey process of double saturation with sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, and how to chlorinate it by predissolving crepe chunks in benzol. He could melt rubber in naphthalene and analyze it down to its most residual particles of manganese and copper. But how to produce it himself, and from what homegrown source of supply?87

Unaware that he was embarking on the last great quest of his career, he read some botanical studies of rubber milkweed, wild lettuce, and hemp, and marked up a monograph by H. M. Hall and F. L. Long, Rubber Content of North American Plants, underscoring one passage in particular: “If natural rubber is ever produced in commercial quantities in the United States, it will be taken from a plant which will give large yields on cheap land, and one which can be handled almost entirely by machinery.”88

“SEVENTY-FIVE SQUARES”

The first indication that Edison’s experiments with rubber were maturing into biochemistry came around the turn of the year, when he jotted an entry in his pocket notebook, after many pages of record production data:

Edison had no sooner jotted some preliminary biochemical ideas (Slice ⅛ inch Milkweed into water with HCL or sol that prevents Coagulation Stirring all the time then 150 mesh screen used to seperate the milk from debris of the weed) than the radio craze diverted his attention—so urgently, Firestone could only conclude that he had lost interest in rubber research.^*7 Edison would not return to rubber research for another eight months, although occasional entries in his pocket notebooks indicated that he held it in mind.89 He needed meanwhile to fortify his entertainment business against collapse. Sales of Edison Diamond Discs were slipping almost as fast as those of Edison record cylinders. The only way of competing he could think of was to invent something so dramatically new, in the way of recording and reproduction, that even young flappers, with their preference for rhythm over melody, would be seduced back to the phonograph.90

“I have set my heart on reproducing perfectly Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with seventy-five people in the orchestra,” he said at a ceremony to commemorate the forty-fifth anniversary of his invention. “When I have done that, I’ll quit.”91

Edison had a theory, more imaginative than informed, that sound waves remained turbulent and unresolved until they traveled 125 feet. To test it, he ordered his machine shop to cast a brass recording horn of that length, confident that it would capture the instrumental timbres of a full orchestra. A Brobdingnagian monster slowly took shape, section by conical section.92 As each was finished, it was carted across to Columbia Street, where the Phonograph Division had a recording facility, for sequential assembly. The longer the horn got, the more it separated the performance studio—a two-story, barnlike structure, muffled with cowhide—from the adjoining “lathe shack,” where wax masters were engrooved. Fortunately the surrounding lot was spacious enough for the shack to be moved east as far as necessary. The horn’s great weight, increased by a total of thirty thousand rivets, was supported on a horizontal scaffold, and roofing and siding sheltered it from the elements. A telephone wire was strung up for communications between the two buildings, although talking proved simpler through the horn itself.

Its small end, which connected to a diaphragm and cutting apparatus in the lathe shack, was only three inches in diameter. The other orifice gaped so large in the studio wall that a six-foot man could stand and stretch in it, Leonardo-style. On first trial, the horn proved dismayingly directional. It picked up some instruments much better than it did others, depending on their position and proximity.

When Edison, who could not hear these imbalances, was told about them, he mapped out and numbered the studio’s floor tiles, as if he were plotting a giant game of snakes and ladders.

“Have the saxophonist start on one and play ‘Leave Me With A Smile,’ ” he said to his music director, Ernest L. Stevens. “Have him go through those seventy-five squares, and I’ll go take a nap.”

Stevens woke him up an hour or two later. Edison listened to all the takes and selected the one he thought best represented sax timbre. “Now take every instrument of the orchestra and go through the same thing.”93

It took several weeks before he thought he found the ideal spot for every player. But when he channeled more than two or three threads of sound into the horn, they came out so ill-balanced as to torment any listener with normal ears. A test take of Saint-Saëns’s contrapuntal Prélude du Déluge, played by the Haydn Orchestra of New Jersey, registered in the lathe shack as if all the string instruments had been stuffed with cotton. Only woodwinds floated clear. It did not seem to occur to Edison that the last remnant of his hearing was monaural, disqualifying him from any sense of sonic space. The purest tones he derived from his giant tube were those of Stevens playing solo piano, and a wind duo exquisitely performing Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home.”^*8, 94

Even then Edison fussed over false harmonics that may have pinged only in his imagination. He tried to eliminate an echo that developed in the horn at certain frequencies, first by packing ice around the tube, then by warming it electrically. One day Theodore, who helped out at the plant during vacations from MIT, found him puzzling over a volume of acoustical mathematics.

“There’s an easier way to do this,” he said, knowing his father’s difficulties with numerical theory. But Edison pushed him off. “I’ll do it my way.”95

SUGAR IN HIS SYSTEM

Overwork, stress, and compulsive fasting took their toll on Edison that winter, and his departure for Florida in mid-March came none too soon for anyone in the family. “Father certainly must plan to stay more than the four weeks he was talking about before he left,” Theodore wrote Mina.96

She replied that Edison was “miserable” with an acute attack of diabetes. “His stomach bothers him considerable and the doctor says that it is the sugar in his system that makes a tingling in his fingers.”97

Edison remained ill through the end of April, by which time his walk had stiffened alarmingly and he had to be monitored for pneumonia. But he still limped daily to his garden laboratory for rubber-related experiments with milkweed and guayule, a southwestern desert plant that seemed likely to adapt to scientific cultivation. He was cheered to receive a report from Charles that battery sales were surging. “I am going to stop right here and enjoy it overnight,” he said. Mina made him promise that when he returned north, he would pace himself and let Charles handle most of the general management of Edison Industries.98

He did, if only because it took him another month to clear his urine and regain some strength. Relations between him and Charles warmed to the extent they could resume their old exchange of “negro jokes.” Then an old enemy, neuritis, struck. It nearly prevented him from attending Theodore’s graduation in Cambridge at the beginning of June. “He’s a good boy,” Edison told a reporter, “but his forte is mathematics. I am a little afraid of that for he may go flying into the clouds with that fellow Einstein. And if he does…he won’t work for me.”99

Theodore Edison, 1924.

The remark, coming at a time of personal frailty, was the first public hint of Edison’s desire to have Charles and Theodore inherit his business as chief executive and chief engineer, respectively. It also betrayed his concern that Theodore was an intellectual loner who might have different ideas. After the graduation ceremony he told Samuel Stratton, president of MIT, that he expected the young man to report for work in West Orange immediately.100

Tall, thin, peppery, and garrulous, a chess player and lover of classical music, Theodore hankered for the very career Edison disdained: that of a pure scientist. But he quailed at the thought of disappointing his father. As gently as possible, he wrote him a letter promising to work at the plant “for a good long time,” if he could only return to college for a year of postgraduate study, and take the flanking summers off for travel. “I figure that this year and a half will mean a whole lot more to me…than will a year and a half of my services in the shop mean to you.”101

Edison discovered that his youngest son was also his toughest, and Theodore got what he wanted.

“I SHALL NOT GO INTO RADIO”

By early summer, Edison felt he had perfected the Diamond Disc, after thirteen years of obsessive tinkering. “I sincerely hope that it is settled this time for good,” Mina wrote her sister Grace. “The surface is better than ever & Thomas is happy.”102

Actually, he had succeeded only in perfecting an obsolescent technology. Acoustic recording—his proudest achievement—could not advance beyond certain mechanical limits. No matter how responsive a diaphragm might be to the force of sound waves, and warm wax to their transferral, there remained higher and lower frequencies that could not be reproduced mechanically. For some time Edison had been hearing from Walter Miller, the general manager of his Recording Division, that scientists at Bell Laboratories were at work on a new method of electrical recording that registered a frequency range of 50 to 6,000 cycles, well over twice the reach of any acoustic system. AT&T, Bell’s corporate owner, was looking to lease this innovation to phonograph companies when it became commercially available.103

Ironically, Edison had pioneered two of the three devices that made electrical recording possible (the vacuum tube encapsulating thermionic emission, and the microphone translating sound waves into signals), as well as inventing the phonograph itself. In further irony, his long-ago discovery of “etheric force” was powering the radio boom104—a word more apt than ever, thanks to the bass-heavy magnetic speakers now installed in commercial receivers. Radio was no longer an unamplified, earphones-only medium. On the contrary, the new sets produced, for free, such astonishing volumes of sound that the Big Four phonograph companies—Victor, Brunswick, Columbia, and Edison—were at a loss as how to compete. Apart from Edison’s clearly doomed attempt to keep his thick disks and rosewood players at the top of the luxury market, there were only two choices: to cram radio receivers awkwardly into record players, or to unload an enormous inventory of acoustic machines and records in favor of a new generation of all-electric phonographs. Either way, there would be the cost of having to pay a per-record royalty to AT&T, unless some way could be found to avoid the numerous patents involved.105

Edison was not alone among phonograph executives in refusing to acknowledge that acoustic recording (with its unbalanced intake and uncontrollable output) was going the way of the dodo. Columbia and Brunswick also ignored AT&T’s initial advances. Eldridge Johnson, who had built Victor up into a cash cornucopia with sales of $51 million a year, suffered a nervous breakdown over the threat of the electrical system. A year and a half of desperate strategizing began in Big Four boardrooms, while a new entertainment behemoth, the Radio Corporation of America, doubled its earnings to $55 million, and the nation’s broadcast frequencies filled with sounds and sweet airs that muffled an old man’s cry in West Orange, “I shall not go into radio.”106

GUAYULE

That June Edison issued a new standing order at the laboratory for “Experimental work on Extraction of Rubber-like sap from various plants.” It looked strange in a progress report that otherwise tracked the activities of men on machines.107 Even stranger—except to his eyes—were the stream-of-consciousness jottings in his pocket notebook, with song titles jostling botanical, chemical, and other data:

Get lot thistle leaves Milkweed & Experiment

Strip 1st—wash off Latex & filler

When the Swallows Homeward Fly

My pretty pretty primrose

Guylue Plant Dry Weight 8 individual plants 3.638 lbs108

He soon learned how to spell guayule correctly, and focused on it, in preference to milkweed, as a researchable source of domestic rubber. It grew wild in arid conditions north and south of the Rio Grande, could be uprooted easily, and regenerated at once. By late summer, with the help of his beloved set of Watts’s Dictionary of Chemistry, he had developed a method of extracting its huge polyisoprenoid molecules.109 Working on some samples from Mexico, he calculated that he could get seven and a half grams of rubber out of every plant. “They occupy a horizontal space of about one foot, and probably grow 40,000 bushes to an acre,” he wrote Henry Ford, who was as nervous as Firestone about the effects of the Stevenson Scheme. “This would give 680 pounds of rubber per acre, worth $183.”110

If Edison’s arithmetic was correct (not always the case), homegrown guayule rubber could conceivably sell at twenty-seven cents a pound—about the current price of foreign crude. But he warned Ford that extensive work was necessary to determine whether guayule, Parthenium argentatum, would adapt to plantation culture in the United States as well as Hevea brasiliensis had in the East Indies. He intended to try growing Hevea, a prodigious latex bleeder, on his Florida estate, although it had never flourished in North America. In the meantime, he was planting guayule seeds both there and in the greenhouse at Glenmont.111

That was normally the domain of Mina’s roses and orchids, but since she had grown up in Akron, Ohio—“Rubber Capital of the World”—she should be tolerant of the invasion of a rubber-bearing species.

