IN HIS THIRTY-THIRD year Edison embarked on what he afterward called “the greatest adventure of my life…akin to venturing on an uncharted sea.”1 His challenge was to take the small incandescent thing he had just perfected—history’s first reliable electric bulb—and turn it into a vast urban illumination system, every part of which would have to be invented, manufactured, and installed by himself.

Since the extraordinary display of linked lamps that he had staged at Menlo Park on New Year’s Eve 1879, he had moved in popular esteem from being the “wizard” of recorded sound to the “genius” of electric light. He scoffed at the latter label, which had been overused since the deaths of Beethoven and Goethe. “You know well enough I am nothing of the sort,” he remarked to an old associate, Walter Phillips, “unless we accept Disraeli’s theory that genius is prolonged patience. I’m patient enough, to be sure.”2

The trouble with being so endowed was that Edison always made himself available to visitors, few of whom had the delicacy to wonder whether they were not intruding upon him. Overnight, and for as long as the Menlo Park light show lasted, his rural laboratory had become a fashionable destination. He had achieved a spectacular public relations coup in opening its doors to the public.3 But the financiers committed to support his looming “subdivision of the light”—potentially the most revolutionary invention since the telegraph—were aware that every hour he spent sharing cigars and jovial indiscretions with strangers was an hour to the advantage of rival electrical engineers striving to overtake him both in the Patent Office and the marketplace. The key elements of his high-resistance, coiled-carbon, fused-glass, evacuated lamp were known, and it was critical that he protected them at once, or Edisonian lightbulbs would soon sprout like snowdrops on both sides of the Atlantic.

“If I had my way,” an attorney in charge of his patent assignments wrote, “I would not allow half the publicity that has been given by Mr. Edison.” Already Menlo Park was having to deal with the consequences of it. The depot, formerly so little used that Pennsylvania Railroad trains sped by without stopping, became mobbed every late afternoon with hundreds of curiosity-seekers. Most wanted simply to gawk at the great inventor. A large number of lighting professionals, including George Westinghouse, Charles Brush, Edward Weston, Elihu Thomson, William Sawyer, and Hiram Maxim, came bent on industrial espionage.4

THE LIGHT OF THE FUTURE

Allowing for artistic license, an illustration in the New Year issue of Harper’s Weekly represented what visitors saw before they walked up the plank road that led to the research complex at the top of the slope. The immediate prospect was dominated by Edison’s house set against the sunset, its front yard already darkening. Marion and Tom could be seen playing on a swing, while three adults, a man and two women, strolled close to the picket fence on Thornall Avenue.5 They were drawn very small, but the man—bandy-legged and waving his hat at some passing horsemen—did not look like the owner of the house. It was most likely Charles Stilwell, an assistant glassblower at the laboratory, who roomed there. In that case, the two female figures were Charles’s sisters Alice Stilwell, twenty-seven, and Mary Stilwell Edison, twenty-four, distinguishable by her plumpness.

The hat, the wave, the fence, and the riders, along with a flagpole in front and windmill out back, were part of the iconography of a million Currier & Ives prints, except that some windows of the house glowed with a new kind of light—as did a white post on the opposite sidewalk that seemed to be crowned with a halo tilted out of perspective. The artist clearly did not know what to make of it. It was the first streetlamp in the world to shed incandescent light, and the first of fifty-eight fishbowled bulbs arrayed elsewhere up the slope.

At the moment, they shone down on nothing more than a few hundred square yards of buildings and scrawny fields rising to a wooded crest.6 There were hardly enough houses for Menlo Park to call itself a hamlet. Only three of them, strung together by droops of bare copper wire, gave off a light similar to Edison’s. It was soft, with a pale orange tinge, and steady, different from the lambency of oil lamps or the whiter glare of gas.7 Nor did the various pools of radiance conjoin. Each pole cast little more than a dissolving nimbus. The nearest thing to brightness came from everyone’s destination—the upper floor of the laboratory, a long, two-story shed in a field of its own, flanked by a brick office/library, glassblowing house, and machine shop.

Edison’s house in Menlo Park, January 1880.

To early visitors from New York, the “Village of Light” described in newspapers was at first a disappointment, its display hardly to be compared with the dazzle of arc lamps along Broadway. But when darkness came and the countryside around Menlo Park receded into blackness—except for a few distant, lantern-lit farm windows—the miracle that Edison had wrought became more apparent. Here, illuminated in the midst of nowhere by an invisible generation plant, were globes of glass that gave off no fumes and sooted no ceilings, that did not ignite anything, that could be held in the hand as they burned, discharging nothing but a pleasant warmth, that could be dunked into a bank of snow, or even drowned in water, without going out. They were silent, flicker-free, each as bright as sixteen candles,^*1 and reportedly flattering to ladies of a certain age. Incredibly, they did not break when dropped from a height of six feet onto the wooden laboratory floor. They could be clustered like flowers or scattered like stars, yet a single switch turned them all on or off. Nor did they mind having their series interrupted. One bulb could be unscrewed from a chain of twenty, and the other nineteen would continue to shine.8

Hard for nontechnical visitors to understand was that the tiny, unlookably bright horseshoe inside each unit had originally been paper. Edison’s craftsmanlike assistant inventor, Charles Batchelor, had perfected a way of cutting U-shapes out of bristol board and carbonizing them at white heat until they shrank into stiff, shiny-black “filaments”—a word new to electricity, coined by Edison himself.9 Clamped to platinum wires and incandesced in a vacuum of 1 million atmospheres, they burned without consuming themselves, some for hundreds of hours. How long that was on average, nobody at the laboratory was ready to say.

Souvenir hunters able to reach nine feet high stole every streetlamp they could unscrew, not knowing or caring that Edison needed to keep statistical tabs on each one. Shorter vandals took advantage of the crush in the laboratory to pocket tools and test tubes and carve squares of wood out of the workbenches. “Gumshoe” security men had to be hired to intercept thefts or breakages of precious equipment. A representative of the gas industry was caught trying to short out the room’s entire electrical circuit with a jump cable threaded through the sleeves of his coat.10

Edison often passed unnoticed in the crowd. Few had yet seen a photograph of him, since newspapers were able to print only engraved portraits that failed to register his animated gaze. Nor did his rough workman’s clothes distinguish him from anyone else in the laboratory crew, unless the white silk scarf, knotted under one ear in lieu of a collar, caught attention. He lounged around with a cigar in his mouth, a hank of hair falling over his huge pale forehead, looking like one of the hoboes who periodically wandered up from the depot.

The impression of vagrancy was not altogether deceptive. Over the last several months Edison had become so obsessed with illumination technology as to become almost a resident of the laboratory. Mary, despairing of seeing her husband at home, would send dinners up the boardwalk that grew cold in his office. “His assistants say that he would forget to eat his meals or go to bed if he were not reminded of those things,” The Sun reported.

The other day, while returning from New York, he alighted from the train at Menlo Park, forgetting that he had his little daughter aboard. As the train was about to start on its way to Philadelphia, the conductor recognized the child. “Are you not Mr. Edison’s little girl?” said he. “Yes, sir!” she answered. The conductor led her to the platform. Some distance ahead her father was seen hastening to his laboratory, entirely forgetful of his negligence.11

Absent-minded as Edison was (even during night receptions he kept on his enormous floppy hat), he focused on every question from the crowd, cupping his right ear and responding with old-fashioned courtesy. He was repeatedly asked how there could be no air inside each bulb—or as one visitor put it, “How do you extract the vacuum?” In the plainest possible words, leavened with jokes, he explained how Ludwig Böhm, his Bavarian glassblower, puffed each one into shape before plugging it with a separate semimolten base that intruded the filament assembly and two platinum “lead-in” wires. Again and again he demonstrated the operation of mercury pumps, blowpipes, and necking shears. Only when he dropped the Latin term in vacuo, or cited the identical coefficients of contraction and expansion obtaining between platinum and glass, did he betray the fact that he was, after all, a professional inventor.^*2, 12

“He is partially deaf and very modest,” the correspondent of The Times cabled back to Britain. “Yet when he finds that his visitor really sympathizes with him, and is not a ‘professional expert’ whose object is only to criticize, he warms up into one of the most entertaining men I have ever met….He has not the slightest trace of that self-assertion which is often the accompaniment of success.”13

What Edison did have was a lively awareness of the value of public relations. He seemed to enjoy chatting to the proletariat as much as to scientists and financiers. “When T. A. hain’t got his thinking cap on,” a local farmer remarked, “he’s just as jolly as a schoolboy.” Visitation reached three thousand a day after the Pennsylvania Railroad laid on extra trains east and west. Even Edison saw that the laboratory should revert to privacy, lest it literally split its sides. His father had carpentered it well, but by the second week of January the walls needed buttressing with telegraph poles.14

Thereafter only bona fide scientists or officials connected with the Edison Electric Light Company were allowed to disturb him as he assembled the resources—human, mechanical, intellectual, and financial—required to consummate his urban power plan. His old friend and counsel Grosvenor P. Lowrey was one of the few who understood the immensity of the task ahead, and in moments of dread, worsened by rheumatism, he doubted that he could do it. But the flawless performance of the lamps during their recent exhibition comforted him. “I am writing this by the light of the future at Edison’s table,” Lowrey scribbled to a friend one evening when the laboratory was quiet. “The same light which was burning when I began, is sound still…having burned three hundred hours before. Should it sustain another test, the economy and durability of the lamp is demonstrated.”15

THE GREAT DISCOVERER

Lowrey’s optimism was echoed overseas by no less a voice of authority than The Times of London. It praised Edison’s achievement in a column and a half of dense print that could have been written by a publicist for the Electric Light Company.

Mr. Edison is determined to maintain his place as the great discoverer of the age. After a silence of some months he has again come before the world as the inventor of a system of electric lighting which he claims to have made complete at every point….The new light, as Mr. Edison’s machines will furnish it, admits of being employed for every purpose of public and of private use. It is as manageable as gas has been. It can be raised to an intense brilliancy beyond any that gas can reach, or it can be turned down to a thread. There is no difficulty in laying it on. A thin wire in connexion with the generating machine is all that is necessary for this. It is light without heat. However carelessly it may be used, there can be no danger of fire from it….It gives almost exactly the tone of ordinary daylight. With all these advantages it is, moreover, the very cheapest light that has ever been produced.16

Members of the British electric engineering establishment rose as one to protest the idea that such things could have been achieved by an unschooled American huckster who did not have the decency to wear a beard. The electrochemist Joseph Swan was first to declare his own preeminence in the field. “Fifteen years ago,” he announced in Nature magazine, “I used charred paper and card in the construction of an electric lamp on the incandescent principle.” Swan was honest enough to admit, “I did not then succeed in obtaining the durability which I was in search of.”^*3 He did not explain why he had never filed a precautionary caveat, or provisional specification,^*4 to protect his light, while continuing to experiment with it on and off, beyond the ken of the English trade press.17

That lack of notice was put to right by periodicals such as The Electrician and Chemical News, not to mention Saturday Review, which on 10 January published an unsigned polemic entitled “The Great Edison Scare.” Some of its blows were shrewd:

What a happy man Mr. Edison must be! Three times within the short space of eighteen months he has had the glory of finally and triumphantly solving a problem of worldwide interest. It is true that each time the problem has been the same, and that it comes up again after each solution, fresh, smiling, and unsolved, ready to receive its next death-blow….His friends may look forward to a long and equally happy future, crowned at periodical intervals by similar dazzling and final triumphs; for, if he continues to observe the same strict economy of practical results which has hitherto characterized his efforts in electric lighting, there is no reason why he should not for the next twenty years completely solve the problem of the electric light twice a year without in any way interfering with its interest or novelty.18

It would be ten months before Swan produced a filamentary lamp of his own, and it proved to be virtually identical to those on display at Menlo Park. This did not stop John Tyndall, the revered professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution, from endorsing Swan’s retroactive claim to have developed such a lamp in the 1860s. Hence Edison’s was “cursed by a total absence of originality.” But both inventors were pursuing a chimera, in Tyndall’s opinion. Eighty years of research had proved that “the most economical form of electric light is, and in all probability always will be, the arc lamp.”19

It was true that Edison and Swan were just the latest in a historic line of electric-illumination pioneers going back to Sir Humphrey Davy, who in the early years of the century had coaxed both arc and incandescent light out of a mass linkage of voltaic cells. Since then scores of inventors had tried to turn either of these incompatible radiances—the one harsh, flaring, and consumptive, the other weak and maddeningly variable—into a light that could be relied on and be competitive with gas. As early as 1840 William Grove had made a spiral of platinum wire incandesce for a moment or two inside a glass tumbler.20 The international arc lamp fraternity, notably Pavel Yablochkov of Russia, had been successful enough in illuminating some great public places with their sputtering “candles,” but that kind of light would never be accepted by ordinary people at home and at work around the world.

The question opening up now, of whether Swan had indeed preceded Edison in finally achieving a viable incandescent lamp, was not going to be settled by Tyndall’s say-so, or for that matter by the only lamp Swan could so far hold up in evidence—a carbon rod enclosed in a flask that looked like a urological appliance. He had demonstrated it in early 1879, several months after Edison’s premature achievement of a platinum-spiral lamp, but long before the first little carbonized “horseshoes” began to shine in globes around Menlo Park.

By all reports, Swan’s rod gave off plenty of light for a minute or two, and also plenty of soot, which indicated either imperfect vacuum or too much exposed carbon. Yet there was an ominous indication in this month’s United Kingdom caveat listings that Swan understood filamentary technology as well as Edison. He gave notice that he intended to seek patent protection for a process of improving bulb evacuation by the use of heat to expel occluded gases out of the incandescent element, whether “rod, filament, or lamina.”21

Before the end of January, British official opinion had solidified against concession of any priority to Edison.^*5 The editors of Nature dismissed his lamp as “a hopeless failure, wrong in design, wrong in principle, useful only in showing how singularly devoid of sound scientific knowledge a clever practical man might be.”22

“In short my Boy you are not loved over here by these fellows,” Edward Johnson wrote him from London. “You have committed the grave error of having succeeded.”23

The same went for Paris, except that the precedents cited there by Théodose du Moncel, the ranking French authority on illumination technology, were mostly the work of his compatriots. He informed readers of Le Temps that Edison was nothing more than “a very ingenious and fecund inventor” who could not claim to be “au courant with the subtleties of electrical science.” It was impossible to believe that his new lamp, “this horseshoe of carbon, so fine spun, so delicate,” did not degrade when incandescing. Du Moncel advised European commentators to withhold their praise until Edison confirmed that he had lit fifty or sixty bulbs from a single generator. For himself, he would continue to be wary of “the pompous announcements that come our way from the New World.”24

Edison was philosophical enough about foreign anti-Americanism to shrug such comments off. His patience was more strained by the abuse of compatriots who claimed to know more about his invention than he did. In a widely published letter, Henry Morton, president of the Stevens Institute of Technology, called his light “a conspicuous failure” and sure to remain so, because as “everyone acquainted with the subject” realized, stringing together a large number of bulbs “involves an immense loss of efficiency.” Tests of the “identical” carbons of such electrical pioneers as Siemens, Weston, Brush, and Maxim had proved over and over that incandescence was a short-lived phenomenon.25

Edison read Morton’s letter beneath the glow of eighty-four lamps suspended from the ceiling of his laboratory. “He should investigate first and animadvert afterward,” he said to a reporter watching him.26

ALL THE OPERATIONS CONNECTED THEREWITH

On 27 and 28 January Edison alternately received and executed the two most historic patents of his career: U.S. 223,898, “Electric-Lamp,” and 369,280, “System of Electrical Distribution.” The former guaranteed seventeen years of protection to his basic bulb—or should have, if eleven of those years were not to be spent fighting jealous lawsuits.^*6, 27 The preamble to the latter application showed that the main components of his plan to illuminate lower Manhattan were already integrated in his head, if nowhere else:

To all whom it may concern:

Be it known that I, THOMAS A. EDISON, of Menlo Park, in the State of New Jersey, United States of America, have made certain new and useful Improvements in Furnishing Light and Power from Electricity….

The object of this invention is to so arrange a system for the generation, supply and consumption of either light, or power, or both of electricity, that all the operations connected therewith requiring special care, attention, or knowledge of the art, shall be performed for many consumers at central stations, leaving the consumer only the work of turning off or on the supply as may be desired.28

The four thousand–plus words and set of complex diagrams that followed lent weight to Lowrey’s concern that no human being would be able to design and build such a system before the Edison Electric Light Company’s capital (currently standing at $300,000) ran out. Edison on the contrary regarded his scheme as so much a fait accompli that he labeled the streets in one drawing “Cortlandt,” “Broadway,” and “Maiden Lane.” Another drawing, of four identical power “districts” arranged in a grid, each with its own “central station” and interconnecting “conductors,” not only anticipated the look of electronic circuitry of a century thence but made clear that he dreamed of lighting whole cities.29

“I will here state,” Edison wrote, “that all the devices for translation of electricity into work are arranged on the mutiple arc system, each device being in its own derived circuit, the effect being in substance to give each a circuit from the generating source independent of the circuit of all the other devices.”30

The last word denoted every machine and immobile link that interposed between raw coal stored in the central station and light, or power, pouring out the other end. Young Francis Upton, in a magazine article timed to coincide with his boss’s application, extended the arc of translation even further, from sunshine to artificial sunshine, but Edison concentrated on the specifics of getting the job done.31

He began with the prime motors, steam engines whose belts and shafts caused a group of generators to whir up a mass of electromagnetic energy, or “field of force,” that could be duplicated to any number the market called for. Having raised his favorite subject of electromagnetism, Edison treated himself to a somewhat rambling disquisition on the “extremely long” magnetic core of the bipolar dynamo he had patented the year before, to power his lightbulb experiments. He would have to rewrite this section of the application extensively to meet Patent Office objections, but when he did, he would make the important claim that “currents of the desired high electromagnetic force can be generated in armatures of low resistance, and the waste of energy in the form of heat in such armatures will be reduced to a minimum.”32

Next came the copper cable conductors, or “mains,” along which the current flowed at a pressure controlled by regulators that sensed the fluctuating demands of customers turning their lights on and off. This maintained the high resistance, at farthest remove, of Edison’s uniquely efficient lightbulbs. He explained that a common differential of low resistance was what made the lamps of other inventors uneconomical. His use of multiple arcs meant that he could wire in any number of circuits without appreciably weakening the output of the generators. To ensure uniformity of pressure, he envisaged photometric test lights at the central station, along with galvanometers at any desired point, so that any drop or surge would be indicated by a change of light or deflection of a needle.33

“For distributing the current thus generated and regulated,” Edison went on, “I prefer to use conductors within insulated pipes or tubing made water tight and buried beneath the earth, provision being made at suitable intervals for house, or side connections.” He had seen the crazy cross-hatch of telephone and telegraph wires that shadowed some streets in downtown New York, and he did not intend to tangle with it.^*7, 34 If running conduits under the city’s sidewalks was going to cost the Electric Light Company vast amounts of money and labor—not to mention permission from city officials, and all the plain brown envelopes that entailed, then the investment must be budgeted for. The gas industry had installed its own piping decades before and gone on to profit enormously.^*8

Insulating pneumatic pipes, however, was a less fraught task than ensuring that no water or rodent teeth reached the copper in electrical conduits. Reliable seals were most important at nodes where branch wires ran up lampposts, or horizontally down side streets in subsidiary mains, branching out yet farther into every house or business establishment willing to subscribe to this newfangled system. That would require the emplacement at entry points of tamper-proof meters. Then the buildings themselves would have to be wired with derived circuits that fed light or power to as many switchable bulbs or live outlets as the customer wanted to install.35

Edison of course already saw his patented globe as the crowning flower of this gigantic electric tree. But he felt free to continue developing it while he gave notice there were components he had yet to invent, such as safety fuses and centrifugal governors to control the running of motors as demand rose or fell. In the meantime he claimed to have listed thirteen wholly original contributions to electromotive science, and he sought protection for them in the plainest of words: “A system arranged as thus provides for all the conditions precedent to an economical and reliable utilization of electricity as a lighting or motive power agent.”36

For the rest of the year he isolated himself at Menlo Park, turning his laboratory and its adjacent lots, sidewalks, and fields into a roughly one-third-size model of his projected “First” lighting district in New York City.37 He intended to generate enough power on the spot to illumine eight hundred lamps. Pennsylvania Railroad trains reverted to their customary policy of not stopping at the depot unless by advance reservation, but this did not lessen the public’s fascination with Menlo Park. At night, passengers traveling to or from New York crowded to look for it when the call came, “There’s Edison’s light!” Out of the darkness ahead a few bright pinpricks emerged, swelled, and whizzed by in a momentary splatter that soon gave way to darkness again.38

INERT BODIES

If Edison had been remarkable through his twenties for industriousness and executive will, he now became freakish in both respects—to his employees, an Übermensch; to his financial backers, an uncontrollable fantasist, half-genius, half-fool; to rivals, a publicity whore of no especial originality; to his wife and children, increasingly a stranger; to Patent Office examiners, a tireless nuisance, filing sixty applications in 1880 alone.^*9, 39

The scope of his project dwarfed anything in the history of electrical engineering to date and was, besides, so new in most of its parts that he could not think of embarking on it without the recruitment of an expanded and intellectually upgraded team of helpers. With the exception of old James Mackenzie, who had taught him telegraphy as a boy, and “Pop” Edison, who came and went with the unpredictability of a septuagenarian Huckleberry Finn, they were all young. Their number rose from sixty-four in the spring to about seventy-five in the fall.40 Edison had his pick of job applicants and paid them little or nothing to start, on the grounds that those with talent would soon earn their worth, and those lacking it, or requiring a normal amount of sleep, would drop off by natural selection. Consequently he rarely had to fire a man.

Charles Batchelor, his impassive, black-bearded deputy of the past nine years, remained indispensable—faithful, meticulous, dull, a cool English breeze whenever Edison blew too hot. Francis Upton combined the manners of Phillips Academy and Princeton with a mastery of mathematics and scientific theory.^*10 Edison nicknamed him “Culture,” and John Lawson, an argumentative assayer who insisted that basic oxides required special heat treatment, as “Basic” Lawson. Martin Force, the laboratory handyman, inevitably became “Fartin’ Morse.” The cerebral Charles L. Clarke, who had a master’s degree in science from Bowdoin College, was hired at twelve dollars a week for electrical systems analysis, but proved to be more valuable as a draftsman, his sketches as precise as steel engravings. William J. Hammer at twenty-two was already a gifted electrical engineer, close-cropped, military-neat, supercilious to anyone junior to himself. These included the teenage office boys “Johnny” Randolph and George Hill, as well as neighborhood urchins who hung around the lab hoping to steal cigars or explosive chemicals. Stockton “Griff” Griffin acted as Edison’s private secretary, a job Randolph would one day inherit. Francis Jehl, nineteen, was passionately interested in electricity, but had such bovine strength that the general manager, William Carman, made him responsible for keeping the vacuum pumps topped up with mercury, which was much heavier than lead. Wilson Howell was a bespectacled youth eager to do odd jobs without pay, as were several other aspiring lab workers hopeful that Edison would eventually take them on.41

Members of the Menlo Park laboratory team, 22 February 1880. From left, Ludwig Boehm, Charles Clarke, Charles Batchelor, William Carman, Samuel Mott, George Dean, Edison (in skullcap), Charles Hughes, George Hill, George Carman, Francis Jehl, John Lawson, Charles Flammer, Charles Mott, James MacKenzie. (Library of Congress.)

A large Germanic quotient affected Menlo Park’s habits of delegated procedure and fanatical record-keeping. Johann (“Honest John”) Kruesi, the master machinist, was Schweizerdeutsch; Ludwig Böhm, Edison’s leather-lunged glassblower, his assistant blower William Holzer, and the chemists Otto Moses and Dr. Alfred Haid were all German-born; John and Frederick Ott and Francis Jehl had grown up speaking German at home; and even Upton, Yankee to his fingertips, had spent a postgraduate year at Berlin University studying under Hermann von Helmholtz.42

Despite their common work ethic, everyone had to adapt to Edison’s decidedly un-Teutonic attitude toward the clock. His day was punctuated only by breakfast at seven and midnight “lunch,” and he was capable of forgetting about each. When tiredness overwhelmed him, usually around four A.M., he would curl up beneath the stairs like a tramp and sleep on a pile of old newspapers. As a result it was not uncommon to see inert bodies at various points in the building and at various times of day or night, while experimental activity went on busily around them.43

MYSTERIOUS BLUE HALO

Allowing for national and other prejudices, Edison’s doubters were correct in saying that he had not yet developed a perfect lightbulb. The paper-derived filament was brittle and hard to install, breaking sometimes even in Batchelor’s nimble hands. It glowed beautifully when seated on its carbon clamps, but the glass crown beneath had a tendency to crack around the lead-in wires, causing a loss of vacuum and consequent oxidization of the carbon.44

These were thermal problems that Edison was confident of solving. He was mystified, however, by the tendency of his lamps to darken inside after a week or two of life. It was as if an invisible soot—“carbon vapor,” he called it—were being given off by the filament that became apparent only as the molecules thickened on the glass close by, clouding it at first, then blackening it. Yet soot was the product of flame, and there could be no fire in his airless bulb, only incandescence. Nor was the blackening uniform. From a certain angle it seemed to show a negative shadow of the filament, most noticeable on the positive side of the horseshoe. William Hammer related it to a blue fluorescence that appeared around the clamps and was weirdly responsive to magnetism, draggable from one pole to the other. Edison thought the blueness was gas given off by the clamps, but when he substituted copper ones, the same “halo” wavered about them. He painted a filament with zirconic oxide, and the blueness deepened to violet. Fascinated, he inserted a wire between the poles and ran it out to a terminal via a galvanometer. The needle at once showed that there was an arc of subsidiary current linking them. This did not, however, explain the “carrying by electrification of the carbon from one side of the carbon horseshoe,” a phenomenon that was reversed when the current was reversed. Perhaps heat loosened their cohesion within the baked body of the filament itself, and caused them to migrate to the cooler surface nearby. “The amount of such carrying,” Edison wrote, “depends upon the resistance of the filaments, the degree of incandescence, the electromotive force between the clamping-electrodes, and the state of the vacuum.”45

He did not understand, even though his language repeatedly edged toward it,^*11 that he was on the verge of discovering electronics.46 The theory of the electron, or charged subatomic particle, would not be propounded by J. J. Thomson for another seventeen years.^*12 What now became known, half mockingly, as the “Edison Effect” was thermal electron emission.^*13 It was a nuisance as far as lighting was concerned, yet novel enough for him to ask the Princeton astronomer Charles A. Young to make “an examination of the mysterious blue halo by spectroscope.” The results were inconclusive. Edison continued to experiment with wireless molecular transfer for three years and eventually patented the phenomenon, with a view to “the utilization of this discovery for indicating or regulating electromotive force.” But he never realized its world-changing potential as radio.^*14, 47

A SIMILAR CONSTELLATION

By March, Edison had 220 lamps burning night and day around Menlo Park. He invited Charles Young and another Princeton physicist, Cyrus F. Brackett, to visit the laboratory and make an independent assessment of his generation system. The result was a report, published in the June issue of American Journal of Science, so astonishing that the academic community as a whole refused to believe it. Brackett and Young found that Edison’s bipolar dynamo had a total efficiency rating (electrical output proportionate to mechanical input) of 89.9 percent. Even if it consumed four points of that output internally, it still made a mockery of the theoretical maximum potential/industrial average of 70 percent.48

Two further physicists, George F. Barker of the University of Pennsylvania and Henry Rowland of Johns Hopkins, reported almost as favorably in the same periodical on the thermal efficiency of the Edison bulb. “Provided the lamp can be made either cheap enough or durable enough, there is no reasonable doubt of the practical success of the light.” Again, this praise was widely dismissed, instilling contempt in Edison’s bosom for the pure-science fraternity that time would increase.49

He could have lit hundreds more lamps after adding a two-ton dynamo to the smaller units already in the machine shop, were it not for the hours it took to manufacture every bulb by hand. The glass had to be blown, the filament baked and mounted and wired, the air pumped out under blowtorch heat, the evacuation point sealed and cooled, then the whole tested, not always with success. Some perfect-looking specimens just would not light, or did so dimly, or flared and burned out due to reventilation. Microscopic cracks appeared not only at base level but at the “two o’clock spot” on the round of the globe, for a reason nobody could figure. On average, however, the bulbs shone for 686 hours, with a quality consistent enough that Edison was emboldened to accept a commercial order that required the opposite of street lighting.50

It came from the railroad tycoon Henry Villard, who was building a steamship, the Columbia, for service on the Pacific coast. Villard had attended Edison’s “Village of Light” exhibition and wanted to float a similar constellation out to sea—specifically, to sail around the Horn on his ship’s maiden voyage to San Francisco in early May. Although this fantasy disrupted Edison’s plans for a lighting district in New York, it was irresistible from many angles, not least that of publicity. The shortness of the deadline helped weld the Menlo Park team together as a productive unit, while the Columbia’s compact hull—332 feet from bow to stern, with a beam of 38½ feet—enabled him to integrate at close quarters all the elements that would one day comprise his city district. Villard called for 120 lights in “all-glass chambers,” one in each first-class stateroom and chandeliers in every saloon.^*15, 51 He provided enough rear hull space for four 110-volt dynamos, three of them belted to a countershaft driven by vertical engines and connected in parallel to the light circuits. A switchboard in the engine room sent power throughout the ship via stranded cables insulated with soft rubber tubing. The strands (cotton-covered and painted red or white to indicate polarity) radiated in seven independent feeder circuits, each of which subdivided again to feed lamps distributed among the upper and lower decks. For extra safety Edison invented an array of tripping devices, with fusible wires in each circuit and single-pole breakers fixed to the saloon lamps in tiny glass tubes, so that in the event of a power surge, no drops of molten lead alloy would fall on anybody’s dinner jacket. Also new to his illumination technology were the keyed sockets and brackets that held each lamp, and the ceiling fixtures that allowed chandeliers to sway gently at sea. Switches were locked inside rosewood boxes sunk into the ship’s paneling, accessible only by stewards.52

Despite these protective devices, Villard’s shipbuilder was so afraid of electrical fire that he refused to have anything to do with the system. Edison and Batchelor therefore gained the useful experience of supervising the installation themselves. By the time Upton arrived with the bulbs, borne in an immense basket and individually wrapped like fresh eggs, they had in effect created their first “isolated” lighting plant.53

The Columbia itself became the world’s first all-electric ship. It lay fully lit at its pier in the East River on the evening of 27 April, when Edison escorted his wife aboard for a celebratory reception. A promenade band on deck serenaded several hundred of Villard’s elegant friends as they danced below in the ballroom and went forward for supper, bathed all the time in soft incandescent light. The occasion was a rare treat for Mary, who did not have much opportunity to show off her fine wardrobe at Menlo Park. And it was yet another public relations coup for Edison. His fixtures attracted more admiration than any other of the ship’s lavish appointments. The Columbia set sail for the Horn ten days later, streaming its long lines of glowing portholes past New Jersey and Delaware until the horizon blotted them out.54

A MOST BEAUTIFUL ACCIDENT

Without doubt, the most bored worker at Menlo Park that spring was “a red-haired, freckle-faced Irish boy with a face like a hop-toad” who was seen sitting all day out of doors, dipping cordwood rail ties into a barrel of boiling asphalt. He was rendering them nonconductive for an experimental electric railway Edison was building north of the laboratory. It was another transportation project financed by Henry Villard, and was gladly undertaken by Edison as an opportunity to study the laws of motor mechanics and load balancing—both of which were important aspects of his urban lighting plan.55

The track (upon which two other urchins nearly fried themselves when they stood on opposite rails and shook hands) ran uphill across open country to a wooded ridge for about a third of a mile, then curved west for another third before looping back toward the laboratory.56 If its trajectory was slyly patterned on that of a gigantic filament, the resemblance was lost on Villard, who had been born Heinrich Hilgard in Speyer, Bavaria, and was not known for his sense of humor.

