IN HIS SIXTY-THIRD year, Edison presided over an industrial complex so vast that only he knew what was going on in all its departments. “Say, I have been mixed up in a whole lot of things, haven’t I?” he said, awed in spite of himself by the constellation of invention that swirled around his rolltop desk in the laboratory at West Orange.*1 From its farthest reaches nationwide—41 million Edison lightbulbs powered by six thousand municipal stations and one hundred thousand isolated plants—down to the pigeonhole in front of him, stuffed with notes of “new things” he meant to develop when he had time, the revolving mass had but one center of gravity. It was, however, expanding at a rate that threatened disintegration if his holding strength should fail.1

The six brick buildings that comprised his relocated laboratory of 1888 (itself an enormous enlargement of the old facility at Menlo Park) were now dwarfed by seven multistoried concrete structures, covering four city blocks. They and twenty-one smaller buildings scattered around the complex co-produced motion pictures, phonographs and records, primary and storage batteries, business machines, and chemicals. All were certified as fireproof—a vital attribute, considering the volatility of most of the materials that crammed them. The National Phonograph Company, as Edison’s sound division was known, produced 130,000 records a day and six thousand phonographs a week, for an annual return of $7 million.^*2 His movie factory shot out 8 million feet of nitrocelullose film stock a year. He employed more than 3,500 people, most of them highly skilled, few of them female,^*3 all underpaid—chemists, cabinetmakers, talent scouts, diamond cutters, opticians, patent lawyers, screenwriters, lapidaries, machinists, and musicians, down to a little old Greek who did nothing all day in his lean-to except roast scraps of marble for lithium.2

Edison’s commercial holdings extended far beyond the thirty acres of the West Orange complex. He owned, in addition to thousands of acres of mountain minelands upstate, a limestone quarry and the world’s largest cement mill in the Delaware Valley, an equally immense chemical plant at Silver Lake, an electric car shop in Newark, a recording studio and showroom on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and a glass-roofed film facility in the Bronx that was larger than the Metropolitan Opera and shot two or three movies a week. He maintained agencies in London, Paris, and Berlin to handle the intricate marketing of his inventions under the patent laws of many countries, plus an export office at home that shipped tons of records and players weekly to places as remote as Madagascar, French Indochina, the Falkland Islands, and British East Africa.3

Edison film studio in the Bronx, circa 1910.

TOO NEAR THE SUN

Edison was, to outer percept and certainly in his own mind, a gifted businessman. Every brick and balance sheet that comprised the fabric and worth of Edison Industries derived from his inventive genius, dating back to the day he opened his first independent shop in Newark, forty years before. “I measure everything I do by the size of the silver dollar,” he liked to boast—not choosing to remember the millions he had lost in a career remarkable for profligate spending and wasted opportunities.4 Even when he restrained his natural impulsiveness and sought to behave like a canny Scot, he managed to lose again. Old associates still spoke bemusedly about the time Edison, arguing that he needed steady income, waved aside a huge British cash offer for telephone rights in favor of annual payments that he would have earned anyway, as interest on the lump sum.

One reason for his business failures was, paradoxically, the characteristic that had made him triumph so often over rival entrepreneurs: an impatient willingness, compulsion even, to take enormous risks. To this might be added such other quirks as his certainty that any idea, no matter how revolutionary, was realizable through sheer doggedness of experiment (witness the nine years it had taken him to perfect his alkaline storage battery), along with his habit of excitedly publicizing breakthroughs in advance, and his contempt for speculators, which did not stop him betting on himself. He was bored by what he called “the humbuggery of bookkeeping,” while indulging an obsessive need to calculate costs to the last penny—although any accountant could see that budgeting was as alien to him as football.5 Edison was both stingy with wages and overgenerous with bonuses when (on rare occasions) he felt that a colleague shared credit for an invention. He was personally honest and honorable, yet tolerant of whichever shady operator might help him beat another man to the patent office. If he had to choose between paying an overdue bill and emptying his bank account to buy a new piece of equipment, he did not see why he and his creditor should not face privation together.

Men who had to do business with him marveled at his inability to see money as anything of value unless it was invested in technology. Ralph H. Beach, president of the Federal Storage Battery Company, noticed him reach into his pocket one hot day for what he thought was a plug of tobacco. “In fact it was a wad of money bills that had evidently been there undisturbed for some time and possibly owing something to the sweat in his old alpaca pants.” Edison gazed at the wad in obvious disappointment, and Beach suggested he could use some of it to buy a new hat.

“Yes I know, but I really haven’t the time.”6

If he had not traded away the securities of his greatest corporate creation, the Edison General Electric Company, to finance his greatest folly, iron mining, Edison might by now be as rich as Samuel Insull—the icily arithmetical assistant who kept him solvent when he tried, against his nature, to be an executive only. During those often perilous years, one of his English directors had said of him, “Like all creative and poetic minds he sees no difficulties where men of ordinary understanding require to make their ground good. This is one of the distinctive qualities of genius, their flight is so high and strong that they are apt to forget they may fly too near the sun and have their wings melted. This, I suppose…explains Mr. Edison’s own pecuniary straits.”7

The comment was made in private, and Edison would have scoffed to hear it. He flattered himself that he had, “beside the inventor’s usual make-up…the sense of the business value of an invention.” Yet as Insull’s successor Alfred Tate observed, he was so arithmetically challenged he could not understand the figures in a balance sheet.8 For all his laborious budgeting, he was cavalier about the worth of his own services. He either inflated them beyond reason or was naïvely amazed that any investor should offer him more than he expected. Nor was he a good judge of men, except in selecting (by attrition) laboratory staff who could stand his own pace of work. Optimistic and good-natured—as long as he was not crossed—he was quick to forgive associates who served him badly. Yet he had no sympathy for veteran employees who left him and fell on hard times, like Tate or Francis Jehl.9 This had earned him a reputation for ruthlessness that was justified only in the sense that anyone out of his sight was thereafter out of mind.

Edward H. Johnson, the struggling milk carton merchant who, of all these forgotten men, had served him most faithfully and knew him best, cited haste as his most fatal business flaw. Edison was always in such a hurry to move from invention to invention that he would often leave a major one undeveloped, in order to experiment on a device as hard to sell as the tasimeter, which sought to measure interplanetary heat. Or he would lavish so many improvements onto something as marketable as his top-class Amberola record player that the Phonograph Works never had time to put the latest model into mass production. Over the years, by insisting on vertical control of all his companies and departments, rather than integrating them horizontally in approved corporate style, he had brought Edison Industries to the brink of financial collapse.10

Time had only reinforced the “opinion of many true friends,” first expressed by Johnson in 1893, that “both the world and Mr. Edison would have been gainers if he had left the conduct of the purely business side of his affairs to associates of special commercial training and instincts.”11

WHAT HUTCHISON WANTED

On 17 July 1910 a short, sleekly handsome entrepreneur of thirty-four escorted three naval officers onto the West Orange campus. Miller Reese Hutchison was no stranger at the gatehouse, having paid court to Edison for at least nine years in the hope of gaining business and other, more personal favors. By his own account, he had been a “worshiper” of the “Big Chief” since he was a boy in Alabama. After a privileged education in military schools and a Jesuit college, as well as polytechnic and medical institutes, Hutchison had flourished as an inventive electrical engineer, winning gold medals for a portable hearing aid that helped Queen Alexandra of Great Britain overcome her deafness.12 His attempts to do the same for the most famous deaf man in America had failed when he realized that Edison liked being wrapped in a cocoon of near-silence. But that did not stop Hutchison from continuing to visit the laboratory, often with potential customers in tow, until he was so much of a persona grata that he was even allowed to conduct tours of the complex.13

Unlike the usual wheedlers who looked to Edison for jobs or endorsements, Hutchison was independent-minded and wealthy. He earned a fortune in annual royalties from one invention alone—the Klaxon horn, whose gargly, turkey-like call was one of the reasons the automobile was hated by peace lovers around the world.^*4 His own luxury cars of choice were a Packard and a six-cylinder Pierce-Arrow, either of which put to shame Edison’s little Bailey Electric Victoria phaeton.14

Exactly what Hutchison wanted by hanging around the laboratory nobody could yet figure, but the fact was that Edison, normally aloof from intimacy, had begun to enjoy his company and admire his social poise. They presented an amusing contrast when seen together—the younger man saturnine, elegant in dress and manners, smoking choice Havana cigars; the older white-haired and slovenly in suits that had often been slept in, chomping on a wad of the cheapest tobacco. Hutchison had an extraordinary voice, melodious and almost Levantine with its rolled rs (“thirty-fourr hundrred my-ils”).15 He addressed Edison as “Misterr Edi-sohn,” and although always respectful in conversation, he was adept at scribbling the sort of smutty thigh-slappers that had the “O.M.” rocking back and forth in his chair with laughter:

A young man with blackened eye was interrogated as to its cause. He replied, “I was kissing my girl good night and her elastic garter broke.”16

Hutchison’s guests this day were young submarine commanders who wished to explore the possibility of developing the Edison storage battery (“Built Like a Watch, But Rugged As a Battleship”) for underwater use.

Edison had experimented with defense technology before, working on a dirigible torpedo with W. Scott Sims in 1889, fantasizing aerial-dropped torpedoes and “dynamite guns” during the Venezuela crisis of 1895, and inventing an explosive illuminant during the Spanish-American War. But after that he had paid no more attention than the average newspaper reader to John Philip Holland’s long struggle to sell the navy a revolutionary new weapon—the attack submarine. Only when President Theodore Roosevelt startled the world by vanishing into the depths of Long Island Sound for two hours in a Holland boat did Congress become seriously interested, and authorize the construction of seven bigger submarines in its defense appropriations for 1906 and 1907.17

That did not prevent Luddites in the Navy Department from continuing to resist improvements in submarine technology. “Innovation,” Holland complained, “acts on these timid souls just as a sudden plunge into ice water.” The Bureau of Steam Engineering was especially obstructive. It had mandated for years that submarines should be powered, illuminated, and controlled underwater by the force in its purview, instead of by electric motors connected to the Exide batteries Holland recommended: open-top, lead-acid cells that required lengthy recharging after the boat surfaced.18

To Hutchison, the bureau’s objections were not unreasonable. A few weeks before, he had taken a dive with one of his current companions, Lt. Frederick V. McNair, Jr., in the submarine Cuttlefish. He was supposed to be demonstrating a marine speed indicator he had invented, but he became curious as to why McNair never dove at an angle exceeding fifteen degrees. The commander explained that a sharper inclination would cause the sulfuric acid in the vessel’s battery compartments to slop over and “attack the steel plate of the main ballast tank.” Should the tank then rupture under pressure, it would flood with seawater, the salt of which, split by the acid, would offer all on board a Hobson’s choice between drowning or suffocating from chlorine gas.19

This had given Hutchison the chance to remind the navy that after a decade of ceaseless refinements, Thomas Edison had perfected an alkaline nickel-steel battery so benign that, even if keelhauled across Chesapeake Bay, it would throw off nothing sourer than a little iron chloride. What was more, it preserved steel through the use of noncorroding potash. Lighter and longer-lasting than lead units and almost completely reversible, it was designed for electric cars and trucks, but Hutchison felt confident that a giant version could be evolved for naval purposes.20

Hence the appearance now, at West Orange, of McNair and his fellow officers, traveling at their own expense. They spent two hours with Edison (Hutchison already functioning smoothly as interlocutor), briefing him on the liabilities of the lead-acid submarine battery and asking whether the capacity of his largest alkaline unit could be increased from 225 ampere hours to “several thousand.” Going beyond questions as the meeting progressed, they told him “it was his duty” to help the navy solve one of its most dangerous problems.21

Edison agreed at least to try a range of experiments, and Hutchison wrote in his diary for the day: “The beginning of the Edison Storage Battery for submarine use and the beginning of my association with Thomas A. Edison.”22

AN AUSPICIOUS DAY

Whether Edison saw this new challenge as “duty” or not, it had the attraction, always compelling with him, of difficulty.23 The specifications his visitors had laid down were much more demanding than those for land batteries. They wanted an alkaline power pack strong enough to illuminate, operate, and maneuver a 105-foot, 273-ton vessel underwater for days on end. Less realistically, they hoped it would be deliverable at a price Congress could stand. This ignored the fact that the initial cost of nickel-steel cells was high, due to the extreme complexity of their internal design. The kind of monster unit McNair was talking about would cost at least $45,000—three times as much as a lead-acid equivalent.24 If, as was likely, Edison took a long time to develop and test such a battery, its price could only soar, and Hutchison would have a hard time arguing that it would pay for itself in less maintenance and greater capacity.25

There was no question, however, that Edison stood to make a mint of money if he could produce a noncorrosive battery that would become standard on all U.S. submarines. Other navies around the world were sure to follow suit, and either order from him direct or buy foreign rights to his patents—a business he projected at $20 million a year.26 But to win the vital first contract from Washington, he would need a supersalesman—charming, hyperenergetic, and expert in electrochemistry.

He did not have to look far. Miller Hutchison, who had the extra benefit of a military education, was confident of successfully lobbying everyone in the Navy Department, right up to Adm. George Dewey. On 25 August Edison authorized him to start doing so. Like a triggered dynamo, Hutchison spun into instant action. He was back within forty-eight hours to report that he had spent “an auspicious day” pitching the Edison battery, if not to Dewey, at least to Adm. H. Ingham Cone, chief of the Bureau of Steam Engineering. Cone had referred him to William Avery, his top electrical expert, and to R. H. Robinson, the naval constructor. Both men would have to pass on any matter of submarine redesign. Hutchison had not failed to treat Avery to a carriage drive in Rock Creek Park and dinner at the New Willard Hotel.27

Edison was sufficiently encouraged to say he would begin building an experimental big battery at once. But he could not give it much of his own time, because he was working on two major projects—movies that would talk and sing, and a supersmooth plastic to replace the hard wax on his current line of Amberol record cylinders.28 Hutchison would have to supervise most of the prototype’s development, and he should not expect an early success. Memories were still raw among Edison’s chemical staff about the long agony of producing the A-4 automobile cell. It made them less than thrilled about the challenge of devising a unit ten times as powerful, soon enough to equip a new generation of submarines.

MERCY? KINDNESS? LOVE?

The advent of the second decade of the twentieth century, with the Western world increasingly, if unconsciously, preparing for a mechanized war, brought about such an angry escalation of the debate between science and religion that Theodore Roosevelt attempted to resolve it in an essay entitled “The Search for Truth in a Spirit of Reverence.”29 The philosopher William James virtually embodied the controversy, being both a psychologist and a quasi-mystic willing to believe, or at least speculate, that the soul was a detachable entity, capable of returning to earth after death of the body.

To Edison, this theory smacked less of Resurrection theology than of atomic physics. Insofar as he understood either, he had no doubt that Truth was scientific, and that reverence for it must therefore exclude faith. James’s death that August prompted Edward Marshall, a feature writer for The New York Times, to ask Edison if he had ever discovered laboratory evidence of the soul.30

“Soul? What do you mean by soul? The brain?”

“Well for the sake of argument, call it the brain, or what is in the brain. Is there not something immortal in the human brain—the human mind?”

“Absolutely not.”

They were sitting in Edison’s great, dim laboratory library. He liked to keep it shuttered in summer, to block out the heat. But enough sunlight seeped in for Marshall to notice that the inventor’s face, normally smooth and untroubled, broke into fine wrinkles when he pondered an abstract question. Sometimes he squeezed his eyes shut before answering.

“My phonograph cylinders are mere records of sounds which have been impressed upon them,” Edison said. “Under given conditions, some of which we do not at all understand, any more than we understand some of the conditions of the brain, the phonographic cylinders give off these sounds again….Yet no one thinks of claiming immortality for the cylinders or the phonograph. Then why claim it for the brain mechanism or the power that drives it? Because we don’t know what this power is, shall we call it immortal?”

He insisted that the brain was a “mere machine.” It could be willed to record an infinite number of things other than sound, but eventually always broke down and therefore could not be immortal.

“Is the will a part of the brain?”

Edison said he was not sure. “The will may be a form of electricity,^*5 or it may be a form of some other power of which we as yet know nothing. But whatever it is, it is material; on that we may depend.”

He was willing to grant that certain aspects of “the thing we call life, or the soul,” endured after death, in the chemical sense that all matter continues to exist through change. But change did not imply transference to another, imagined world. There was only the world of here and now, and it was plenty occult enough for any metaphysician. “Heaven”—the sentimental paradise where good souls were supposed to live forever—was nothing but “the ignorant, lazy man’s refuge” from the mysteries that confronted him on earth. “There are plenty of savages, you know, who still call fire immortal.”

Marshall asked how he, as a scientific materialist, would analyze the soul.31

Edison felt it could only be done at a microscopic level, by examining sentient units small enough to pass through glass. “Each part of us is made up of millions of cells,” he said, and argued that the ability of skin to replicate an abraded fingerprint, for example, implied a physical if not spiritual uniqueness. His own individuality was nothing more than a “collection” of nervous or chemical or electrical impulses, just as New York was a collection of people “continually dying, moving away, and being replaced.” He had about as much chance of an afterlife, from his cells holding together, as the city had of going to heaven.

Marshall tried repeatedly to get him to address the fashionable topic of psychic research, but Edison, his face wrinkling, would not be drawn. “I don’t go into the psychic much,” he said, dismissing its practitioners as “desirous of believing.” With the naïve frankness that endeared him to reporters, he admitted to wishful thinking himself. Once, experimenting with a certain ore, he had selected what he thought were some random pieces to analyze.

“I assayed them very carefully, intelligently, and scientifically, and they showed 20 percent. I then took the same ore in quantities and crushed it, and assayed it, and it showed 17 percent….I tried again and again, and each time the same result. I could not understand it. So I went again to the ore heap, shut my eyes, and grabbed, taking whatever pieces of ore I happened first to touch….[They] assayed the same as the crushed ore. But if I took pieces while my eyes were open I always took bits which assayed high.”^*6, 32

The fact that his eyes were capable, within milliseconds, of detecting a 3 percent differential in ore content did strike Edison as remarkable. He was more interested in showing Marshall a worn photograph he kept on his desk. It bore the stamp of a Russian portrait studio. “That’s Mendeleev. See his autograph down at the bottom?”

Gazing at it as he talked, he explained that Mendeleev was the “great generalizer” who had discovered the periodic table of the elements. “Existing experimenters seem to be working, all of them, with details.”^*7 One day a man of comparable intellectual breadth would study the mysteries of the soul, and do so scientifically. “He will work through the material.”

The phrase through the material obviously meant much to Edison, because he repeated it in a low voice. “That Russian is dead. Now where is his will? He was a very great man. His will was the greatest part of him….What has become of that will?” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Marshall saw a chance to get him onto the subject, so far avoided, of the existence of God. “For that will to have entirely ceased when Mendeleev’s body died would indicate a loose system in nature, would it not?”

“It would seem so,” Edison said, “and yet nature’s systems—nature’s methods—are not loose. It’s hard to figure out. Perhaps matter is getting to be more progressive. That may be it. But—God—the Almighty? No!”

The journalist had his scoop. Edison had expressed agnostic doubts in public before, but never atheistic ones. It was plain as he went on that, unlike Roosevelt and James, he wanted no compromise between faith and reason.

“Mercy? Kindness? Love? I don’t see ’em. Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of the religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me—the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness love—he also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do his mercy, kindness and love for that fish come in?”

Edison continued to talk in this vein for some time. Marshall was struck by the forcefulness with which he expressed his convictions, his huge head tossing for emphasis and his face growing flushed. But he ended up grinning. “Nature seems to be a very undesirable member of society.”33

“PROOF! PROOF!”

The New York Times made the most of Marshall’s article, spreading it across the front page of its Sunday magazine section on 2 October under the headline “ ‘NO IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL,’ SAYS THOMAS A. EDISON.” The reaction was extraordinary. Within two weeks, it generated at least three pamphlets, as well as a double avalanche of protest mail to the newspaper and to Edison himself. “Perhaps no utterance by any man of science,” Marshall boasted two weeks later, “has created a sensation so extensive within the past decade.”34

Fanning the flames, he interviewed one of the most outraged respondents, Dr. William Hanna Thompson, whose book The Brain and Personality Edison admired. Speaking as a man of faith rather than a clinical neurologist and former president of the New York Academy of Medicine, Thompson harrumphed that “people who do not believe in immortality are abnormal, if not pathological.” He criticized Edison for making some “very unscientific” claims, while not refraining from one himself. (“The brain…offers a colored or distorted lens to the Personality that looks through it.”)35

Preachers predictably assailed the blasphemer as an “intellectual anarchist” and ingrate who “seemed to have not one touch of disappointment” in denying himself the consolations of religion. “What metaphysical problems has Mr. Edison ever solved?” the Rev. Charles F. Aked, pastor of the Fifth Avenue Church in Manhattan, wanted to know. As an inventor, he had brilliantly dealt with technological ones. “But what has he ever done to entitle him to be heard as an authority on the human spirit and its relation to God?” The Times voiced similar sentiments in an editorial. It condemned the interview (which it nevertheless reprinted in six languages) as an example of how savants granted “preeminence in one or other domain of knowledge…often make amusing and even pathetic displays of overconfidence in their own judgment…in regard to matters lying outside the field of their special competence.” The most eminent cleric to censure Edison was Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore, who remarked that he had “maimed his own mind, just as Darwin did by a too one-sided exercise of its power.”36

Edison was dumbfounded to have caused a theological scandal that had few freethinkers coming to his support. All he had done was voice, amid many expressions of uncertainty, a metaphysical opinion prompted by fifty years of empirical observations of nature. Nobody seemed to have noticed that he had discussed an array of purely scientific subjects with Marshall, including Hertzian waves, Brownian motion, attrition of memory in the Broca’s fold of the brain, and the revelations of the ultramicroscope (“We may, eventually, be enabled to see the inner structure of matter”), as well as making an astonishing prediction: “The time will come when a man with a bad kidney…will be able to go into the open market and purchase a good kidney of some one else who has a good one…and have it inserted in the place of his imperfect one.”

Replying to his critics in the pages of The Columbian Magazine, he said he could not help thinking the way he did.

I honestly believe that creedists have built up a mighty structure of inaccuracy, based, curiously, on those fundamental truths which I, and every honest man, must not alone admit and earnestly acclaim….

I have not reached my conclusions through study of traditions; I have reached them through the study of hard fact. I cannot see that unproved theories or sentiment should be permitted to have influence in the building of conviction upon matters so important. Science proves its theories or it rejects them. I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. I earnestly believe I am right….Proof! Proof! That is what I have always been after; that is what my mind requires before it can accept a theory as a fact….

Moral teaching is the thing we need most in this world, and many of these men could be great moral teachers if they would but give their whole time to it, and to scientific search for the rock-bottom truth, instead of wasting it upon expounding theories of theology which are not in the first place firmly based. What we need to do is search for fundamentals, not reiteration of traditions born in days when men knew even less than we do now.

SOMETHING ELEMENTAL

The fire and brimstone Edison chose to bring down on his head could not have been better—or worse—timed to sabotage the publication, in early November, of a two-volume biography, Edison: His Life and Inventions. Its coauthors were Frank Lewis Dyer, general counsel for the Edison Laboratory, and Thomas Commerford Martin, former president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. Stoutly bound, gilded, and boxed, meticulously researched, respectful yet not sycophantic in tone, and featuring in facsimile the subject’s signature of approval, it practically begged to be called “definitive.” Volume 2 ended with an appendix of 156 pages, describing just nineteen of Edison’s “twenty-five hundred or more” inventions.

After a month of silence The New York Times, which had harshly criticized Edison’s religious views, conceded in an unsigned review that he otherwise deserved all the praise his biographers bestowed on him.37

There is something elemental about this man Edison, and the sense of it grows upon one in reading such a book….More than once he has been called the greatest living American, and it is at least curious that a popular vote of one of the big daily newspapers and a poll of one of the electrical engineering journals gave him priority over all others considered. Somehow one thinks of Edison already as being as big and as typically American as his contemporary, Mark Twain, and as grouping with Lincoln and Franklin in largeness of mental mold and actual achievement along lines that are essentially of this nation.

The reviewer noted that many pages, as revised by Edison, were essentially autobiography, “quoted in his own nervous and forceful language.” At the same time it was technical enough to amount to a history of the last fifty years of electrical innovation, most of which Edison had dominated.

Yet his work does not stop short with electricity. It is interesting, even surprising, to learn that he is one of the largest makers of cement in America; to read of his gigantic efforts in the reduction of magnetic iron ore; to be shown that to him was committed the task of licking the early typewriting machine into practicable shape; to find that he invented the paraffin paper in which candy is wrapped; brought out the mimeographed copying press, and for eighteen to twenty hours a day applied his ingenuity against pretty nearly every real problem in the mechanical arts and sciences. At times the tone of the authors, as they dwell on one tour de force after the other, seems too eulogistic; but in the end it must be said that it would have been strange if they could have lived so close to such a versatile, indefatigable, resultful spirit without becoming enthusiastic.

A PITCHFORK FOR CHRISTMAS

Edison’s pious wife worried that the attention he was getting would encourage him to apply his “nervous and forceful language” to more and more subjects outside the range of technology. “It makes me sad to see him lose his old time simplicity,” she wrote Charles. “He never used to assert himself but now upon all subjects he has something to advance. This miserable immortality idea is so upsetting.”38

His heresies, though, were nothing new to Mina. She had realized as early as their courtship in 1885 that Edison was a cheerful infidel who delighted in shocking her pieties. Had he not been such a celebrity, even then, and so old-fashioned in begging for her hand, her equally devout father, a pillar of the First Methodist Episcopal Church in Akron, Ohio, might well have reserved her for somebody more comfortable in a pew.

After a quarter-century of going to church without him, she despaired of his salvation and concentrated on a new and more painful problem: what to do about her daughter Madeleine’s infatuation with a Roman Catholic. They were about as opposite as any lovers could be—Madeleine a twenty-two-year-old flower of Bryn Mawr, bright, witty, and impulsive; and John Eyre Sloane, small, dour, bespectacled, hard up, unsure of what to do with himself at twenty-five except get up in the dark every morning to go to six o’clock mass.39 His formidable mother, Alice, shared the same conviction. She would be more than a match for the diffident Mina, if it ever came to an argument over doctrine. But since both women were determined Madeleine and John would never marry, that prospect looked unlikely.

