AT TWENTY-THREE, EDISON landed his first major contract as an inventor. The Gold & Stock Telegraph Company of New York City paid him $7,000 to lease a shop in Newark and develop a small, fast, one-wire printing telegraph. He was given an extra $400 to buy tools and equipment and hire a machinist for six months. When (the contract was respectful enough not to say if) his instrument was “clearly patentable,” he would receive a salaried appointment as the firm’s consulting electrician. And in further recognition of the ingenuity he had displayed last summer in Manhattan, Gold & Stock promised him a bonus of $3,000 if he could invent a facsimile telegraph that transmitted shapes, not just dots and dashes. Wealth—at least in terms of his absolute penury not so long ago—stared Edison in the face.1

It was an unusual face for a young telegrapher at the beginning of the Gilded Age, when beards were as obligatory as bowler hats: smooth-shaven, large, and pale, blank during moments of thought, yet animated and focused when speaking. Edison looked like—and was—an open, engaging personality, unusual only in his lack of interest in food and apparent habit of sleeping in his suits. He compensated for being unable to hear much of general conversation by dominating it himself. His near-cataleptic concentration on any technical problem could have been that of a recluse, yet upon emergence from it, he was as gregarious as an actor, eager for approval of his sometimes labored jokes. The fact that he thought himself funnier than he really was betrayed a certain detachment from society. His frequent acts of generosity and kindness contrasted with an apparent inability to care about, or even notice, the emotions of other people. Victims of this indifference put it down to his haste to outrace everybody, whereas in fact it often hampered Edison’s own progress.

He constantly sought to widen his web of business and social relationships, while detaching himself with difficulty from those of no use or interest. Even now, as he put up the shingle of “Newark Telegraph Works” at 15 Railroad Avenue, he was still a partner in Pope, Edison & Co., electrical engineers of New York, and a co-founder of the Financial & Commercial Telegraph Company, directly competing with Gold & Stock. He had a telegraph patent pending for the former firm, and was about to execute two more for the latter, one in his own name and another co-signed by Franklin Pope—in whose mother’s house he was boarding, under increasingly strained circumstances. Pope and he were further allied with James Ashley, editor of The Telegrapher, a New York journal always willing to promote new devices in which Ashley was personally interested. Back in Boston there were even older associates with varying claims on him, one owning the rights to Edison’s first patented invention, the electric vote recorder of 1868.2

Had he been less of a confidently self-centered spider, adept at tweaking all these strands, he might have quailed at acquiring yet another partner. But in late February he took on William Unger as his machinist and gave him a large share of the Newark shop. It was an impulse he would soon regret—unlike the friendship he at once struck up with John Ott, a twenty-year-old mechanic whose ability to construct any device on order amazed him. “Here, I tell you what I want: you come and take charge of this place for me.” Ott would remain on Edison’s payroll for more than half a century, until they died within hours of each other.^*1, 3

YOU CAN DRAW ON ME

The Newark Telegraph Works, soon to be known as Edison & Unger, was that city’s first communications laboratory. Edison intended forthwith to manufacture his own inventions, but as Ott noted, he was not a man to waste time in manual labor.4 He liked to use his hands creatively—spilling just the right number of drops from one test tube into another, sketching rapid diagrams of telegraph circuitry (clear to the last relay, for all their speed), or calligraphing important letters with graceful curlicues. For the next several years, while bending his brain to complex theories of information exchange, he would devote himself with increasing fascination to the mechanics of recording—printing, perforating, engraving, motographing, mimeographing, and other still-undreamed-of ways of capturing words on the fly.

It took him three months to perfect the device specified on his first contract, a stock printer that would be smaller and at least as fast as the telegraph industry’s standard Calahan ticker.5 Gen. Marshall Lefferts, president of Gold & Stock, was impressed with it. He began to keep an admiring eye on Edison, even though the “Autographic or Fac Simile Telegraph instrument” he also wanted would not materialize for another eleven years.6

Edison’s delightful feeling of being affluent for a change was buttressed in the spring when Gold & Stock paid $15,000 for rights to a ticker he and Pope had co-patented. They called it their “gold printer,” although it was neither the first nor the last instrument Edison designed to work on circuits reporting gold price fluctuations on the New York Stock Exchange. The high value Gold & Stock assigned to it derived from his innovative use of electricity to operate a “unison stop” that synchronized all the printers subscribing to the circuit. James Ashley had contributed nothing to the patent, but as a partner in Pope, Edison & Co., was happy to accept one-third of the purchase price.^*2, 7

Edison was less happy to have either man profit from a machine he regarded as largely his own. He looked for a way to dissociate from them, and began by using some of his $5,000 share to pay off rent arrears he owed Pope’s mother. Then he moved to bachelor digs on Market Street. With obvious pleasure he wrote to tell his parents in Port Huron, Michigan, that they could “take it easy after this.”8 Nancy Edison, to whom he owed almost all his inquiring spirit, was bedridden with dementia.

Dont do any hard work and get mother anything She desires = You can draw on me for money—write me and Say how much money you will need in June and I will Send the amount on the first of that month = give Love to all the Folks—and write me the town news—What is Pitt doing….

