ON THE EVE of his forty-third birthday, Edison succumbed to an unusual attack of depression. He had only just recovered from the shock of seeing his proudest achievement, the Pearl Street generating station in New York, burned to the bricks, with seven of its eight great dynamos ruined. Thanks to quick emergency action by the local illuminating company, the system was back in service after only a few days. But the memory of seeing a powerhouse he had designed with such care standing blackened, drenched, and gap-windowed was still raw when he heard that Henry Villard, the multimillionaire president of Edison General Electric, wanted him to sacrifice a thousand shares of his stock in that firm, so that certain Vanderbilt interests—aided and abetted by the Drexel, Morgan banking house—could buy their way in.*1, 1

This casual assumption that he would allow himself to be elbowed still further down the board table of a corporation bearing his name (and how much longer would the financiers maintain that trademark?) enraged Edison, at a time when he would have preferred to unload some of the less gilt-edged assets in his portfolio. Having agreed to accept stock certificates, instead of cash, from the treasurers of dozens of isolated central stations he had installed around the country in the 1880s, he held almost $4 million in currently worthless paper.2 Having further agreed, perhaps foolishly, to Edison General’s absorption of all the electrical manufacturing companies he used to control, in exchange for a cash payment that somehow also turned to paper, he found that his income had fallen from $250,000 to $85,0003—too little to keep the West Orange laboratory going, unless he delved into his own pocket.^*2

“Your request has worried me so much that it is the principal reason for breaking me down in spirits,” he wrote Villard, saying that he needed a vacation in the North Carolina mountains to refresh him, body and soul.

I have been under a desperate strain for money for 22 years, and when I sold out [to Edison General], one of the greatest inducements was the sum of cash received, which I thought I could always have on hand, so as to free my mind from financial stress, and thus enable me to go ahead into the technical fields. To put it back into the business is something I have never contemplated….I feel that it is about time to retire from the light business and devote myself to things more pleasant, where the strain and worry is not as great.4

Villard dismissed this threat as the kind of cri de coeur to be expected on occasion from a temperamental genius. “No cause for worry,” he replied. “With long rest I am sure you will return in better spirits.”5

SPOTTED LIKE A LEOPARD

Actually Edison was remarkable for hardly ever losing his cheerful equanimity. Not since the death of his first wife, five and a half years before, had he shown such emotion. But the decade had certainly opened with a pileup of worries for him—in contrast to the 1880s, which had been one long crescendo of celebration and success. Now he was again a plaything of financiers (Villard suggested he borrow to make up for his lost income), contractually compelled to work up to nine hours a day, unpaid, on electrical problems that should have been handled by engineers in the field. That left another nine hours—eighteen being his habitual schedule—for him to devote to problems closer to home, such as a faltering start to the production of Edison talking dolls, a sharp decline in phonograph and record sales, two looming court decisions that could well humiliate him, bad news from an experimental iron mine he had opened in Pennsylvania, and even worse news from Germany, where his eldest daughter had been struck by smallpox.6

Marion lay now in a Dresden hospital, her seventeen-year-old body “spotted like a leopard only more so,” in the words of Elizabeth Earl, her governess and chaperone. She had been touring Europe for ten months, partly to finish her education but mostly to keep an ocean between herself and Mina. As far as Edison could see—which in domestic situations was a matter of millimeters—Tom and William had recovered from the loss of one mother and adapted to another without much difficulty. But Marion’s memories of Mary went further back (the golden hair, the chocolates, the laughter). She could not forgive Mina for supplanting her. Mina had been unable to fill the void in the girl’s heart, and Marion herself had decided to go abroad.7

Marion Edison as a teenager.

That venture itself cost Edison plenty, and now he was faced with thousands of dollars in medical and recuperating expenses, assuming Marion survived—there was some evidence that her case was hemorrhagic.^*3, 8 Mina’s budget for the rest of the family also showed inflationary tendencies. The boys had their names down for fall attendance at St. Paul’s in Concord, New Hampshire, a boarding school that was by no means cheap.^*4 And she was pregnant with her second child.9

As long as Edison was flush, he willingly supported all the minor or impecunious family members who depended on him, from his eighty-five-year-old father to little Madeleine, not yet two. But his charity went no further than signing checks. He saw no reason to write sympathy letters in addition—not even to Marion, suppurating in a foreign sanitarium. She could count on all her bills being paid, no matter how long it took for her pitted face to heal. Surely that permitted him to ignore the suggestion of a past governess that what Marion needed most of all was “a loving letter from her Father.”10

Affable to every stranger who waylaid him, generous with advice even to competitors, Edison was unaware of how often he hurt the feelings of intimates. He was at once gregarious and distant, willing to admit that “I live in a great, moving world of my own,”11 like the flickering figures seen through the peephole of his Kinetoscope machine. Even when alerted to the pain, or loneliness, or shame, or other neuroses of people who were less successful than himself, he seemed puzzled that they did not cheer themselves up by embarking on some bold venture, as he was about to do.

MORE AND BIGGER ROCKS

Iron, more than fresh air, was what he sought in the mountains of North Carolina, on the basis of prospecting rumors. For years he had dreamed of becoming a mining mogul, in about the greatest conceivable contrast to his work as a laboratory engineer. The fantasy went back to his discovery in 1881 of a black beach at Quogue, Long Island—sheet upon sheet of powdered magnetite shifting and resettling in the sand every time the wind changed or the tide went out. Then and now, Atlantic Slope iron oxide looked like gold to him, although it was inferior both in quality and quantity to the great ferric oxide deposits around Lake Superior.12

He wore down many 4B pencils calculating how much low-grade Appalachian magnetite he would have to concentrate to undercut the price to local furnacemen of Michigan hematite, which was softer and richer but cost a fortune to haul east along a thousand miles of railroad. Edison’s equations were conditional upon many variables, among them his ability to design excavating, crushing, grinding, and separating machines of such size and sophistication as to remain competitive even as other mills in the region closed and midwestern production increased.13 Also he had to be sure that whatever deposits he found were enormous enough to guarantee he would never run out of ore.

After an unrewarding six-week search for iron formations along the Blue Ridge (“I go out to prospect a property here, I meet a negro, who refers me to another negro, and finally I find the mine—a dental drill vein”), he returned north convinced that his best bet lay in the wooded highlands of his own home state, near Ogdensburg.^*5 He had recently acquired a sixteen-thousand-acre tract there on Sparta Mountain, including abandoned excavations left over from the days when the only iron was eastern iron. According to his estimate, the Ogden mine had a potential yield of 200 million tons of low-grade magnetite just in its central three thousand acres—enough to make him a billionaire if he exploited it the way he intended: “The ores of New Jersey are in the primal rocks and if these mineralized rocks can be worked commercially, there is more iron ore in the state of New Jersey than in any other area of equal size in the world.” Just across the border lay the struggling but still active foundries of eastern Pennsylvania, and the anthracite mines that provided them with natural blast-furnace fuel. “The market is here in their midst,” Edison wrote in a rationale for his scheme. He noted that local labor was cheaper, and the supply of skilled managers greater this side of the Alleghenies. “The only thing necessary is cheap ore. With abundance of that commodity…the center of iron production in the US would be brought back easterly many miles and Western [exporters] would not underbid the Eastern mills at their very doors.”14

He needed no further inducements to resurrect Ogden under the grand name of the New Jersey & Pennsylvania Concentrating Works. A phoenix rising from the ashes of his old Edison Ore-Milling Company, the plant would have all the features of a legally established corporation, with a small board of directors and a capital stock of $250,000. He was determined to keep it off the open market and was prepared to finance its future expansion himself, instead of depending, as in the past, on tightwads like J. P. Morgan for development money. For now he was content to be the major shareholder, with such loyal friends as Robert L. Cutting, Jr., Charles Batchelor, and Sammy Insull backing him up.15

A dinner in New York on 24 March, hosted by Henry Villard and attended by many senior figures in the lighting industry, confirmed his long-held suspicion that Villard was working on a merger of the Edison General Electric and Thomson-Houston Electric companies—a move that, if successful, would combine their respective strengths in illumination and motor technologies. Edison objected to the idea because Thomson-Houston would be able, through cross-licensing, to trade on his patents, and he was not sure he would receive fair compensation. Besides, Thomson-Houston had adopted an alternating current system, which was more efficient than his own and therefore detestable.^*6 Whether or not the deal came off, he had had his fill of electrical invention after twenty years of connecting wires to other wires. It had left him no wiser as to what electricity was. Except when current pulsed under his fingers, or shocked or heated them, he had no sense of dealing with something substantial.16

As a boy reading R. G. Parker’s Natural Philosophy, he had learned that science was divided between “ponderables” and “imponderables,” that is, agents with or without mass.17 So far he had dealt with the weightless phenomena of telegraphy, sonics, and light. Now he wanted to measure his strength against the material massiveness of the world. He longed in body as well as mind to crush more and bigger rocks than any man before him and to use magnetic force to drag the iron out of their dust.

An editorial in the trade journal Iron Age warned that such desire was addictive and potentially ruinous:

There is something very fascinating in the production from lean ore of a concentrate in which very few particles of foreign matter can be detected. No one who has approached this subject has escaped the glowing enthusiasm and the air of triumph of an inventor over such an achievement….Yet there are very few of the promoters of such work who have an adequate conception of the costs and of the losses involved….

We do not mean to convey the impression that magnetic concentration has not a brilliant field before it; but, generally speaking, hopes have been raised on the basis of underestimates of costs, which are sure to lead to disappointment.18

BLACK TOOTHPASTE

To Edison, the greatest of all mysteries, surpassing even that of electricity, was “the mystery of what passes between the north and south poles of the magnet.”19 That had not stopped him, in youth, from writing learnedly about the behavior of magnetism in self-adjusting telegraphic relays and wondering if it might be used to deflect the iron ray in the solar spectrum. He had gone on to invent a myriad of electromagnetic and pyromagnetic devices, including a rhomboid bridge that measured the integrity of various metals with extraordinary accuracy. His most imaginative use of the force had been to apply it to bent lamp filaments. They magically straightened when he passed a magnet close by: “One pole attracts while the other repels the charged carbon.” Lately he had put on exhibit in West Orange a soft-iron magnet of great ore-separating potential. It was six feet long and two and a half feet wide, heavily wound with copper wire, and weighed well over three thousand pounds.20

Contrary to his reputation among pure scientists as being a technological experimenter only, Edison read deeply in the analytical literature and was familiar with all aspects of natural force theory, including the writings of Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. His research into such phenomena as the effect of diamagnetism on magnetic stress, or the loss of conductivity in ferromagnetic materials, was limited only by his lack of mathematics. For that extra dimension of understanding, he had become dependent on Arthur Kennelly.21

Right now he could live with magnetic mystery, as long as what fell past the poles was a thin, broad stream of ore, with the blackish part of it wavering sideways while the shiny remainder dropped straight. The first separator he ever designed (out of the blue in 1880, at the height of his frenzy to perfect his incandescent lightbulb) had been so simple a device as to look almost silly: a wooden lamppost, a dangling hopper, a mounted electromagnet, a bifurcated bin. Yet it worked well on ferrous beach sand, using only gravity and magnetism, the most fundamental forces in physics.22

Edison did not pretend to have invented magnetic separation. He emphasized in a research paper coauthored with John Birkinbine and published in Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers that various forms of it had been tried in the Adirondacks and countries as remote as Bohemia and New Zealand. But few of them matched the effectiveness of the seven separators Edison had patented since 1881, most recently one that combated the problem of too-dry ore clumping as it fell, so that grains of chert blocked the extraction of grains of iron. He fed crushed rock directly into a tank of water, then agitated it in a revolving, magnetized drum that freely dispersed all particles. The fines clung to the poles of the drum as it emerged from the water and could be scraped off afterward, like black toothpaste.23

For Ogden, he now sought to patent a sophisticated separator in partnership with his most talented engineer, the Scottish photographer William Kennedy Laurie Dickson. It monstrously resembled a secret camera they were working on, in its combination of drive wheels, spools, and rolling belt loaded with granular product:24

A snake feeder screwed ore, wet or dry, into a hopper that fed the fines one way, and the rough another, while four giant magnets pulled the iron powder onto the belt in a series of ripples that grew denser with every transit of the poles. Demagnetized as it proceeded, the powder fell from collecting pockets into a delivery container. Fans whirled away collateral dust and filtered it for “float iron.” The overall system was unique in the way it repeatedly counterposed gravitational and magnetic forces to enrich the concentration of fines, resulting in a high degree of purity by the time they settled.25

In May, Edison ordered a series of preliminary tests at Ogden. He left them to be conducted by Dickson and returned to West Orange to plot a major expansion of the facility in the fall. If other eastern “iron men” were struggling to produce a thousand tons of ore a day, he intended to mine and mill five times as much.26 In his haste to make plans, he probably never read a story that appeared in the Pittsburgh Dispatch on 11 May: “NEW IRON TERRITORY—INDICATIONS OF A RICH FIND IN AN UNEXPLORED FIELD OF MINNESOTA.”

The range was called Mesabi, and its wealth of red hematite was reportedly so prodigious that three local entrepreneurs were already building a rail link from Duluth to export it to the world.

YOU OUGHT TO BE VERY THANKFUL

Marion Edison escaped the worst ravages of smallpox, thanks to the care of one of Dresden’s best physicians. But her face was so pitted that she shrank from reentering European society until the crimson scars faded. Edison sent the doctor a magnificent set of silver and rented her a villa on the French Riviera, where she could recover in seclusion with Mrs. Earl. It would be months before Marion could be persuaded to leave the house without a veil. She continued to pine, mostly in vain, for some written words from her father, while berating herself for being a burden to him. “It makes me sick when I think of the money [I] cost Papa,” she wrote Mina.27

For obvious reasons, the young woman could no longer be expected to attract an early marriage proposal and so relieve Edison of responsibility for her. Half homesick, half proud, wholly aware that another child was about to swell his second family, she clung to Mrs. Earl and accepted her fate as an invalid in exile.

Charles Edison arrived on 3 August. “You are a lucky woman Mama,” Marion wrote when she heard the news, “and you ought to be very thankful you have one of the loveliest of men for a husband, a sweet little baby who will do you credit, money, beauty. For my part I don’t know what else you want in this world to make it a Paradise.”28

“SOCIETY OF HARMONIC CURVES”

Edison’s “Ogden baby,” as he jokingly referred to his other neonate acquisition, proved much less able than Charles to ingest processed helpings. Dickson ran some of the local rock through crushers rented from the Brennan company and found the resultant pulver far different from beach magnetite. It powdered in dry weather, abrading the oiled joints of machinery and penetrating the thickest of respirators. When wet, it sweated clay and clogged the rotating screens it was supposed to fall through. Ominously, Sparta Mountain’s iron quotient turned out to be leaner than Edison had hoped, averaging only 16 percent. A previous generation of miners had carved away the four most workable seams, leaving it to him to figure how to excavate the rest.29

He was not discouraged when Dickson reported that the initial tests were “n.g. with a vengeance.” Stimulated as usual by difficulty, he undertook to design new screening and drying systems that would meet all Ogden’s challenges, and shut the plant, hoping to make it fully operational in the spring of 1891. That committed him and his nervous board to a carrying cost of $20,000 to $30,000 a month, just as news came of more and more hematite findings in Minnesota.30

In September an ambitious writer, George Parsons Lathrop, came to stay in West Orange, hoping that Edison would now have time to work with him on a project inspired by the phenomenal success of Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward. Lathrop was the author of “Talks With Edison,” a magazine article published earlier in the year that made much of his subject’s affable approachability. He had been so impressed with the inspirational, quasi-poetic way Edison dreamed up inventions—“These ideas are occurring to me all the time”—that he suggested they collaborate on a science fiction novel, to be called Progress. To his surprise, Edison not only agreed but waved aside any question of a fee. It was enough that Lathrop would do the writing, while he, simply for fun, came up with futuristic notions to embellish the story. He even offered to illustrate it with his own drawings.31

Their collaboration was to be kept secret, under a first-serial-rights contract with the McClure newspaper syndicate. “There would be some money in it for you and me,” Lathrop informed Alfred O. Tate, Edison’s secretary and an intermediary in the arrangement. No doubt the novel could then be issued as a best-selling book. In that case he would offer Edison a share in the royalties, “tho’ I fancy that it will not be much of a consideration in his eyes.”32

At thirty-nine, Lathrop was no literary lightweight. He was married to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter and had published several volumes of fiction and poetry, as well as founding the American Copyright League and serving as an associate editor of The Atlantic Monthly. These achievements had not saved him, however, from the twin liabilities of a freelance writer’s career, anxiety and alcohol.33 Over the next nine months he was to discover, with frequent relapses into both, that Edison was possibly the busiest man in America.^*7

The delay-prone tempo of their “collaboration” was set in mid-October, when Edison sent Lathrop thirty-three pages of notes, scrawled so fast as to be barely readable in places. Some were surreal, others visionary, but most read like experimental prompts from Edison to himself, as if he had forgotten they were supposed to inform somebody else:

Lubrication at high temperature by the Bromine substitution

Mfr oxygen by passing over molten Titanium

Disassociation of all the Halogen group by incandescence34

Lathrop feigned delight at being vouchsafed such jottings—“I have copied them. They are immense!”—and returned the manuscript to Edison, red-penciled with many requests for elucidation. It was not clear to him what a “Society of Harmonic Curves” might be, or how vaporized mica might be turned into microfilm by electrical excitation. He also needed help on the technologies of cable telegraphy powered by “etheric force,” screwless steamships, climate change, aerial navigation, hypnotizing machines, phonographic newspapers, Saharan canals, mother-of-pearl room panels, and colored music. Edison was unavailable for an interview but promised to record some explanations on wax cylinders. Lathrop waited for them in vain. He was not mollified to receive another batch of enigmatic memoranda and two sketches of an “air-ship.” Edison finally saw him for a hurried discussion that left Lathrop no wiser than before.35

With his advance money dribbling away and McClure asking awkward questions, he tried to make literature out of the notes he had. It was difficult to do so even when they were not technical. Edison’s few efforts at science fiction could have been written by a schoolboy (“Person inside a non conducting chamber…passing limits of our atmospheric shield adjusted to attain speeds of 100,000 miles per second there being no friction in vacuous spaces”) or by a tired man half asleep, drowsiness turning into dream (“Glow worm—not popular—striving for perfect steadiness, beautiful eyes.”)36

Lathrop cobbled together some initial chapters and sent them to Edison for approval. Six weeks slipped by with no answer.37 He could only plead with McClure for an extension of his contract and hope that whatever in the world was distracting Edison’s attention would permit them soon to resume their imaginative journey into another.