Madeleine Edison, circa 1911.

Madeleine shared something of her father’s irreverence (she teasingly bought him a pitchfork for Christmas). Although not an unbeliever, she failed to see why belief was so essential to John. His idea of a refreshing weekend was to go on retreat and ponder the remission of sins. This bothered Edison less than the young man’s inertia. The “rising intelligence” he seemed to lack surged contrastingly in Madeleine, except that hers was bottled up by the social conventions her mother imposed on her. “I want to be a free agent,” she complained, desperate to excel at something other than household management and polite entertaining—which, along with regular confinements, represented Mina’s idea of fulfilled femininity. Madeleine felt a victim of male prejudice too. She loved to act in amateur theatricals, but John disapproved. When, to her passionate excitement, a researcher in New York offered to pay her for help in processing the papers of E. H. Harriman, Edison curtly informed him that he was affluent enough to support his own daughter.40

The unhappy lovers, held apart by prejudice and penury, occasionally breaking up yet always drawn back together, took refuge in a private engagement that threatened to drag on for years. John kept assuring Madeleine that all would be well, with divine assistance. “After all it is between God and you and me and you may be sure He will direct us when the time comes.”41

THEY ARE PEACHES

Another Christmas present to please Edison was brought to Glenmont by Miller Hutchison on the evening of 21 December. It was an order from the Navy Department for the development and construction of a trial submarine battery, with no expenses spared. Hutchison reported that Admiral Cone had offered the use of USS Cuttlefish for tests once the device was ready. Clearly the high command was interested. Edison rewarded “Hutch” by introducing him to his family—a rare honor, since Mina seldom approved of mixing with the help.42

Early in the new year draft specifications were ready for the new S-type battery. It would consist of 102 alkaline cells, each standing five feet tall and containing nineteen positive and twenty negative tubes. When topped up with electrolyte, they would weigh 508 pounds apiece. This projected a power pack 25 percent lighter yet three times as capacious as the leaden mass that so inhibited the Cuttlefish underwater. The cells, moreover, were fully dischargeable, whereas acid ones could not stand a drop to one hundred volts without injury. They would last three times longer—ten years or more—and radiate enough electricity to drive a submarine 150 miles underwater at an easy five knots. Altogether the S-type battery would have an operating superiority of 92 percent, in Hutchison’s excited calculation.43

Taking advantage of Charles’s absence at college, he worked at becoming a substitute son to Edison, and succeeded sooner than he expected. He had special qualifications that endeared him to the Old Man and made it difficult for other sycophants at the plant to compete. One was his scientific understanding of deafness. Hutchison knew enough to feel the sense of exclusion behind Edison’s lifelong pretense of being content not to hear most of the world’s noises—a loneliness that had driven him, from puberty onward, to surround himself with the jostling camaraderie of men at work on machines. Hutchison also shared Edison’s nocturnal energy, joking that he took vacations only “from 2 A.M. to 7 A.M.”44 Most congenially, both men had the positive imagination characteristic of inventors. They could see solid, finished engineering behind a pencil sketch and, with less rational clarity, the orders that were sure to result from any expression of buyer interest.

“If, within the next five years—the life maximum of lead cells in use in new boats—we get the battery business of the present submarine boats of the U.S. Navy,” Hutchison wrote Edison, “we will sell 6,912 of the S-19 cells, equivalent [to] the gross business of $3,710,000.00.” That was but a fraction of the billions of rubles, marks, lire, yen, and pounds that would flood West Orange if other navies of the world followed suit. At present, the United States had eighteen submarines, with ten more under construction. Germany deployed eight and Japan nine (both powers were rumored to be secretly and urgently building up the size of their flotillas), Russia thirty, France fifty-six, and Great Britain sixty-three. All relied on lead-acid batteries. Hutchison’s next move was therefore to write, and have Edison sign, letters to the naval attachés at relevant embassies in Washington, inviting them to visit the laboratory and be briefed on S-type technology.45

He prided himself on his ability to write seductive copy, but the letters (“They are peaches”) attracted just one representative of a major sea power, Cdr. Dmitri Vassilieff of the Imperial Russian Navy.46 This was an unusual rebuff to Edison, whose celebrity was such that any chance to meet him was prized. It was his first experience of the extreme caution with which naval bureaucracies reacted to innovation.

Nor did he distinguish himself as a diplomat when Vassilieff showed up in full uniform. The commander was welcomed with an Edisonian harangue on Russia’s ill treatment of Japan in the early years of the century. Afterward it was all Hutchison could do to persuade him to accept four smaller batteries for testing in Kronstadt. Rival attachés chose to wait and see how Edison’s prototype performed.47

They were in no hurry, knowing his reputation for fanatical perfectionism. Undiscouraged, Hutchison applied for, and received from Edison, exclusive agency rights to market the S-type at home and abroad, for a 10 percent commission on each sale in lieu of salary. In the meantime he tried to stimulate interest in the battery by the old sales technique of making it sound hard to get. When a contractor to the Royal Navy, more interested in intelligence than business, inquired about its availability, he cannily replied that so many continental powers had approached him, “I cannot make any definite arrangements with you at present.” And to Frank L. Dyer, he boasted that even Washington was going to have to restrain its impatience. “I told the submarine people we did not care to consider tying up with them at the present time, as Mr. Edison is averse to doing business on anything which he has not finished and thoroughly tested to his satisfaction. I therefore left the matter open, and their representatives departed disappointed, but hopeful.”48

“INC.”

Dyer was the most ambitious of Edison’s senior aides. Having added the title of biographer to his other roles as company counsel and sales manager, he aspired to greater distinction. His hope had long been that Edison: His Life and Inventions would serve as a sort of pedestal onto which Edison the Colossus would step and turn to marble. Dyer could then reorganize the multicompany mess at West Orange (nobody knew quite what to call it) into Thomas A. Edison, Inc., and be rewarded with the new firm’s presidency.49

Personal ambition aside, it was urgent that someone trained in corporate law prepare for a time when the laboratory would no longer be a fountainhead of Edisonian invention but merely the research arm of a great manufacturing concern. The National Phonograph Company, Edison’s biggest dollar earner, was bled white from transfusions to unprofitable subsidiaries.50 Two of these—Edison Storage Battery and Edison Portland Cement—seemed sure to pay off their enormous start-up costs eventually, because they each manufactured a superb product. So, for that matter, did National Phonograph: its cylinder-playing Amberolas were sonically superior to Victor’s disk-playing Victrolas. But the evidence was unmistakable that consumers preferred the convenience of flat records. Victor’s sales for the last year totaled $8.25 million to National Phonograph’s $2.67 million. Even Edison agreed that he must adapt to disk technology or see the company go under. Over the last twenty years he had personally spent well over $4 million to hold his business empire together. Dyer made him understand that any further profligacy would bankrupt him. Only outside investment could help now, and the best way of ensuring that was to capitalize on his single greatest asset—his name.51

Reluctantly, he gave permission for National Phonograph to be reincorporated as Thomas A. Edison, Inc., and serve as the nucleus of a centrally structured organization run by one executive committee instead of dozens. He was made chairman of the board of directors, which then elected Dyer president, and Carl Wilson, chief of the Phonograph Works, general manager. Edison’s compensation for the loss of his autocracy (and bets were off on how long he would stand for that) was the creation of an “Engineering and Experimental Department” allowing him continued control over all intellectual property issuing from the laboratory.52

The new company was registered on 28 February 1911. As a consolidation it was hardly complete. The battery and cement companies were kept off the books, for fear of frightening off investors. Still, a jumble of antiquated fiefdoms had been pushed part of the way toward the modern ideal of a professionally managed public corporation. “Inc.,” as Dyer’s creation soon became known, was capitalized at $12 million and employed about 3,600 people.53

YOU’D THINK HE’D HAVE AN APRON ON

Edison’s metamorphosis into a corporation coincided with the silver anniversary of his marriage to Mina. They celebrated with a family party at Glenmont. The house was laden with gifts and flowers. Charles, now in his sophomore year at MIT, could not attend, so Madeleine put a photograph of him on the dinner table. “As a surprise,” Mina squeezed as much of herself as possible into her wedding dress. Eleven-year-old Theodore at least was dazzled, and reportedly “fell in love” with her. After dinner Edison engaged everybody in a game of Parcheesi, which he had learned during his wandering days as a telegrapher.54

It was a treat for Mina to have her husband close for a whole evening, because he was in one of his periods of near-manic activity at the laboratory. Assigning Hutchison most of the responsibility for submarine battery development had by no means reduced his workload. He simply took on the weight of a project that he deemed much more urgent: restoration of the Edison Phonograph Division (as it was now known) to profitability. That meant coming up with a disk player and a compatible line of records that would not impinge on patents held by his competitors. “Such a drag on him,” Mina complained to Charles. “Don’t you think that Victor is gaining all the time?”55

She paid close attention to retail trends, and fretted about her husband’s paradoxical refusal to accept that the cylinder was a doomed device. Soon Edison Records would be the only company, except for Pathé Frères in France, to keep producing it. His reasons for doing so were in no way sentimental. Having experimented with a telegraph-recording disk even before he invented the phonograph, he knew that the geometry of the cylinder made for more constant pitch. Its volute grooves spiraled from left to right without tightening or tapering, whereas disk grooves contracted toward the turntable spindle, slowing the speed at which the needle rode in its cut.56

When fresh copies of the Edison Amberol cylinder and the Victor Red Seal twelve-inch disk were played through the same horn, there was no question as to which sounded more natural, and which thinner and scratchier. But the very plasticity of the cylinder’s hard-wax grooves allowed a sapphire stylus to carve away their definition, so its fidelity deteriorated, whereas the disk’s gritty shellac, like most coarse things, endured.

Had it not been for an ill-reasoned injunction against him in 1905, Edison would have long before coated his cylinder blanks with one of the cellulose compounds he had pioneered in the early days of the phonograph era. Only now, having bought a competing patent, was he free to switch. But his star chemist, Walter Aylsworth—“one of the best experimenters I ever have known”—offered him something even tougher than celluloid. It was an infusible phenolic resin impregnated with a heterocyclic compound of ammonia and formaldehyde. The only trouble with this plastic was that its glasslike hardness, while admirably preserving the vertical incisions of the recording needle, caused the reproducer, or playback head, to ski-jump. Furthermore, each jump and subsequent touchdown shocked the sapphire point and fragmented the sound. Edison experimented successfully with a heavier reproducer, but the cost of continuous sound was more stylus wear.57

Searching for a varnish that would be kinder to sapphire, and good for both disks and cylinders, he patented his own “Composition for Sound-Records,” a hard resin into which he melted crystals of halogenized naphthalene. The crystals felted together during cooling and solidification, giving him an end product of extraordinary tensility and strength. He laminated some tubes of German lignite wax stiffened with cotton flock, and found that both base and coating had the same coefficient of expansion—which meant none of the cracking that so often bedeviled plaster of paris cylinders during changes of heat or humidity. Delighted, he patented that process too. “My improved record,” he boasted in his application, “is so durable that it may be dropped or even thrown on the floor with considerable force without encountering any objectionable injury.”58

All the same, he had to acknowledge the superior durability of Aylsworth’s plastic, which was nonfibrous and consequently smoother. If he could design a floating-weight reproducer it would not shrug off, it promised permanent fidelity. Since even Aylsworth had difficulty pronouncing the name of its condensed hardener, hexamethylenetetramine, they settled on the brand name Condensite. Edison allowed the chemist full patent credit and put it into bulk production at Glen Ridge, New Jersey.^*8, 59

Although he would cling to the cylinder as his preferred recording medium for another eighteen years, he was astonished at how good Condensite sounded when engrooved in disk form. But the disk had to be absolutely flat. If not, the vertical needle movement he insisted on (as opposed to the wall-banging, lateral swing his competitors preferred) tended to exaggerate any surface warp, with resultant distortion and pitch variations painful to his strangely sensitive remnant of hearing. This mandated an extra-heavy disk base, which might put off some customers.

Mina wished he would give up on the phonograph altogether, sell up, and retire. Seminole Lodge beckoned her, with its fruits and orange blossom, but Edison said he was too busy to go south. As it was, he seldom slept. “Papa is in the laboratory tonight working away at his disk,” she wrote Charles on 6 March. “He cannot get the pure tones and it is worrying him greatly.”60 As always, Edison’s solution to any problem was to pile experiment upon experiment (more than two thousand on the reproducer alone) until he dropped from fatigue.That same night Hutchison photographed the Old Man napping on a workbench in the chemistry building:

Edison asleep in his laboratory, 6 March 1911. (Photograph by Miller R. Hutchison)

If he did not come home at four-thirty A.M., only to bolt back to work after breakfast, he would stay away for days, until Mina went down and forced him to eat, bathe, and shave.

Edison was so driven, in both senses of the word, that when he had dry cleaning to drop off at the Armenian laundry on Valley Road, he would order his chauffeur to maintain speed and, en passant, hurl out his dirty suits. Rose Tarzian, the young immigrant inside the shop, got used to hearing the thump of the bundle on her screen door. Sometimes his vests would be virtually uncleanable, being burned by acid or spattered with wax. Beads of Condensite were of course unremovable. “You’d think he’d have an apron on, a leather apron!” she complained.61

After doing her best, Rose would return the suits to Glenmont, climbing the long slope of Llewellyn Park on foot. If Mina came to the door, she could count on a fifteen-cent tip. If the master of the house did, she got nothing.62

HE IS OPENING UP

Although Edison treated Hutchison and a New York Times reporter to a preview of a new “talking pictures” system he had devised, he said he was not satisfied with it yet. “I want to give grand opera….I want to have Teddy addressing a meeting.”^*9 Characteristically, he waved aside its main problem, synchronism, sure that he would be able to fix it once he was finished with his recording project.63

He was, in any case, still involved in development of the submarine battery, if only because Hutchison sought the special intimacy with him that comes when men work side by side late at night at the same experimental table. They performed safety tests on the prototype, checking its water resistance and equipping it with an overcharge alarm. Its cells—suitcase-size six-hundred-pound steel jars—emitted large quantities of hydrogen at the beginning of their recharge cycle, so they subjected them to a series of internal detonations, to ensure the steel was thick enough to contain the explosive force.^*10 “He is opening up to me more and more all the time,” Hutchison wrote on 22 April. And a month later: “Long talk with TAE. Gradually making myself more valuable to him.”64

Often as not, it was he who drove the Old Man home at dawn. Sometimes he would return at once to the laboratory, eschewing sleep altogether, in the hope that his dedication would be noticed. It was. Edison soon rewarded him with free office space in the storage battery building across Lakeside Avenue. That was enough encouragement for Hutchison to move his wife and four sons to a rental property in West Orange, while keeping a beady eye on real estate opportunities in Llewellyn Park.65 Discovering that Edison loved to be driven through the New Jersey countryside, he treated him and Mina to long jaunts in his Packard, and showed them where he lived. Mina began to be as suspicious of him as she was of Madeleine’s rosary-rattling boyfriend. Was “Hutch,” as he insisted on being called, also seeking a filial relationship with the world’s greatest inventor?

As the weather warmed, she moved to detach her husband from his clutches, and her daughter from those of John Sloane. She declared that it was high time the Edisons—her Edisons, excluding of course Tom and William—took a grand tour of Europe. They should stay away all summer, exploring northern France, the Alps, the Danube valley, and Germany. Perhaps a reunion could be arranged with Marion Edison Öser, the half-sister Theodore had never seen, and Madeleine and Charles could hardly remember. Marion was married, happily by all reports, to a German army officer and lived in Mühlhausen.

Edison was not averse to a sabbatical. Having patented eighteen phonograph improvements in as many months and designed a prototype disk player (not to mention an apparatus to add sound and color to movies), he admitted to being exhausted.66 He had not taken a real vacation since 1889, his winter retreats to Florida—when he took them—being little more than transfers from one laboratory to another. But he still would not leave until the disk player was ready to show at the National Association of Talking Machine Jobbers convention in July. After that he had yet another patent to file, for the reclamation of wash water from electroplate cathodes, and Hutchison needed help in the manufacture of nickel flake….67

Mina, Madeleine, and Theodore sailed for France on 24 June, leaving Edison to follow with Charles at his leisure.

A GREEN SEVEN-SEAT, OPEN-TOP DAIMLER

“I want to get away and do a little worrying,” Edison joked to reporters when he finally boarded the Mauretania at the beginning of August. He said he had been too busy to indulge that luxury at work, and now had at least two months to make up for it.68

On the first day out to sea, Charles came of age. He celebrated by smoking his first cigarette, a practice he would maintain as continuously as possible for the rest of his life. His father nudged him further into his future course with a gift of 505 shares in Thomas A. Edison, Inc., phonograph stock.^*11 Charles by no means disliked the idea of taking the company over one day. But first, there were the fleshpots of Europe to look forward to. The astute Madeleine sensed that Charles had “Bohemian” tendencies. “He likes queer—out of the ordinary things and places.”69

If by expressing a desire to “get away,” Edison imagined he would escape his own celebrity, he soon discovered that it traveled with him.70 He became a fixture in the first-class smoking room, where fellow passengers hung on his cigar-chomping monologues. One of them was Henry James. “The great bland simple deaf street-boy-faced Edison is on board and I have talked with him,” James wrote in a letter describing the voyage. He added that he was touched by the kindness and sympathy with which Edison had asked after his favorite niece, a victim of depression. Charles was amused to see the author of The Wings of the Dove throwing paper darts on deck with his father, in an apparent investigation of the laws of aerodynamics. “The days of steam power are about to finish,” Edison observed as it thrummed beneath him. “Flight will be the future transport phenomenon.”71

News of his imminent arrival in London reached the highest levels of the British government. Arrangements were made to receive him in the House of Commons on the evening of 8 August, in spite of the fact that the Liberal government’s Parliament Bill, the most controversial legislation since the Reform Act of 1832, was scheduled for debate that night. Hard as it was for Edison to comprehend, Britain was in a prerevolutionary state over the measure, which sought to deprive the unelected House of Lords of its power to control public spending.

His legal affairs representative in Britain, Sir George Croydon Marks, MP, met him after he checked into the Carlton Hotel and escorted him and Charles to Westminster. By order of the Speaker, they were accommodated in the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery of the Commons and looked down on a scene of extraordinary rhetorical venom. The debate was dominated by Winston Churchill, who as home secretary of the governing Liberal party accused his old Tory colleague, Lord Hugh Cecil, of trying to provoke “riot and disorder” by resisting evolutionary change. Cecil declared that Prime Minister H. H. Asquith and his cabinet were “guilty of high treason” in seeking to overthrow a thousand years of aristocratic privilege. Arthur Balfour, leader of the opposition, defended a panicky amendment aimed at protecting the monarchy itself from violence at the hands of Liberal demagogues like David Lloyd George. Cries of “traitor” echoed across the aisle.72

Meanwhile Edison, unable to understand a word, pondered the deficiencies of the chamber’s ventilation system. It was a hot night, and he asked if there were no means of cooling the room. Marks replied that generally, when temperatures became unbearable, iced water was sprayed onto the windows outside. Edison listened wide-eyed. “Do you tell me so? I could not have believed anything so stupid.”73

Bored by the debate, which went on until after midnight, he sought relief on the terrace, where a steady procession of MPs paid homage to him. Lloyd George, a jovial little Welshman, asked if he could “invent something for getting bills quickly through Parliament.” The Irish nationalist leader T. P. O’Connor received the same impression of naïveté that struck Henry James. “He is like a great schoolboy….The simplicity of genius was never before so remarkably illustrated.”^*12, 74

Next morning, as newspapers shouted news of the government’s victory, a fire burned the Carlton Hotel to the ground. Since it was the traditional haunt of British bluebloods visiting town, Lord Cecil no doubt saw its immolation as symbolic of the vote. But by then Edison and his son had checked out, and were on their way to Folkestone and the ferry to Boulogne, where Mina, Madeleine, and Theodore awaited them in a green seven-seat, open-top Daimler.75

MR. VALENTINE

The car, rented for them by the ever-resourceful Hutchison, came with a chauffeur, as befitted a conveyance warranted to the British royal family.76 Edison delighted in its size and power. One of his quirks was that he had never learned to drive, although he always sat forward, giving peremptory directions.

For the next six weeks he occupied this vantage point, enjoying panoramic views of northern France, the Loire valley, Burgundy, Switzerland, the Austrian Tyrol and Italian Dolomites, Hungary, Bohemia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Prussia. Every prospect was partially obscured by the American flag that Theodore—at thirteen a patriot contemptuous of all things foreign—insisted on flying from a pole on the front bumper. Edison protested in vain that the sight of Old Glory doubled or tripled the prices that innkeepers quoted them en route.

Sometime after leaving Paris, the travelers became aware that they were being followed by another car. It turned out to be carrying a representative from The World who, when confronted, protested that he was under orders to cover their every move in Europe. “You know we newspaper men have to do these things.”77

Edison refused to have anything to do with him but nevertheless provided him with a scoop when the Daimler, approaching Interlaken, skidded into a ditch and had to be hauled out by horses. Thereafter the reporter could not be dislodged. The younger Edisons felt sorry for him, because he turned out to be underpaid, sickly, and endearingly incompetent.^*13 They delighted in his name—Edward Abram Uffington Valentine—dubbing him “Feb. 14” for short. Edison yielded to their entreaties to grant him the occasional reluctant interview. When in the Austrian town of Bludenz he accidentally overdosed on strychnine^*14 and nearly died, Mina nursed him with a calm competence that surprised her children. He was too weak to file his next report, so Charles wrote it for him.78

Impatient to get on, Edison showed little sympathy for the hapless scribe, nor for any of the dirt-poor peasants they saw as the Daimler continued east. (Charles remained behind, to follow with Mr. Valentine once the reporter recovered.) Their next destination was Budapest, which Madeleine and Mina both longed to see. If they imagined its remoteness would allow them to visit like any ordinary American family, they were progressively disillusioned. No matter how small the village or how large the city on either side of the Danube, from Klagenfurt to Vienna to Györ, crowds besieged them.79

In Budapest a wistful, bowler-hatted figure from Menlo Park days accosted them. It was Francis Jehl, whom Edison had sent abroad as an engineer twenty-nine years before and subsequently lost interest in. Jehl was now working for the Budapester Allgemeine Elektrizitäts Aktiengesellschaft, burdened with an invalid wife and resentful of the fact that he had never shared in the fabulous riches deriving from his pioneer involvement in incandescent lightbulb technology. As far as Edison was concerned, he hadn’t either. But to Jehl, the great car, the royal suite in the Grand Hotel Hungaria, and the crowds in the street spoke gilt-edged volumes.

Alternately obsequious and querulous, he mustered the courage to tell his former boss that he, Edward Johnson, Francis Upton, and William Hammer felt unrewarded for their services. Johnson was now “a milkman,” and Upton was “selling sand.” Edison’s response was to shrug and say they ought to have helped themselves.80

Jehl nevertheless proudly escorted him to Brünn on 13 September, in order to show off the theater he had fitted out with incandescent lights in 1882, on behalf of the Compagnie Continentale Edison. Next morning Edison and his party—amplified now by Marion and her German husband Oscar, traveling in Mr. Valentine’s car—left for Prague. The Daimler got under way first, with a police escort, amid cheers and a shower of flowers. Jehl stood in the road with his hat off until it disappeared from sight.81

A SMALL BOY DASHING

Madeleine took an instant liking to her half-sister, a stout, vivacious forceful woman of thirty-eight. She also took to Oscar, an echt deutsch army officer who spoke little English. “He seems an awfully nice man, rather jolly or rather genial and good-natured and adores her.”82

Over the years Marion had become more German than American. She even looked it, with her knotted blond hair and massive build. Fluent also in French, with an acute ear for opera, she had a sophistication that Madeleine admired, while lacking the means to live well. She was possessed of her mother’s love of money, and like Tom and William, felt that Edison had never given her enough of it. She showed no envy of Madeleine’s Bryn Mawr cachet, although she would one day remark that “my father’s idea of an education was that I shouldn’t get any.”83 In her heart, and on her lightly pockmarked face, Marion bore scars of Edison’s neglect of her at age seventeen, when she lay ill with smallpox in France and he declined to visit her, or even write.^*15 But her adulation of him was still so plain that he was flattered into a renewal of the love he had shown her after Mary Edison’s death.