Edison excited the railroad circuit with two of the same generators he had installed on the Columbia. He assigned one of his top engineers, Charles T. Hughes, to turn a third into a locomotive by bolting it flat onto an iron truck just big enough for two men to sit behind. The driver controlled the traction of two massive fore wheels with a long friction-gear lever that came in handy as a vaulting pole at times of imminent derailment. One wheel drew power from its rail and transmitted it via a brass hub and brush to the spinning bobbin, or armature, of the motor, while the current rushed on and out the other wheel. Edison’s engine made its first trial run on 18 May and proved powerful enough to pull two cars carrying twelve to fourteen passengers, or the equivalent weight of freight.57 As such, it was a partial realization of a vision he had had four years before in the Midwest, of driverless electric trains loaded with corn crisscrossing the plains on wheels that would “grasp the track like an iron hand,” deriving their power from wind dynamos.

With refinements such as an electric headlight, signal bell, and fringe-topped observation car, the train became a popular tourist draw, although on hot days the odor of armature wafting back from the engine, mixed with that of the tar-soaked sleepers, could offend delicate nostrils. Mary Edison waited for a cool evening before she took some of her friends on what was probably history’s first electrically illuminated railway excursion.58

By early June the “Edison Express” was attaining speeds of forty miles an hour, enough to whiten what was left of Grosvenor Lowrey’s hair. “We ran off the track,” he reported to his fiancée after a day on the railway that threatened to be his last.

I protested at the speed on the sharp curves (designed to show the power of the engine) but E. said they had done it often & finally when the last trip was taken I said I did not like it, but would go as long as Edison did. The train jumped the track on a short curve, throwing Crucy [Kruesi] who was driving the engine, with his face prone in the dirt and another man in a comical somersault through some underbrush. Edison was off in a minute, jumping and laughing & declaring it a most beautiful accident. Crucy got up, his face bleeding & a good deal shaken; & I shall never forget the expression of voice & face in which he said (with some foreign accent) “Oh yes, pairfeckly safe!”59

Edison applied for a patent on various aspects of his railway, but claimed no overall priority on the system.^*16 He emphasized to reporters that Werner von Siemens had invented and operated an electric train in Berlin the year before. When news broke in July that an American engineer, Stephen Dudley Field, had been awarded letters patent for a locomotive looking remarkably like his, he reacted with jovial unconcern. Field’s claim rested solely on the novelty of a trailing arm that took current from a conductor running between or to one side of the tracks. “It is a curious thing how vague the ideas of the general public are on the question of patents….A man…draws an entire machine with his ‘improvement’ in it, and people think he has invented it all.”60

The Edison electric train, Charles Batchelor driving.

The good humor and objectivity of remarks like these, exemplifying Edison’s absolute refusal to be discouraged in any endeavor (even when the Patent Office declared his application an “interference” with Field’s), came as a tonic to pessimists like Lowrey, who worried that he was playing with ships and trains when he should be devoting all his energies to the light. Portly, bug-eyed, fiftyish, and bruisingly widowed, the little lawyer had known and loved Edison since 1869.61 He had always felt responsible for protecting his client from the push and pull of too many ideas fighting for precedence at any given time. Now the time was especially critical. As corporate counsel for the Edison Electric Light Company, Lowrey knew that its directors were concerned by the accelerating rate of Edison’s laboratory expenses, in contrast to what appeared to be halting progress toward his announcement of a central station in New York.

The appearance was true. Week by week Edison was confronted by a proliferation of development problems that would have caused any project manager less positive to see failure looming ahead, like the still-unsolved blackening of his bulbs. One day Lowrey, confessedly “ultramarine” with depression over the Electric Light Company’s finances, came out to Menlo Park to be cheered by his client, and was not disappointed: “An hour with Edison has restored [my] spirits….Perhaps I’d better marry him, since he cures me.”62

GOD ALMIGHTY’S WORKSHOP

Mindful of his own remark on the tendency of “people” to intuit the whole from the particular, Edison waved aside a growing number of press suggestions that his municipal lighting scheme for New York was a chimera. He ascribed them to lobbying by the gas industry. “I am superseding a system of artificial lighting in which is invested about $850 million,” he said to a representative of The Boston Globe. “This cannot be done in a day.”63

The reporter, more objective than Lowrey, scrutinized him as he talked, and got a distinct impression of monkishness.

He resembled a young man who had spent several years of probation in the novitiate of a Roman Catholic religious society. He had a tired appearance; his face was almost expressionless and his general ensemble made a suggestion of close confinement within doors and unceasing application and thought….His eye is brilliant, emitting a sort of electric light that bespeaks keen penetration and rapidity of perception. It illuminates his whole face, which is otherwise passive….His sandy hair is streaked with gray.64

That summer, while Francis Upton calculated the market mathematics of electrifying lower Manhattan, and Kruesi dug up Menlo Park’s red clay to bury an experimental conduit system, Edison and Batchelor absorbed themselves in filamentary experiments. The lamp factory was due to begin operations in the fall, with a projected annual output of half a million units, and they had to have the basic bulb standardized by then. There had been enough failures among lamps tested in the laboratory to recall what du Moncel had said about the atrophy of incandescent elements. Edison distrusted the mealy texture of his bristol board carbons: “Paper is man made and not good for filaments.” No matter how hard and shiny the little loops baked, they could not be relied on for equable distribution of heat under electrification.65

For week after week the two men cut, planed, and carbonized filaments from every fibrous substance they could get—hickory, holly, maple, and rosewood splints; sassafras pith; monkey bast; ginger root; pomegranate peel; fragrant strips of eucalyptus and cinnamon bark; milkweed; palm fronds; spruce; tarred cotton; baywood; cedar; flax; coconut coir; jute boiled in maple syrup; manila hemp twined and papered and soaked in olive oil. Edison rejected more than six thousand specimens of varying integrity, as they all warped or split: “Somewhere in God Almighty’s workshop there is a vegetable growth with geometrically powerful fibers suitable to our use.”^*17, 66

In the dog days, as heat beat down on straw hats and rattan parasols, the idea of bamboo suggested itself to him. Nothing in nature grew straighter and stronger than this pipelike grass, so easy to slice from the culm and to bend, with its silicous epidermis taking the strain of internal compression. It had the additional virtue, ideal for his purpose, of being highly resistant to the voltaic force. When he carbonized a few loops sliced off the outside edge of a fan, they registered 188 ohms cold, and one glowed as bright as 44 candles in vacuo. That particular specimen, being cheap Calcutta bamboo, blued at the clamps and went out after an hour or so. Splints from the Far East proved to be of much finer grain, and carbonized so well that they could take a white heat that melted the platinum clamps they stood on. Böhm blew a new pear-shaped bulb to accommodate their typical bend. In a decisive experiment on 2 August, some Japanese samples lasted nearly three and a half hours at the dazzling incandescence of 71 candles—well over four times as much light as was needed for commercial purposes. Another, reduced to the comfortable glow of sixteen candles on a current of 110 volts, burned for an astonishing 1,589 hours. On the evening it registered that record, William Hammer ran up the laboratory steps bulb in hand, like an eager knight brandishing the Holy Grail, to share the news with Edison, Batchelor, and Upton. An impromptu conga line developed behind the four men as they danced in serpentine fashion around the workbenches, then downstairs and out into the night, singing and cheering.67

From that day on, the words bamboo and filament were synonymous in the shop talk of Menlo Park.

Stages of splitting and shearing a splint of madake bamboo into filaments ready for carbonization.

LONG RIPPLES

John Kruesi was the most gifted mechanic in Edison’s employ, Swiss-trained in geometrics and physics, equally adept at precision machining (he had built the prototype phonograph) and the hard labor of laying out the world’s first underground electrical distribution system. His long arms and slope-shouldered stoop seemed to incline him naturally toward any manual task that lay within reach. He was so objective in addressing technological problems that he had to be kept away from investors. Edison tried without success to make him understand the difference between truth and “deferred truth.”68

Nevertheless, Kruesi had intuition enough to render his boss’s sketchiest diagrams into logically functioning models. The most inspired of these was a feeder-and-main principle of distribution that at one stroke solved a problem the mathematicians had been struggling with all year: how to conduct electricity through block after city block without using enormous amounts of copper. At an estimated eight hundred thousand pounds for just nine blocks, costing in excess of $700,000, the metal could have made it impossible for Edison to undercut the price of gaslight as much as he needed to, if customers were to allow him to snake wire into their premises.69

Kruesi’s invention, just as vital as that of the lamp itself, replaced the “tree” system he had originally planned. That had essentially been a trunk of copper emerging from the central station and thinning into branches and stems that then “translated,” to use his own word, into leaves of platinum and carbon. The massiveness of the trunk was necessary to convey as much electrical sap as possible to the top of the tree. Even so, Upton had warned of a 30 percent drop in power there, because of resistance along the way.

“The object of this invention is to obviate such danger and to maintain practically throughout the entire system an equal pressure,” Edison wrote, in the first of two patent applications for his feeder-and-main concept. He drew a blocky square labeled “CS” for “central station” and surrounded it with four square borderlines that expanded symmetrically, as did the lots, blocks, and districts of a typical American city. Each side of the CS square radiated a pair of lines that fed north, south, east, and west, into the resultant grid. Long ripples showed where each feeder ran to its destination main. They graphically, if unintentionally, conveyed the flow of current around the whole, in an exquisite distribution of balanced forces. Its practical effect at 110 volts^*18 was to reduce copper cost by seven-eighths, and almost completely absorb the energy loss to be expected of lamps farthest from the central station, with no visible dimming of candlepower anywhere.^*19, 70

When Sir William Thomson, Britain’s most eminent electrical scientist, was asked why no one else had dreamed up a system so simple, yet so efficient, he replied, “The only answer I can think of is that no one else is Edison.”71

In physical reality, the system was more complex than it looked on paper. Edison’s second application—one of seventy-seven that he executed for the distribution system alone—featured zoom-in diagrams and explanatory paragraphs not likely to win him speedy approval from the Patent Office: “In Fig. 6 is shown direct or main feeding circuits 1 2 and 5 6 with lamp-circuits 3 4 and 9 10 with branch feeders 7 8, 15 16, and 21 22 leading into side streets, supplying lamp-circuits 17 18, 19 20, 23 24, and 25 26, the branch feeders being derived circuits from the main feeders.” But his overall claim of providing a consumption circuit that spread drops in voltage so widely that the candlepower charge of individual lamps remained, to the naked eye, imperceptible, was so strong that letters patent were almost immediately granted him in Canada, Italy, Belgium, France, Austria, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, and India. His American patent would not arrive until after the “lamp-circuits” he designed were glowing five thousandfold around the First District in Manhattan.72

Kruesi and his gang of six diggers had no sooner finished interring Menlo Park’s subterranean experimental conduits—five miles of wired, four-by-four pine scantling boxes, each sixteen feet long—than two weeks of rain liquefied the clay that covered them. Red dribbles leaked into some of the boxes and short-circuited the conductors, even though each pair lay in grooves well sludged with coal tar and capped with extra wood. The entire grid had to be exhumed while Kruesi applied himself to the unstudied subject of insulation. He wrapped various lengths of copper cable with white rubbercloth, muslins, and marline hemp, all soaked with hot coal tar or cold paraffin or linseed oil, or smeared with resinous gums, or stewed in black pitch, pine tar, cottonseed oil, and various other proofings, but none were sufficiently water-repellent. Edison gave young Wilson Howell free rein of the laboratory library and chemical room to boil a series of compounds, some so noxious that even Otto Moses, used to pungent odors, was driven to seek fresh air. Eventually a blend of “refined Trinidad asphaltum boiled in oxidized linseed oil with paraffin and a little beeswax” was chosen, and fifteen men and boys deployed to apply it to the cables. They elevated the bare wire on sawhorses and straddled it in groups of three, each pair of hands tightly winding a spiral of sticky muslin ribbon that advanced, inch by inch and layer by layer, toward an end that never seemed to get any nearer. When, however, it eventually did, the triple-wound cable was found to resist the leakage of both current within and water without.73

The first fully insulated line was reburied and reconnected in time for Election Day, 2 November. It was looped to the laboratory and ran for a mile northeast, parallel to Thornall Avenue and the railroad. When evening came on, Edison, a staunch Republican, said to his switchboard operator, “If Garfield is elected, light up that circuit. If not, do not light it.”^*20, 74

Returns began to chatter through the laboratory’s telegraph sounder soon after dark. Edison maintained full steam in the engine room, ready to trigger the line dynamo on command. When a swing toward Garfield became evident around nine o’clock, he gave the order for power. A mile of bamboo-filamented streetlamps lit up all the way from the depot to the barn behind his house.

They stayed on until nearly midnight, in the first use of incandescent light to salute the victory of an American presidential candidate.75

“NOT A WORD WAS SAID”

Edison had little else to celebrate that fall. He was under intense pressure from the board of the Electric Light Company to demonstrate the main elements of his proposed First District illumination plan to a delegation of New York City aldermen. But he was unable to do so until a new hundred-horsepower Porter-Allen steam engine he had ordered to power Menlo Park’s enlarged plant was ready. It was still under laborious construction in Philadelphia. “Every little delay is embarrassing to us at this time,” he wrote to its builder, “and we cannot wait longer.”76

But he had to. Rumors multiplied in industry circles that after two years of announcing that he had solved the problem of subdivided electric light, the Wizard was defeated by its complexities. Meanwhile his senior glassblower, Ludwig Böhm, departed Menlo Park mit Sturm und Drang, saying in a resignation letter he was tired of being bullied by “the boys” in the laboratory. “Yesterday Mr. Batch and I had a disagreement from a cause not worth to be mentioned, which went so far that I had to hear that you were a dem side [sic] better if I were not here.”77

Edison had been depending on Böhm to help him start up the world’s first electric lamp factory—an elaborate, self-financed, $10,000 conversion of his old electric pen works down by the railroad. It had long been evident to Upton and Clarke, as they projected the labor costs involved in competing with gas illumination in New York, that some sort of molding machinery would have to be devised to speed up the production of bulbs. Deprived of Böhm’s expertise and faced with multiple other start-up problems, Edison subcontracted with the Corning Glass Company to supply him with blank globes at five dollars per gross. They arrived every day in two freight cars, thirty thousand at a time, punctual as the morning milk.78

His principal challenge at the factory was the installation of 476 towering mercury pumps. For coordinated day-to-day operation, they could not be modeled on the delicate Sprengel-and-Geissler hybrid that Francis Jehl sweated over in the laboratory. It pumped well, if slowly, as gravity pulled the liquid metal down, each drip sucking the “atmospheres” out of an attached bulb blank. But it was so encumbered with extra gauges and tubes that it required constant maintenance and repair. Edison offered a prize to any employee who could design a simpler version. Not surprisingly, Jehl won. He was rewarded with a certificate of 1.6 Electric Light Company shares and a fatherly admonition from his boss: “Keep it under your cap, Francis.”79

The efficiency of Jehl’s prototype did not alter the fact that it too worked by gravity and therefore depended on a constant circulation of mercury. Edison saw that twenty-five tons of the liquid metal would have to be held in suspension at all times in his factory line. To attain this he invented what was, in effect, a superpump for the pumps on the Archimedean screw principle. Instead of using steam energy, he drove the entire evacuation system by means of an electromotor connected to his central station, in a pioneering step toward the industrial application of electric power.80

He also had to fabricate huge carbonizing and annealing ovens for the mass production of filaments. Batchelor designed beautiful molds for them. But the first test batch of ninety bulbs to come out of the factory had an average life of only 25.8 hours, compared to the 132 days racked up by Hammer’s laboratory-made record breaker. This was less the fault of the ovens than the propensity of certain coarse-fibered bamboos to warp while incandescing. Some bent so far as to touch and melt the inside of the globe.81

Japanese bamboo remained Edison’s wood of choice for filaments. But when he learned that there were over a thousand species of Bambusca phyllostachys growing worldwide, he gave letters of credit to six freelance explorers and told them to search the Caribbean, South America, and Asia for a cane close-textured enough to stand unlimited incandescence. It was a typical large gesture that over the next few years would cost him $100,000.82

“Edison said to be progressing towards the perfection of his Electric Light & may soon be a very wealthy man,” the R. G. Dun credit agency reported. “He must have an income of a good many thousands a year but his constant experimenting eats up money exceedingly fast & it is thought he so far has not laid up much.”83

In mid-November Edison heard that sixty bulbs designed by the inventor Hiram Maxim were working well in the Equitable Life Building in New York. Their light was said to be stronger than his own, albeit less steady, since it pulsed to the rhythm of a primitive generator. He remembered Maxim visiting Menlo Park earlier in the year and spending an entire day “looking over the whole place.”84 From what his spies told him, the new bulb was nothing but a copy of his own paper-fiber original, except that its filament was tweaked in the shape of an M.^*21 But he could do nothing about a resultant whirlwind of competitive publicity, reversing the excitement he had whipped up in his own favor a year before.85

Much of it came from the professoriat. Henry Morton, in a paper read before the National Academy of Sciences, stated that Maxim’s light was “more economical and efficient” than Edison’s. The astrophysicist Henry Draper held a reception in his laboratory to coincide with the meeting and illuminated it with Maxim lamps. George Barker, the University of Pennsylvania physicist who had been so complimentary earlier in the year, told The Evening Post, “There is no doubt in my mind or in that of Professors Morton and Draper as to the value of Mr. Maxim’s remarkable discovery….I do not say that Maxim is a better electrician than Edison, but he has invented a lamp which surpasses, I believe, even Edison’s dreams.”86

Edison could afford to ignore Morton’s criticism as that of a man with little real experience of electricity.87 But Barker’s hurt. The two of them had been friends long before they went west with Draper in ’78 to observe the total eclipse of the sun. It was then that Edison had first conceived his idea of centralized electrical power, and Barker had become his most vocal academic supporter, praising him for having an “original and ingenious” scientific mind.88 Pointy-nosed and sycophantic, especially when he wanted to borrow Menlo Park equipment for his public lectures, Barker now seemed ready to rat aboard a less heavily loaded freighter.

“I notice in last evening’s NYork Post,” Edison wrote him on 23 November, “what purports to be an interview with you & wherein you are made to say some things concerning my Electric Light work which I cannot bring myself to believe ever emanated from you. Will you be good enough to say if you even so much as supplied the reporter with a foundation upon which he could build such an interview.”89

Before Barker could reply, Joseph Swan exhibited thirty-six linked, filamentary incandescent bulbs to Britain’s Society of Telegraphic Engineers. The meeting was attended by the flower of the English electrical establishment, including John Tyndall, Alexander Siemens, and William Henry Preece. Swan was coy about the substance of his carbon, saying he had a patent pending, but convincingly—and ominously—he showed it to be wire-thin and hard, yet pliable. He again claimed to have experimented with a carbonized-card conductor twenty years before and made no reference to his transatlantic rival except to recall the “non-success” of Edison’s earliest platinum lamp.^*22 According to the official record of the proceedings, he was congratulated for the “beautiful steady light” of his demonstration display.90

“Not a word was said on your behalf,” a sympathetic attendee wrote Edison, without explaining his own failure to stand up.91

Barker, in turn, confirmed the substance of his remarks in the Post. In a letter that was at once polite and patronizing, he said he had come to the conclusion that Swan and Maxim had priority as inventors of practical incandescent lamps. He was especially complimentary about the latter, whose laboratory he had just visited. “I tell you in all frankness,…the method he has for making his carbon loops, consolidates them and gives them a wonderful resisting power and durability. He has run them up to 60 candles for an entire month and they are still good.”92

Edison reserved judgment on the M-lamp. But he was aghast at Barker’s “ignorant” assertion that the coarse carbon stick that Maxim had sought to patent on 4 October 1878, was anticipatory of his own carbonized cotton filament, successfully held in incandescence a year later. More disgraceful still, from a professional point of view, was that Barker, who served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, seemed willing to embrace Swan’s completely undocumented claims, as reported in Chemical News.93

“This is a mean thing to throw at me at this late day,” Edison complained, sending a copy of Barker’s remarks to Henry Rowland. “Have you noticed lately the utter indifference of the technical press in giving credit [for] scientific work to ‘previous or first publication and public exhibition.’ ” It was as if his past willingness to let any competitor visit Menlo Park and see and test his inventions counted for nothing in journals that were supposed to be objective about the empirical process. Apparently a summary of a lecture was as good as a patent. Only one magazine had come to his defense and said that “it would be interesting to know where Mr. Swan’s labors may be found in printed form” previous to Edison’s own publications and exhibitions.94

He was particularly bitter because he had tried hard in recent months to present an image of himself as a scientist as well as an inventor, going so far as to bankroll a new weekly, Science, out of his own pocket.^*23 But the effort had been in vain. Ever since his invention of the phonograph, there had been a swelling chorus of establishment attacks on him as “the great successor of Barnum,” an unschooled self-promoter greedy for money rather than the austere accolades of learned societies. The latest crescendo, joined by Barker, was so shrill he felt he was being penalized for “my criminal efforts to devise a subdivided electric light.”95

Rowland was a scientist of impeccable probity, and for that reason he thought Barker had no business talking to reporters. “I was as much surprised as you were to see the statements about Maxim’s lamp,” he wrote Edison. “Of course it is only yours with a slight modification in the method of making it….You alone will show the world what you have done and dispose of all these petty hangers on.”96

The fact remained, however, that Maxim had filled a public building in Manhattan with incandescent light, while Edison was still rusticated in Menlo Park, with another winter coming on. When he heard that Ludwig Böhm was now blowing glass for Maxim’s United States Electric Lighting Company, he put zwei and zwei together and decided to sue for patent infringement.97 There was nothing he could do about Joseph Swan’s claim to have lit up a paper carbon in vacuo somewhere around 1860 until that inscrutable inventor’s specifications were made known.^*24

A GASLESS NEW YORK

Edison could have recalled all his bamboo explorers in December, because by then one of them, William H. Moore, had sent him an ideal variety for his filaments: Yawata madake, a giant timber from the Kansai forest of Japan.^*25 Its long, steel-strong fibers were built up of eight-sided cells that carbonized with uniform density and stiffness, held the shape of the mold when electrified, and rated an average 2,450 hours of life.98

Francis Upton tried hard to prove on paper that a central station electric illumination franchise in Manhattan would be profitable, despite delay and the physical, political, and financial obstacles still to be surmounted before the first dynamos began to spin. Working with insurance maps and his beloved slide rule, he estimated that it would cost $150,680 to wire up an initial downtown district, plus $45,989 for patent rights and other expenses. If customers plugged in ten thousand lamps and ran them five hours a day (based on current gas consumption averages), receipts should total $136,875 a year—and then would surely increase at a compound rate, as more and more New Yorkers converted to the safety and economy of incandescent light. Upton therefore felt confident in recommending that the company capitalize the plant at around $300,000, with an expectation of a payable dividend of 30 percent and a 60 percent annual return on its investment.99

Edison’s backers, however, had learned to look first and count twice before approving any scheme emanating from Menlo Park. On 17 December nine directors of the Edison Electric Light Company, led by Grosvenor Lowrey, formed a majority of the board of a new corporation, the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York. Its urgent mandate was to transfer Edison’s operations to Manhattan as soon as City Hall could be persuaded to give him permission to start digging up the streets. Edison sensed from the board’s composition, which notably represented the interests of some of the most powerful financiers on Wall Street, that he would lose much of his independence when he moved. In a vain gesture of protest, he declined to serve as a director. Lowrey slapped him down. “I shall not present your letter of resignation as Mr. Fabbri [of Drexel, Morgan] very strongly objects to your leaving the Board. His impression was that ‘Edison’s name is a tower of strength to us, and if he never attended a meeting, it would be a great loss if his name should not appear at all times among the names of the Directors.’ ”100

The Illuminating Company was duly organized and capitalized at $5 million. Five nights before Christmas Edison showed his ability to épater le bourgeois when a large party of municipal dignitaries, including eight aldermen, arrived at Menlo Park by special train.101 The sun had just gone down, and some two hundred freshly polished streetlamps were already glowing up the hillside. A little tavern by the tracks stood ready to slake the thirst the visitors had worked up on their journey. But they were corralled without refreshment into the laboratory, where for two hours Edison, wearing a sealskin skullcap, explained the intricacies of multiple-arc circuitry, feeder-and-main distribution, metering by copper deposit, and the cold ohm resistance of various bamboos. The aldermen were less interested in these subjects than whether he would entertain them to dinner at an hour earlier than one of his famous “midnight lunches.” Inexorable, he led them to a tour of the machine shop and the generation room, where the bed, if not yet the body of his new Porter-Allen engine sat on its massive foundation.

It was eight o’clock when he escorted his wilting guests back upstairs to the laboratory. The long room had been darkened during their absence, but as they crested the stairs, its thirty-seven ceiling lamps (one enclosed in a globe of shimmering water) burst into light, and a U-shaped dining table was revealed against the backdrop of Hilborne Roosevelt’s pipe organ. White-gloved waiters stood ready to serve champagne. A banquet catered by Delmonico’s ensued. Grosvenor Lowrey sat at the head of the table with Edison on his left and Chief Alderman John C. Morris, who was known to oppose the central station plan, on his right. The wine flowed copiously (Edison diluted his with liberal splashes of water), giving way to Kentucky bourbon as course followed course. By the time cigars were handed out, Morris had become an ardent advocate of municipal incandescent lighting. He told the table that Edison was “entitled to the thanks of the world for bringing this light to such perfection that it can now be made to take the place of gas.”

The superintendent of gas, Stephen McCormick, allowed that electricity was a safer illuminant. It was too easy for a hotel guest in New York to blow out his lamp on retiring “and wake up dead.” Parks Commissioner Andrew Green said that at last Central Park would have lights that did not burn foliage. Alderman John McClave waxed prophetic, seeing a gasless New York in 1900. “If at any time my voice or vote can be used to advocate the beautiful electric light which I have seen here tonight, you may count on me to use them.”

Lowrey stood up and proposed a toast to the inventor. As the rest of the company reached for their glasses, Edison remembered he was still wearing his skullcap and awkwardly snatched it off. The toast, accompanied by loud cheers, was drunk standing.