I REMEMBER, I REMEMBER

Edison’s own half-forgotten Buckeye background thrust itself back into memory when Warren G. Harding died of a heart attack on 2 August 1923. The shock loss of the president, eighteen years his junior and to all recent appearance a superb physical specimen, was a reminder that life could be short. Accompanied by Mina, the Fords, and the Firestones, Edison attended the funeral ceremony eight days later in Marion, Ohio, then took the opportunity to show them his birthplace in Milan, only sixty miles north. The property belonged to him, but he had seen it only a couple of times since moving to Port Huron, Michigan, in 1854. A distant cousin, Miss Metta Wadsworth lived in it as caretaker.

The party set off along Route 4 in three new Lincoln touring cars, rolling on enormous, low-pressure “balloon” tires that partially explained Firestone’s greed for rubber.^*9, 112 Twin branches of the Huron River flowed in the same direction, as if escorting Edison to their confluence near where he was born. He had to brace for an onslaught of primary memories. For him, this was a journey both linear and circular, weirdly connecting Harding’s grave in Marion to that of Marion, his eldest sister, in Milan—even as Marion, his elder daughter, planned to end her exile in Europe.

Edison liked to joke to geologists and paleontologists that he was too interested in the future to bother about the past. This was certainly true of his first seven years, only three or four of which he could recall.113 Although they had been flush years for his father—and golden ones for Milan, with its canal basin and warehouses full of wheat—he associated the town with painful events: a public whipping, the loss of a fingertip to an ax, a swimming buddy left to drown, a teacher complaining that young Al Edison seemed “addled.” By contrast, he had always regarded Port Huron as a place of ecstatic self-discovery.

Late in the afternoon, some beautiful hills ahead parted to reveal Milan.114 Two or three thousand citizens were waiting to greet him in the public square, the scene of his chastisement some seventy years before. But the convoy proceeded without stopping to the highest point of the hogsback overlooking the basin. There stood the elegant little seven-room house Sam Edison had built with his own hands in 1841, its redbrick walls and tall, stone-linteled windows solid and straight as ever.^*10

From the front, it looked like a simple, one-story Federal structure. Only when Edison stepped down into the back garden did lower and upper floors disclose themselves above the slope of the bluff.

“Does the old home look familiar to you?” Henry Ford shouted into his right ear.

Reporters in the street had no difficulty hearing Edison’s reply. “Yes, it does.”115

He seemed more interested in the view downtown than in the house itself. But where a boy, seventy years before, had been able to survey a freshwater harbor jostling with barges, all his white-haired self could see now was a depressed townscape. Wild scrub and weeds traced the line of the old canal, long drained and silted up. A shabby cannery squatted in the curve of the road once jammed with wagons waiting to unload their grain. Milan and its waterborne economy had never recovered from the advent of the railroad.116

When at last Edison took his party into the house, he was astonished to find that Cousin Metta still used kerosene lamps. So much for his success at giving the rest of the world electric light. He led the way to the little northeast bedroom, feeling whatever a man feels when he contemplates the first walls he ever saw. Then he went out onto the porch and posed for a photograph, standing alone with the setting sun on his face.117

Metta said, “Tom, you’ll have to go to the square and make a speech now, or the town will be heartbroken.”118

There followed the usual ceremony saluting him as “the greatest inventor in all the world,” and the usual disappointment when he politely refused to reply. “I’m too deaf to speak,” he explained, and emphasized the point by cupping his ear when the brass band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Although Mina could see that he was tiring fast, he endured a long hand-shaking ritual afterward, saying over and over, “I remember, I remember, yes, I remember.”119

THE DIVERSITY OF THINGS

After leaving Milan, Edison joined his fellow Vagabonds on a camping trip to the upper peninsula of Michigan. He remained in a pensive mood, and taught Firestone’s twenty-five-year-old son, Harvey Jr., his theory of “memory swarms” that perpetuated human character. “The microscope cannot find them at all….When these entities leave the body, the body is like a ship without a rudder—deserted, motionless, and dead.”120

Edison flattered himself that he was talking metaphysics, but the tortuous lengths he went to to avoid using the word God betrayed, more than concealed, an aging man’s need for some sort of divine reassurance that death was not final. Two summers before, at the Vagabond camp in Maryland, he startled Bishop William Anderson with the question, “Tell me what is to become of us and where are we to be when this short life ends?”121

That was, of course, one of the basic questions of human existence, and science could not answer it any more than reason. For most of his not-short life, Edison had been a disciple of Thomas Paine, about whom, around this time, he wrote:

I have always been interested in this man. My father had a set of Tom Paine’s books on the shelf at home. I must have opened the covers about the time I was thirteen. And I can still remember the flash of enlightenment which shone from his pages. It was a revelation, indeed, to encounter his views on political and religious matters, so different from the views of many people around us….

Many a person who could not understand Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp….

He has been called an atheist, but atheist he was not. Paine believed in a supreme intelligence, as representing the idea by which other men often express the name of deity.122

Edison’s self-identification with the great rationalist showed when he praised Paine the inventor. “He conceived and designed the iron bridge and the hollow candle, the principle of the modern central draught burner. The man had a sort of universal genius. He was interested in the diversity of things.”123

If that suggested they shared a purely mechanistic pantheism, Edison now found himself going beyond the artificiality of manufactured “things” and studying natural ones more. There was a diversity more awe-inspiring than anything in Paine’s purview. “The Book of Nature never lies; in it may be found lessons concerning almost every fact of life, death, and perhaps immortality.”124

THE PROTOPLASM OF THE OLEANDER

Returning to West Orange in September, Edison tried again to save the acoustic phonograph—tinkering endlessly with his long horn, putting Theodore to work polishing diamond needles, and resisting the desire of both brothers to enter the radio business. But he devoted increasing amounts of time to studying the mysteries of biochemistry, often spending sleepless nights in his laboratory library and private experimental “Room 12” on the floor above. He authorized a bifurcated rubber research project that would operate simultaneously in West Orange and Fort Myers, and had no qualms about charging it to the corporate budget. Thanks to robust cement and storage battery sales, Thomas A. Edison, Inc., was once again in the black.125

“Until a man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge,” he assured a former employee, as he realized how much botany he had to learn.126 The breadth of his erudition in other sciences was extraordinary, but it was also linear, in the sense that a common force—electricity—had linked his experiments in telegraphy, telephony, sound and light technology, magnetic mining, movies, and battery design. Now he needed to embrace systems of growth, morphology, and propagation that were in no way electrical.

It meant that he must saturate himself in the technical literature and work harder than ever before in his life, until comprehension came, and with it success. Surely in time he would be able to coax rubber from plant tissue, as he had once coaxed music out of tinfoil.

Edison secluded himself in his laboratory library, studying Alfred Allen’s Commercial Organic Analysis to see which alcoholic solvents would give him the most viscous rubber extracts, and William H. Johnson’s The Cultivation and Preparation of Pará Rubber for advice on the coagulation and purification of latex. He also read and heavily annotated Kurner von Marilaun’s Natural History of Plants. Soon he felt knowledgeable enough to dismiss Frank Braham’s Rubber Planter’s Handbook as “a hash…untechnical,” and challenge many of the conclusions in William Wicherley’s The Whole Art of Rubber-Growing. Brailsford Robertson’s The Chemical Basis of Growth and Senescence impressed him with its scholarship, which muted some of the things the book had to say about his own bodily decline.127

MILKY VARIETIES

For most of 1924 and 1925 the pattern of Edison’s supplementary research in his private laboratories, and what came to be known as “the hay fever room” at the West Orange plant, was haphazard, depending on the availability of seeds and specimens. He seemed unable to drive past a New Jersey weed patch without jumping out in search of milky varieties. To eyes other than his own, his pocket notebooks for the period were a manic collage of disparate data: Latin plant names, lists of organic solvents, sizings of the pores in sponge rubber, mechanical drawings, geographical and climatological statistics, an acoustical analysis of the theme of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, urinalysis results, and (since he could not shake his interest in defense technology) deception systems to deploy in warfare.128

Although he told Henry Ford, early on, that he had devised “a very good method of extracting the rubber” from guayule, that was just his habitual way of imagining success far in advance, as a goad to himself.129 From time to time he penciled the word PHENOMENON into his notebook, but often as not it denoted a hard-to-understand failure. He began to infer that finding an appreciable amount of good rubber in any plant other than Hevea brasiliensis was the botanical equivalent of getting blood out of stone.

Guayule was hopefully classified by the USDA as a domestic source of the polymer in an emergency. Edison sowed some beds with it at Fort Myers, but the seedlings came up so slowly that he calculated the shrub’s reproductive cycle at four to five years—far too long for practical cultivation. Nor did he like the fact that guayule’s rubber molecules were dispersed colloidally in the parenchyma of root, stem, and branch bark, as well as in the more crushable leaves. Unless he could devise a better extraction method than flotation (the whole shrub pulverized, then steeped in dilute sodium hydroxide until its woody dirt sank and rubbery “worms” swam up for skimming), he doubted that the soft, sticky end product could ever compare with, say, fine pure plantation Pará, or even the mats of Pontianak crude he imported for vulcanization in his battery division—tough and dark, slicing white with a moist sour reek.