“My best invention?” he said, in response to a question from Oscar. “You own it.”84

The couple’s German came in useful—critically so—on Sunday 17 September, when the Daimler cruised into the Black Forest village of Lauf and smacked into a small boy dashing across the street. He was clubfooted and had probably tripped in an attempt to play chicken. An angry crowd collected at once. Edison and Mina jumped out of the car to try to prevent someone from lifting the boy, for fear he would choke on his welling blood. But then they saw he was already dead.85

It took some time for Oscar and Marion, traveling miles behind with Mr. Valentine, to arrive. The situation grew ominous until local police confirmed that the accident had been the boy’s fault. Even so, Oscar’s military bearing and Marion’s interpretive skills helped quell the horror of the incident, enough for the Edisons to get some fitful sleep in an inn that night. An official inquest the next day cleared them of negligence, and Edison left four hundred marks behind to compensate the boy’s indigent mother.86

The remaining ten days of the tour were hard to enjoy. Mina had been hoping that Madeleine would go to Italy for the rest of the year and, with luck, forget about John Sloane. But she had no heart to protest when the girl said she preferred to go home.87

Before kissing his other daughter goodbye in Dresden, Edison sensed her desperate desire for a car. He told her to buy a Mercedes-Benz and charge it to him. From Berlin, he sent the Daimler back to Paris, then took the rest of his family by train to Hamburg. On 28 September they embarked in the German liner Amerika, and the first person they saw on arrival in New York, snapping photographs as they came down the gangway, was Miller Hutchison.88

ANOTHER AND GREATER ARCH

Edison’s oracular tendency, which had grown on him since his pronouncements on the afterlife, did not permit him to come home without letting American reporters know exactly what he thought about modern Europe. “What is my impression of the people on the other side? Well, I’ll tell you. For the most part they are too thick—too wide.”89

In a variety of interviews, he criticized the “lazy” English for consuming too much “beef and porter,” dismissed the illuminations of Paris as “twilight” in comparison with those of Broadway, and complained about the feminine fashions he had seen there and in Prague. “Primary colors in a toilette are a sign of an undeveloped sense….A woman’s skirts should bow in curved lines from her hips.” As for the urban scene east of the Rhine, “Something is wrong with the German aesthetic lobe. They ice their brains with too much beer. The result is beer architecture.”90

This last comment outraged the scientists, writers, and industrialists who had welcomed him to Berlin, one with such respect “I felt inclined to kiss his hand.” Sigmund Bergmann, who had known Edison for more than forty years, sent him an article entitled “Eine Bier-Phantasie Edisons” and asked him to deny his reported words, “so that I can pacify the people here, who are looking at this matter very tragically.”91 Edison cabled a quasi-corrective letter and tried to atone for his gaffe by praising Germany’s phenomenal industrial growth, especially in the field of chemical manufacturing.92

He sounded more serious when he spoke about the belligerent nationalism that he had sensed in every country he visited. “They’re all thinking too much about war—forts and guns everywhere and everyone on the lookout for spies.” Even in Switzerland, where a man had been shot dead for picking strawberries on the wrong side of the Swiss-German border, there was fear of a collapse of international order. “I’m not a Malthusian,” he told a reporter from the Pittsburgh Telegraph. “I don’t believe in the agency of war in keeping down the population, though I think that if France had another tussle with another country, its wonderful intelligence would go far to meet superior brute force.” It was clear which “brute” power he had in mind. He worried about the extent to which war, and the glorification of it, permeated European history, saying that was why he had never been impressed by the Arc de Triomphe. “I always see beside it another and greater arch, thousands of feet high, made of the phosphate of the bones of victims sacrificed for Napoleon’s personal glory.”93

If every battle monument in Europe were inscribed with its true cost in blood and money, Edison said, there would be no new ones. However, there was now a deterrent that he believed would have the same moral effect: “fear of indiscriminate annihilation” brought about by the development of the flying machine. “A nitroglycerine bomb dropped from one of our modern airships will do more damage than whole days of fighting did in Napoleon’s time.” No sane political leader would ever contemplate such carnage. “In other words, invention has got beyond the thirst for blood; the power of science that has been let loose must overwhelm aggressive diplomacy.”94

A COUPLE OF QUARTS

On 18 October, nine days after the employees of Thomas A. Edison, Inc., welcomed their chairman back to work (Hutchison again snapping away), unofficial word came from Stockholm that he was to be awarded the $40,000 Nobel Prize for physics.95 The news was, to say the least, consolation for his rejection, earlier that year, for membership in the National Academy of Sciences.^*16, 96 But when the Nobel Foundation made its formal announcement, the prize went to Professor Wilhelm Wien of Würzburg, a city rich in beer architecture. Edison maintained a dignified silence. If he had done so after his trip, instead of inflaming European sensibilities, he might have been bemedaled along with Marie Curie, who won the prize for chemistry.

Instead, he accepted from the president of the American Institute of Mining Engineers a gift made to his own Shylockian specification. It was a cubic foot (“Nor cut thou less nor more”) of solid copper inscribed to him in appreciation of the boost his electrical inventions had given to the nation’s copper industry since 1868. He mounted it on a pedestal in the laboratory library, preferring its tactile, 468-pound mass to the frippery of his other awards, of which he claimed to have “a couple of quarts” stashed somewhere.97

Boosted by his vacation, Edison confronted multiple business challenges that fall. “He certainly has come home with new energy,” Mina wrote on 27 October. “It is so overpowering that it paralyzes me.” He found that the 250 experimenters who depended on him for daily direction had been lax, during his absence, on several fronts—the most critical being their failure to adapt his prototype disk phonograph to the requirements of commercial production.98 Although the model exhibited to jobbers both looked and sounded splendid, he had to be sure its complex technology did not price it out of the market. It would take him another year to achieve that confidence.

They had also stalled on the manufacture of one of his loonier inventions, concrete furniture—whose main virtue was that it tended to stay in place. Only the submarine alkaline battery project showed progress. The lead-acid lobby was already campaigning against it, a sure sign that Wall Street was seriously interested.

In appreciation, Edison appointed Hutchison as his personal representative at the plant and confided that as soon as Donald Bliss, his chief engineer, could be gotten rid of, he would have that powerful position too.99

A CIVILIAN OF CONSEQUENCE

Hutchison soon coined a variant to his title and had stationery printed that proclaimed him “Personal Representative of Thomas Edison in Naval Affairs.” He arranged for his boss to be made honorary vice-president of the Navy League and on 2 November drove him, Mina, Madeleine, and Theodore to Staten Island to watch the Atlantic Fleet parade in New York Bay. It was the greatest display of American sea power yet seen, confirming news that the U.S. Navy now ranked second only to that of Great Britain.100 In a frigid gale that failed to blow away the thudding of nearly four thousand cannon shots, twenty-four battleships foamed past the Statue of Liberty, followed by a five-mile chain of smaller ironclads. No longer white as they had been in Theodore Roosevelt’s day, they presented a progression of gray, war-ready steel. Of particular interest to Edison and his party were eight submarines riding so low in the water that their saluting crews were at risk of slipping off each narrow whaleback.101

Later that month Hutchison escorted Edison to Washington for introductions to President Taft, Admiral Dewey, and officials at the navy yard. Edison was taciturn about their discussions of defense matters, except to predict that one day most of the engineering on U.S. warships would be electrical. A week later he welcomed two hundred officers and men from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to the laboratory for a lecture-demonstration on alkaline battery technology. Describing the S-type as the climax of his life’s work in electrochemistry, he assured them it would enable a submarine crew to stay underwater for three months without breathing any fatal “acid gas.” What was more, it was invulnerable to concussion. This was of particular interest to the sailors in his audience, some of whom might have suffered ear damage during the fleet exercise. They told him that violent sound waves, as from cannon fire, had neutralized many lead cells in the past.102

Slowly and subtly (and without awareness on his part, while he remained preoccupied with disk and talking picture development), Edison was being transformed into a civilian of consequence to the national defense. Hutchison wrote at the end of December: “I am ensconsed here, right next to the greatest living inventor & apt to step into his shoes when he passes away. Brilliant future ahead of me & what others consider phenomenal advancement behind me. If every year of my life is as satisfactory to look back on, I’ll be glad.”103

A LITTLE GAMBLING

The first important visitor Hutchison escorted around the Edison plant in the new year of 1912 was a nouveau multimillionare from Dearborn, Michigan. Henry Ford, at forty-eight, had long been a genuflector at the shrine of Thomas Edison. He preserved as holy tokens some snapshots he had taken of him at a beach hotel in Brooklyn fifteen years before. In those days, Ford had been an aspiring gas-buggy designer in the employ of the Edison Illuminating Company of Detroit. Now, thanks to wildfire success of his Model T automobile, he was one of the richest men in America, keen as ever to become close to his idol.104

William J. Bee, Edison’s resident expert on electric vehicles, was equally keen to have Ford divert some of his money into the Edison Storage Battery Company. He had sent him a portrait of his boss, flatteringly inscribed, along with an invitation to come to West Orange, as Edison “would be very much pleased to meet Mr. Ford.”105

The pleasure was augmented when Ford allowed Bee to persuade him that the lightweight alkaline battery would make an ideal triggering device for automobile self-starters. He agreed to invest $1.2 million in whatever buildings and equipment Thomas A. Edison, Inc., would need to supply the Ford Motor Company with 450,000 type A cells a year, starting in 1913.106 Overjoyed at the windfall, Edison sent Ford a letter in the curlicued calligraphy he reserved for momentous documents:

Friend Ford.

Billy Bee seems to be obsessed with the idea of having you do a little gambling with me on the future of the storage battery. Nothing would please me more than to have you join in….

Up to the present time I have only increased the plant with profits made in my other things, and this has a limit. Of course I could go to Wall St and get more, but my experience over there is as sad as Chopin’s Funeral March. I keep away.

Yours

Edison107

A MAN TO BE WATCHED

Edison turned sixty-five in February 1912, and decided that the alkaline storage battery, his most sophisticated invention since the movie camera, was “complete” enough to sell itself without further improvements. No matter how long Hutchison took to finish testing the submarine version (and the Navy Department’s arthritic approval process was bound to take even longer) smaller A-cells were now pouring out of his factory at a rate that Ford’s order promised to transform into an avalanche. Hutchison saw nothing but gold in its monetary moraine. Dazzled, he pitched for, and received, permission to act as advertising and sales agent for all Edison batteries. He was a fluent long-copy writer, and the media managers of the magazines who sold him space would probably find ways to express their gratitude.108

“I feel afraid of him,” Mina wrote Charles. “He is so aggressive and has Papa so thoroughly under his thumb without Papa’s realizing it that there is no telling to what lengths he may go— He seems to me a man to be watched.” Her unspoken fear was that by the time her son graduated from MIT, “Hutch” would have amassed enough power to threaten Charles’s future as heir to the leadership of Thomas A. Edison, Inc.109

Hutchison, whose appointment as chief engineer became formal that summer, was aware of Mina’s fears, as well as that of Frank Dyer (ailing, overextended, and bullied by Edison at board meetings). He combated it by working longer days and nights at the plant than anyone else, the Old Man included, and by sending Charles lengthy reports of company activities, written with a disingenuous frankness that charmed the young man and reassured him that his future was secure.

I am very anxious to get something in shape for you to jump into when you get through College….There isn’t a job here in the Works that I would have on a salary basis….I am so exceedingly fond of your father that I would work for ten years for nothing to help in any way if he happened to be in any such condition that he could not pay. As it is, I fully expect my commission end of the Government business^*17 to amount to a good deal in the next few years, and meanwhile, I am doing all I can to promote the interest of the Battery Company and T.A.E. Inc.110

I am so exceedingly fond of your father. Mina worried that the fondness might be reciprocated. For most of his career Edison had been immune to flattery. He had always depended on acolytes to do his will and treated them all, affectionately if distantly, as intimates. But his attachment to them had never been as quasi-filial as this one. There was something yielding about the way he accepted Hutchison’s compliments, guffawed at his “coon” jokes, and allowed the younger man to publicize him as if he were a white-haired, benignly smiling cigar-store Indian. He posed for a couple of strange two-shots that Hutchison did not hesitate to circulate on company literature. One showed him apparently conversing with a submarine battery almost as big as himself. In the other, a withdrawn-looking Edison sat staring into space while Hutchison, a skilled Morse code sender, tapped out a message on his knee.

THE INSOMNIA SQUAD

Edison receiving Morse signals from Hutchison, circa 1912.

The photograph was deceptive, in that Edison, who had been attracted to the stage as a teenager, always enjoyed hamming for the camera. Helpless he was not, as staff in the Phonograph Works discovered when he embarked on a bout of disk development so protracted that his seven assisting engineers dubbed themselves “the Insomnia Squad.”111 It began behind locked doors around 9 September 1912 and continued with minimal sleep, soap, or shampoo for the next month and a half. Mina was not around to corral Edison home, due to consecutive absences in Maine on vacation with her children, and in Akron, where her mother lay dying. He took full advantage of his liberation, enjoying himself more, probably, than his bleary-eyed colleagues. When he boasted that they put in “more than twenty-one hours a day,” he did not include a preparatory solo spell by himself, lasting 95 hours and 49 minutes by the laboratory time clock.112

Edison bore much responsibility for the desperate pace of the Squad’s work, because in vowing to market the ne plus ultra of phonographs, he had with typical optimism assumed that it could be announced to the general public in October. Fourteen months after his call for the production of 3,500 disk machines, only 329 were packed—a frustrating situation, since the sales department had advance orders for nearly five thousand. The problem was not lack of supply—he had $800,000 worth of instruments stacked in the warehouse—but lack of records to issue with them. For that, his own obsession with sound quality was responsible.113

To the frustration of his executive committee, Edison rejected almost every test pressing he heard. Dust and other impurities endemic to the disk duplication process caused a slight surface noise that bothered nobody else. Cranking up the playback mechanism to its maximum amplification and cupping his right ear to the grille, he complained of loud “scratch.” He would not approve any commercial pressing for release until it matched the clean sound of the masters he had cut in experiment.114 That was the Insomnia Squad’s challenge as Edison cajoled its members into action.^*18

After two or three days of progress, he posed with them for an ostentatiously “historic” photograph, as he had done once at Menlo Park when he was young himself, and some of his experimenters mere boys. It showed a group of not-yet-exhausted men stoking up on hamburgers, apple pie, and coffee at two in the morning.115 They needed all the food they could get—“fuel for our physical energies,” Edison called it—through mid-October, when he wrote Mina to say, “I have overcome with certainty the principal troubles.”116

Edison and the Insomnia Squad at midnight “lunch,” fall 1912.

On the twenty-sixth he patented three significant disk-molding improvements. One involved a controlled system of Condensite flow onto a rotating transfer plate of polished German silver, which tilted as it slowly spun, causing the varnish to bleed evenly across the plate surface before the rotation became horizontal. Thus Edison, who had not yet read Einstein, showed an instinctive sense of gyroscopic motion in relation to gravity. With equal ingenuity, he used centrifugal force to throw bubbles and dust granules in the varnish outward while the stock remained fluid. After it cooled and hardened, the rough periphery could be sliced away. The result, Edison claimed, was “a homogenous veneer free from imperfections,” and the Patent Office agreed, granting all three of his applications, along with fifty-eight others he had filed since the beginning of the decade.117

PRETTY CRUEL

That period happened to coincide with the political rise of progressivism, a largely white, middle-class, moralistic, and proregulatory insurgency drawing strength from the liberal wings of both major parties. In the election year of 1912 the movement rated a capital P with the founding of an official Progressive Party by bolters from the GOP. Its leader and formidable candidate for a third term in the White House was Theodore Roosevelt, running on the one hand (to use his favorite phrase) against the Republican president, William Howard Taft, and on the other against Woodrow Wilson, Democratic governor of New Jersey.

Edison had always been a loyal Republican, and with his ear so consistently jammed against phonograph grilles that fall, he might have been expected to pay little attention to the distant barking of ideological debate around the country. But he surprised the writer Will Irwin, while watching a trial of his A-6 battery on the Orange electric railway system,^*19 by declaring for Roosevelt.

“I’m a Progressive, because I’m young at sixty-five,” he said.118 “And this is a young man’s movement. There are a lot of people who die in the head before they are fifty. They’re the ones who get shocked if you propose anything that wasn’t going when they were boys.”

Irwin was struck by the dreamy look in Edison’s gentian-blue eyes as he watched his battery absorbing a recharge that would have melted any conventional lead-acid unit. He stood with hands stuffed in his pockets, talking half to himself, in the manner of a man not used to being interrupted.

It’s the way the world goes—the young push ahead and do things, and the old stand back. I hope I’ll always be with the young.

You see, getting down to the bottom of things, this is a pretty raw, crude civilization of ours—pretty wasteful, pretty cruel, which often comes to the same thing, doesn’t it?…Our production, our factory laws, our charities, our relations between capital and labor, our distributions—all wrong, all out of gear. We’ve stumbled along for a while, trying to run a new civilization in old ways, and we’ve got to start to make the world over.

Edison spoke disapprovingly of the monarchical system of government in Germany, and that country’s “great standing army,” not subject to the will of its people. At least the United States was able to keep its polity in balance through regular elections and constitutional amendments. He said he was for Roosevelt’s most radical proposal, the popular review of judicial decisions. The current Supreme Court was too powerful, and too conservative. “Precedent, all precedent!” he scoffed.

It occurred to Irwin that every one of Edison’s thousand-odd inventions had been built on a precedent of some sort. Yet there was no irony in his claim to having been “a progressive always.” His entire career had been a drive toward modernity.

“There’s the matter of injured workmen,” Edison said, citing the Court’s opposition to employer liability laws. “A laborer loses his right hand in an accident. It’s his capital. It’s as though my plant should burn down without insurance….I never heard a squarer and truer thing from Roosevelt than when he said the loss to workingmen by injury should be a tariff on the business, to be paid by the public in increased prices if necessary.”119

Irwin was probably unaware that Edison’s first example related to a particular amputee in his memory—poor John Dally, radiated to death by their work on X-rays—and Edison himself did not know that he would soon enough experience the pain of the second.

WE’VE HELD YOU DOWN

Edison also followed Roosevelt in embracing the right of women to vote—to the displeasure of his ultraconservative wife and, surprisingly, that of his younger daughter. Since Madeleine’s sole attempt to get a paying job away from West Orange, she had been consumed only with the desire to marry John Sloane and have his children.^*20 The female suffrage movement left her cold.120

Not so Lucile Erskine, a young independent journalist and summa cum laude graduate of Washington University, who boldly asked Edison in an interview what he thought of her sex.121 His reply took her aback.

“It will be three thousand years— at the shortest 2,500—before women are the intellectual equals of men,” he said.

She came back at him. “Haven’t women any brains?”

“There’s some there,” Edison conceded. “A little, not much. But women haven’t any cross fibers. That’s our fault! We’ve held you down. But now you’re beginning to evolute.”

From the twinkle in his eyes, Miss Erskine realized she was being teased.

“There was a chance to hurl the name of Mme. Curie at him,” she wrote afterward, “but the cruel lack of ‘cross fibers’ made one forget to put it in the right place.”

CORPORATE REGRET

Woodrow Wilson had no sooner won the presidency in November than Frank L. Dyer lost his. Ever since the formation of Thomas A. Edison, Inc., there had been speculation among employees as to how long the Old Man could stand for something incorporated in his name to be run by somebody else. Edison blamed Dyer for the Phonograph Division’s continued sales fallback behind Victor, choosing to forget that his own perfectionism (or obstructionism, as the long-suffering lawyer might call it) was a principal reason for the delay in getting its new, competitive products out.122

“The coming of the Disk Phonograph I hope will mark a period of great prosperity for you,” Dyer wrote in his resignation letter, “and I think it better that my successor should take charge of the business at the start rather than later on.” Both he and Edison knew well who that successor would be.

My present position is quite untenable. Many subordinates are reporting directly to you, and I have reason to believe that in a number of cases you have indicated to them that you have lost confidence in my ability or capacity. Rumors of this sort naturally spread very rapidly and destroy all possible authority….

In my recent talk with you, you criticized me quite severely, but I do not think your criticisms were fair or just.123

Dyer pointed out that it had been he who pushed the disk project to begin with, and that the company’s new line of Blue Amberol cylinders, only just coming onto the market, could have been released two years earlier, had Edison stopped fussing with its Condensite composition. He took credit for surging profits in the company’s battery and dictating machine divisions and particularly in his own creation, the Motion Picture Patents Company—a hugely lucrative trust that dominated the movie distribution market. Despite the indignity of never having been allowed a corporate electric car, issued free to most department heads, he assured Edison that “I shall always entertain for you the strongest feelings of admiration and personal affection.”124

William Meadowcroft announced Dyer’s departure with the usual expression of corporate regret, followed by: “Mr. Edison takes the presidency in order that he may direct the policy of the Company in addition to the technical details which he has always had charge of.”125

AND WHAT FLESH

At the end of the year Edison was working past midnight in his laboratory, with Miller Hutchison close by as usual. Distant steam whistles announced the arrival of 1913. The two men shook hands, and Hutchison wished his “Big Chief” well—as indeed he might, since Edison had just wiped off a record with potassium cyanide and was beginning to feel ill. But before taking to his cot in the library, he held a phonograph horn to his ear to hear the whistles better.126

Hutchison recognized the amplifier as part of Edison’s new Kinetophone talking picture system, which he would soon have to introduce to reporters and exhibitors. He was not looking forward to the task. It was bound to be confused with the unsuccessful audio peepshow device, also called a Kinetophone, invented by Edison and W. K. L. Dickson in 1894—not to mention their even earlier attempt to make the prototype Kinetograph camera responsive to sound. Hutchison doubted that this modern enhancement, a complex hookup of hitherto independent machines, would work as “perfectly” as Edison claimed when put in the hands of untrained or half-trained operators. So far his experience with the theater owners and projectionists he had signed up for the launch had not been sanguine. “If ever a fellow was up against a tough game,” he wrote Charles Edison, “it is yours truly.”127

Edison had been the first movie pioneer to equate pictures with spoken words and music: “I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear.” But after the failure of the first Kinetophone, he had abandoned the idea.128 For the rest of the nineteenth century in America, nickelodeon managers clicked coconut shells behind the screen to simulate the sound of trotting horses, hammered metal bars in time with on-screen blacksmiths, and blew bugles or popped Chinese crackers during battle scenes. Some employed hidden actors to utter aloud what their filmed counterparts were supposed to be saying. Rubber-lipped virtuosi who could imitate ship sirens or creaking floors or the whooshing of wind earned excellent money. Music, live or recorded, was a common background effect. Lyman Howe, the wandering “phonograph entertainer,” cheekily used Edison machines to accompany movies from other studios.

Meanwhile in France, dozens of inventors pursued the chimera of images parlantes with a variety of systems that all, sooner or later, fell victim to the medium’s peskiest problems, synchronization and amplification. The only way “live” sound recording (as opposed to a later dub) could be matched with cinematography was to position a phonograph as near as possible to the action, and have the cylinder roll in tandem with the camera. For as long as the phonograph was able to record before running out of wax—no more than two minutes—an illusion of synchronism could be enjoyed by cast and crew. But when cylinder and film were separately duplicated and installed in theaters of varying dimensions, it became almost impossible to maintain a convincing pas de deux. The devices had to be linked by an electric wire or geared shaft, generally run under the auditorium floor, and subject to such interferences as rat suicide or vibratory dislocation. Any skip or splice in the projecting reel might cause Sarah Bernhardt, melodramatically dying on-screen, to start talking like a man, or even worse, break into song. Audiences reacted with predictable outrage, and many an impresario went bankrupt on the huge costs of production and exhibition.

Even when so gifted a showman as Clément-Maurice Gratioulet premiered his Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre at the Paris Exposition in 1900, he had to rely on a projectionist skilled enough to hand-crank the film at varying speeds, while listening via telephone to the dialogue weakly sounding from a Lioretrographe player in the orchestra pit. The man must have had phenomenal hand-ear coordination, because at first Gratioulet prospered mightily, earning rave reviews for his presentations of such spectacles as the ballet L’Enfant prodigue and the duel scene from Rostand’s Cyrano. “Here are beautiful sounds and beautiful gestures which are fixed for eternity,” Le Matin declared. But the beauty the newspaper ascribed to the Lioretrographe was that of novelty, more than true acoustics. Amazement at being able to hear, as well as view, the exquisite Cléo de Mérode perform her danse orientale wore off when theatergoers realized they could see her do it in the flesh—and what flesh!—at the Folies-Bergère. Moreover she danced to the chimes of a live gamelan band, rather than indistinct noises from a tin horn.

Edison’s most serious rival in the audiovisual field—and an unabashed infringer of his sound and movie patents—was Léon Gaumont, whose Chronophone apparatus featured several innovations, such as a transmission clutch, to improve synchronism. But Gaumont also tried to solve the amplification problem by squirting compressed air into the reproducer of his phonograph, which added more hiss than volume to its sound stream. And his device enabling the projectionist to adjust the RPM of the cylinder whenever the film jumped or lagged made for queasy changes of pitch.

Nevertheless, by the time Edison decided to resurrect his Kinetophone idea, the basis of all the French systems, Gaumont’s phonoscènes were being successfully shown all over Europe. Some, with hand-tinted enhancements, made their way to North America. Their sound, however, remained thin and weak. Edison was confident that he could succeed where so many had failed. As president of two of the world’s largest film and phonograph studios, he was in a unique position to combine the experimental resources of each. And as chairman of the powerful Motion Picture Patents Company, he could make sure no further Gaumonts arose to poach on what he regarded as his intellectual property.129

The new Kinetophone apparatus that he developed in an access-restricted, asbestos-padded tent athwart his laboratory^*21 only superficially resembled its predecessor of 1894. There was still a wax cylinder for recording, betraying Edison’s continued preference for that format over the disk. Only now it was a fat, foot-long drum that could hold six and a half minutes of dialogue or music, enabling Edison’s talking pictures director, Oscar Apfel, to shoot the prison scene from Gounod’s Faust in one take. The wax, moreover, was so pure and smooth under the recording needle it could have been frozen butter. It picked up the softest sounds—sighs, stealthy footsteps, creaks—from thirty to forty feet away, through a twelve-petal horn that expanded and tilted toward sound like a great lily seeking sunlight. The phonograph itself was immobile (it weighed seventy-four pounds) and unseen below the frame. This cramped lateral movements onstage, because Edison found that the horn’s receptivity to voices faded at a compound rate when actors walked away.130 As a result, the half-dozen features he prepared to demonstrate the Kinetophone’s adaptability to various entertainment genres all had a centered, “tableau” look, in contrast to the fluid action of silent films.

A high-tension belt of unstretchable silk connected two wheels, one revolved by the phonograph axle, and the other driving a “synchronizer” that was in turn geared by means of a worm shaft to the camera. Thus the Kinetophone, unlike its French predecessors, recorded and shot at a speed controlled by the revolutions of the cylinder, rather than the rotations of the camera’s shutter. When the film was printed and the cylinder duplicated in Condensite, neither could be edited, or the sounds and images would at once separate. “A variation of one-fifth of a second is fatal,” Edison admitted.131

The shorter and tighter the silk belt, the better the synchronism while filming.^*22 But the reverse process of projection—with the phonograph in playback mode, hidden behind the screen and “talking” through a small gauze grille—almost always involved a lengthy extension of the system, via pulleys, to the booth whence another unseen device (endlessly fascinating to children) sent forth its moving fingers of light. Every show, starting with the press preview Edison hosted at the laboratory on 3 January, required the services of a brace of operators: one to crank the picture, and one to activate the phonograph on cue. This occurred when the opening credits (displayed in silence, to save cylinder space) faded from the screen and gave way to the image of an actor in full evening dress entering a luxuriously furnished room. He advanced, stationed himself between two potted plants, and opened his mouth.132

ALL THE RREALISM OF NATURE

“A few brrief years ago,” the mouth said in a clear tenor voice, rolling its rs and articulating every syllable, “Mr. Thomas A. Edi-son prresented to the world his Kinetoscope.^*23 Inventors the worrld over have endeavored to synchrronize the phonograph and motion picture. But it remained for Mr. Edi-son—”133

Was a mouth indeed saying these things, or was a diamond-point reproducer vibrating somewhere below the potted plants, camouflaged with photography? To most people in the room, the illusion was total. Gasps of surprise and wonder could be heard on all sides as the actor continued reciting the words Hutchison had written for him.134

“—to combine his two grreat inventions into this one, which is now entertaining you, and is called the Kinetophone. The Edison Kinetophone is abso-lutely the first genuine talking picture ever prroduced.”