NO GOING BACK NOW

On the following morning, New York newspapers announced that the Illuminating Company had a permit to bring incandescent electric light to fifty-one blocks downtown. Its First District, one of a projected twenty-six, would run from the East River to Nassau Street in the west, Wall Street in the south, and Spruce in the north. That square mile encompassed some of the densest real estate in the city, including the headquarters of several major financial institutions (notably Drexel, Morgan & Co.) and many townhouses and tenements.102 Somewhere in the parcel, wherever Edison might find a lot that suited him, he could build his central station, and the streets were his to dig—subject to approval by the next board of aldermen, taking office in the new year.

Lowrey was uneasy about the permit, which could be revoked at any time. What he needed from the new administration was a formal ordinance, and knowing the ways of City Hall, it was bound to be expensive. But that was his problem, not Edison’s. There could be no going back now on the revolution engineered at Menlo Park. After four and a half years of monastic seclusion and communal experiment, the inventor and his “boys” (many of whom had had their own champagne party at the tavern, with bottles purloined from the laboratory stash) were going to have to face the pain of diaspora—and with it, what amounted to the end of youth.103

Heavy snow fell on the twenty-seventh, whitening the little clutch of buildings that Henry Ford would one day resurrect in another state, in another century.

THE PATIENCE OF JOB

Menlo Park in the winter of 1880–81. Painting by Richard F. Outcault.

The advent of 1881, accompanied by a partial solar eclipse, portended great changes but found Edison in a melancholy mood. It was evident that the recent assaults on his reputation still stung. “I think I ought to have credit for what I have accomplished,” he complained to a correspondent of the Chicago Tribune. “Only a year ago the subdivision of the current for lights was declared a practical impossibility….Everybody was down on me, and now a fellow named Swan is making an exhibition in London of my incandescent lamps.”104 The possessive pronoun betrayed his fury that William Spottiswoode, president of the Royal Society and titular descendant of Sir Isaac Newton, should announce that Swan had at last solved the problem of the electric light.

Edison threw up his hands. “What’s the use of a man trying to do anything anyway? If he keeps things secret and will not tell everything, he is denounced as a mountebank, and if he does things openly, they steal all his ideas.”105

It did not occur to him that Old World sensibilities, attuned to the virtues of self-deprecation and proper procedure, recoiled from his American tendency to overshare—exactly what he was doing now—and his naïveté in assuming that every invention he boasted about, or let competitors borrow for testing, would not soon be imitated. To establishmentarians like Spottiswoode, a product of Eton, Harrow, and Oxford, Edison was an embarrassing example of the genus Americanus egotisticus, lacking Latin and even guile, which made him anybody’s fool.

Guile was a quality Joseph Swan possessed in abundance. It had enabled him to climb in British society far above what Spottiswoode would call his “station,” a working-class niche considerably lower than Edison’s. He too had little formal education, having been apprenticed to a chemist in his teens and employed in a provincial pharmacy before he began experimenting with lightbulbs. This was, according to his first recollection, in 1855, a date that he and his family would progressively push back to 1848, the year of Edison’s first birthday. Since then Swan had made all the right career moves, setting himself up in London as a gentleman-inventor and waiting twenty years to patent his filamentary lamp.106

“Talk about the patience of Job,” Edison scoffed.107

LOVE OR MONEY

On the Feast of the Epiphany three kings of the New York financial world—John Pierpont Morgan, Egisto Fabbri, and Jacob C. Rogers—paid a late-afternoon visit to Menlo Park to convince themselves that they were wisely investing in his system. The sight of five hundred lamps casting pools of orange-tinted light on the snow at a flick of Edison’s wrist was all the evidence necessary. “I don’t believe you could buy a share of this stock for love or money,” one of them remarked.108

Edison had recovered his good humor by now, and drew an aide’s attention to the sight of the great “J.P.” leaning thoughtfully against one of the laboratory worktables and flicking his shoes with an ivory-topped umbrella. “Hammer, look at Morgan, you would not think he had $100,000 in this, would you?”109

From then on Drexel, Morgan & Co. acted as the Illuminating Company’s bankers, promoted its interests abroad, and managed Edison’s personal portfolio.110

As expected, the new mayoral administration of William Grace proved avid for tax money in return for its blessing on the First District lighting scheme. Its initial demand was for more than $1,056 per mile of street conduits, plus a 3 percent share of all gross receipts once the system commenced business. But Morgan’s lobbying power was formidable, and the city eventually settled for a mere trench fee of five cents per linear foot. Its only other demand was that Edison reimburse the cost of having inspectors on site at all times during the installation period. (He was soon to find out that “at all times” meant a brief appearance on payday.) Otherwise he was free to start laying tubes as soon as the ground of lower Manhattan thawed.111

Before he transferred the bulk of his operation there, he wanted his systems analyst, Charles Clarke, to conduct a rigorous test of the whole Menlo Park system, to be sure that it could be economically duplicated to scale in New York.112 It was not necessary to include the new Porter-Allen engine, which had at last been delivered but not yet set up in the machine shop. He had other plans for it. In the meantime his old eighty-horsepower Brown unit, linked to eleven dynamos, could be trusted to drive the test.

As the most mathematical intellect on Edison’s staff, Clarke rejoiced in the algebra that thickened in his logbooks after the system powered up at 9:22 P.M. on 28 January.113 The ciphers 772t (W + wS + W¹s) signified to him that a calorimeter had obtained the full value of the economy of the lamps under observation, while a certain amount of energy was being lost in the conductors. Edison was happy to take his word for it, and even happier to accept Clarke’s conclusion, at the end of the twelve-hour test, that all aspects of the system, from the “clear, free-burning egg coal” in the boiler to the last light in thirty-nine thousand feet of circuitry, were well coordinated. The most important figure in Clarke’s final report was a ratio of 7.25 lamps per horsepower, substantially better than that of gas, and he did not doubt that with improvements in dynamo design it could be increased. Delighted, Edison told him, “After this we will make electric light so cheap that only the rich will be able to burn candles.”114

YOUNG LADIES WHIRLED

January gave way to February, and the young men of Menlo Park, several of whom were now married, braced to hear which of them would shortly be ordered to find quarters in the city. For a year or two at least and perhaps forever, the Old Man was going to have to change his country hats for the bowlers and stovepipes of fashionable Manhattan. (Mr. Morgan wanted an Edison lighting plant in his house, and so did Mr. Vanderbilt.)115

Mary Edison—twenty-five years old, mother of three, universally liked for her sweet nature, if not her love of loud clothes—had as much reason as any to have conflicting feelings about the looming change.116 Her big house was the village’s social center, while she had only one good friend in New York. She was by no means a country girl, having grown up in Newark, and since she enjoyed spending money, her husband’s intent to reside on Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, not far from the couturiers and confectioners of “Ladies’ Mile,” sounded agreeable. But her working-class background might “show” more, in such a milieu, than it did in Menlo Park. Marion and Tom would no longer be able to roam freely about the countryside and make themselves pesky in their father’s laboratory. They would require a governess in town, not to mention a nanny for William, aged two. Mary would miss the live-in companionship of her sister Alice, who was sweet on William Holzer the glassblower, and she would not be able to drive twelve miles down the turnpike to see her parents whenever she felt like it.117

Edison had no intention of cutting all local ties, as long as the lamp factory, railway, and machine shop kept running. The laboratory too could be maintained by a skeleton staff, until he found a substitute location in town. And the house with its adjoining green fields would make a pleasant summer retreat, remote as that prospect might seem in the middle of a particularly white winter.

Mary made the most of her last days at home by doing what she loved to do—dress up and entertain. A reporter from The New York Herald, sent out to view the laboratory’s closing display of lamps, wrote a description of the little world she was about to leave behind:

Mrs. Edison’s parlors were brilliant indeed….You do not know what the Edison electric light in a house is until you have seen the pendant globes, spreading uninterrupted radiance on all beneath and around. There was a merry company, full of life and triumph. An Italian gentleman sang a Neapolitan impromptu to his own accompaniment. Young ladies whirled in the waltz….We went down to the depot, and as the train came thundering by to bring us to the city, the jingle of sleigh bells rang over the snow from near the Professor’s house, for there is no pleasure at Menlo Park like sleighing by electric lights when the public has gone away.118

YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN HER RUN

The Menlo Park diaspora began on 5 February with the departure of Charles Batchelor for Paris. He was charged with preparing an exhibit for the great Exposition Internationale d’Électricité, to be held in that city later in the year.119

Edison had hesitated before agreeing to take space in the show,120 just when he should be establishing himself in New York and beginning the biggest practical task of his career. But it would be the first such event devoted entirely to the science and technology of electricity. Maxim and Swan were bound to be there, attempting to dazzle the public and the press with their imitation lamps. There would be demonstrations, medals, and worldwide publicity. Edison did not see how he could avoid participating—except to send the all-capable “Batch” to deputize for him.

With Batchelor gone, and Upton put in charge of the lamp factory—now incorporated as the Edison Electric Lamp Company—the question arose as to who would become the boss’s new right-hand man. It did not remain unsettled for long. Two mornings after Batchelor sailed, Edison, bursting with energy and excitement, shouted across the laboratory at Charles L. Clarke, “Come on, Clarke; pack up at once and come with me to New York. We’re going to begin business right off!”121

By noon they were walking into a four-story, double-width brownstone at 65 Fifth Avenue. Edison announced it as the new headquarters of the Edison Electric Light Company.

“The company has made you chief engineer,” he said, rushing Clarke upstairs. “This is your office, the furniture will be here this afternoon. Furniture for your living room upstairs will be here too—I want you on hand all the time!”122

The brownstone quickly became known as “65.” It stood on the east side of the avenue just south of Fourteenth Street, its sixteen tall windows unfurling striped awnings against the afternoon sun—which at this time of the year set, symbolically enough, over Menlo Park.123

Edison could have moved his family into a suite on the top floor. But he chose to use it as a laboratory and looked for an apartment elsewhere, pending a house rental somewhere in the neighborhood.^*26 For the rest of that month Mary and the children remained in the country, while he supervised the transfer of staff and equipment across the Hudson.

As Edison’s behavior with Clarke indicated, he was in one of his periods of cyclonic overcharge, excited by the project ahead of him much as a dynamo is “excited” by connection to a start-up machine. The comparison became actual on the twenty-eighth, when he and Clarke reunited at Menlo Park for an experiment that nearly became the last for both of them.

One integer of Edison’s central station plan—the most important of all—was still unsatisfactory: its generation plant. Eleven bipolar dynamos had been able to handle the demands of the model system and electric railway, but a plant many times more powerful would be needed to light up the First District. He had realized this since last spring, when he assigned Upton and Clarke, his two experts in electromagnetic theory, to build him a dynamo with sixteen times the capacity of any previously made. The spinning armature alone would weigh one and a half tons.124

It was for this leviathan that he needed his hundred-horsepower Porter-Allen steam engine. Clarke believed that the optimum rotor speed for the new dynamo should be 350 revolutions per minute. Edison, just to make sure, had asked Charles T. Porter to build a machine fast enough to drive a locomotive. Part of the delay in delivery lay in his extra demand that the engine be configured to couple directly with the dynamo by means of a mutual shaft, in a union of steam and electricity sure to incite coarse jokes among the “boys.”

Hitherto all generators had been linked to their driving engines indirectly, through geared wheels and belting. Edison saw that much energy was lost that way. He was hoping that direct transfer, high speed, and low internal resistance might give him as much as 90 percent efficiency, rather than the 60 percent generally considered the limit any electrical engineer could expect from a dynamo.125 But the imponderable was vibration—hence the two-foot depth of the Porter-Allen’s cast iron bed, and the massiveness of its foundation in the machine shop.

The combined unit was now assembled and ready to test at Menlo Park.126 Charles Porter, summoned from Philadelphia, was given the honor of operating his own engine. Feeling too nervous to do so at close quarters, he attached a chain to the throttle and backed away as far as possible before pulling it. Steam pressure built up slowly while Edison, stopwatch in hand, kept calling for more power. Then the governor took hold, and the dynamo accelerated at a compound rate until, in Clarke’s words, “all the moving parts became a blur like that produced by flies’ wings.” Not only the foundation but the entire shale hillside began to shake underfoot. If any Wagnerian had been present, he might have called it der Erdenton, the bass note of all creation, but there was only Edison, stopwatch in hand, yelling “Hup…hup.”127

Clarke could feel the hair rising on his neck. At Edison’s signal he activated the speed indicator and found that the dynamo was spinning at 750 RPM. That being dangerously close to its disintegration point, Porter was allowed to throttle the engine down. Clarke was not happy with the performance of the armature, but Edison felt confident, now, that he had a prototype for six even larger dynamos to install in his central station. Years later he boasted to the editor of Electrical Review about the time he nearly maxed out a big Porter-Allen: “You should have seen her run! Why, every time the connecting rod went up she tried to lift the whole hill with her!”128

A PRIVATE SECRETARY BEYOND PRICE

Edison installed his family in the Chipman Boarding House at 72 Fifth Avenue on 1 March 1881. It was a date that coincided with the entry into his life of Samuel Insull, fresh off a steamer from England. Twenty-one years old, short and skinny and side-whiskered, with popping eyes and a humorless manner acquired from reading the motivational tomes of Samuel Smiles (Self-Help; Character; Thrift; Duty), Insull did not look like a youth destined to become one of the richest men on earth. However, he came highly recommended by Edward Johnson, who had known him in London and thought Edison could use someone with a bookkeeper’s brain to take charge of his personal and financial affairs.129

Insull was well qualified, having worked as the factotum of Edison’s chief European representative, Col. George Gouraud. During that time he had become a passionate subscriber to the Edison legend, and could have dreamed of no greater good luck than to be hired sight unseen by “one of the great master minds of the world.” Johnson escorted him up the steps of “65” and introduced him to Edison in the bare back office. Insull’s first reaction was surprise that anyone so famous would wear a seedy black three-piece suit and rough brown overcoat. But the face over the carelessly knotted white silk neckerchief was unforgettable. “What struck me above everything else was the wonderful intelligence and magnetism of his expression, and the extreme brightness of his eyes.”130

That same night, Insull discovered that his new boss was something of a child about money. Edison pulled out his checkbook and revealed without embarrassment that he had $78,000 cash in the bank. Which of his European telephone securities, he asked, should he sell in order to capitalize three private ventures right away—a bigger lamp factory, a works for the production of dynamos, and a company to lay tubes under the streets of New York?131

Insull was able to answer on the spot, because he had made it his business to read all Edison’s contracts passing through Gouraud’s office. He had a photographic memory for stocks and shares, and told Johnson, who was returning to Europe to handle the transactions, exactly which ones to divest and where. Edison had, for example, a reversionary interest in the United Telephone Company of London worth around $100,000, and he might get as much again from a deal Gouraud was trying to swing with the Bell Company in the Far East. By four o’clock in the morning Insull had been through Edison’s books and compiled a schedule of foreign patent rights as collateral against which further funds could be borrowed. If Edison was not yet assured by this performance that he had acquired a private secretary beyond price, then he was by Insull’s ability to work through the night without apparent fatigue. A mutual contempt for the clock was to prove their strongest bond in the years to come.132

FACTORIES OR DEATH

Charles Clarke thought that Edison’s impatience to start up three manufacturing adjuncts to the central station project, all independent of the Electric Light Company, was due to his “bull-like” overconfidence. He blamed himself for reporting so favorably on the Menlo Park system that the Old Man assumed it would work just as well when duplicated on a huge scale downtown.133 By the same token, any small problems he had glossed over were likely to loom large.

Actually Edison already felt around his neck the “leaden collar” of corporate caution, personified by Sherburne B. Eaton, general manager and vice-president of the company. Eaton was a Civil War veteran who liked to be called “Major,” and though small, occupied the largest office at “65.” Even before they each moved in, Eaton had made it plain that his fellow directors believed their prime asset to be the patents they had acquired from Edison in 1878, in return for financing his development of the electric light. The time for experiments, Eaton’s neat little goatee seemed to say, was now over, and the company’s last great investment must be in construction of the First District.134 If it was as successful as Edison promised it would be, cities around the world would clamor to replicate it, and his patents would become so priceless that he would never need lay another cable.

Consequently, most board members were opposed to getting into the manufacturing business, which they viewed as an unnecessary indulgence. They had put more than $130,000 into Edison’s scheme without seeing so much as a cobble lifted downtown. Budget watchers at Drexel, Morgan failed to see why tubes and dynamos could not be bought instead of being expensively custom-made. Nor could they understand why he would want another lamp factory. The one at Menlo was blowing one thousand bulbs a day, and madake filaments were coming out of the ovens uniformly carbonized after being packed in with peat moss.135

Edison believed that it would be profitable in the long run to manufacture every part of the central station system. He was so convinced of this that he did not quail even when told that he would have to pay the Electric Light Company for the right to use his own patents. It was worth it in order to keep control of the whole operation. In any case, who but he could make things that nobody else had ever made—switchboards, regulators, current indicators, conduits, feeder-and-main junction boxes, connectors, meters, and house wiring, down to the very sockets that held his lamps?136

“Since capital is timid,” he told Major Eaton, “I will raise and supply it. The issue is factories or death.”137

Insull had no sooner snatched his first few hours of sleep in America than he found himself being hustled down to 104 Goerck Street, near the East River, to see the first of these facilities—an immense old iron-making shop now emblazoned EDISON MACHINE WORKS in letters three feet high. Edison had leased, refurbished, and equipped it for $65,000, contributing 90 percent of that sum himself, and Charles Batchelor was putting up the rest.^*27, 138

In view of what Insull already knew about Edison’s finances, he uttered no protest when he heard that he was to be paid only $100 a month, half what he had earned in London. His discretion was rewarded. As Edison proceeded to organize subsidiary after subsidiary in years following, Insull was appointed corporate secretary of all of them, and each paid him a salary to match. He even received, unasked for, a stock bonus of $15,000 after twelve months’ service. “If you pushed Edison in money matters, he was as stingy as hell, but if you left the matter to him he was as generous as a prince.”139

Another immediate start-up was the Electric Tube Company, to be run out of a shop on Washington Street by John Kruesi. It began to wire up subscriber buildings as soon as the city issued its ordinance of approval on 19 April. The franchise, negotiated by Grosvenor Lowrey, could hardly have been broader. It gave Edison the right to “lay tubes, wires, conductors and insulators, and to erect lamp-posts within the lines of the streets and avenues, parks and public places of the City of New York, for conveying and using electricity or electrical currents for purposes of illumination.” He could do so not only in his chosen First District but in another one uptown if he wanted.140

In the same month two veterans of Edison’s earliest days in Manhattan, Edward Johnson and the fabricator Sigmund Bergmann, partnered to form Bergmann & Co., with a contract “to produce electric-light fixtures”—switches, bulb-holders, panels, meters—that were too small for the mighty machines on Goerck Street. Edison contributed almost half the firm’s capital, much more than Johnson’s 12 percent, but as with the Tube Company, he took no titular credit—possibly to prevent his corporate backers from thinking he was spreading himself too thin.

However, when he put $5,000 cash down in early May on another vast complex in East Newark, New Jersey, reserving it for lamp production once the Menlo Park factory became too small, his pride in the basic bulb that had triggered all this expansion could not be suppressed. The factory—three massive wings linked with bridges, covering a whole city block—was acquired for $52,250 under the aegis of the Edison Electric Lamp Company.141 As such it constituted the fourth and final arm of his new industrial empire.^*28

There remained only the purchase of a suitable structure to house his central station in lower Manhattan. Edison may not have been much of a money man, but he had a nose for real estate. It led him in more respects than one to the leather-trade corridor of Pearl Street. That part of the First District was especially aromatic in warming spring weather, because most of the ninety elevators that serviced its warehouses were horse-drawn. Drays ridden by boys could be seen on the flat rooftops, patrolling back and forth as bales of hides rose and fell. How the horses got up there was a question that Edison could investigate once he had made a deal to buy numbers 255 and 257, two conjoined four-story buildings on a lot five thousand feet square. He paid $65,000 on behalf of the Electric Illuminating Company, a pittance compared to what he would have had to shell out had Pearl Street been closer to the banking houses of Wall Street, five blocks away. But besides price, the site had the virtue of being—as required—central to the district, and the money he had saved buying it would enable him to reconfigure the buildings as extensively as he liked.142

He saw at once that the second floor of number 257 might collapse under the weight of the six dynamo-engine combinations he meant to install. Nor could he trust the north and south walls to support the heavy girders that would support them: what was necessary was for Clarke to build a complete internal wrought-iron bridge, almost as massive as an elevated railway. Beneath it, a battery of boilers would supply steam heat to the engines, and they would be fed by continuous conveyance of coal up from the basement. On the third floor he would place his voltage regulators, and on the fourth a bank of one thousand load-monitoring lamps would glow at all times. (The big advantage he had over the gaslight companies was that his power could be drawn on during the day, by sewing machines and the like.) The twin building next door at number 255 would serve for service, sleeping quarters, and storage.143

By 27 May Edison, working with manic energy, had started every project necessary to complete the First District within (he hoped) six or seven months. As yet all this peripheral activity—administrative planning at “65,” lamp production at Menlo Park, dynamo assembly at the Works, Kruesi casting miles of conductor pipes in a shop on Washington Street, Bergmann rattling out auxiliary appliances on Wooster—was ragged and unconnected, like the slow start of a storm system. But momentum was building, and concentration would come, until everything converged on the switch he would throw—with luck, sometime in November—to begin the incandescent illumination of the world.

THE BALLS OF THE FIRMAMENT

“Boulevard St Antoine that damnable merchants of inhumanity Citenian wharfrats. Why Centenus dost run a line already greased from Sirus to Capella with angularity,” Edison scrawled in the midst of a laboratory notebook otherwise full of engineering data, “whereon ten million devils slide down to the fathermost sag and piss into pendemonum.”144

He was either recounting a dream, or teasing Charles Hughes, the main keeper of the notebook, into thinking that he had lost his wits, or—more likely—amusing himself by seeing how much nonsense his pencil would write before the point wore down. “Tell me winged soldier of Hell if in the farthermost ends of infinity warted demons with carvernous mouths spit saliva on the balls of the firmament….”145

Some of the imagery in this stream of consciousness—the Rue Saint-Antoine, the wharf rats, the warted demons—pointed to the Paris of his favorite novelist, Victor Hugo.146 The jets of saliva might as well have related to something of contemporary concern to him: a report that workers at the lamp factory were salivating excessively as they worked the pumps. That was a sure sign of mercury poisoning. Much else, including references to water closets in the underworld and men sleeping on telegraph poles, sounded like deliberate nonsense, unless it related somehow to the work he planned downtown.

Edison completed four pages, ending with an assertion that Thomas De Quincey, “had he a brain 300 miles in diameter full of opium,” could never have comprehended the passion of the lovers in Longfellow’s poem Evangeline—another of his favorites. Then he flipped the last page, scratched a tight, symmetrical zigzag, and left his screed for posterity to puzzle over.147

LA GRANDE GÉNÉRATRICE

As it happened, opium was a problem in his own family. Mary took so much of it, in the form of medicinal morphine, that her friends feared she might one day take too much. She was often plagued with neuralgia, that common complaint of housebound nineteenth-century women,148 and when it struck, she could not rely on her peripatetic husband to nurse her.^*29

Edison was closemouthed about Mary in public, and only on the rarest occasions hinted, obliquely to intimates, that she was the girl he should have left behind. After meeting Kate Armour, the gifted young Canadian his attorney had married, he burst out with, “Why is it, Lowrey, that so few women have brains?”149

The question excluded Kate, whom he took to at once and presented with one of his souvenir calligraphed notes: “How do you do my dear Miss Armor? The Electric Light is a success, take my word for it.” Lowrey was surprised and told Kate, “I never heard him refer to any woman the second time.” He liked Mary but thought her ill equipped to be the helpmeet of a genius. “Edison’s experience,” he confided, “is of the slightest and poorest.”150

For the moment Mary seemed well enough. She took full advantage of the stores along Ladies’ Mile, wearing ever more brilliant outfits and parading Marion in party dresses of nile green or yellow satin, with hand-painted flowers.151 She loved going to the theaters and music halls, and even bought tickets to the occasional society ball, but her husband invariably bowed out on account of his deafness, so she had to rely on the company of friends.

It was fortunate for Edison, busier than he had ever been,^*30 that Mary had the house at Menlo Park to retreat to when the weather warmed in Manhattan. Her absence across the river this summer enabled him to supervise preparations at the Machine Works for the imminent international exposition in Paris. Ever since his decision to participate, Charles Batchelor had been working to fill two halls of the Palais de Champs-Élysées with a display of all his electrical inventions to date—the vote recorder, the duplex and quadruplex and octoplex telegraphs, the electric pen, the phonograph, the tasimeter, and dozens of others—all to be bathed in the incandescence of his latest and greatest. And the pièce de résistance was to be a dynamo even bigger than the one that had shaken the hillside at Menlo.152

Resistance, indeed, was key to its performance. Edison’s theory of generator design was that the larger the armature, the fewer ohms would inhibit its flow of current. Accordingly he gave it a spinning core of laminated iron and heavy copper bars connected in pairs, fore and aft, to aureole-shaped copper “tits.”153 The field magnet, nearly six feet long, consisted of eight solid iron cylinders, each wound with more than two thousand turns of insulated copper wire.154 Rotational power was applied directly, as to the dynamo’s predecessor. But because the fast Porter-Allen engine had never worked well in a close embrace, causing dynamos to spark and build up heat, Edison ordered a 125-horsepower Armington & Sims unit that would run slower and, with luck, cooler.155

When all the components of this colossus were bolted together at the Works, its thirty-ton bulk inspired awe. It measured fourteen feet in length and towered taller than Francis Upton. Edison had spared no expense to perfect it, even gold-plating lugs and screws to lower resistance. Energy reduced to essence, it was a thing of brutal beauty, with all the basic forms of geometry massed around the invisible confluence of electrical and magnetic waves. But when tested at the end of June, it too got hot and sparked, with arcs cracking between adjacent induction bars. Edison began to lose hope that the machine would be ready in time for the opening of the exposition on 11 August. He ordered an emergency reconstruction and rewinding of the armature, deploying two shifts of fifty-five and sixty workers around the clock for eight days. While they dismantled the core, he filled twenty-three pages of his notebook with wiring diagrams of almost astronomical beauty.156

Eventually he settled on a combination of slimmer bars painted with zinc white, wrapped in japanned paper, and cooled by a fan blowing air through the interstices. Voltage dropped as a result, so he added two extra electromagnets to the upper field cores. This threw the circuit somewhat out of alignment, but restored tension to the point that the dynamo efficiently lit seven hundred lamps at 350 revolutions per minute.157 But he made a mistake in amalgamating the commutator and brushes with an excess of mercury, to keep resistance to a minimum. Those surfaces oxidized in time and threw off such clouds of toxic vapor that attendants at the Works salivated as badly as their mates in the lamp factory.158

Shell winding for Edison’s large magneto dynamo, February 1879.

He solved the problem by reamalgamating often and polishing with the care of a silversmith.^*31 That lowered resistance to less than one-hundredth of an ohm. But so many other “bugs” required fixing that Charles Batchelor, representing him at the exposition, had to fall back on two smaller dynamos to illuminate the Edison rooms. Opening day came and went. Visitors hoping to see la grande génératrice d’Edison were told they might have to wait another month before it could be exhibited.159

By the end of August it seemed ready to ship. Edison had to go west to pick up Mary, who had been taken ill on a family visit to Port Huron.160 Some instinct prompted him to test the dynamo one more time before he left. No sooner had it powered up than the crankshaft shattered and flew across the room. Fortunately no one was killed. He examined the broken iron, cursing, and was amazed to see that Armington & Sims had failed to anneal it.161

When he got back from Michigan early in September, the dynamo was working again with a new steel shaft and was at last ready to ship. It was booked on the French liner Canada, departing 7 September for Le Havre. With only four hours to go before the hold closed, sixty Machine Works employees disassembled the dynamo and packed it into 137 crates, while Edison leaned on Tammany Hall to give his delivery trucks quick passage to the loading dock. Police held up traffic, and a fire bell cleared the way as the horses sped across town. Stevedores were waiting at the Compagnie générale transatlantique pier. The last box was taken aboard with an hour to spare.162

“FIVE GOLD MEDALS”

As things turned out, he need not have hurried. The Paris exposition, plagued by power problems, had not so much opened as half-opened, offering only dull or dark displays at first, except for a bluish mix of arc and incandescent light near the ground-floor entrance. Edison’s lamps at least shone steadily, if not strongly, while Batchelor and William Hammer coaxed as much current as they could out of the main line at their disposal. The arrival of the great dynamo from America on 23 September caused widespread excitement, since it was four times the size of any generator yet seen in Europe. Edison had given it the model mark C, to distinguish it from his smaller bipolars, but because of its elephantine proportions, it soon acquired the nickname “Jumbo.”163

When it brought Edison’s exquisite lamp displays to full brilliancy, a tone of rueful admiration crept into the commentaries of French scientific writers, who for the last couple of years had vied with their British colleagues in mocking the promises of le solitaire de Menlo-Park. They could hardly avoid seeing that he had put together all the elements of a complete lighting system—as opposed to Swan and Maxim, who exhibited lamps and chandeliers only. “Edison is not a myth,” Le Figaro had to admit. Henri de Parville wrote in Le Journal des débats, “Times have certainly changed. All doubts are gone. Those who want physical evidence, like Saint Thomas, can see his lamps now with their own eyes.”164

Edison’s “Jumbo” dynamo at the Paris Electrical Exposition, 1881.