For these reasons, he decided that guayule could never be grown profitably.130 The inventor in him, forever wanting to be original, tested other polyisoprenic varieties less favored by the government. He was excited by the potential of Cryptostegia grandiflora, a fast-growing vine with exceptionally virile seeds. Its latex rubber content averaged only 3 percent, but he believed he could triple that by judicious breeding. The plant had one major disadvantage: its sprawling habit militated against a mechanical harvester. Next he considered the rubber fig tree Ficus elasticus, a white-sapped banyan that milked as easily as Hevea. However, it too was antimechanical, since it spread by sending out flying buttresses that swooped downward and rooted themselves, creating aisles and transepts irresistible to children but not to any tapping device Edison could conceive. That did not stop his planting a specimen of the giant variety, Ficus benghalensis, at Fort Myers, unaware that in another century it would become a green cathedral covering almost an acre of his estate.^*11

ONE GOOD ONE

To Mina’s consternation, an ambitious, cigarette-smoking, “flapperish” Modern Girl appeared in West Orange in the summer of 1924, engaged to her favorite son. Miss Ann Osterhout was a twenty-three-year-old medical student from Massachusetts. “I love Ted to the limit,” she assured Mina, although she had been reluctant to give up her dream of becoming a doctor for married life in New Jersey. Mina, who thought housekeeping (with plenty of servants) and motherhood were the twin peaks of femininity, half-hoped Ann would return Theodore’s ring—being confessedly in love with him herself.131

Edison, in contrast, looked favorably upon Miss Osterhout, if only because her father was a Harvard biochemist.132 He was sufficiently impressed with the young woman’s own scientific bent (she had an avid interest in the new subject of colloidal behavior) to allow her to work with Theodore in the research department of his laboratory, hitherto exclusively male. It was about time, he told Mina, that he had “one good one” among his children’s disappointing set of spouses.133

Marion’s husband, Oscar Öser, was a case in point, his infidelity and post-Versailles hatred of Woodrow Wilson driving her home to America in the fall. Rusty-tongued after thirty years of speaking German, she thought of settling somewhere near Tom and William in New Jersey, but was not sure her father would approve. “I have been hungry for years for some sign of affection from you,” she told him, adding that she regretted her teenage rebellion against him for marrying Mina. “If I had not loved you so much I would not have been so jealous.”134

Mina fought, as she had done many times before, with aversion for Edison’s “other family.” They had never made it easy for her—Marion least of all, as the eldest and most rebellious of the three. Mina tried to make the refugee welcome in West Orange. Marion was grateful, but eventually chose to settle in a Manhattan residential hotel.135

Theodore and Ann married in the spring of 1925 and took an apartment not far from the laboratory. This confirmed, for the time being, Theodore’s commitment to work for his father. Edison was so relieved not to lose him to the airless world of academe that he drafted a telegram of thanks in his most elegant calligraphy, forgetting that it would be transmitted as dots and dashes. Mina was touched by “the look of pride on his face” as he inked each letter.136

Her own feelings were less triumphant. For as long as her sons had remained single, she had felt of some motherly use. But now, with yet another bedroom at Glenmont empty, she lapsed into despair. “All my life,” she wrote Theodore, “I had had love, attention, admiration without any effort on my part but now my attractions are diminishing, which were mostly looks, and I find myself floundering. Re-adjusting! It comes hard.”137

Every now and again, goaded by some imagined slight, Mina would lash out, and then for weeks afterward be overcome with remorse. “I am terribly spoiled and it behooves me to take on Sack-cloth and ashes.” Charles and Theodore were sympathetic, knowing that a large part of her problem was their father’s genial absenteeism. Whenever she barged in on him—even in the midst of an experiment—he would melt her heart with his ready smile. But there was something exclusionary in his willingness to be interrupted, as if he had all the time in the world to wait for her departure.138

When Edison, in turn, barged in on an interview Mina was having with a pair of reporters over lunch, they were struck by the fact that though present, he seemed to be elsewhere.

“Mr. Edison has few friends,” Mina told her guests after he abruptly left the room. “Because of his work he has had to live a great deal by himself and in himself.” Admitting that the “intensity of his application” excluded her from what mattered most to him, she said she felt fulfilled all the same. “I have had a definite life job—the intimate service of Thomas A. Edison. And it has been worth everything I could give.”139

“BEING THE FIRST”

With his ninth decade looming, Edison took steps to free himself from all responsibilities not directly connected to rubber research. On 1 February 1926 he executed a last will and testament, awarding his corporate holdings—the vast bulk of his estate—to Theodore and Charles. “My dear wife, Mina M. Edison, is already adequately provided for through gifts from me or otherwise.” He bequeathed small cash amounts to three longtime employees, and directed that his remaining assets be put in a trust, the proceeds of which “shall be divided equally among my six children.”140 Simultaneously, he sold all the patents he still held to Thomas A. Edison, Inc., for $78,200.

It was a token sum, but he was enriching himself anyway as a major shareholder in his own company, which—along with most American industry—was piling up profits at a record rate. This encouraged him, at last, to hand over the title of president to Charles. His mood on finding himself a laboratory man again, after fifty-six years of executive responsibility, was ebullient. “The secret of staying afloat, Jimmie,” he said to James Newton, the young manager of an estate adjoining his in Fort Myers, “is to create something that people will pay for. I didn’t work at inventions unless I saw a market demand for them. I wasn’t interested in making money so much as in being the first to invent something society needed. But if you do that, the money comes in.”141

The distinguished astronomer and Nobel laureate Albert A. Michelson did not have to overhear this boast to block his nomination for membership at the spring meeting of the National Academy of Sciences. Prejudice against Edison as a mercenary, publicity-seeking technologist was strong in the organization, as it had been ever since he invented a theoretically “impossible” dynamo in 1880.142 Nevertheless Robert Millikan, the chairman of Caltech, had the courage to stand up and—nervously balancing up and down on his toes—suggest that it was time for the great inventor to be recognized. “I am sure that no physicist would wish to oppose Mr. Edison’s nomination.”

Michelson rose from the front row and said quietly, “I am that physicist.”143

That was enough for Millikan’s move to be defeated. Edison was not surprised by the rejection, having invited it with his many jibes against “lead-pencil” theorists.144 “An inventor is essentially practical.” But he felt that he had made at least five genuine scientific discoveries in his career, and listed them in response to an inquiry from Electrical World magazine. They were the “Edison Effect” of electronic transmission, “now used in Radio bulbs”; the motograph principle, which smoothed the passage of a stylus over a charged electrolytic surface; the “etheric force” spark, subsequently credited to Hertz; the reversible nickel-iron galvanic cell; and the phenomenon of variable resistance of substances under pressure, embodied in his carbon button telephone transmitter.145

Of these claims, the distinguished physical chemist Michael Pupin accepted only the motograph as an original discovery. The others, Pupin said, had been either anticipated or were not purely scientific. “There is no doubt that Mr. Edison is a most resourceful genius in eliminating technical difficulties in the course of technical development of a scientific idea. I do not think that in this respect he has ever had an equal. [But] his true distinction lies in the field of applied, rather than true science.”146

Edison, stung, dashed off another list of his scientific “firsts,” including the X-ray fluoroscope, mica insulation in dynamo commutator bars, and the electrochemical receptivity of tellurium in telegraph recorders. In his haste he forgot to mention the tasimeter, and the papers he had written in youth on magnetic conductivity and the pyromagnetic dynamo. But academic opinion denied him the honor he thought he deserved.147

ONE HAS TO MOVE

Charles and Theodore were now at liberty to publicize some Jazz Age initiatives that they had kept secret for fear of annoying their father. These were a switch from acoustic to electrical recording (which they neatly branded as “Edisonic” technology), an experimental issue of twelve-inch long-playing records, and plans to enter the radio market both as manufacturers and as producers—ultimately, perhaps, creating the company’s own broadcasting network.

Charles felt that innovation was the only way to compete with sonic rivals. Victor had adjusted to the radio boom by introducing its hugely popular Orthophonic Victrola with built-in RCA receiver; Brunswick was marketing an all-electric radio-phonograph, the Panatrope; and Columbia was profitable after combining with its British namesake and signing up for Western Electric technology. Alone among the Big Four recording companies, the Edison Phonograph Division was languishing, its instruments too expensive, its vertical-cut disks and cylinders unplayable on other models, its sales force unable to persuade young customers that Frank Lucas “the Accordion King” was a better entertainer than Al Jolson. Only the Ediphone dictating-machine department was doing well—which was ironic, because Edison had originally conceived the phonograph for just that purpose.148

As far as he was concerned, his sons were trying to do too much, too late. But Mina agreed with them that “one has to move with the times.” She risked divorce by installing a five-tube radio set at Glenmont, and was soon addicted to its coverage of political events. Edison could hardly object to her having something to fill the emptiness of the big house when he was at work, and his deafness prevented him from being bothered by the noise. But he was sure Charles would regret investing in the new medium. “In three years,” he warned him, “it’ll be such a cutthroat business that nobody will make any money.”149

With that valedictory, he let the long horn on Columbia Street go quiet, and returned to his experiments in polyisoprenic chemistry. In Mina’s words, from the moment her husband turned eighty on 11 February 1927, “Everything turned to rubber in the family. We talked rubber, thought rubber, and dreamed rubber.”150

PRIME FOR GREAT THINGS

Edison’s obsession had burgeoned over the last three years in inverse ratio to the flow of imported rubber into the United States. Except for a freak, temporary shortage in 1924—more of a hunger pang than a famine—the Stevenson Scheme had proved a failure, due to the inability of the British Colonial Office to control competitive Dutch competition in the Far East.151 Neverthless, Harvey Firestone was as evangelical as ever in trumpeting the slogan “America Should Grow Its Own Rubber,” and Henry Ford, as well as Commerce Secretary Hoover, joined him in encouraging Edison to proceed with deep research.