This was of course not true. Gratioulet’s Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre had achieved a similar if less precise verisimilitude twelve years before. But Hutchison, an early exponent of the art of movie hype, evidently thought the adjective genuine meant something.

“The actor,” said the actor, moving freely about the stage, “performs exactly as he does upon the stage, moving freely about, and his everry word and every action are simultaneously recorded, with all the rrealism of nature.”

He proceeded to demonstrate the Kinetophone’s fidelity by smashing a china plate, blowing a horn and a whistle, and introducing some musicians, including a pretty girl who sang “The Last Rose of Summer.” In a crescendo of noise, he brought on a pair of barking dogs.

Edison, chomping on a big black cigar in his front row seat, chuckled at the din and nodded at the actor’s prediction that the world would be watching such performances “one hundred years from now.” But he frowned when his signature flashed on the screen and he heard himself described as “that Wizard of sound and sight, Mr. Thomas A. Edison.” Hutchison had not yet learned that the W-word irritated him.135

The show continued with six more demonstration shorts: the “Miserere” from Il Trovatore, a scene from Planquette’s operetta The Chimes of Normandy with clinking coins and carillons, the quarrel of Brutus and Cassius in Julius Caesar, and three comic sketches that restored Edison’s good humor. Afterward, however, he was cautious in accepting the congratulations of reporters. “No machine is perfect,” he said. “Man is not perfect.” Nevertheless he could not disguise his pride in achieving a synthesis of all his experiments in phonography and cinematography. He said that he had “arrived at a place where ‘the movies’ are also to be known as the ‘talkies.’ ”136

Within twenty-four hours the word talkie entered the vernacular. There was a rush by entrepreneurs, including Edison’s conniving son William, to acquire Kinetophone exhibition rights.137 The Chicago financier John R. Dos Passos offered a down payment of $1 million for a controlling interest in the venture. His envoy was staggered when Edison “just laughed” at the certified check, saying that he intended to “operate the machines and market them himself.” The successful bidder, representing a combine of the nation’s three largest vaudeville networks, accepted these conditions and named itself the American Talking Pictures Company. It contracted with Edison to manufacture three hundred systems and produce a steady supply of features to feed them. A national release date was set for 17 February, much to Hutchison’s dread. The press preview had gone well because the room was small and the operators were well trained. But he did not see how he could ensure synchronism when the cord linkage expanded to the huge proportions of theaters like the Colonial in New York, let alone persuade unionized projectionists to learn a complex new technology. “This entire apparatus is the most unsatisfactory product we have ever turned out,” he warned Edison. “I can see all sorts of trouble ahead.”138

As far as Edison was concerned, that was Hutchison’s problem. Never having cared much for movies as entertainment, he had an overriding interest in adapting the medium—with or without sound—for education.139 Besides, he wanted to get back to the improvement of his disk records, which did not satisfy him and were still unavailable for general distribution.

Hutchison, having gotten the job of chief engineer through what he believed to be adroit manipulation of “the Old Man,” was entitled to wonder who had manipulated whom. The fat commissions he looked to as Edison’s storage battery sales agent had only just begun to accumulate, thanks to encouraging orders from train and delivery truck companies. But the navy was tying so much red tape around the installation of the S-type unit in a trial submarine as to raise questions about its willingness to switch from acid to alkaline cells. Meanwhile Edison had been quick to take advantage of Hutchison’s status as an unsalaried employee, heaping responsibility on him for all the plant operations his title embraced.140

As for his secret hope that he would one day become president of Thomas A. Edison, Inc., it became increasingly obvious that Mina would not allow anyone other than Charles to succeed to that office. Relations between her and Hutchison exploded into open hostility in late January. “It makes me sick the way that man jinks,” she wrote Charles. They came to a truce out of concern for Edison, who was vaguely aware of some people quarreling somewhere beyond the music room of the laboratory. Hutchison tried to reassure Charles in long, disingenuous letters that he was nothing but a faithful servant of his father. “Every one of these [Kinetophone] outfits that is to go into practical use is worth so much a week to the Old Man,” he wrote. “I naturally am anxious to see as many of them in practical money-making as it is possible to get.”141

Mina confirmed that Edison was facing one of his periodic cash flow problems, as a result of shipping thousands of expensive disk players while restricting production of the only records they could play. Acceptance of Dos Passos’s offer would have dispelled the cloud of insolvency darkening over him, but independence mattered more to him than security. She could only wait for him to turn the cloud to sunshine, as he somehow always managed to do.142

Impatient as he was to closet himself again with the Insomnia Squad, Edison did what he could to help publicize the Kinetophone in the days leading up to its release. “Oh yes, I’ve plenty of time to see you,” he said to a reporter asking to see the system in action. He led the way to his private screening room (“This is my experimental theater”) and ordered the projectionist to put on the “Miserere” from Trovatore. The reporter boggled at the film’s visual and sonic power. Out of the corner of his eye, he discerned that while he was watching it, Edison was watching him, with a strange, quizzical smile. “Truly, the man of practical science, noting the effect of his latest creation upon mankind!”143

At four P.M. on 17 February, Edison stood in the wings of New York’s Colonial Theater to monitor the reactions of more than a thousand viewers to his portfolio of demonstration shorts. The program began in expectant silence, with the usual shutter-flutter emanating from the projection box. But when Hutchison’s stentorian spokesman appeared on-screen and began to orate, there was a collective murmur of astonishment. The wonder grew when the pretty girl sang and Brutus and Cassius quarreled and Mephistopheles taunted Faust and a group of minstrels (two in blackface) launched into a medley of popular hits. The show climaxed with a chorus performance of “The Star Spangled Banner.” When it ended, the audience sat spellbound for a long moment, then burst into applause and shouts of “We want Edison!” He remained out of sight while the calls, punctuated with rhythmic handclaps, grew louder. After five minutes Frank Tate, an American Talking Pictures executive, came on stage to say that the inventor was unavailable. That did not quell the bedlam, which lasted until Tate reemerged to say that Edison was already en route to another show at the Alhambra, in Harlem.144

It was lucky he chose to go there instead of downtown to the Union Square Theater, where he would have been humiliated by a ten-second slip in synchronism that had the audience hooting and jeering. During the “Edison Minstrels” short, the program announcer, wearing for some reason a powdered wig, sat down long before his amplified voice stopped speaking, while the singer he introduced launched into what The New York Times described as ten or twelve seconds of “fervent but soundless song.”145

Theodore Edison claimed, with all the certainty of a fourteen-year-old, that union sabotage was responsible. In truth, the Kinetophone was much harder to operate in theaters than on the set. While the projectionist hand-cranked his machine, keeping one eye on the screen, he had to keep another on the synchronizer beside him, as well as listen through earphones to the sound of the distant phonograph.146 Hutchison tried to make his job sound easy in an FYI letter to Charles:

There is a little indicator on this device which shows the operator whether he is turning properly or not, and by operating this little indicator, he can shove his Kinetoscope [projector] ahead of the phonograph, or vice versa, as the case may be.

The phonograph is, of course, located behind the screen. First the title is thrown on the screen from the Kinetoscope. Although the phonograph motor is running, the cylinder is not, and the reproducer is properly placed at the beginning of the record. After the title is shown, there is a blank space of one second, and just as soon as the blank space ceases to exist, and the picture comes on, the phonograph operator presses a button which throws in the clutch on the cylinder, and causes the phonograph to proceed to play or talk….If the phonograph operator is a little slow in pressing this button, he will, of course, throw the outfit out of synchronism, and it is up to the operator of the Kinetoscope to hang back on the Kinetoscope until it is in step with the phonograph.147

Hutchison needed another half page to describe the workings of a supplementary telephone rig, which the projectionist, if he happened to have a third arm, could use to contact his invisible colleague. He complained of having to train twenty-one engineers to instruct operators in only eleven theaters, as well as dealing with fire inspectors and “unbusinesslike” impresarios. “I have never come across anything that has as many angles to it as this infernal talking picture proposition.”148

But when the Kinetophone system worked well—which it mostly did at first—it succeeded so brilliantly as to promise a huge return to its backers. “EDISON’S TALKING PICTURES THE GREATEST SUCCESS IN YEARS,” Edward F. Albee of B. F. Keith’s Theaters telegraphed his regional managers. “THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE TURNED AWAY…STORMS OF APPLAUSE…WE WILL HURRY A MACHINE TO YOUR CITY AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.” With the Orpheum and United Booking circuits joining in, shows spread to more than a hundred theaters. Hutchison had to dispatch his operational instructors farther and farther afield and ordered double-shift production of projectors to meet the demand. Foreign rights were sold to exhibitors in South America, Europe, and Asia. Edison seemed assured of at least $500,000 in royalties by the end of 1913.149

Audiences had difficulty believing that the sounds they heard were not emanating directly from the images moving before them. “It is all so natural as to appear almost uncanny,” the Philadelphia Item reported. “I have heard a photograph bark,” the syndicated columnist Arthur Benington wrote in The World Magazine. “I have heard a photograph squirt water from a siphon and splash in a bathtub.” A music critic in Fort Worth, Texas, marveled at the synchronism of the Faust film. “The work was so perfect that the mechanized details were forgotten.” Several reviews praised the beauty of the diamond-reproduced sound, and the fidelity that captured even a slight lisp in an actor’s enunciation. “No, Silas, they can’t fool me—there was a man back of that curtain,” the usual little old lady was quoted as saying after a show in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.150

RATHER THAN WITH THEIR MINDS

Unusually, for a lifelong self-promoter, Edison never expressed much enthusiasm for the Kinetophone. He kept saying that it was a long way from perfection, that major problems had to be solved before the talking picture stood a chance of supplanting the silent. Among them were constricted stage action, limited feature length, underpowered amplification for large halls, and—most challenging of all—the recalcitrance or incompetence of operators whose numbers soon put them beyond Hutchison’s instructional reach.

Edison tried to deal with the action problem by inventing an overhead miking system that extended sound intake to the limits of the stage. It consisted of an adjustable-height canopy impregnated with miniature receivers, electrically linked. “I collect the sound at a plurality of points…and transmit pulsations or impulses corresponding to the collected sound waves to a single recording device.” He also allowed for similar reception, if needed, beneath grilles on the stage floor.151 His patent application, dated 6 March 1913, was successful, but the system was apparently never installed at the Bronx studio.^*24

Perhaps because of his deafness, or the dismay he sometimes betrayed at being seen as a purveyor of mass entertainment, Edison was interested in talkie technology primarily as a means of elevating popular taste: he wanted “to make it possible for the poorest families in Squeedunk to see the same operas and plays that are produced in New York City for an admission price of five cents.” He also recognized its enormous historical potential as a recorder of current events. Already he had a Kinetophone cameraman, James Ricalton, filming the war between Bulgaria and Turkey.152

It was not generally known that fifteen months before, on his visit to the White House, Edison had invited President Taft to become an audiovisual candidate for reelection. Taft had just completed a cross-country tour that lasted eight weeks and exposed him to more than three million people. Edison suggested he use the Kinetophone as a “campaign machine.” He could record his stump speech, get the Republican National Committee to distribute it to theaters nationwide, and reach 60 million voters without missing a day at his desk. But Taft was the wrong person to lobby on this subject. There was nothing he loved more than getting out of Washington, so he passed on the opportunity to pioneer an electronic medium that would one day define the democratic process.153

Edison showed much more passion—in his own words, “I was on fire”—when pushing his idea that film would be the educational medium of the future.^*25, 154 His long-standing interest in the subject had been stimulated by the difficulty of finding words to answer some of the questions his son Theodore kept asking (just as young Al Edison had tormented a teacher in Milan, Ohio, sixty-six years before). Deafness, too, made him preternaturally aware of the value of lessons in things seen, not just described. The most he could hope for at present, given the militant protectionism of America’s teachers, was that a scaled-down version of his projector, known as the Home Kinetoscope, would appeal to some progressive school boards as a classroom tool especially suited to lessons in geography. In time, its effectiveness (indeed its superiority to the oral method of many blackboard thumpers) should sell it to a much larger market. He could then increase the variety of subject reels to be produced by his studio. “We shall aim to teach not only geography but science, mechanics, chemistry, botany, entomology, and, in fact, all the regular branches of study.”155

When a sample program of Edison instructionals was screened in sixteen New York schools, eleven of the audiences, consisting of senior staff, board members, city officials, and parents’ associations, were highly enthusiastic, and six voted to buy a projector right away. The cost of the machine and the expense of renting films put off some other would-be purchasers. But a similar demonstration in Schenectady went badly. It took place at the annual general meeting of the New York State Principals Association, and the membership, composed largely of small-town pedagogues, rejected the Home Kinetoscope as a threat to their trusted “old ways” of teaching.156

This did not bode well for acceptance in states west of the Hudson, not to mention the extremadura of Texas, where an agent for the southwestern schoolbook publisher Silver, Burnett & Co. warned Edison that it would be many years before a regional school board could entertain the notion of children studying “with their eyes and ears rather than with their minds.”157

Edison refused to believe this. “Books,” he blustered, “will soon be obsolete in the public schools.”158 This statement caused the biggest sensation since his denial of immortality in 1911, and a heavyweight delegation of teaching authorities came to West Orange at the height of summer to see if he could possibly be serious. They included the philosopher John Dewey, Leonard P. Ayres of the Russell Sage Foundation, and Arthur D. Dean of the New York Education Department. The visit was sponsored by the sociological magazine Survey, which reported it on 6 September in a symposium entitled “Edison Versus Euclid: Has He Invented a Moving Stairway to Learning?”

That Edison was serious was at once apparent. The delegation found that he had a production list of nearly a thousand educational “scenarios.” Besides those already in the can, there were fifty or sixty ready to shoot, covering such subjects as astronomy, bacteriology, physics, forestry, fine art, and zoology. The technical excellence of the films Hutchison screened in demonstration amazed everybody, although reactions as to their effectiveness varied according to professional prejudices. Marietta Pierce Johnson, founder of a progressive school in Alabama, remarked that Edison had found a way to bring “joy” back to education. Rudolph Reeder, the superintendent of the New York Orphan Asylum, was impressed by the “unlimited possibilities” of observational instruction on film, while asserting that some subjects were still better taught with “words, words, words.” Leonard Ayres marveled at an animated depiction of the Bessemer steel process and the beauty of time-compressed sequences showing crystal formation and the metamorphosis of a caterpillar. Edison, he thought, had devised “an educational tool of great value.” However, the “very perfection of detail” that made cinematography so hypnotic made him worry that it would alienate students from one another. “When they sit silent in a darkened room, they are individual and exclusive. When they are making something material or abstract, because they need it in their business, they are active and alert. When they watch moving pictures…they are passive and inert.”159

Predictably, John Dewey contributed the most thoughtful essay to the Survey symposium. “That Mr. Edison has a sound psychologic basis in relying upon the instinctive response of human beings to what moves and does something is unquestionable….But I was also impressed by the fact that, after all, seeing things behave is a rather vicarious form of activity, and there is some danger of the better becoming an enemy of the best.”160

CRAMPS

Dewey was not so cerebral that he did not boggle at the amount of money the Edison company must be investing in so ambitious a scheme, quite apart from its development of the Kinetophone and disk phonograph. Edison himself was so strapped at this time that he accepted a short-term personal loan of $50,000 from Hutchison. The latter had plenty of cash to spare. He had just sold the rights to his Klaxon invention for $142,500 and was happy to earn 5 percent interest on part of that windfall. But any employer with an ego less impregnable than Edison’s would have felt embarrassed to be beholden to a subordinate.161

On 24 June the financial pressure on Edison eased, with a $100,000 second installment of Henry Ford’s business loan, and royalties coming in from “Edison talkies,” which he was now producing at the rate of five or six new titles a month. He announced that his next steps in the movie business would be “the production of multiple-reel screen dramas, colored pictures, and possibly stereoscopic films with the effect of actual depth,” but he filed only one patent for the color process before showing symptoms of exhaustion and a return of his old enemy, gastrointestinal cramps.162

Mina insisted that he join her and the children for a summer vacation on Monhegan Island in Maine. She had been depressed for much of the year. What with Madeleine obstinately getting engaged to John Sloane, Charles falling for a girl in Boston, and the hated “Hutch” seeing more of her husband than she did, she complained that she was “crowded out” of the lives of her loved ones. “I can feel every minute the losing game, and it makes me feel unloving and hard.”163

The most Edison would grant her of his company was a ten-day spell in late August. He prepared for it in typical fashion, working through the night on the eve of his departure and arriving at Monhegan more dead than alive after a three-day car journey. He remained ill throughout his stay there, suffering intense abdominal pain. Returning south with his family after Labor Day, he insisted on stopping off in Boston to meet Henry Ford. The motor magnate was there with another personal hero, the naturalist John Burroughs, and during a long morning of “chinning,” as Madeleine termed it, a triadic friendship was born.164

Edison was pronounced “a very sick man” by a doctor who examined him in West Orange and diagnosed his ailment as either gallstones or an abscess on his gallbladder. Preparations were made for an operation, but applications of ice soothed his pain, and he was soon back in the laboratory, working up to twenty hours a day.165

“I am simply living up to the laws of my own being,” he said to the writer John H. Greusel, who asked why he felt the need to deny himself food and sleep.

Greusel was unable to fathom what those laws might be or why they were so compulsive. “The strangest figure of our time,” he concluded. “Aloof, enigmatic, unamenable to the rule of averages in human life.”166

WOA, WOA, WOA

With the Christmas sales season approaching, it was urgent that Edison introduce his disk phonograph and complementary record catalog. When he did so at the beginning of December, the publicity campaign highlighted the jewel on which the whole technology rested.

Copywriters, bill posters, and sandwich board men made a mantra of the brand phrase EDISON DIAMOND DISC, so phonetically suggestive, with its repetitive dentals and sibilants, of the polished hardness of the stylus (“No Needles—No Trouble”) and the clarity of the sound that poured from the hidden horn. The disks, unplayable on any other phonograph, were as extraordinary to look at as to hear: a quarter of an inch thick and inflexible as stove lids, with narrow grooves that packed in five and a half minutes of music, much more than the contents of a ten-inch Victor disk. No paper label obtruded on their glossy blackness, intensified by one of Edison’s old laboratory standbys, lampblack. They had to be angled to the light before his portrait could be seen, impressed in halftone beside the spindle hole, along with his name and signature and the record title, but—bewilderingly—no performer credit. “I have very excellent reasons for not putting the names of artists on our records,” Edison informed a jobber, without further explanation.168

Diamond Disc retail advertisement, 23 December 1913.167

The National Phonograph Company’s old townhouse at 10 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan was luxuriously refurbished as a four-floor showroom for the new machines, issued in five sizes as models A80, A150, A250, A300, and A450 (“Louis XVI Circassian Walnut, Metal Parts Gold Plated”). When visitors realized that the numerals signified dollars, it was all Edison’s chief salesman, Percy Morgan, could do to get them to listen to a sample Diamond Disc. Usually a minute or two was enough to convince even skeptics that the Wizard of Menlo Park had “done it again.” Their reactions (which Morgan noted verbatim and sent weekly to West Orange) almost unanimously expressed amazement that recorded music could sound so full and sweet.169

This was also the general opinion of browsers and buyers at thirteen thousand stores around the country. Audio fanatics—already a distinct species—agreed that the Diamond Disc phonograph’s combination of floating-weight reproducer,^*26 geared tracking, and records of adamantine smoothness was superior to any other sound system on the market, other than Edison’s parallel line of Amberola players and superb Blue Amberol cylinders.^*27, 170 “I would have thought, had I not known differently, that the songs from the machine were really being sung by singers in the room,” one of them wrote, giving Edison an idea for future publicity. A University of Chicago professor praised “the clear articulation, the plastic roundness of tone, and the fine balance of parts” of the A250 instrument, and although he already possessed a Victrola, he immediately treated himself to an upgrade.171

Edison A-100 “Moderne” Diamond Disc phonograph, 1915.

The willingness of such enthusiasts to spend half or a full month’s salary on a player that accepted no other records bore out Frank Dyer’s prophecy that the Diamond Disc would restore the fortunes of Thomas A. Edison, Inc.^*28 Before long, the company indeed derived a large income from it. This was in spite of the fact that Edison, growing more autocratic by the month, did his perverse best to sabotage sales by imposing his own musical taste—or lack thereof—on everybody in the phonograph business, from performers in the studio to customers in stores.

He used the personal pronoun forty-seven times in an interview entitled “Edison’s Dream of New Music,” published in Cosmopolitan magazine. Acknowledging that he could neither read nor sing a note of music, he nevertheless declared that it was an art “in the same backward state today that electricity was forty years ago. I am going to develop it….I shall also make the phonograph the greatest musical instrument in the world.”172

Although Edison was not averse to Beethoven, or the occasional aria by a composer whose name ended in a vowel, his favorite repertory remained the moony melodies he and “the boys” used to caterwaul legato e doloroso in Menlo Park days, to the strum of Ludwig Böhm’s zither—songs like “My Poor Heart Is Sad with Its Dreaming” and “I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen.” He could not hear the latter tune often enough and recorded it numerous times. Its sweetness and simplicity were worth more to him than the unresolved harmonies of Debussy, which he likened to “interrupted conversations.”173

That particular comment was acute, but professional musicians winced at some of Edison’s other aperçus, which he voiced with the hortative smugness of Bernard Shaw. Mozart was “the least melodic of composers.” He liked “the 7th Nocturne of Fields [sic]” because it had “no dissonance.” After listening to 2,700 waltzes, he found that “they consisted of about 43 themes, worked over in various ways….Of course, I do not include Chopin in this, as his waltzes are not conventional waltzes.” There was apparently “no such thing as a definite musical term relating to time.” As for the art in general, “I have already discovered that music is pitched too high.”174

His pickiness in the classical repertory extended to any Tin Pan Alley “hit” that he considered untuneful. He had no general prejudice against popular or vaudeville music,^*29 even sanctioning, as the premier Diamond Disc release, a comic “coon” duet entitled “Moonlight in Jungleland,” with chimpanzee chatter and birdsong obbligato. But he still insisted on approving every run of records that issued from his factory. As a result, the Blue Amberol and Diamond Disc catalogs grew at a slow pace quite unrelated to market demand. Jobbers became frustrated at the paucity of available titles and Edison’s indifference to their repertory suggestions. Nor did his no-names policy convince them he was being anything else than perverse in withholding vital sales information.175 Their protests grew so strident that he was called upon to explain it:

One of several reasons why I do not publish names of the singers is the “faking” going on in the musical world. There are many singers today with reputations upheld by advertising of the Italian & Jew^*30 syndicates who never should be permitted to sing on any stage. They have no voices—just personality. The Composer & those artists who have beautiful voices [but lack] syndicated reputations, are ignored and the public made to believe that only Grand Opera artists can sing properly. The Victor Co. has carried this to the extreme….

What I am trying to do is search the world for fine voices & instrumental soloists & to record & re-record their songs, etc. until they are musically perfect or as nearly so as possible & sell the records on their merits, giving the names after the public itself has given the verdict.176

The awkwardness of Edison’s language suggested he did not altogether understand what he was saying. At any rate, the policy was soon reversed, and his artists got due credit—which was just as well, given his stinginess with recording fees. Rather than pay the enormous sums demanded by stars of the caliber of Caruso and Paderewski, he looked for talent that was younger, hungrier, and willing to indulge a deaf man’s belief that he knew more about music than they did.^*31

One who auditioned for him was Samuel Gardner, a twenty-year-old Russian-born violinist with great gifts but, as yet, no recognition. Instead of asking him to play, Edison, “very gruff, very kindly,” asked him to comment on two violin records just received from Germany.

He said, “They’re very bad. These people who play have a shaky bow—woa, woa, woa.”…I listened to one of them. The piece that was played was the “Ave Maria” of Schubert, arranged by Wilhelm. The first sounds I heard, I recognized a great artist immediately….I heard a good strong vibration, very steady tone, and I wondered what he meant by the bad playing. That record was made by Albert Spalding.

Then, he said, “I want you to listen to another one,” the same piece by another player. Little different sound, but an artist. That was Carl Flesch. And this old man—I don’t think he even knew the names of what he was listening to, he said, “These people have a shaky bow. They go woa, woa, woa.” And I remember asking him, “How do you figure that out, Mr. Edison?” Well, he couldn’t hear….He gave me a microscope, a little glass, to look at the grooves. I looked and looked, but I didn’t know what I was looking at. He said, “Don’t you see how uneven those grooves are. It must be a straight line in the grooves.”

Wasn’t much I could say.177

Gardner realized that no matter how Edison cupped his right ear to any music, he could not help receiving acoustic waves wrongly. The sea wall of his head had too narrow a sluice, breaking every high swell into foam. Because he was compelled to hear (or in this case, see) sound at the closest possible range, he could tolerate only the flattest undulations. What registered as full and rich to a normal ear, with the special overtones that made every instrumentalist’s timbre and every singer’s voice unique, was torment to him, and he could not understand why nobody else flinched at the discord.178

“Mr. Edison,” Gardner said, “that’s not right. Your opinion isn’t right.”

Meadowcroft, who as ever stood at the boss’s elbow, was horrified. “You musn’t talk to Mr. Edison that way.”179

Edison took no offense and asked the young man to record the “Ave Maria” without any left-hand vibrato. Gardner was desperate for the ten-dollar fee he would earn but could not bring himself to strip the bloom from Schubert’s melody. “I’m just starting my career as a violinist,” he pleaded. “I don’t want to kill it right at the beginning.”180

It occurred to him as he spoke that the cold, white, “spooky” tone Edison wanted might suit at least one piece: Chopin’s Funeral March. He played it that way, hating the sound, and was rewarded with a check for ten dollars. At his insistence, the resultant record was issued without his name on it.