Perhaps the most influential of these skeptics was Théodose du Moncel. He published a long article in La Lumière électrique retracting his former dismissal of Edison as a “pompous” poseur—as well he might, because the Electric Light Company was now paying him a thousand francs a month to represent its interests in Europe. Nevertheless, an international panel of examiners found in mid-October that Edison’s bulbs, boosted by his three-thousand-watt power plant, had an efficiency rating of 12.73 lamps per horsepower. Swan’s rated 10.71, little better than those of his compatriot George Lane Fox at 10.61 and Maxim’s, at 9.48.165

On 22 October Grosvenor Lowrey, who was in Paris representing the interests of the Electric Light Company, cabled Edison in New York:

OFFICIAL LIST PUBLISHED TODAY SHOWS YOU IN THE HIGHEST CLASS OF INVENTORS. NO OTHER EXHIBITORS OF ELECTRIC LIGHT IN THAT CLASS, SWAN LANE FOX AND MAXIM RECEIVE MEDALS IN CLASS BELOW. THE SUB-JURIES HAD VOTED YOU FIVE GOLD MEDALS BUT GENERAL CONGRESS PROMOTED YOU TO THE DIPLOMA OF HONOR CLASS ABOVE. THIS IS COMPLETE SUCCESS THE CONGRESS HAVING NOTHING HIGHER TO GIVE.166

Almost simultaneously another cable arrived at 65:

EDISON N.Y.—YOU HAVE RECEIVED THE HIGHEST AWARD THE JURY HAD TO GIVE. I CONGRATULATE YOU.

JOSEPH W. SWAN^*32, 167

BOTH OF THEM DIED

Edison received the news of his five medals without comment. He was at work on another generator—“Jumbo No. 2”—even bigger than the one in Paris. Edward Johnson had ordered it for an exhibition to be held at the Crystal Palace, London, in January 1882. A New York Times reporter was given the honor of a private demonstration in the Machine Works. It took place at four in the morning, an hour more convenient to his host than to himself.168

“You are seeing what nobody else ever witnessed before tonight,” Edison said, rubbing his hands with glee as a rheostat turned and row after row of lamps ignited on the test room’s high ceiling. “A thousand electric lights, all from one dynamo.” The armature accelerated to 360 RPM, flickering with an electric nimbus so strangely colored that the Times man could only describe it as “indescribable.”169

It would be equally hard for any chronicler to find words for the blur of energy that Edison himself had now become. Thirty-five and at his mental and physical peak, he was everywhere and nowhere to those who tried to keep up with him or merely corner him long enough to get a recall of the old Menlo Park experimenter, always willing to stop and chat, doodle out tunes on the organ, and swap lunch boxes—even, on occasion, shutting up shop, renting a boat, and taking the “boys” out fishing off Sandy Hook. Over and above medals, he had gotten what he most wanted from the exposition—international respect.

This, however, did not help him much in downtown New York, where Kruesi’s Electric Tube Company was finding the work of completing the First District’s distribution system almost prohibitively slow. The businessmen and householders who had signed up for electric lighting were wired up and waiting to see and smell the last of their gas mantles. But the city would not allow the laying of mains and feeders under the streets during the day, and the delayed delivery of copper cable and parts had prevented a start to nighttime excavations until the fall. A troop of Irish navvies was racing to dig as many trenches as possible before the subsoil froze. Edison saw that he would have to abandon his dream of illuminating the District in November, and that he would be lucky to do so within the next year.170

The navvies had fifteen miles of iron pipes to connect, twice that length of half-moon conductors to thread, hot insulation compound to pour, and heavy junction boxes to bolt down, toiling beneath harsh arc lamps and enduring the ire of pedestrians who wanted to know why current could not be distributed via overhead wires. It was difficult for them to understand that something as bodiless as electricity needed protection. The work was filthy and dangerous, with accidental gas leaks and at least one short-circuit that lifted a passing horse off the wet cobbles.171

Edison often helped out in the trenches, as if his own muscle would accelerate the Tube Company’s forward progress of no more than a mile a week. He rejoiced in hard labor and often did not go home to sleep. Instead he napped on the spare tubes that Kruesi stored in the cellar at number 255, half-fulfilling his fantasy of men who slept on telegraph poles. He did not seem to care that the iron rounds were tarry and striped his overcoat. Nor was he bothered by the damp as winter approached. “I had two Germans who were testing there,” he reported, “and both of them died of diphtheria.”172

In contrast to these nights downtown, he enjoyed cerebral evenings at Delmonico’s with a new friend, the great Hungarian violinist Edouard Reményi. They could hardly have come together from cultures farther apart, but to Reményi, Edison’s technological talk was a new kind of music. “Since I was with Victor Hugo and Liszt,” he wrote after one of their dialogues, “I was never so much in intellectual heaven.”173 He jokingly appointed himself “court musician” at the Machine Works, as he had once been at Windsor Palace, and treated Edison to several private recitals there and at 65, weeping as he played. When Edison asked why, he said, “I always weep when I hear really good music.”^*33, 174

By November the Works had geared up to the extent that it had a backlog of well over 130 smaller generators for sale, along with successors to the giant Paris and London machines. This contrasted with a double decline in productivity and quality at the Lamp Company in Menlo Park. Edison resolved on “a grand bounce of the bugs” before he moved that facility to its new quarters in East Newark. He recrossed the river and within eight days had lengthened lamp life from four hundred hours to six hundred. “I had just 18 hours sleep that week without my boots being off.” Not trusting Francis Upton to improve on his improvement, he elected to stay at the Park all winter if necessary, until his bulbs were twice as energy-efficient as they had been.175

Christmas marked the tenth anniversary of his marriage to Mary. She celebrated by reopening their house and hosting a dance party. It was elaborate enough that Insull asked the Pennsylvania Railroad to make special arrangements for guests traveling back to New York in the small hours.176 Edison’s deafness prevented him from enjoying such occasions as much as she did. But the Patent Office had a gift for him on 27 December: the award of a patent, U.S. 251,545, on his electrolytic meter, a coilless device so simple that it measured current without needing any to operate itself.177

Much as his future lighting customers were going to dislike it, the meter was, with the possible exception of his big dynamo, his most important invention of the year. Without a reliable tally of power consumed or power saved month by month, the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York could never function profitably. There was no shortage of other devices almost as ingenious, such as an “electrical knockdown chandelier” that could be pulled apart and reassembled without tortuous rewiring. Edison was in the midst of a phenomenally fertile period, executing, on average, one new patent every four days.178 His total of successful applications in 1880 had been fifty-nine; this year would see another ninety, and next year well over a hundred. Over the entire decade he would average one patent a week (starting with the electric light and ending with a hydraulically regulated phonograph), while combining the duties of manufacturer, engineer, entrepreneur, publicist, plotter, executive, and family man in a torrent of hyperactivity to be stopped only twice, and temporarily, by das Ewig-Weibliche.

DESIGNED TO FLASH DAGGERS

When Chief Sitting Bull, one of the celebrities who chose to drop in on Edison unannounced, saw the jumbo dynamo destined for London, he allowed that it was “damn big.” That was also the opinion of William H. Preece, consulting electrical engineer to the British Post Office, who had boggled at its predecessor in Paris. In an address at the Royal Society for Arts, he informed his colleagues that “those who are interested in this machine, and everyone should be, because it is a decided step in advance—will soon have an opportunity of seeing it at work at 57, High Holborn.”179

Preece was referring to the Edison central station system that Edward Johnson was installing in London as a curtain-raiser to the opening of the Crystal Palace Exhibition on 25 February 1882. Although the station was not intended to be permanent (it was part of a test incandescent-lighting project organized by the London County Council) and would illumine only half a mile of the Holborn Viaduct, there was no question now that it, and not 257 Pearl Street in Manhattan, would be the true cradle of incandescent street lighting.180

It could be finished quickly because Johnson did not have to go underground to wire up the buildings lining the viaduct (despite its name, nothing more than a broad thoroughfare elevated above Farrington Bridge Road). All he had to do was string his mains and feeders under the supporting stonework, along conduits already hollowed out by the city’s gas utility.^*34 John Kruesi had no choice, meanwhile, but to wait for the subsoil of downtown Manhattan to thaw and permit the completion of his distribution system. If he could get that done by midsummer, there was a good chance that the First District could be lit up before the fall.

Johnson was an eager, honest, torrentially garrulous promoter of whatever business he happened to be in at any given time. He had begun his career selling telegraph equipment out west and would end it selling milk cartons in upstate New York; currently he was working with absolute devotion on behalf of Edison’s telephone and lighting interests in Britain. “There is but one Edison,” the London Daily News remarked, “and Johnson is his prophet.”181

With the help of Hammer and Jehl, sent over by the Electric Light Company as consultant engineers, Johnson literally dazzled the British press on 19 January with a coruscation of four hundred Edison lights along the viaduct, and 250 more at a black-tie dinner in the Crystal Palace. It went without saying that any lamp display in that building was bound to reflect in many directions. But the chandelier Johnson hung in the concert room, with its own crystals multiplying the bulbs ten times over, was designed to flash daggers into the heart of any gas industry executive present. Both installations were expanded in the weeks that followed, as extra dynamos ramped up their voltage. The viaduct system eventually reached a capacity of three thousand lamps, and the Crystal Palace one thousand—some of which were rigged by Hammer to spell out the letters E-D-I-S-O-N, making his boss the first man ever to have “his name in lights.”182

Edison’s hopes of illuminating all of London, however, were dashed when Parliament adopted an anticommercial Electric Lighting Act, effectively discouraging central franchises. This did not prevent him from forming a British subsidiary, the Edison Electric Light Company, Ltd., in March, to join a number of European start-ups, proliferating like branch feeders in the afterglow of his Paris triumph. In France alone he organized the Société industrielle et commerciale to manufacture lamps under the management of Charles Batchelor, the Société électrique Edison to build central stations locally, and the Compagnie continentale Edison to do the same across Europe. One of the most successful of these licensed plants was the Deutsche Edison-Gesellschaft in Berlin. Edison lamps shone in the railroad station at Strasbourg and the grand foyers of the Paris Opéra and La Scala in Milan. Teams trained by Batchelor installed isolated systems as far away as Finland.183

Joseph Swan, competing strongly, put a system of his own into the Savoy Theater in London, well before Francis Jehl wired up a municipal theater in Brünn, Bohemia. However derivative Swan’s new lamp might or might not have been of Edison’s—a question that could be settled only in a court of law—it was equally efficient if not superior with its filament of parchmentized cotton thread, even smoother and harder than madake bamboo. Johnson thought the best thing for both inventors would be to merge their British interests. Edison would not hear of it. Swan’s gentlemanly concession of victory to him at the Paris exposition left him unmoved: “My own private opinion is that he tries to claim other peoples work & carries to extreme the idea of enormous respectability while being at heart what his compatriots call a ‘bloody liar.’ ”184

RED, WHITE, AND BLACK

Mary Edison suffered during her husband’s hyperactivity that winter with uterine troubles and an attack of depression. “She seems very nervous and despondent and thinks she will never recover,” the family doctor wrote Edison. “She seems so changed physically and mentally of late that I think something ought to be done.”185

He suggested she be taken to Europe for a few months. But the best Edison could do, with resumption of work at Pearl Street looming, was escort her and the children to Florida for four weeks in March. He was exhausted himself, after a spell of seventy-two-hour working jags, and also under doctor’s orders to get away. It was his first visit to the Sunshine State. The strawberry season had begun, and the sulfurous waters at Green Cove Springs, a resort on the St. John’s River in Clay County, were therapeutic. Mary was in no hurry to go back north. Insull, who enjoyed writing letters in Edison’s name, was pleased to hear nothing from “the Great Mogul” until the twenty-eighth, when he suddenly announced his return home.186

For the moment that meant Menlo Park rather than Manhattan, Edison not having relinquished his takeback of the Lamp Company. He felt that it was now ready to relocate to the enormous plant he had bought for it in East Newark. The transfer, supervised by Francis Upton, began on the first of April, and more than a hundred local jobs melted away.187 For as long as Edison needed his laboratory and electric railway for experiments, and Mary the house as their country retreat, Menlo Park would retain some signs of life. But with the Uptons and the Batchelors and Kruesis gone, and Mrs. Jordan’s boardinghouse in need of guests, and the lamp works standing empty, its ghost days were near.

Edison returned to Manhattan and rented a suite in the Everett House, a luxury hotel on Union Square.188 It was to be a base for him during what promised to be the most urgent summer of his life. If he took much longer to light up the First District, after Batchelor and Johnson had won such cheers for him last autumn in Paris and London, he could expect only ruder noises from the citizens of New York.

Already, The New York Times reported, there was “grumbling” by Electric Light Company subscribers in the First District, tired of seeing dead wiring hanging out of their walls. Trench work had resumed with the spring thaw, but there were still seven miles to go, at one thousand feet a day. The paper sent a representative to ask Sherburne Eaton if he had set a completion date, and his replies made plain the pressure on Edison to deliver.

A We can fix no limit whatever. We should have completed the work before the frost came last fall, if the parties who furnish our material had not failed to keep their contracts.

Q Can a very distant limit be fixed, say four months?

A Not definitely.

Q Will it be concluded in a year?

A I can’t positively fix any limit whatever. Our contractors may disappoint us again about material.

Q Do you expect to be delayed again by frosty weather?

A. You can judge that as well as I can….We are doing our best to get the wire laid, immediately after which we should be able to light the lamps.189

Edison was further driven by the desire of his backers to develop a lucrative and less costly alternative to the construction of central stations—isolated systems for private customers like J. P. Morgan, or suburban factories and small towns.190 That switch of interest signified that financing for a Second District in New York might be a long time coming or never at all if he did not finish the First before another winter came round.

Four 240-horsepower boilers were installed at 257 Pearl in the spring, along with three jumbo dynamos on the second floor and a mini-avalanche of auxiliary fixtures next door. The first dynamo, directly shafted to its Porter-Allen engine, whirred into life on 5 July. Three days later it was connected to the monitoring panel on the top floor of number 257.191 A vision of a future unimaginable even by Edison materialized when the wall-mounted oblong lit up: a thousand bulbs packed close in rows, their brightness flickering at different strengths according to the current that fed them.^*35

The pace of pipe laying increased during July, Edison helping out as before. It did not stem his flow of patent applications, more tumultuous now than it would ever be again. Among them were a coal conversion method of power generation that essentially presaged fuel cell energy, and a 330-volt overhead “village” distribution network that reduced the already economical copper quotient of the Pearl Street system.192 He simultaneously and brilliantly invented, but did not have time to caveat, a three-wire branch circuit that interposed a neutral conductor between two “hot” ones of 220 volts each, permitting independent operation of multiple lamps at 110 volts. It too looked forward to a time when red, white, and black wires would be standard equipment in American homes.^*36, 193

His total of fifty-three successful patents that spring and summer did not include foreign ones, or the seventy-eight applications lost or stolen from him by his alcoholic patent attorney, Zenas Wilber. “I am free to confess,” Edison said in later life, “that the loss of these 78 inventions has left a sore spot in me that has never healed. They were important, useful, and valuable.”194

While oddly forgiving of Wilber, he took the precaution of hiring a new young intellectual property lawyer, Richard Dyer, and gave him the task of organizing his cumulative total of letters patent, now numbering more than four hundred in the United States alone.195

Power monitor panel, Edison Pearl Street station, 1882.

August was a month of rapid progress for the Edison Light, Lamp, Isolated Lighting, and Electric Illuminating companies and especially for the Electric Tube Company and the Machine Works. All of them were aware that the consummation of their effort was in sight, with a momentum that seemed determinate now rather than willed by any manager. Even Edison was borne along. Lamp production in Newark rose to fourteen hundred a day, with an estimated capacity of thirty times that output. The factory had so many dynamos to build, thanks to orders coming in from Edison’s foreign enterprises, that it had to put them on hold while it finished the six jumbos he needed for Pearl Street.196

Finally the full column of paired engines and dynamos stood ready at 257 Pearl. Kreusi paved over the last of the First District’s feeders and mains and completed connections to the premises of major system subscribers—most notably, the New York Times building on Park Row. So far the Electric Light Company had 946 customers with well over fourteen thousand lamps installed. Property owners and tenants who had not yet signed up were wooed with circulars promising no charge for installations unless “you ultimately decide to adopt our light permanently.”197

Scientific American published the first detailed description of “the Edison Electric Lighting Station” system on 26 August. It was illustrated with exquisite technical engravings that conveyed, better than any screened photographs, the radiance of the high monitor (every one of its thousand bulbs limned), the frightening mass of the dynamos, the ocean liner dimensions of the stoke hole, with its sixteen furnaces and attendant Nibelungen (all wearing neat black bowlers), and the precision engineering of the two dozen street conductors attached outside, beneath the Pearl Street sidewalk, in a service hall bright with reflector sconces, unknown to the pedestrians clomping overhead. The text explained how all the moving devices worked, from the coal conveyors to a giant switch, something like a triple-bladed guillotine, that could be used to slice any dynamo out of circuit.198

“We have no doubt,” the editors wrote, “that before this paper meets the eye of the reader, the district will have been illuminated.”199

In the days immediately following, gas company workers were seen removing their globes from streetlamps around Pearl and trundling them away in wagons.200

AN END TO THE DOMINANCE

Another issue of Scientific American had gone to press before Edison felt ready to activate his system on Monday 4 September. He did so with some dread, and none of his usual theatrical flair, powering up just one dynamo at three in the afternoon and directing its current to a scattering of customers across one-third of the district.201 It was as if he hoped daylight would blank out the failure of any of his “luminous horseshoes” to incandesce. Workers at The New York Times did not notice until dusk that there was any change in the light they were used to. They turned the thumbscrews on their office walls and, instead of the flickery glare of gas mantles, found themselves bathed in a soft glow that remained pleasantly steady. Commuters walking down Fulton Street to the Brooklyn Ferry noticed circles of the same light on the sidewalk. Those who glanced up saw pear-shaped globes with porcelain shades hanging from iron crooks, each filament leaving a tiny imprint on the eye if stared at too long.202

By seven o’clock it was dark enough203 for reporters seeking Edison out to be surprised that the lamps of Pearl Street had not been cut in, although the station itself was radiant. He was found on the second floor at number 257, looking gleeful and as slovenly as ever in a high-crowned white hat and collarless shirt:204 “I have accomplished all that I promised.” Asked why he had not illuminated the whole district, he said that he would have, but for the insistence of the New York Board of Fire Underwriters that the city should sign off on every wired building. He rejoiced in those that had already been connected: “The lights in the office of Drexel, Morgan & Co., half a mile away, are burning as brightly as the lights here.”205

Brightness, however, was not a novelty anymore. The sixteen-candlepower average of the eight hundred lamps aglow that evening was pallid compared to the intensity of arc lights in public places elsewhere in the city. The revolution Edison had wrought was so unobtrusive and at the same time so world changing that few, if any, of the people who experienced it realized what had happened: an end to the counterbalance of night and day that had obtained for all of human history, mocking the attempts of torchbearers and lamplighters and gas companies to alter it with their puny waves of flame.

A TUSSLE BETWEEN ELEPHANTS

The only morning papers that paid attention to the inauguration of central station service in New York were, not surprisingly, the two with the most Edison lamps in their newsrooms: the Times and the Herald.206 There were a few other brief reports across the country, none conveying much excitement. The best that could be said for British comment was that it was respectful, perhaps because Edison had for once achieved something without boasting about it. An editorial wisecrack in The Boston Globe came nearest to the truth of the matter: “Chevalier Tom Edison has had an ‘opening night.’ His aim is to open night until it shall be as day.”^*37, 207

For a week Edison slept on a cot at the station, determined to keep its output up as subscriptions to the First District network multiplied. Foreseeing a time when he would need his full battery of six generators to supply the demand of sixteen thousand lamps, he experimentally yoked two jumbos together, in a union that he thought would make for a smooth aggregation of power. As things turned out, he could not have been more mistaken.208

The moment we threw in the second engine the first engine slowed way down and the second engine jumped up to speed almost in an instant, and then went two or three times its speed, until we thought the building would collapse. Then the other engine would speed up, and they would see-saw, from 50 revolutions a minute to 800 revolutions a minute. Nothing of steel or iron could stand it. The commutator brushes burned and red-hot globules of copper flowed down on the floor and began to burn the wood. Smoke poured all over. The building was apparently going to come down, and everybody made for the stairs. Finally I yelled to shut down, and two of the men jumped in and closed the throttle.209

Edison had encountered the phenomenon of “hunting”—the contrary torques of a rotary machine searching for a balance between the mechanical power applied to it and the electromagnetic forces inside it. But stability is key. The boards beneath the Pearl Street generators rested on a bridge of cast iron. Strong as it was, it stood free of the walls, transmitting the vibrations of each dynamo downward, in the same direction as gravity operated the Porter-Allen engine governors. They were extra sensitive and, confused by the electrical connections between dynamos that let one run as a generator one moment and as a motor the next, began to hunt wildly for equilibrium. The result was changes of speed in one dynamo that conflicted with changes in the other. It was a tussle between elephants no trainer could handle, complete with deep groans and shrieks. Edison was lucky not to lose his station.210

For once in his life he needed a slug of liquor and went across the street with Edward Johnson to get one. “Am I to drink the whole of that?” he asked as he watched the glass being topped up.

“Yes,” Johnson said.211

The next issue of the Electric Light Company’s promotional bulletin made no mention of the near-catastrophe but admitted that there had been problems at Pearl “of a peculiarly mechanical nature relating to the imperfect regulation of the engines.” Edison solved the problem by devising a tubular connecting shaft, full of trapped torsion, that brought the Porter-Allens into sync, but he thought it wise to order new engines with more centrifugally weighted governors from Armington & Sims. Meanwhile the station continued to operate, as it would do, with only two short service breaks, for the rest of the decade.212

NOW THAT IT LIVES

The transfer of a personal library from one home to another is always, for an intellectual, a sign of irreversible change, and for an inventor, a transfer of test tubes and precision instruments amounts to the same thing. Edison accomplished both at the end of September 1882, taking a two-year lease on a gray stone townhouse at 25 Gramercy Park and opening a new laboratory on the top floor of the Bergmann factory at Avenue B and Seventeenth Street in Manhattan. For the time being he held on to his country house but said that “because of the women constantly bothering him,” he would henceforth operate out of New York.213

Mary Edison was no doubt a member of this female lobby, along with his daughter and Mary’s younger sister Eugenia, a recent addition to the Edison ménage. Marion, at nine and a half, had endured a year in boarding school and looked forward to the more pleasant prospect of living with her parents in the most fashionable quarter of the city, while she and Tom attended Mlle. de Janon’s “English and French School for Young Ladies and Children” nearby.^*38, 214

Edison grumbled to Insull about preferring life across the river, but the young man was not fooled. “Johnson and myself are of the opinion that it is six of one and half a dozen of the other,” he wrote Charles Batchelor, “and that he wants to come in just as much as the women do.”215

The lease on Edison’s new home included furniture and fittings but not, apparently, many books. To supplement those he brought from Menlo Park, he ordered sets of the novels of Dickens, George Eliot, Hugo, Cooper, and Hawthorne, as well as Don Quixote, Gil Blas, Longfellow’s complete poems, Macaulay’s essays, and a number of other volumes—“good solid binding only nothing fancy.” The house had been Mary’s choice out of nineteen other properties available, but he felt a sense of grand design when he explored the attic and found the private diary of Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraphic code that had once been—still was—his second language.216

The last woman to “bother” him in 1882 he scarcely knew and could not have cared less about, except that a New Jersey state court found on 18 December that he owed her $5,065. She was Mrs. Lucy Seyfert, and she based her claim on a promissory note he had written six years before while raising capital for the Automatic Telegraph Company. Edison remembered the note but also that it had not then been held by her. The blood of old Sam Edison, a compulsive litigant, arose in his veins, and he declined to pay. As a result, the case was referred for trial at the New Jersey Supreme Court.217

Except for that unpleasantness, promising more discord later, the year rang out happily for Edison. It would be a while yet before all the lighting enterprises he had started became profitable or even proved themselves individually viable. The Pearl Street project in particular had years to go before it would return a dime of its $600,000 capitalization. Its growth rate from four hundred subscriber lights in September to nearly five thousand in December looked impressive, but offering people power for free at first had much to do with their willingness to wire up. Still, there was no mistaking the admiration with which Britain’s newspaper of record recognized the “constant and equal” amperage put out by the central station and the superior effulgence of Edison’s bulbs over any manufactured in England. The success of his system, declared The Times, “is now beyond question.”218

Another money loser for the moment was the Edison Electric Lamp Company. Its hugely expensive factory in Newark was not yet at the break-even point of producing fifteen hundred bulbs a day. Each one had to go through two hundred delicate processes before shipping and sale, at forty cents apiece—a price that was sure to come down as output cranked up.219 Lamp life and lamp quality were steadily improving. If the plant ever reached its intended capacity of forty-two thousand bulbs a day, the rate it was designed for, it might well relabel itself the First Edison Bank of New Jersey.

The Machine Works (which Batchelor had successfully duplicated at Ivry-sur-Seine in France) had the contrary problem of being so productive that it was warehousing seven unsold jumbo dynamos—“very heavy stuff for us to carry,” Insull complained, with his English tendency to make lame puns. Despite this $140,000 liability, it was at least in the black and had already paid Edison $38,000, the first decent stash he had pocketed all year.220

By far the most lucrative of his start-ups was the Edison Company for Isolated Lighting. One hundred and thirty-seven domestic or small-business plants were now on its books, all running Edison dynamos and burning Edison lights. The most prestigious of these was in J. P. Morgan’s midtown mansion on Madison Avenue, where it short-circuited frequently, set fire to the mogul’s desk, frightened his horses, and drew noise complaints from neighbors, but otherwise gave complete satisfaction.221 Better reports came from distant locations, none more remote than a sawmill at Yväskylä, Russia, north of the sixty-second parallel. The town councilors were so pleased with its light that they had voted to upgrade to a central station. In the shipyards of Glasgow, Scotland, crowds queued in drenching December rain to tour a new Edison-illuminated steamer. Even its shaft tunnelway was aglow.222

Edison foresaw many corporate problems in the immediate future, as he sought to lean on the Electric Light Company directorate for more central station capital and they looked for easier money by offering “help” with his independent companies. He wrote in a draft memorandum to the English Light Company, “I have nursed the baby so far & I believe I can continue to do so without any extraneous aid, especially from those who said the baby would never be born & when born would never live, & now that it lives wants to change the manner of nursing. If I should fail in any particular it will then be time to call in other inventors.”223

IS NOT A PATRON

Except for another Florida vacation with his family, which he cut short before February was out, Edison was not seen much in public in the early months of 1883. He luxuriated in the spaciousness of his sixth-floor laboratory in the Bergmann building, discovering, typically, that the elevator ride up there lasted as long as it took him to wind his watch. When he held the grilled stem against the shaft column as he rose, he saved his thumb and forefinger much labor and arrived at the top fully wound.^*39, 224

He had become so identified with electric light innovation since 1880 that occasional news reports noted, almost with surprise, that he was still capable of inventing other things, such as a horse-drawn truck that scooped up snow, compressed it by 90 percent, and deposited it in the form of neat ice blocks that left the rest of the street clear. He also toyed, for reasons best known to himself, with the idea of vacuum-packing bran. Much to his regret, he had to give up on another device that he had patented out of farthest left field two years before. It was a magnetic iron ore separator, designed to refine the sheets of black sand that covered the beaches of Quogue, Long Island, and Quonochontaug, Rhode Island.225 Major Eaton had become as excited as he at the ferric richness of those deposits, in some places twenty feet deep. Yet the Edison Ore-Milling Company they formed together had never flourished, not least because the sea that had washed up the deposits in the first place kept reclaiming its own. As Edison later groused, “It was too much like taking out a mortgage on a school of herring.”226

The winter somewhat strained his relations with Grosvenor Lowrey, hitherto his best friend on the board of the Electric Light Company. A Wall Street man at heart, Lowrey waved aside the complaints of Edison, Upton, and Johnson that the company was greedy in taking ten cents for every lamp it sold, at cost, for forty cents. Major Eaton, who was now president, darkly hinted that the autonomous manufacturing shops they represented—the Machine Works, plus the Lamp, Tube, Isolated, and Bergmann companies—would be better off under corporate patronage.227

Every hackle Edison possessed rose at this takeover threat. He and his partners signed a joint nonnegotiable declaration of independence, reminding Eaton that the Electric Light Company had been ungenerous to them back in the days when they were trying to capitalize their shops. The letter was drafted by Johnson, who may have recalled the cry of another Johnson, to another plutocrat, 127 years before: “Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?”228

AMERICAN CERTAINTY

“How your genial—delightful light spreads—and it spreads—and spreads and spreads,” Edouard Reményi wrote Edison from Lincoln, Nebraska, on 25 April. He had just attended a banquet where he had basked in the double glow of Edison lamps and his own intimacy with the man who had made them: “I—old fiddler I brag that I am your faithful and affectionate friend and your court musician.”229

Edison was aware of the spread himself. He had already taken steps to go after the “Village Plant Biz” by forming the Thomas A. Edison Construction Department, an independent company that would install cheap, overhead-strung central lighting systems in the provinces. Although the name of his new venture was strange—how could a department be a company?—and seemed contrived to disguise its purpose, he headquartered it at 65, as if to reprove Major Eaton for not being more interested in central stations outside New York.230

He wrote to tell Edward Johnson, who had gone back to London to straighten out the tangled affairs of the local Edison Electric Light Company, that it would be as well to let the management there muddle along and come home for good. “Just now we are doing all we can to rush the Village business. There is immediate money and plenty of it in that….Here we can get things done just as we say, and I therefore think that it is better to concentrate our efforts on American certainty rather than an English possibility.”231

Johnson was respected in London and did not want to be seen there as a quitter. He needed a couple of months to finish his task before joining the Construction Department. Besides, he wanted to help a London barrister argue a patent infringement injunction suit Edison had insisted on, against Joseph Swan in the High Court.232 The prospects for a favorable decision were not good, considering that the court building was illuminated with Swan bulbs.