PERSISTENCE OF VISION

That fall Edison, working secretly in the “precision room” of the laboratory, was developing a device far more fantastical, in its practical effect, than any novelistic machine. It was his Kinetograph motion picture camera, a radical redesign of the cylinder-based Kinetoscope he had conceived two years before.^*8 W. K. L. Dickson (back in West Orange for the winter, while Ogden’s new buildings arose) had persuaded him that a strip of translucent film, winding sideways across the viewer from spool to spool, could present hundreds of much larger, sharper images at a speed of ten frames per second.^*9, 38

The proof of this, around November, was Monkeyshines, a blurry sequence of movements by one of Edison’s Greek employees in a belted fustanella, energetically waving his full white sleeves. It lasted less than half a minute and was so diffuse at times as to resemble the pulsations of a jellyfish. Yet it was performance and photography combined, and history too, the first moving picture ever produced in the United States. Dickson and his assistant, William Heise, did most of the mechanical work.^*10, 39

The filmstrip that made Monkeyshines possible was cut from photosensitive cellulose nitrate plasticized by George Eastman of Rochester, New York. Thin, springy, and sweetly redolent of bananas, it came in rolls seventy millimeters wide. Dickson thought that unnecessarily broad. He sliced it in half before perforating one edge to fit the Kinetograph’s sprocketed wheels. The result was a thirty-five-millimeter film that (to his pride as a forgotten old man) would become the standard stock of cinematography.^*11, 40 Monkeyshines was followed by a better-focused sequel and a series of progressively improving “camera tests,” but myriad drive and darkroom problems kept postponing the moment Edison could announce his invention publicly. The escapement mechanism chattered too slowly or too fast; patches of film emulsion frilled off the negative in development, leaving oleaginous images at the bottom of the trough; perforations snagged; torque yanked the pictures out of alignment.41 “Persistence of vision”—a phrase Edison loved to use when explaining the eye’s inability to separate a rapid succession of stills—began to look more like the orneriness of a new medium, as yet too raw to synthesize.42

PETTY SPITE AND LOVE OF REPUTATION

On 1 January 1891 Edison was annoyed to see himself advertised by The Sun, along with Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling, as the author of an important forthcoming work of fiction. The news spread as far as Germany, where it was described as an “electrical novel” in two volumes that he would subsequently adapt for the stage. The Hartford Courant expressed mock horror: “Let him keep outside literature pure and simple where he belongs not.”43

Edison blamed his collaborator for the story, calling it “an act of bad faith” and threatening to repudiate their partnership if any more embarrassing publicity ensued. Lathrop protested his innocence, pointing out that “the Sun’s misstatement injures me, by ignoring my name.” He was forgiven, but from then on Edison became even more inaccessible to him. When Lathrop appealed to Mina for the return of the sample chapters he had sent to Glenmont, they came back evidently unread.44

Except on the unique occasion when Edison shared a patent with W. K. L. Dickson on their new magnetic separator at Ogden, he disliked having his name coupled with that of any other creator—whether a minor talent like Lathrop or an inventor as brilliant as his onetime employee Frank J. Sprague. He had been careful in the 1880s not to involve Sprague in his experimental electric railway project, thus losing out on Sprague’s later, seminal innovations in rail traction technology.45 That false pride showed now on a visit to Buffalo, when he told a local reporter that Edison General Electric was “going to furnish the power for your street railway system.”

“But is the company here not going to use the Sprague system?”

“Yes. But it is not known as the ‘Sprague’ system. It is the ‘Edison.’ We have absorbed and improved the Sprague.”46

Edison General had indeed recently bought the Sprague Electric Railway and Motor Company, acquiring its invaluable patents and burgeoning goodwill (well over a hundred urban systems installed or contracted for since 1887) while providing it with the capital it needed to expand.47 But Edison’s royal-plural boast that he had “improved” its technology enough to substitute his name for Sprague’s sounded like a slap at the latter for resigning after the acquisition. At thirty-three Sprague was hungry for renown and blamed both Edison General and Henry Villard for withholding it from him:

Your company, instead of being managed in the best interests of its stockholders and to make the most of its property and connections, is conducted in the personal interest of Mr. Edison and his representatives and has become an active agent for my personal, professional and business injury, in which jealousy, petty spite and love of reputation, however attained, are the strongest motives….

It contents itself with the promulgation of circulars known to every railway man in this country to be untrue, and has set out to do everything possible to wipe out the Sprague name and to give to Mr. Edison the reputation properly belonging to other men’s work….He finds most favor who is most abusive of all things Sprague, and he meets with a cool reception who does him the smallest reverence. The Edison fetish must be upheld, and the Sprague name abolished: that is the law….

Not only Mr. Edison’s subordinates and those who bask in the sunshine of their smiles, but Mr. Edison himself, forgetful of his dignity and jealous of any man who finds in the whole realm of electric science a corner no matter how small not occupied by himself, loses no opportunity to attack and to attempt to belittle me.48

Sprague, who went on to become an equally distinguished inventor of vertical traction systems, would complain for the rest of his life about the world’s failure to recognize his genius, and its contrary insistence on keeping Edison at the summit of Parnassus.^*12, 49 He never acknowledged that his achievements, great as they were, were confined to “the whole realm of electrical science,” and that he would have been lost in such foreign fields as harmonics in music, illusionism in moving pictures, dispersion of rubber molecules in Soxhlet extractors, and magnetic separation in the highlands of northern New Jersey.

ROSY FOLIATIONS

Edison’s impatience to start mining and refining at Ogden as soon as the ground unfroze—it had been a brutal winter—was stimulated, rather than slowed, by news in early February of a phenomenal gain in Edison General Electric stock. Speculators ascribed the surge to a rumor that Henry Villard, hard up for cash, was about to sell his majority shares to someone associated with “the Vanderbilts.” No such sale ensued, but it was not the first time Edison had heard the names of Villard and Vanderbilt bracketed in the same sentence. He was disagreeably reminded that the bulb he had invented, the dynamos he had built, the industry he had founded, had become corporatized far beyond his control.50

Mid-March found him heading north to gear up his new plant for production. A little mine train picked him up at Lake Hopatcong and began to ascend a back spur of Sparta Mountain. It passed the old Hurd mine, abandoned a century before, then rose further through thick forest still bare of leaves. No ferns or creeping vines yet obscured the errant boulders that lay everywhere on the slope, some looking ready to roll down and crush the train. When it reached twelve hundred feet, it puffed to a halt, leaving Edison to climb the last half-mile to Ogden on foot.

The slippery trail led to a quarry face known as Iron Hill, the most accessible part of his vast domain. It was a tabular sheet of gneiss four miles long,^*13 running along the southeastern slope of the Beaver Lake anticline, parallel to the general corrugation of the Appalachian range. Wherever spring rains washed the rock clear of mud and snow, flecks of mica caught the light. Rosy foliations in the gneiss showed the dissemination of magnetite crystals, dense in a few places, disappointingly sprinkled in others. But who knew how deep and rich the seams might be, where they receded into the slope or dived almost vertically into bedrock? Edison guessed at least four hundred feet and a mile in each direction. He was prepared to carve away the whole mountain, if necessary.51

Seen from this vantage point between the ridge and a reservoir to the east, the New Jersey & Pennsylvania Concentrating Works had a certain flow-through continuity—albeit hampered by his decision to adapt as many of the old mine buildings as possible. He had spent nearly $54,000 on a new magnetic separation house, as well as adding some storage hangars and several miles of railroad track. The existing stone powerhouse now contained the four-cylinder, triple-expansion vertical engine he had treated himself to at the Paris Exposition in ’89. A chain-and-bucket cableway was braced on the upper bench of Iron Hill, ready to convey hand-loaded chunks of ore (as yet he lacked a crane to lift larger boulders) four hundred yards down to the mill, where seventeen jaw crushers would bite them down to pebbles. From there they would proceed through a series of grinders and rotating screens that would reduce them further, from gravel to grains. Then the magnetic separators would divide them into iron “fines” for storing and shipping, or gritty “tailings” to a dump for separate sale as sand. Elsewhere in the congeries two millhouses loomed, one old and one new, a machine shop, and a black-towered pump sucking floodwater from an abandoned shaft in the heart of the complex.52

It was a raw and ugly scene in a landscape not yet broken into leaf. There were no accommodations for Edison’s labor force of several hundred mostly Italian immigrants, who had to crowd into tenements in Ogdensburg, half an hour’s trudge down the hill. For himself, there was at least the hospitality of a farmhouse to the east of the plant. He was invited to stay there whenever he came up from Glenmont, sixty miles away.53

TRAILING ZEROES

Harry Livor, the general manager at Ogden, tried to obey Edison’s order to start milling at once. But the system was so intricate that it did not crank into a semblance of production until the beginning of April, and even then it was plagued by numerous mechanical and coordination problems. Raw ore from the quarry was often wet, filthy with clay or fibrous with torn roots, jamming the machinery and clogging screens. Or it gave off clouds of dust that mixed with grease on cableway wheels and abraded them, necessitating frequent shutdowns for replacement and repair. The jaw crushers were of frustratingly small capacity, and the six belt separators needed constant regulation. Undiscouraged, Edison went to Pennsylvania in search of foundry orders for his iron concentrate. He figured he could supply it at a richness rate of 66 percent (up from 25 percent in ore) for $5.28 per ton, earning a $2.62 profit for himself.54

John Fritz of the Bethlehem Iron Company was less persuaded by his figures than by the scope of his ambition. “Well, Edison, you are doing a good thing for the Eastern furnaces….I am willing to help you. I mix a little sentiment with business, and I will give you an order for one hundred thousand tons.”55

Or so Edison chose to remember the conversation, with his habit of trailing zeroes after any number that pleased him, like soap bubbles from a pipe.^*14 Fritz’s order was actually for one hundred tons a day, conditional upon the smelting performance of an advance consignment. The Pennsylvania Steel Company and North Branch Steel made similar commitments. Livor managed to deliver at the pace Fritz wanted but could offer only forty tons a day to the other customers, and the quality of his product declined. “Bethlehem complains iron running down phosphorus running up,” Edison warned him. “Be careful or we will be ordered to stop shipping.” Livor in turn grumbled that he was not getting enough marketing support: “There apparently seems to be no vigorous effort to dispose of our product….Someone of some little knowledge of the business ought to be at the furnaces very quickly after the ore reaches them.”

This was not the right tone to strike with Edison. Livor was soon dismissed, as was a “damned fool” of a mining expert who dared to predict that Ogden’s quarry-and-concentrate method would never be profitable.56

“SUCH A HAPPY COMBINATION”

As Edison feared, Bethlehem Iron canceled its order after buying only a few thousand tons of his concentrate. It cited phosphorus levels, furnace blowback, and caking as the principal faults of Ogden fines.57

He decided that the only person who could get his grand scheme going was himself. That meant prolonged stays in the mountains and possible further redesign and reconstruction. He felt quite up to the task: “I feel that I am in my prime, and I suppose that I am a better man than I have ever been.” But first he had a major patent infringement case to prosecute—Edison Electric Light Co. v. United States Electric Lighting Co., in the Circuit Court of the Southern District of New York—that could be worth millions if Judge William J. Wallace ruled in his favor. Then he had to prepare two prohibitively difficult patent applications, covering his still-secret Kinetograph technology. Dickson and Heise had improved the camera and its attendant player enough to begin to demonstrate them to carefully selected audiences. But there were enough competitive devices under development in France and Britain (Étienne-Jules Marey’s exquisite “chronophotographs” of undulating sea horses and anemones had recently been featured in Scientific American) as to cast doubt on Edison’s chances of winning any but the narrowest claims of exclusivity on his own.^*15, 58

It occurred to him that George Lathrop, still pining for his collaborative attention, would be the ideal scribe to publish an article on the Kinetograph that might subliminally influence Patent Office examiners in its favor. Lathrop jumped at the chance, and began to research a long piece for Harper’s Weekly. Edison thereupon yielded to the temptation to start talking about it in advance, and scooped his chosen publicist.

At a meeting on 12 May with some commissioners of the great World’s Fair planned for Chicago in 1893, he told them that he would exhibit something that would cause a revolution in home entertainment:

Such a happy combination of photography and electricity that a man can sit in his own parlor and see depicted upon a curtain the forms of the players in opera on a distant stage, and hear the voices of the singers. When this system is perfected, which will be in time for the Fair, each little muscle in the singer’s face will be seen to work; every color of his or her attire will be exactly reproduced, and the stride and positions will be as natural and varied as those of the live characters. To the sporting fraternity I will state that ere long this system can be applied to prize fights. The whole scene, with the noise of the blows, talk, etc., will be truthfully transferred.59

Asked what the new invention would be called, Edison uttered its name publicly for the first time. “The Kinetograph. What does that mean? The first half of the word means motion, and the other half write. That is, the portrayal of motion.”60

It was clear from his emphasis on sound effects, color, close-up camerawork, and projection that his imagination had moved far beyond the silent flickerings that Dickson and Heise had conjured up in a peephole box. He said nothing about the mechanics involved. “But that doesn’t matter to Edison,” The Philadelphia Inquirer remarked. “With him, to conceive is to execute….He talks freely and seems to defy anybody to steal his designs even after he has given a clue to them.”^*16, 61

Two weeks later he sat in court in Manhattan, tensely chewing a toothpick, as his patent lawyer, Richard N. Dyer,^*17 summed up the Edison company’s seven-year-old case against United States Electric.62 Since the latter firm was now owned by George Westinghouse, Dyer’s argument was a final offensive in the “current war” that had done so much to embitter Edison against his rival in the last decade.^*18

Dyer argued for four hours that Edison’s basic electric light patent of 1879 was original and unprecedented in its claim of a “receiver made entirely of glass,” with conductors passing through into a carbon filament held in near-perfect vacuum. Consequently, an older and faulty patent held by Westinghouse, U.S. 204,144, amounted to invalid competition and did not entitle him to market lamps clearly modeled on Edison’s own. Since United States Electric had been doing so since 1880, Westinghouse could owe Edison General Electric as much as $15 million in back royalties—not including another $2 million payable before Edison’s patent ran out in 1897.63

The appellant complaint involved so many boring technical data, along with the deposit of seven volumes of evidence in front of the judge, that the public benches of the court soon emptied. Edison alone remained, in company with two or three newspaper reporters. Bored, he willingly submitted to some sotto voce questioning about the Kinetograph from the representative of The Sun and invited him to come and see it in West Orange.64

This gave both men an excuse to stay away from the rest of the trial, which went on for several more days and ended with Judge Wallace promising a decision early in the summer. Meanwhile Edison, back at the laboratory, not only demonstrated his “phenomenal machine” in action but drew a sketch of it for his guest, to George Lathrop’s jealous distress:65

Edison’s sketch of his tabletop Kinetograph, 28 May 1891.

He explained that A was the sound amplifier, B the phonograph, C the camera, and D a primary battery powering the whole synchronized system. It was clear that he still thought of the Kinetograph as an audiovisual device, although for patent purposes he would have to describe only C. Less clear from the sketch was whether that component was designed only to shoot pictures or project them as well. He insisted that the objects on the table were capable of recording whole scenes of an opera in both sight and sound. “Marie Jansen comes out and sings, and the band will play a charming waltzing minuet, and then she dances around and the audience applauds.”66

“How do you expect to do all that, Mr. Edison?” the reporter asked.

Edison went into full imaginative mode. “I will get the company to give a dress rehearsal for me. I place back of the orchestra on a table a compound machine consisting of a phonograph and a Kinetograph, with a capacity of thirty minutes’ work. The orchestra plays, the curtain rises, and the opera begins. Both machines work simultaneously, one recording sound and the other taking photographs, recording motion at the rate of forty-six photographs per second.”67

He said that in his opinion that shutter speed gave the most realistic illusion of continuous movement.^*19 “Afterward the photographic strip is developed and replaced in the machine, a projecting lens is substituted for the photographic lens, and the reproducing part of the phonograph is adjusted. Then, by means of a calcium light, the effect is reproduced lifesize on a white curtain.”68

Just such a sheet was hanging in his laboratory library. But Edison was coy about showing any projection more extensive than the one lit up within the Kinetograph itself. Running upstairs with the energy of a boy, he opened what looked like a plain pine box and displayed a ribbon of “gelatine” film three-quarters of an inch wide, perforated along one edge, threaded horizontally between two spindled, velvet-lined reels, and printed with tiny but pristine photographic images. Each frame portrayed a young man—W. K. L. Dickson—reaching by infinitesimal degrees for his hat. But when Edison closed the box, switched on its electric drive, and applied full power to the take-up spool, Dickson seen through an inch-wide peephole lens became a figure of miraculous mobility, uncovering, shaking his head, waving, and laughing. Only as the power scaled down did his movements become jerky and finally freeze.69

“I can put a roll of gelatine strip a mile long into it if I like,” Edison boasted. He said that would accommodate 82,800 images a half-inch square and a half-inch apart and, at forty-six FPS, make for a moving picture of half an hour’s duration.

The reporter noted that his math was faulty but did not have the temerity to correct a genius.70

The next day, 28 May, The Sun made the most of its exclusive story, running it as a front-page lead headlined “THE KINETOGRAPH—EDISON’S LATEST AND MOST SURPRISING DEVICE—PURE MOTION RECORDED AND REPRODUCED.” Under the circumstances, there was little more that Lathrop could report when his own piece came out in Harper’s a few days later. He did, however, have a quote in which the inventor acknowledged his debt to such pioneers of “instantaneous photography” as Muybridge and Marey. “All I have done is to perfect what has been attempted before, but did not succeed. It’s just that one step I have taken.” Edison was referring neither to sound nor to projection experiments but to the precise coordination of his rotating shutter and leaps of frame. At forty-six advances per second—about as fast as the vibration of a hummingbird’s wings—they found time to both expose and transpose the film, so a fresh square was ready for each new shaft of light.71

Lathrop was awed by the potential of the technology to distract human beings from one another and away from reality itself: “We seem to be nearing a time when every man may reach the old philosophical idea of a microcosm—a little world of one’s own—by unrolling in his room a tape which will fill it with all the forms and motions of the habitable globe.”72

BETTER THAN THAT

Edison was asleep at Ogden at noon on 14 July—he had worked right through the previous day and night—when Henry Hart, the mine superintendent, touched him.