Gardner went on to have a long and honorable career as a performer, teacher, and Pulitzer Prize–winning composer. Asked in old age if he thought Edison’s appreciation of music was hampered by poor hearing, he had a succinct reply. “His deafness had nothing to do with his musicality, because he hadn’t any.”181

WHO TOLD YOU YOU WERE A PIANO PLAYER?

Unlike most people with an aural problem, Edison went out of his way to publicize it as a professional asset. He willingly posed for a photograph to illustrate the Cosmopolitan article that showed him auditing a Diamond Disc with his right ear jammed right up to the speaker grille. “Beethoven, playing the sonatas that his deaf ears would not let him hear, formed no more pathetic picture than does Edison, with his gray head pressed against the machine that he made talk and sing,” the caption read.182

It was just as well that the photographer did not know about the more extreme method Edison resorted to when he wanted to capture the last vestiges of a pianissimo emanating from a phonograph. “I hear through my teeth, and through my skull,” he explained. “I bite my teeth into the wood, and then I get it good and strong.” Many were the oak or rosewood Amberolas that he chomped in order to divert their reverberations into his brain. Because it was difficult for him to do so without slobbering, some cabinets lost their surface stain and looked as if they had been savaged by an enormous rodent. He even bit into the grand piano at Glenmont when one of the family was playing something he liked. A house guest that December, the educator Maria Montessori, was moved to tears by the sight of Edison attached to the frame, as though he were trying eat its sound.183

He insisted it was a “blessing” to be able to hear this way, because his cranial bone filtered out the haze of background noise—breathing, rustling, shoe creaks, heartbeats, subliminal vibration—that occluded the pure tones of music even in a muffled studio. “I have a wonderfully sensitive inner ear. I do not know that, in the beginning, it was any more sensitive than anyone else’s, but for more than fifty years it has been wrapped in almost complete silence.”184

What he called sensitivity was his inability at any distance to hear higher (or very low) musical frequencies. It threw the mechanical noises of sound production, such as the thump of a piano hammer, or the skitter of a violin bow playing spiccato, into abnormal relief.185 Sound engineers were amazed that he could detect recording flaws they had missed in the studio. After subjecting an orchestral recording to a dental audition, Edison correctly traced a flaw in its sound to the top desk of the woodwind section. “The keys on that fellow’s flute squeak.” He used a felt-lined ear trumpet with a rubber diaphragm to measure the frequency of overtones by some method inscrutable to science. “I could strike any note on the piano anywhere and he could tell the exact vibrations,” his music director, Ernest L. Stevens, testified. “I don’t know how he ever did it….It was remarkable, really.”186

The same acuity, however, made Edison react pathologically to two effects essential to good tone production. One was the vibrato that so disturbed him in Gardner’s playing. The other was tremolo, or rapid, single-note pulsations in the throat of a singer—an entirely natural phenomenon, albeit exaggerated by some show-off performers. To Edison, it was an aesthetic insult, “the worst defect a voice can have.” He tried to stop it by making singers drink ice water before they stepped up to the horn, and on one occasion wondered aloud if taping a soprano’s breasts flat might do the trick.187

When Sergei Rachmaninoff, arguably the world’s greatest pianist, auditioned for a contract with Edison Records, Stevens neglected to warn him, “Don’t play anything that’s going to hurt the old gent’s ears.” After the first three thunderous notes of his Prelude in C-sharp minor, Edison interrupted to ask, “Who told you you were a piano player? You’re a pounder.” Rachmaninoff rose from the keyboard in silent outrage and reached for his hat. It was all Stevens could do to persuade Edison to let him record some further sessions, which included a crystalline performance of Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody.188

Although Edison’s aural dicta were more than most self-respecting musicians could bear for long, some—notably the lovely opera singer Anna Case—stuck with him because of his avuncular charm, the prestige of his name, and the unsurpassable quality of Diamond Discs. Their deep-lodged sonority and trueness on the turntable gave the illusion that the performers were somehow “present” inside the cabinet. Miss Case was the inspiration behind a dramatically effective advertising campaign that took advantage of this fidelity.

One day I walked into a shop, and they were playing one of my records. When I walked in the door, I started singing with the record and making my voice sound exactly like it….They asked me to go on a concert tour with the machine. I gave a recital at Carnegie Hall, standing beside the machine, and copied the recorded sound. They didn’t know when I was singing and when I wasn’t. Of course, they could see my lips go, but by the tone quality, they couldn’t tell the difference.189

Other famous artists were hired to conduct “Edison Tone Tests” around the country, sometimes concealing themselves and the phonograph behind a curtain and challenging listeners to distinguish between live and recorded sound. The test results were equivocal enough to sell many millions of Diamond Discs through to the dawn of the electric recording era.^*32, 190

BUSINESSMAN JEKYLL

When Charles Edison reported for work at his father’s plant in January 1914, he was twenty-three years old, a cheerful dropout from MIT, and had sown a considerable number of wild oats across the country, from Boston to Colorado to San Francisco. Although his seed-scattering days were by no means over, he was eager now to become a mature executive and learn all he needed to become second in command of Thomas A. Edison, Inc. If Miller Hutchison still nurtured a fantasy in that direction, Charles quickly dispelled it by visiting him at home one Sunday evening and grilling him until two A.M. on “all aspects of the business.”191

Edison gave no sign of wanting to hand over power for some years yet. But neither did he try to impose his own management style (“An autocrat is the best kind of man to run an industry”) on his son. Charles was both more willing and more able to hear the complaints of the Old Man’s five thousand employees, whom he was distressed to find a demoralized lot. They had little corporate spirit, and were constantly on the lookout for jobs that paid better and abused them less. We must never be paternalistic, Charles told himself as he worked his way through department after department with the vague title of “Assistant to Mr. Edison.”192

It was good for Mina to have him back home—not that she saw much of him at night. Like his father, Charles was usually out the door after dinner. But when they passed through the rock-walled gate of Llewellyn Park, the paths of father and son diverged. Edison swung left toward the laboratory, while Charles, mutating from businessman Jekyll into bohemian Hyde, headed for the railroad station and New York.

Mina clung ever tighter to Theodore, dreading the fast-approaching day when Madeleine would become Mrs. John Eyre Sloane and move in the same direction. Despite the efforts of both sets of parents, the young couple had overcome their own religious and emotional doubts and settled for a spring wedding. John had started an aeronautical manufacturing business in Long Island City, so they planned to rent an apartment in Manhattan. Conveniently for Charles, it would be in Greenwich Village.

ON THE BANKS OF THE CALOOSAHATCHEE

The Edisons went to Florida at the end of February for a final vacation together as an unbroken family. Madeleine was amazed to see a parade of Ford cars waiting to welcome them in Fort Myers, signaling the presence in town of her father’s wealthiest friend. Edison had invited the Ford family and John Burroughs south for a long visit. He said it would be good for them to “get away from fictitious civilization.”193

Madeleine liked the “awfully nice” Fords, but did not take to Burroughs. She found him aware of his own importance as one of America’s most beloved writers.194 Long-winded, simplistic, white of beard and low of brow, he carefully cultivated a folksy image not unlike Edison’s, except that in his case it was unaccompanied by any hint of originality.

A cross-country automobile expedition to the Everglades in early March cemented the friendship of the three men, and presaged more such “vagabond” excursions in future. Hitherto, Ford had been the least popular of the trio, celebrated more for wealth than for charm. But he gave off a justified glow at the moment, having just announced a five-dollar daily wage for his workers in Detroit. This benefaction—far more than any other industrialist considered compatible with profits, and twice what Edison paid—had transformed the Ford Motor Company overnight into a mecca for skilled labor.195

Like most people rich or poor, Ford needed to be loved, but he was too attention-craving, too gauche in his enthusiasms (high-kick contests, bluegrass fiddling, health food) to hold on to public affection for long. Socially he was an incongruous combination of humor and humorlessness, intelligence and apparent idiocy. Rail thin and always immaculately dressed, eschewing the top-hat-and-cane uniform of other industrial magnates, he somehow lacked elegance. His bony awkwardness contrasted amusingly with Edison’s relaxed ability to conform to the curve of any perch, whether it was a boulder or the shell of a rowboat. Ford could no more snooze in public than he could coax his jerky handwriting into calligraphy or match Edison as an easy, unhurried storyteller.

Yet there was much that drew them together, as former boy mechanics in Michigan—a shared disdain for Ivy leaguers, alcohol, and haute cuisine; driving energy, graphic thinking, and delight in anything new. At this early stage of their relationship. Edison underestimated Ford’s intelligence, just as he went too far, later on, in granting him a poetic imagination. But when he noted that his friend possessed “the practical ability of an Irish contractor foreman and a Jewish broker,” he used only one adjective that Ford would object to.196

After two weeks of birdwatching, fishing, and al fresco dinners on the terrace of Seminole Lodge, Ford returned north impressed with the beauty and tranquility of Edison’s winter estate. He was more in awe of his hero than ever, and ready, should the opportunity present itself, to buy a similar property on the banks of the Caloosahatchee River. “There is only one Fort Myers,” Edison joked to a neighbor, “and there are ninety million people who are going to find this out.” Mina and Clara Ford were cautious about the good-old-boy intimacy developing between the two tycoons, and in no hurry to follow suit.197

Edison accepted Ford’s adoration with the same affable equanimity he displayed toward Hutchison and Meadowcroft and the dozens of other moths, male and female, who had fluttered about his flame for so many years. Although he was as liable as ever to irascible tantrums, they almost always related to business difficulties. Now that his battery and phonograph divisions were booming (Diamond Discs selling as many as fifty-seven thousand a day), he could open mail from West Orange without misgivings.

He did not know that Charles had telegrammed Hutchison not to send “any news, good or bad to Father unless absolutely necessary.” So for six weeks of warming weather, Edison was free to potter in his bougainvillea-draped laboratory, chew cheap cigars (or a tobacco plug when Mina was not looking), sleep twelve hours a day, and indulge his favorite recreation—automobile excursions over the roughest possible roads. It was hard to resist his childlike charm when he was as relaxed as this. Madeleine begged her fiancé to come south and hear her father rambling engrossingly over dinner on whatever subject—parapsychology, physics, music, medicine—had his current attention.198

Edison’s tranquil mood was unbroken even when he heard, despite Charlie’s mail ban, that a fire had ravaged his movie studio in the Bronx, causing $100,000 worth of damage. He merely expressed relief that most of the hardware had been saved, saying he wanted to transfer production to West Orange anyway. A new talkie studio was being constructed on the second floor of the Kinetophone building, where he would improve talkie technology “to the limit…show the theatrical people that scientific people can beat them at their own game.”199

He was indirectly acknowledging that Edison talking pictures, after their initial rampant success, had proved a commercial flop. There were just too few operators sufficiently trained to deal with the spread of distribution to thousands of theaters. When such a picture as Mayor Gaynor and his Cabinet^*33 was projected, amplified, and synchronized correctly, audiences still gasped at its truth to life. But more often the Edison advertising slogan “They Laugh—They Talk—They Sing” seemed to refer to talking and singing that bore no relation to screen action, and to laughter coarsened by jeers and catcalls. Complaints proliferated about actors taking a bow in mid-soliloquy and trumpets that blew ukulele music, as well as cramped stage movement and foreshortened plots. Hutchison felt that his misgivings about the Kinetophone had proved correct, but Edison was confident that its problems would be solved in time, as would those of the Home Kinetoscope and educational movies, which more and more school boards were rejecting. “There’s no hurry,” he kept saying. “There’s no hurry.”200

Madeleine seemed to feel the same about her wedding, which she was miserably inclined to put off because Mina and Mrs. Sloane were now squabbling about the religion of any future grandchildren. Eventually Mina capitulated to a private Catholic ceremony, providing it was not empurpled by the presence of a cardinal. Edison gave his daughter away at Glenmont on 17 June, and Mina wished the young couple well in a letter edged with black.201

NO HONOR OR GLORY

Eight days later Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was assassinated in Sarajevo.

As the chemistry of war percolated toward explosion in Europe and Russia, Edison like most Americans was concerned only with the pursuit of happiness in the world’s freest, safest, and most technologically advanced polity. He had never confused the pursuit with attainment—“Happiness is only for the honest—that’s a law that runs through matter as undetectable as gravitation”—but as long as the United States maintained its own peace, he saw no immediate threat to the national stability. To be sure, there had been a disturbing increase in violence on both sides of recent strikes organized by the socialistic Industrial Workers of the World. But they were mild compared to the prerevolutionary conflicts portending overseas, between emperors and peasants, autocrats and anarchists, colonialists and voteless majorities. Fortunately, three thousand miles of salt water separated Montauk Point from Land’s End. Edison had seen all he wanted of the Old World on his recent tour of the nations now bristling at one another, and he was content to spend the rest of his life in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, whose copper skirts he had “felt like kissing” when the Amerika glided past them on her way to the dock at Hoboken.202

Being an avid newspaper and magazine reader, Edison was well informed on political affairs without being particularly concerned with them. Except for his brief flirtation with Progressivism in 1912, he had never deviated from the orthodox, isolationist, pro-business Republicanism of his youth. Added to that, and congruent with his own domineering nature, was a strong belief in centralized power. “There’s an open-mouthed philosophy of indolence today which finds a fine name in socialism….I have more faith in governments based on oligarchy; the few govern the many through a law of evolution. The purest democracy shows that a few picked mentalities rise as instinctively to the ruling top as bubbles break on the surface of a stream. They are surcharged with the great initiative intelligence which contributes actively to the general good.”203

If such a view made him a Social Darwinist, it did not extend to love of war. He read Friedrich von Bernhardi’s protofascist Germany and the Next War with contempt, scribbling beside a passage in praise of bloodshed, “War kills off the best animals & leaves the degenerates to breed, a misapplication of Darwin’s law.” As for romanticizing battle as the breeding ground of heroes, “the thinking world can certainly find no honor or glory in it.”204

SPEED HE HAD

Edison did not have to think much himself to infer, when the guns of August began to fire, that American industry would soon face a critical shortage of organic chemical imports from Europe. “Substitutes! Substitutes! We’ve got to find them….It has been too easy for us to import our materials.” He was himself the nation’s largest consumer of German and British phenol, mixing a ton and a half of it every day into Condensite, the varnish that slicked Diamond Discs. It also happened to be a basic ingredient of high explosives, so foreign munitions factories would have a lock on it in the future.205

The chemist in him reasoned that phenol was a volatile derivative of coke. But few domestic coke ovens were designed to capture it. After inquiring in vain for an emergency supply of phenol from several chemical companies, Edison decided to synthesize the compound himself. Within three days he had invented a ten-step process of crystallization by sulfonation fusion. “It works beautifully,” he told a friend, “and really it is indispensable.” He then led another Insomnia Squad of forty draftsmen and chemists, working around the clock to design and construct a phenol facility at Silver Lake.206

Mary Childs Nerney once remarked that no one ever saw Edison rush at a thing: “Speed he had but not haste.”207 At all times, even in a crisis, he projected an air of catlike calm. Yet because his energy seldom slackened and he spent little time eating or sleeping, his achievements seemed sudden. The new plant opened on 8 September and became a cornucopia of the purest phenol he had ever used. So much of it poured out that he sold four or five surplus tons a day to envious competitors and expanded production to a second factory near Johnstown, Pennsylvania.208

His success enabled him to contract with coal tar companies to attach equipment to their ovens that sucked off rich gases for purification, liquefaction, and crystallization. One such extractor produced eighteen thousand gallons of benzene a day. He thus became a wholesaler of such valuable intermediates as antiseptic acetanilide, fragrant mirbane, toluene solvent, aniline salt, and—“Here’s a jawbreaker,” he used to say—paraphenylenediamine, the only known dye that turned gray furs black. Demand for it grew so great that he built a third plant to produce it exclusively. As a result, the discoverer of thermionic emission in vacuo found himself trading with furriers and fashion houses. Eventually Edison would have nine factories producing chemicals in short supply because of Britain’s naval blockade of Germany.^*34, 209

As a pacifist, if not as a Democrat, Edison supported President Wilson’s declaration of American neutrality in the “European” war. He was willing to profit by it—secretly selling phenol even to the German-based Bayer Corporation^*35—as long as he did not get into the armaments business. “Making things which kill men is against my fiber.”210 His conscience was untroubled by the fact that his S-type battery was designed to improve the performance of a torpedo-carrying vessel. Until the last day of summer, the submarine was still perceived around the world as a defense device, a protector of home ports.

But then on 22 September a German U-boat patrolling invisibly off the coast of Holland sank three British ships in less than ninety minutes. The news made clear that the war was going to be as different at sea as it already was on land, with the submarine and machine gun equally willing to abolish old notions of chivalry and fairness in warfare. It coincided with a secret report that made Josephus Daniels, Wilson’s reform-minded secretary of the navy, receptive to everything Miller Hutchison had been saying about the dangers of lead batteries underwater. Submarine E-2 had suffered an internal leak of sulfuric acid while taking a dive in the Atlantic. It was brought to the surface with difficulty, and all nineteen crew members suffered lung burns. Investigation showed that the acid had eaten through the walls of the ballast tanks and mixed with seawater, filling every compartment with the same chlorine gas that Germany would soon use against the French in Belgium.211

Hutchison heard about the accident on one of his Washington visits. He leaped at the opportunity to invite Daniels to come north and see a pair of Edison S-type batteries being stress-tested in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. As an extra inducement, he suggested a preliminary visit to West Orange, where the secretary could get to know Edison over lunch, then drive with him to the Yard in one of Hutchison’s limousines. Daniels not only accepted the invitation but, hearing that Edison had never been aboard a warship, arranged for a dreadnought and a submarine to be made available for his inspection on the appointed date, 10 October.212

The secretary was a portly, soft-spoken fifty-two-year-old North Carolinian, entirely unreconstructed in his vested suits and country bow tie. Wealthy and powerful as the longtime owner/editor of The (Raleigh) News and Observer, he had helped put Woodrow Wilson in the White House, and shared the president’s patrician and racial prejudices. These were little in evidence now that he had moved to Washington and become an unctuous political operator. Only when his rigid Methodism was challenged, or when he allowed Hutchison to address him in slave dialect, did “Marse Josephus” reveal the bigotry that had made him a force in the Wilmington, North Carolina, race riot of 1898.213

Like most first-time visitors to the Edison plant, Daniels was awed by its size and complexity, and was even more humbled to meet the great inventor in his laboratory. He recorded his somewhat incoherent feelings on a Blue Amberol cylinder for the Phonograph Division archives:

The mecca of America is not in the national capital but at Edison’s works. It is a great pleasure to see this wonder-working man at his task, and to find that although he is superman to all the world, he is very human….In Europe today it is Edison who has made war more terrible, and therefore, let us hope, made it shorter, and that when this war ends, we will have no more wars.214

It was not clear what Edison was supposed to have done either to worsen the war or to hasten its conclusion. Neither suggestion made much sense, unless Daniels, also a pacifist, meant that modern technology in general made the future frightening.

Edison assured a reporter, “I can’t get interested in inventions for war,” but from the moment he and the secretary arrived at the Navy Yard (to the sound of nineteen guns, and the sight of admirals saluting), he behaved to the contrary. Pacing the deck of the dreadnought New York, then descending into its supersecret control station, he marveled at the equilibrium of Elmer Sperry’s gyrocompass. “It ought to have been discovered years ago—it’s a cinch.” He asked ordnance officers whether shells that smashed through armorplate were more lethal than those that exploded on impact. In the cramped torpedo compartment of submarine G-4, he boasted that he could easily devise a system of mechanical gills that would extract oxygen from seawater and allow the boat to remain immersed for months on end.215

The climax of the visit, as far as Hutchison was concerned, occurred when the commandant of the Yard showed Edison a steam-powered rig that was subjecting his S-type cells to a punishment no gyroscope could withstand. “Yes sir, we’ve rocked your batteries back and forth at all speeds and angles for the major part of two months and they haven’t leaked yet.”216

Edison was dismissive of the tossing, slamming machine. “Key it up, make it roll further and faster,” he said. “The battery is all right.”217

A BEAUTIFUL SIGHT

If Edison still nurtured hopes that his talking and teaching movies would succeed at a time when culture itself seemed to be in retreat, they went up in smoke at the plant on the night of 9 December 1914.218 Just after sunset, at 5:25 P.M., spontaneous combustion took place in the film inspection building, a wooden, single-story structure crammed with nitrate stock. As the reels caught fire, they generated their own oxygen, transforming the little building into a tinderbox that soon touched off a nearby lumber shed, two alcohol tanks, and the five-floor “Wax House,” where hundreds of cylinder blanks were stored, along with twenty tons of highly volatile phenol. That building became an inferno of such intensity that some of its concrete columns fused and flowed like candles.

Ladder companies from six surrounding towns fought to saturate the brick walls of the laboratory complex in the southwestern corner of the block. Their hose work was hampered by inadequate water pressure, even when a line from Edison’s own artesian well was added to the main feed. A north-blowing wind came to their aid and fanned the blaze toward the carpenter shop and veneering department, both stacked with rare hardwoods. By six-thirty the fire was out of control. Undeterred by concrete or cinder block, it leaped east into the shipping, packing, assembly, and film print buildings, penetrating them through their dozens of wooden sash windows and crumpling tin doors like foil. Half an hour later the two main structures in the western yard, occupied by the Phonograph Division, were aflame too. The huge record building, holding nearly forty tons of Diamond Discs and Blue Amberol blanks, lit up with sequential evenness, window by window and floor by floor, as if a mobile flame thrower were advancing inside.

Among the crowd of twelve thousand townspeople who flocked to watch on the valley slope overlooking the plant was Edison. He was strangely calm, even cheerful after seeing that his laboratory was safe, screened from the wind by the long cement mass of the storage battery building across Lakeside Avenue. “Get Mother and her friends over here,” he said to Charles. “They’ll never see a fire like this again.”^*36, 219

At seven-thirty a terrific explosion signaled that a benzene deposit had been breached. Multicolored flames shot into the night sky, illumining the landscape for half a mile around, while snowflakes fell indifferently.220 The conflagration reached its height around nine o’clock, by which time it had engulfed thirteen buildings across more than half the complex. Destructive as it was to their contents, it collapsed only one top corner of a tall unit, number eleven, where finished Amberolas stood in crates, ready for shipping on the Erie Railroad. There the heat equaled that of a blast furnace. Slag dripped from buckling girders, and melted glass ran like water.

Edison surmised, as if he were monitoring an experiment, that some chemical vats on the fourth floor had burst. The resultant spill would have mixed nitric, hydrochloric, and sulfuric acids into an aqua regia solution, corrosive enough to crumble masonry.221

The last open flames went out around midnight. “Mr. Edison, this is an awful catastrophe for you,” an executive from the advertising department said in a shaking voice.

“Yes, Maxwell, a big fortune has gone up in flames tonight, but isn’t it a beautiful sight?”222

The great fire of 9 December 1914.

When daylight came, he returned to his laboratory—wet-walled and sooty but intact—having been on his feet for more than twenty-four hours. He penciled a brief statement to give to reporters. “Am pretty well burned out—but tomorrow there will be some rapid mobilizing when I find out where I’m at.” Then he stretched out on a bench, rolled his coat into a pillow, and went to sleep.223

WINTER SUNSHINE

“I see by the papers that the Edison factory has been largely destroyed by fire,” Rep. Ernest Roberts (R., Mass.) said to Secretary Daniels that afternoon.

Daniels was testifying before the House Naval Committee on the need for an accelerated program of submarine construction, which he promised to push for if current tests on the S-type power pack were successful.

He said he had heard the same news. “The battery plant was not damaged, I am informed.”

“The paper states that the factory was partially destroyed and 5,000 hands thrown out of employment.”

“I do not know how that will be.”224

Actually the damage was much less serious than the pyrotechnical display had portended. Edison’s first estimate of his loss had been as high as $5 million; the true figure turned out to be $1.5 million. One workman had been killed in the first chemical explosion, but other casualties were few, thanks to the company’s policy of regular fire drills. There had also been an efficient evacuation of vital documents, record masters, and portable precision instruments.^*37 An astonishing 97 percent of the heavy machinery had withstood the heat and explosions, and the reinforced concrete walls and slab floors of the seven major buildings—all of them fireproof, except for their wooden elements—were largely intact.225

Far from laying off his employees, Edison hustled them into an emergency program of cleanup and retooling, while a construction company from New York worked triple shifts to make the standing buildings better than new. Within twenty days, six acres of floor space had been cleared. Square columns were rounded to hold more load, floor slabs were reinforced and slicked with his hardest portland cement. Partitions, which Edison disliked (“They make too much newspaper reading”), were reduced to a minimum, opening up vast spaces. When the vertical, flat, and cylindrical surfaces were painted white and winter sunshine streamed in through new, tilting, metal-frame windows, the result was as austerely elegant as anything later achieved by the Bauhaus school.226

Production of Blue Amberol cylinders resumed on the last day of December. Now more than ever, the Phonograph Division had to be the chief source of Edison’s wealth. He needed all the profits it and his outlying chemical factories could rack up, since the fire insurance he carried paid out a mere $287,000 on a claim of $919,788. Far from being downcast, he radiated energy and excitement as he rose to the challenge of full recovery in the new year. “I am sixty-seven….I’ve been through a lot of things like this. It protects a man from being afflicted with ennui.”227

A GREAT RESEARCH LABORATORY

By the spring of 1915 Edison had created what amounted to a new plant, while his young efficiency expert, Stephen Mambert, made it the nucleus of a thoroughly modern corporation—Frank Dyer’s dream of four years before. Mambert was a typical graduate of the progressive school of “management engineers,” clerky, clean-shaven, and closely barbered, his neck movements constricted by a high, detachable white collar. Organization charts and budgeting—the geometry and calculus of business science—were his dry delight. Working companionably with Charles, who was still more at home in Greenwich Village than in West Orange, Mambert instituted Ford-like production and methods, demanded strict accounting of every purchase order down to the last paper clip, and put Thomas A. Edison, Inc., on the soundest financial footing it had ever enjoyed.228

Edison had his doubts about the company’s burgeoning bureaucracy. “An ‘efficiency’ which submerges the individual,” he remarked, “is an inefficiency.” But it was a relief for him to hand over many executive chores and have more time to potter with new inventions—among them a portable, battery-powered searchlight that could throw a beam several miles. The idea for it had come to him during the fire. Willing as ever to jettison failed projects, he gladly took $50,000 from a Japanese entrepreneur for what was left of his talking picture business and looked around for some other large venture to engage him.229

There was no need to offer any help to his “personal representative in naval affairs.” Since the beginning of hostilities in Europe, Hutchison had been selling storage batteries to the government as fast as the works on Lakeside Avenue could turn them out—most recently, seven thousand B-4 cells to operate wireless systems on warships.^*38 Josephus Daniels had chosen USS E-2, crucible of last fall’s chlorine-gas accident, as the first submarine to be equipped with Edison S-type cells, and he also approved their future installation in a larger vessel, the L-8, under construction in Maine. Edison priced the latter order at $90,000 and wrote the secretary: “Your telegram will cause the boys around here to lash me to the machinery to keep me from flying.”230

Hutchison saw an opportunity to nudge the two men into a closer relationship, with a view to consolidating his own profitable position between them. He saw chains of zeroes accumulating in his bank account, like a submarine bubble trail, if he could only persuade Edison to abandon his pacifist sentiments and put his inventive genius at the service of the government. On 7 May a German U-boat saved him the trouble. It sank the Cunard liner Lusitania off the coast of Ireland, drowning 128 Americans and more than a thousand other civilian passengers. The tragedy caused even the most neutral-minded patriots to call for a program of “preparedness” to go to war if Germany ever struck again.