Before announcing that he was now a full-time botanist, Edison had to submit to a birthday luncheon in Newark, attended by well over a hundred “Edison Pioneers”—grizzled veterans of the great days in the ’70s and ’80s, when their boss was inventing something new every two weeks. The seven-course menu, featuring cream of asparagus soup, shad stuffed with its own roe, and sweetbread patties, was notably easy on the gums.152

Such occasions were torture for Edison. He was repulsed by the overeating, tired of being told that he was an intellectual superman.153 His disclaimer that genius was “one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration,” had become a cliché, yet the Pioneers clung to it—except perhaps the few who could remember him when he had been young, and they even younger: Francis Jehl and William Hammer, witnesses to the night his first viable lightbulb had burned and burned and burned; Charles Clarke and John Lieb, who had helped him power up that first square mile of Manhattan in ’82; and Sammy Insull, his former factotum, richer now than everyone else in the room, with the exception of Henry Ford.154

The latter had become so besotted with Edison that a newspaper publishing a photograph of them in conversation, mouth to ear, felt obliged to explain to its readers, “Ford isn’t kissing his aged but still vigorous chum.” Ford planned to establish a $5 million Edison Institute of Technology in Dearborn, Michigan.155 It would feature a re-creation of his hero’s first laboratory, stocked as authentically as possible, down to the last jar of aqua regia. One of the first items he solicited was a testimonial, suitable for framing, that the phonograph had been invented in that shed half a century before. Edison obliged with a letter showing he could still wield a pen beautifully at age eighty.156

Ford began by purchasing the scrubby hamlet that had once been Menlo Park, New Jersey. Next, he carried off every brick and board of the original complex, and foraged the soil for experimental detritus. To Mina’s mounting irritation, he also became a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles around Seminole Lodge, where his immaculate trouser seat was seen protruding from a barrel of old lamps. He proposed appropriating Edison’s laboratory there too, in exchange for a modern facility more tailored to rubber research.157

Mina threatened to contribute her own dead body to this scheme. She had never been able to understand her husband’s goodwill toward Ford or Firestone, and considered them both to be hucksters, capitalizing on his fame. It did not occur to her that maybe Edison was, in turn, capitalizing on their wealth and willingness to finance his work.158

Since 1912 he had tolerated Ford’s obsequiousness as interest on the corporate loans and battery orders that flowed his way from Dearborn. It had been less easy for him, in recent years, to accept leather-bound volumes of The International Jew, a series of antisemitic newspaper articles in which Ford felt impelled to warn Aryans against such threats as the “Jewish Plan to Split Society” and “Jewish Jazz—Moron Music.” Edison avoided embarrassment by having his staff noncommitally acknowledge receipt of the books for him. “I know very little about Mr. Ford’s efforts. I do not want to get into any controversy about the English Irish Germans or Jews—even Yankees.”159

Feeling himself thus unsullied, he agreed to accept Ford and Firestone as partners in establishing an official “Edison Botanic Research Corporation” to seriously address the issue of American dependency on foreign rubber.

WHERE LIGHT CAN’T STRIKE

Ford would have preferred to delay publicity for the new venture until all details of financing and staffing had been worked out. But Edison at eighty was as incapable of withholding big news as he had been at thirty. He had no sooner transferred to Fort Myers than he granted a series of “exclusive” interviews to various reporters and press agencies.

“Thomas A. Edison,” The New York Times announced, “is working way past midnights in his laboratory here on an experiment which he believes will revolutionize the world’s rubber trade and change the South from the land of cotton to the rubber planting center of the United States.” Other dispatches described the great inventor’s dream of a patchwork of plantations, spreading north as far as Savannah and west into guayule terrain, that would supply all the nation’s rubber needs in time of war. Right now Edison was reportedly designing a machine that would reap, crush, press, and suck the rubber globules out of a plant he might breed himself—some milksappy vine or weed or shrub that would grow fast, with minimal maintenance, and reproduce easily. His current focus of interest was a variety of Cryptostegia native to Madagascar. A shipment of rare seeds from that island was on its way, paid for by Henry Ford.160

Edison cleared ground for the new plantings across the avenue from Seminole Lodge, where his four-year-old grove of fig and rubber trees already stood tall and deep-shadowed in the humid riverside climate. “I am of the earth, earthy,” he exulted. By late spring he had sixteen species of laticiferous plants under cultivation across nine acres, including one hundred Ficus elastica and 350 Cryptostegia madagascariensis. The latter plant thrived to an almost predatory extent, making it difficult to control and impossible to harvest mechanically. Herbaceous things, Edison realized, were less tolerant of automation than the inorganic materials he had dealt with in the past. Beyond this problem were the paradoxes of nature. He puzzled over the green cambium beneath the dead bark of Hevea. “Why does the plant place chlorophyll where light can’t strike it?” Rubber-bearing plants grown in greenhouses, where there were no insects, secreted less latex and more resin. Was latex some sort of bug repellent?161

Henry Ford, Edison, and Harvey Firestone in Florida, circa 1928.

He made full use of his dusty Model T, exploring the wilds of central Florida for specimens. He learned how to pull a leaf apart and examine the “gossamer threads” that dangled from split capillaries. (“If there is some rubber they will not sag but will stretch out one-quarter to one-half inch.”) He anointed a freshly slashed Ficus with glycerine and found that it doubled the latex flow. Unfortunately the polyol also retarded coagulation. Pine trees were not laticiferous, but he tapped one anyway, to see how fast it dripped gum: in this case, one bead every eighty-two seconds.162 By way of relaxation, at night, he studied rubber-industry periodicals, or sat at his desk doodling botanical sketches.

Edison botanical sketch, 1920s.

THICK WHITE SAP

Edison was unaware till he returned to New Jersey for the summer that the National Academy of Sciences had voted to honor him after all. At its latest meeting, an unidentified advocate more eloquent than Robert Millikan had shamed the membership by quoting a French academician’s epitaph to Molière. “We cannot afford to say when Mr. Edison dies, ‘Nothing can add to his glory, we can only regret that he does not add to ours.’ ”163

He accepted the diploma in writing with an especially graceful signature but otherwise showed no interest in it. By now he was so fixated on polymers that when Mina put a carnation in his buttonhole one morning, he asked if she had tested its stem for latex. He was soon seen at the New York Botanical Garden, abusing various species of Euphorbia “by cutting plant stems, catching the thick white sap in his hand and rubbing it to test its elasticity.” Staff at the garden were honored to have so distinguished a vandal on the premises. John K. Small, the head curator, schooled him in the cataloging, preservation, and labeling of specimens.164

On 29 July Ford and Firestone officially established the Edison Botanic Research Corporation, with parallel field and laboratory operations ongoing in West Orange and Fort Myers. Its initial capitalization was $93,000, with the two magnates each putting in $25,000 and Edison insisting—over their objections—on contributing an equal amount. He hired fourteen field botanists and gave them each a Ford car and a tent, with orders to fan out across America and “cut every plant in sight” that might suit his purposes. Within a month, he was receiving dozens of express-mail specimens daily, each labeled by genus, finding date, and location soil type. He asked the agents of western railroads to check their rights of way for laticiferous-looking shrubs. Frank Stout, his estate manager in Florida, was told to add more varieties to the plantation there—Ceara trees from Brazil, Landolphia vines from Liberia, Indian figs, guayules, poinsettias, and scores of other specimens. Meanwhile Edison himself analyzed the enzymes and proteins of as many as fifty plants a day. Aware that most species required two to five years to maximize their rubber cell inclusions, he wrote his doctor that he was embarked on “a race with the Angel of Death.”165

Mina noticed that he was losing weight, and worried that he was trying too hard to live up to what Ford and Firestone expected of him. But she understood that he was by temperament and disability insulated from praise or gratitude, “simply being impelled to do.” At least he was no longer fretting about the Phonograph Division. “He is happy and busy with this rubber research. Just thinks of nothing else.”166

That made Charles happy too. In a note addressed to “Father: Dept. of Rubberology, Edison Laboratories,” he wrote, “I have come to the conclusion you really do want to concentrate on rubber and not bother much with the details of the business.”167

It spoke much for Charles’s confidence that he got away with such a tease. But Edison was, as Mina saw, back in the single-minded mode that had preceded his major accomplishments in the past. If he could live just as long as it took for a guayule shrub to grow, he might surprise the world yet again.

Or not. “I have worked too hard,” he said to Marion when she came upon him one day, stone deaf and weary at his desk. In his youth, he had found the difficulties of electric light technology addictively challenging. Now those of botany often bewildered him. He told Popular Science Monthly that rubber research was “the most complicated problem I have ever tackled.”168

At least he could confirm that guayule was not the plant he was looking for. After purifying a large quantity of its secretions and sending the coagulum to Akron for molding, all he got back was a set of fragile tires that cracked and split. Losing interest in desert species, he spent the rest of the year working his experimental way through the Euphorbiaceae, Asclepiadaceae, and Apocynaceae families, and assuring reporters, “We have only just begun.”169

IMPALPABLE PULP

That winter Edison executed his one thousand ninetieth patent and his first ever in botanical technology, “Extraction of Rubber from Plants.” It claimed to be unique in that it was designed (like his magnetic ore separator of forty years before) to precipitate what was valuable in material that was largely valueless.170

He described a two-stage process by which small, air-dried, rubber-bearing plants were first passed through heavy metal rollers “so as to open up the pith seams and break the bark,” as well as the woodier stems, branches, and roots. The half-crushed mass was chopped into short strips and soaked until the bark and pith softened, then poured into a water-filled pebble mill, in which tumbling balls pounded the remaining solids, gently separating wood from pulp. In an hour or so the resultant slurry could be decanted from the mill through a fine screen and washed. “The woody material thus retained by the screen,” Edison wrote, “is very clean and almost snow-white and in the case of some plants…can probably be advantageously used for making paper.”171

The second stage of his process amounted to a refinement of the first, producing an “impalpable pulp” that slowly liberated and agglomerated all the rubber particles in the mix.172

Edison’s principal claim of uniqueness for his invention was that it enabled the harvesting and concentration of laticiferous plants containing less than 1 percent of the polymer.173 Two years later the Patent Office approved this claim, but by then he had lost interest in low yielders and fallen in love with one of the most ignored weeds on the American roadside. For the moment, he kept its name to himself.

HOLIER RED CLAY

“Won’t you let us go into radio?” Charles pleaded, as he saw his father off to Florida early in the new year of 1928. Farther down the platform, six Botanic Research Corporation aides were loading a hundred boxes of biochemical equipment aboard the train.