“What is it?”

“I have good news for you.”

“I know. The screening plates have come.”

“Better than that.”73

Hart handed over a telegram, and Edison sat on the edge of the bed reading it. Judge Wallace had upheld his electric light patent. After all the imitations, challenges, and outright infringements of the past eleven years—most annoyingly, those of George Westinghouse—his basic bulb of 1880 shone undefiled at last.

He could think of nothing to say but “Ain’t it a daisy?” before joining Hart and his fellow miners for lunch.74

Westinghouse was certain to appeal, although the decision was grounded on such specific design details that his motive could only be to delay the date he would have to start paying royalties. Edison had no power in the meantime to demand the $15 million arrears United States Electric technically owed him—the technicality being that his patent now belonged to Edison General Electric and would have to be litigated by the company’s full board. A suit for so enormous a sum was bound to drag on far beyond 1897, and involve such commensurate costs as to bankrupt Villard in the process.^*20, 75

Nor, for the same reasons, could Edison expect to prosper much after the appeals court found in his favor. His experience with important patents was that seventeen years—the maximum protection period allowed by law—was scarcely long enough to defend them, let alone profit from their true worth. “What I have made has been because I have understood the inventions better, and have been able to manipulate the manufacturing of them better than the pirates.”^*21, 76

He had not yet reached the point when, in extreme bitterness, he would complain of never having made a cent out of his patents in electric light and power. And now that the Kinetograph was publicized, he was quick to execute two patents covering it both as camera and player.^*22 But he sympathized with any inventor who could not afford to fight for protection: “His certificate of patent is merely a certificate to the poorhouse.”77

THE LARGE END OF THINGS

Edison had moved full time to Ogden, vowing to stay there half a year if necessary, because he felt he could not trust anyone else to manage the mine and the mills properly and solve the problems inherent in launching such a complex operation. A reporter found him there late one afternoon, just as the big engine in the powerhouse had ceased its throbbing. The sun was setting over Sparta Mountain, and cowbells tinkled in the valley. Yet a file of Italian laborers was heading up Iron Hill, where a pyramid of cream-colored rubble awaited transportation to the crushing plant.78

“We do not pause here day or night,” Edison said, pointing to a row of arc lights near the quarry, ready to illuminate the evening shift. Taking obvious pride in the immensity of the scene—six miles in all directions, all owned by himself—he declared that there was enough ferrous rock in the mountain to be mined for at least a century.

A hill-shaking explosion came from the upper bench. “Well, there go five thousand tons more,” he said, grinning.79

Like many another private person, Edison enjoyed confiding in strangers. “I like to begin at the large end of things. Life is too short to begin at the small end. The larger includes the smaller, the details grow out of the principle….We are apt to be impressed by the boulder before us and not reason with the mountain above us, that the boulder rolled down from. Did you ever read Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Domain of Arnheim’?”

He explained that it was the tale of a wealthy man^*23 who loved beauty and sought, unwearyingly, to realize it on a monumental scale. “He sought to do rather than be known as achieving, and Poe says of him that in contempt of ambition he found the principle of earthly happiness.”80

When his secretary, Alfred Tate, told George Lathrop that Edison was now working full-time at Ogden (“He has practically been retired from the world”), the bewildered writer vented his frustration in the angriest letter Edison had ever received. He reminded him that fourteen months had passed since they had first talked of doing a book together, “and you gave it your cordial assent, even suggesting the idea of cuts to be made from sketches of yours.”81 On the strength of that encouragement, “Mr. McClure has made me certain payments which I am not in a position to refund.”

I ought not to be left liable to be called upon to refund them, through delay on your part in completing the notes on which I depend….

I can understand how—preoccupied as you have been, and especially if you have somewhat lost interest in the plan of the book—my recurring to the subject may seem to you a sort of nuisance. But, on the other hand, I will ask you to try to realize what it is to me to be forced to hang around like a dog waiting for a bone—& not even getting the bone….

It is only fair that you should give me a chance to consult with you about the book, in the same happy & genial spirit with which we began upon it. I have been willing to wait, to travel to the mines or anywhere with you, in order to carry the thing out. But Mr. McClure is now promising the story in his newspapers for October; & there is no time to wait any longer.

I am a man of my word; & you are a man of your word. I have praised you to the skies, right & left, as being a man not only of supereminent genius, but also faithful to his promises; whose word is even better than his bond—as you once told me it was. I wish to hold you to that belief, & be justified in it.82

Lathrop might as well have saved his ink. Edison had indeed lost interest in the novel. Obsessed with his mine and mills, he offered through Tate to compensate McClure. Lathrop considered it a debt of honor incurred by himself, and indignantly refused: “Nothing could induce me to accept pecuniary aid from Edison, although I appreciate his big-heartedness.”

He thus faced years of privation, heavy drinking, and befuddlement while he tried to make plausible science fiction out of what he remembered Edison saying in their first few meetings. Eventually he would publish a pallid fantasy, “In the Deep of Time,” that had two men exploring Mars on mechanized, antigravitational stilts. It attracted almost no attention, despite being advertised as “by George Parsons Lathrop in collaboration with Thomas A. Edison.”^*24, 83

“CHASING AWAY FROM THE SUN”

One day that summer Edison was eating lunch under a tree at the apex of a large iron conformation when he noticed that the needle of his pocket compass was trembling strangely. He had the momentary feeling that “signals sent through interstellar space might be responsible for the disturbance.” Then he remembered that he was sitting in the center of a body of magnetite five or six miles deep. No matter how low grade, it was at least a million times more responsive to the electromagnetic flaring of sunspots than whatever deposits underlay the Kew Observatory in England, where solar radiation was measured daily.84

Intrigued by the notion that he might connect his own magnetic energy field to those on the sun, he strung a fifteen-wire copper power line on poles planted all around the iron bed, and ran it down to an ordinary Bell telephone receiver in the plant. He said it would enable him to listen in to sunspots, as well as observe them through his telescope. “Why, they are beautiful,” he said to a reporter from, appropriately, The Sun. “The disturbances are tremendous….Yes, sir, I can hear them with this telephone….The next time there is any violent change in the sun’s spots which disturbs the magnetic lines on earth I shall know it, and if 600,000 miles of hydrogen go chasing away from the sun I shall hear it.”^*25, 85

LOTS MORE RUBBER

Edison’s peculiar delight in taking arms against a sea of troubles was never more evident than when Samuel Insull told him he was losing $6,000 a month on his Ogden venture. His reaction was to scrap much of the expensive machinery Livor had installed, order replacements of his own design, build a narrow-gauge railway along the foot of the western incline, and begin construction of an adjacent settlement, complete with post office, store, and saloon, to house his labor force of Italian and Hungarian immigrants. To nobody’s surprise, the village was named Edison, New Jersey.^*26, 86

A party of inspectors sent by Engineering and Mining Journal toured the plant early in the fall. Although some sections were idled for refurbishment and Edison was coy about showing any of his new machines, they could see that he already excelled at quarrying and magnetic separation, if not yet in the difficult processes of crushing and refinement. They were particularly impressed with his cableway system, every suspended “skip” delivering four tons of rock to the crushers at only twelve cents a load. But they predicted that in view of the low iron content of local ore, Edison would still have to spend a fortune and deploy “the utmost resources of engineering skill” to compete with Mesabi ore at 64 percent iron. “With his surpassing genius [and] capacity for taking infinite pains, it cannot be doubted that he will ultimately achieve success.”87

Another visitor to Ogden was Thomas Robins, Jr., a twenty-two-year-old rubber salesman looking for a job in engineering. He noticed some canvas conveyor belts being changed and asked Henry Hart how long they lasted.

“From six to eight weeks,” the superintendent said.88

Robins examined a discarded belt. It was rubberized to protect it from the abrasive mass of tipped loads. But the laminate was so thin that he could penetrate it with his fingernail. Consequently the central strip, which bore the most weight, was eroded, and the edges were frayed where the belt had curled in its troughed bearings. He counted fifty conveyors in all, some of them longer than five hundred feet, and calculated they were costing the mill a fortune in replacements. What was needed was lots more rubber, so that resilience would replace resistance, and make for lighter belts lasting fifty times longer.89

It was an aperçu that would win Robins the grand prize at the Paris Exposition in 1900. In the meantime it endeared him to Edison, who let him perfect his invention on-site over the next several years, making Ogden the cradle of the world’s first system of continuous mass-materials handling.90

SOLAR SURPRISE

Within six months of taking over management of the New Jersey & Pennsylvania Concentrating Works plant, Edison doubled the company’s subscription capital from $500,000 to $1 million.91 His fellow directors could see that he was prepared to double it again—and write checks of his own when they quailed—so sure was he that the day would come when orders flowed in, as fast as pure, phosphorus-free fines were trucked out.

His joyful sense of freedom to build and rebuild came in contrast to the impotence he felt as the owner of only 10 percent of Edison General Electric. In that company’s stately headquarters in downtown Manhattan, Henry Villard reigned supreme, and the avid interest of Wall Street was increasingly felt at board meetings. Unrestrained by Edison, a habitual absentee, Villard was again trying to sell his majority holding and amalgamate Edison General with Thomson-Houston. In recent years the latter firm, run by a brilliant business tactician, Charles A. Coffin, had taken advantage of Edison’s prejudice against alternating current systems and built itself up to the point that its paper worth, in early 1892, was $18.4 million, ahead of Edison General’s $15 million. In fact, it was a smaller, less profitable concern, its products inferior and its business practices not far removed from larceny. Edison General, in contrast, ably served between four and five thousand customers and pulled in $1 million worth of business every month. It had fourteen acres of manufacturing plant to Thomson-Houston’s eight. But Coffin saw that it had a weakness—a $3.5 million floating loan—that he could exploit, with the secret approval of his banker, J. P. Morgan.92

The news of their combined intent leaked out on Saturday 6 February, four days before Villard planned to announce it at the annual meeting of Edison General Electric trustees. It created an instant sensation. Ever since Judge Wallace had sanctioned the primacy of Edison’s electric light patent, received wisdom held that his company would devour all its competitors. Instead, the shark was poised to swallow the whale. Villard put a brave face on it when he confirmed that “negotiations are in that direction…and are progressing rapidly.”93

That weekend, in a macabre concatenation of electrical violence with the takeover of Edison General Electric, one of the largest geomagnetic storms ever recorded began to move across the surface of the sun, while in Ossining, New York, a convicted murderer, Charles McElvaine, prepared to be executed on Monday morning. Edison’s connections with both events were more than metaphorical. He had wired his “cosmic telephone” at Ogden for just such a solar surprise and advised the authorities at Sing Sing prison that a sixteen-hundred-volt charge sent through McElvaine’s wrists was likely to kill him faster than one through the head, blood being less resistant than bone.94

The execution was a reminder of a publicity campaign Edison would as soon forget, his battle in the late 1880s to brand alternating current as a lethal force ideally suited to capital punishment.^*27 Reserving judgment on the merger until he heard from Samuel Insull, his personal representative at the negotiations, he sent Arthur Kennelly—currently testing the therapeutic effect of electromagnetism on the brains of a dog and a boy^*28—to monitor the execution, while he tracked the sunspot.95

At 11:32 A.M. on Monday McElvaine was strapped into Sing Sing’s electric chair. It had been reconfigured so that his arms were forced down into two cans of salt water, wired in series to the prison’s AC dynamo. “In the execution of Mr. Elvaine,” the officiating physician told witnesses, “a new method, suggested by Mr. Thomas A. Edison, will be tried.” An initial jolt lasting forty-nine seconds proved that Edison’s theory of enhanced conductivity was wrong. McElvaine seemed still to be alive. One electrode was hurriedly applied to his skull. He died afterward, stiff in his straps and transpiring puffs of steam.96

Winter winds, meanwhile, kept blowing over Edison’s poles on Sparta Mountain, frustrating his efforts to hear the crescendo of heliomagnetic signals impinging on observatories around the world. For the rest of the week he clung to his telescope, showing more interest in the cosmos than in Insull’s efforts to protect him from the rapacity of Coffin and Morgan.97

“It was a beautiful sight, that aurora borealis last night, wasn’t it?” he said on Saturday, exultant after the sunspot passed the solar meridian.98 By then his fellow directors had officially approved the absorption of Edison General Electric by Thomson-Houston. The name of the resultant conglomerate had not yet been decided, and for the time being Villard was technically its president, but power had switched to more power, and soon the name of Edison General Electric would be shortened to just two depersonalized words.

PEOPLE WILL FORGET

Many years later Alfred Tate wrote that Edison blanched when he heard that he was the victim of a hostile takeover. “I never before had seen him change color. His complexion naturally was pale, a clear healthy paleness, but following my announcement it turned as white as his collar.” Mina, too, ranted in old age about Insull selling her husband out and leaving him almost bankrupt, while laying the foundation of a vast fortune for himself.99

Memory tends to melodrama. Edison blustered at the time that he approved the merger.100 Far from being impoverished by it, he believed Morgan’s offer to exchange his 10 percent sharehold in Edison General Electric for a similar stake in the new company would “result financially to my advantage.” And he was still the owner of several “large shops” not included in Thomson-Houston’s purchase, the latest and most promising being his iron-concentrating works in New Jersey. He confessed to some disappointment at Insull’s performance in the negotiations. However, “We are on the best of terms now. I expect he will come with me again when the consolidation has been completed.”101

The first of his predictions, at least, turned out to be true. Morgan capitalized the combine at $50 million, making Edison richer than he had ever been in his life, with around $5 million in cash. Samuel Insull also did well, in spite of dashed hopes that he, and not Charles Coffin, would become its general manager. He was offered instead the post of second vice-president, two rungs below. No other Edison executive was so favored. This fueled angry speculations among his colleagues at West Orange and Schenectady that “Sammy” had sold them and the Old Man out.102

When, providentially, the directors of the Chicago Edison Company asked Insull to find them a new president, he suggested himself and was accepted. Edison let him go without protest. Unpopular as the little Englishman had always been, with his clicking, cash-register efficiency and Ozymandian sneer, he received a valedictory dinner at Delmonico’s attended by Edison, Villard, and virtually every heavyweight in the electrical industry. Insull was still only thirty-two. Ahead lay all the glitter a lowborn lad could wish for—success beyond imagining, the beautiful actress wife, the thirty-one-thousand-square-foot mansion, the $20 million opera house—and in further prospect, the desiderata of pulp fiction: financial ruin, flight from the law, and death on a foreign railway platform, with only a silk handkerchief and the equivalent of eight cents in his pocket.^*29 For the moment all Charles Batchelor, another guest at the dinner, could say was: “I think a very wise move for him.”103

On 15 April the organization of “General Electric” was formally announced. Edison uttered no public protest about the exclusion of his name from its trademark. Nor could he consider himself snubbed, unless Elihu Thomson and Edwin Houston did too. He was appointed a director of the new behemoth but attended only one of its meetings.104 The only hint he gave of deep hurt at being erased from the history of the industry he had founded came in conversation with his private secretary.

Tate, if you want to know anything about electricity go out to the galvanator room and ask Kennelly. He knows far more about it than I do. In fact I’ve come to the conclusion that I never did know anything about it. I’m going to do something now so different and so much bigger than anything I’ve ever done before, people will forget that my name was ever connected with anything electrical.105

PANTING OR SHORT BREATHS

In July Edison learned that his mining venture had so far cost him $850,000, including some $100,000 that could not be accounted for. A profit-killing amount of money was being lavished on labor that simply loaded and unloaded rock at either end of the conveyors. The jaw crushers took too long to do their work and often broke down, necessitating expensive repairs. The magnetic separators, plagued by screening problems, were concentrating only 47 percent iron—far less than the 66 or 70 percent he needed to match the richness of Great Lakes ore. He was still digesting this information when a stockhouse under construction at Ogden collapsed, killing five men and injuring twelve. Lawsuits alleging negligence were filed by bereaved families.106

A newspaper clipping he carried in his wallet read, “Thomas Edison is a happy and healthy man. He does not worry.” As usual he countered the pull of bad news by pushing forward harder. Rather than continue to “improve” Ogden with ad hoc adjustments, he increased the capital of its parent company to $1.25 million, then shut the plant for a tear-down rebuild that would expand it enormously and make it a showpiece of automated design.107 No sooner had a new separator house gone up than he decided it needed some screening towers, and should be constructed all over again.

“Is the Old Man all right today?” a fireman whispered to the chief rigger. “He told me to get it down to the foundations.” Forty men were needed to do the job.108

Construction crews often found Edison working, eating, and even sleeping beside them. He loved hard labor and the luxurious tiredness it induced when he finally flopped onto a bed or the nearest heap of soft pea coal. In a letter to Mina that looked as if it had been scrawled upside down, he signed himself “Your Lover always the same (who sleeps with his boots on & smokes 23 cent cigars).”109

She could have used his company at Glenmont, because she had a discordant household to run. Marion, aged nineteen, was at last back from Europe. Her smallpox scars were sufficiently faded for her to face a reunion with Tom and William, themselves home for the summer from boarding school. It was an open question how long the boys would remain at St. Paul’s, a school they both hated—and for that matter, what success Mina would have integrating Mary Edison’s children with her own. For the time being she felt capable of managing both broods, with the help of a nanny for Madeleine and a nurse for little Charles. But to Marion, desperate to resume intimacy with her father, it was inevitable that sooner or later Mina would insist on privileged possession of him and the fruits of her own body.