Among the first was Edison, who chose the Memorial Day weekend to make his own recommendations in a major article in The New York Times.231 He advised against the creation of a large standing army and an overcommissioned navy but advocated enormous stockpiles of weaponry at strategic points along the nation’s two seaboards: “All our war would be there.” New battleships and submarines should be built with dispatch and held in drydock, thousands of military “aeroplanes” chocked for instant takeoff, and 2 million well-greased rifles kept in arsenals that could be got at by truck, instead of by trains, to speed distribution. Young American men, meanwhile, should be trained to spring to arms whenever their country called.

“I believe that in addition to this,” Edison said, “the government should maintain a great research laboratory, jointly under military and naval and civilian control. In this could be developed the continually increasing possibilities of great guns, the minutiae of new explosives, all the techniques of military and naval progression.” When the time came—and sooner or later it would come—“we could take advantage of the knowledge gained through this research work and quickly manufacture in large quantities the very latest and most efficient instruments of warfare.”232

Hutchison at once drafted a letter for Daniels to send Edison, begging him to help establish just such a “department of invention and development” for the navy, along with a board of eminent civilian scientists to supervise its operations. Daniels rewrote the document to include some of his own views and those of Franklin D. Roosevelt, his hawkish assistant secretary, and sent it off to West Orange on 7 July.233

I feel that our chances of getting the public interested and back of this project will be enormously increased if we can have, at the start, some man whose inventive genius is recognized by the whole world….You are recognized by all of us as the one man above all others who can turn dreams into realities and who has at his command, in addition to his own wonderful mind, the finest facilities for such work.

What I want to ask you is if you would be willing as a service to your country, to act as an adviser to this board, to take such things as seem to you to be of value, but which we are not, at present, equipped to investigate, and to use your own magnificent facilities in such investigation if you feel it worth while.

Edison read the letter, then put in his out-basket with a scrawled superscript, Hutch—note and return with comments.234

YOU NOW RANK AS A COMMODORE

Many years later, when Edison was dead and Daniels was President Franklin Roosevelt’s ambassador to Mexico, an aging and much diminished Hutchison recalled his excitement at seeing language he had drafted typed out on the Navy Department’s heaviest stationery.235 “There was my whole conception of the Board,” he vaingloriously wrote Daniels.

I drummed it into Mr. Edison’s head, until he took cognizance of the need and allowed me to use him as its sponsor….I hopped on the Congressional to Washington, called on you, at your home, and said Mr. Edison would be glad to head such a Board if composed of men elected by the outstanding Scientific and Engineering Societies….President Wilson appointed Mr. Edison and myself.

I will never forget the day we all signed the Oath and, jocularly, I asked Mr. Edison if he wanted to be measured for his uniform. “Uniform, h—!” he said. “But you now rank as a Commodore and really must wear a uniform,” I replied. Turning to you, he said, “If I have got to wear a uniform, count me out. I want to be able to tell an Admiral to go to —— if he is in the wrong.”

Hutchison was conflating, in retrospect, a pair of dates fifteen months apart. Nor did he mention the submarine disaster in between that could have sent him to jail. Daniels was either too tactful or too hazy himself to challenge the former chief engineer’s memories, which were otherwise fairly accurate. Hutchison had even leaned on Edward Marshall, the New York Times writer, to publicize Edison’s original call for what would eventually become the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

At the time—midsummer 1915—Edison’s first priority was the composition of the proposed supervisory board. Daniels paid another visit to Glenmont on 15 July and approved his suggestion that it should be recruited from the Inventors Guild and ten major professional associations. These would be the American Aeronautical, Chemical, Electrochemical, and Mathematical Societies; the American Institutes of Electrical and Mining Engineers; the American Societies of Automotive, Civil, and Aeronautical Engineers; and the War Committee of Technical Societies. Each body would be asked to nominate two representatives, serving without remuneration as a patriotic duty.236

Edison notably excluded the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, on the grounds that neither was likely to nominate anybody “practical.” He accepted the presidency of the board, and Daniels agreed to appoint Hutchison as his “personal assistant,” on the tacit understanding that Edison’s deafness would keep him away from most meetings. That made a round membership of twenty-four.237

Predictably, the scientific community reacted with outrage at being snubbed when the nominations were announced. Edison would soon enough learn to his cost that academic wrath was on a par with the furor teutonicus now ravaging Europe. But for the moment he could bask in the compliments he earned, from President Wilson on down, for putting his “genius” at the service of his country and publicizing the cause of preparedness. “The willingness of Edison to head the Board is a spectacular advertisement,” wrote Waldemar Kaempffert, managing editor of Scientific American.238

The Naval Consulting Board, as it was officially named, posed for its first group photograph on the steps of the White House on Wednesday 6 October. Edison recognized only a few of the faces around him. Two were by no means friendly. Leo Baekeland, the Belgian-born inventor of Bakelite plastic, resented the success of Condensite and wrongly believed that Walter Aylsworth had infringed his patent. Frank J. Sprague’s wolfish, frowning features had been forbidding enough thirty-seven years before, when Edison gave him his first break as a young inventor. If Sprague had ever cracked a smile since then, it was unrecorded in articles celebrating his brilliant achievements in the field of electric power. The gold medal of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers hung around his neck like a millstone, since it was engraved recto with the profile of Thomas Alva Edison. Sprague nurtured a grudge against his old boss for allowing the General Electric Company to erase his name from its history—forgetting that Edison had suffered the same corporate fate.239

A more affectionate face was that of Thomas Robins, Jr., inventor of the rubberized conveyor belt. He had developed it at the Edison mine in Ogdensburg, New Jersey. Forty-six years old, center-parted, Princetonian, and precise, Robins was a natural for the post of secretary to the board. Edison was also acquainted with William L. Saunders, a mining engineer, Elmer Sperry, inventor of the gyroscope, and the polymath Hudson Maxim, a bewhiskered eccentric equally devoted to poetry, penmanship, and explosives (as his prosthetic left hand attested). The rest of the board, consisting of sundry scientists, industrial executives, and engineers, were strangers.

When they went inside to meet the president, Wilson took the opportunity to announce his conversion to the cause of preparedness—adding carefully that it should be “not for war, but for defense.” He said that the army and navy would welcome “the cooperation of the best brains and knowledge of the country” to enhance national security.240

Anxious to dispel rumors to the contrary, Secretary Daniels organized a cruise down the Potomac that afternoon on the presidential yacht Mayflower, so that members of the board could get to know some admirals en route to the gun proving grounds at Indian Head. Edison could no more resist playing with the ship’s communications equipment than a schoolboy.241 The following morning, before the board met to organize itself, he was found at the aquarium in the lobby of the Post Office Department, so engrossed in the circulation of goldfish that a messenger hesitated to disturb him.242

At eleven o’clock he called his colleagues to order in the library of the Navy Department.243 The board’s first action was to elect Thomas Robins secretary. Edison then ceded the active role of chairman, for which his deafness obviously disqualified him, to Saunders.^*39 Peter Cooper Hewitt, developer of the mercury-vapor lamp, became vice-chairman. It was agreed that the board should meet at least bimonthly at venues of its own choosing. Fifteen subcommittees were then appointed to advise on various aspects of naval and aerial defense. Edison did not sit on any of them. Instead he assumed the major responsibility of heading a committee of five that, on Frank Sprague’s motion, would report as soon as possible on “the organization of a fully equipped and amply sustained laboratory for research and development…essential to the needs of the navy.”

After lunch, he laid out his rough ideas for the facility. It should be built of indestructible concrete somewhere along the Atlantic seaboard, on “tidewater of sufficient depth to permit a dreadnought to come to the dock.” There should be a large city nearby, “so supplies may be easily obtained,” but—Edison’s old desideratum for Menlo Park—not so near as to distract young researchers from their experimental work. The governing factors in its design were to be secrecy and security, with no visitation permitted. For maximum speed in developing inventions, it should also be a manufactory, equipped with a full range of shops, from a cast steel foundry and optical grinder to an explosives department, necessarily “separate from the main laboratory.”

During a long afternoon’s debate with the library door closed, Edison had to modify his original recommendation of complete civilian control as inimical to the navy. He agreed to let technologically qualified officers run the facility, as long as they did not impose “too much red tape.” All its innovation, however, must come from outside the service, including freelance ideas that the board considered worthy of development.

Daniels interrupted the proceedings only once, with a reminder to the board that it had no legal status or funding yet. It should not call for a large increase in naval spending for fear of alienating pacifists on the House Appropriations Committee. This did not prevent a final resolution in favor of Edison’s estimate that the laboratory would cost $5 million to acquire and at least half as much again to operate year by year.244

HIMSELF A MULTIMILLIONAIRE

“The soldier of the future will not be a sabre-bearing, bloodthirsty savage,” the president of the Naval Consulting Board announced a week later. “He will be a machinist.”245

Edison was holding a press conference in Chicago while his private Pullman car was hitched to the back of a train that would take him to the Panama-Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco and a reunion with Henry Ford. Clearly enjoying his new role as a prophet of preparedness, he said that the United States was “the greatest machine country in the world” and should be able, in time of war, to deploy mechanical agents of death twenty times more efficient than men on the battlefield.

“What do you think of the use of liquid fire and asphyxiating gases?” asked a representative of The New York Times.

“They are perfectly proper for use in defense, but not in offense. A man has a right to claw, scratch, bite, or kick in defending himself.”246

Alarming as such sentiments were to Ford, a passionate pacifist, Edison’s further declaration that he would keep the business of defense innovation out of the hands of government—“I am down on military establishments”—were even more so to his chief engineer.247

At the moment, “Doctor” Hutchison (as he now liked to be addressed, having gotten an honorary degree from his alma mater) urgently coveted the goodwill of the navy. His seat next to his boss at the recent board meeting—close enough to knee-tap Morse transcriptions of remarks Edison couldn’t hear—represented another advance toward his dream of becoming equally famous. He would almost be Edison when deputizing for him at future meetings. This latest example of the Old Man’s habit of feeding one-liners to reporters threatened to compromise the publication of a glossy booklet by Hutchison, entitled The Submarine Boat Type of Edison Storage Battery. He had sent copies to every vessel in the navy and was counting on the successful installation of S-type cells in the E-2 submarine to make the battery universal and himself a multimillionaire.248

Piling promotion on promotion, Hutchison also planned to stage a media coup later in the month that would link West Orange with San Francisco and advertise Thomas A. Edison, Inc., as the most innovative company in history.

I HAD A GIRL ONCE

Edison had never been as sanguine about the S-type as Hutchison. Granted that its sealed, noncorrosive chemicals obviated chlorine-poisoning accidents, such as had caused the recent loss, off Honolulu, of submarine F-4 with twenty-one aboard,^*40 he knew that all storage batteries liberated hydrogen when electricity passed through them in reverse.249 His own alkaline cells did so copiously at the earliest stage of recharge. This was no problem when they were installed in well-ventilated conveyances like automobiles and trains. But submarines, with their huge battery packs, had to be on the surface, with all fans going, to purge themselves of the odorless gas.

What worried Edison was that S-type cells continued to seep small amounts of hydrogen and oxygen after being recharged. In a letter to “friend Baekeland” written as his train crossed Iowa, he asked for advice on the problem. It was hardly necessary for one chemist to remind another that the formula H + O, at a certain level of concentration in a confined space, “reaches to an explosive mixture.” He said that he had tried to absorb hydrogen in permanganate and also pumped it through unglazed porcelain—the latter an effective procedure, but impracticable underwater. “Won’t you please think of other absorbers or methods & see what can be done.”^*41, 250

Henry Ford was in San Francisco when Edison and Mina arrived there three days later. He disapprovingly accompanied them on a cruise around the bay aboard USS Oregon, which had fired the first shot in the Battle of Santiago in ’98. When Edison gave its big gun an affectionate pat, Ford said that as far as he was concerned, all warships were dodos, fit only for stuffing.251

The two men were making their first public appearance together as honorees at the Panama-Pacific Exhibition. Whatever glory Ford hoped to bask in paled in comparison to that accorded his friend, whom Californians had never seen before and who was to be honored on “Edison Day,” 21 October, rather awkwardly flagged as the thirty-sixth anniversary of the electric lightbulb. But he clung close to his hero on the eve of the celebration, touring the exhibition grounds with him and cramming close whenever press cameras flashed.

At one point they stopped by the Western Union booth, where Edison sat down in front of an ancient telegraph sender.

“Where did you get this?” he asked the young woman in attendance, taking up the perforated tape and letting it spill through his fingers.

“It was made by you, Mr. Edison.”

“Well, well! I had a girl once in New York that could send 119 words a minute with it.”252

The exchange was more spontaneous than the one staged by Hutchison at the height of the festivities next day. It occurred during a lunch banquet in the California Building, and the audio connection he arranged between Edison’s table and his own station in the library at West Orange went to ludicrous literal lengths, employing a multiple splice that linked sections of Samuel Morse’s first signal wire, the first transatlantic cable, Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone circuit of 1875, a fuse from Edison’s Holborn Viaduct power system of 1882, and other historic hookups.253

When Hutchison’s cross-country “call” was piped into the lunchroom, it sounded loud and clear even to Edison, who was listening with the aid of a special amplifier. The chief engineer said he was reading his script under a “flood of mellow light” cast by an Edison incandescent lamp, powered by an Edison storage battery. Around him, he went on, were “several hundred of your friends,” including Menlo Park veterans and all four of Edison’s sons. Then he sprang a coy surprise: “This address is being made to you by your greatest favorite—the Edison Diamond Disc Phonograph. An Edison Granular Carbon Telephone Transmitter is transforming the sound waves into electric impulses which, after following the tortuous paths of copper between rivers and bays, over valleys, deserts plains, and mountains…”254

By the time Hutchison ran out of purple prose, his audiences east and west were more than ready to hear from Edison himself. Everyone knew that the Old Man never spoke over the telephone. But here he was, leaning into a mouthpiece and reading out yet more of Hutchison’s advertising copy:

This is the first time I have ever carried on a conversation over the telephone….A pretty big undertaking, but the engineers of the Bell system have made it easier to talk thirty-four hundred miles than it used to be to talk thirty-four miles. I heard the record of Hutch’s talk very plainly. I should now like to hear a musical record. If you have one handy, I wish you would play that Anna Case record from Louise.255

Later, when he adjourned to Festival Hall to receive a commemorative medal, he had to fight his way through a crowd so dense he lost both his wife and his hat.256

WHITE BLACKBERRIES

With a busy winter of naval-related work ahead of him, Edison took advantage of being on the West Coast to spend two weeks sightseeing by train and automobile. One excursion Henry Ford insisted on was a visit to Luther Burbank’s gardens in Santa Rosa. The little horticulturalist had a popular image as saintly as that of John Burroughs, despite his desire to propagate a white super-race, in the same way he bred white blackberries.257

Ford noticed, as Burbank led them around, that Edison was not much interested in plants. But having recently met Harvey Firestone in San Francisco, he raised the subject of rubber, predicting that it would be the first vital import to be cut off if America entered the war.258

“Could you devise a domestic equivalent?” Ford asked.

“I will,” Edison said. “Some day.”259

SHARE IT WITH NIKOLA

At sunset on 27 October Edison stopped by Universal City in the San Fernando Valley to lay a plaque on the wall of Carl Laemmle’s massive new film studio. The text lauded him as “the world’s greatest electrician” but said nothing about his two decades of dominance over an industry he had himself founded. This was perhaps just as well, because a federal court had just ordered the breakup of the “Edison Trust,” as his Motion Picture Patents Company was generally known. The judge found that a move by the trust to deny Laemmle the right to thread independent films through a patented projector had made it a conspiracy in restraint of trade in all aspects of the motion picture business.260

The decision was so much a reproof for Edison, and so much a victory for Laemmle, representing hundreds of maverick filmmakers, that it was a wonder either man had consented to the ceremony. But neither seemed to hold a grudge against the other. Edison could only hope that the MPPC’s right to license its products might be reasserted by the Supreme Court. Otherwise his own studio, which depended on trust royalties to stay profitable, would soon go dark. The future of movies belonged to Hollywood, not to the Bronx or Fort Lee—and to feature-length, star-studded, narrative scenarios, rather than the uncredited two-reelers he had specialized in.261

He returned home on 8 November to hear that he was once again in line for the Nobel Prize. This time it was to be for physics, and The New York Times reported that it would be awarded jointly to Nikola Tesla. Edison declined comment, but Tesla was gracious, saying that “he thought Mr. Edison was worth a dozen Nobel Prizes.”^*42, 262

In the event, they lost out to a father-and-son team of British crystallographers and were destined to die without receiving the honor.

A SHEAF OF PLANS

After three weeks of Western sun, Mina was mahogany brown but Edison remained pale, as if he had never left his laboratory. Mentally that was more or less true: his head was now full of defense technology requirements, from an invisible periscope (almost tauntingly wished upon him by the navy) to smokeless navigation lamps powered by the ebb and flow of waves. He wondered how the Brazilian firefly managed to contradict the second law of thermodynamics. “Its luminous organs are but specks, and the illumination generates no heat. I have studied that little bug for years, and tried it with the most delicate thermometers….I’d give anything to know how he does it.”263

He was afraid that a closed-cylinder apparatus he had devised to burn off unventilated hydrogen in submarines might get hot enough to trigger an explosion. The navy had noticed seepage of the gas from the cells Hutchison had installed in USS E-2 and was requesting a hydrogen detector that would warn its commander to surface and open all hatches if the diffusion level rose too high.264

Edison let his chief engineer deal with that problem while he drew up a sheaf of plans, including blueprints, for a naval research laboratory. He presented them to the Naval Consulting Board at its last meeting of the year, held at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and attended by three advisory admirals.

“This is the first speech Mr. Edison has ever made,” Chairman Saunders joked, unaware that thirty-six years before, two thousand scientists had gathered in Saratoga Springs to hear a talk by the young inventor of the chalk-cylinder telephone.^*43

As speeches went, it consisted of the tersest possible comments as Edison laid sheet after sheet on the table, letting the drawings speak for themselves. They represented thirteen buildings and eight shops, and he was precise about the expensive equipment each would contain: “surgical apparatus…all universal tools…three five hundred KW turbo generator sets.”

When he was through, the naval officers said he had convinced them such a facility would greatly speed up the development of new prototypes. Rear Adm. David W. Taylor, chief of the Bureau of Construction and Repair, thought Congress could be persuaded to invest $5 million in it. Rear Adm. Robert S. Griffin, chief of the Bureau of Steam Engineering, was not so sure. “If Mr. Edison will appear before the [House] Naval Committee with the plans and all the data that he has…it will make a very profound impression.”265

No public exposure could have been less to Edison’s liking, but he recognized his responsibility as board president. “I will go down to the Committee and explain that and fight for it if you want.”266

A SPARK OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN

When 1915 came to an end, Hutchison wrote in his diary, “The year has been the happiest one of my life and I look forward to a most happy one for 1916.”267 In particular he anticipated passage by Congress of a bill, drafted by himself, providing for the installation of Edison S-type batteries on all American submarines.268

But just over a fortnight later, he fell from happiness to mortification. At 1:12 P.M. on 15 January a massive explosion rocked USS E-2 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, killing five men and injuring ten more. The submarine was in drydock at the time, undergoing modifications to its battery installation, and the whitish-gray smoke that shot out at the sound of the boom, along with a sailor still clinging to a section of the steel ladder, suggested a hydrogen blast.269 Rescuers had to don oxygen helmets before entering the fume-filled interior. Along with the dead and wounded—some were burned beyond recognition, others were pinned under mangled machinery—they found evidence that the boat’s two hundred Edison cells had blown with such force that the engine-room bulkheads were curved back like cockleshells.270

The news reached West Orange late that afternoon. Hutchison rushed to inspect the wreck, while Edison, feeling far from festive, dressed in white tie for the annual dinner of the Ohio Society of New York. There was no question of him dropping out, since he was the guest of honor, and Secretary Daniels had come north to deliver a tribute to him. Both men looked stiff and grave as they endured what was supposed to be a jovial celebration. As usual Edison remained silent and, when accosted by a reporter afterward, said only, “I have no statement to make, except that the accident could have been due to any one of a hundred causes.”271

Hutchison sent him a formal memo, blaming the disaster on lack of proper ventilation. It had been the coldest morning of the winter, with eleven degrees of frost at noon. “There were nine plumbers working in the boat, in addition to the crew present, and they doubtless wanted to keep warm.” A preliminary survey by naval officials of the damage, which included a dismembered torso, indicated that the explosion had been caused by “a spark of unknown origin” igniting an unacceptably high concentration of battery gas. Daniels had no choice but to appoint a court of inquiry.272

It convened at the yard on Tuesday 18 January under the presidency of Capt. William H. Bullard. His youthful judge advocate was a lanky, tight-lipped lieutenant named Joseph O. Fisher. Another young officer, Lt. Chester Nimitz, served as counsel for the captain of the E-2. A retired naval engineer, Cdr. William H. McGrann, represented Hutchison and the Edison Storage Battery Company.

Hutchison did not endear himself either to Edison or to the court by talking to the press even before proceedings began. The New York Times headlined his self-defense in a front-page story that took care of what was left of Edison’s reputation as a pacifist:

A FOREIGN NAVY USES EDISON BATTERY, TOO

M. R. HUTCHISON SAYS THREE SUBMARINES

EQUIPPED WITH THEM HAVE SUNK MANY SHIPS

HYDROGEN GAS NO DEFECT

AMOUNT THROWN OFF BY DEVICE

INFINITESIMAL, HE INSISTS—

E-2 EXPLOSION PURELY ACCIDENTAL273

He also blustered to The Sun that “the battery in the E-2 does not appear to have been injured in the least.” As a result, “I see no reason to recommend to Mr. Edison any changes or alterations in the theory, construction, or method of installation of the Edison submarine type storage battery.”274

Fisher at once brought out evidence that the “plumbers” Hutchison mentioned had been duct workers installing new, larger vents over the batteries. Lt. Charles M. Cooke, Jr., commander of the E-2, had expressed concerns about the behavior of his boat’s power pack as early as September 1915. Some of the cells seemed to heat more than others, indicating an irregular rate of discharge. It was Cooke who had asked the Edison company, through Navy Department channels, for a hydrogen detector and an individual cell voltmeter. Nimitz showed that both requests were “held up by objections” from Hutchison, pending improvement in the submarine’s ventilating system. The chief engineer had also advised that the ductwork be accompanied by a discharge of all cells to zero voltage, to even them up for sea service.275

Hutchison responded with yet another press statement, alleging that one of the E-2’s two ventilator fans had been idle on the morning of the accident.^*44 Hence the commander of the vessel, not the manufacturer of the batteries, was responsible for allowing an explosive mix of hydrogen and oxygen to build up in the boat. When he appeared in the witness stand, Captain Bullard reproved him for public conduct prejudicial to justice: “Interested parties to this investigation will refrain in the future from quoting or giving articles to the public press.” Red-faced, Hutchison said that reporters were entitled to know the full facts, since the battery seemed to be “on trial.” This earned him another reprimand.276

He was lucky not to be on trial himself, for not warning Lieutenant Cooke, either verbally or in battery maintenance instructions, about the hydrogen threat. Fisher kept harping on this dereliction, while failing to acknowledge that Cooke’s worries about gas seepage had coincided with a study published by the navy itself on the vital importance of ventilating all storage batteries, Edison or Exide. There had been at least six lead-acid battery explosions in the Atlantic fleet during 1915—another fact ignored by the court. Hutchison suspected industrial lobbying behind the scenes.^*45, 277

He had to admit in further testimony that he “didn’t know exactly” what was wrong with four quirky cells that the E-2’s electrician, L. L. Miles, had complained of before the disaster. They lost their charge more rapidly than the others, which meant they began to recharge at zero, and liberated clouds of hydrogen while the rest of the plant was still powering down.278 This caused a dispute between Hutchison and Fisher as to who was responsible for the gas buildup in the submarine—Hutchison as installer, or Cooke as caretaker of the cells.

Q Did you ever tell Lieutenant Cooke that the reverse cell of the Edison submarine battery, in closed circuit with other cells not reversed, generated gas to a greater extent than on normal discharge?

A Not that I know of. I did not consider it necessary any more than I would tell an engineer to keep water in his boiler.279

The judge advocate asked for Hutchison’s haughty second sentence to be stricken. Bullard overruled him. “I think that does no harm.”280

Later on, Fisher, still harping on premature reversal, saw an opportunity for some loftiness of his own. But Hutchison was better educated than he on the declension of Greek nouns.

Q This seems to be a phenomena that wasn’t known to the officers of the Edison Storage Battery Company?

A I don’t think that the phenomena—if you call it a phenomena—of gas given off by a reversed cell has been appreciated to a full extent by anyone.281

It was a mistake for him to patronize an officer of the court. From then on, Fisher was determined to absolve the navy of all blame. He repeatedly referred to the E-2’s battery as “defective” and shouted at one point that Hutchison was a liar. This caused McGrann to object and demand an apology.