“Well if you want to be a damn fool, go ahead,” Edison replied. “You’ve got my permission, but I’m telling you it’s no good.”174

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SEMINOLE LODGE WAS at its most beautiful that January. Mina rejoiced to see her flowers and orchids blossoming, and orange and mango trees bearing almost summerlike loads of fruit. Across McGregor Boulevard the rubber plantation looked equally lush, but the view was spoiled for her by the sight of ground being cleared for a new chemical laboratory, courtesy of Henry Ford. She braced for the disappearance, plank by plank, of the dim old studio Edison had built in the first year of their marriage. He himself was unsentimental about it, pointing out that he needed more space for his burgeoning team of “rubberologists.”175

William Benney, one of the patient, bull-strong helpers Edison relied on for eclectic duties around the clock, was appointed laboratory superintendent. Francis S. Schimerka, an Austrian-born chemist, headed the analysis and extraction efforts, assisted by a professional botanist, a machinist, and five or six other functionaries of varying usefulness. These ranged from a teenage specimen collector to old Frederick Ott, whose ability to sneeze on cue had made him the first of Edison’s film stars.176

Mina warmed toward Ford when he arrived in midmonth, full of plans for his projected Edison Museum. She could not help being touched to see the world’s richest man worshipping the ground her husband walked on—literally, because Ford was adamant that when the old laboratory was transported, it should take a one-foot depth of Florida soil with it. He intended to do the same with the even holier red clay of Menlo Park, together with whatever fragments of Edisonia remained embedded in it.^*12, 177

Ford had no idea that he was giving birth to a science which would one day be called industrial archaeology. He knew only that his museum would not be complete without the acquisition of a collection jealously held by the Pioneers—models and machines from all periods of Edison’s career, including a magnificent chronological run of his lightbulbs, assembled by William J. Hammer. The Pioneers wanted to display these treasures in a gallery of their own, possibly at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.178

On another front, the Ford Motor Company faced a challenge from General Electric as to which firm should sponsor the anniversary on 21 October 1929 of Edison’s breakthrough incandescent lamp. Given Ford’s ability to lobby the Old Man by simply stepping across the lawn that separated their winter villas, it seemed an unequal contest. Yet GE had the powerful support of the Pioneers, and was prepared to reward them and the Smithsonian in return if “Light’s Golden Jubilee” could be staged in its hometown of Schenectady, New York.

Edison appeared not to care less about the location of the festival or the enshrinement of his memorabilia. Ford therefore courted Mina, telling her that he was prepared to spend $5 million, if necessary, to achieve both ends at the Edison Institute in Dearborn. She undertook to hold a family conference on the question when she and her husband returned north for the summer. It was unlikely that Edison himself would participate. He no longer had any appetite for public honors. When told that he had been voted one of the three greatest men alive, along with Ford and Benito Mussolini of Italy, he waggishly imitated a Jewish pawnbroker, saying, “Vell, dey vas great men, yes, but de man vot invented interest vasn’t no slouch.”179

NO SUCH FIFTH ACT

The German writer Emil Ludwig visited Seminole Lodge in late February. He had just published a best-selling biography of Napoleon, but if he was thinking of Edison as another heroic subject, he found only an abstracted old man who had reacquired some of the wonder of childhood:

I saw him step from the door of his flower-covered workshop….He was wearing his white suit, his head was bowed. In his right hand he held a small plant, and his face was filled with joy. For the plant had yielded a good percentage of rubber.

He led us to a rubber tree, which he pierced with a knife, then collected the white liquid that dripped from the cut, meanwhile talking to us in terms of figures and percentages. Then he led us back to his shop, where he showed us preparations he had made from the juice of all gum-producing plants, from oleander to honeysuckle. They had all been weighed and distilled. Lovingly he picked up a tube that contained sap from the leaves.

“Here is the main thing—chlorophyll,” he said.

What a drama in the life of this man! Since Goethe’s last years there has been no such fifth act!180

By early summer Edison was able to note, “I have tested 2250 wild plants in Florida, of which 545 have rubber.” He also designed a variety of crop-handling machines, including a leaf stripper that could denude twenty thousand oleanders a day. That was still too slow for him: “Must have 160,000 in 8 hours. 2 acres per man.”181

Meanwhile his efforts to develop a more sophisticated extraction technology were blocked by the difficulty of finding a coagulating agent that precipitated anything less tacky than globules, impossible to vulcanize. But he typically regarded every failure as a step toward success, and told Mina that the past five months had been the happiest he had ever spent.182

She could not say the same, feeling again and again the loneliness of a wife waking up nights to find the bed beside her empty—sometimes not even slept in. “Father dear is certainly pushing the rubber idea for all it is worth,” she wrote Theodore and Ann one sleepless morning. “He is over at the laboratory now working on his solvents, etc. and it is 2:30 A.M.”183

Mina’s desolation was augmented by letters from Theodore and Charles, full of their enjoyment of life, marriage, and work. She would have preferred family news of a more intimate sort, although she did not expect it from Charles. He was now thirty-eight, and Carolyn considerably older, despite a policy of celebrating her birthdays in reverse order. Mina’s hopes focused on Ann, but that purposeful young woman seemed more interested in studying economics than stitching baby clothes.^*13, 184

Innocent or uncaring of her angst (“Ask me nothing about women—I don’t understand them”), Edison continued to ponder the seed, the wind, the sapling, the tree, the branch, and the leaf.185

NO NEW “PUPS”

In early June the spacious new green-painted laboratory across McGregor Boulevard began to fill with staff and equipment. It was sequentially laid out, with the crushing and drying rooms servicing the chemical processing tables, and machine and glassblowing shops set alongside. Some visitors assumed it was modeled on Ford’s famous production line at River Rouge in Detroit. They did not realize that Ford himself had been inspired by Edison’s “beltway” mining complex in the 1890s. And that, in turn, had owed much to the workbench layout at Menlo Park a quarter-century before—so much so that Fred Ott, looking around the long, two-bay-by-four room with its twelve double bays of tables and tubes, could be excused a pang of nostalgia. Except that this laboratory’s cabinets were crammed with seed banks, solvents, slicers, grinders, percolators, Büchner funnels, screens, pans, and porcelain balls. Soxhlet extractors sprouted like glass reeds from the farthest tables, their bulbs refracting the tall windows that overlooked the plantation.

Thomas Edison brooding in chem lab.

Mina forbade her husband to work there just yet. The new roof was not yet covered with creepers, and she worried about summer heat beating down on him. It was time, she said, to return to New Jersey for the summer.

“I don’t want to leave, but she makes me,” Edison joked, as they boarded the northbound train on the twelfth.186

After ten months of organization, the Edison Botanic Research Corporation was now a bipolar but smoothly functioning unit. Around its northern and southern ends swirled many institutions interested in “war rubber,” such as the New York Botanical Garden, the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Commerce, the Army-Navy Munitions Board, and the Ford and Firestone companies. Their various force fields were held together by Edison. No experiment could be undertaken, no new “pups” planted or seeds solicited, without his approval. Even senior scientists were expected to obey his constant stream of orders, oral, written, or telegrammed. To their relief, his disability prevented him from using the telephone.187

He made the twenty-four-man Florida campus responsible for analysis and domestication of foreign rubber plants. West Orange handled an ever-swelling inflow of specimens from Botanic Research Corporation collectors in the field. As though this were not enough, Edison spent $8,000 to turn his garden at Glenmont into a Florida-style plantation, growing over five hundred varieties of herbs and weeds in straight rows, to the modified pleasure of neighbors. It was no wonder that his assistant William Meadowcroft, overcoming two decades of deference, complained, “This rubber business seems to stretch out to infinity.”188

A VERY BIG THING

Mina held her “important” family conclave about Jubilee planning at Glenmont on 20 August. Edison was represented, for once, by his eldest son. Tom had been brought back to the plant as an Edicraft engineer, testing electric toasters, amid general sympathy for his fragile health and marital distress. (Beatrice was cuckolding him with a handyman.) Charles, Theodore, and Ann Edison attended, along with Mina’s brother John V. Miller. The only outsider was John Lieb, sitting in on behalf of the Edison Pioneers.189

Mina dominated the discussion. As far as she was concerned, General Electric had forfeited any right to celebrate her husband in 1892, when it dropped his name from its title. Lieb, pushing for the Pioneers, said that the company would compensate him now, to the tune of $100,000 a year, and build an Edison museum in Schenectady if he would give his blessing to a festival there. But Mina, still seething over a betrayal she blamed on Samuel Insull, rejected the offer. She confirmed that Henry Ford was prepared to spend as much as $15 million on his proposed Edison Institute, and approvingly cited the magnate’s “desire to make this a very big thing—a national affair.”190

A vote was taken, unanimously favoring Ford and Dearborn. Lieb mangaged to negotiate an agreement whereby General Electric would still sponsor “Light’s Golden Jubilee,” albeit in Michigan, while Ford simultaneously publicized the opening of the Edison Institute. In time the latter’s museum would house the bulk of the Pioneer collection.191

Edison thus had to brace for apotheosis a year hence, when all he wanted to do was produce some homegrown rubber that did not stick to his fingers.192 Already other Greeks sought to ply him with gifts. At the suggestion of Treasury Secretary Mellon, Congress awarded Edison its Gold Medal for “illuminating the path of progress.” He said he was too busy to visit Washington to receive it, so on 20 October Mellon came north with an official party to pin it on him in his laboratory.193

A radio audience of 30 million heard the secretary praise him as “one of the few men who have changed the current of modern life and set it flowing in new channels.” Edison thanked him for the medal, but sounded more pleased when presented with an artifact of duller metal: his first phonograph of 1877, deaccessioned with the utmost reluctance by the Science Museum in London.194

HURRAH!!!

Seventeen days later Herbert Hoover was elected president of the United States. One of his earliest votes came from Edison, who could not be sure that Hoover would support domestic rubber research in the White House.195 Whatever the case, he himself meant to continue his botanical quest for as long as it took to succeed—or until either his body or brain failed.

The latter organ showed no decline as far as curiosity and retention of complex information were concerned.196 But its tolerance of other points of view, never remarkable, was almost gone. Henry Ford’s occasional snits were nothing to the spectacle of Edison roaring like a blast furnace when he heard—or misheard—something not to his liking. The bristling brows would contort, the always-jerky gestures become spasmodic, and the voice hoarsen, as if he were convinced that everyone around him was mentally deficient.