Edison appointed him a partner in absentia, along with Batchelor, Insull, and Eaton, who could hardly be left out. The little major was a good-natured, if cautious person, the sort of gray bureaucrat who burrows molelike into positions of great power. Somehow he had become president not only of the Edison Electric Light Company, but of the Isolated Company too. The cooperation of each was necessary if Edison was to use his own patents for Construction Department projects. In return, the parent company would have a share of the income from every new station that joined the spread of his “delightful light.”233

For Insull—another burrower, but much more aggressive and devious than Eaton—his partnership amounted to a reward for two years of self-sacrificing service to Edison. It came with the proviso that he must handle the new Department’s finances, which were bound to be complex, as well as run its head office, while Johnson functioned as sales director and the Old Man supervised designs and installations. Still, the more power he got, the happier Insull was—especially when Edison agreed to pay him an annual minimum of $2,400 on all regional plant profits, plus a generous 20 percent of the rest. On 3 May Insull also took financial control of the Machine Works, potentially the most lucrative of all Edison’s businesses.^*40 The manager of that enterprise “kicked,” he wrote Johnson, but “Edison supported me in a bully fashion & I came out top of the heap.”234

BUSINESS PURE AND SIMPLE

Except for a highly successful, nontaxpaying enterprise undertaken at age twelve, to do with the sale of candy, fruits, and newspapers, Edison had never before acted alone as a businessman. The Construction Department was his own commercial conception and responsibility, launched with $11,000 of his own money and likely to enrich him, or impoverish him, to a far greater extent than it would his partners. For every twenty dollars they won or lost, he would gamble sixty.235 Consequently he had to forsake what he loved most—experimenting and doodling in notebooks—and take on a new identity that shocked many who knew him.

Mary Edison and feathered friends, 1883.

“What has happened to ‘the wizard of Menlo Park?’ ” a Brooklyn Daily Eagle correspondent wrote on 29 July. “The last time I saw Edison he had grown very stout, and no longer wandered around with a misty far off look in his eye and a battered felt hat on his head. Instead he wore a shiny beaver, gold eye glasses, and looked fashionable….Perhaps too much prosperity—for Edison has made a vast fortune—has driven all ideas of inventing out of his head.”236

There were elements of caricature in this description, although Mary Edison had certainly discovered that her abstemious husband had a weakness for pie. She was partial to it herself, as well as to expensive Huyler chocolates, which she ate by the pound.237 Her gowns grew larger and more elaborate by the season. She posed in one brocaded creation for a studio photographer, who needed all the focus he could get to delineate the dead, stuffed, red-and-black birds pinned to her breast and thigh.^*41

Edison confirmed in an August interview with The Evening Post that he was taking “a long vacation” from his workbench. “I am going to be simply a businessman for a year….I won’t go near a laboratory.” Sounding more like Insull than himself, he ran off a long list of the contracts the Construction Department had already signed with regional municipalities: “Sunbury, Pa., where we are putting in 500 lights; Shamokin, Pa., 1,600 lights; Brockton, Mass., 1,600 lights; Lowell, Mass., 1,200 lights; Lawrence, Mass, 4,000 lights.” Before he ran out of breath, he had strung imaginary wires across Ohio, Wisconsin, and Minnesota as far west as Davenport, Iowa. “I am so convinced of the system’s success that, as I said before, I have given up inventing and taken to business pure and simple.”238

The trouble with such interviews was that they were read by Edisons less fortunate than he, such as his fifty-two-year-old brother Pitt, a farmer in Port Huron:

Dear Bro

I see by the papers that you are agoing to be a buisness Man for a year…I keep a good man on the farm so it is not nessesary for me to be thare much of the time for a year at least now al can’t you place me somewhere for that time thare is lots of work for me yet I would not care whare I was placed in New York or any whare Else239

Edison replied, “I think the best thing that you can do is to look out for something where you are.”240

Another reader of the Evening Post article may have been Henry Rowland, the Johns Hopkins professor who had praised the efficiency of his lightbulbs three years before. Edison’s worldly success since then, together with speculation (incorrect, as it turned out) that he was now a millionaire, was evidently on Rowland’s mind when he delivered an impassioned “Plea for Pure Science,” at the August meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Minneapolis. Refusing to dignify such “conveniences” as telegraphs and electric lights by the name of science, he said that money-seeking, manufacture, and the pursuit of fame were hindrances to intellectual progress. “It is not an uncommon thing, especially in American newspapers, to have the applications of science confounded with pure science; and some obscure American who steals the ideas of some great mind of the past, and enriches himself by the application of the same to domestic uses, is often lauded above the great originator, who might have worked out hundreds of such applications, had his mind possessed the necessary element of vulgarity.”241

As Rowland proceeded with his address, it became clear that he was pleading, not for pure science per se, but for more funding for university laboratories—a complaint that would be renewed a century later.242

BOUND BY PRIDE

By now Edward Johnson was back from London. As he expected, the High Court had rejected Edison v. Swan as a suit of no value. Mr. Justice Chitty held that the plaintiff had failed to show any fundamental dissimilarity between his filament and the defendant’s spaghetti-thin carbon rod. Edison’s case would have been stronger if he had not carelessly neglected to describe, in his own application for a British patent, the unique “running on the pumps” method he had devised to suck occluded gases out of a bulb when the carbonized element was first heated in vacuo.243

Edison felt that any judge able to see past his wig flaps should understand that there was a difference between a flexible black fibrous hoop that incandesced cleanly, and a brittle stick that smoked up its bulb in less than an hour. (Swan’s more recent parchmentized cotton filament was not part of the priority issue.) Johnson repeated his urgent suggestion that there should be a merger of the Edison and Swan United Electric companies.244

Reluctantly, Edison agreed. But he made it as difficult as possible for Swan to agree too, by insisting that the joint concern “shall be distinguished by my name in its title solely.” He disclaimed, with an ingenuousness sure to make Swan’s representatives groan, “any such feeling as might naturally be imputed to me of wishing to gain in this way a concession as to the disputed claims of Mr. Swan and myself concerning lamp patents.” On the contrary, he would be happy to drop out of the British market altogether, were it not for the importance of having his rights to all other aspects of his system recognized around the world.

I remain in this country, and wherever else I can, as large an owner as possible in my inventions. I have never parted with any of my holdings except when compelled to in order to carry on my various works….I am bound by pride of reputation and by pride and interest in my work, to remain interested in the business. I expect to be a large owner in all companies employing my inventions after most persons now interested shall have sold out and retired with their profits.245

Before signing off on a letter that was supposed to be a sober statement of terms, he could not resist adding a sarcastic suggestion that if Swan had contributed as much to the science of lighting as he had, “then his friends may with equal force say what I have said.”246

Johnson could only allow him to send it off as Exhibit A in what was sure to be a legal battle. Then he, Insull, and Edison turned their attention to the more immediate exigence of making the Construction Department viable.

OUT OF THE DAM-D HOLE

They found that there was a budgetary penalty to Edison’s public offer to plan, wire, and light any town or village “within sixty days.” Before a contract could be drawn up, the distribution area had to be surveyed and canvassed street by street, so that Insull could figure how much revenue to expect, and how many physical obstacles to overcome, in arriving at a quotable price. This cost serious money. More often than not, the outlay had to be swallowed when towns (including several Edison had boasted about) chose not to proceed. If they did, he was charged with the initial costs of manufacturing the necessary hardware, plus providing transportation and on-site labor—not to mention teaching the local illumination companies how to maintain their systems. Since everything about central station technology was so new, capable engineers were almost impossible to find. Edison therefore needed to establish a school at the Machine Works to train men for the job and persuade them that life in places like Canyon, Arkansas, was just as interesting as life in New York.247

There followed the difficulty—often the impossibility—of getting paid in cash for each central station installed. As early as mid-September, five regional utilities owed Edison $43,000. Others were too poor to pay at all, and he had to accept their promises of stock dividends. It was better than nothing, which he often had to settle for. He spent $10,400 to canvass eighty cities and towns, only twelve of which ordered systems.248

The only encouraging aspect to his enterprise was the steady increase in customers once a community lit up. But that meant future, not present income, and meanwhile most of the Construction Department’s assets and liabilities accrued to his personal account. He was rich—incalculably rich—in expectations, and poorer by the day in reality.

An expense he could cut was that of his posh townhouse in Gramercy Park. He had been falling behind on rental payments for several months. “Would get out of the dam-d hole if could,” he scrawled on one of James Pryor’s bills, referring it to Insull for inaction. (One of the reasons Edison liked his secretary was that Insull was a virtuoso prevaricator.) Mary’s invalidism gave him an excuse to beg for cancellation of his two-year lease. “I very much regret to say that owing to the illness of my wife it has become imperative that she should give up housekeeping in accordance with the Doctor’s instructions.”249

Pryor declined, with contempt for this hiding behind skirts, but agreed to let him sublet the house and “lighten the burden under which you find yourself placed.” Edison removed his family to a luxury annex of the Clarendon Hotel, which was twice as expensive but at least had a more corporate tolerance of credit.250

He was not as short of money as Insull made out, since he repaid two loans totaling $42,806 to Drexel, Morgan in December. At the same time he instructed his counsel in the Lucy Seyfert case to postpone “just as long as possible” any settlement of the judgment against him. He preferred to risk the wrath of the Supreme Court of New Jersey than to lose the goodwill of Wall Street.

When Christmas came, Mary let no financial considerations cramp her style. She loved giving presents, some of which—for lack of any later ones—Marion remembered with especial vividness: “a first edition of La Fontaine Fables, with beautiful etchings, a ring with diamonds and turquoise, a Le Maire mother-of-pearl Opera Glass which was in a blue velvet case.”251

Edison’s personal gift to himself was the knowledge that he now had 12,843 lamps shining around Pearl Street, plus a further 64,856 nationwide.252

YOURS DEVOTEDLY

Around this time he became aware of a twenty-three-year-old Scotsman with a ridiculously long name hanging around the testing room at the Machine Works. “W. Kennedy Laurie Dickson,” as this engineer signed himself over a double curlicue, had been hired by Insull several months before, on the strength of a recommendation that spoke to his electrical training and mastery of French and German. Dickson was also a master of flattery, to which Edison was not immune. “If you only knew how I am heart [and] soul in all your inventions & all you do,” he wrote, in a note attached to some lamp designs, “you would now & then stoop to assist & better my prospects in life.”253

Edison ignored the lamp designs but gave Dickson two of his own to test. They looked like regular T models except for an unusual tongue of platinum inside the hoop of the carbon. It was separately wired and, when the filament incandesced, deflected a galvanometer needle. This indicated a ghost flow of electromagnetic force within the lamp’s vacuum and was further proof of thermionic emission, the famous Edison Effect. Its discoverer, apparently forgetting that he was supposed to be a businessman only, wanted to patent it as an “electrical indicator” that would gauge and regulate the voltage of lamps connected in multiple arc.254

Dickson reported favorable results to Edison one night in the cavernous testing room. The scene registered in his photosensitive memory in such detail that he could draw it forty years later: bare brick walls ascending to a galaxy of pendant bulbs, a German silver (as in French door: an alloy, not silver) shunt in one corner, two assistants pottering, a central stove discharging heat. Edison, his hair disheveled, sat tilted back in a Windsor chair, one foot up on the work table, idly playing with one of the test lamps while Dickson talked to him.255

Shortly afterward he executed his patent for the indicator, U.S. 307,031. The device did not work well, and he was too busy with other projects to develop it. But in its use of thermionic emission for a practical purpose, it was technology’s first attempt at what would one day be called electronics.^*42, 256

As for Dickson, he had at last been noticed. He was soon put in charge of the testing room and began his long rise to obscurity.257

“THE FOLLOY OF HIS WAYS”

By the new year of 1884 Edison was back in his laboratory on the top floor of the Bergmann building, trying to develop synthetic filaments from various gelatines and researching electrodeposition techniques that he hoped might precipitate gold foil.258 Such absorption in experiment, with his hands moving and his deafness muffling outside noise, was usually a sign that he was tired of pretending to be what he was not: a man of the world comfortable in society, savvy about money, adept at boardroom maneuverings, and interested in politics, women, and children.

The Construction Department had been his attempt to show Grosvenor Lowrey, Sherburne Eaton, and other directors of the Edison Electric Light Company that the traits that distinguished him as an inventor—contrary thinking, obstinate repetition, daydreaming, delight in difficulty—would bring about the demise of the gas industry much faster than their insistence on cautious progress. He had expected them to admire him for his courage in daring to launch a new enterprise on his own nickel. But although the Department had signed up many towns and cities, its expenses were outrunning its income at a compound rate. Moreover, the quality of its work—rushed through as fast as possible, to collect fees—was often shoddy. There was a sour joke going around about “Edison’s Destruction Department,” and he now faced the prospect of having to ask Sherburne Eaton if the Electric Light Company would defray his personal deficit of $11,000. Since Eaton was likely to say no, his high laboratory offered both refuge and solace.259

Eaton did turn him down. Edison’s hurt anger (the Light Company, after all, stood to gain hugely from his patents) was gratifying to Insull. Daily more powerful as he acquired financial and administrative authority, the secretary saw a corporate crisis coming that he could turn to his own advantage. “There is no one more anxious after wealth than Samuel Insull,” he admitted. Edison made no effort to restrain him. He was grateful for the icy efficiency with which Insull kept creditors at bay, while always coming up with whatever cash he and Mary needed.260

Insull’s secret plan was to relieve Edison, as tactfully as possible, of responsibility for the Construction Department. He intended to amalgamate it with the most successful of his boss’s ventures so far, the Edison Company for Isolated Lighting. At the same time he wanted to bring down the man they both now saw as their corporate opponent—Sherburne Eaton—and Grosvenor Lowrey too. His target date for this coup was 29 October, when Eaton would preside over the parent company’s annual board meeting. That gave Insull most of the year to gather enough shareholder support to force the election of a new president, who would be beholden to him rather than to Drexel, Morgan & Co.261

Eaton was a courtly man who had never gotten used to Insull’s brash lack of manners. He made a mistake in trying to be acerbic when he sent Insull a memo on 18 February, drawing attention to one of Edison’s Construction Department shortfalls. “I have no doubt that he will see the folloy [sic] of his ways after having learned experience at heavy and unnecessary cost.” Insull may have been self-serving, but nobody ever criticized his adored boss without penalty.262

THE DEMON SHARK

Edison was then in Clay County, Florida, letting Insull act for him while he and Mary treated themselves to their most extended vacation yet. This time they left the children behind, traveling instead with Mary’s good friend Josie Reimer and her husband. Edison had $1,500 in Construction Department funds in his pocket, charged up, truthfully enough, to “Expenses South.”263

Mary, her daughter noted, was never happier than when she had Edison to herself in Florida—enjoying white glove service at the Magnolia Springs Resort Hotel, lolling in the warm baths, and cruising with him down the St. John’s River between palms and sour-orange plantations, while he scribbled laboratory ideas in his pocket notebook.264

“Stay away as long as you feel like it,” Insull wrote Edison on “Birthington’s wash Day,” one of his occasional attempts at humor.265 “At least give me till 1st April before you show your face in New York. I am conceited enough to want to try & get some work single handed for Const Dept.”266

Edison was not sorry to be relieved of that responsibility for a while, and did what he was told. He was at last able to accept that his affairs were too complex for him to manage alone, with new lighting systems, wholly owned or affiliated, opening up almost weekly around the world, and competition harder and harder to restrain. For that reason he agreed, after all, to let Joseph Swan join names with him in the union of their British interests, henceforth to be known as the Edison & Swan United Electric Company, Ltd. He also consented to the incorporation of his Lamp Company and Machine Works, while continuing to resist Eaton’s desire to add them and the Tube Company to the portfolio of Drexel, Morgan. Of Insull’s private intent to the contrary, he had, as yet, no idea.267

He continued to fill his notebook with mostly electrical notions but omitted to include one that instantly became one of Florida’s taller fishing yarns. In the last week of March he was seen by a reporter escorting Mary (“a superb blonde”) aboard a yacht in the harbor of St. Augustine, accompanied by the Reimers and a small black boy toting a basket of what onlookers assumed was champagne.268 The yacht pulled out to the fishing ground off the lighthouse, where for years a “demon shark” had consumed multiple blackfish and bass and, reportedly, one or two swimmers. Lines went overboard, one of which unspooled from the basket and proved to be a regular telegraph wire insulated with gutta-percha. It was attached to a powerful battery, and baited at the other end with an electrode. Within fifteen minutes Edison and the captain were hauling in a mortally shocked seven-hundred-pound shark. It ended up on permanent display in the local Vedder Museum, labeled:

THE DEMON SHARK.

CAUGHT BY T. A. EDISON,

WITH ELECTRIC BAIT.269

HUBRIS

Sharks of another kind (or so Edison chose to see them) gathered when he resumed work in New York at the beginning of April. During his absence Major Eaton had menacingly attempted to glean full details of the finances of his profitable manufacturing shops. The Electric Light Company derived no proceeds from them, whereas Eaton kept receiving bills for “sundry” Construction Department expenses that Edison seemed to think he should pay. Eaton was not sure that he would, and pressed his demand for information about the shops, pointing out that they were, after all, “connected with our business.”270

Edison replied that he would prefer not to comply “until I have had an opportunity of discussing the matters in question with Mr. Villard,” referring to the one Light Company director he had always been able to count on for moral and monetary support. But Villard was a broken man now, having pushed his Oregon & Transcontinental Railroad too far and too fast toward the Pacific, and caused both it and himself to collapse. He could not suggest anything to save Edison from similar hubris, trivial as the latter’s entrepreneurial difficulties were compared to his own.271

On 24 April Edison wrote Eaton to say that he had been unable to win any new contracts for the Construction Department, and could not coax any more cash out of the ones he had acquired. “I find myself in the position of being obliged to immediately disband my organization, as the expenses in connection with it are too large to allow of my continuing it.” He would therefore allow the Electric Light Company, “as it has been suggested,” to take over the Edison Company for Isolated Lighting, along with all his current construction projects. The sooner this was done the better, because he had recruited some of the best men in the electrical industry over the past year, and it would be shortsighted to let them go for lack of pay.272

Actually Charles Clarke and Frank Sprague, a brilliant (if obstreperous) young engineer brought in by Edward Johnson, had already walked, early refugees from a business empire widely perceived to be in trouble. The perception was inaccurate. Pearl Street was pouring out more power by the month and looked sure to become profitable sometime soon. Planning had begun for Manhattan’s second central station, and John Kruesi had taken extra space for the Tube Company in Brooklyn. But negativism was the prevailing mood on Wall Street these days, due largely to Villard’s fall. It was a gloomy time for Edison to have to admit his own failure to push a grand project, even in another man’s handwriting.273

The Electric Light Company board accepted his proposal and reaffirmed its interest in buying his shops, while Insull, emulating Brer Fox, lay low. Then in mid-May a liquidity crisis hit the nation’s banks. Commerce froze, and Edison in a panic fired his engineering staff (retaining only Dickson and an assistant). He also closed down the Machine Works for “maintenance.” Several jumbo generators sat unsold on the factory floor, and he unsuccessfully tried to get his British company to buy them.274

For Mary, too, the spring was bleak. Her adored father died, and she felt less well than she should after a long vacation. Besides being caught up in funeral preparations, she found that for budgetary reasons she must transfer her husband and children out of the Clarendon Hotel and back into the house in Gramercy Park. Edison’s sublessees had come up short, and the lease there would not be up until the first of October.275

Lucy Seyfert’s legal team chose this moment to inform Edison that the New Jersey Supreme Court had again validated his debt to her, now amounting to $5,349 exclusive of fees. In view of his obstinate refusal to pay, the Middlesex County sheriff had authority to seize his holdings in Menlo Park.276

Edison was convinced against all reason that Mrs. Seyfert would settle for $300, the original value of the note she held, if he continued to stall. He ordered his lawyers to assert that the Electric Light Company was the owner of his former laboratory and auxiliary buildings. Everything in the house on Thornall Avenue should be put in Mary’s name and out of the sheriff’s reach. The house itself belonged to him but was heavily mortgaged in New York, which meant that the plaintiff would have to cross state lines, and celebrate several more birthdays, before she got satisfaction on that score. He presented Mary (“Duck—please sign your name below”) with an affidavit claiming title to all the goods and chattels they still possessed at Menlo Park, from a six-piece marble top suite in the master bedroom to a gray horse, three cattle, two pigs, and a “lot of manure” upwind in the yard.^*43, 277

HIS PASSING ALONG

Olive Harper, a roving reporter on women’s issues, was impressed with the splendor of Mary’s home in Gramercy Park, when she interviewed her for a profile published in The World at the beginning of June. The pale blue satin furniture and Chickering piano had come with the lease, but Mary had rearranged the first-floor parlors, laid down some extra Persian rugs, and crammed in many bits of painting and porcelain that were evidently her own artistry.278

Miss Harper seemed to want to write a mainly descriptive article, noting that “Mrs. Edison has been called the most extravagant woman in New York as to personal adornment,” and estimating her weight at 160 pounds. But Mary was wearing nothing but black in mourning for her father. She wanted, in her first and last chance to speak to the press, to correct a story about her marriage that had irritated her for more than five years.279

“In the first place,” she said, “I never worked in any factory, not for Mr. Edison, nor anybody else in any capacity, and therefore all the stories about his passing along where I was at work Monday evening and proposing to me and setting the wedding for Tuesday morning hasn’t a word of truth in it.”

She confirmed that she had been fifteen and a half when he first set eyes on her, ducking out of the rain into his works on Ward Street in Newark. And “very handsome” eyes they were, although the rest of him had been so grimy and oily. “I’m a little in love with my husband’s eyes—yes, in fact, a good deal.” He had been the most gentlemanly of courtiers, gradually winning her father’s trust.

Mary became so sentimental as she rambled on about Edison and her children that she forgot the main rumor she had wanted to deny—that he had gone to the laboratory on their honeymoon night and forgotten to come home. “I have been very happy with him, and I expect to be as long as I live.”280

QUIETNESS AND COUNTRY AIR

Menlo Park was a stripped and saddened place for Mary to return to that June, with none of the “boys” and their wives remaining, the laboratory emptied out, the electric railway grassed over, and the famous streetlamps dead. She would be seeing little of her husband, now that his work was concentrated in New York, and Mr. Batchelor back at last from France. She had her mother, her sister Jennie, and her children to talk with during the day. But with no man in the house at night, and hoboes squatting in the old lamp factory nearby, she slept with a gun under her pillow.281

The quietness and country air at least were good for her in her uncertain state of health—and for eight-year-old “Tommie” as well. He was like his father with his bright eyes and large head, but he was like her too, being prone to fainting spells and mysterious headaches. Little “Willie” was sturdier and stronger, and Marion, now in her twelfth year, even more so, with long blond hair that reminded Mary of herself as a girl.282

A DAMN GOOD MAN

It was a comfort for Edison to have Batchelor at close quarters again, as they worked together on dynamo improvements in the shut-down Machine Works. Edward Johnson (whom Insull was plotting to put on the board of the reorganized Light Company) was the only aide who had served him as long and with as much devotion. But whereas Johnson was an excitable, affectionate dog, constantly pulling to the next pole ahead, Batchelor was a cat who kept his own counsel. He had wisely invested the bonuses, stock certificates, and other pourboires Edison had given him over the years, in moments of shared elation over some triumph at the workbench. As a result, he was by now a wealthy man, and would have been shocked if he knew that his employer currently had little more than twenty dollars in the bank.^*44, 283

Edison appointed him general manager of the Works and accepted his recommendation to hire Nikola Tesla, a phenomenally gifted young Serbian engineer, just off the boat from France. Batchelor had discovered Tesla in Paris the year before, and been awed by his understanding of electricity, as well as the voracity of his appetite for steak.^*45 On both counts, America was clearly where Tesla should be. It had not been difficult for Batchelor to persuade him to cross the Atlantic and become the newest of Edison’s “boys.”284

He at once solved a dynamo problem that was preventing an Edison-lighted steamer, the Oregon, from leaving New York Harbor. Having stayed up all night, he then reported to the Works for another assignment. Edison murmured to Batchelor, “This is a damn good man.”285

Tesla was reciprocally impressed: “The effect that Edison produced on me was rather extraordinary. When I saw this wonderful man, who had had no training at all, no advantages, and did it all himself, and [saw] the great results by virtue of his industry and application, I felt mortified that I had squandered my life…ruminating through libraries and reading all sorts of stuff.”286

ALL TWENTY-ONE LOTS

Mary’s affidavit claiming possession of everything in the house at Menlo Park had not persuaded her husband’s lawyers that the sheriff of Middlesex County would be put off by it. Nor was he likely to be intimidated by the note she had added for good measure: “You will interfere with same at your peril.” Frail as she might be at the moment, with gastritis complicating her chronic neuralgia, Mary was a fighter.287

So, but in a less emotional, more vengeful way, was Edison. Neither of his ploys to frustrate Mrs. Seyfert’s suit passed legal muster. The mortgage argument admitted of no postponement under New Jersey law, while Mary was unable to show a transfer deed that proved she was the rightful owner of the house’s chattels. Edison, who had excellent credit, could have borrowed money to honor the obligation imposed on him by the state’s highest court. But he declined to do so, and the sheriff thereupon announced that his entire property at Menlo Park would be auctioned to satisfy the judgment, at two P.M. on 22 July.

Nobody involved in the action chose to inform posterity where Mary was that day or what she felt about strangers bidding low for things she held dear. However, a bidder comfortingly familiar to her won out. All twenty-one lots were gaveled down to a Mr. Charles Batchelor, of New York.

The total price paid was only $2,750, reflecting Menlo Park’s desuetude as much as the constriction of the economy. Batchelor acted only as a front for Edison, who had arranged to reimburse him later. But $2,852 was still owing on the judgment, and as far as Edison was concerned, the sheriff could sing for it.288

Mary moved back into the house pending further court action. Simultaneously, Edison vacated his office at “65,” on the ground that he was now an inventor again and could safely leave the reorganization of his corporate affairs to Insull. He returned full time to his laboratory in New York—and at once blew out all its windows in an attempt at the direct conversion of coal to electricity.289

He had only just settled in when, without explanation on Thursday 7 August, he left for Menlo Park. His train arrived there before sunset. Two nights later, in the small hours of the morning, Mary died.290

SORROW AT MENLO PARK

Edison had suffered no major bereavement before, except the loss of his mother in 1871. She had ailed for several years with dementia, so he had had time to brace for her death. Mary—still only twenty-eight, and usually able to bounce back to fun-loving health from her spells of illness and depression—departed with such suddenness that for the only recorded time in his life, he cried uncontrollably. When he broke the news to Marion, he was shaking and sobbing and hardly able to speak.291

The immediate question to be asked was what had killed Mary Stilwell Edison. Half a century later her sister Alice told an Edison biographer, “The cause of death was typhoid fever.”292 If so, Mary’s prostration was remarkably rapid, bringing the gigs of country doctors to the house at a gallop even as Edison took his train from New York. Her death certificate, and a terse report issued by the Electric Light Company, cited “congestion of the brain,” which in contemporary parlance could mean anything from meningitis to apoplexy. Or it could mean the alternate dilation and contraction of cranial arteries stimulated by morphine.293 An unsigned article, “Sorrow at Menlo Park,” in The World on 7 August (reading as if written by Olive Harper) went beyond circumspection in suggesting that Mary died of opioid abuse.294

She suffered from obstinate neuralgia that refused all manner of treatment. The best physicians were called in, but their remedies were useless. At last for temporary relief she tried morphine, and soon learned the great palliative powers of the seductive drug—a ready dose of which was always at her side—and when the premonitory symptoms of an attack came on she knew the value of her white powder.