“I apologize for my bearing,” Fisher said, “but my language stands.”282

ALL THE MUCKERS WE NEED

By the time the court of inquiry was over and its secret report sent to Secretary Daniels, Edison had lost patience with prejudgmental headlines blaming Hutchison—and by extension, himself—for the deaths in Brooklyn Navy Yard. He issued a public appeal for industry support, accusing his competitors of “a colossal attempt to bring ruin to a product on which I have spent many millions of dollars and years of unceasing labor.”283

He conceded that his chief engineer had been responsible for installing four nonsynchronous cells in the submarine, and negligent in not warning the Navy Department about the S-type’s hydrogen potential until the day before the explosion.^*46, 284 But Lieutenant Cooke should have kept the battery alive while the E-2 lay in drydock and not allowed spark-prone metal work to proceed at the same time as the cells were being discharged inboard.

Daniels was sympathetic, and suppressed the report while appointing a technical board of examiners, including Nimitz, to decide once and for all if the Edison battery, properly handled, was superior to the Exide. This did little to ameliorate the damage that had been inflicted on Edison’s reputation, just when his regular line of nickel-steel batteries was providing light and signal power to the nation’s largest railroad systems, and traction to one-third of all electric trucks. In hindsight, he might have paid more attention to Hutchison’s overdevelopment of the S-type. But for two years the monster battery had performed without fault on the navy’s floating cranes in Boston and Honolulu—not to mention its secret success in foreign submarine operations. All that shining achievement was now bespattered with the blood that had to be hosed out of the E-2.285

“Yes, this is pretty bad,” Edison consoled an anguished assistant. “However I can stand it.”286

In the circumstances, he could have expected some aggressive questioning on 15 March, when he presented his plans for a national research laboratory to the House Naval Affairs Committee. But his charisma—in part the aura of world fame, in part the force of his jerky energy and blunt speech—cast a spell over the hearing room. There was also the always shocking effect of seeing how deaf he was, how dependent on Hutchison for shouted repetitions of everything said to him. It made him seem formidable and vulnerable at the same time. Perhaps in consequence, the E-2 explosion was not mentioned.287

“The object of the laboratory is to perfect all the different details, or one unit of the war machinery, and do it quickly,” Edison said in his opening statement.

When I want to make a thing quickly, I put a hundred men on it instead of a few men, to carry it along for weeks and months; I put everybody in the shop on it….

In this laboratory I have all kinds of machinery; not manufacturing machinery, but all universal machinery, the same as they use in the great tool shops for making tools….I can do almost anything in that shop….I have laid it all out here; I have all the details of it, as far as I have gone, and the minimum amount for the land and the buildings and the machinery that we will want, I cannot figure it any lower than a million and a half, approximately; but I have left it so that you can increase it if you want it.288

Evidently Daniels, who sat listening, had persuaded the Naval Consulting Board to moderate its initial start-up estimate of $5 million. But he made clear that he foresaw “a very much larger laboratory” in future years, and showed a casual disregard for committee concerns about its upkeep in time of war.

REP. WILLIAM D. OLIVER (D., ALA.): How much would it cost?

EDISON: Well, we would work in three shifts of eight hours each—never stop—and I should say over a million. You could string it along, if you wanted to.

REP. ERNEST ROBERTS (R., MASS.): Do you think you could get technical and scientific men enough to work three shifts?

EDISON: Yes, sir; I can get all the muckers we need—a lot of them.

HUTCHISON: Mr. Edison calls experimenters “muckers.” He is president of the muckers’ association in his own plant.

REP. ROBERTS: Suppose in a laboratory like this there was developed a satisfactory aeroplane, and the next day some inventor outside put on the market a superior aeroplane engine. How much do we gain by the enormous amount of money we have spent in the laboratory to perfect an engine?

EDISON: Well…Drop the other one and take the new one.289

At another point he had the whole floor laughing when Roberts asked him if patented parts might cause a problem in the manufacture of munitions. “I would not pay any attention to the patents,” Edison replied. “Settle afterwards.”290

Although he talked about the facility as if it were already built and managed by himself, he conceded with a shrug that it could be run by “the Navy Department, I suppose.” But its creativity would depend on the services of civilian scientists and engineers working not for love but for money. “If the other fellow will pay $12,000 a year, you will have to pay 14,000, or you will not get them.”291

“I move,” said Representative Oliver, when he was through, “that we rise as an expression of our respect and appreciation.”292

Spectators were treated to the extraordinary sight of twenty-one congressmen standing and applauding as Edison gathered up his plans and quit the testimony table.293

IF HE COULD ONLY FEEL RICH

After a vacation in Fort Myers sweetened by Madeleine’s delivery of Thomas Edison Sloane, his first grandchild,^*47, 294 Edison returned north to march in New York’s great Preparedness Parade on 13 May.

Any hopes Daniels might have had that his celebrity recruit would support President Wilson’s pacifist reelection campaign were dashed that same day, when Edison was quoted on the front page of The New York Times saying that Theodore Roosevelt was “absolutely the only man” to lead the country for the rest of the decade. “He has more real statesmanship…and a greater executive ability to handle the big international problems that will arise at the close of the war, than all the other proposed candidates put together.” The paper also printed Roosevelt’s emotional response. “My dear Mr. Edison: I am so profoundly touched by your letter concerning me, that I shall ask the Roosevelt Non-Partisan League to give the original to me. I wish to hand it over to my children.”295

TR was not a serious candidate, although he had recovered from his attack of Progressivism and was willing to let his name be put forward at next month’s Republican National Convention.296 Ever since the sinking of the Lusitania, he had been the nation’s most ardent advocate of intervention in the European war. All that was lacking to increase the impact of the endorsement was for him and Edison to stride together beneath the ninety-five-foot American flag strung across Fifth Avenue at 55th Street. But the colonel was detained at a Boy Scout function on Long Island. So Edison marched instead with his fellow board members and 125,000 other patriots, waving so many smaller flags that for eleven hours Fifth Avenue was a slowly flowing river of red, white, and blue pointillé.^*48

He dominated the Preparedness Parade, stimulating a roar among bystanders as he strode along, waving and smiling, with the energy of a twenty-year-old. (Mina, wearing a large violet sun hat, tried to keep pace with him on the sidewalk, terrified that he would be attacked by pacifists.) But Edison’s appearance of blitheness was deceptive. He was a careworn man at this time, sleeping uncharacteristically long hours and beset by money and other worries. “Poor dearie, if he could only feel rich once in his life,” Mina wrote Theodore. Apart from the ruinous effect of the E-2 disaster on Edison Storage Battery Company sales—just when the National Defense Act was about to create a huge demand for portable power—he was beset by labor unrest and a pollution lawsuit at one of his phenol plants. Although the breakup of the “Edison Trust” had not yet been confirmed by the Supreme Court, his movie business was in terminal decline. The House Naval Affairs Committee disappointed him by recommending a $2 million appropriation for his dream research laboratory—exactly as much as he had asked for, but far less than he hoped he might get, in response to his heavy hint, “you can increase it if you want.” He drafted an angry letter to Sen. Benjamin Tillman, Democratic chairman of the parallel committee in the upper chamber, saying that if the $2 million was in any way reduced by Congress, “it would be better to drop the whole thing altogether.”297

Another worry was what to do about Hutchison. Stephen Mambert and Charles were demanding that the chief engineer’s profiteering at the expense of the Edison Storage Battery Company be restricted henceforth.298 Looking askance at “Colonia,” the mansion Hutch had acquired in Llewellyn Park (and staffed with three Japanese servants), they sought to impose new rules upon him that would restore the company’s right to market its non-submarine batteries to the government. Edison felt obliged to agree, since Charles was now officially—as of 12 June 1916—chairman of the board of Thomas A. Edison, Inc.

THE HIGHEST KICK I HAVE EVER SEEN

After Theodore Roosevelt dropped out of consideration for the Republican presidential nomination in favor of Charles Evans Hughes, a fence-sitter of almost gymnastic equipoise, the way was clear for Edison to yield to pressure from both Tillman and Secretary Daniels to come out for Woodrow Wilson—to whom, after all, he owed some fealty in his position on the Naval Consulting Board.

He did so in a letter released by the Democratic National Committee for maximum impact on Labor Day weekend. “They say [Wilson] has blundered,” he wrote. “Perhaps he has, but I notice that he usually blunders forward.” The endorsement rated national headlines. It warranted a warm welcome from Secretary Daniels in Washington two weeks later, when Edison, Hutchison, and eighteen other members of the Naval Consulting Board officially became officers of the navy and swore to “defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.”^*49, 299

They were compelled to take the oath under the authority of the recent Navy Bill, which gave a broadside of instructions as to what Congress expected of them in return for its $2 million appropriation:

Laboratory and research work on the subject of gun erosion, torpedo motive power, the gyroscope, submarine guns, protection against submarines, torpedo and mine attack, improvement in submarine attachments, improvement and development in submarine engines, storage batteries and propulsion, aeroplanes and aircraft, improvement in radio installations, and such other necessary work for the benefit of the government service, including the construction, equipment and operation of a laboratory, [and] the employment of scientific civilian assistants as may become necessary, to be expended under the direction of the Secretary of the Navy.300

Edison was less concerned by the contradictory length and vagueness of this list, which could be left to subcommittees, than by ominous signs that Washington bureaucrats disliked his idea of a naval research laboratory operating far from their purview. Already there had been a move on Capitol Hill, fortunately quashed in the Senate, to order its construction in the District of Columbia. All Edison’s board colleagues joined him in protesting this preemption of their advisory privilege. “They attach great importance to having the location question decided upon after conference and investigation,” Daniels advised Rep. Lemuel Padgett, chairman of the House Committee on Naval Affairs.301

At the general meeting of the board that morning, 19 September, Edison was elected head of a six-man committee tasked with reporting on some fifty possible sites for the laboratory. The other members were Sprague, Baekeland, Robins, Whitney, and Addicks. Secretary Daniels, attending as an honored guest, assured them, “I wish you gentlemen to understand that I have no views myself at all as to the place where it shall be located.” But he privately allowed to Padgett, “It may be that Washington is the best place.”302

On 6 October, Daniels, as a loyal Democrat anxious to reelect President Wilson, traveled to New York in a desperate effort to sock Edison and Henry Ford for campaign funds. American voters seemed to dislike both major party candidates equally, so Charles Evans Hughes’s lack of charm was not proving the hindrance Democratic strategists had hoped for. There was a chance that “the Bearded Lady,” as TR called him, might win. To emphasize the seriousness of the situation, Daniels brought the chairman of the Democratic Party, Vance McCormick, with him. The meeting, over lunch in the Biltmore Hotel, did not go well, as Daniels recounted in his memoir.

I do not suppose anything so strange ever occurred at a luncheon in New York and elsewhere….After the first course, Edison, pointing to a large chandelier, with many globes, in the middle of the room, said, “Henry, I’ll bet anything you want that I can kick the globe off that chandelier.” It hung high toward the ceiling. Ford said he would take the bet. Edison rose, pushed the table to one side of the room, took his stand in the center and with his eye fixed on the globe, made the highest kick I have ever seen a man make and smashed the globe into smithereens. He then said, “Henry, let’s see what you can do.” The automobile manufacturer took careful aim, but his foot missed the chandelier by a fraction of an inch. Edison had won and for the balance of the meal or until the ice-cream was served, he was crowing over Ford, “You are a younger man than I am, but I can out-kick you.” He seemed prouder of that high kick than if he had invented a means of ending the U-boat warfare.303

When Daniels broached the subject of campaign finances, Edison made a convenience of his deafness. Ford was just as tightwadded, although he did consent to place a number of paid endorsement articles in national newspapers. These may have helped Wilson’s subsequent victory, attained by a margin so slim that for fifteen days Hughes refused to concede.304

WE WERE IN NO WAY TO BLAME

Although Edison stayed away from almost all meetings of the Naval Consulting Board, he threw himself with passion into the tasks visited upon it by the Navy Bill. Making his first foray into ballistics, he invented a large-caliber, self-stabilizing shell that obviated the need for rifling and thereby reduced gun barrel erosion. He attended target practice exercises off the Virginia Capes and made sarcastic notes on the low standards of fire control^*50 on even the newest battleships. The USS New Jersey had overly vibrating rangefinders, the New York’s weak searchlights were good only for letting “the Enemy know where you are,” not one of the Nebraska’s 185 guns scored a hit, and the Florida’s “appalling” command communications network would infuriate a housewife calling her grocer. “Here we have the entire nervous system of the ship’s battle organization,” he wrote, “depending for its operation on a system that even in the piping times of peace will not stand the strain of ordinary drills.”305

His main compulsion in the last weeks of 1916 was to persuade the other members of the committee on sites to recommend Sandy Hook, New Jersey, as an ideal location for the naval research laboratory. He stressed its easy connection by speedboat to Manhattan and Brooklyn, while not mentioning the equal proximity of West Orange. “Rough and quiet waters on the two sides, twenty feet or more at the old Railroad Dock where steamers for New York departed—now abandoned. The Government has a Railway running full length of the Hook….There are 1300 acres and the Laboratory could easily get 100 to 150 acres and have the use of much more for special experiments.” There was a fort and proving ground at the tip of the promontory, ideal for testing the big guns he intended to design and forge on the spot. Nearby on the mainland was a bluff with views of the whole of New York Bay. Edison thought this vantage point would be ideal for marine visibility tests, essential for the development of submarine detection technology.306

Baekeland, who favored building the laboratory in Annapolis, observed that Sandy Hook had “the very great defect” of being remote from the national capital. “If the Lab is to be a success,” Edison countered, “it should be as far from Washington as possible.”^*51, 307 Other members of the sites committee shared Baekeland’s preference for Annapolis, pointing out the advantage of having the Naval Academy next door as an intellectual resource. It was true that congressmen and navy bureau chiefs were more likely to pay visits to the small city on Chesapeake Bay than to a sliver of sand and saltings 225 miles farther north, but since the products of the laboratory would have to be approved, sooner or later, by those same officials, Baekeland saw an advantage in making it reasonably accessible to them.

The result, much to Edison’s annoyance, was a report prepared for him to sign, declaring, “We are unanimous in favor of Annapolis.” An overriding consideration, in view of “the great and regrettable reduction” in Congress’s appropriation to the board, was the fact that the land available at the mouth of the Severn River was already owned by the government, and could presumably be gotten free. And instead of Edison’s original idea of a troika command representing military, naval, and civilian interests, the report recommended a single navy officer in charge, responsible only to Daniels.308

After forty years of having his own way in planning laboratories, Edison was outraged at this attempt to coerce him. He refused to sign, on the ground that a facility so closely allied with the Naval Academy would become scientific rather than technological, and would manufacture theories instead of sophisticated new weapons. “I believe that I am right in re Sandy Hook & of a Rapid Constructing Laboratory,” he wrote Hiram Maxim, “and I am going to stick to it. I shall never attach myself to a dead Government operated concern. If I can’t get quick results & plenty of them then I will not play the game.”309

Ignoring an appeal from Frank Sprague to accept a revision of the report that would include arguments for and against the Hook, he wrote a seventeen-point dissent of considerable force. It argued that uninhabited remoteness was essential to security, that the fragility of such a wisp of sea-washed land almost duplicated marine conditions, that the dunes were perfect for “aeroplane” development, and that New York’s wealth of specialist shops could be relied on to supply the most obscure raw materials at an hour or two’s notice. He envisioned a secret factory of invention operating “on a war basis” twenty-four hours a day. “As to the management of the proposed Laboratory, I believe it should be civilian.”310

Edison was humiliated when the full Naval Consulting Board rejected his minority report and accepted that of the majority. Sperry, acknowledging that the vote had been more political than practical, sent him an apologetic private letter. “This is written to assure you that you have been an inspiration to us all by your example; and your devotion to the cause…touches us all deeply. So, my dear Edison, do not for a moment be discouraged, because it may all come out for the best.”311

Daniels was even more sympathetic. He knew that Edison had also been badly bruised by a leak of another report: the recommendation of the technical panel appointed to examine the E-2’s power pack that “no Edison battery be installed on any of our submarines until further tests have shown that their disadvantages have been overcome.” Its implication that nickel-steel technology was inherently inferior to that of lead-acid cells (which needed just as much ventilation when recharging, on top of their propensity to cause chlorine gas accidents at sea) had struck to the heart of the old inventor’s pride. Hutchison warned Assistant Secretary Roosevelt’s chief of staff, Louis Howe: “As you have not seen Mr. Edison when he is enraged, it would be difficult for me to describe to you the effect this article had on him. He has not gotten over it by any means.”^*52, 312

Secretary Daniels was in an awkward position, feeling compelled to go along with the majority opinion while valuing Edison’s more—as well as being indebted to him for his declaration of support for Woodrow Wilson. As gently as possible, Daniels asked him to consider switching his vote from Sandy Hook to Annapolis, for fear of a much more parochial alternative. “The feeling here at the department among the experts is not in favor of either place; they prefer the District of Columbia.”313

Edison responded with bitter dignity. “I have it fixed in my mind, whether right or wrong, that the public would look to me to make the Laboratory a success, that I would have to do 90% of the work. Therefore if I cannot obtain proper conditions to make it a success I would not undertake it or be connected with it in the remotest degree.”314

He mailed the letter on 23 December and spent the last days of 1916 in bed, having accidentally seared his throat with nitrous acid fumes. He also had a heavy cold that threatened to turn to pneumonia. It was a season of cold comfort, too, for his “personal representative” on the Naval Consulting Board. Hutchison wrote in his diary, “If I could go back one year and avoid the explosion of E-2, I’d give many thousands of dollars which it has cost us and especially me. We were in no way to blame, but the odium has gone all over.”315

INFRA AND ULTRA

Edison’s pulmonary prostration in January 1917 made it easier for his colleagues on the Naval Consulting Board to exclude him from a committee appointed to develop and design the research laboratory, at whatever location Congress eventually chose. The anger of many members against him for refusing to endorse Annapolis turned to sympathy, even fear, when newspapers reported that he was critically ill. “Should anything happen to wink out your life at this time,” Hudson Maxim wrote, “it would be a human calamity of such magnitude as though another Atlantis were to go down under the sea.”316

Maxim’s imagery echoed an announcement by Germany that effective the beginning of February, Unterseeboot attacks on Allied ships would be extended to any American vessel suspected of carrying contraband. The Wilson administration still feigned a policy of neutrality in the war, but as any “hyphenated” German-American could tell, its real sympathies were Anglophile. Within seventy-two hours, Berlin made good on its threat by sinking the USS Housatonic, which was full of nothing more lethal than wheat. Wilson expelled the German ambassador from Washington and warned his government against any further “overt acts of war.” The situation was fraught enough for Secretary Daniels to suggest that Edison forget about board responsibilities and become an inventor again, developing secret defense ideas with the help of a twenty-five-man support team that the government would pay for.^*53, 317

Recovering from his pulmonary ailments, the Commodore plotted a series of experiments for the detection of submarines. He used his status as a senior naval official to persuade the Essex County Park Commission to lease him a secure location atop Eagle Rock, in the mountains overlooking West Orange. He had in mind an elegant, two-storied folly known as the Casino.318 During the season it served as a restaurant, but now stood high, cold, and empty, its forty-mile vantage point perfect for his research purposes.^*54 He wanted, for a start, to see if he could improve the vision of “splash observers,” sailors perched at masthead to track the accuracy of fire and—if they focused on the right patch of ocean—the slight trail of foam that indicated a submarine approaching beneath them.

Pausing only to attend a fifteen-hundred-seat lunch at the plant in honor of his seventieth birthday, Edison established himself on the second floor of the Casino and returned to the study of optics, a science brought to his attention by Eadweard Muybridge in 1888. Sending along a pair of service volunteers to an ophthalmologist in New York, he wrote, “Please examine these two men and report if they will be O.K. for using Homatropin.”319 The drug—addictive and best kept under lock and key—dilated the pupils of the eye. He thought it might aid night vision, as well as the ability to pick out unfriendly shapes in dense fog. With medical permission, he administered it in solute drops, then put the men in a darkroom before a phosphorescent screen, tuned so low that for half an hour they might as well have been blind. Gradually they became aware of a patchy glimmering that resolved into readable letters.^*55

This and other experiments along the infra and ultra ranges of the spectrum (“Want to keep all light out of the eye except Red & want different shades of red”) taught him nothing beyond the obvious fact that the last thing a lookout needed, at sea and in sunshine, was a paralyzed optic nerve. The best he could do was build a massive handheld visor that cut out ambient glare, not concerning himself about how it could be carried up a mast ladder. Going to the other extreme, he devised a low-slung glass bull’s-eye for the observation of periscopes in silhouette, and he invented a submarine searchlight, after many measurements of the absorption of light in tubes of seawater. He tested the opacity of various chemical fumes as marine “smoke smudges,” and the viscosity of oils that could be sprayed on the sea surface to blear periscope lenses. He mastered enough geometrical theory to bounce “dots” and “dashes” of light off tilted mirrors inside a ship, for emergency communications if its telephone wires were shot out. Perhaps his most ingenious radiant invention was a gyroscopic, disk-divided convoy lamp that flashed horizontally from vessel to vessel, uninflected by rolling, its sliced beams invisible at water level.320

WATER FALLING FROM WHITECAPS

By early spring Edison was in need of a laboratory with sea access, and quit Eagle Rock for Sandy Hook. Its panorama of New York Bay was wider and closer than the Casino’s, and its secluded western shore, half holly forest, offered a sweep of quiet water for some ballistic experiments he had in mind. The location was also ideally secure, being shared only by a Coast Guard station and Fort Hancock Army Base, which came with its own proving ground. He had only just built a shack for himself and his team on a pier south of the base when President Wilson asked Congress to declare war against Germany, in view of the continued “wanton and wholesale destruction of the lives of noncombatants” by U-boats.

Edison’s first thought, even before Wilson signed the declaration on 6 April, was that his chemical and storage battery facilities were now vulnerable to domestic sabotage. He telegraphed Newton D. Baker, the secretary of war: “PERSISTENT RUMORS OR THREATS TO DAMAGE SOME OF MY MOST IMPORTANT PLANTS COMPEL ME TO ASK THAT YOU GIVE THEM IMMEDIATE MILITARY PROTECTION.” The request was referred to a distant department of the army, filed, and forgotten. However, the Office of Naval Intelligence considered his work to be important enough to supply him with a bodyguard.321

He threw himself into experiments with redoubled urgency. Conquering his aversion to men with degrees, he corralled four scientists from Princeton to advise him on the arcana of trajectory graphics, radio resonance, air and sea navigation, and gyroscopics. He was happiest, as ever, when inventing sonic devices—a waterproof microphone, an airplane direction finder, a depth charge that literally took “soundings”—or practicing chemistry,^*56 as when he packed charcoal and soda lime into a gas mask that immunized masthead spotters from the narcosis of stack gas.322

One of his new recruits, Karl T. Compton, was a physicist well qualified to observe Edison as a body in perpetual motion.

Barely taking time to say “how do you do,” he took out his pencil and began to describe a problem which had been put up to him by the Naval Consulting Board—the problem of increasing the efficiency of the driving mechanism of a torpedo so that a larger amount of explosive could be stored in it without changing its range or size. He gave me a very brief history of the development of the present torpedo…and told me to come back and see him when I had a solution.

In about three weeks I reported to him that I had found three fuels which seemed to offer possibilities. He disposed of these solutions in three sentences: “Fuel A can only be obtained in Germany. Fuel B has been tried but discarded because of the danger of explosions. Fuel C [containing alcohol] is no good because the sailors drink the damn stuff.”323

---

—

COMPTON MARVELED AT the organic imagination Edison applied to the fabrication of low-resistance granules for his marine microphone. He bought hog bristles from a brush factory, electroplated them, then chopped the shining filaments with a microtome into tiny metal-rimmed platelets. Next he washed away the keratin in a solution he described as “the stuff men dissolved their murdered wives in,”^*57 and packed the remnant rings into a diaphragm that he linked to a telephone receiver and amplified with a triode vacuum tube. After all this trouble, the granulated diaphragm did not satisfy, so he shaved down a disk of mica that worked much better. “He was uncommonly ingenious in figuring out ways of designing apparatus to do what he wanted it to do,” Compton wrote, “and he was one of the most patient and persevering men who ever lived in carrying through his ideas to the last stage of comprehensive test.”324

As finally rigged, Edison’s underwater listening device let freighter crews hear the engine revolutions of a U-boat more than a mile away. It consisted of a cone dropped from the bowsprit ten or twenty feet ahead of the ship, where there was no sound of turbulence aft. The force of water flowing into the cone was counterbalanced by that of air compressing behind the diaphragm, allowing it to vibrate freely at any number of knots. He found that by swiveling the angle of reception, he could determine the path of an approaching torpedo. But the cone then became so sensitive that it registered distracting amounts of interference.325

Edison had to draw on all his acoustical knowledge to solve the problem. His explanation, in “Report No. 31” to Daniels, dated 30 April 1917, was not calculated to make the secretary look forward to Report No. 32:

The greatest trouble is the sound of the water falling from whitecaps. But to day I have finally finished a lot of tests for cutting out the noise almost entirely by means of a mechanically operated resonance column.