The longer Edison stayed on Sparta Mountain, the more he lusted for that body—olive-skinned and stocky, not yet coarsened by the passing of youth. “Our dear little Mamma don’t want to leave her nice home & come up to keep company with her lover—Why? no real love is the answer.” He showed no awareness, as he teased, that she might feel the same way. In letter after letter he hailed “the 649th grandchild of Eve” with apostrophes of adoration: “Darling darling Billy Edison & 2 angels besides,” “Darling Sweetest Loveliest Cutest Extra Billie Edison,” “Sweetest on this ball of granite, verdure and H2O.” His sign-offs were even more figurative: “With love Andesian in dimensions I am your Lover TAE,” “With a kiss like the Swish of a 13 inch cannon projectile I remain as always your lover sure solid & unchangeable.”110

He wrote about wanting to see her so much that he had resorted to searching around for a photograph of her and was frustrated by its inadequacy. Knowing that she enjoyed jokes about sex (behind a veil of Methodist decorum), he shared one that he heard at the plant. It was a question: “How to recognize the Modern or so called Coming Woman.” Answer: “By [her] panting or short breaths.” In his next letter he said he had more stories of the kind to tell her when they met up. “I suppose you saw the point of the ‘Coming Woman’ joke, if not I will bring diagrams and explanatory notes.”111

FAULT LINE DEVELOPING

In October Edison assigned Walter Mallory, an experienced iron and steel man fast becoming his closest associate, to supervise the transfiguration of Ogden. He reestablished himself in West Orange and worked with Dickson on an improved version of the Kinetograph, which he wanted to patent and exhibit at the Chicago World’s Fair next spring. His announcement to that effect in The Phonogram magazine made clear, once again, that he conceived of the new machine as an audiovisual device: “The Edison Kinetograph is an instrument intended to produce motion and sound simultaneously, being a combination of a specially constructed camera and phonograph.” With its thirty-five-millimeter film now feeding vertically rather than horizontally, a double row of perforations holding the frames steady as they were exposed forty-six to the second, and electrical connection to a recording device, it was the prototype motion picture camera of the coming century.112

While vast new structures arose on Sparta Mountain, a smaller and peculiarly ugly one was built by Dickson in a vacant lot behind the West Orange laboratory. Black-painted, pitch-roofed, and pinned together with great sheets of felt siding, it was windowless except for a small rectangle of red glass and an angled aperture open to the sky. It also lacked foundations, riding instead on a circular wooden path, so that at any time of day it could be aligned with the sun. It was the world’s first movie studio, making use of natural light rather than the hissing, sparky flare of arc lamps or the soft glow of what were now “GE” lightbulbs. Dickson needed all the illumination he could get when shooting at forty-six FPS. He enclosed the rear of the stage in a fourteen-foot cone to give a dark background to foreground action and mounted the Kinetograph on rails, in order to dolly forward for limited zooms. There was a phonograph for sound-synchronism experiments, a central stove, and a darkroom in the rear. In inclement weather, the skylight could be closed with a flap of tar paper, black sealing in black. The shed became known as “Edison’s Black Maria.”^*30, 113

For a few months Edison and his elder daughter recaptured something of the closeness they had shared in the aftermath of Mary Edison’s death. Marion rejoiced to have her adored “Papa” back at Glenmont and to find him no longer as cold to her as he had been when she first quit his hearth. But by the time Tom and William came home again for Christmas, Mina began to feel there were altogether too many of her predecessor’s children in the house. She could not conceal her regret that Marion had declined the marriage proposal of a socialite she had met in Madrid.114

Embarrassingly for Edison, a gossip columnist publicized his domestic situation in Town Topics magazine:

I am all the time running across charming newspaper accounts of the home life of one of the great inventors of the world, a genius that lives not very far from New York. The inventor is very happy in the possession of a young wife that [sic] is remarkable for her physical beauty and is devoted to him. They have two fine children of their own, and the inventor has several grown up [sic] children by his first wife….Now, everyone knows how difficult it is to be a good stepmother, and therefore it is not at all strange that the inventor’s wife is by no means the fond and generous type of the species that she attempts to have people believe. [She] is said to fancy that her treatment of her husband’s children is quite all that it should be, but among her friends, I believe, it is held that her tolerance and gentleness are not remarkable.115

The Black Maria, circa 1893.

In January 1893 Tom, a sickly boy who clung to Marion, turned seventeen and refused to go back to St. Paul’s. He said he wanted to work for his father. Edison saw a fault line developing in the family and decided to make Marion a present of their old home in Menlo Park. She was not yet of age, but he saw no reason to wait another year before handing it over to her. Marion was in some respects more mature than Mina, who had never known peripatetic insecurity, let alone faced death in a foreign country. He transferred the deed on the last day of the month, and Marion moved out of Glenmont a few weeks later. It remained to be seen how long she could stand living alone in a vandalized hamlet on the wrong side of Metuchen. As far as Edison was concerned, she was “now settled for life.”116

After returning to Ogden, he tried with some irritation to soothe Mina’s feeling that his heart was not all hers. “You are mean to doubt me as you did in your last letter…you are not a lover, only on occasions do you impress me as loving me, in any event it is not a strong deep love like mine, what little there is would easily be disturbed, someday Billy darling you will love me….It is very cold here today, the wind is blowing very hard.”117

NOT THE BEST TIME

In February the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, a stressed spar of the nation’s overextended transport industry, snapped and toppled into bankruptcy. Investors already concerned about a decline in Treasury gold reserves rushed to buy as much bullion as they could. Panic set in, just as organizers of the World’s Fair in Chicago were preparing to celebrate American industrial might.

W. K. L. Dickson collapsed at the same time as the railroad. He was worn out by his multiple responsibilities as photographer, producer, performer, studio builder, and sound coordinator—in one experiment, playing violin while two young men self-consciously waltzed for the camera.^*31, 118 On top of all these responsibilities, he had embarked on writing an authorized life of his employer, and had already published several advance chapters in Cassier’s Magazine. Edison sympathetically treated him to a ten-week vacation at full pay in his house in Fort Myers. It did away with any lingering hope that they would be able, as promised, to exhibit a sonic version of the Kinetograph at the fair—or for that matter, even show the basic camera.119

He had already given up on an earlier dream, to be the official supplier of electricity to the exposition, and fill its white palaces with the radiance of his greatest invention. Since he was no longer in the lighting business, it was a matter of practical indifference to him that George Westinghouse had won that honor by underbidding General Electric. More personally, it was satisfying to see Westinghouse scrabble not to infringe on his now-universal lamp patent, by supplying leaky, reconfigured bulbs that lasted about as long as candles.120

No sooner had President Cleveland opened the fair at the beginning of May than a second speculative juggernaut, the National Cordage Company, went into receivership. The stock market crashed. There was no doubt now that the economy was headed for a major depression. Hundreds of banks called in their loans, then failed themselves. Edison was somewhat protected by the variety of his investments in his own companies, but with all his children still depending on him—as well as Mina, with her love of fine food and good clothes—he had personal expenses of almost $3,000 a month.^*32 It was not the best time to discover that he had been wrong in assuming he could build a new plant at Ogden as quickly as he had adapted the old. Instead of taking four months and costing $100,000, the project looked likely to drag on for another year and a half, at incalculable cost. And there were no more orders for the limited amount of concentrate he still had on hand.121

“The Ogden baby is sick,” he said to Tate.122

He was unwell himself, suffering from an onset of diabetes that would trouble him for the rest of his life. Two insurance companies declined to cover him “on account of sugar,” and he was able to register with a third only after stringent dieting. In other indications of stress, he borrowed $115,000 from Drexel, Morgan at the high rate of 6 percent, fired many employees, and complained about “professional sharks” continuing to infringe on his inventions. “I’m through with patents,” he told a lawyer soliciting his business.123 Over the next four years, he would send only five applications to the Patent Office—for him, the equivalent of a total boycott.124

INSIDE THE BOX

Dickson came back from Florida in time to help Edison mount the first public demonstration of the Kinetograph at the Brooklyn Institute on 9 May. The occasion was almost perversely uncommercial, being a lecture delivered by George M. Hopkins, chairman of the department of physics, to an audience of four hundred scientists. For once, Edison did not arrange newspaper coverage: nor did he attend the event himself. “These Zoetropic devices,” he scoffed to Eadweard Muybridge, “are of too sentimental a character to get the public to invest in.” He may have been embarrassed by his failure, two years after promising to show moving pictures with sound and color at the World’s Fair, to come up with anything more impressive than the evening’s tall, varnished box with a peephole at the top. As for pictures, all he had to offer Dr. Hopkins were some silent black-and-white experimental shorts.125

The professor chose a twenty-seven-second loop of three blacksmiths clustering around an anvil, sharing a beer, and forging a piece of white-hot iron. He was unable to project the action for communal viewing, but used a magic lantern to flash a few stills on the auditorium screen. The gradated differences between each frame were at least discernible. “Persistence of vision,” he explained, “is depended upon to blend the successive images into one continuous ever-changing photographic picture.” Using the lantern’s radially slit disk shutter, he showed a spasmodic suggestion of movement. “In Mr. Edison’s machine far more perfect results are secured,” he said, explaining that its fundamental feature was an advancement system operating at hardly comprehensible speed. “This camera starts, moves, and stops the sensitive strip which receives the photographic image forty-six times a second.”126 He then invited his colleagues to file past the Kinetograph and bend over the peephole to watch Blacksmith Scene endlessly playing inside the box.^*33

Three hours went by before all were able to do so. Unless any of them had been overseas, and—by remote chance—seen private demonstrations of paper-roll motion pictures by Louis Le Prince, Étienne-Jules Marey, and William Friese-Greene, this vision of a new medium was so strange as to defeat initial comprehension. Each scientist in turn applied his eye to the glass and was pulled from the bright auditorium into a flickering world where Lilliputian figures moved in chiaroscuro, their tiny hammer blows falling soundlessly.127

THE FIRST FEW CONCUSSIONS

Ogden, in contrast, was a crescendo of noise from August on, as Edison began to assemble and test the components of his new concentrating facility. First in order of process were the world’s largest traveling crane, a 215-foot bridge rumbling on rails over the quarry and lifting overloaded skips pneumatically, with earsplitting hisses and snorts, and a six-ton electric elevator that thunderously spilled ore into the crusher building. Their combined cacophony, amplified by shrieking locomotive whistles, throbbing engines and dynamos, and the clatter of miles of conveyor belts, rose to hurtful levels when he invented and installed a pair of self-styled “Giant” crushing rolls in March 1894.128

These counterspinning, corrugated cylinders were six feet in diameter and weighed about thirty tons each. Along with four supplementary pairs of rolls, they were designed to reduce the most adamantine gneiss to powder. Only Edison, with his muffled hearing, could stand near them without wincing. “They have a surface velocity of nearly 40 miles per hour,” he boasted, “and can strike a blow of 1,800,000 lbs.”^*34 The violence with which they did so came from his addition of a cabled friction clutch to their drive. It resolved the ancient conundrum of irresistible force meeting an immovable object by releasing the rolls to whirl free just before they bit into a boulder, so that momentum alone—seventy tons of chilled steel hitting a few tons of rock—did the fracturing.129

The first few concussions were enough to show that he had been unwise to mount his roll assembly on a wooden foundation. Drops from the hopper caused misalignments that either jammed the machinery, or threw boulders high into the air before they descended, spinning, and rode the rolls with the deceptive lightness of ping-pong balls. On such occasions the crew had to scatter to avoid flying fragments. Edison saw that nothing short of a bed of cast iron, and babbitted bearings, could fortify the roll banks, both “giant” and intermediate, well enough to stand a constant torrent of ore.130

The tests were a disaster, necessitating many more months of crusher redesign that cost him another $200,000 and postponed—yet again—any thought of getting the New Jersey & Pennsylvania Concentrating Works into regular production.131

THAT CROWD OUT THERE

Edison had no more luck in making a practicable combination of the phonograph and Kinetograph when he returned to the laboratory. He settled for the spring release of a coin-operated version of the peephole player Hopkins had unveiled in Brooklyn, along with a small library of “films”—his own word—to demonstrate the miracle of photographed movement. Quashing hopes that the box might be wired for sound, he renamed it the Kinetoscope^*35 and announced that the first reel made for it would feature the dancing biceps of Eugene Sandow, “Strongest Man on Earth.”132

For Sandow, alias Friedrich Wilhelm Müller, a German chain-breaker who had wowed audiences at the World’s Fair, the chance to be associated with the most famous inventor of the age was more than a splicing of superlatives. It meant that hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of Americans would now be able to admire his physique in Aktion and buy his various bodybuilding products. Nor could the publicity hurt Edison, who needed the Kinetoscope to distract attention from the shutdown of his iron mill. He welcomed the massive young man to West Orange and posed for a snapshot beside him, taking care to stand a little higher, before escorting him to the Black Maria. Once inside, Sandow stripped down to boxing boots and a white undergarment that gave new dimensions of meaning to the word briefs.133

The resultant forty-one-second “actuality,” taken by Dickson and Heise in a brilliant downfall of sunshine, beautifully caught the ripple of his muscles as he clenched and writhed and twirled for the camera. But by chance, or more likely by design, the lighting emphasized some of his less mobile protuberances, with an attention to detail not to be matched in cinematography for seventy years.134

Nevertheless it was the likeness of Thomas Alva Edison, cast in bronzed plaster, that appeared on a pedestal in the forecourt of the first Kinetoscope parlor in New York on Saturday 14 April, two days before Sandow and two dozen other “moving pictures”^*36 were due for exhibit. The ambitious lessor of the premises at 1155 Broadway was Alfred Tate, who like Insull before him had parlayed his job as Edison’s private secretary into a variety of outside responsibilities. With his brother Bertram and a friend, Thomas R. Lombard, helping out, he spent the morning arranging ten Kinetoscopes for on-demand viewing. The oak cabinets were electrically linked in two rows and enclosed in a curving rail for patrons to lean against while moving from peephole to peephole. Framed pictures hung high on the walls, as if to emphasize the contrast between their stillness and the animated “shows” available below, at twenty-five cents for five. The floor was glossed to reflect the varnished oak of the machines, and sprays of potted palm added a touch of salon-like elegance.135

Eugene Sandow models for W. K. Dickson’s camera, March 1894.

By early afternoon all was ready for the opening on Monday. Tate and his companions retired to the back office to smoke and chat.

We had planned to have an especially elaborate dinner that evening at Delmonico’s, then flourishing on the southeast corner of Broadway and Twenty-sixth Street, to celebrate the initiation of the Kinetoscope enterprise. From where I sat I could see the display window and the groups who stopped to gaze at the bust of Edison. And then a brilliant idea occurred to me.

“Look here,” I said, pointing towards the window, “why shouldn’t we make that crowd out there pay for our dinner tonight?”

They both looked and observed the group before the window as it dissolved and renewed itself.

“What’s your scheme?” asked Lombard with a grin.

“Bert,” I said to my brother, “you take charge of the machines. I’ll sell tickets and,” turning to Lombard, “you stand at the door and act as a reception committee. We can run till six o’clock and by that time we ought to have dinner money.”136

The trio never got to Delmonico’s. There was such an inrush of patrons that Tate was unable to close the parlor until one o’clock on Sunday morning.137 During the weeks that followed it became a magnet for oglers of both sexes. They admired Sandow’s masculinity and the gyrations of female dancers and contortionists until Edison, embarrassed, ordered his bust to be removed.

Given the nonnarrative shortness of Kinetoscope films, the public’s fascination with them derived, beyond prurience, from incredulity that movement, which by definition was a state of continuous change, could be both recorded and replayed. The fifty-foot loops magically kept boxers punching, barbers shaving, gymnasts somersaulting, Fred Ott sneezing, and Annie Oakley sharpshooting until celluloid fatigue set in—whereupon there was always a duplicate copy to wind onto the reels. Dickson and Heise were more interested in novelty than aesthetics, except when they filmed the Butterfly, Sun, and Serpentine dances of Annabelle Whitford. Her yellow hair and radiant, floaty costumes encouraged them to have a few strips hand-tinted, frame by frame. Privileged viewers were then able to watch Miss Whitford twirling amid undulations of colored gossamer that at one moment resembled wings, at another the petals of an enormous windblown flower.^*37, 138

Soon the Kinetoscope department of the Edison Manufacturing Company was selling $2,000 worth of players a week, plus Kinetograph cameras and films, through three competing agencies. Purchase orders grew at a compound rate as new parlors opened up across the country. Over the next year Edison’s income from his invention would exceed $250,000.^*38 Yet he again refrained from patenting it overseas and again emphasized, in a handwritten statement published in the June issue of The Century Magazine, that he was not the only begetter of moving pictures. If the technology ever reached the point of presenting spectacles as grand as those of the Metropolitan Opera, he wrote, it would be due to “my own work and that of Dickson, Muybridge, Marié and others who will doubtless enter the field.”139

Whatever authenticity Edison’s graceful calligraphy (and misspelling of Marey’s name) gave to this modest sharing of credit was compromised by his declaration, a few lines earlier, “In the year 1887, the idea occurred to me that it was possible to devise an instrument that would do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.”

If this alteration by one digit of the true chronology of his invention was deliberate, rather than a simple slip of the pen, it gave birth to a lie that would make him and Dickson—who perpetuated it with fanatical insistence for the next forty years—morally suspect in the eyes of history.140

DAMN FOOL

The depression triggered by the previous year’s panic reached its nadir in July. Exhibitors, nevertheless, were eager to invest in Kinetoscopes. Edison belatedly realized that entertainment was a public necessity, especially in hard times. No longer could he pretend that his phonograph was a business instrument, best suited for stenographic purposes. He brooded over the success of Emile Berliner’s rival disk-playing Gramophone and decided he could do better. Coin-operated phonographs were highly successful and a natural complement to peephole machines in amusement arcades. But first he had to wrest the commercial rights to his invention back from the hands of the ailing, failing entrepreneur Jesse Lippincott.141

He had sold those rights to Lippincott six years before, at the same time undertaking to manufacture phonographs for him exclusively, at the profitable rate of $250 apiece. The resultant North American Phonograph Company had struggled amid proliferating competition to keep paying him back. When Edison heard that it was $1 million in debt, he moved to push it into receivership.142

The suddenness and brutality with which he did so shocked Tate, who represented him on North American’s board and who felt obligated to honor that company’s many agreements with regional retailers—all of which he would have to abrogate if the bankruptcy suit went through. Rather than do that, he announced his resignation.