At the request of Mr. Edison she took a trip to Florida last winter. Instead of obtaining relief she fell victim to gastritis, due to the peculiar atmosphere or perhaps the long acquaintance with morphine. She returned to Menlo Park in a more troubled condition. Her pain intensified, and at times she was almost frantic. Morphia was the only remedy, and naturally she tried to increase the quantity prescribed by the doctors. From the careless word dropped by [a] friend of the family it was more than intimated that an overdose of morphine swallowed in a moment of frenzy caused by pain greater than she could bear brought on her untimely death. The doctor in attendance said she died of congestion of the brain. When a reporter put the question to him he positively asserted that it was the immediate cause, but about the more remote causes he preferred to remain silent.^*46, 295

So did Edison. Like Henry Adams and Theodore Roosevelt and other dumbstruck widowers of the time, he honored the dead by keeping his grief to himself. Except for a brief reference to “my poor wife” in an interview at the end of the month, he rarely mentioned Mary again. Because she was soon to be replaced, she was edited out of the Edison family’s later history—except among her children, and only the eldest of them had much of her to remember. In the mythology of the Stilwells, Mary became a limp, naked figure being lifted from her bath by Grace-like vestals, or a ghost walking in the front yard of Edison’s house, rising as he ran forward to clutch at her white summer dress, which dissolved in his fingers like a cloud.296

DAMON AND PYTHIAS

The barrage of emotional blows that made 1884 Edison’s annus horribilis—his business folly, his near bankruptcy, the humiliating sale of his house, the abruption of the mother of his children—drew him closer to Marion than to either of his bewildered boys. At eleven and a half, she was old enough to feel another’s grief as well as her own. He took what consolation he could from her girlish company, addressing her as “Miss Marion Edison, sweetest of all.” In September “Grammach” Stilwell, Mary’s mother, looked after Tom and William at Menlo Park while Edison took Marion to the International Electrical Exhibition in Philadelphia. It was a grown-up treat for her before she went back to school in New York. There was a nice new apartment waiting for them on East Eighteenth Street. They would not live again in that stone house on Gramercy Park, with its pale blue satin furniture and mirrors full of memory.297

Father and daughter made a touching duo as they toured the Philadelphia show hand in hand, gazing up at a Doric column of more than two thousand lamps that dazzlingly spelled out his name letter by letter over spirals of colored light. As if that were not apotheosis enough, an electrified bust of the inventor represented him at the moment of perfecting his first carbon bulb, with a halo of incandescence encircling his brow.298

“As soon as I go the laboratory again I’m going to work on several new things,” he said to a reporter. “I haven’t been doing work on anything much but light.”299

In an encounter that would pluck him from the slough of despond, he met an old colleague from his days as a wandering telegraph operator. Ezra Gilliland was a humorous, loose-mouthed electrician from upstate New York who had helped him promote his phonograph six years before. In the interim since then, Gilliland had married well, and was now working for the research arm of the American Bell Telephone Company in Boston. He had acquired a healthy paunch and a beach house on the North Shore.300

Gilliland dabbled in invention and owned a share in several communications patents. When Edison asked him “what would be a good thing to take up next,” he suggested they collaborate on a long-distance telephone transmitter for American Bell. Edison was immediately interested, having himself, seven years before, invented the carbon button that made Bell telephones audible.^*47 After returning to New York, he at once reverted to acoustic technology, and as early as 24 September executed a patent on a xylophone-like signal receiver that chimed at different pitches, depending on who was being called.301

He felt at liberty to work for an outside client now, especially after Insull (who had gone into his own private depression over Mary’s death) succeeded in reorganizing the Electric Light Company in October as promised. Eaton was out as president, replaced by a more compliant Eugene Crowell; Edward Johnson was vice-president, and Lowrey dropped from the board.^*48 The independence of the manufacturing shops was preserved, and the power of Drexel, Morgan to block innovation nullified. “I have got mine at last,” Insull exulted. Edison, less vindictively, expressed relief at being free of corporate restrictions. “I have worked eighteen and twenty hours a day for five years, and don’t want to see my work killed for want of proper pushing.” With Johnson in control of the Light Company and other Menlo Park alumni running the shops, he returned to the study of telecommunications, his once and future passion—and the best therapy imaginable for a man in mourning.302

Edison and Gilliland cemented their professional relationship at the beginning of December with a joint application for a patent on the prevention of electromagnetic interference in speech transmission.303 For the rest of the winter they worked together in New York and Boston, staying in each other’s apartments and recapturing the intimacy that had linked them as youthful wire gypsies. It burgeoned with unusual speed, since Edison had a widower’s need for company at night. His new laboratory did not offer the rough camaraderie of the old, with only a couple of mechanics and a boy to join him for midnight lunches, if they could be persuaded to stay so late. Gilliland and his birdlike wife, Lillian, were childless. They compensated with many entertainments, to which the teenage daughters of their friends, many of them students in Boston’s private academies, were always welcome.304

On 20 February 1885 Edison and Marion—delighted to play hooky from her own school in New York—set off with the Gillilands on a marathon railroad tour. They headed first for Adrian, Michigan, where Gilliland’s father lived and where Edison had worked as a sixteen-year-old night operator on the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railroad. A blizzard slowed their progress. The two men passed the time discussing a patent that Gilliland co-owned, for sending wireless telephone waves from a moving train by means of electromagnetic induction. They believed that the technique could be refined for telegraphy by using a vibrating reed to compress the dots and dashes of Morse code into rapid pulses—as many as 250,000 a second, Edison calculated—which would then be “jumped” to wires running alongside the track for transmission to stations along the line.305

The idea grew in their minds as they proceeded south via Chicago and Cincinnati, where they had once worked together for Western Union, and where Edison had conducted his first experiments in multiple telegraphy. At the end of the month they attended an industrial fair in New Orleans before moving east into Florida. They installed Mrs. Gilliland and Marion in St. Augustine’s luxury hotel, the San Marco, then crossed over to the considerably wilder Gulf Coast. The tarpon fishing was said to be especially good off Punta Rassa, so they rented a sloop at Cedar Key and sailed south to that cow town on the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River. They checked into the Schultz Hotel, which was in all respects the opposite of the San Marco and therefore entirely to Edison’s taste.306

One day he became curious about Fort Myers, a village twelve miles upstream, after hearing that bamboo grew seventy feet tall there. He still had a bamboo explorer on his payroll, scouting the world for splints, but had not thought of Florida as a possible source of supply. On 20 March he and Gilliland took the sloop and, leaving behind Punta Rassa’s miasma of fish parts and cattle dip, sailed inland into the fragrance of orange trees and fan palmettos blooming.307

A white road of crushed oyster shells paralleled the left bank of the river, half-screened by live oaks, tamarinds, date palms, and native cinnamon. It was besplattered with dung, testifying to its function as a cattle conduit to the southern part of the state. At the head of the road Fort Myers came into view: a straggly settlement consisting of a few dozen houses, a tiny telegraph office, a drugstore, a hotel, a schoolhouse, a church, and that feature of all American outposts, a real estate office.

Although the bamboo growing nearby at “Billy’s Creek” did not compare with Japanese madake for hardness, Edison was charmed enough with the little town to request a tour of a thirteen-acre riverfront property advertised for sale a mile down the white road. It was unfenced and overgrown, but the panorama of the river, one and a half miles wide, was magnificent. Before he sailed back to Punta Rassa the following day, he had contracted to buy it for $3,000.308

Separately, Gilliland agreed to pay a quarter of the price of the estate. Although that gave Edison most of it, they planned to build twin winter homes there, in a grove facing the water. When they journeyed back north a few days later with their female companions, they had something other than “jumping” train telegraphs to discuss. Punta Rassa was becoming fashionable and an investment upriver seemed worthwhile, although as Edison admitted, “it will make a savage onslaught on our bank account.” United now in business and at least partially in domicile, they began to call themselves Damon and Pythias—Gilliland assuming the former identity, with its Greek connotation of readiness to die for his best friend.309

Pythias had no sooner returned to his laboratory than he applied in Damon’s name for two patents on a wireless train communications system using induction telegraphy. Possessive as Edison always was of his own patents, he was scrupulous in recognizing the antecedence of other inventors—even though the claimant in this case had merely bought his way in. But on legal advice, and recognizing that he was to be the major developer of the system from now on, he added his own name at filing time.310 Week by week, signature by signature, the Pythagorean duo was being yoked closer together.

A SORT OF RAPHAELIZED BEAUTY

Among the young women who prettified the Gilliland apartment in Boston was a Miss Mina Miller, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a wealthy businessman in Akron, Ohio. She was a student at a finishing school on Newbury Street, where she had become fluent in French and well trained in fine and domestic arts. Her piano teacher, however, had been unable to match Mina’s love of music with anything resembling musicality. Edison’s first reaction when she sat down at Mrs. Gilliland’s piano was a mixture of surprise and curiosity. “I could not help being interested immediately in anyone who would play and sing without hesitation, when they did it as badly as that.”311

Mina performed not because she was vain, but because she had been asked to. It was her nature to oblige. She doubted that she would see Edison again. He was, of course, famous and “a genial, lovely man” to boot.312 But he was twice her age, with gray streaking his hair and a habit of cupping his right ear in conversation. For all her study of English literature, it did not occur to her that such a man, single and in possession of a good fortune—not to mention three motherless children—must be in want of a wife.^*49

All he was aware of, at first, was a pair of “great dazzling eyes.” On subsequent visits to Boston to do business with Gilliland and American Bell, he could not fail to notice that Miss Miller had other double attributes, agreeably arranged elsewhere on her sturdy person. Had she been fair instead of darkly brunette, she might have reminded him of an even younger schoolgirl, ducking out of the rain and into his life fifteen years before.^*50 Except that this one had an easy sophistication poor Mary never attained. Her four elder brothers were all college men, and her two younger ones were destined for Yale. Her older sister was as polished and well traveled as she, and the other two were at or put down for Wellesley. Her millionaire father, Lewis Miller, was a pillar of Akron society, an elder of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and co-founding president of the Chautauqua Institution. From her equally pious mother Mina had inherited a certain dourness that was less attractive to Edison than those big eyes and—was fate again speaking to him?—the delightful fact that she was at home in a workshop.313

It turned out that Mr. Miller was also an inventor, with a hundred farm implement patents to his credit, so she had an understanding of technology and was not likely to be bored when Edison talked to her about electromotographic mirrors. Luxuriating in company with her and other “fresh invoice[s] of innocence and beauty” at Woodside Villa, Gilliland’s beach house in Winthrop, Massachusetts, Edison became so infatuated that he sounded like a teenager himself, writing Insull at the end of June, “Could you come over here to spend 4th at Gills—there is lots [sic] pretty girls.”314

A page of Edison’s diary, summer 1885.^*51

Around this time someone in the Gilliland circle suggested that they all start keeping diaries, full of as many personal details as possible, to be shared for common amusement. Edison began his on 12 July in Menlo Park, where his children were being looked after by Mrs. Stilwell.315

When he returned to Woodside Villa with Marion in tow, Mina had left to join her family at Chautauqua. Lillian Gilliland, who was openly seeking a mate for him, offered Louise Igoe from Indiana for his consideration. “Miss Igoe,” he wrote, “is a pronounced blonde, blue eyes, with a complexion as clear as the conscience of a baby angel.” But he could not shake Mina’s darker charms from his mind. During a Boston book-buying excursion, he “got thinking about Mina and came near being run over by a street car—If Mina interferes much more I will have to take out an insurance policy.”316

There followed the laziest, most ruminative period of his life, a sun-soaked, ozone-flavored, female-graced, and oddly frenchified interlude so unlike what he was used to that the days seemed to blend into a prolonged raptus that was more dream than reality. Missing from it only, yet permeating his diary through and through, was “the Maid of Chautauqua,” whose remoteness in western New York State he was determined to make temporary. In the meantime Mina could be pleasurably associated with Madame Récamier, Lucien Bonaparte’s scantily dressed muse and the embodiment of unattainable, sophisticated sexuality. Although Edison spoke little French, he had always been drawn to French literature, and one of his book purchases in Boston was the autobiography of la divine Juliette—“I should like to see such a woman.”317 Absorbed in it, he drowsily envisioned the jealous tyrant who had sent her into exile.

After breakfast laid down on a sofa, fell into light draught sleep dreamed that in the depth of space, on a bleak and gigantic planet the solitary soul of the great Napoleon was the sole inhabitant. I saw him as in the pictures, in contemplative aspect with his blue eagle eye, amid the howl of the tempest and the lashing of gigantic waves high up on a jutting promontory gazing out among the worlds & stars that stud the depths of infinity Miles above him circled and swept the sky with ponderous wing the imperial condor bearing in his talons a message….

Mina Miller dressed as a gypsy, at about the time Edison first met her.

Then my dream changed—Thought I was looking out upon the sea, suddenly the air was filled with millions of little cherubs as one sees in Raphaels pictures each I thought was about the size of a fly. They were perfectly formed & seemed semi-transparent, each swept down to the surface of the sea, reached out both their tiny hands and grabbed a very small drop of water, and flew upwards where they assembled and appeared to form a cloud.318

Clearly Edison was in the grip of an emotional turmoil that had him struggling to keep his balance amid the vast stability of a universe governed by immutable natural laws or (if Mina insisted) by God:

Went out on Veranda to exercise my appreciation of Nature. Saw bugs, butterflies as varied as Prang’s Chromos,^*52 Birds innumerable, flowers with as great a variety of color as Calico for the African market….What a wonderfully small idea mankind has of the Almighty. My impression is that he has made unchangeable laws to govern this and billions of other worlds and that he has forgotten even the existence of this little mote of ours ages ago. Why cant man follow up and practice the teachings of his own conscience, mind his business, and not obtrude his purposely created finite mind in affairs that will be attended to without any voluntee[re]d advice.319

Marion, not to be outdone by her father in imaginative expression, wrote an outline for a novel about “a marriage under duress.” When she read it to him, he said, in words that might have told her something about his own past experience, “Put in bucketfulls of misery.”320

It was the only sour note sounded in what was otherwise, for him, a period of ecstatic expectation that Mina (who had turned twenty on the sixth) would be receptive to his advances. If by heading west she was playing hard to get, then he would pursue her, even into the bosom of her family. That meant he would have to charm as many as ten other Millers, not to mention Mina’s countless cousins, and especially win the favor of her father, the largest frog in the small pool of Chautauqua Lake.

Edison’s best chance there was to ingratiate himself with Lewis Miller as a fellow inventor, while staying off the subject of churchgoing. “My conscience seems to be oblivious of Sunday,” he wrote in his diary. He learned what he could about the great man by reading a collection of business profiles encouragingly entitled How Success Is Won. There was little he could do about his other possible liability—middle age—except to strive for an elegant appearance by buying a pair of uncomfortably tight, French-made chaussures de monsieur.^*53 “These shoes are small and look nice,” he noted in his diary. “My No. 2 mind (acquired mind) has succeeded in convincing my No. 1 mind, (primal mind or heart) that it is pure vanity, conceit and folly to suffer bodily pains that ones person may have graces [which are] the outcome of secret agony.”321

He also brushed up intellectually by delving into his pile of beach books—Rousseau’s La nouvelle Héloïse, Disraeli’s Curiosities of Literature, Hjalmar Boyesen’s Goethe and Schiller (“a little wit & anecdote in this style of literature would have the same effect as baking soda on bread”), Johann Kaspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy, Hawthorne’s Passages from the English Note-Books, Rose Cleveland’s George Eliot’s Poetry and Other Studies, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and The Sorrows of Young Werther, Thomas B. Aldrich’s Story of a Bad Boy (“very witty and charming”), and Longfellow’s Hyperion. As if this were not enough erudition, he reveled in the epigrams of Sydney Smith and reminded himself, “I must read Jane Eyre.”322

On 10 August Edison presented himself at Chautauqua. Marion accompanied her father, not altogether congenially. He had sensed, while extolling Mina’s “perfection” to the Gillilands, that his daughter was becoming jealous. “She threatens to become an incipient Lucretia Borgia.”323

Lewis Miller turned out to be a pleasant surprise. Reciprocally, he took to Edison at once as a man who, like himself, made large amounts of money for the benefit of humanity. Although the light he sought to bestow was more spiritual than electrical, he was at the same time an earthy, good-natured, receptive personality, more willing than his austere wife to laugh at cornball jokes—which Edison was careful to scrub clean of words likely to shock them. Even Mary Valinda Miller admitted that her daughter’s new suitor had a winning way with him. She had previously hoped for a match between Mina and young George Vincent, the son of Chautauqua’s other co-founder, but neither she nor Lewis could help being flattered that one of the most famous men in the world was calling at their cottage, hat and heart in hand.^*54, 324

They jibbed, however, when Edison asked permission to take Mina off on a tour of northern New York State and New Hampshire. Decent girls did not go on such jaunts, even with respectable widowers. Ezra and Lillian Gilliland offered themselves as chaperones, and Louise Igoe (who was sweet on Mina’s brother Robert) volunteered further company. They all, in Mina’s words, “made it so attractive [that] father at last consented.”325

The six travelers set off on 18 August. Their rail and pleasure boat itinerary took them via Niagara Falls and the Thousand Islands of upstate New York to Montreal, whence they swung south into the White Mountains of New Hampshire and stopped at the grand Maplewood Hotel. Here, Mina primly recalled, “things got a little warmer” between herself and the inventor of the quadruplex telegraph.326

One evening after spending the day on top of Mount Washington, we were sitting around the hotel in the foothills. Mr. Edison wrote down for me the Morse code characters and by next morning I had memorized them. A short time later he slowly tapped a message to me which I was able to understand. Just what the message said I consider too sacred to repeat.327

Marion claimed to have witnessed the tapping, which took place on Mina’s hand, as well as the dash-dot-dash-dash, dot, dot-dot-dot response. Having often hung about her father’s laboratory in Menlo Park, she may have learned Morse code too. More likely her memory of Mina’s story transmuted over time into an imagined recollection. At any rate it was an end to the happiest year she ever spent,328 and for Edison and Mina, the beginning of a union till death.

CUPID’S DEMANDS

On 30 September Edison wrote Lewis Miller, formally asking if he could marry Mina.

My Dear Sir

Some months since, as you are aware, I was introduced to your daughter, Miss Mina. The friendship which ensued became admiration as I began to appreciate her gentleness and grace of manner, and her beauty and strength of mind.

That admiration has on my part ripend into love, and I have asked her to become my wife. She has referred me to you, and our engagement needs but for its confirmation your consent.

I trust you will not accuse me of egotism when I say that my life and history and standing are so well known as to call for no statement concerning myself. My reputation is so far made that I recognize that I must be judged by it for good or ill.

I need only add in conclusion that the step I have taken in asking your daughter to intrust her happiness into my keeping has been the result of mature deliberation, and with the full appreciation of the responsibility I have assumed, and the duty I have undertaken to fulfil.

I do not deny that your answer will seriously affect my happiness, and I trust my suit may meet with your approval. Very sincerely yours

Thomas A. Edison329

He gave his New York laboratory as his return address, and was good for nothing connected with business until he heard his fate. Edward Johnson tried to get his attention on a matter of some urgency—what to do about a new rival to the phonograph, the “graphophone”—but had to postpone further discussion, “for the simple reason that he is in love and don’t want to make any appointments in advance that might possibly conflict with Cupid’s demands.”330

Miller replied promptly and with equal formality, inviting Edison to visit him en famille at Oak Place, Akron, early in October. Mina’s towering home was defended by a profusion of deer, horse, and dog statuary, and Edison was not made entirely welcome by her mother. Mrs. Miller doubted his assurance that he would be a churchgoer, were it not for the unfortunate problem of his deafness. Mina had some concerns on that score herself, but Lewis had none at all. He liked Edison enormously and gave the lovers permission to marry under his roof on 24 February 1886.331

In the interim, Edison had some major real estate decisions to make. On a bright night by the sea the previous summer, indulging fantasies of Mina far away, he had taken an imaginary triangulation of the moon, “the two sides of said triangle meeting the base line of the earth at Woodside and Akron, Ohio.” His calculations had got him to the latter point precisely as planned. Now he had to plot a series of other extensions, which would become the geometry of his future life. First, from Oak Place to Fort Myers, where he wanted to take his bride on honeymoon, and where he and Gilliland were building twin houses and a winter laboratory to share; then back to wherever in the New York area Mina wanted to settle (he would give her the choice of city or county);332 then the shortest possible connection from that base to the location of a new superlaboratory that would erase all memories of Menlo Park.

Mina chose Llewellyn Park, an exclusive, gated, hillside enclave in West Orange, New Jersey. It was far enough from the railroad station in downtown Orange to be considered rural, yet close enough to merit municipal horsecar service. Glenmont, the estate’s premier residence, was listed for sale fully furnished, thanks to the downfall of the owner, Henry Pedder, in a million-dollar embezzlement case. It was bigger than the house she had grown up in, a many-gabled, twenty-three-room Queen Anne mansion, red of brick and exterior framing, almost new and built as solidly as a bank, with a mahogany central staircase, a billiard den, a music room, and an immense curving conservatory that caught the morning sun. It had hot running water in all bathrooms and fireplaces in all bedrooms, central heat, hand-stenciled ceilings, oil paintings, statuary, a huge service of Tiffany silver tableware, and a library of leather-tooled books Mr. Pedder had been unable to take with him when he skipped the country for St. Kitts.333

Glenmont in Llewellyn Park, soon after Edison’s purchase of it for Mina.

Glenmont was so named because it had a valley view, facing east across the Oranges toward New York, only twenty miles away. It was surrounded by eleven acres of shaven lawns and plantings designed by Nathan Franklin Barrett, the nation’s foremost landscape architect. Behind and to the north, fragrant woodlands soared toward the Eagle Rock reservation, which offered skating in winter and a refuge from the state’s mosquitoes in summer. All Mina needed to acquire this paradise from its receiver was a fiancé able to unbelt $125,000—well under a third of the estate’s estimated value.334

Edison did not disappoint. He was beginning to be flush again, with profits surging in from his manufacturing shops and other enterprises. Pearl Street was in the black, having paid off its start-up costs in a year, and already issued its first dividend. The Edison Illuminating Company of New York was poised to begin construction of a much larger Second District, extending as far north as Central Park. Nationwide, fifty-eight Edison central stations and 520 isolated plants had more than three hundred thousand lamps in circuit.335 The Machine Works had so outgrown its cramped Lower East Side neighborhood that it would soon have to move out of Manhattan or even upstate. Not for some years yet might Edison count himself as rich as some of the other mansion dwellers in Llewellyn Park, but for the first time in his life he felt wealthy enough to match his spending to the scope of his ambitions.

He signed for the purchase of Glenmont on 10 January. Not wishing the pesky Mrs. Seyfert to place a lien on the property, he settled her suit for $6,134—more than twenty times his original debt to her husband. In another severance, he ordered a Newark florist to discontinue the placement of flowers on Mary’s grave. He treated his ninety-one-year-old father to a three-month tour of Europe. He wrote his real estate agents in Fort Myers to notify them he was coming there soon (without mentioning it would be on honeymoon) and expected that he and Mr. Gilliland would be able to move into their completed houses.^*55 He dispatched two schooners loaded with heavy equipment for the laboratory, and when one of them was destroyed by lightning en route, he sent another with duplicate cargo. Looking further ahead, to the work he would be doing after settling into Glenmont, he doodled several elevations of his northern laboratory and conjoined works, massively built in beaux arts style around a quadrangle and anchored, to the right of its gates, by a library.336

Ezra and Lillian Gilliland opted to go to Fort Myers in advance of the wedding, to prepare the compound for his arrival. They took Marion with them. Tom and William stayed in school.^*56 On 20 February the Menlo Park “boys” gave the Old Man a stag party in New York at Delmonico’s. Three days later Batchelor, Johnson, Insull, and a few others entrained in a private car to Akron, where at three P.M. on the twenty-fourth Edison stood under a wishbone of roses in the parlor at Oak Place and waited for Mina to marry him.337

Edison’s Magritte-like sketch of Mina as an airborne clock.

TO LOVE AND TO CHERISH

She made a glittering prize in white satin, with a diamond and pearl necklace he had bought for her. Heaps of other gifts of diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and silver were on display in the great room, arrayed around a column of solid onyx, capped with a gold capital, confirming (along with a bronze dog outside, garlanded for the occasion) that Edison had been accepted into the ranks of the nouveau riche. He made a stab at elegance in a black Prince Albert coat, but declined to wear gloves.338

This omission was widely noted in the nation’s press. It served as a signal that for all his new wife’s social aspirations, he was still a man who worked with his hands. And his haste to leave for Florida that same evening indicated a desire to return to inventive engineering that was at least as urgent as sex. No sooner had they begun to pass through Georgia plantations than he figured out the mechanics of an automatic cotton picker, with air-blown depilatory spindles.339

Peach trees bloomed on the approach to Florida. When “Mr. and Mrs. Edison” checked into the St. James Hotel in Jacksonville, Mina found herself the object of such avid public scrutiny that she was overcome with shyness. She took refuge in their room while her husband, used to fame, went sightseeing. Like many a young bride suffering the anticlimax of honeymoon, she found she had given herself to someone not wholly congenial. Her husband’s irreverence bothered her. Having knelt beside him before a white altar in her father’s house and heard him vow “to love and to cherish, till death do us part, according to God’s holy ordinance,” she hoped that he might be receptive to the Methodist Episcopal Church’s 223-page Doctrines and Discipline, a copy of which Lewis Miller had stuck in his coat pocket for light reading on the train. “He intends to study it well,” Mina wrote her mother, sounding doubtful. “He wanted to know the other day if I married him to convert him.”340

Edison tried to make her understand that he needed hard evidence, or at least logical argument, to believe anything, and that religion was deficient in both respects. He had no wish to convert her to agnosticism and was willing to admit that he might be wrong to shrug at faith. But he could not help the way he felt: “Everyday life must be the convincing power.”341 On that, at least, they agreed.

“XYZ”

If Mina was aware how much Edison’s creativity had diminished in the eighteen months since Mary’s death, she might have given herself inspirational credit for the volcano of ideas that erupted out of him as soon as they got to Fort Myers.342 His laboratory there—a plain prefabricated shed—was still not ready, and $16,000 worth of equipment had yet to be installed. But that did not stop him from filling six notebooks with enough drawings and specifications to keep a research team busy for the rest of the century. One or two sketches prefigured surrealism, such as a piano that produced speech instead of music by means of keys “playing” a rubber larynx, or a bust of Mina, bare-shouldered, hanging upside down from an airborne clock. But most of the entries were so precisely conceived, dated, and signed that it was clear he had set up a laboratory in his mind.343

Notebook number one began with three images that on any other honeymoon might be considered phallic—

—but for Edison were just variations on the endlessly fascinating theme of incandescent light. Before that day’s jotting was over, he had run eleven mental tests on carbonizing solutions, purified and desiccated “city gas” by passing it through tubes of finely divided copper, experimented with a foil balloon for long-distance electric signaling, and converted natural gas into lampblack. There followed, over the next six weeks, more than four hundred inventions, including fluid prisms, a phonographic siren, a motorized “cash carrier” for department stores, a metal fatigue detector, sonar depth sounders, a squirter of artificial silk, and a pneumatic device to suck turpentine out of trees.344 Amid this array of minor notions there emerged two concepts that he considered to be of major importance: an electromagnetic theory of gravitation (influenced by his readings of Faraday) and conversion of light or heat into electricity. The former made him see the solar system as one giant centrifugal dynamo, or in universal terms as a molecule among billions of others whirling in the cosmos. The latter derived from an idea that had tantalized him for years, that there existed in frequencies above and below the limits of human reception a type of energy so new he could only call it “xyz.” He sensed it again now, when he mentally projected beams of light or heat through liquids, or theorized an opposing relationship between the current in a condenser and the lines of force in a magnet. What was the signal-emitting train that he and Gilliland were working on but a giant condenser, “jumping” electrical energy through air, in defiance of the law of insulation? He drew, three-dimensionally, various ways a rotating, slotted cylinder could throw slices of light between the prongs of a magnet “straight and at right angles.” In his brain’s ear he heard a tone emitted by a rapidly spinning magnetized wheel, audible through an attached telephone as a kind of spectral music. “Now if this disturbance is created without the production of electricity or magnetism, then we have a new form of energy.”345

The orthography of his notes at such times showed him being swept into a fever of excitement, careful script degenerating into a sprawl, as if his speculations were running ahead of the pencil in his hand.346 Edison was rushing into realms of thought where even pure scientists feared to tread, and he knew that he was unqualified, but as when arguing theology with Mina, he could not help himself.^*57

She in turn could not help feeling lost in the primitive environment of a riverside estate stripped of jungle growth and only partially replanted. The twin houses were attractive enough, in a raw-looking, just-carpentered way, and it was comforting to have Lillian Gilliland at hand to help her deal with Marion, but she looked askance at the cowboys and colored people—“nearly every one of the darkest shade,” she wrote home—that constituted the lower ranks of Floridian society. They were not what her schoolmates in Boston might call de notre monde.347

Mina’s doubts about having married Edison were compounded by his incessant jocularity.348 She was devoid of humor herself and flinched at the way he teased both men and women, sometimes in a rough way that made her wonder what kind of language he used when closeted with men only. Just as hard to get used to was his need to control everyone and everything around him. Even so personal a task as planning the gardens around their winter home had to be executed to the last detail by himself:

Edison’s plan for his Fort Myers estate, spring 1886. Laboratory to the left of the twin houses.