Mary Childs Nerney, a cataloguer hired by Charles to organize the papers of Thomas A. Edison, Inc., had just begun to work in the upper stacks of the laboratory library when she became aware that the founder of the company was below.197

Never shall I forget my first sight, or rather sound of him. High voltage invectives winged their way past in mass formation and in solo flight….I looked over the railing of the gallery.

A man of medium height and stocky build stood by the inventor’s desk. He was slightly stooped. He had a magnificent head to which his snow white hair gave a venerable look. His fine eyes flashed as he let loose his amazing vocabulary. Could it be—it was—the Old Man himself.198

The impression of stockiness she got was caused by Edison’s quaint belief that any clothes that fit too well bruised the microvessels of his skin and caused internal damage. So he wore the largest and lightest possible suits, left his high collar loose, and scuffed around in shoes two sizes too big. In winter he declined to wear an overcoat, on the antithermal theory that stiff sleeves let cold air run up his arms. Instead he kept himself warm with two or three layers of underwear—even four in blizzard conditions. Despite the almost invariable shabbiness of his vests and trousers, his shirts were spotless. This was probably due to Mina, yet Edison had an odd love of fine linen, in the form of black satin string ties, Indian silk handkerchiefs one foot square, and enormous pongee nightgowns that billowed around him. It did not stop him from bespattering them with tobacco juice, or from rolling up his jackets to serve as pillows when he napped after lunch.199

That meal consisted, these days, of nothing more than a few crackers washed down with warm milk.200 Dinner, when he bothered to eat it all, was equally frugal. He insisted that solid food dulled the brain, that he needed all his wits to adapt his extraction techniques to the biochemistry of thousands of specimens.

“I am always defeated by the tenacity of the solvents remaining in the rubber extract,” Edison complained, despairing of ever getting a precipitate that would toughen enough to vulcanize.201 Notwithstanding his successful patent for extraction by aqueous flotation, he found the “dry chemistry” of the Soxhlet extractor more efficient. In its tall, teetery, glass-tubed intricacy, it looked not unlike the Sprengel-Böhm pumps he had used in his early lightbulb experiments, striving for a perfect vacuum. Both devices used gravity and airlocks.

The Soxhlet stood on a hot plate that warmed a flat-bottomed flask of solvent (Edison tried ninety different formulas) enough to vaporize the liquid and send it up to a top-mounted, water-cooled condenser. As the vapor reliquefied, it trickled down into a cylinder stuffed with plant pulver and plugged with a thimble of porous paper. The solvent soaked through the pulver, absorbing rubber molecules as it went, forming a slightly syrupy filtrate that was then siphoned back into the warming flask. There the entire cycle of vaporization, condensation, dissolution, and dribble was repeated until virtually all the rubber had been leached out. Decanted into a porcelain drying dish, the syrup solidified into a “stiff tremulous jelly” that was never dry enough, or elastic enough, to please him. Physics kept violating the purity of his residue. He got different results according to how he stirred, kneaded, or washed the coagulum. Even weather, or the kind of light that played on the Soxhlet during extraction, seemed to affect its molecular structure.202 But then, on 7 November, after applying some dilute sulfuric acid to the powdered leaves of a black mangrove, Avicennia germinans, Edison joyfully reached for his pencil and wrote

THE PLANT OF PLANTS

Success with one solvent on one species of plant, however, did not bring Edison appreciably close to the river of domestic crude that he dreamed of diverting into the nation’s strategic reserve. At the beginning of 1929 he claimed to have examined fifteen thousand plants and gotten nothing better than a 6.91 percent yield from the milkiest. “I may say that the patience of Job has been considerably overrated,” he told a reporter from The Saturday Evening Post.203

As his eighty-second birthday approached, he could identify with Job’s sufferings, both mental (“Where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding?”) and physical. Exhaustion, self-starvation, and a restlessness akin to panic whenever his studies were interrupted took a toll on his health. He was racked with stomach cramps and suddenly began to look frail.204

There was no lightening of his workload when he went south. The laboratory in Fort Myers was as busy as the one in West Orange. “He just works and nothing else,” Mina wrote to Theodore. “Leaves here about nine and crosses over there until six and comes home exhausted. After a spasm of pain lasting the last three nights about two hours he falls off to sleep…until 11:30 and then up again reading until 1:30 or two.” Edison blamed his pain on indigestion. But as both he and his doctor were aware, he was suffering from chronic diabetic gastroparesis.205

Since life was short, and the regenerative cycle of most plants long, he decided to postpone any further attempts to improve the quality of his extracts, and breed for quantity instead. On 25 January Edison selected about forty plants that he believed might produce double-digit rubber. When he listed them by their Latin names, the genus Solidago appeared more often than any other. As a boy among millions of other midwestern children, he had known it as goldenrod—the wild plant whose yellow bloom, every August, warned that schooldays were about to resume. (Might the charged curvature of its tiny bulblike buds, balanced on their stems before exploding into flower, have reminded him of a similar configuration bursting into light, fifty “golden” years ago?) In terms of yield, Prairie goldenrod led the other species—Mexican, Tall, Sweet, and Pine Barren—by more than a full percentage point, save for one Florida specimen so anonymous that Edison simply cataloged it as “Fla. 201.” All he noted now was that at 4.15 percent, it was perennial and a “good plant.” He would need a few more months to identify it as Solidago leavenworthii, and conclude it was the plant of plants that most excited him.206

NO APPARENT ROSETTE

Seventeen days later Edison held his usual birthday press conference, this time in the charming hideaway that Mina had built for him, as a surprise, on the estate. Questions—mostly fatuous—were presented to him in writing. He could have answered aloud, for the benefit of a new breed of reporters, the “talking newsreel men.” But his mood was subdued, and for most of the time he merely took each slip of paper and penciled a terse reply on it, as if dealing with nuisance mail. When asked what was his recipe for “a happy life,” he scrawled, “I am not acquainted with anyone who is happy.”207

An hour later, however, he was. President-elect Hoover arrived by yacht at the Seminole Lodge dock. Big and calm, tanned from a cruise in quest of marlin, Hoover was the picture of American success, at a moment when the polity he represented—ultracapitalistic, giddily speculative, awash in dividends—was at its apogee. For the next few hours, as he toured Edison’s estate and rode with him in a motorcade through Fort Myers, he gave off such waves of pleasure and good nature as to belie his reputation for dourness.208

All the same, his visit indicated a concern among public figures that the “Father of Light” might die before his Golden Jubilee. Henry Ford used the occasion to announce his endowment of the Edison Institute of Technology. He released an architectural drawing that projected a five-gallery industrial museum bigger than Versailles and the Kremlin combined, centering on an overscaled replica of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. His reconstructions of Menlo Park and Fort Myers laboratories were not included. Subsequent news reports, issued by the publicist Edward L. Bernays, confirmed that they were to be the core of an adjoining “Greenfield Village,” an attempt by Ford to re-create the small-town America his automobiles had done so much to despoil. The entire complex covered 542 acres.209

Edison was more interested, that spring, in the nine acres he had under cultivation across McGregor Boulevard—particularly a bed of Solidago leavenworthii root cuttings. After six weeks of potting and two more in the ground, they had sprouted as high as fourteen inches. At the end of March he calculated that if they maintained their vigorous growth rate, “possibly and probably [they] will give one ton of leaves for an acre.”210

The more he looked at this species of goldenrod, the better he liked it. By May he concluded it had the best potential of all the plants he had tested. “No apparent rosette, fast grower, occupies smallest area, 6 x 6, without crowding…and mostly forty inches high though not yet in flower.” The rubber was concentrated in its leaves, and they were luxuriant all the way to the ground, so if he bred a sufficiently straight stem, they could be stripped by machine. At an extraction rate of 6.9 percent, that projected a per acre rubber yield of 138 pounds, meaning that his entire plantation might generate about fifty-four Firestone balloon tires a year. This was a slight yield by Hevea or even guayule standards, but Edison was sure that by massive propagation of the best rootstocks, he could squeeze an additional 2 or 3 percent of rubber molecules into their leaf tissue and greatly increase plant size.211

Having taught himself how to crossbreed, he sat all day on his swivel seat in the laboratory, surrounded by dozens of goldenrods in flower. He delicately washed the anthers of some specimens, waited for them to dry, then brushed on the pollen of others, working with the patience of a miniaturist in watercolors.212

In June he drafted a detailed sequence of goldenrod treatment for the instruction of his Florida staff. Seven extraction processes were to be performed with linked dispatch. First, low-temperature drying of the leaves to prevent oxidization of the rubber cells; then prompt powdering and purification with acetone; resaturation with benzol for rubber removal; partial distillation of the resultant solution; application of a coagulating agent to the concentrate; and finally, after the stiffened crude was run through a creping roller, hydration to wash out its chlorophyllous resins.213

Edison was confident that the rubber of Solidago leavenworthii, being “not in the least sticky,” could be vulcanized, despite a troublesome “X compound” that affected all his percolations and weakened the springiness of the resultant elastomer.214 He said nothing publicly about his choice for the time being, knowing that if he did, the press would at once fantasize that he had discovered a miracle plant.^*14

I AM WRITING THIS

His stomach continued to bother him into the summer, and he found the only relief he could get from abdominal contractions was to adopt an all-liquid diet. Henry Ford flew in a quantity of iced pasteurized milk from Detroit, but Edison preferred the fresh product of his estate brown cow—high in sugar, low in butterfat, still warm from the udder. She was not always cooperative, so he arranged with the Dobbins dairy in Fort Myers for backup supplies of Jersey milk, ordering twenty-four pints whenever he left town on a plant-collecting trip.215

Mina noticed that his stomach was always worse when he was distracted from botanical work.216 She dreaded the day he would discover that Charles and Theodore were failing in their efforts to modernize entertainment technology at Edison Industries. Exactly as he had predicted, they had come to radio, electrical recording, and the long-playing disk too late and at too great a cost. They were now risking their father’s wrath by ending production of Blue Amberol cylinders, and the time was fast approaching when the Phonograph Division would have to shut down. Ironically, the one sonic instrument doing well—amid abundant profits elsewhere in the company—was the Ediphone dictating machine. His sons might have forgotten (though Edison had not) that he had visualized the phonograph as a business device from the moment it first spoke to him.217

“Father is a little worried and upset over things just now,” Mina warned Theodore on the eve of her husband’s return to West Orange. “So just let him get settled and realize that it is not your work really that is annoying to him…but his experiments in rubber. It might make him irritable and critical so just understand and if anything does seem amiss be patient and know that it will pass.”218

Evidently it did not. Edison, for whatever alimentary or executive reasons, behaved so tyrannically over Charles’s decision to manufacture a line of green “neutrodyne” radios—while also building a majestic stone mansion in Llewellyn Park—that Charles went to the extraordinary length of drafting a proxy suicide note.219 Ostensibly coming from a friend identified only as “Williams,” it read:

Your son Charles is no longer a boy. Although not yet forty, he has literally worn himself gray in your service. His unswerving loyalty to you through the blackest days has been a rare and admirable thing….He has handled a difficult job with imagination and judgement.