While listening for submarines, the water column moves up and down continuously, making a cycle in 6 minutes. Any movement of water by the movement of boat does not change the pitch, which is lucky. Any note from 2500 per second to 70 per second is picked out of the mass of sounds, making it conspicuous and by a brake on motor held there. If there are two more sounds and they repeat themselves and if no boat is in sight it is sure that they come from a submarine as no sound of high periodicity comes from the sea.326

SHADOW SAILING

For the next year and a half,327 Edison labored on land and at sea to perfect thirty-nine new devices, systems, strategies, and tactics of defense. Some of his ideas, such as a mast extension that lofted lookouts dizzily high in the sky, were landlubberly enough to amuse naval scientists.^*58 But as long as a thing worked, he scoffed at their criticism: “My private opinion is that most of them lack imagination.” He saw the war as a contest of technologies, not ideologies, and explored every notion that might help win it: a wireless telegraph message scrambler; a nocturnal telescope; cannon-fired steel mesh drapes to slow the momentum of enemy torpedoes; a turbine-headed shell that obviated the need for rifling; underwater coastal surveillance stations; a grease of Vaseline infused with zinc dust for rustproofing submarine guns; a silicate-of-soda fire extinguisher that glazed coal embers; and a water brake for quick turns of ship. In a particularly exuberant flight of fancy, he even proposed the dispatch of a fleet of self-steering skiffs to mine Belgium’s Zeebrugge Harbor.^*59, 328

Almost more remarkable than this frenzy of invention—his last—was Edison’s self-control in not boasting about it to reporters. He was as scrupulous about secrecy as he was about spending the government’s money, constantly assuring Daniels that innovation could be economical.^*60, 329 Working twenty-hour days and financing some projects himself, he encouraged his academic recruits to work without pay, as a patriotic duty. The only perk he insisted on was a large yacht, and the navy’s attempts to fob him off with inferior vessels in the early summer of 1917 made him threaten to “quit on experiments requiring a boat.” Hutchison came to the rescue when he arranged with Assistant Secretary Roosevelt to lease a 210-foot “submarine chaser” to the Commodore indefinitely.330

USS Sachem had a crew of twenty and was captained by Lt. J. N. Patton, an experienced deep-sea navigator. Besides a large cabin earmarked for Edison, it had guest bunks for ten researchers, a conference room, and enough deck space to accommodate projectile launchers and observational gear.331 Its only deficiency—not surprising in a warship—was that there were no amenities for a female passenger. The navy had a traditional prejudice against petticoats at sea, and Patton boggled when he heard that Edison wanted Mina to sail with him.332

This request had less to do with septuagenarian insecurity than with a deaf man’s need for interpretive services. It was so unprecedented that Daniels stepped in to order the captain to comply. Mina was flattered to be acknowledged—for once—as someone Edison could not do without. But she looked forward with little enthusiasm to weeks, if not months, of being caged in a swaying stateroom, far from her garden, birds, and children. Theodore was back home from Montclair Academy, nineteen years old and ardent to sign up for military service, as John Sloane had just done. Mina, remembering the loss of another Theodore—her brother, killed in the Spanish-American War—was terrified that the boy might be in uniform when she saw him again. (She had no such worry about Charles, who had registered for the “managing director” class of draft exemption and claimed also to be going deaf.)333

President Wilson asked to see Edison and hear something of his plans before he went to sea. Impressed by their interview on 20 August, Wilson vowed to do anything in his power to help him. “I was an undergraduate when his first inventions first captured the imagination of the world,” he told Daniels. “Ever since then I have retained the sense of magic which what he did then created in my mind.”^*61, 334

Twenty-four hours later the Commodore and his wife were piped up the gangway of the Sachem at Hoboken. It set sail immediately for Sag Harbor, Long Island, where Edison had established a torpedo research station. He planned to use New London, Connecticut, as an alternate base for experimental cruises in the sound. After the first of these, Mina decided to make as much use as possible of onshore accommodations. “Papa and I sleep on a board bed with simply a mattress,” she wrote Theodore, “and I can tell you it is hard.”335

Captain Patton treated her with a strained courtesy that darkened to surliness as the weeks went by. Periodically she fled back to Orange for a few days of recuperative gossip with Madeleine, who was pregnant again and dreading John’s imminent departure as a private attached to the Army Aviation Service in Washington.336

Meanwhile Edison saved Theodore from the draft by cannily advising the secretary of war, “I have come across many things that would be of value to the army,” and would develop them if only he had a few extra engineers to help. Baker at once authorized him to hire “thirty men of the kind you have in mind.” Theodore was the first qualifier, and Edison gave him an aircraft direction finder to try out at Hazelhurst Field in Mineola, New York. But Theodore’s independent nature soon asserted itself, and he began work on a fearsome weapon of his own design, a self-propelled, unattached, toothed wheel loaded with TNT that was supposed to bite its way across the Western front, heedless of barbed wire, and explode in targeted trenches. It would keep him dangerously occupied for the duration of the war.^*62, 337

At first Edison enjoyed experimenting at sea. It was a novelty to be saluted as an officer of high rank, even though he stuck to his usual shabby suits and treated all hands on the Sachem with affable informality. But by Labor Day he was already bored by the claustrophobia of shipboard life and the slowness of port procedure, which was constantly subject to weather and communications delays. When Charles and Theodore paid a surprise visit to the yacht, Mina noticed how much he had been missing them, and how he clung to her after their departure.338

Another frustration for him was the apparent determination of the Navy Department, pace “friend Daniels,” to block every one of his technological initiatives. He fumed over what he considered to be its anticivilian prejudice, although most of the rejections he received were respectful and exhaustively argued. In early October, he put a deputy in charge of ongoing experiments aboard the Sachem and took a temporary office in Washington to confront the bureau chiefs more directly.339

Commodore Edison and the crew of USS Sachem, 1917.

The suite Daniels found for him in the Navy Annex could not have been more imposing. It was the former sanctum of Adm. George Dewey, the hero of Manila Bay, who had died earlier in the year. But neither it nor Edison’s own eminence had much effect on the line officers he tried to cajole. Hutchison was no longer available to help. His wings were so clipped by the management reforms Charles had instituted at West Orange, and by a new congressional ban on conflict-of-interest lobbying, that it was inevitable he must quit his job—but not so soon as to avoid responsibility for a sheaf of corporate lawsuits arising out of the E-2 disaster.340

Edison expected to remain only a few weeks in the capital. His researches into marine optics had gotten him interested in camouflage and other trompe l’oeil phenomena, including the ultimate one of darkness. Before returning to his marine laboratory, he needed to make use of Washington’s reference resources to find out where, and at what time of day, most U-boat sinkings took place in the war zone. The result was such an avalanche of charts and statistics that he used three aides to help collate them. In the process he began to see an offensive pattern around the British Isles that was not countered by defensive moves on the part of Allied shipping companies.341

“Just about what I expected,” he said to Thomas Robins. “Those captains of the ships that do business from Norway to Greece don’t know any navigation, they simply sail from one lighthouse to another, the Germans know that and sit there and wait for them.”342 He began a laborious effort to turn himself into a cartographer, on the assumption that Sir Eric Campbell Geddes, Britain’s new first lord of the admiralty, would thank him for advice as to how the Allies could stanch the attrition of vital imports. In the process he discovered that statistical analysis was not much different from his deductive experimental method. By 21 November he had eight policy recommendations and forty-five “strategic maps” to send to Sir Eric. It did not occur to him that a member of His Majesty’s Government might resent being patronized by an amateur American incapable of self-doubt. Anyone with “imagination,” Edison wrote—again implying that few nautical men had it—could see that 94 percent of Allied losses occurred by day. Hence, “no cargo boat should enter or leave any English or French port except at night.” This did not apply to convoys, which could more effectively be choreographed in at dawn and out at dusk, with such coordination that half the time, destroyer escorts would not be needed. A trinational routing office, working around the clock, would ensure that no lanes became overcrowded. Steamers from abroad should stop veering toward the lighthouses of the Irish coast, the Isles of Scilly, and the Severn Estuary, and steer a mid-channel course where U-boats were few. They should burn smokeless anthracite coal and drastically modify their silhouettes. Periscope observation, being low, depended on perpendiculars. “Cut off the masts, which are no longer of any use; cut down the smokestack to a minimum; close the gaps between the various deck constructions on the ships by canvas [flanks] to make an even contour….In addition to this, all boats which cross the danger zone in an easterly or westerly direction should sail in line with the rays of the sun, or what I call ‘shadow sailing.’ ”343

When he tried to apply his ideas stateside, “in the event that enemy submarines start operations along the American coast,” he found that he would have to compile the charts himself, for lack of relevant records. The task kept him in Washington for another two months and caused him to brood more and more about governmental “red tape” and his thwarted plans for the naval research laboratory.344

Mina visited her husband at his hotel in mid-January 1918 and saw possible signs of depression. She itemized them for Theodore:

Suit a sight with spots

Shirt, dirty—when he changed, left studs & buttons in….

Socks all holes

Glasses broken

Room, as if a cyclone had struck it

Suitcase not even unpacked345

A terse letter from Frank Sprague, complaining that the naval research laboratory was still unbuilt and unlocated ten months into the war, hardly improved Edison’s mood. The irascible engineer pointed out that only one member of the Naval Consulting Board sites committee was responsible for blocking its construction at Annapolis. Because of the “intolerable” delay, sentiment in the Navy Department and on Capitol Hill had now swung toward the Bellevue Magazine site in Washington.346

“Frankly, we have no right to let this matter drag along further,” Sprague wrote. He recommended the board vote unanimously in favor of Bellevue, or, what was even more embarrassing, ask to be relieved of expressing any preference whatever.347

Edison lost patience with the national capital and its endless political compromises. He ordered the Sachem to join him at Key West Naval Station in Florida, and he moved there with Mina at the beginning of February. William Meadowcroft sensed his acute frustration. “He does not wear his heart on his sleeve…only those who know him well realise how greatly he was discouraged.”348

Explaining himself to Daniels rather than Sprague, Edison wrote on 4 March that he had always envisaged the laboratory as a place of rapid product development, not solely devoted to research.

Of course the board can do what in their judgment they think best, but they cannot expect me to agree to recommend what I firmly believe will be a failure….I am so deaf that I have seldom attended meetings of this consulting board and am so entirely out of touch with it that it seems to be a species of deception for me to continue as its head, so I think I had better disconnect and work directly for the Navy, the board electing a young and aggressive man in my place.349

A SORT OF GRUDGE

Daniels ignored this letter, perhaps on the grounds that a “president for life” would have to die to make his resignation effective. The alternative was for Edison to calm down on a tranquil, palm-shaded naval base as far south of Washington, D.C., as possible. He proceeded to do just that in Key West as the guest of the station commandant, Capt. Frederick A. Traut, a gentlemanly sophisticate who did much to restore his jaded opinion of naval officers. As an attaché in prewar Berlin, he had had extensive contact with Kaiser Wilhelm II and naturally knew much about German offensive technology. Traut insisted that the Edisons stay in his spacious villa on the base, and he further endeared himself to them by offering to find Theodore an uninhabited island on which to test his killer wheel.350

The arrival of the “boys of the Sachem” cheered Edison further. He at once began experiments with them, making use of the base’s nautical, aerial, and wireless facilities and spending much time at sea, testing his quick-turn anchor. He even essayed a silvery sailor’s beard. Mina sensed that she was again femina non grata, and removed in something of a huff to Fort Myers.351

Charles paid her a consolatory visit there, bringing with him Carolyn “Pony” Hawkins, his girlfriend of several years, a small serious woman furtive about her age and family circumstances.352 One day the couple came in from the pier and announced they “wanted to get married right away.” Mina was still struggling to recover from this when Edison telegraphed his approval to Charles from Key West: “IF YOU HAVE DECIDED IT MUST BE THEN THE SOONER THE BETTER. CAN’T BE ANY WORSE THAN LIFE IN THE FRONT LINE OF THE TRENCHES.”353

The wedding, attended only by Mina, Charles’s former nurse, and a butler, took place on 27 March between a camphor tree and a cinnamon tree in the garden of Seminole Lodge.354 Few spots in the world were more fragrantly remote from the Kaiserschlacht, the German spring offensive then reaching its peak in France. As Edison’s mischievous wire implied, Charles, by marrying at twenty-eight, had further ensured he would not be called up anytime soon.

That did not stop another Edison fils from enlisting in the tank division of the army at the age of thirty-eight. Like many a lost soul in ordinary life, William saw the war as his chance to prove himself as something more than a playboy turned poultry farmer. He throve under military training and soon won a sergeant’s stripes. When the time came for him to be sent overseas, Mina suppressed years of dislike and traveled to Gettysburg to wish him well.355

There was no question of sickly Tom doing anything as rashly brave at forty-two. He had had no more luck growing mushrooms than trading away his famous name in dissolute youth. All he wanted was what he had so long been denied: a job using his gifted hands somewhere in Edison Industries.^*63 The firm had recovered from the E-2 disaster, and under Charles’s progressive leadership, its phonograph, battery, cement, and chemical factories were registering record profits. Fond of Tom and increasingly self-confident as chairman of the board, Charles decided to give his half-brother a break, once the war ended.^*64, 356

He also rid the company—at last, and at great expense—of the suave services of Miller Reese Hutchison, canceling the last of his commission privileges in exchange for a severance package of $112,589. Edison made no protest. Hutchison resigned with worldly ambitions intact, rented an office suite in the crown of New York’s Woolworth skyscraper, and looked around for new business opportunities.^*65, 357

On 23 April, Edison wound down his experiments at Key West and transferred what was left of them to his garage at Glenmont, where he continued to putter and sketch with diminishing energy. The strain of working what he described to Josephus Daniels as “eighteen months steady for 17 hours per day” was at last taking its toll. So was a gathering suspicion that neither the navy nor the army would ever adopt any of his ideas. Madeleine noticed that the very sight of a uniform coming through the door at Glenmont drove her father into a sulk. “He seems to have a sort of grudge against the service.”^*66, 358

In August, Edison joined Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, and John Burroughs on a camping trip along the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains. Burroughs was struck by his new tendency to sit apart and brood. “Occasionally around the camp fire we drew [him] out on chemical problems, and heard formula after formula come from his lips as if he were reading them from a book.”359

When a submarine explosion almost identical to that of the E-2 occurred in Brooklyn Navy Yard on 5 October, killing the captain and one officer, Edison noted that this time the hydrogen was given off by a lead-acid battery pack. This only reinforced his feeling that he and Hutchison had been discriminated against by the naval court of inquiry—even though a sympathetic Daniels was still suppressing its final report.^*67, 360

By now the end of the war was imminent, but Edison continued doggedly to foist himself on the Navy Department, demanding a vessel larger than the Sachem to test the latest version of his underwater microphone. Daniels tried to make him understand that he had done more than enough to help defend his country. Edison’s response was to say that the invention would be just as useful in peacetime as an anticollision device.361

William got to the Western Front just two weeks before the Armistice on 11 November. He survived and was soon pestering his father for money to bring him home.362

THE THANKS OF THE NAVY

Commodore Edison at Key West Naval Station, spring 1918.

To Daniels’s barely concealed irritation, Edison ignored the peace and kept behaving like a naval scientist through the summer of 1919. He failed to take a hint when Assistant Secretary Roosevelt withdrew the Sachem from service and provided him with a rusty substitute slated for demolition. When it too was withdrawn, in favor of a yacht lacking fifteen feet of bow, Edison asked if he was expected to end his marine experiments. On 10 September Roosevelt informed him that due to retrenchment throughout the service, it would not be possible to supply him with any further hulks: “I beg to extend to you now the thanks of the Navy for the efforts you have made.”363

Edison replied with equal coldness, saying he would find it “quite satisfactory” to return to private life and “close my connection with the government.” He did so without yielding to Daniels’s plea that he bestow his valedictory blessing on a naval research laboratory to be built in the District of Columbia, “[on] government owned land and under the jurisdiction of the Navy Department.” For the rest of his life he would chafe at the thought of this perversion of his original concept, presented to Congress with such high hopes three and a half years before, at the cravenness of the Naval Consulting Board in ultimately approving it, and most painful of all, at the failure of the armed services to accept a single one of the contributions he had vouchsafed them. “I made about forty-five inventions during the war and they pigeonholed every one of them.”364

The only balm to his hurt in the last days of the decade came not from any official at land or sea but from an ambitious, Havana-smoking promoter of technological progress in the air. An immense Handley Page bomber flew low over Llewellyn Park and dropped a tribute to Edison deus ex machina:

THE GREATEST LAND TYPE AEROPLANE IN THE WORLD SENDS ITS GREETINGS TO THE GREATEST INVENTOR IN THE WORLD.

HUTCH.365

*1 Edison by the middle of 1910 had applied for 1,328 patents, or about one for every eleven days of his inventive career.

*2 Equivalent to $191 million in 2018.

*3 Aside from movie actresses, the only women Edison employed were stenographers, packagers, and cooks.

*4 In 1910 Hutchison’s Klaxon royalties alone totaled $41,921, equivalent to well over $1 million in 2018.

*5 A century after Edison ventured this opinion, a team of American neurophysiologists endorsed it in their own language. They studied the movement of 1,019 neurons in twelve subjects exercising acts of free will and concluded, “There is substantial evidence implicating the parietal and medial frontal lobes in the representation of intention and in initiation of self-generated activity.” Itzak Fried et al., “Internally Generated Preactivation of Single Neurons in Human Medial Frontal Cortex Predicts Volition,” Neuron 69, no. 3 (February 2011).

*6 Again, Edison anticipated the findings of modern neuroscientists that purportedly “random” selections are in fact deliberate choices made by the brain, often hundreds of milliseconds before it persuades itself to the contrary. See P. Haggard, “Human Volition: Towards a Neuroscience of Will,” National Review of Neuroscience 9, no. 12 (December 2008).

*7 William James had voiced a similar complaint in his last book, A Pluralistic Universe (1909): “The over-technicality and consequent dreariness of the younger disciples at our American universities is appalling.”

*8 No sooner had he done so than a rival product, Bakelite, was developed by the New York chemist Leo Baekeland. For the next several years, Edison’s Condensite Company of America had to fight a patent infringement suit from Baekeland, although its product was purer and harder. In 1917 Condensite was awarded priority, but by then Aylsworth was dead.

*9 TR was at this time reemerging as a political force and possible candidate for a third term in the White House. Edison never made a talking picture of him but did issue four cylinder records of his campaign speeches in 1912.

*10 At one point Edison got Hutchison to detonate a cell inside a slightly inflated balloon, anticipating the modern automobile airbag.

*11 This gift was worth $50,575 in 1911, equivalent to $1.4 million in 2018.

*12 Edison was presented with a copy of the Parliament Bill signed by Asquith, Lloyd George, and other senior government members.

*13 Valentine, Joseph Pulitzer’s special foreign correspondent, published a novel in 1912 entitled Hecla Sandwith. It did not sell well.

*14 In 1911 small doses of this deadly poison were considered to enhance heart performance.

*15 See Part Four.

*16 According to the physicist Robert Woodward, president of the Carnegie Institution for Science, Edison received only three votes “because of the profound prejudice among our academic colleagues against any kind of work not done in their characteristic ways.”

*17 By now, Hutchison was earning 20 percent on all battery contracts.

*18 The situation was especially critical because eager dealers had already ordered more than 175,000 unproduced disk records. Meanwhile the Edison Phonograph Works had run up an operating loss of $65,000 on top of a gross deficit for 1911 of $126,154.

*19 Railcars designed by Ralph Beach and battery-powered by Edison had been in service in New York City and on the Pennsylvania Railroad since the summer of 1911. The batteries were underslung and propelled the car with twenty-four passengers well over one hundred miles per charge, often through heavy snow.

*20 A letter around this time from Madeleine to Mina makes clear that by then she and John were lovers. The document’s woman-to-woman confidentiality implies that Mina was expected to keep the secret from Edison.

*21 Edison’s idea in erecting this marquee was that its canvas drape would obviate the “echo effect” of solid walls.

*22 Edison’s directors clapped two halves of a coconut shell together at the start of each take.

*23 The reference is to Edison’s motion picture camera, patented 31 August 1897. By 1913 the trademark terms Kinetoscope, Kinetograph, and Kinetophone were frequently confused in the public mind. For their changing meanings in the 1880s and ’90s, see Parts Four and Five.

*24 Motion picture miking remained static until Walter Wellman devised the overhead boom on the set of Beggars of Life in 1928.

*25 Edison’s educational movies project was a natural sequel to a series of semidocumentary, reformist shorts put out by his studio between 1910 and 1913. They covered such subjects as slumlords, tuberculosis, and child labor.

*26 Edison claimed that his nonskip jewel holder was the result of 2,300 experiments.

*27 “Blue Amberols…when played with an Edison Diamond Reproducer…outperformed any other medium of reproduced music then available,” the audio historian Roland Gelatt writes in Fabulous Phonograph. “The ears in Edison’s recording studios were attuned with extraordinary sensitivity to the elements of good sound reproduction.”

*28 Edison, aiming for wealthy connoisseurs, soon added even more elaborate disk players. By 1919, at the height of the phonograph craze, he was offering a luxury cabinet model at $6,000, or more than $87,000 in today’s money.

*29 In 1917 Edison put out what is widely considered the first authentic jazz record, “That Funny ‘Jas’ [sic] Band from Dixieland.” Arthur Collins and Byron G. Harlan vocal duet, Edison 5186.

*30 William Meadowcroft added the suffix -ish to this word when typing up Edison’s statement for release.

*31 In 1911 the distinguished operetta composer Victor Herbert quit as Edison’s music adviser, unable to stand any more professional insults.

*32 In 2018 researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara undertook to restore and digitize nine thousand Edison Diamond Disc recordings and make them publicly accessible under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

*33 This series of talking-head interviews, now lost, was the first political documentary with sound.

*34 He sold the last of them in November 1917, having profited greatly and restored much of his personal fortune.

*35 In the summer of 1915 the U.S. Secret Service investigated a briefcase mistakenly left on a Manhattan-bound train and found evidence of a $100,000 contract to buy and resell Edison phenol to German-American firms by means of a fraudulent “Chemical Exchange Association.” The funds involved came from an espionage account at the German embassy. Edison was embarrassed when The World broke the story, although he had already committed the rest of his phenol surplus to the U.S. military.

*36 At one point, a flushed and excited Edison was heard declaiming the last lines of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If.”

*37 Historic wax cylinders destroyed in the fire including the only recordings of such great nineteenth-century musicians as Hans von Bülow, not to mention Mark Twain telling jokes, do not appear to have survived.

*38 Hutchison boasted a one-day tally of $415,000 in battery and phenol sales to Madeleine Edison Sloane on 20 March 1915. His commission was 20 percent, equal to $2.2 million in today’s money. M. R. Hutchison to Madeleine Edison Sloane, 20 March 1915, PTAE.

*39 Edison thereafter became president of the Naval Consulting Board, but for the rest of his tenure, through 1921, he was loosely referred to as its chairman.

*40 “The navies of the world,” Edison announced after the F-4 disaster, “…must expect catastrophes so long as they continue to use sulphuric acid in those vessels.”

*41 It took a month for Baekeland to come up with the idea of letting hydrogen bubble out of the submarine through a waterproof vent. Edison had to explain that what was needed was a way to vacate “without any gas leaving the boat to indicate its presence to the enemy.”

*42 On 18 May 1917 the American Institute of Electrical Engineers awarded Tesla its Edison Medal. He reminisced on that occasion about working for Edison (“this wonderful man”) as a newly arrived immigrant in 1884. (See Part Five.) For discussions of the internet myth that Edison and Tesla were bitter rivals, see Bernard Carlson, Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age (Princeton, NJ, 2013), 397ff., and the essay “Edison and Tesla” at http://edison.rutgers.edu/​tesla.htm.

*43 See Part Six.

*44 An annotated diagram of the explosion in the Edison National Historic Park archive indicates that the main outboard battery exhaust was valved shut, and plates opened adjacent to the fans for increased inboard ventilation.

*45 Hutchison told Daniels that a detective in his employ observed “frequent consultations” during the course of the trial between a member of the court and representatives of Edison’s principal competitor, the Electric Storage Battery Company.

*46 Hutchison had, however, been explicit about all kinds of battery gas evolution in his briefing booklet on the S-type, distributed throughout the U.S. naval command in the fall of 1915.

*47 Madeleine’s news coincided less agreeably with another of Beatrice Edison’s avowed pregnancies. Her confinement was “expected” around the end of June, but thereafter she and Tom remained childless. Beatrice Edison to MME, 19 June 1916, CEF; Madeleine Edison to MME, ca. late August 1916, DSP.

*48 The parade inspired Childe Hassam to paint his famous series of New York flag paintings.

*49 From this date on, Daniels addressed Edison as “Commodore,” unbothered by the latter’s conviction that his own name was “Dannels.”

*50 Fire control is the aiming, balancing, and concentration of naval gunfire on moving targets.

*51 Edison had earlier prospected Fort Wadsworth and Governors Island in New York Bay, and even the Hudson Valley, but “on account of the ice, I did not go beyond Tarrytown.”

*52 According to Hutchison, Edison’s fury was such that he ordered the breakup of all the precision tools and dies that had gone into the manufacture of the S-type battery.

*53 Edison was nevertheless confirmed as “president for life” by a vote of the Naval Consulting Board on 10 March 1917.

*54 The Casino, looking much the same as in Edison’s day, is now a luxury restaurant in Eagle Rock Reservation.

*55 Edison had experimented with vestigial vision as early as December 1903, when he told a newspaper editor that the eye was “marvelously selective” in storing up low-intensity light.

*56 “I have always been more interested in chemistry than physics,” Edison told a reporter in February 1917.

*57 Potassium hydroxide, or caustic potash.

*58 When an officer of the Bureau of Ordnance objected to having to test some Edison projectiles, Daniels told him, “Commander, you may be right in this matter, but the public will think that Edison is right, so go ahead and test them.” William L. Saunders to TE, mid-September 1917, PTAE.

*59 Edison’s inventive flow was such that he begged Daniels in April, “Please do not send on other people’s ideas….I have more now than I could ever work out.”

*60 When one series of experiments became costly, Daniels had to encourage Edison to “go ahead and spend as much money as will be necessary” to complete them.

*61 Edison, in contrast, remembered Wilson as a “conceited bookworm.”

*62 Theodore’s long illustrated letter of 15 November 1917 explaining this device to his father shows that he was a born inventor.

*63 Between 1918 and 1934 Thomas A. Edison, Jr., was awarded ten U.S. mechanical patents.

*64 Charles added the executive title of general manager to his chairmanship in January 1919.

*65 Hutchison prospered briefly, then became a victim of the postwar depression. By the end of 1925 he was down to his last $275. He lived on until 1944, clinging to his title of “Doctor,” and never ceasing to bask in the memory of having once moved among the great. “I spent the happiest days of my life with Edison. I knew him as did no other man.”

*66 John Sloane did not improve the family atmosphere that summer by suggesting, to Edison’s rage, that Charles and Theodore were evading war duty.

*67 The report was never released. Through his legal department, Edison aggressively fought the lawsuits arising out of the E-2 disaster, with claims totaling more than half a million dollars. He settled them in 1919 for $66,000.