“What’s the matter with you, Tate?” Edison said, turning on him in annoyance. “Why are you going to make a damn fool of yourself?”143

It was a split with yet another veteran of Menlo Park days, clearly less painful to him than to Tate, who for some time had noticed the growing willfulness of Edison’s behavior.

From the period of the fusion of the Edison General Electric and Thomson Houston Companies I observed a marked change in him in this respect. He seemed to repel discussion and his decisions became mandates issued from the depths of his own mind. If they were questioned he became impatient and merely reiterated them….

The iron bit into the flesh when I broke the link that bound me to a man I loved so sincerely.144

On 21 August North American Phonograph declared bankruptcy. Edison’s bid of $125,000 for its assets was accepted, challenged by less agile rivals, and eventually confirmed by the receiver. He thus regained full rights to develop and market his favorite invention, creating for the purpose a new subsidiary, the National Phonograph Company: “I don’t care to have anyone else have a lien on my brains.” Tate drifted off to a life of wandering, indifferent achievement and was replaced in his managerial responsibilities by William E. Gilmore, a tougher executive better suited to the temper of the times.^*39, 145

ONE PARTICULARLY DISREPUTABLE ONE

That summer, notwithstanding the success of his film venture, Edison had to increase the stock of the New Jersey & Pennsylvania Concentrating Works to $1.75 million. He needed funds to reinstall the mill’s crushers on a bed of cast iron, strengthen the traveling crane (which experts warned was too wide to be safe), and build something never seen near a metal mill before—a bricking house. This costly experiment was Edison’s answer to complaints from smelters that Ogden fines had shown a dangerous tendency to “blow” in blast furnaces. He wanted to find a way to agglomerate the concentrate into Bessemer-quality briquettes, hard enough to stand heavy shoveling yet porous enough to absorb reducing gases at high heat.146

Every problem solved at Ogden seemed to generate a dozen more. The belts on the rolls began to slip at certain speeds, and buildings had to be reconfigured so many times that carpenters took little care over their work, cynically assuming that all of it would be changed sooner or later.147

Edison’s way of dealing with every procedural obstacle was to throw himself at it, body as well as mind, until something gave way. He and Walter Mallory nearly suffocated when they crawled into an eighty-foot tower dryer to investigate a blockage above and were buried under an avalanche of ore.148 This may have occurred just before Edison returned home for a rare family visit, imprinting on the memory of little Madeleine an image that would never fade:

One Saturday [Charles and I] were called in from play—scrubbed and combed & dressed to the nines to accompany Mother to meet him at the station…Mother—who was a very beautiful woman—looking exquisite in her flowered dress—ostrich feather hat, & lace parasol—the coachman—elegant in his livery—managing the high spirited team of bay horses…& the two of us—miserable but resigned in our starched ruffles because we realized that this was to be a great occasion: “Papa” was coming home!

Then the train arrived, puffing & blowing—black soft coal smoke—and from it emerged the most disreputable group of men I had ever seen—laughing & talking—they were dusty & dishevelled, their faces streaked with soot…and none of them looked as if they’d shaved for a week. I gazed at them in horror & then suddenly one particularly disreputable one detached himself and leaped into our carriage, kissed my mother most enthusiastically & we were off—my Father had arrived.149

If Marion had been there, she might have recalled a much younger but equally filthy Edison besmirching her own mother’s fine linen. But as expected, she had been unable to stand her rustication in Menlo Park and was back in Germany—whence she applied, now, for his permission to wed Oberstleutnant Karl Hermann Oscar Öser of the Royal Saxon Army.

“I at last love some one better than myself,” she wrote with her usual engaging frankness. “I hope dear Father you will make a flying trip to Europe to see me married. I have a good reason for wishing you very much to do this for me. Because I don’t throw my money away people think I am an imposter and not your daughter.”150

Like her rapidly maturing brothers, Marion was afraid that when the time came for her father to divide his kingdom, he would not do so equitably. Mina was a more powerful influence on him than all of them combined, and she was bound to fight like Goneril to acquire the largest slice possible, in favor of her own privileged brats. That at least had been Marion’s obvious belief when she left—angering Edison so much he had refused to see her off, and had kept Mina from doing so too.151

He was soothed by the simple sincerity of Oscar’s request for his daughter’s hand, but not enough to cross the Atlantic to give her away. Assured by intermediaries that the lieutenant was a decent man who loved her, he gave his approval. It would take many months of gemütlich residence in Neusalza-Spremberg before Marion apologized for “the way I acted before I left America.” She blamed her old traveling companion, Mrs. Earl, for making her doubt his goodwill to her, Tom, and William. “She it was who told me that you had settled all your money on Mina so that we would get none of it.”152

THE GREATEST GENIUS OF THIS OR ANY OTHER AGE

In September the Thomas Y. Crowell Company announced the forthcoming publication of The Life and Inventions of Thomas Alva Edison, an imperial quarto volume of nearly four hundred pages with 250 illustrations, co-written by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and his sister Antonia. It was an expanded compilation of the biographical articles they had been publishing about Edison in Cassier’s Magazine and was billed as “the first complete and authentic story of his life,” reflecting years of collaboration between the authors and their subject.

Edison received an advance copy and gave it a qualified testimonial: “Although I have not had time to read it through carefully, after a casual glance I must say that it is extremely well gotten up.”153

His glance may not have extended to the final line, which described him as “the greatest genius of this or any other age.” He was used to superlative salutations and quite aware of his public stature, but the Dicksons elsewhere gave him enough praise to embarrass an egomaniac. This was unfortunate, since the book contained much biographical information derived from Edison himself. The New York Times reviewed it favorably. “No one can help admiring the man who is revealed in these pages. Starting with nothing, he has acquired almost everything that men prize. The boy who sold papers on the Grand Trunk Railway forty years ago is today known and honored in every country in the world….The popular notion is that Edison will discover everything if he shall live long enough.”154

CATASTROPHIC FOLLY

Edison spent lavishly building the new Ogden, liquidating all his General Electric stock in the process.155 At first the reopened plant seemed set to become its designer’s dream: a fully automated fons et origo of purified magnetite, cheaply delivered in unlimited quantities to revived foundries on either flank of the Adirondacks.

In mid-October he put its machinery into experimental motion, aware that a malfunction at any point along the line—twenty-two sequences of pulverization, separation, and refinement—could jar the whole into immobility. The first disaster occurred in December, when one of the ore elevators split and fell. It necessitated a total rebuild of all three, plus complex adjustments to the crushing machines they served. The new bricking facility produced, after a number of false starts, some cakes that had encouragingly high levels of magnetite, but they were too few and too crumbly, bound to shatter en route to the foundry. In damp weather they absorbed water like sponges. Edison was obliged to shut Ogden down for yet another winter. He ordered the construction of a larger, more sophisticated bakery and set about developing a resinous binder, not anticipating that the “briquetting problem” would torment him for the next several years.156

Twice in the early months of 1895 he called on his fellow shareholders for cash infusions. Alarmed that the mill was costing $1,200 a day just to maintain, they declined to increase their stakes. Gloom gathered among Edison’s engineers, all of whom regarded the giant rolls as a catastrophic folly.157 He alone remained convinced that when their kinetic action was accelerated to the point that they outperformed the explosiveness of dynamite, the plant would usher in a new age of automated magnetic mining.

MORE THAN ENOUGH GLORY

Emboldened—and personally enriched—by the rush of peepshow exhibitors around the world to buy Edison machines and show Edison films, W. K. L. Dickson chose this time to publish History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope, and Kineto-Phonograph, a monograph that reflected much glory upon himself as the great man’s closest aide. Or so it seemed to Edison, hypersensitive as ever to any presumption of intimacy. He thought that his tribute in The Century Magazine to the photographic innovations “of Dickson, Muybridge, Marié [Marey] and others” conferred more than enough glory to go around.158

Now he saw that same tribute reproduced, along with a full-page portrait of himself, as the opening spread of a volume that otherwise paid him only passing attention. The text that followed was evidently written by Dickson’s sister Antonia, who cultivated a high literary style. (“With its great flapping sail-like roof and ebon complexion, [the Black Maria] has a weird and semi-nautical appearance, like the unwieldy hulk of a medieval pirate-craft or the air-ship of some swart Afrite.”) Dickson, identified as the book’s designer, managed to attach his extremely legible signature to most of the illustrations, including two bizarre self-portraits. One showed him posing à la Napoleon with hand tucked inside coat, while the other was a trick photograph of his severed head on a platter.159

His principal provocation, however, was to append “by request” an article from the American Annual of Photography that described him as “a clever young electrical engineer” who was “co-inventor with Edison of magnetic ore separators.” This resulted in a rare outburst of Edisonian rage, dictated for the record to a stenographer:

I object to the little book gotten out by Dickson. The part about Dickson being a co-inventor in the magnetic separator etc., is incorrect, as there is no co-invention in the Ogden business with Dickson or anybody else….Mr Dickson will get full credit for what he has done without trying to ram it down peoples throats….I am not especially stuck on having my own photograph in the book, it looks too much like conceitedness and self glorification on my part and the public never takes kindly to a man who is always working his personality forwards. It’s the thing they want to know about and not the man for whom they do not care a D—.160

Having thus convinced himself, if nobody else, of his personal humility, Edison cooled down. But Dickson would never get the “full credit” he deserved as a pioneer of American cinematography.

AN EXPERIMENTER OF THE HIGHEST TYPE

Edison was about to reopen Ogden in mid-March when news came that Nikola Tesla’s laboratory in Manhattan had been destroyed by fire. Although the Serbian inventor was a wealthy man, on the strength of his brilliant innovations in alternating current electricity and wireless power transmission, he had neglected to insure the property. He was seen walking through the ruins, a storklike figure, picking up a piece of brass, blowing the soot off it, then tossing it aside in tears.161

“I am in too much grief to talk,” he told reporters. “What can I say? The work of half my lifetime, very nearly; all my mechanical instruments and scientific apparatus….Everything is gone. I must begin over again.”162

Edison reached out in sympathy to his stricken colleague. He knew what it was to begin over—and over and over. “I have received a letter from Mr. Edison offering me the use of his workshop in which to continue my experiments,” Tesla announced to reporters. “He has shown me the greatest kindness and consideration. I do not think, however, that I will accept the offer.”163

Ever the loner, he said he would look for temporary quarters in the city and try to resume work there. Many observers thought it was more probable he would lose his mind. Just weeks before, he had confessed that his current experiments were “so beautiful, so fascinating, so important,” that he had virtually given up on food and sleep. This was hard to believe, since Tesla was a regular, solitary diner at Delmonico’s and ate pathological quantities of meat.^*40, 164 Nor, with his frail constitution, could he keep the same kind of hours as Edison did without damage to himself. He admitted as much: “I expect I shall go on until I break down altogether.”165

In all respects except that of creativity, the two inventors were opposites. Tesla at thirty-nine was a melancholy celibate. Edison at forty-nine still had a healthy libido and had carried off two teenage brides, impregnating both of them repeatedly.^*41 If he was egotistical, his vanity concerned only work, while Tesla’s megalomania had no bounds. The New York Times went too far in reporting that “personally they are warm friends,” but they admired each other despite their professional differences. Edison restrained his contempt for alternating current enough to praise Tesla’s “amazing” success in transporting hydroelectric from Niagara Falls, while Tesla let it be known that he had “the utmost faith in the genius of Mr. Edison.”166

THE VANISHED PRECURSOR

Just when Ogden was thundering back to life, news came that Kinetoscope business in the United States had gone into a sudden slump. All three of Edison’s principal exhibitors—the Latham Company, Maguire & Baucus, and Raff & Gammon—reported peak sales in January, followed by precipitous falloffs of 72, 92, and 95 percent, respectively. Evidently the novelty of a device that showed moving pictures through a peephole had worn off. The clenching of Eugene Sandow’s buttocks did not encourage repeat viewings, except by a furtive minority of patrons.167

Frank Gammon begged Edison to transform the Kinetoscope into a projector that would entertain large seated audiences, not just one standing viewer at a time. He got nowhere. Edison had lost interest in screened images after failing, four years before, to throw any that were larger than ten inches wide.^*42, 168 The difficulty with projection was that it called for intermittent movement—forty-six film-tearing stops and starts per second—as each frame passed between a light and a lens. Otherwise, it would not reproduce in detail twenty feet away—much less at a hundred. Kinetoscope loops ran smoothly just below the eyepiece, with tolerable clarity.

Edison the manufacturer in any case preferred to sell multiple machines to parlors rather than single machines to theaters. He paid little attention when Dickson, choosing his words carefully, said that the Latham Company was building a projector for the specific purpose of screening Edison pictures. He chose not to mention that he had designed it himself and was spending many evenings in New York with the Latham brothers, secretly discussing the prospect of joining them in the organization of a full-scale production company once the machine was perfected.169 Such a studio would of course compete with Edison’s, making Dickson a pending, if not yet actual traitor to his boss.

After twelve years of service, he was in terror of being found out and fired before he could be sure of security with the Lathams. They were little known and underfunded, entrepreneurial dwarfs in comparison to the giant he had done so much to mythify. Tempting as it was to accept a $125,000 start-up stock offer from them, he earned a good salary and substantial royalties as chief of the photographic department at West Orange. Until recently he had also run a profitable sideline selling portraits of Edison, shots of the laboratory, and paper print film strips, all copyrighted under his own name. That extra income, however, had been cut into by William Gilmore, who as general manager had forced him to transfer most of the copyrights to the Edison Manufacturing Company. Because of this Dickson hated Gilmore, and felt supplanted by him as the Old Man’s favorite aide.170

In fact, that fluid title currently belonged to Walter Mallory. Edison had always winked at Dickson’s photo trafficking, since it served his public image. But he agreed with Gilmore that it must stop. His sudden attack on Dickson for aggrandizing him (after years of pretending not to notice) implied that Gilmore had advised him to distance himself from an associate whose days were numbered.171

As indeed they were, once the general manager got wind of Dickson’s negotiations with the Lathams. On 2 April Gilmore accused him, in Edison’s presence, of corporate treachery. Dickson blustered that he had only been spying on the competition and demanded that Edison choose between him and Gilmore. His wish was gratified, but not the way he hoped.172

Later it turned out that he had also given creative advice to American Mutoscope, a film company ambitious to advance beyond Edison Manufacturing in both peepshow and screen-machine technology.^*43 All Edison would say publicly was “We are not the best of friends.” Dickson became Mutoscope’s globe-trotting cameraman—a career step-down from the prestigious position he had enjoyed under Edison. In later life he became, like Edward Johnson, Francis Jehl, Alfred Tate, and many other alumni of Menlo Park, a pathetic claimant for the notice of historians and biographers. He lied about his co-invention of the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope with such fanatical insistence—advancing every initial date by one year, in order to claim precedence for Edison over Marey and Friese-Greene—as to obscure the fact that he had done most of the work himself, and deserved principal credit.173 Not until almost a century after he quit Edison’s employ did a fragment of pristine cinematography, filmed in the garden of a Yorkshire house on 14 October 1888, prove that Louis Le Prince was the vanished precursor of them all.174

A BUMBLE BEE IN FLOWER TIME

Edison’s Kinetoscope business continued its precipitous slide through the spring. In a vain attempt to compensate, he introduced the “Kineto-Phonograph” he and Dickson had rigged up the year before, renaming it the Kinetophone. It was a combination cylinder and reel player equipped with two sets of rubberized earbud tubes, so that couples could watch peephole films together and hear background music blasting away as they did so. The instrument made no attempt at more subtle synchronizations and sold only forty-five units.175

Leaving Gilmore to deal about the news that the Latham brothers had simultaneously and successfully demonstrated their “Eideloscope” projector in public, Edison returned with relief to iron mining.176

“The mill as it stands today is the largest crushing plant in the world,” he boasted, in a draft report to investors. “It has double the capacity of the great crushing works of the Calumet & Hecla copper mines of Lake Superior.” When brought to full concentrating power, Ogden should be able to produce “from 1400 to 1600 tons of Bessemer briquettes daily.” It was modern in both machinery and method, automated “to the limit,” so that one day it might run under a single supervisor. “This venture has all the elements of permanent success.”177

Nothing so ugly, certainly, had ever befouled the Appalachian skyline. At latest count—because he kept adding extensions—the works consisted of thirty-nine major structures at the crest of Edison Road above Ogdensburg. It was dominated by the cathedral-size magnetic separator building and webbed together with so many bridges, cranes, conveyors, steam pipes, power lines, and busy little railways that it looked like a compressed red-painted city. North, south, and west of its littered fringe, cliffs of gray rock were being blasted into slow retreat, while the surrounding forest (dangerously creviced in places by the shafts of ancient mines) retreated too, leaving behind a litter of felled or dying trees. A perpetual dust boiling out of the mill whitened every upturned surface and the clothes and hair of workers and executives alike. Those who cared about what they breathed wore sponge-filled rubber snouts. Seen from a distance of ten or twelve feet in the pale gloom, they could be mistaken for pigs walking upright.178 Only when rain rinsed the filthy landscape did Ogden temporarily become a place where a man could feel clean.

That was not a sensation that Edison—to whom the plant was paradise—seemed to care about. Slovenly as he was at the laboratory, here he emulated the shabbiest of his employees. But the big head under the brown cap (slashed open and laced at the back for extra room)179 and the clean-shaven jowls (either chomping on a stogie or bulging with plug) flagged him everywhere as “the Old Man,” a benign autocrat always willing to stop, swap yarns, and spit.

“Today has been hotter than the seventh section of Hades reserved for Methodist ministers,” he wrote Mina on 9 August. She was making her annual pious retreat to Chautauqua. “The dust in the air was frightful….I feel lost in not going home to see my darling dustless Billy. What am I to do without a bath, some smartweed seeds have commenced to sprout out of the seams of my coat….Think of it Billy darling your lover turned into a flower garden.”180

Twelve days later he had more serious problems to report. The bricking plant was plagued by a breakage rate of over 50 percent, and there were frequent accidents farther up the line, causing labor unrest and expensive safety changes. Edison had to sell another batch of General Electric shares just to keep production going through the summer.181

Everything seems to go wrong and I fear we shall have to close the works for want of money….