The radio situation is dangerous and no one knows it better than Charles….If you force him to obey you, he is through. He is a condition of such despair that I am actually afraid of suicide.

You are too great a man to fail him now at this critical moment in his independent career. I urge you from my soul to let him fight out his battle if it means sweeping away all you have done.220

Before signing off with his friend’s surname, Charles wrote, “Charles does not know I am writing this, and will never learn about it from me.” His despair was not so great as to prevent him sharing four versions of the draft with his mother. She in turn showed a copy to Theodore and Ann. They did not take it seriously. Ann said nothing, and Theodore’s only comment was that the author had written “like a man” and sounded “very earnest.” The final version, in Williams’s handwriting, had the suicide line deleted.^*15, 221

THEY’RE ALL HERE

In late August Edison was felled by an attack of pneumonia that had doctors worrying for his life. But he rallied by Labor Day, only to succumb once more to gastroparesis. This time his recovery was slower. When he emerged, snow-haired and alarmingly thin, from Henry Ford’s private railroad car at a depot near Dearborn early on Saturday 19 October, it was as if he were stepping down onto the last platform of old age.222

The Golden Jubilee was two days away, and Ford wanted to familiarize—or refamiliarize—him with certain structures that had arisen, like brick or clapboard phoenixes, among the lawns and new trees of Greenfield Village.223 The latter complex was still under construction, and would be for years to come. But the Edison Institute’s centerpiece, “Independence Hall,” stood complete to the last detail, pristine in the Indian summer sunshine, ready to receive President Hoover and half a thousand other VIPs on Monday.

Edison was already somewhat befuddled by the experience of arriving at a depot that called itself “Smith’s Creek” and exactly resembled—in fact was—the station where he had been dumped at age twelve by a conductor infuriated by his onboard chemical experiments. Memory, however, insisted that in those days the depot had been a stop on the Grand Trunk Railroad, sixty miles to the northeast. But this paradox was nothing to the experience of being led by Ford through a barbed-wire fence, with Mina at his side, and seeing at some distance ahead the six buildings that had once comprised Menlo Park—the dominant one white, double-storied, and many-windowed. Was he in Michigan or New Jersey? The very earth he now trod—seven carloads worth, trucked in by train—was the same eastern clay he had walked on fifty years before.224

Menlo Park reconstructed at Greenfield Village, Dearborn, Michigan, 1929.

Edison’s cognition flickered back and forth between place and time. When Mina tried to button his overcoat, he pulled away. “I’m all right, I can take care of myself. I’m just as young as I was when I worked there in the old laboratory.” He nodded at the white building, which everyone else could see was new. “There’s the old boarding house, just like it stood.” In this case, he was correct—the hostelry where his research team used to live had survived and been transported intact. “And by golly if Henry hasn’t moved in the stump of that old elm tree. I tell you, it’s exactly as it was, every bit of it.”225

At first Edison was animated by what he saw. But when he entered the laboratory and climbed a stair that took him back half a century into the past, he stopped talking. Ford had assumed, with all the naïveté of a surprise party planner, that the restorations he had paid for, whether authentic or duplicated with fanatical fidelity, would evoke nothing but delight in his hero. He was unaware that the effects of sudden déjà vu on an octogenarian might be more complex, not to say depressing.

Again, as in 1879, a long light-filled room opened out, its tables strewn with hundreds of tools and machines collected by the Edison Pioneers. Chemical cabinets glittered against the walls, and gas fixtures—not yet wired for electricity!—spiked down from the ceiling. At the far end stood the pipe organ that Hilborne Roosevelt had built for the entertainment of “the boys” during midnight “lunch.” Edison gazed about him with an abstracted half-smile. He pointed at the three volumes of his youthful bible, Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity, and said in satisfaction, “In their old place.”226 A few straight-backed chairs, designed to discourage sleepiness, stood about. He crossed over to one and sat down.

A silence descended, as by some instinctive scruple, the rest of the party refrained from joining him. For several minutes Edison gazed around, his arms folded and his eyes dimming.227 At last he became aware of a short man, almost as white-haired as he, waiting deferentially farther down the room. It was Francis Jehl, whom he had hired as a muscular twenty-year-old to help with the hard labor of operating mercury pumps. Jehl was now Ford’s resident archivist and the last living witness of the night Edison’s first viable electric lamp held its incandescence.

Edison had not seen him in eighteen years, but showed no more awareness of the man’s half-reverent, half-hostile attitude now than he had then. He merely rose and led Jehl to a cabinet full of pharmaceuticals, asking, “Where d’you suppose they got ’em all? They’re all here, every one of the chemicals I had at Menlo Park.”228

So they were. Obedient to Ford’s fanatical quest for faithfulness, Jehl had ordered them from the laboratory’s former supplier, Eimer & Amend, still doing business in New York. For a while Edison opened random jars, sniffing powders and licking crystals off the palm of his hand. Then he dawdled along the tables, picking up many implements that he recognized. “I could sit right down here and go to work with my old tools.” At the request of a photographer, he did just that, scooping up some carbon paste with a spatula to impregnate several raw cotton threads, then kneading and rolling them between his palms until they were stiff and shiny, ready for baking into light filaments.229

“Francis, give me the kerosene,” he said, assuming that a jar of the hand cleaner would be where it had stood fifty years before. It was, and so was the towel that Jehl brought him to dry his fingers.230

He was as cooperative as ever with the playacting of publicity, but at several unguarded moments, his eyes filled with tears.231

LIGHT ’ER UP, FRANCIS

In Chicago that weekend, electrical engineers employed by Samuel Insull readied a “sky writing gun,” intended to flash Edison’s name in capitals fifty feet high on the night of the Jubilee. For the letters to register, there had to be a screen of cloud; but if there was not, a smoke bomb projector was ready to provide one. Countless other technicians in seven continents prepared to celebrate the birth of electric light, amid general agreement that Edison’s system had been the most seminal technological advance since the invention of printing. Amsterdam declared a full “Edison-light-week,” and incandescent arches were cantilevered over the streets of Tokyo’s Ginza district. An especially elaborate land-and-air link was strung between a studio in Berlin and loudspeakers in Ford’s banquet room in Independence Hall, because Albert Einstein wanted to congratulate Edison viva voce, at the climax of the festivities.232

Dearborn’s weather on Monday could hardly have been worse. Sheets of freezing rain beat down on the Edison and Ford families as they attended the president’s nine o’clock arrival at the River Rouge transfer station. Hoover himself was soaked before he finished shaking hands, while his wife tenderly tried to shelter Edison under her umbrella.

Across the platform, an old-fashioned locomotive waited puffing, with coach, smoker, and baggage car attached. It was Ford’s replication of the train Edison had ridden as a newsboy. He hustled his VIPs into the rear car, while press and White House personnel piled into the forward ones. Soon the train was jerking and coughing its way toward Greenfield Village. At a cruising speed of four miles an hour, that gave Edison—who had bucked up considerably after a day of rest—plenty of time to parody his old job. The car was furnished with a basket of fruit and candy for that purpose.233

“Candy, bananas, peaches, apples,” he sang in a voice much hoarser than a boy’s.

“I’ll take a peach,” Hoover said, producing a quarter.234

Edison’s energy began to flag during the afternoon, when he accompanied the presidential party on a long, muddy tour of the village. At four P.M. in the laboratory, with Hoover, Ford, and a phalanx of photographers looking on, he assembled a replica of his original lightbulb of 1879. He worked with bushy-browed concentration, his hands still deft, aware that he would have to do it again in six hours’ time, for an even more intimidating audience.

“Everything should be ready now,” he said after finishing. “If only the vacuum is good.”235

Jehl teetered up a stepladder, poured mercury into the Sprengel pump, and partially evacuated the bulb.236

“We used to seal ’em off too quick,” Edison told Hoover. He gave the filament some battery current to burn off the occluded gases that remained. “Bring ’em up very high. We pumped out an enormous amount of air.”

The president, an engineer himself, watched fascinated until the mercury driblets ceased to fall.

“Well, for all practical purposes that’s enough,” Edison said, peering closely at the outlet tube. “Seal it off.”

Jehl heated, softened, and snipped the bulb’s umbilical. When it had cooled, Edison reconnected the lead-in wires to the battery. A curl of light ignited in the glass. He sat back in his chair and beamed.

“Well, sir,” Hoover said, “with that little invention, you’ve multiplied the light of the world a thousandfold.”

By dusk Edison was again a frail old man. Stormy day became stormy night, compelling the Chicago skywriters to abandon their plans to glorify him aloft. Oddly, Greenfield Village and the facade of the Edison Institute were illumined with nothing but weak oil lamps. The dimness was intentional. After six months of mounting publicity, Edward Bernays was about to stage a coup de theatre that would eclipse anything the electric age had yet seen.237

At seven-thirty, live radio coverage of a white-tie-and-jewels reception for five hundred of Ford’s most powerful friends—improbably including Marie Curie—began in Independence Hall. The lighting was almost as low as it was outside. It emanated from hand-dipped candles that threw shadows over the white walls and ceiling, while chandeliers and gold sconces stayed dark.