Edison presented this design to their gardener/caretaker with fifteen hundred words of precise instructions, informing him that 280 boatloads of topsoil would be needed to cover the eight-acre riverside parcel four inches deep. He ordered ninety different fruit trees, including figs, mangoes, mulberries, alligator pears, plums, peaches, apricots, persimmons, and “as many orange trees of best variety as will go on end of the House plot.” There should also be a banana bed twenty feet square, a thousand pineapple plants, and a lemon hedge. (“If you cannot procure the regular Italian Lemon seed elsewhere…raise the slips yourself from seeds found in the lemon.”) He also authorized the purchase of eight tons of fertilizer: “We propose to have our ground the best manured in Florida….I think you should go back from the river & look for black muck fresh water muck….It evidently wants some fine decayed fibrous spongy matter like they are putting in the Coconut holes to hold the manure & prevent it going clear through to China.”349

Mina learned, like Mary before her, that she would never have the whole of her husband, nor even the best of the balance. Perhaps sensing her feelings of inadequacy, Edison asked her to copy and countersign many of the inventions in his notebooks. But the only experiment he permitted her to perform with him was an attempt to shock an oyster into opening its shell. They had to write it off as a “dead failure.”350

BILLY, GEORGE, TOM, AND WILLIE

Edison was in no hurry to resume normal life after his honeymoon ended in late April. He and Mina spent the early days of May in Akron before moving into their mansion—with apprehension on her part and false modesty on his. “It is a great deal too nice for me,” he told a reporter, “but”—touching Mina’s arm—“it isn’t half nice enough for my little wife here.”351

Her problem was not its grandeur but the intimidating prospect of having to run such a large establishment, with many servants and three stepchildren looking to her for authority. Edison could be relied on not to supply that, once he was back at work full-time. Domesticity, including the balancing of household accounts, was a woman’s work. Her chances of civilizing him were about as slim as the Widow Douglas’s with Huck Finn, although for a while friends were amused to see that his pants were now pressed, his shoes shined, and his jacket buttons inserted into the correct holes.352

Edison began to mind his own business again, moving decisively to punish a strike for union recognition and higher pay at the Edison Machine Works on 19 May. If the “communists” of New York City thought they could organize one of his shops, he was happy to move the entire plant to Schenectady, where Insull had providentially found an old locomotive factory. “Do it big, Sammy. Make it a big success,” he said. “Or a big failure.”353

Insull took the word big to heart and established beside the Erie Canal the future world headquarters of General Electric.^*58

With him and John Kruesi gone, Edison was freer of corporate encumbrances than ever, and able to indulge his most consuming current interest, wireless telegraphy. The “jumping” train communications device he had developed with Gilliland the year before, now nicknamed the “grasshopper” system, was being tested with only partial success on the Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad. He had much more faith in an alternative device he had patented himself, the phonoplex. It gave depots along the track the ability to telegraph one another via multiple lines, without interfering with terminal communications. When in a moment of inspiration he devised a weighted diaphragm to enhance its acoustics, it performed so well along the Grand Trunk Railroad—the very route he had run as a newsboy—that his tester, Alfred Tate,^*59 reported, “There is no ‘frying pan’ induction or ‘morse hash’ to drown the writing of the phone key.”354 Translated from telegraphese, that meant that the phonoplex sounded clear, with no crackly interference or blurring together of dots and dashes.

The “grasshopper” system was eventually taken over by the Consolidated Railway Telegraph Company and never flourished, but the Edison phonoplex was adopted by the Baltimore & Ohio in July and became a staple on American railroads well into the next century.355

That summer Edison transferred his laboratory from New York to the Lamp Company in East Newark, which was closer to home. He continued to involve Mina in his experimental work, taking her there as an assistant and—since she was being allowed into a man’s world—calling her by the pet nickname “Billy.” When on occasion Marion joined them, she was likewise “George.” In mid-August he joined Billy, George, Tom, Willie, and numerous Millers at Chautauqua, and basked for as long as he could stand it in what William James called its “unmitigated goodness.”356

For the rest of Mina’s life this annual pilgrimage, plus churchgoing, was to offer her spiritual relief from her husband’s material preoccupations. Chautauqua, however, never quite alleviated her tendency to melancholy; nor did the sermons she heard at the 1886 assembly help her deal with the problem of a jealous stepdaughter. Marion, with adolescence coming on, could not adjust to being displaced from Edison’s affections by a woman only six and a half years older than herself. The boys were difficult too. Mina unloaded her angst in letters to her mother, who replied in comforting Chautauquese. “Try and love them and they will love you and Mr Edison will be perfectly happy.”357

But Edison was so already. In October his good friend Gilliland joined him in East Newark for a new round of experiments, and Mina found her services there were no longer needed. About the same time, she became pregnant.358

FOR SHOCKING PURPOSES

On 2 November the U.S. Patent Office issued one of its most unpronounceable patents to Károlyi Zipernowski, Ottó Bláthy, and Miksa Déri, of Budapest, for an induction coil transformer to provide the high voltages required to distribute alternating current economically over distances far beyond the limit of Edison’s direct current system.359 The device became popularly known as the “ZBD” transformer, and its power as “AC,” while Edison was positioned as the defender of “DC.” Thus began the competition that would develop, over time and in conspiratorial myth, into the “war of the currents” between Edison and an opponent always identified as Nicola Tesla but whose real name was George Westinghouse.360

At first it was not so much war as a research effort by Edison to see if AC technology—which Frank Sprague predicted was “going to be a formidable rival to the system of direct supply”—could be integrated with his own. He had long been aware that DC power, suited as it was to a compact urban area like the First District of New York, was not suitable for long-distance transmission, because the farther it was extended, the thicker and costlier its copper conductors would have to be. His “three-wire” distribution system was an ingenious answer to that problem, but again best served a close-spread circuit. DC power flowed in one direction, steadily and at moderate voltage from dynamo to lamp. AC power zigzagged back and forth as it flashed along the surface of any wire, alternately swelling to maximum and dropping to zero pressure, forced by tranformers to as many as three thousand volts, then using magnetic induction to reduce them, transformer by transformer, to levels that would not melt a filament. It used little copper and went as far as any supplier needed to send it. Until the perfection of the ZBD, however, high-voltage AC had been too unsteady for reliability.^*60 But the Hungarian transformer smoothed it out so effectively that Sprague warned Edward Johnson, president of the Edison Electric Light Company, “You cannot too soon take steps to prevent someone getting into the field ahead of you.”361

Johnson accordingly bought American rights to the ZBD.362 It availed him little. Westinghouse had already formed his own eponymous Electric Company, financed an AC system in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and acquired an even more sophisticated transformer, recently designed by William Stanley. Meanwhile Edison, acting out of curiosity rather than combativeness, applied for nearly a dozen AC-related patents of his own. Experimenting with it gingerly, he convinced himself that the system’s invisible, flickering, trapped lightning was likely to kill careless utility workers, not to mention householders who tinkered with the wrong outlet or allowed the insulation around their feed wiring to fray. He summed up his findings and his feelings in a lengthy, highly technical memorandum to Johnson: “As the [back-and-forth] wave cannot start instantly and stop instantly…it will require 130 volts or thereabouts to produce the equivalent of 100, thus we have for shocking purposes a reversed intermitting current of unlimited amperes as far as the body is concerned (!) and [at] a difference of 260 volts it will certainly be unpleasant.”363

ALL REFERENCES TO CRIBS

Telling jokes coatless outside his East Newark facility, one icy day around the turn of the year, Edison contracted pleurisy and for many weeks lay dangerously ill.^*61 It was the end of January before he could sit up in bed364 and attend to his first order of business in 1887: the purchase of fourteen acres of property at the corner of Valley Road and Lakeside Avenue in West Orange, about a mile from his home in Llewellyn Park.

As soon as he was mobile again, he wanted to resume work at the lamp factory and develop a squirted-cellulose filament for the Edison lightbulb. He believed that if he could double the reach of his system by such advances, it would beat back the challenge of AC power. But his doctors insisted he recuperate further in Florida, sending him there so early in February that he was obliged to celebrate his fortieth birthday on the train. A press rumor that he had tuberculosis and would never return north flashed across the country. Edward Johnson attributed it to the Westinghouse Company. Edison’s recovery in Fort Myers was slow and complicated by an ear abscess that had to be lanced on 24 March. A reporter from The World found him a few days later at work in his wooden laboratory, healthy but harder of hearing. “He certainly was a sick man at one time,” Ezra Gilliland admitted. “The trouble somehow reached the heart, and it was found necessary several times to administer hypodermic injections of morphine.”365

Mina had her own problems, being by now visibly pregnant and worried after a year of marriage that she did not have Edison’s “full affection.”366 She preceded him north in mid-April, taking Marion with her, leaving the field clear for her father to visit with Edison alone and subject him to Methodist scrutiny. Lewis Miller came, stayed, and was beguiled. He listened in vain for improprieties in his host’s storytelling and for any remarks that might indicate disappointment in her as a wife.

“The more I see him,” he wrote Mina, “the more I am impressed with his greatness and genuine good heart. I am thoroughly convinced that he is true to you and true to what he appears to be. And socially he is superior to any man I know.”367

However cheering this was to her, she had to deal sometime that spring with a trauma more real than any imagined marital strain. All references to cribs and specially measured dresses vanished from her correspondence.368

HILLS AND DALES

Edison had Mina work with him in his East Newark laboratory for a while in May, but soon got caught up in a project so technical that only Batchelor and Gilliland could help. It was the development of a dictating machine to counter the cylinder recorder that Charles Sumner Tainter and Chichester Bell had patented last year, when he was too lovesick to pay it much attention. Now he had to. As if calling their device the “graphophone” were not cynically evocative enough of his favorite invention, it looked so like the phonograph, with its voice funnel and helical grooves and hand crank, as to trick casual shoppers into thinking he must have licensed it.^*62 The crucial difference between the two instruments was that the graphophone stylus incised a wax sleeve, instead of indenting a tinfoil wrap. This was a definite selling plus—on top of the fact that Tainter and Bell were ready to market their device, while Edison had little more than a rough sketch of an “Improved Phonograph” to offer in competition.

He was further lumbered by a mistake made in 1878, when he patented an extraordinary number of potential phonograph developments in Britain, rather than in America. Among those innovations (itemized in sixty-seven descriptive drawings) had been all the features that Tainter and Bell now claimed to have come up with independently. But the Patent Office refused to award him priority over them at home, on the grounds that protection overseas was all that he was entitled to. Whatever new instrument Edison designed for the American market must, by maddening irony, not infringe on the graphophone, whose technology he had anticipated nine years before.369

His sketch, dated 7 May, accordingly showed a phonograph with an electric motor drive and rubberized acoustic tubes for recording and playback. The round of the cylinder was left enigmatically blank, and as he and Batchelor built what became known as model M, it was clear that they acknowledged the advantage of a recording surface of wax coating cardboard over one of foil laid on iron.370 When incising, the stylus cut the wax cleanly and lightly, with minimal drag. When indenting, it needed weight to press the foil into hills and dales that were less well defined. The contrary problem with wax was that it was softer than foil, so sound quality deteriorated with each replay.

Hence, Edison’s challenge was to formulate a wax that was hard enough to wear well yet receptive to the highest, least incisive frequencies, contained in such sibilant words as sphynx. (Clarity of speech was essential to this machine, since both he and Tainter were aiming at the dictating market, in a boom time for American business.) The wax should not clog the stylus by curling up behind it as the cylinder rotated; ideally what was etched out should float into the air, dust from the sonar landscape. That meant, of course, that the stylus itself should be as durable as it was sharp—yet not so sharp as to erode the very slopes it was shaping, when it traveled over them again.371

The search for an ideal counterbalance between all these requirements, involving chemistry as well as physics and electrical engineering, was to preoccupy Edison for the next thirteen months. At the same time, and for almost as long, he had the equally challenging task of planning, building, equipping, moving into, and staffing his huge laboratory on Valley Road in West Orange—the ground for which was broken on 5 July.

Both projects afforded him deep pleasure, the first being the kind of experimental marathon that had produced his best inventions. He had at least one seminal idea, a playback needle that “never touches the surface of the record but is itself electrified,” in essence a magnetic pickup. For some reason he abandoned it, postponing the advent of electrical recording for thirty-three years.372

There were three other distractions to deal with during this period: a corporate squabble about the future of the long-defunct Edison Speaking Phonograph Company, a second pregnancy for Mina commencing in the fall of 1887, and a visit from the photographer Eadweard Muybridge later on that would profoundly affect his future.

Edison had hardly started work on model M when Edward Johnson and Uriah Painter, co-founders of the old phonograph company, lobbied him to accept a move by Tainter and Bell to combine all his patents with theirs, and form a new company that would practically monopolize the dictating machine market. To Edison, any such merger, ludicrously scrambling together phonograph and graphophone and Painter and Tainter, was unthinkable. It would compromise his primacy in the recording field, and he could see that what the Bell interests really wanted was his all-embracing British patents. “Under no circumstances will I have anything to do with Graham Bell with his phonograph pronounced backward graphphone [sic],” he wrote his London agent, Col. George Gouraud. “I have a much better apparatus and am already building the factory to manufacture [them].”373

Alexander Graham Bell was involved with his brother Chichester and Sumner Tainter in the sense that all three of them comprised the newly formed American Graphophone Company of Washington, D.C. With increasing obstinacy, Edison rejected their repeated efforts to do business with him and, rather than revive the Speaking Phonograph Company, decided to form a new one, the Edison Phonograph Company. He incorporated it on 10 October 1887, establishing its capital at $1.2 million and waving aside the anguished protests of Johnson and Painter that he was trampling on their rights as shareholders of the old firm. They declined to accept his offer of a 30 percent stake in Edison Phonograph as dishonorable and inadequate, since they would have profited to the extent of a half interest if he had accepted the Bell offer.374 That merger, in retrospect, looked all the more sensible a month later, when Emile Berliner, a German immigrant, patented a recorder that played disks instead of a cylinder.

In several ways, Berliner’s was a revolutionary device, but he was years away from making it commercially feasible. Edison had an advantage over him and the Bell interests too, being able to boast the imminent completion of “the best equipped & largest Laboratory extant.” It would loom three stories high, total 37,500 feet of floor space, and employ a large staff of scientists, specialist engineers, and craftsmen—in all, a multidepartmental facility “incomparably superior to any other for rapid & cheap development of an invention.” He intended to occupy it by Thanksgiving and have it fully operational by the end of the year. Numerous outbuildings would surround it, each with its coordinated research or development function, including a gigantic Phonograph Works that would ship (by means of the Erie Railroad, curving right past his back door) so many perfected talking machines that Graham Bell would wish he had stuck to telephone design. In its integration of innovation and manufacture, the West Orange facility would amount to an apotheosis of Menlo Park. “In fact,” Edison wrote, as if the plant were already in operation, “there is no similar institution in existence….Can build anything from a ladys watch to a Locomotive.”375

During much of the time that he was jockeying with corporate lawyers and working out the mechanics of the M phonograph, Ezra Gilliland found it convenient to be ill and away from work. He thus avoided having to take sides in what became a painful showdown for Johnson particularly, as Edison’s oldest friend and passionate promoter of the first phonograph. Johnson was for the first time in his life rich, having risen to the presidency of both the Edison Electric Light Company and the Edison Company for Isolated Lighting. He also enjoyed royalties from a personal invention—twinkling, colored Christmas tree lights—was living in a baronial Connecticut mansion, and had looked to the resurrection of the old phonograph company as the clincher of his fortune. But now, instead of sympathetically choosing him as “general agent” of the new one, Edison appointed Gilliland. The terms of the latter’s contract were more than generous, assuring him an income of around $160,000 during the first full year of production.376

There was little Johnson could do but wonder at Damon’s preferment at the hand of Pythias. He was a sensitive soul, and cringed when Uriah Painter tried to bully him into a shareholder revolt that would punish Edison for trading away their former rights. “Can we not get together & straighten this out?” he wrote Edison. “It is not a matter of money, but of wounded pride—Upon receipt of your ans[wer,] I shall take such action as will forever remove me from my present unpleasant position….The burial of all my long cherished ambitions in this Phono. matter will cost me no slight regret.”377

Edison replied with the written equivalent of a shrug. “Its not your fault in any way that the present condition of affairs have [sic] come about. I’ll take care of Mr U. H. P. after he gets through his outburst of temper & damfoolery.”378

Gilliland quailed at the unattractiveness of the “improved” phonograph Edison expected him to sell. It was still only a dictating machine, for one person to speak into and another to listen to at close range. The best that could be said of it was that the sound quality was remarkable. It was small but grotesquely complicated, with two diaphragms, exposed electric coils, and an array of studs, slides, knobs, and screws likely to cause mass resignations in the stenographic industry.379

He worried that Edison, who had recently won court victories that gave him almost total patent protection for his lamp design worldwide, was beginning to think that anything he invented obviated the work of other inventors, including men as gifted as Tainter and Berliner. The graphophone, operated by a treadle, like a sewing machine, struck Gilliland as a simpler and better device than his friend’s prototype M. Early that fall Edison bragged to a New York Post reporter that although his Phonograph Works was still under construction, he would have five hundred of the new machines on sale by the end of January 1888.380 He also showed his mastery of mathematics by figuring that four of its detachable cylinders, each with a capacity of six hundred words, would be enough to record all of Nicholas Nickleby.^*63

BUILDING 5

Fortunately for all concerned, he forgot about these promises in the excitement of opening his new plant on Valley Road in the new year. An imposing gatehouse admitted nobody to the campus without a pass. The redbrick complex beyond, designed by Joseph Taft, was a considerable expansion of Edison’s original 37,500-square-foot concept, with four experimental longhouses servicing the main laboratory. They were respectively devoted to physics, chemistry, chemical storage, and metallurgy. The first building was completely nonferrous, so its galvanometers and other delicate instruments would relate only to the earth’s magnetic field. The second, sure to be Edison’s favorite retreat, had a concrete floor inclined and drained for toxic spillage. Among his personal stash of supplies, there were a few platinum cathodes remaining from some old Grove batteries he had broken open as a boy telegrapher.381

Building 5 opposite presented three great arched windows to passing traffic—as yet mainly buggies, in an otherwise rural landscape. Behind the glass was Edison’s library, double-storied, galleried, and paneled in yellow pine that would take years to darken to a more studious shade. The first aide he intended to install there, beside Alfred Tate, was a linguist able to translate his subscription list of German, French, and Italian technical periodicals, not to mention the jargon of scientists purportedly writing in English. His executive bathroom adjoined, gleaming with porcelain and Italian marble. (Elsewhere in the laboratory complex, galvanized iron was the noisy surface of choice.) Farther back was a house-size stockroom under orders to acquire, catalog, and index every nonperishable substance in the world, from hardwoods, graphite, waxes, drugs, and gems to sheet glass, silk, meerschaum, seeds, bone, aromatic oils, and the hair of the red deer, which Edison had found more delicate than camel skin to clean the grooves of his cylinders. The rest of the immense structure was given over to light and heavy machinery shops, plus a third-floor warren of research rooms whose walls were movable and whose functions would change as his interests changed. A tall-chimneyed powerhouse was annexed to the rear, its output of DC current set to handle the demands of all the laboratory buildings as well as the Phonograph Works—as yet little more than a frozen field alongside Alden Street, awaiting the spring thaw. Edison planned to run a branch feeder to his house in Llewellyn Park, a mile away.382

Edison’s new laboratory in West Orange. Phonograph Works in background.

By the end of January he had recruited or transferred from New York seventy-five laboratory assistants, a payroll that steadily increased. So did the number of extra hours he seemed to expect everybody to put in. One employee defined the Old Man’s idea of a basic schedule: “Saturdays the laboratory closed at five o’clock instead of six…and holidays were celebrated with work.” When he complained of having no life of his own, Edison said to his mystification, “There’s just as much time coming as going, young man.”383

PICTURE AFTER PICTURE

On 27 February the photographer Eadweard Muybridge visited Edison after giving a demonstration of “zoopraxiscope” images in Orange. Having spent years encouraging racehorses and naked men and women to run, jump, and stroll past a long row of cameras—each one synchronized to capture a moment of apparent stillness that was actually a moment of motion—he had a suggestion that he thought would appeal to a man who had been working just as long to record sound and project light. Would Edison consider applying himself to the invention of a machine that would show moving, talking pictures?384

What Muybridge had in mind was, ironically, a system that reversed his own concept of photography. Whereas his multiple cameras—as many as twenty-four in a row—exposed only one frame each in a broken sequence, Edison’s imagined single camera must expose hundreds, even thousands, in smooth succession, and reproduce them in much the same way as his phonograph played back linked sound waves. The impression of continuity would of course be an illusion—picture after picture, each slightly different, succeeding one another so rapidly that the eye could not register the blanks between them.

Edison was interested, saying he would look into the idea when he had time. At his request, Muybridge sent a selection of his Animals in Motion plates to West Orange for exhibit in the laboratory library,385 and left their haunting sequences to float in Edison’s subconscious.

NOT BAD FOR A FIRST EXPERIMENT

In March, just as Gilliland was denying yet another rumor of the amalgamation of the Edison Phonograph and American Graphophone companies, a Pittsburgh multimillionaire, Jesse Lippincott, made a move to take over the latter firm. Lippincott’s fortune derived from glass. He knew nothing about the dictating machine business except that it looked like a good investment at a time when the American economy was booming. He also coveted the marketing rights to the “improved” phonograph, despite its nonappearance since being announced. With a capitalist’s wolflike alertness to any whiff of financial vulnerability, he sensed that Edison had overextended himself in West Orange and might be amenable to a sale that would give him titular preeminence over Tainter and the Bell brothers.386

Lippincott guessed correctly. Edison was indeed short of cash, having sunk $140,000 into his new laboratory and budgeted another $250,000 for the Phonograph Works, on top of his expenditures on personal real estate. He had covertly tried and failed to get Henry Villard to finance the West Orange plant, not pausing to think that he might be encouraging another wolf to start prowling around him.387

Insull, who still managed Edison’s financial affairs, wrote Tate in late May to say that he had heard the Phonograph Company was not paying its bills. He worried that this would reflect on the credit of the Machine Works in Schenectady. “If you people at Orange are going to abuse your credit you will cripple us.”388

This plaint coincided with a disastrous demonstration Edison put on at the laboratory, hoping to impress another group of financiers with the latest refinements to his prototype M phonograph. Unknown to him, Fred Ott had put a stylus into the machine’s reproducer that was broader than the recording point. The result in playback was a prolonged hiss, bewildering Edison, and the money men retreated to New York with checkbooks intact.389

A similar humiliation had befallen Edison once before, when he was experimenting with his first lightbulbs at Menlo Park. Now as then and at other crisis times in his life, he marshaled a team of his best men—Arthur Kennelly the mathematician, Walter Aylsworth the chemist, Franz Schulze-Berge, and Theo Wangemann, German-trained acousticians—and plunged into a prolonged blitz for mechanical perfection. The phonograph was a much more sophisticated instrument now than it had been in January, attuned to music as well as speech, but it was still not ready to manufacture or market. Edison’s urgency was prompted by demands from Colonel Gouraud in London for a machine to recruit British investors, as well as by a need to make the stock of the Phonograph Company as attractive as possible to Lippincott—for by now that entrepreneur had made a direct purchase offer of $500,000, and Gilliland thought it was too good to pass up.390

Absorbed in his laboratory work, Edison did not notice, or did not sufficiently heed, a clause in the offer awarding Gilliland $50,000 in cash and $200,000 more in new-company shares, for his “general agency” contract. What was more, the shares could be redeemed for cash as soon as the purchase was consummated.391

On 16 June Edison declared that he was through, for the time being, with improving the “improvements” and perfecting the “perfection” of his new recorder. He shipped a handmade model on the next steamer to London, along with what he called a “phonogram”—history’s first audio letter. It was recorded by himself on a detachable spool, and contained the news that he had just become a father again.392

Ahem! In my laboratory in Orange, New Jersey, June 16, 1888, 3 o’clock, A.M.

Friend Gouraud—Ahem! This is my first mailing phonogram….I send you by Mr. Hamilton a new phonograph, the first one of the new model that has just left my hands. It has been put together very hurriedly and is not finished, as you will see. I have sent you a quantity of experimental phonogram blanks, so that you can talk back to me….

Mrs. Edison and the baby are doing well. The baby’s articulation is quite loud enough but a trifle indistinct. It can be improved but it is not bad for a first experiment.^*64

With kind regards,

Yours,

Edison.393

The organization by Jesse Lippincott of the North American Phonograph Company on 14 July ended the strife between the Edison and Tainter-Bell interests and pooled all their patents. It enriched everybody concerned, especially Gilliland, who hastened to cash in the rest of his quarter-million-dollar bonus and depart posthaste for Europe. He claimed to be exhibiting the phonograph there, but when Edison found out about the agency sale clause and heard that it had been negotiated by his own personal attorney, John Tomlinson, it was as if Damon had slipped a knife between the ribs of Pythias. “I have this day abrogated your contract,” he cabled Gilliland in London, “and notified Mr Lippincott of the fact and that he pay any further sum at his own risk. Since you have been so underhanded I shall demand all the money paid you.”394

Gilliland cabled back, “Sale made to Lippincott exactly as presented and had your approval….You certainly are acting without knowledge of facts and are doing me great injustice.” A court of law agreed when Edison, in one of his litigious furies, sued him for breach of contract. But their friendship, which had yielded them both such dividends—financial, professional, and in Edison’s case romantic—was over. For as long as the Gillilands continued to winter in Fort Myers, the Edisons stayed away, depriving themselves of vacations in the sun for the next fourteen years and making sure that no electric power from their generator or water from their windmill pump would ever cross the space between the twin houses.^*65, 395

THINGS IN MOTION

On 8 October Edison, free now of another corporate responsibility, sketched a device that at first sight looked like a phonograph.

But M was not a stylus or a speaking tube, and N was not a wax cylinder. Nor were the dots on its surface indentations or incisions: they were too widely spaced for that. Actually he was thinking of microphotographs—Muybridgean images reduced down to ¹/32nd inch wide, spiraling past a tiny telescope at a rate of twenty-five exposures per second. He calculated he could embed forty-two thousand such images on a cylinder of plaster of paris that, rotating at phonograph speed, would present a moving-picture show twenty-eight minutes long. If the drive shaft P was geared to that of an acoustic cylinder in playback mode, sight and sound would blend.

“I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear,” he wrote, in the beautiful script he reserved for important documents, “which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion, and in such a form as to be both cheap practical and convenient. This apparatus I call a Kinetoscope ‘Moving View.’ In the first production of the actual motions that is to say of a continuous Opera the Instrument may be called a Kinetograph but its subsequent reproduction for which it will be of most use to the public it is properly called a Kinetoscope.”396

He went on to describe how the recording version of his device would be a camera big enough to contain a photosensitive cylinder, or even a reel of film, either of which would advance in a stop-start motion so rapid as to seem continuous. The essence of his invention was deception: each unbelievably short stop would be enough to photograph a slice of action, and each unbelievably fast jump forward enough to expose another frame to the light. That would necessitate a shutter just as kinetic, or mobile, as the advancing cylinder, able to snap at least eight pictures a second (but preferably twenty-five) in order to flow them past an enlarging lens later, and pull off the con known as persistence of vision.

Edison’s first Kinetoscope caveat, 8 October 1888.