I have had 6 hours sleep in 4 days & am trying to pull it through. Especially the Bricker for when that goes the whole problem is solved & we actually know what we can do. I shall run till Saturday night & if I have good luck will probably go ahead if not I shall probably shut down until I see my way clear for money. While raising money I can have time to get a rest and go over the whole thing carefully so that when we start up again we will be OK—Mallory is the most dejected man you ever saw. The master mechanic and Mr Conley are completely discouraged while your lover is as bright & cheerful as a bumble bee in flower time.182

It occurred to Edison that he could drastically cut costs by reducing the number of men he employed, now that the major phase of plant construction was over. He boggled at a group photograph Dickson had taken in 1894, showing at least four hundred workers massed in the mill yard and clustered like ants on rooftops and steam lines. Then, they had looked like a contented lot—even the pitmen and muck makers and coal passers who earned no more than $1.30 a day. But now they were threatening to walk off their jobs, due to Edison’s refusal to pay extra wages for overtime work.183

He saw an opportunity to speed them on their way when he heard that a strike meeting would be held at the end of the workday on Thursday 22 August. Five minutes before quitting time, Edison put up a large sign outside the assay house reading WORK IS SUSPENDED AT THE MILL EMPLOYEES WILL BE PAID IN FULL SATURDAY THE 24TH.184

The result was an angry mass exodus over the weekend and a resumption of mill operations on Monday with a residual force so small that Mallory was surprised to see how well much of the line operated without human assistance. His spirits lifting, he persuaded himself that soon, thanks to Edison’s unstoppable drive, “we will be able to turn out product at a very considerable profit.”185

The Ogden mine workforce, circa 1895.

Decades later, when the red city had disappeared and the forest reclaimed the mine, Mallory wrote:

You cannot live with a man without learning a great deal about him; that he wears two or three suits of underwear instead of many sweaters and coats when it is cold; that he steps out of his clothes at night, leaving them on the floor so they will be easy to step into again next morning; that he loves pie; that he is inordinately fond of smoking cigars. Little things, all of them, but they set off the big things. There were many big things. All of us associated with Edison knew, from the first, that we had to deal with an extraordinary man.186

“A MORE ORIGINAL GENIUS”

From now until the end of the decade, Edison spent the bulk of his time at Ogden, working an average of sixteen to eighteen hours daily and returning home to Glenmont only on Sundays. He stopped and started production so often (“New problems to be solved come up every day”) that his predictions of imminent fabulous success began to sound fabulous indeed. The mill crushed more money than magnetite, and to keep himself, if not it, flush, he had to accept a $15,000 retainer from General Electric to develop a squirted-cellulose lamp filament.187

This nuisance did not last long, but another distraction temporarily, and irresistibly, diverted him in the first week of 1896. News came from London that the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen had discovered a mysterious green “X” ray that emanated from an electrified glass vacuum tube and caused a barium platinocyanide screen nine feet away to fluoresce, even if a sheet of the thickest cardboard was placed in between.188 The ray had a similar and even eerier effect when the body it penetrated was that of a human being, making solid flesh resolve itself into a mist in which bones stood out with a sharpness half erotic, half frightening. “Ich habe meinen Tod gesehen,” Röntgen’s wife said after he irradiated her hand and wedding ring. “I have seen my own death.”189

Edison was instantly consumed with desire to explore, and possibly exploit, this electromagnetic phenomenon. Ten hours after hearing about it, he began to construct a special darkroom in West Orange. “How would you like to come over and experiment on Rotgons [sic] new radiations,” he wrote Arthur Kennelly. “I have glassblowers and Pumps running and all Photographic apparatus. We could do a lot before others get their second wind.”190

He soon produced X-rays of his own, and was shooting and printing radiograms by the first week of February. Journalists plagued him for images to print. William Randolph Hearst begged “as an especial favor” a picture of the human brain. Edison failed to achieve this ne plus ultra of invasive photography with the standard Crookes tube Röntgen had used. Instead he designed a range of variant bulbs, with platinum wires and thinner glass to enhance emission. Imaging interested him less than the invisible, undeflectable streaming of light that was not light: “I want to see if the Roentgen rays are really perpendicular to the cathode plate, or if they curve between the cathode and the anode in a manner analagous to magnetic rays.”191

Absorbed in his work, he paid scant attention to a report from Paris that the Lumière brothers had perfected an intermittent-action projector, the Cinématographe, and exhibited moving pictures to a paying audience. When William Gilmore suggested that he move at once to acquire the rights to a rival American projector, the Phantoscope,192 he agreed with the equivalent of a shrug and plunged back into radiation experiments.^*44

One evening that month a representative of Metropolitan Magazine found Edison in his darkroom, regulating the balance of electricity and airlessness in a long bulb. He seemed “oblivious to everything in the world but the gradation of light within the tube.” Coaxed out of his trance, he said that he was now trying to determine whether the X-ray was “ethereal” or “allied to coarser matter.” The vagueness of these terms indicated that his researches were still unscientific. He was enjoying, as boyishly as the four young laboratory workers assisting him, the thrill of exploring a new technology that so far seemed benign. They worked far into the night, photographing the effects of various degrees of radiation on opaque substances. Every strip received a twenty-minute exposure. Not until two A.M. did he leave the photographs to dry and invite the reporter to join him and “the boys” (one of whom turned out to be Thomas Edison, Jr.) for dinner. He could not stop talking, as he ate, about the practical implications of Röntgen’s magic ray.193

Somebody managed to change the subject from fluorescence to incandescence and asked if he would undergo a test to see if the human retina stored light. Edison agreed. He sat for two minutes with his eyes shut, then opened them to the glare of a lamp positioned inches away, on top of a camera. He withstood the glare for another two minutes, after which all lights were switched off and the camera simultaneously clicked. It captured a momentary double gleam at the back of Edison’s vision that, when printed, made him look less human than feline, a great cat in the dark.^*45, 194

Edison was by no means the only, or even the first experimenter with X-rays in the United States. Röntgen’s announcement had galvanized many of the country’s finest electrical engineers, including Elihu Thomson, William F. Magie, and Nikola Tesla. Aware that they were all, like himself, venturing into a strange new world, he ceased trying to keep ahead of the competition and on 18 March published the results of his research so far in Electrical Review. Among them were two findings that illustrated the Carrollian contrariness of X-ray behavior: first, that the lower the vacuum and the dimmer the fluorescence within the tube, the greater the radiation without; second, that the sharpest “shadowgraphs” were registered by the shortest bulbs and got sharper with distance.195

On the same day and in the same periodical, Tesla, who had taken almost a year to recover emotionally from the loss of his laboratory, described his own radiation experiments. He boasted that thanks to his recent invention of an oscillating steam generator, he had succeeded in throwing X-rays forty feet or more. And he, too, had tried to photograph a brain—in this case, his own. He had bombarded it at close quarters for more than half an hour, but found only that the treatment made him sleepy. Edison sent him an encouraging note: “I hope you are progressing and will give us something that will beat Roentgen.”196

Notwithstanding their mutual—if guarded—goodwill, an article in that month’s issue of Scribner’s Magazine did its best to set them up as David and Goliath. The author, C. Benjamin Andrews, president of Brown University, opined that Tesla was “a more original genius than Edison” because he had eliminated the wiring inside lightbulbs and sent bolts of high-tension current through his own body. “He surrounds himself with a halo of electric light and calls purple streams from the soil. His aim is to hook man’s machinery directly to nature’s.” Edison let this hyperbole speak for itself. But the “genius” comparison rated headlines in many newspapers across the country and set him and Tesla up as rivals for glory at the National Electrical Exhibition, scheduled to open in New York on 4 May.197

Coincidentally, they were both developing fluorescent lamps that they hoped to be able to show in time. Tesla claimed his would have 250 candlepower and a light efficiency of 10 percent; Edison aspired to 12 or 15 percent efficiency and said that by coating the inside of his tube with a secret material, he had harnessed some of the electromagnetic energy of X-rays: “I have turned them into a pure white light of high frangibility.”198

He kept the coating (calcium tungstate) secret only because he had used it in another device that was sure to be the sensation of the exhibition if it, too, could be made ready for display. Edison the chemist had discovered, after testing eighteen hundred fluorescent salts in 150 tubes, that the phosphor CaWO4 came brilliantly alive when its fused crystals were excited in a vacuum. He applied it to the screen of a portable visor, flared in shape and fitting snugly to the face, that took an instant X-ray picture—even a moving picture, if desired—of whatever lay before it on a radiant box. “You can see all the bones of the body and the heart beat plainly,” he told Mina.^*46 This capability of what he called his “fluoroscope” was of obvious benefit to medical personnel who, in emergency situations such as a shooting, would not want to wait two hours for a radiograph to be exposed and developed. He therefore declined to patent it and sent an early model to one of his fellow experimenters, Michael Pupin of Columbia University.199

“It is a beautiful instrument,” Pupin wrote in surprised gratitude, saying that he had demonstrated “its miraculous power” in three public lectures, to much applause. He doubted, however, that fluoroscopy “would entirely supersede the photographic method of diagnosis in surgical work,” where record keeping was vital. To that end, he was already testing the idea of contact prints that could be taken directly from Edison’s “very excellent” screen. “Your success will be received with great delight by all scientific men.”200

Edison was not used to reading such compliments, especially on stationery headed “University Faculty of Pure Science.” Touched, he replied that he was working on some other tubes that “I think will surprise you and aid you in your scientific investigation, which is out of my line.”201

There was no point in being secretive anymore about his calcium-tungstate bulb, because the fluoroscope quickly preempted it as a news sensation in the weeks preceding the electrical exhibition. Advertisements guaranteeing that “Edison will be there. And Tesla will be there” only increased the demand for tickets, as did an announcement that any attendee with the courage to hold a hand under the magic machine could get a bone examination for free.202

The distraction saved Tesla from having to answer too many embarrassing questions about why his own lamp was not on display. Edison had never thought much of him as a lighting engineer and knew he was having difficulty with it. But he begged the editor of Western Electrician not to publish a “foolish” letter comparing their respective molecular-impact systems unfavorably to the new glow discharge tube of Daniel McFarlan Moore. “I don’t care what is said, but Tesla is of a nervous temperament and it will greatly grieve him and interfere with his work….It must not be forgotten by Mr. Moore that Tesla is an experimenter of the highest type and may produce in time all that he says he can.”203

His request was of course unheeded, and press speculation grew that Edison and Tesla were rivals. Unnoticed in the general publicity was a brief report in The New York Times that both men complained that long exposure to X-rays hurt their eyes.204

PERFECTLY BAKED AND HARD AS GRANITE

As the technology of moving pictures advanced, patent and copyright offices were deluged with so many Greek and Latin brand names, most of them ending in -scope, that even entertainment lawyers had difficulty remembering the difference between the tachyscope, eidoloscope, mutoscope, bioscope, parascope, veriscope, magniscope, and kalatechnoscope, not to mention the cinematograph, centograph, projectograph, and kineopticon. Edison was fortunate in being so famous that he had merely to attach his name to the Kinetoscope and Kinetograph to imply that they were somehow superior to the rest. Gilmore urged him to bestow similar cachet upon the phantoscope, even though it was the invention of Thomas Armat, a young engineer who had licensed it to him in exchange for exhibition royalties.205 He agreed to market the projector as “Edison’s Vitascope” and “Edison’s Latest Triumph” and, in doing so, became party to a deal that did much to harm his reputation for proud individuality.^*47

However, it also did much to restore his wealth, because the Vitascope was a culture-changing success. Audiences gasped at the onrush of great waves in Rough Sea at Dover and at the prolonged intimacy of The May Irwin Kiss—shocking when blown up more than life size and the Edison studio’s biggest hit that year. “Can genius go farther?” the Los Angeles Times marveled. “We have been made to hear the voices of our distant friends, and now we are able to see them move and act.”206 It remained only for Edison to present himself to the camera, which he did, teasingly, by letting a young newspaper artist, J. Stuart Blackton, sketch him while he remained offscreen.

The Edisonian forelock and black brows were given gestural attention, with slashing sweeps of charcoal.^{*48, *49,} 207

On 11 August Henry Ford, chief engineer of the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit, had a chance to worship the same features “live” during an industry convention at Manhattan Beach, Long Island. He surreptitiously photographed Edison snoozing straw-hatted on the porch of the Oriental Hotel but did not dare to approach him until around midnight, when Edison sat drinking beer with a number of Menlo Park veterans.208 Ford worked up the courage to tell him that he had designed and driven “a little gas car.” Although Edison was himself beginning to think of the storage battery as the ideal power source for horseless carriages, he reacted encouragingly: “Keep on with your engine. If you can get what you want, I can see a great future.”209

Less than a month later, at the state fair in Providence, Rhode Island, two “electrics” averaging fifteen miles per hour beat five gas-powered Duryeas in the first track race for automobiles ever held in America.210

By then Edison was back at Ogden, where at last the briquetting plant was registering big improvements. “Made 13,000 bricks without a miss,” he wrote his wife in triumph. “They came out perfectly baked and hard as granite. Now everything is known all will work and we are getting things to completion.”211

Mina had heard such effusions so often, and had pined for his company so long, that it was hard for her to simulate excitement. She was more inclined to complain—or in his language, “growl”—about their many separations. She had recently turned thirty-one, and like Mary Edison before her, she was becoming stout. Edison tried to make her feel less neglected by sending extravagant endearments. “Darling Billy (Constitutional Growler)….I just simply love you to pieces….with kisses so thick that 40,000,000 X ray lamps couldn’t penetrate….”212

Meanwhile on the Mesabi Range in Minnesota, steam shovels were pushing aside thin topsoil and lifting out pyramids of high-grade hematite, thirteen tons at a time. The price of that ore was steadily falling, just as shipments were rising—from 621,047 gross tons in 1893 to a frightening 2,884,372 tons this year. Edison’s only response was to scale up the size of his assault on Sparta Mountain. He let newspapers know that he, too, was ordering steam shovels and was ready to go into full production at five thousand tons of ore a day, if a sample order of his briquettes tested satisfactorily at the Crane Iron Works in Catasauqua, Pennsylvania.213 In that case, other eastern furnacemen were bound to switch to satiny Ogden agglomerate and rejoice that they need never again choke over trainloads of red rubble from Duluth.

As if to remind the world he was still an inventor, he rounded off his laboratory work for 1896 with a flurry of new product announcements: a superior projector to replace that of Thomas Armat, a spring-driven home phonograph, an improved wax for cylinders, an “autographic telegraph” that sent dotted script and sketches, and a lightning-fast current breaker that, combined with Tesla’s coil oscillator, greatly increased the electromagnetic force of an X-ray machine.214

A demonstration of this hookup at the Kentucky School of Medicine on 23 November showed how radiation could be used to aid surgeons in the extraction of bullet fragments from human flesh—a frequent chore in that part of the country. It also tantalizingly suggested what scientific miracles might be achieved if the two “geniuses” could be persuaded to form a team. But given their opposing personalities, that was as unlikely as an alliance between Oscar Wilde and the Marquess of Queensbury. Already Edison had joked about the nonappearance of Tesla’s fluorescent lamp—“If Tesla has a light why don’t he show it?”—while Tesla criticized him for X-raying the eyes of blind people to see if they registered any internal light patterns: “Is it not cruel to raise such hopes when there is little ground to them?”215

On one thing they were agreed: that by toying with X-rays too much, they had done some mysterious damage to themselves. Until more was understood about the pathology of radiation, they preferred to return to safer research.216

“The fact is, there is really a terra incognita bound up in crystals and salts,” Edison told a visitor to his laboratory. “Just come out here in the workshop and see how my assistants have suffered from the bombardment of these rays.” He led the way into another room and got Clarence Dally to hold out his arms and hands. They were swollen out of all proportion, as if they had been pounded with clubs.217

Edison seemed more interested than sympathetic. He wondered aloud if focused rays might not be effective in killing tuberculosis bacilli or clarifying cataracts. “I can blindfold you, and yet cause you to see objects by means of the X-ray….I know there are those who say that such a thing is impossible, but you cannot laugh a fact out of court.”^*50, 218

THE LAST NOTCH

On New Year’s Day 1897 Edison was in Catasauqua to observe the start of a long series of tests on Ogden briquettes. He was accompanied by his inseparable aide Frederick Ott, who a few years earlier had become history’s first film star by pretending to sneeze for the Kinetograph camera.

“This is Freddie,” he said to Leonard Peckitt, president of the Crane Iron Company. Peckitt was an Englishman and thought he said “Friday,” in reference to another famous factotum.

Later, when they were alone, he asked, “What does Friday do?” and Edison, deaf, replied, “Nothing.”

“If he doesn’t do anything, why do you want him?”

“Because he never falls asleep. That’s what I pay him for, to keep awake. Whenever I want him, he is there. The other damned fools are always asleep when I want something.”219

Peckitt put Edison up at home while Ott stayed at the local hotel. At mealtimes he was fascinated by his guest’s obliviousness to whatever was served.

He never asked for anything, never would express a preference, never helped himself. He ate and drank what was before him. If you put nothing on his plate, he did not miss it. He then told endless stories.

If you put a glass of wine before the Inventor, he drank it. It made no difference whether the brand was sherry or champagne, he said nothing, but the glass was always emptied without comments. He [just] went on talking and cleaned his plate without any trouble.220

Edison was gratified by the initial yields of his briquettes in the blast furnace but kept pushing for more and more revolutions of the blower to produce more heat. When Peckitt demurred, for fear of an explosion, he scoffed and said he had deliberately wrecked a $25,000 crusher at Ogden in order to see how much load it could stand. “Now I can design and build one that will do as well as she did before the last notch was added.”221

There was intense interest throughout the Pennsylvania iron industry in the ongoing tests, which usually began at two A.M. Trade reporters hung out in Peckitt’s office to hear Edison tell stories while the furnace was prepared for casting. One night he interrupted himself to roar out, “Hi, there, what are you doing? What the devil now? Someone kick him.”