As they drank their cocktails under the Liberty Bell tower, they had the novel experience of hearing—along with millions of radio listeners around the world—the voice of an NBC commentator relayed from a hidden loudspeaker: “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of the radio audience. This is Graham McNamee speaking from Dearborn, Michigan, where Henry Ford and Edsel Ford are entertaining one of the most notable gatherings assembled in the annals of American history to honor Thomas Alva Edison.”238

McNamee was located not in the hall but six hundred yards away in the laboratory, along with the Fords, Edison, Mina, Hoover, and Jehl, who had set out another clutch of archaic lamp parts on a tiny table. Edison repeated his afternoon performance, minus the evacuation. He was deaf to McNamee’s suspense-building hyperbole (“Tonight is the climax of Light’s Golden Jubilee, and what a climax….the greatest tribute ever paid to any living man!”) and could not understand why the ignition of his bulb had to wait until eight o’clock sharp, the official anniversary hour. It was not that anyone had been keeping careful time in 1879.

“Will it shine, or will it flicker and die as so many previous lamps have died?” McNamee mouthed into his microphone. “Oh, you could hear a pin drop in this long room.”

“Light ’er up, Francis,” Edison said.

Jehl respectfully declined the honor.239

Edison had to be helped to stand up. Again he connected the bulb to the battery, and again the filament incandesced. By prearrangement, Hoover pressed a button.

Back in the banquet room, chandeliers and sconces burst into radiance, “with the effect,” one observer remarked, “of an eclipse running backward.” The Liberty Bell pealed out the wonder of fifty years of electric light. Deerfield Village and Detroit lit up, along with many downtowns across the nation. A thousand rockets exploded in the rainy sky, while two Ford Tri-Motors took off from the company field. One released a coruscation of silverstar fireworks, and the other displayed, in glowing red signage under its wings, the name EDISON—written in the skies after all.240

AND NOW, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

Ford had an automobile standing by at the laboratory to hurry his guests to Independence Hall. It was past two A.M. in Berlin, where Einstein was waiting to broadcast his congratulatory message. But Edison collapsed on the way. He was laid on a couch in an alcove off the vestibule, and Mina and the White House physician, Cdr. Joel T. Boone, rushed to attend him. After drinking a glass of hot milk, he revived enough to enter the banquet room, to a standing ovation.241

This reached a crescendo when Hoover, ignoring protocol, insisted that he take the seat of honor. Mina, seeing that her husband still looked pale, urged that the evening’s speeches begin immediately.242 The toastmaster, Owen D. Young of General Electric, agreed and spoke of “the vitality of spirit…aided by a little phosphorus” that had gotten young Al Edison tossed off a train at Smith’s Creek depot nearly seventy years before. He compared it to the glow of radium, which touched off another ovation for Madame Curie. Walter Barstow, president of the Pioneers, informed the guests that just when Edison had illuminated the building they sat in, a memorial tower in New Jersey burst into light at the spot where he had defeated darkness in 1879. Barstow quoted the inscription on the tower’s base: “The light once lit shall never dim, / But through all time shall honor him.” Then to laughter, he added Edison’s favorite saying, “All things come to him who hustles while he waits.”

Young read out some congratulatory telegrams from Guglielmo Marconi, the Prince of Wales, President von Hindenburg of Germany, and Admiral Byrd, who was experiencing even worse weather in Antarctica. “And now, ladies and gentlemen…Mr. Thomas A. Edison.”

Edison hitched himself up, to applause that was but a rustle in his right ear. His horror of oratory came not from shyness but from uncertainty about the volume of his own voice. Would those whom he could not hear be able to hear him?

What they did hear was a forceful if croaky light baritone, breaking when he pushed it too hard in the direction of a dangling microphone.243

“Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I am told that tonight my voice will reach out to the four corners of the world….”244

As far as he could see in the dazzling light reflected from gloss-painted walls and pilasters, it embraced a cathedral-like space lined with long tables and, beyond the transept, many more tables receding in perspective. Arranged along every front were some five hundred white-tied grandees and their women—Rockefellers and Morgenthaus and Rosenwalds and Kahns, Orville Wright and Lee DeForest, George Eastman and Will Rogers, university presidents and industrial tycoons. All of them were beholden to him for their telephones, dictaphones, stock tickers, and record players and movies, as well as the extra hours of work they could get out of their employees and servants, thanks to the billions of Edison bulbs now illuminating the world.

“I would be embarrassed at the honors that are being heaped on me on this unforgettable night,” Edison continued, “were it not for the fact that in honoring me you are also honoring that vast army of thinkers and workers of the past”—his voice grew rough—“and those who will carry on, without whom my work would have gone for nothing.”

Charles and Theodore and their wives, along with a large contingent of Mina’s relatives, tensed with fear that Edison would break down.245 But he drove himself to finish, his voice rising to a panicky yodel.

“This experience makes me realize as never before that Americans are—are s-s-sentimental, and this great event, Light’s Gold Jubilee”—he began to weep again—“fills me with gratitude. I think—I thank our President and you all.”

Edison turned to his right. “And Mr. Henry Ford, words are inadequate to express my feelings. I can only say that in the fullest and richest meaning of the term, he is my friend. Good night.”

The last two words came out in a half-shout that took the last of his strength. He would not stay for the president’s speech, and he had to be helped back to the anteroom by Dr. Boone. Lying there too weak to move, Edison heard nothing of Hoover’s affectionately witty thanks to him for the gift of electric light.246

It enables us to postpone our spectacles a few years longer; it has made reading in bed infinitely more comfortable; by merely pushing a button, we have introduced the element of surprise in dealing with burglars….It enables our cities and towns to clothe themselves in gaiety by night, no matter how sad their appearance may be by day. And by all its multiple uses it has lengthened the hours of our active lives, decreased out fears, replaced the dark with good cheer, increased our safety, decreased our toil, and enabled us to read the type in the telephone book. It has become the friend of man and child.247

After this, Einstein’s German tribute, broadcast through a storm of static, left few auditors the wiser, although some may have caught the words Visionär, Ausgestalter und Organisator, and at the end, his attempt at five words of English: “Good night, my American friend.”248

FRAUGHT WITH GOLD

His apotheosis over, and his strength restored by two days of rest on the Ford estate, Edison returned to West Orange. “I am tired of all the glory, I want to get back to work.”^*16, 249 He arrived home in time to hear two pieces of catastrophic news. On Tuesday 29 October the stock market fell with such violence that ticker tape printers kept chattering far into the night, unable to keep pace with the volume of selling. And on that same day Arthur Walsh, a vice-president of Thomas A. Edison, Inc., announced that the Phonograph Division was ceasing all production, “in order to devote our great record plant to the production of radio….This step is being taken regretfully because the phonograph for home entertainment was one of Mr. Edison’s favorite inventions.”250

Neither denouement came as a surprise to Edison. During his birthday press conference earlier in the year, he had spelled out the consequences of overspeculation: “Ultimate panic. Loss of confidence.” Now, and for the next forty-eight hours, many of the plutocrats who had sat listening to him the week before saw their wealth evaporating like acetone. None suffered more, in the long run, than Samuel Insull, who had leveraged his $2 billion empire of electric utilities to an extent that no amount of extra credit could save him from ruin, and eventual fugitive exile.251

There had been plenty of hints from Charles that the Phonograph Division was (like its founder) succumbing to sheer old age. The latest Edison electrical players and records were of superb quality, but it had proved impossible for them to succeed, given the company’s well-earned reputation for stuffy design, dull repertory, and mediocre artists.252

Edison could only lash out at Charles in a final burst of impotent rage before returning to botanical research.253 “I can’t get my mind off rubber just now.” At the beginning of December he announced his choice of goldenrod as the best guarantee of American rubber independence. After testing seventeen thousand plants, he was convinced it could produce a good tough polymer at sixteen cents a pound—less than the current spot price for foreign crude. But some years of development were needed to bring the weed to its maximum polyisoprenic richness.254 Since his own years were obviously numbered, he would not stop for his usual Christmas at home.

On the sixteenth Time magazine reported:

Thomas A. Edison in a fringed muffler, Mrs. Edison, four servants, a dozen laboratory assistants and five carloads of laboratory gear and raw materials, all rolled southwards from New Jersey towards Fort Myers….Inventor Edison, having celebrated the golden jubilee of his electric lightbulb, had signalized his annual winter hegira by an announcement that sounded fraught with gold.255

*1 Around this time Edison also exhaustively studied analytical atomic spectroscopy, as described in his annotated copy of The Nature of Matter and Electricity, by Daniel Comstock and Leonard Troland (1919).

*2 The equivalent of $125 million in 2018, according to the “Purchasing Power Calculator” at measuringworth.com.

*3 Although women constituted a number of the Edison Industries workforce in 1920, their jobs were either menial or secretarial.

*4 The equivalent of $1.2 million in 2018.

*5 The boy’s name was Ronald Reagan.

*6 A silent documentary filmed that summer, A Day with Mr. Edison, can be seen on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=ep5NGVOi6QE. It poignantly conveys his energy, tetchy decisiveness, and extreme deafness.

*7 In Washington, on 27 February, Firestone publicly called for American rubber independence. The House voted a $500,000 appropriation to research the project, and President Harding signed the McCormick Bill in early March.

*8 Ernest L. Stevens survived into the age of stereophonic recording and remained proud of the Diamond Discs he recorded for Edison. “They sound exactly as if you’re listening to a piano in the room,” he said in 1973. “No overtones, no vibration or anything—the best piano record on the market, in tone quality.”

*9 Edison’s personal dark green Lincoln is now an exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn.

*10 The Thomas A. Edison Birthplace Museum is now a National Historic Landmark.

*11 The banyan tree at Edison-Ford Winter Estates is now the largest in North America.

*12 According to Francis Jehl, Ford also managed to salvage “nearly all the timber of the old laboratory, with the doors and most of the window stiles.”

*13 In an unguarded moment, Mina voiced concern to Emil Ludwig over her husband’s lack of a grandson. “After marrying twice and producing six children, none of them have perpetuated his name.”

*14 In May 2013 one of Edison’s rubber notebooks from this period, featuring his drawing of a goldenrod in flower, was offered by the Paul Fraser auction gallery for sale at an estimated price of $120,000.

*15 It is possible the letter was never sent. Edison would easily have identified its purported author as Charles Sumner Williams, a vice-president of Edison Industries, and fired him for apparent interference in family affairs. Williams was known in the company as “Charles Edison’s right hand man.”

*16 Edison’s “glory” in October 1929 was amplified by the first honorary Academy Award, “in grateful recognition of your eminent service in the creation and development of the motion picture.”