Edison thus articulated for the first time in history the idea of motion pictures synchronized with words and music. He was never to achieve the combination practically, and he was wrong to imply in his caveat that a spiraling cylinder was preferable to unrolling film. Nor—even as he datelined the document “Orange N. J. Oct 8 1888,” with the initial O inked in a perfect circle—did he know that Louis Le Prince, an obscure French camera inventor working in Leeds, England, was six days away from doing precisely for the Eye what the phonograph did for the Ear.^*66, 397

“Rush this I am getting good results,” Edison wrote later that day, dispatching the Kinetoscope caveat to his patent attorneys for submission to the Patent Office. It was followed in due course by two others, all attesting in their force and specificity to the power of the idea that had seized him. But for the next nine months he was so busy with electric power and phonograph promotions, in anticipation of the epochal Paris Exposition Universelle in 1889, that he left the technical work of building his cylinder-camera to W. K. L. Dickson. The young man was not only a gifted engineer but an expert photographer. Fluent in French and German, he was able to browse foreign periodicals in the laboratory library and keep track of experiments in motion photography overseas.^*67, 398

Le Prince’s supreme achievement with a single-lens camera was unpublished news and in fact would not be recognized for almost half a century. If Dickson was ignorant of it in 1888, he certainly knew about other pioneers in France and Germany, and lived to see the day when Edison’s own pretension of primacy in the history of cinema (a word not yet coined) was under justified attack by their proponents. As an old man, Dickson would again and again notch his memory calendar back one year, to prove beyond doubt that the Kinetoscope was the mother of all motion picture cameras, and that he and Edison had started working on it in the fall of 1887. He wasted much ink in refusing to acknowledge that there was such a thing as a Zeitgeist, as his revered boss did in 1912, in words as modest as they were true: “My so-called inventions already existed in the environment—I took them out.”399

COMPARATIVE DANGER TO LIFE

In November Edison was drawn into the most disagreeable controversy of his career, when a body calling itself the Medico-Legal Society advised the New York State legislature that the quickest, most painless way to execute criminals sentenced to capital punishment was to subject them to three thousand volts of direct or alternating electric current.400

Earlier in the year Gov. David B. Hill, impressed by this argument, had signed a bill to abolish hanging as the state’s standard execution method, in favor of death by electricity—or electrocution, as it became known, to the distress of word purists. Few understood the implication of the decision better than Charles Batchelor, who nearly killed himself fixing a light on the Edison laboratory’s direct current system. Had the current been alternating, instead of flowing directly through him, he would unquestionably be dead at forty-two, mourned by all.^*68 The savage sawing motion of AC, at hundreds of reversals a second, would have shredded every cell in his body. Or so Edison persuaded himself, on the basis of animal tests conducted on his own premises by Batchelor, Arthur Kennelly, and Harold P. Brown, an independent, passionate proponent of DC power.401

Brown was responsible for perverting what had been a reasoned debate between the Edison and Westinghouse interests as to which system was preferable for most lighting purposes. In all respects except safety, the so-called “war of the currents” was now resolved in favor of AC. During the last month, George Westinghouse had received more orders for central station lights than the Edison Company had in the previous year.402 Local utilities simply found his thin-wire, high-tension system cheaper to install and operate, as well as extensible to suburban areas where affluent customers lived.

Brown’s only recourse was to stigmatize AC as the “executioner’s current,” better used on death row than in the home. Although his professional credentials were slight, he was possessed, to a near-pathological degree, with desire to prove his point by electrocuting dogs, calves, and horses both at West Orange (where Arthur Kennelly meticulously noted their convulsions) and at venues as public as Columbia University. His evangelism on the subject was based on industrial deaths he had observed during five years as an electrician working for Brush Arc Light Company.403

Edison witnessed several of the electrocutions, and gave no sign of being disturbed by them. “I have taken life—not human life, in the belief and full consciousness that the end justifies the means.” He had opposed capital punishment in the past, but found his moral attitude toward it wavering now that it had become a concern of electricians. If criminals were to die for their sins, then he would prefer them to be dispatched by a Westinghouse dynamo. “Electricity of a high tension must be used,” he told a reporter who questioned him on the subject, “and an alternating one rather than a straight one.”404

He was, nevertheless, sincere in his belief that DC power of around three hundred volts was safer for common distribution than the lightning bolts Westinghouse was sending around cities like Pittsburgh—via overhead wires that were liable to tangle disastrously with those of telegraph and telephone companies. Had he given the word, the Edison Electric Light Company could have used its own AC patents to compete on both the high- and the low-tension levels. But he would not consent, to the company’s great cost.^*69, 405

In December the Medico-Legal Society formally recommended the installation of an AC system at Sing Sing Prison, to excite the electric chair being built there by Edwin F. Davis, the New York state executioner. The New York Times published an approving article headlined “SURER THAN ROPE.” At this, George Westinghouse, who had maintained a dignified silence in the controversy so far, publicly accused Harold Brown of being a paid Edison Electric Light Company stooge and a cynical scaremonger. Brown responded by challenging Westinghouse to an electrical boxing match, wherein they would each submit themselves to punches of their preferred current. The punches would increase by fifty volts, round by round, until one of them was forced to admit defeat. He was pretty sure it would not be him.406

To general disappointment, Westinghouse did not take up the challenge. Brown expanded his campaign in the new year, calling for a nationwide ban on AC distributions of more than three hundred volts. He published a booklet, The Comparative Danger to Life of the Alternating and Continuous Currents, which thanked Edison for giving him the space and the power to conduct his experiments. The authorities at Sing Sing rewarded him with an order for three Westinghouse dynamos, which were secretly provided by Charles A. Coffin of the Thomson-Houston Electric Company. A murderer on death row, William Kemmler, was given the honor of being the first man to test the effectiveness of the prison’s electric chair.^*70, 407

YOUR INSTRUMENTS TAUNT ME

Edison paid only sporadic attention to the protracted and worsening “war.” It was primarily the concern of Edward Johnson,408 president of the Electric Light Company and Brown’s main backer. Nowadays he was more interested in the applied sciences of sight and sound. He wrote two further moving picture caveats as stimuli to W. K. L. Dickson, whom he had charged with the construction of a cylinder-spinning, microphotographic camera.409

Production, meanwhile, of the improved phonograph began at West Orange. It reproduced so clearly that Edison changed his mind about marketing it only as a business instrument. He opened a soundproof studio in the laboratory and began to engroove a long series of musical and spoken-word performances on spools coated with a hard-wax formula that he kept as secret as Babbage’s solution to the Vigenère cipher. It consisted of 80 percent burgundy wine, 25 percent frankincense, 9 percent colophony (a rosin derived from spruce), 8 percent beeswax, 4 percent olive oil, and 4 percent water, heated at 110 degrees until it steamed solid and was left to cool in molds.410 Record production was a simple matter of remelting the wax, so that blank spools of plaster of paris could be dipped in it and rotated for an even coating.

Edison with his microphotographic camera. (Photograph by W. K. Dickson, 1888.)

Before the decade was out, Edison would imbue this dark red medium with the sonic presence of some of the great names in classical music, including Johannes Brahms, Hans von Bülow, Josef Hofmann, and Johanna Dietz, as well as such celebrities as Mark Twain, William E. Gladstone, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Florence Nightingale, Sir Arthur Sullivan, Prince Napoleon, Otto von Bismarck, and the aged Count Helmuth von Moltke—whose voice had first been heard in the eighteenth century. Von Moltke recited some lines of Goethe that spoke forward through time: Ihr Instrumente freilich spottet mein / Mit Rad und Kämmen, Walz’ und Bügel (“Your instruments taunt me / With cylinders and levers, wheels and cogs”).411

Most of these records were cut by Theo Wangemann, whom Edison appointed manager of his new Phonograph Experimental Department and sent abroad as his musical emissary. But he also dispatched another sound technician, Julius Block, to Russia, whence a high-pitched Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky could be heard giggling with excitement over what he called “the most surpassing, most beautiful, most interesting invention of the nineteenth century.”412 Block was unable to record Tsar Alexander III and Leo Tolstoy, but they joined Tchaikovsky in sending good wishes and “gloire au grand inventeur Edison!”^*71

These and other plaudits from Europe, where his isolated lighting systems were proliferating, set the tone for Edison’s looming reception at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. He had decided to attend in August, partly because his advance man on the site, William J. Hammer, was putting together a complete retrospective of his career so far, and partly because Mina deserved a treat after two years of adjustments to marriage and stepmotherhood. (Marion had become such a resentful problem that they had allowed her to leave school and sent her to France ahead of them, accompanied by an aunt.)^*72, 413

Besides, as the pianist Hans von Bülow noticed in April, Edison was an exhausted man. He had patented thirty-eight phonograph refinements in the last year, as well as doubling the luminosity of his lamps, inventing the Kinetoscope, embarking on a new career as a record producer, fighting a hopeless breach of trust case against Ezra Gilliland, and nearly blinding himself in a chemical explosion that had his face swathed in bandages for almost a month. Throughout this draining period he had to stand by, half regretful and half relieved, while Henry Villard reorganized all his lighting companies and shops (excluding only the Phonograph Works in New Jersey) into the Edison General Electric Company, capitalized at $12 million.^*73, 414

For good measure, Villard included Frank Sprague’s highly successful Electric Railway and Motor Company, which furnished the Machine Works in Schenectady with two-thirds of its business. Sprague had created the world’s first electric streetcar service in Richmond, Virginia, in 1887, obliterating the memory of the little track and train Edison had built six years earlier. Edward Johnson and the other Menlo Park veterans running Edison shops were sullen about Villard negotiating away their autonomy. Edison pretended to sympathize, but he saw that the combination made business sense. Better even than its enormous profit to himself—at about $1.25 million in cash and stock—was the feeling, when he signed the incorporation papers on 24 April, that the “leaden collar” of company ownership had finally fallen from his shoulders.415

For twenty years he had had to find capital to keep his various enterprises going and over that span had been compelled to shelve many inventions, for lack of time or money to develop them. The hundreds that had come to him on honeymoon were only the latest examples of these suppressions. If he had nevertheless managed to invent a pyromagnetic motor and glassmaking machine since then, along with the Kinetoscope, how free would he now be to develop new ventures! For one thing, he had developed a compulsive interest in mining. When the exposition was over, he might switch to that entirely.416

GO AND BE PART OF A ROSE

Edison’s five-week visit to Paris in the summer of 1889 was a succession of dazzling social and professional triumphs, culminating in near apotheosis when the French minster of foreign affairs inducted him into the highest rank of the Légion d’honneur.^*74, 417 Instead of his usual loose black bow tie, he had to wear the red ribbon of a commandeur under his collar, plus a dangling, enameled grand cross. Save for two superior “dignities” usually awarded to statesmen, it was the greatest civil honor France could bestow, recognizing his “eminent merits” as a benefactor of civilization.

Wherever he went in the city (which he had mapped in his head before arrival), crowds pressed close to stare at him, inventors waylaid him with devices under their arms, and sycophants hailed him as “Maître,” “Sa Majesté Edison,” “le roi de Paris,” and less formally, “le papa du phonographe.” Two hundred letters a day poured into his hotel suite on the Place Vendôme. The conservative feuilletoniste “Caliban” went to extremes of Gallic metaphor in predicting that Prometheus must soon wreak vengeance on Edison, out of “divine jealousy” for his success in “shackling lightning” and “externalizing sound.” He was serenaded by Charles Gounod au piano and by Emma Eames, the Opéra’s latest ingenue, who sang him Liszt’s setting of “Comment, disaient-ils,” a poem by his favorite Victor Hugo. Louis Pasteur showed him around his institute. Alexandre Dumas fils begged him to come to Puys so that they could hold hands.

He was twice received at the Élysée Palace by President Sadi Carnot, and was twice treated to champagne luncheons in Gustave Eiffel’s vertiginous new tower.^*75 The hurtling elevators, the poulet braisé aux truffes and langoustines et écrevisses au buisson, the clamor of French conversation in his muffled ears, agreed with him no better than an “American breakfast,” hosted by Buffalo Bill Cody, at an outdoor table loaded with clam chowder, cornbread, pork ’n’ beans, “grub stake,” hominy, and two kinds of pie. Long before the biggest celebration of all, a seventeen-course banquet staged in his honor at the Hôtel de Ville by the municipality of Paris, opening with sherry-infused soup and sluiced down with Château d’Yquem ’75, Edison’s shrunken stomach rebelled, and he was pale with dyspepsia.418

At all public functions, he remained obstinately mute in his refusal to acknowledge the countless toasts tilting his way. Yet he was accessible as usual to reporters, telling them with a straight face that he was designing a telephone that would allow parties to a call to see each other. He said nothing about the moving picture machine that he and Dickson would be working on when he returned home. But Étienne-Jules Marey, whom he met at a dinner commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the daguerreotype, divined enough of that secret to give him a private demonstration of his own zoetrope électro-photographique, a rolling film device that could shoot twenty images a second of birds in flight. The difference between them, as Marey afterward acknowledged, was that he sought the illusion of moments of stillness in motion, to elucidate avian or animal mechanics, whereas Edison sought the illusion of movement, by streaming stills so rapidly that the eye could not “seize” on their separation.^*76, 419

His exhibit was by far the largest at the exposition, attracting thirty thousand visitors a day. It covered almost an acre of the Palais des machines and centered on a lamp of lamps—twenty thousand bulbs clustered into the shape of a single bulb forty feet high. At periodic intervals they were unlit, irradiated only by a giant concealed carbon. Then crowds thronging the gallery gasped as a wave of light ascended from the base, transforming opalescence into incandescence, until the whole thing shone like an effulgent balloon about to take off. Its glow fell on 493 of Edison’s inventions, dating back as far as his 1869 vote recorder. Polished and carefully positioned, they gleamed and throbbed while phonographs cranked out “cheerful American songs.” The music played only tinnily through speaker diaphragms (the problem of amplification had not yet been solved), but when Parisians listened through attached white rubber tubes, they were amazed that so much sound could emanate from wax. Not everyone liked what they heard. The bone earbuds scrubbed words and music clean of the “varnish” of ambient noise. It was the sound of a harsh new age of talking machines and artificial sunshine and le Dieu moderne, technology as God.420

Unknown to Edison as he went his rounds of the city, a French writer who had long obsessed about him lay dying in the care of nuns. Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam was the author of L’Ève future, a visionary novel that imagined Edison’s creation of an android woman. Its opening pages, written in 1877, depicted le Sorcier du Menlo-Park as a reclusive, Faustian figure, frustrated in his attempts to record the voice of the Almighty. Instead, this fictional Edison had applied his mechanical magic to the creation of a “new Eve,” who could be the progenitor of a whole new race of synthetic beings, untroubled by morals, dedicated only to the advancement of science. At first he shaped her out of sound, as a singer heard but not seen, but then he made her a moving image, a singer-dancer whose seductive vivacity derived from the synchronization of audible and visible effects—just what the real Edison dreamed of achieving now with his Kinetoscope-Kinetograph. “I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear.”^*77, 421

Villiers’s death was reported on the front page of Le Figaro on 20 August. A few days later “Caliban” wrote in the same paper:

It is clear that Edison has never read L’Ève future, and without doubt the name of [its author] is totally strange to him. Maybe he’ll learn from this article that, during his stay in Paris, he passed a hundred paces from the hospice where his prophet lay in agony.

I don’t subscribe, like poor Villiers, to the philosophy that holds up the dressed crucifix against the invasion of the scientific barbarian….But, being a man of the sort menaced by the American, who resembles Napoleon and is deaf like Beethoven, I find he plunges me into unspeakable melancholy, because I know well that he holds the future in his fob pocket.422

Before returning to America, Edison spent two scientifically oriented weeks in Germany, Belgium, and London, being further lionized by the likes of Hermann von Helmholtz, Werner von Siemens, Heinrich Hertz, and Sebastian de Ferranti. He revisited Paris just once to receive his final awards, pack a major souvenir—Aurelio Bordiga’s white marble statue of the “Genius of Electricity”—and say goodbye to Marion, who was remaining behind in a pensionnat on the Champs-Élysées to complete her European studies.423

By the time he sailed from Le Havre on 28 September, he had picked at so many banquets and pretended to hear so many toasts that he did not care if he never donned a dress suit again. Across the Atlantic the prototype Kinetoscope awaited his inspection, and great tracts of Appalachian ironland lay ready for prospecting by a new company he had formed, the New Jersey & Pennsylvania Concentrating Works. Pearl Street—by any account his supreme achievement—was aglow with 16,377 lamps, just one of thousands of imitative constellations around the world.424

Edison had had enough of light, and enough of fame.425 A new decade beckoned, in which he meant to recover his old identity as an empirical inventor, feeling his way by hand and intuition toward fresh fields of discovery—perhaps that of submolecular science, which suggested the communality, and maybe interchangeability, of all matter at the most basic level. What a great thing it would be to have every microscopic unit of his own body under control, detachable and adjustable at will!

“I would say to one particular atom in me—call it atom No. 4320—‘Go and be part of a rose for a while.’ All the atoms could be sent off to become parts of different minerals, plants, and other substances. Then, if by just pressing a little push button they could be called together again, they would bring back their experiences while they were parts of those different substances, and I would have the benefit of the knowledge.”426

*1 The modern equivalent of sixteen candlepower would be around ninety-five watts.

*2 Robert Friedel observes that the crowds attaching themselves to Edison at this time represented “a new relationship between advanced technology and the common man. Edison’s electric light was as mystifying and awe-inspiring as any invention of the age….The wizardry of scientific technology was now a source, not of distrust, but rather, of hope. This attitude toward the powers of science and technology was one of the nineteenth century’s most important legacies, and no single instance exemplifies it better than the enthusiasm with which the crowds ushered in the new decade at Menlo Park.” Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 89–90.

*3 Later Swan backdated his invention another five years, to 1860, and after his death, his children added a further five, to 1855.

*4 A caveat in nineteenth-century American parlance, or provisional specification in British, protected the main elements of an invention in advance of a more formal, detailed finding.

*5 The consensus endures in modern Britain. See, e.g., the timeline under “Joseph Swan” in Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History, https://www.gracesguide.co.uk. It states that Swan “obtained a UK patent covering a partial vacuum, carbon filament incandescent lamp” in 1860, whereas he did not even apply for such protection until 27 November 1880 (UK 4933 of 1880), more than nine months after Edison’s anticipatory British patent (UK 4576 of 1880) was approved.

*6 Edison’s parallel British patent, UK 4576 of 1880, was approved ten days later. See Part Six for the final approval of U.S. 223,898, arguably the most important of Edison’s 424 lighting and power patents.

*7 “No bird could fly through their network,” Edmund C. Stedman wrote of downtown New York’s tangle of wires in the 1880s. “A man could almost walk upon them…they darkened the street and the windows below their level.”

*8 Edison had it in mind to make as much use as he could of the existing gas fixtures in every building he electrified, even down to adapting the mantles of chandeliers. It would save him money and at the same time enrage his competition—both agreeable prospects.

*9 From 1880 through 1883 Edison would file for 321 patents—more than at any other time in his career and more rapidly than any inventor before or since. This total does not include seventy-eight other applications that he alleged were stolen from him and sold by a corrupt patent attorney, Zenas Wilber.

*10 Upton was the victim of a typical Edisonian tease. Asked to calculate the volume of a pear-shaped bulb, he spent several brain-cracking hours numerically integrating its curves in three dimensions. Before he finished his quod erat demonstrandum, Edison reappeared and asked if it would not be simpler to fill the bulb with mercury and weigh the contents. Dyer and Martin, Edison, 277.

*11 Edison also used the phrase molecular bombardment.

*12 In 1972 the molecular biologist Gunther Stent famously raised the question of “prematurity” in science—discoveries or theories too much in advance of contemporary knowledge to be explored seriously until years later.

*13 As now exemplified in the vacuum tube diode.

*14 Edison’s U.S. Patent 307,031 was the first ever granted in America for an electronic device. It features a drawing and description of a two-element vacuum lamp that in essential details anticipates the diode “invented” by John Ambrose Fleming in 1904. Fleming had previously used the Edison Effect to rectify radio waves. Two decades later Edison was annoyed to read Fleming’s claim in his autobiography Fifty Years of Electricity to have been the first to realize “that a carbon filament incandescent lamp with a plate sealed into the bulb could be used to rectify high-frequency alternating currents.” Edison scribbled in an angry marginal note, “Absolutely untrue & he knows it is untrue.”

*15 Edison was not asked to provide lights for navigation, that function being performed by the much more powerful arc lamps of Hiram Maxim.

*16 Edison’s 1880 locomotive and cars can be seen at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

*17 He even tried such eccentric materials as myrrh gum, macaroni, asphalt, fishing line, cork, and banknote paper.

*18 Edison’s choice of this potential, over the much lower voltages favored by his competitors, eventually became standard in the United States.

*19 Edison also invented a “three-wire” connecting system that reduced the copper content of his conductors by a further two-thirds.

*20 James A. Garfield (R., Ohio) was running against Winfield S. Hancock (D., Pa.).

*21 The Maxim bulb also substituted a flame-suppressant hydrocarbon vapor, loosely sealed in, for Edison’s high vacuum.

*22 Swan’s contempt for Edison at this time was plain in a letter he drafted on 24 September but apparently never sent: “I had the mortification one fine morning of finding you on my track and in several particulars ahead of me—but now I think I have shot ahead of you.”

*23 Edison continued to finance Science through the fall of 1881, at a personal cost of $10,000, before declining to do so any longer. The magazine briefly failed and was restored to life by Alexander Graham Bell. It is still in publication.

*24 The lighting historian Adam Allerhand points out that Edison could hardly have known about Swan’s early lamp before Swan himself began to remember it publicly on 27 December 1879—the same day the “Village of Light” was illuminated for a press preview. From that date on, the British electrical establishment vigorously supported Swan’s claim of priority, having not noticed it before. Swan admitted that his unpatented “invention” (one of twenty pre-Edison attempts to develop a workable electric light) had not shone for much more than a minute. As will be seen, in 1888 the London Court of Appeals ruled the first Swan lamp “a failure.”

*25 An elegant monument “To the Memory of Thomas Alva Edison” stands at the Iwashimizu Hachimangu shrine between Osaka and Kyoto in Japan. The site was chosen for its proximity to the madake groves that supplied the Edison Electric Light Company with filament fibers for almost fifteen years.

*26 Some of Edison’s bachelor employees were allowed to occupy bedrooms upstairs at “65.”

*27 Neither man could guess at the time that they just co-founded General Electric.

*28 Edison, who had a gift for real estate, got an extraordinary bargain. The property’s asking price was $136,000, but he bought it in receivership for $52,250. A number of years later he sold it for $1.08 million.

*29 There is little doubt that Mary Edison’s sufferings from neuralgia were genuine (see Part Six), no matter how they may have been related to emotional problems. They appear to have passed on genetically to her eldest son, who was afflicted with paroxysmal headaches all his life.

*30 Between 17 May and 25 June 1881 Edison applied for twenty-six U.S. lighting or power patents, only four of which were not granted. Papers, 6.4.

*31 Edison’s fanatically detailed, 8,700-word letter of 8 September 1881, consigning this dynamo to Batchelor in Paris (“I will write you further if I have omitted anything”), is a good example of how closely he dominated his subordinates.

*32 Swan also conceded privately to Lowrey that “Edison is entitled to more than I….He has seen further into this subject, [more] vastly than I, and foreseen and provided for details that I did not comprehend until I saw his system.”

*33 In 1898 Edison served as a pallbearer at Reményi’s funeral in New York.

*34 Today the conduit access door at Farrington Bridge is still labeled “North Thames Gas.”

*35 When the black-and-white image of this panel printed in Scientific American, 27 August, is viewed on a modern computer screen, the rows of lights suffuse with patterns of refractive color. See https://babel.hathitrust.org/​cgi/​pt?id=pst.,000062999472;view=1up;seq=137.

*36 Edison delayed executing his patent on this invention until 27 November 1882, allowing John Hopkinson to file a similar application in Britain well before that date. The Edison system was awarded priority in the United States on 20 March 1883 (U.S. Patent 274,290), but by then Hopkinson already had his British patent.

*37 In 1878 Edison had been appointed a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor for his work on the phonograph.

*38 Thomas Edison, Jr., attended the same school.

*39 Sam Edison, just as typically, delighted in climbing all the stairs whenever he visited the factory. At eighty-two he had the legs of an elk and a chest expansion that his son was proud of: “I think it was five and one-half inches.”

*40 As indeed it was, when it became General Electric.

*41 The number of cardinals on this dress, designed by Madame Anna Duval, was seven. It cost $391.90, or $9,500 in 2019 dollars.

*42 See Part Four.

*43 Mary was by no means passive in signing this affidavit. She attached a covering letter warning the sheriff, “You will interfere with same at your peril.”

*44 The editors of The Papers of Thomas A. Edison found that on 1 June 1884 Edison had only $18.64 on deposit at Drexel, Morgan, and $3.80 at the Bank of the Metropolis. They point out, however, that he always regarded banks as clearinghouses: “Large sums flowed into his two checking accounts, [and] flowed out just as quickly.” Papers, 7.575.

*45 According to T. C. Martin, writing in the February 1894 issue of The Century Magazine, Edison wondered aloud if Tesla was a cannibal.

*46 Mary Edison’s death certificate was unsigned by any doctor, and the space for registering the cause of death was left blank. The original, in the New Jersey State Archives, shows signs of being mutilated. As a family friend remarked at her funeral, attended by four hundred mourners, “She is dead now, poor thing, but no one will ever know what she died of.”

*47 See Part Six.

*48 Lowrey was deeply hurt by Edison’s apparent acquiescence in the purge, but persuaded himself that Insull alone was responsible.

*49 Edison had confessed this need to Lillian Gilliland during their railroad trip to Florida, and asked her to introduce him “to some suitable girls.”

*50 See Part Six.

*51 Edison’s references are to Grace “Daisy” Gaston, one of the other girls visiting with the Gillilands that summer; Lillian “Mamma” Gilliland; and the English geneticist Francis Galton (1822–1911).

*52 The colored “chromolithographs” of Louis Prang, popular in late-nineteenth-century America.

*53 These shoes cost Edison fourteen dollars, or $355.60 in modern money.

*54 The Miller Cottage still stands at Chautauqua.

*55 The houses were being constructed from kit parts shipped down from Maine.

*56 On 1 March Tom wrote his father, “I am in long division and willie is in subtraction.”

*57 The editors of The Papers of Thomas A. Edison have concluded that Edison was familiar with the nonmathematical aspects of James Clerk Maxwell’s classic Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism and with all of Oliver Heaviside’s papers on “Electromagnetic Induction and Its Propagation,” recently published in The Electrician (UK).

*58 In two years Insull quadrupled Machine Works sales, and in six he increased its payroll from two hundred to six thousand employees.

*59 Tate had succeeded Insull as Edison’s secretary-factotum in 1883.

*60 Edison had tried and dismissed alternating current as early as 1882, saying it was good for nothing except the euthanasia of animals. However, he looked the other way when it was successfully installed on his isolated systems in Europe, for example at La Scala in Milan, May 1886.

*61 Edison may also, or alternatively, have contracted pneumonia.

*62 The “graphophone” that Tainter and Bell caveated at the Patent Office in a sealed and dated box on 20 October 1881 actually was an Edison phonograph, with a coating of wax applied to the metal cylinder. The deception was not uncovered until 1937.

*63 Edison wildly overestimated. Dickens’s novel totals 263,520 words.

*64 Madeleine Edison was born on 31 May 1888. H. de Coursey Hamilton was one of Edison’s paid globe-trotters.

*65 Ezra Gilliland died childless, of heart disease, on 13 May 1903. In extreme old age his widow wrote Edison, “He loved you very dearly, Edison, and regretted all those misunderstandings.”

*66 Le Prince’s Roundhay Gardens, filmed on 14 October 1888, is now generally regarded as the first motion picture. The First Film, a 2013 documentary by David Nicholas Wilkinson, is available at https://vimeo.com/​ondemand/​thefirstfilm/​181293064.

*67 In some respects the contemporaneous Electrotachyscope of Ottomar Anschütz and the Chronophotographes of Étienne-Jules Marey were more sophisticated than Edison’s, the one employing projection and the other intermittent action.

*68 Experiments conducted in the 1970s confirmed what Edison had believed, but been unable to prove, in the 1880s: that AC current is two and a half to three times more lethal than DC. There is no evidence, however, that death by either is painless.

*69 With the advent of sophisticated new transformer stations in the early twenty-first century, high-voltage DC power has been rediscovered as a superior force for, e.g., underwater cable systems.

*70 Kemmler’s execution on 6 August 1890, was a notoriously agonizing disaster, with two long applications of current being necessary to kill the prisoner. Edison agreed that an account of it was “not pleasant reading,” and suggested that Kemmler would have died much more quickly if the executioner had dunked his hands in cans of water added to the circuit.

*71 Tolstoy did record some cylinders after Edison sent him a gift phonograph in 1908. They can be heard on YouTube, e.g. at https://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=6310hAtdl6k. The machine is on exhibit at Yasnaya Polyana.

*72 Once in France, Marion was placed in the care of a governess, and she received the rest of her education in Europe.

*73 Villard had previously and successfully combined all Edison’s European lighting companies.

*74 The ceremony was performed at the Élysée Palace in September.

*75 To this day, a wax Edison may be seen visiting with Eiffel in the latter’s office atop the tower.

*76 Marey sent Edison an advance copy of his magnificent Le vol des oiseaux in the fall of 1889. It included the specifications for all his cameras. Edison’s subsequent Kinetograph and Kinetoscope were, as Marey dryly noted, “not without resemblance to my appareil.”

*77 Life imitated art on 9 September, when Edison went to see Léo Delibes’s ballet Coppélia, about an old doctor’s creation of a life-size singing and dancing doll.