Ott had fallen asleep.222

Edison stayed in Catasauqua for a week, long enough to see that the tests were going to be positive, pending a final report from the works. Shortly before returning to West Orange, he sent a telegram to one of Peckitt’s rival smelters, S. B. Anderson of Andover, New Jersey: “Come to breakfast. Have 11,000 tons for you.” When Peckitt asked what it meant, he explained that Paterson had mocked his briquetting method by saying, “I will eat all you make.”223

MILE OF MAGNETS

The test results were more than positive, they were extraordinary. Peckitt reported that the briquettes had caused a 33 percent increase in furnace smelting, and he was confident of reaching 50 percent if they were supplied to him in large quantities. They reduced ore to a precipitate that “showed unusual strength, and was, in fact, the strongest and toughest foundry iron we have ever made.” Considered technically, it “could not be better, as the purity of the briquettes enabled us to make an iron very low in phosphorus and sulphur.”224

Even more pleasing was an order from the Crane Company for as much ore as Edison was willing to deliver. Along with news that his film and phonograph business was booming, and that William McKinley’s election to the presidency had brought about an end to the long depression, it was the nicest possible present for his fiftieth birthday, at Ogden in February. Mina sent up a congratulatory cake with model miners and little electric lights.225

Edison needed no further encouragement to authorize yet another expansion of the plant, intending a switch to full commercial production in the spring. He commissioned two Vulcan steam shovels (one of them, at ninety-three tons, the biggest ever built), and studded his giant rolls with steel “slugger” knobs and more than doubled their rotary speed. He also invented a device that made dust a lubricant rather than a coagulant and lengthened the line to what the Harrisburg Daily Independent breathlessly described as a “mile of magnets,” totaling 480 separation processes.226

The trouble with his goal of refining five hundred tons of concentrate a day was that the bricking facility could handle only half that output. Unless he installed another fifteen fabricators and eight new furnaces at a cost of $50,000, both stockhouses would soon be swamped with fines. Walter Mallory had to send a begging letter to investors, telling them that Edison had already spent over $1 million of his own money at Ogden ($200,000 on the giant rolls alone) and could use some help from “friends” now that his product was in demand.227

This appeal coincided with intelligence that the price of Mesabi Bessemer ore, which had dropped as low as $3.25 a ton in 1896, was now falling so fast that it might soon approach the two-dollar mark. Edison insisted that he could ship at seventy-eight cents a ton, but he was not famous for arithmetic.228 The president of the American Institute of Mining Engineers said at its annual convention that a more likely price for Ogden ore was $4.08 per ton. In that case, “it is not probable that the Edison Works can be run continuously at a profit.” The most that could be said for the remarkable venture on Sparta Mountain was that it was “a monument of perseverance in original research which certainly deserves our admiration.”229

Under the circumstances, Edison’s backers again declined to give him any more money, so he again had to shoulder the cost of a vital improvement.230

At least he could save on one minor expense while doing so—the wage he had been paying his eldest son as a general mechanic at Ogden. Tom had just turned twenty-one and come into a $17,309.91 legacy left him by Mary. In a letter half aggrieved, half supplicatory, he wrote to say he wanted to strike out on his own. “I feel that I have never pleased you in anything I have ever done….I don’t believe that I will ever be able to talk to you the way I would like to—because you are so far my superior in every way that when I am in your presence—I am perfectly helpless.”231

Edison ignored Tom’s request for a special assignment that would give him a chance to show that he, too, was an inventor. In a series of letters to Mina, the young man demonstrated only that he was a world-class whiner. “Why is it I am unhappy? why is it I feel alone?…why am I so backward?…I love but I am not loved.”232

He went west and south for a few months but inevitably, like a small moon in irregular orbit, yielded to the pull of its star. By May he was back at the plant, doing laborer’s work. His father gave no indication of noticing that he had been away. “I can say,” Tom wrote to Mina, “he has not even looked at me.”233

Edison hardly had time to look at a clock. He was busy doubling the size of the bricker plant and building a larger powerhouse, patenting Ogden’s screening system, designing new machinery (in one case, forty-eight versions of a single device), taking delivery of the Vulcan steam shovels, and running out of money fast. In August, after yet another start-stop, he had to sell his stock in the Edison Electric Illuminating Company, just to maintain the mill during closure. “I am full of vinegar yet, although I have had to suffer from the neglect of absent minded Providence in this scheme.”234

It was plain even to him at summer’s end that when Ogden next opened, it must stay open and prove itself to be the inexhaustible cornucopia of iron that he had so long promised. Otherwise it would be forever known as “Edison’s folly,” a multimillion-dollar mockery of his past achievements, good for little more than the production of sand.

By late September the new bricker machines were ready to receive. He put the entire line into operation and gave reporters unrestricted access to it for the first time.235 The result was three major articles in The Iron Age, Scientific American, and McClure’s Magazine, exquisitely illustrated and sharing a common tone of reverence. “Mr. Edison appears in the new light of a brilliant construction engineer grappling with technical and commercial problems of the highest order,” the trade journalist wrote. “He pursues methods in ore dressing at which those who are trained may well stand aghast. But considering the special features of the problems to be solved, his methods will be accepted as economically wise and expedient.”236

What awed the visitors, apart from the fact that they were looking at the biggest iron-concentrating works in the world, was the way Edison had synchronized all its operations, integrating mechanical power with the natural forces of gravity, momentum, and magnetism. High on Iron Hill, the steam shovels loaded slabs of black-grained gneiss weighing as much as six tons into skips that ran down a tilted track toward the mill, one every forty-five seconds, simultaneously returning “empties” to the quarry.

The Traveling Crane lifted them to the top of the Crusher House, whence they thudded ten feet down into the whirring cleft between the giant rolls—an abyss no man could look into without fear. Shattered in less than three seconds, they dropped through to a set of intermediate rolls and got chewed into stones. Elevator no. 1 took them for further decimation by the first and second thirty-six-inch rolls, whereupon they lost their plural identity and became a speeding mass of rubble. Except in the hottest weather, this reduction usually showed sign of dampness. It passed through the twenty-four-inch rolls to elevator no. 2, slid onto Thomas Robins’s rubberized first conveyor belt, and was roasted in dryer no. 1. Elevator no. 3 and the second and third conveyors, then carried it, smoking, to the three-high rolls, which beat it into gravel before it fell through fourteen mesh screens, in a zigzag trajectory that allowed only the finest pulver to reach the separator building. There, from a great height, it fell again, a thin gray curtain of dust that paled as three progressively stronger twelve-inch magnets deprived it of its iron specks. Even now the black draw-off was not rich enough for Edison’s purpose. He subjected it to more heat in dryer no. 2, reconcentration by the fifty mesh screens and eight-inch magnets, cleaning and dephosphorization in the dusting chamber, and a final refinement by the four-inch magnets before it was conveyed to an immense stockhouse, ready for caking and baking.

The process whereby Edison transformed his fines into hard briquettes that were, paradoxically, both porous and waterproof could have been devised only by an inventor equally versed in chemistry and physics. He mixed the iron powder with a warm binding material whose formula was a trade secret. Then he transferred it as dough to a row of die-block machines that took it, cut it, and compressed it three times (under squirts of oil to prevent adhesion), the last plunger slamming down with a force of sixty thousand pounds. This all happened at a disgorge rate, per machine, of sixty briquettes a minute—each a squat black cylinder three inches in diameter and nineteen ounces in weight. They were superheated for well over an hour before shipping.

Theodore Waters, the writer from McClure’s, marveled at Ogden’s total automation. “The never-ending and never-resting stream of material constantly circulates through the various buildings…and not once in its course is it arrested or jogged onward by human agency.” He was also impressed by the economical way the mill recycled its waste products. On the last day of September he watched a conveyor unrolling from “the magnet-house” and pouring what looked like a cascade of gold onto a hill-size dune that shimmered strangely in the sun. It was a mix of quartz, feldspar, and lime phosphate tailings, and the shimmer came from its sharpness—unlike the dull obtundity of beach sand. Builders and the manufacturers of abrasives prized it, so to that extent it was gold, of a sort, in Edison’s pocket. He even sold the dust from his dephosphorizing chamber to paint companies, who thickened their pigments with what had once been the rock of Sparta Mountain.237

HOT CAKES

Edison needed every cent he could earn as Ogden cranked into full production. The artist William Dodge Stevens sketched him for McClure’s, while Waters went down the line, and caught a knot of intense worry between his eyes.

Edison sketched by William Dodge Stevens, Ogden, 30 September 1897.

He had just mortgaged the Phonograph Works at West Orange for $300,000. That same day, he humiliated himself by borrowing $11,175 from his eldest son’s inheritance.238 Tom did not take kindly to the transaction, even though Edison paid him 6 percent on the loan. Edison already owed him $4,500 on a “bond” agreement of doubtful validity. The two withdrawals pretty well swallowed up all that Mary had left Tom.239 But he was as usual helpless in his father’s hands. All he could do was continue to send self-obsessed letters to Mina from Asbury Park, New Jersey, where he had settled after leaving Ogden for the second time, to nobody’s regret.

Hitherto, Tom had written in a rounded script creepily imitative of Edison’s own. But now it was spiky, the hand of a different person, and an unstable one. It tilted ever more to the right, as if he were losing equilibrium. On 27 November he wrote Edison to say that he was ill, due to “the treatment I have received at the hands of my family,” and might not survive. “I sincerely hope—that if this does prove very serious to me—you all will feel better satisfied….I am for a little while longer your affectionate son.” The signature “Tom” reverted to upright characters, but was inked so small as to be almost illegible.240

In another letter, to Mina, he sounded cheerful and full of ambition. He had invented “one of the finest incandescent lamps in the world” and was hustling it with great success in New York. It was called “the Edison Junior Improved” and would “sell like ‘hot cakes’—in fact I never can fill my orders—for it is simply remarkable….I intend to have ten thousand agents on commission….I will control the market of the world or bust.” He went on excitedly for eight pages, ending with: “I wonder what father will think when he hears about this. He very probably won’t believe it.”241

Tom guessed right. Edison was aware that the lamp was derived from the fluorescent tube they had worked on together the previous year.242 He also heard that some unscrupulous “backers” were hoping to cash in on the fame of Tom’s surname. On 5 December The Sunday World featured a huge drawing of the young man inside a lightbulb. Across its base was bannered a new version of Tom’s signature, writ large now and so much an imitation of his father’s that Edison hastened to file for trademark protection. Even more infuriatingly, the article below declared that “a new personal power is risen in the world of invention” and quoted Tom as saying he would soon build a lamp factory “in Menlo Park, N.J.”243

It was clear that Tom’s paternal fixation was degenerating into a fantasy of reincarnation. Unless he was checked soon, he might well claim to have invented the phonograph. Mina wrote him a few kindly words of caution and was rewarded with an effusion that could have been penned by Little Nell: “That letter that has never left its sacred place—nearest my heart—binds me nearer and nearer to you darling Mother.”244

WHAT THEY MOST WANTED

At the annual board meeting of the New Jersey & Pennsylvania Concentrating Works on 12 January 1898, Edison boasted that Ogden was now so automated that he had been able to reduce the workforce from 400 to 78. This economical-sounding figure was deceptive, because the mill was again not running. He had closed it to deal with a drying problem and could not say when production might resume. But at least the problem—mud and ice clogging the ore—was caused by success: the steam shovels had proved more effective than dynamite in gobbling up chunks of mountain, “and now the rolls will take anything that can be put into the hopper.” That meant that the lower parts of the line had to be adjusted to deal with an embarras de richesses, not least the stockhouse, which was already crammed with unbricked fines.245

Edison talked on for a while in his usual optimistic way, before asserting (with Walter Cutting’s eyes upon him) that the plant was underfinanced: “I am in negotiations at the present time with a syndicate to furnish operating money until the Company has its own funds; but as to the money needed to liquidate the Company’s present indebtedness and that for test expenses, insurance, and leases, nothing has been done except by myself.”246

He said he was still prepared to bankroll the plant, “as far as I am able,” in confidence that it would soon become profitable. Mallory spoke next and cast doubt on the “soon” with a recital of cold numbers: Ogden, capitalized at $2.25 million, had so far cost $2,091,924 to build, equip, and test, and sold only $158,591 worth of iron and sand.247

Under the circumstances, it strained belief that Edison (who was privately trying to borrow $15,000 from his father-in-law) had just told reporters that he intended to build a $1.5 million gold mine southeast of Santa Fe, New Mexico.^*51, 248 But such was the positive spell he cast that his fellow directors reelected him president and accepted his offer to lend the company $51,500 over the next six months. As Mallory remarked to Theodore Waters, “What has been said of his personal magnetism has not been overstated.”249

On 9 February Edison wrote Mina that he had cleared the stockhouse and was about to start milling again. He was working sixteen-hour days and “making good progress on 3 or 4 inventions to raise money.” The same could not be said for his eldest son, who had gone to Florida, reportedly on doctor’s orders. “Tom wrote a horrible letter to William saying he was deserted by his family, that he was lying at the point of death, that we would probably never see him again.”250

Mina had received a similar cri de coeur from Tom himself. She was the principal recipient of Tom’s letters, which came at the rate of two or three a week and formed an ongoing record of manic depression. “I enquired of my agent at Fort Myers,” Edison went on, “and got word that Tom & friend were having a fine time and had just come in from a Deer hunt.”251

Being a depressive herself, and by nature compassionate, Mina sympathized with Tom to a degree. He had indeed been dangerously ill, with what sounded like inflammatory rheumatism. She dreaded that he might come “home” to live, as he occasionally threatened to do.

William was another claimant on her responsibilities as stepmother. He was in his freshman year at Yale and hated it there. Mina did what she could to give both what they most wanted—expressions of love and payment of bills—but she was expecting another child of her own in July and had little time to spare for two malcontents who should have long since grown up.252 Edison had even less. As far as he was concerned, they were out in the world he had entered at age twelve, and could drown if they chose not to swim.

YOUNG DAYS

William Edison, circa 1898.

Patriotic young Americans that spring smelled war coming between the United States and Spain over the cause of Cuba Libre, a movement to win freedom for the last major European colony in the New World. One of the first Yale men to vow to fight if President McKinley issued a call to arms was Mina’s brother Theodore Miller. A twenty-three-year-old postgraduate law student in New York, he was well acquainted with both William and Tom, and admired neither. At least William (who dropped out of college in early March) wanted to join up too. Tom manifestly was unfit to serve. He talked vaguely of “going away soon,” but at the same time he posed as the president of a new $100,000 lighting company, with two maternal uncles as his backers. “He is a queer boy,” Theodore wrote his father. “I am very sorry he is allowed to do these things and have talked to Mina but she says Mr. Edison says he can do nothing.”253

Congress declared war on 25 April, and within six weeks Theodore and William were enlisted as privates, the former in the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, or “Rough Riders,” and the latter in the First New York Regiment of Engineering Volunteers.254

For Edison, toiling obsessedly on Sparta Mountain, the Spanish-American War proceeded as little more than a twelve-week geopolitical disturbance in the Antilles, its rumbles inaudible amid the satisfying roar of his mill.255 He took enough notice of it to offer the navy a night illuminant consisting of calcium carbide and calcium phosphite packed into shells that would explode on contact with water and flare long enough for enemy ships to be detected four or five miles away. But as he would discover later in life, the government was not much interested in civilian defense ideas.256

Incomprehensible as it might have been to Mina, awaiting her baby in the green peace of Llewellyn Park, Edison so loved being at Ogden that coming home on Sunday was something of a chore for him. He even lost interest in his laboratory. It languished for lack of assignments from the Old Man, although the rest of the West Orange campus thrived with burgeoning production of phonographs, moving pictures, cameras, and projectors.

By now Edison had resigned himself to the fact that because of the Mesabi phenomenon, iron prices were never going to rise more than a few cents above the historic low they had registered in May. (Bessemer was selling as low as $2.25, and non-Bessemer even lower at $1.75, almost sixty cents less than what he had hoped to get for his iron when he began mining at the beginning of the decade.)257 But such was his pride in the magnitude of his achievement so far that he began to think of bigness as an economic advantage in itself. He would prevail by building more Ogdens, each four times the size of this one.

Besides which, he was happy at the plant, happier even than he had been starting out at Menlo Park in ’76 with Charles Batchelor and “the boys.” Batchelor was mostly absent now, semiretired and wealthy on his share of their mutual inventions over the years, but Edison did not miss him. He had a different set of “boys” to josh around with now, and in their rough masculine way they enjoyed mountain life as much as he did. On rare days off they played baseball, boxed, or bet their wages on rattlesnake and cock fights in a pit dedicated to bloodshed. Edison allowed the sale of beer at the company store, rather than encourage the smuggling-in of banned hard liquor. Racial violence occasionally broke out in the Summerville settlement, where laborers lived in a squalid clutch of frame houses and outside privies.258 It derived from Old World hostilities of no interest to the “Americans” more comfortably quartered in Cuckoo Flats, or the hotel Edison had built for visitors and senior management. He could often be seen daydreaming on the porch, or wandering up to the quarry in his enormous straw hat and duster to watch the steam shovels at work, a sight that endlessly fascinated him.

“I never felt better in my life,” he reminisced years later: “Hard work, nothing to divert my thought, clear air, simple food…very pleasant.” In old age Dan Smith, his big mine rigger, looked back with similar nostalgia on these “young days…the happiest time of my life.”259

Neither man, however, was on active duty in Cuba. On 1 July, in a coming together of names, Theodore Miller fought beside his commander, Col. Theodore Roosevelt, at the battle of San Juan and was fatally wounded. Ten days later an anguished Mina gave birth to a son. He was baptized Theodore Miller Edison.260

William survived through the cease-fire on 12 August and thereafter lay sick and bored in Puerto Rico, begging his father to help him get an early discharge. As if this were not enough family distraction, at a time when Edison urgently needed to give all his attention to problems at the mill, Tom also complained of ill health, along with his usual financial straits. He was then reported to be summering in a camp in the Adirondacks with a showgirl, scandalously unchaperoned, by the name of Marie Toohey. Tom denied press rumors that they were engaged, and when she reappeared in his apartment in October, he insisted that she was only “nursing” him.261

THAT HOLE IN THE GROUND

Personal, professional, and meteorological crises converged on Edison in the last days of 1898 with a suddenness that drove him closer to panic than ever before in his career. A blizzard whitened Sparta Mountain and was followed by a long period of intense cold. Many laborers walked off their jobs, never to return. Hitherto, during the depression years, they had been insecure enough to tolerate the low wages and primitive accommodations Edison begrudged them. But now there were better prospects elsewhere. Mallory warned that unless decent housing was built at the plant, Ogden for all its automation would never be a paying proposition. In fact, it was already at the point of financial collapse.262

On 2 December Edison wrote in desperation to Mina, who was visiting with her family in Akron, “I must have the $12,000 of the General Electric bonds in exchange for Phonograph Works bonds without these the works would have to be shut down.” He needed the cash from this transaction on the fifteenth and a further $5,000 in Northern Pacific bonds before Christmas: “You had best make a flying trip home.” Three days later he cabled her, “I think you better return by the tenth…very important i am feeling quite ill.” In an attendant letter he admitted, “I am very worried about things.”263

She hurried to help him, but before she could get back to Glenmont, weather and worker attrition obliged him to close the plant for what looked ominously like the last time.264 Meanwhile the proliferation of yellow press articles about the erratic behavior of “Thomas Edison, Jr.” annoyed Edison so much that he sent his son a message, via William, threatening legal action unless he stopped abusing the family name. “The old man says he is through with you,” William wrote, enjoying his mission. “Also he says that you are in debt and furthermore that you have married this actress.”265

Whether in fact Tom had spliced himself to Marie was not clear, but he responded with outrage on 17 December, addressing his father as “Dear Sir.” He asked why it had been necessary to reprimand him by proxy. “However I understand this is one of your characteristics.” In a shrewd blow, he pointed out that he was not the only Edison in debt. “If you knew how to handle your own achievements—what have you today—ask the financial world—they know….People are through putting money into your inventions—and—as a consequence they are through with the name of Edison for good—otherwise I would be a rich man.”266

This was uncomfortably near the truth of Edison’s current situation, and Tom’s separate reply to William showed that he knew its full dimensions. “He couldn’t raise a dollar on anything—he put two millions out of his own pocket in the Mill—simply because he couldn’t get it from any one else.”267

Edison gambled what was left of his faith in magnetic mining on anticipated borrowings from the National Phonograph Company, although William Gilmore resented having to play Peter to his Paul. For the rest of the month—“What, is it Christmas already?”—he sought relief from worry in reading. But the books and periodicals he studied had less to do with iron concentrate than with the golden pyramid of sand piled up outside the separation house. Before the year was over, he was ready to apply his tailings separation technique to the production of portland cement.268

He would continue to insist, until the end of the century, that his great experiment at Ogden would succeed. But events tinged with a sense of finality, or of significant change, kept cautioning him, throughout 1899, that it would not—that alternative avenues of research and development were open for him to explore. For the better part of a decade he had embraced the problems that Ogden taxed him with, delighting in his ability to solve them one by one. But when, early that year, he compiled a list indicating there were 183 more to be tackled, he could no longer ignore the odds against him.269

On 17 February Mina’s revered father Lewis Miller died—the second great grief to hit her in seven months, hastening her passage toward middle age. Edison himself, having just turned fifty-two, was white-haired now. Three days later he heard that Tom and Marie had married, in a Roman Catholic ceremony that at least confirmed the seriousness of their relationship—as did news that the girl had given up her stage career in order to be a full-time wife. “She will not go back without my consent,” Tom was quoted as saying, trying to sound like a man in charge for once.270

When spring came, Ogden remained shut amid a nationwide surge in iron ore demand that Lake Superior mines were only too pleased to satisfy.271 Mallory told backers that $100,000 was needed to get the works started again. If necessary Mr. Edison would contribute yet more cash in exchange for stock, but first, decent housing had to be built for the labor force.272

By then Edison was back to working full-time at the laboratory, educating himself in all aspects of portland cement production. In one sleepless twenty-four-hour stretch he designed what would become the largest cement mill in the country, right down to minute details of plumbing, lubrication, and ventilation.273

On 15 April he organized the Edison Portland Cement Company, capitalized it at $11 million, and began looking for a suitable site in western New Jersey. The following month he attended the annual electrical exhibition in New York, where all the talk was of electric automobiles. He denied that he was building such a car for himself, but told Mallory that he had an idea in mind for a light, efficient, durable storage battery that was “absolutely not to work with lead and sulphuric acid.” He began experiments on it at once, and soon had more than a hundred technicians detailed to the project.274

Tom told reporters in July that he had “severed all connection” with his father and would pursue an independent career as an inventor: “I think he is too wise a man to bother over the inevitable.” William, no longer in uniform and furious not to be offered a job at West Orange, made a similar bid for independence just before he turned twenty-one on 26 October. “What little money I receive in a few days I will invest in picture machines and a small factory,” he wrote Edison. “If I fail it will be my loss.” Within three weeks he, too, would marry and embark on a lifetime of proving that to be true.275

In November construction began at Ogden on a few rows of worker houses arrayed along the ridge of Sparta Mountain. Edison and Mallory both talked bravely of reopening the mill when the houses were occupied and leaves were back on the chestnut trees. But when Ogden’s balance sheet came in at the end of the year, it emphasized the vanity of human wishes. Since 1890 the New Jersey & Pennsylvania Concentrating Works had cost $2,600,942 to build and run, and sold a mere $180,688 worth of product. Edison was due $334,611 plus interest for cash advanced, and there was no money to reimburse him. He already owned most of the rest of the company’s stock in unredeemable paper. There was just one unfulfilled contract on its books: a two-year-old order for five hundred tons of briquettes for Bethlehem Iron, conditional on low phosphorus content. If he chose to honor it, at a time when the nation’s stockhouses were awash in cheap ore, he would have to do so at a competitive price that was sure to drive him even further into debt.276

The memories of aging men, recorded after the plant became a clutch of ghost buildings, varied as to who made Edison realize it was facing bankruptcy. Charles Batchelor recalled bringing him a press report of John D. Rockefeller’s takeover of the Mesabi field, portending a vast increase in production, and shipments all over the world via the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence waterway. Improbably, though, Batchelor said the article made Edison burst into laughter before exclaiming, “Well, we might as well blow the whistle and close up shop.”277

Thomas Robins claimed to have been a witness to the incident—“The Old Man and I were sitting astride a plank which rested between two horses”—but he remembered no laughter, only Edison’s kindly concern that if the mill shut, “this boy” would be out of a job. In 1899, however, Robins was long gone from Ogden, and so was Batchelor.278

The account that rang most true was that of Walter Mallory, who for most of Edison’s time on the mountain had worked with him day and night. He said that when he first got the bad news, he could not bring himself to pass it on. Edison sensed something was wrong, and the two men avoided each other for three days, postponing a moment they both dreaded. Eventually they met in a bleak bedroom at the Lake Hopatcong Hotel. Mallory locked the door. Speaking as loudly as possible to give himself courage, he reported what he had heard.279

Edison sat listening on the edge of the bed, nervously tugging at his right eyebrow. His initial reaction was predictable: “Yes, it’s a problem, it’s a problem. But worry won’t solve it. Brainwork will.”

Mallory ventured to disagree, knowing that no amount of thinking could alter the laws of supply and demand.

Edison waved him silent and brooded for a long time, still tugging at his eyebrow. Then in a calm voice he said, “We will stop work here immediately.”280

There was little to stop, apart from the construction along the ridge. The mill itself had been inert for a year. Edison marked some machinery for transfer to a limestone field near Stewartsville, which he had chosen as the site of his new cement plant. But before that happened, he was determined to fulfill his contract with Bethlehem Iron, at the latest low prices. Ogden, his too-heavy phoenix, must try to rise one more time before sinking back for good.^*52, 281

The Ogden mill under snow, late 1890s.

No matter how little Bethlehem paid, he would not accept bankruptcy. His sense of honor, incomprehensible to Tom and William, demanded that he settle all the mill’s debts. He displayed no embarrassment over its failure and for the rest of his life would look back on his mining days with nostalgia. Only once, on a return visit, was he heard to say, “I put three million dollars down that hole in the ground, and never heard it hit bottom.”282

*1 The Edison General Electric Company had been incorporated in 1889 as a merger of three Edison electric light manufacturing companies.

*2 Edison was, however, by no means a pauper in early 1890. His latest bank statement from Drexel, Morgan showed a balance of $465,440.25, or $12.5 million in 2019 dollars.

*3 “The abscess on her back [inflicted] permanent injury to the spine,” Mrs. Earl wrote Mina on 10 March. “When they lanced it…she bled so profusely they feared for her life.” Hemorrhagic smallpox is almost always fatal.

*4 The fee for two boarders at St. Paul’s in 1891 was $1,200 per annum, or $32,280 in 2019 dollars.

*5 Between 1888 and 1891 Edison conducted a mammoth dip-needle survey of the Appalachian ironlands from New York State to the Carolinas, buying up in the process title to “97% of all the concentrable ore” within practical range of eastern blast furnaces.

*6 See Part Five.

*7 According to Alfred Tate, Edison was at this time supervising seventy-two projects.

*8 See Part Five.

*9 Most film historians date Edison’s development of the Kinetograph from the time Dickson rejoined him at the laboratory in October 1890. But as early as February that year, the Orange Journal reported: “For many months past Mr. Edison has been at work on a series of experiments in instantaneous photography which have at last been successfully concluded.” In April Western Electrician described a mysterious Edisonian projection at the Lenox Lyceum in New York: “A magic lantern of almost unimaginable power casts upon the ceiling…such pictures as seem to be the actual performances of living beings!” That same month the Minneapolis Times stated that he was experimenting with a horizontal-feed spooled motion picture machine (“he calls it the Kinetograph”) and also was planning to equip it with synchronized sound: “When it is completed…it will be possible not only to hear the voice of a person…but to see the person’s face just as it was at the time the words were spoken, with every change of expression, the movement of the eyes, etc.”

*10 The complex chronology of the invention of cinema, involving simultaneous experiments and claims of precedence in France, Britain, and the United States, is a subject of unresolved debate by scholars in all three countries. Edison’s relations with Étienne-Jules Marey and his pioneer work on the Kinetoscope in 1888 and 1889 will be discussed in Part Five.

*11 Dickson wrote that he got his filmstrip idea after a glance at Edison’s “perforated paper automatic telegraph.” Dickson, “Brief History.”

*12 In 1911 Sprague heard with modified rapture that the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers had awarded him its highest honor, the Edison Gold Medal.

*13 By 1898, this mass was already known to geologists as “Edison gneiss.”

*14 See, e.g., his claim in 1906 that the Edison works at New Village produced “60,000,000” tons of portland cement a week, the correct figure being $600,000. In May 1891 he told a reporter that the amount of iron in the Ogden mine was “2,000,000,000,000 tons.”

*15 Edison was familiar with Marey’s pioneering work and could not fail to recognize its superiority to his own. He was also at least dimly aware of that of William Friese-Greene. The British inventor wrote to him on 18 March 1890, to say he was sending by separate post “a paper with description of Machine Camera for taking 10 a second.” There is no trace of this paper in ENHP, but receipt of the letter was acknowledged.

*16 One of the reporters who attended Edison’s oracular presentation in Chicago was Frank L. Baum, a cub recently hired by the Chicago Evening Post. He was fascinated by Edison’s top-heavy appearance. “Of medium height is the Wizard of Menlo Park…a massive head is his,” wrote the future author of The Wizard of Oz.

*17 Brother and partner of Frank Dyer, the future president of Thomas A. Edison, Inc.

*18 See Part Five.

*19 Dickson appears to have convinced Edison of this. Marey shot at speeds ranging from thirty to fifty frames per second.

*20 The Phonogram, Edison’s house magazine, predicted in 1892 that with all other lighting companies included as liable in the infringement decision, Edison General Electric was due as much as $50 million in back damages and $2 million a year in future royalties.

*21 Judge Wallace’s decision was upheld by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on 4 October 1892, more than twelve years after the issuance of the electric light patent. An identical opinion affirming the originality of Edison’s invention overseas was handed down by an English court in Edison and Swan United Electric Light Co. v. Woodhouse and Rawson (1887).

*22 Edison made no attempt to patent the Kinetograph overseas. This was probably because he quailed at the cost and difficulty of claiming precedence over the rival inventions of Marey, Le Prince, Friese-Greene, and others. But he thereby lost millions and enabled such French competitors as Lumière and Pathé to make substantial inroads into the U.S. market.

*23 Named, coincidentally enough, “Ellison.”

*24 Lathrop, emotionally damaged by debt and the loss of his only son, died of alcoholism in 1898, aged forty-six. His last literary project was a biography of Edison.

*25 Edison proposed in 1920 that a “scientifically-kept watch for interstellar signaling should be established in Michigan, where enormous masses of ore might be expected particularly to attract magnetic signals from space if any should be sent.”

*26 Not to be confused with modern Edison, New Jersey, a town in Middlesex County that memorializes the original site of Menlo Park.

*27 See Part Five.

*28 Kennelly’s experiments with “magneto-therapy,” part of a major magnetism research program initiated by Edison at this time, anticipated by nearly eighty years the modern technology of magnetic resonance imaging.

*29 Orson Welles once cited Insull, rather than William Randolph Hearst, as a role model for Citizen Kane—“a real man who built an opera house for the soprano of his choice.” Unlike Kane, however, Insull lost his wealth when his $500 million electrical empire collapsed in the Great Depression. He was prosecuted by the federal government on antitrust charges and, although found innocent, never recovered from the attendant opprobrium.

*30 There is a full-size reconstruction of the Black Maria at Thomas Edison National Historical Park.

*31 A restoration of The Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1894 or 1895), the first sound film in movie history, has been jointly accomplished by the Library of Congress and the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archive of Recorded Sound in New York. It may be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=Y6b0wpBTR1s.

*32 Budget figures prepared for Marion’s information by John Randolph in the fall of 1894 indicate that Edison was currently spending $33,220 a year on household expenses, or just about $1 million in today’s money.

*33 Blacksmith Scene may be viewed online through the peephole of YouTube, at https://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=FaFqr7nGsJM.

*34 Edison exaggerated the kinetic force of his crushers, which was more realistically the equivalent of seven tons, ample to shatter a five-ton rock.

*35 Kinetograph henceforth meant only the talking camera.

*36 A word search of American newspapers in 1894 indicates that the phrase moving pictures was first used to describe the illusion of photographic movement when Edison announced his Kinetoscope on 10 March. Previously it referred either to still pictures that appealed to the emotions, or to mobile tableaux onstage. On 21 July the American Encyclopedic Dictionary announced that it was the first reference book to define “Kinetoscope” and [sic] “kinetograph.” The word cinema would not enter the language until after the Lumière brothers patented their Cinématographe camera-projector in 1895. Motion picture appeared in 1896; movie around 1908. Edison, as has been seen, coined the word talkie in 1913.

*37 See, e.g., http://earlysilentfilm.blogspot.co.uk/​2013/​08/​peerless-annabelle-symphony-in-yellow.html.

*38 Or more than $7.1 million in 2019 dollars.

*39 Tate did not mention in his memoir that Edison, whose fits of anger were always short, gave him a farewell loan of $800, saying he could pay it back whenever he earned his “first stake” as a self-employed businessman. Twenty-six years later Tate took pleasure in sending him an interest-included check for $2,060.

*40 According to one source, Tesla counted his jaw movements while chewing, and always used eighteen napkins.

*41 In addition to bearing three children, Mina Edison had at least one and possibly three miscarriages.

*42 Edison never explained why he abandoned the projection method (calcium-lit images, slotted rotary shutter, magnifying lens, and screen) that he tantalized the Sun reporter with in 1891. It is described by the Dicksons in chapter 22 of Life and Inventions. They refer specifically to “exhibition evenings” in the “projecting-room” of Edison’s photographic department, its walls “hung with black” to prevent reflection from “the circle of light” [sic] emanating from the screen at the other end, and “the projector” similarly draped so as to expose only “a single peephole for the accommodation of the lens,” connected to an electric motor running with “a weird accompanying monotone.” They even report that some images were “projected stereoscopically” with “a pleasing rotundity.” These evenings can have occurred no later than September 1894, when their book went to press, and presumably no earlier than October 1893, when Cassier’s Magazine published a shorter version of this chapter that made no mention of projection at all. If the images thrown on the screen were as “life-like” as the Dicksons claim, then Edison was the father of movie projection. The enlargements, however, were apparently “not…much more than ten times the original size [of a 35-mm. frame],” too small for commercial viewing.

*43 It ultimately became the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, under which name Edison sued it in a marathon patent infringement case that was eventually resolved in his favor.

*44 These experiments were briefly interrupted by the death on 26 February of Sam Edison, age 91. Edison traveled to Port Huron for the funeral.

*45 Edison was to repeat this experiment in 1917, when researching the optics of night vision for the U.S. Navy.

*46 A young American dancer, Loie Fuller, visited Edison in his darkroom at this time, and had an epiphany of herself performing in costumes permeated with his radiant salts. They experimented together with initial success, but the fluorescence kept fading. In her later career, Fuller won fame for light-based choreography, while also becoming an amateur expert on radiology.

*47 Edison’s license lasted only a year. On 30 November 1896, he brought out his own highly praised projector, and in 1897 reassigned the Phantoscope patent to Armat.

*48 https://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=lW3uIm82hpY

*49 Blackton took a bow at the end of this ninety-five-second short and went on to become a major movie producer and the father of film animation.

*50 According to the appropriately named Niagara Falls Cataract, 20 November 1896, Edison pressed his aching eyes shut after a long spell of work on X-rays and found that he could still see his hands.

*51 Edison was serious. He bought a two-year lease on fifty-four thousand acres of low-grade gold sands at Dolores, in the Ortiz Mountains, and by the summer of 1898 he had put a preliminary dry placer plant into operation extracting gold by a magnetic drum process. The mill grew to Ogden-like proportions, cost him half a million dollars, and was a complete failure. “I lost the usual amount,” he joked.

*52 The plant did reopen for a few months in 1900 but failed to satisfy Bethlehem Iron’s low-phosphorus requirement and was forced to dispose of its remaining briquettes below cost. It closed finally for dismantlement at the end of that year.