Thos A^*3, 9

Pitt was his much older brother William Pitt Edison, superintendent of the Port Huron street railway and a perennial loser in speculative local schemes. For the rest of his life Edison was going to have to deal with “Dear Al” letters from relatives whose number, and financial difficulties, increased in ratio to his own prosperity.10

He continued to work on a variety of printing devices through the summer, at a pace that struck more sedate observers as freakish. An assistant at F. Brunner, Engraver & Die Sinker, in Manhattan recalled him slamming bound rolls of typewheel blanks on the counter and asking “When can I have them—when can I have them?” as if the future of telegraphy depended on their immediate embossing. Sometimes he was in such a hurry, he was out the door before the assistant had time to reply.11

In the fall, Edison and Pope created an elegant glass-domed, private-line printer that won first prize in its class at the American Institute fair in New York. It was “comparatively slow” and simple, but so were most of the operators it was designed for. Gold & Stock saw its potential and bought not only the machine but the company the partners had formed to market it.12

At this point Edison’s patent attorney, Lemuel Serrell, expressed concern that his client was not doing enough to protect all the technological ideas that he kept innocently talking about. Edison at once filled a notebook with sketches, explanatory notes, and dates of inspiration. The fact that most of the entries were made on the spot in Serrell’s office, with no reference to the instruments themselves, testified to the photographic accuracy of his memory.13

Out of this skein of shapes two major projects emerged: a refined system of automatic transmission, and an evolving series of “universal” printers that promised to be his most important achievement yet.

Automatic telegraphy—codified electric pulses shot down the line mechanically, rather than by a slow human hand tapping a key—was a technology that inventors had been struggling to perfect ever since the first Morse operator developed repetitive motion disorder. It involved the perforation of a paper ribbon with holes that corresponded to dots and dashes, each one permitting an electrical contact to be made as the ribbon whirled through a transmitter. In theory, the speed at which pulses were released was limited only by the pace of the ribbon. In practice, however, electrical induction—current arising in a wire because of charges in the magnetic field around it—caused a problem known as “tailing,” with each hole, like a miniature comet, allowing part of its charge to drift behind it and blur the oncoming roundness of the next. At a speed of more than ten words a minute, the blurring erased the distinction between hurtling dots and dashes. Distance compounded the problem, so that often only an unbroken streak printed out at the end of the line.14

Earlier in the year, Edison had designed a shunted automatic transmitter that to a certain extent reduced tailing. He returned to that work with a will in October, when an independent backer, George Harrington, helped him open a second factory on Railroad Avenue, the American Telegraph Works, and followed up with the incorporation of the Automatic Telegraph Company a month later, capitalized in the extraordinary amount of $13 million. Harrington was a former assistant secretary of the treasury under Abraham Lincoln, and Edison looked forward to tapping him as a treasury in himself. Another promising source of funds was Harrington’s friend Daniel H. Craig, a founding director of the Associated Press and the most ardent promoter of automatic telegraphy in the country. He had heard enough of Edison’s skills to write him, “If you should tell me you could make babies by machinery, I shouldn’t doubt it.”15

Encouraging as these commitments were to a young inventor still largely unknown, they were eclipsed by the scarcely credible sight of a draft contract, in Marshall Lefferts’s handwriting, offering him “forty thousand dollars” for a universal printer that would deliver text copy as well as numerical information. The sum was so large that it hardly bothered Edison to see that Lefferts, thinking twice, had crossed out the word forty and substituted “$30,000”—nor that the dread phrase “payable in stock” followed.16

Yet he still sounded not quite grown up when he wrote again to boast to his parents.

I am in a position now to Let you have some Cash, so you can write and say how much = I may be home some time this winter = Can’t say when exactly for I have a Large amount of business to attend to. I have one shop which Employs 18 men, and am Fitting up another which will Employ over 150 men = I am now—what “you” Democrats call a “Bloated Eastern Manufacturer.”17

Edison’s latest engineering recruits included Charles Batchelor, John Kruesi, and Sigmund Bergmann. All were recent immigrants, and destined to be among his longest-serving aides. Batchelor, a product of the Lancashire cotton mill industry, was slow, calm, and meticulous, with a deft pair of hands. He could draw like a draftsman and make his own precision tools.18 Kruesi had many of the same qualities, combined with what passed in Switzerland for charm. Bergmann, newly arrived from Germany, had few words of English, but was a dogged perfectionist at whatever mechanical task he was assigned. “It doesn’t matter if his tongue falters,” Edison said. “His work speaks.”19

THE SWING LAMP OF PISA

By January 1871 Edison had so much work on hand that his clients competed for his full attention. George Harrington wanted to know when some marketable devices might be expected from the inventor’s new shop, in return for the thousands of dollars he had so far been charged for equipment and supplies. Lefferts was irked to find that he was designing perforators for both Gold & Stock and Automatic Telegraph, and wondered which company was getting the best for its investment in him. “I do see most clearly, that I shall through you be a very heavy looser [sic],” he wrote.20 The plaint sounded more cajoling than bitter, because Lefferts had not yet signed their universal printer agreement and could afford to wait until Edison had something to show that justified its execution.^*4

Edison counseled patience, reminding all that technological breakthroughs could not be hurried. “Galileo discovered the principle of accurate Holology in the swing lamp of Pisa,” he wrote Daniel Craig. “It wouldn’t be a very sage remark to say—why damn it that lamp aint a clock.” He told Harrington that he was working nineteen hours a day on his behalf. “The Machines that I am making now will be made well & Complete, and if they don’t perforate more than 80 words a minute then there will be a funeral over here pretty quick.”21

Harrington, reassured, continued to sign checks on demand, as did Craig, who was grateful for Edison’s cheerful serenity. “Your notes, like your confident face, always inspire us with new vim.”22

So, presumably, did the originality and specificity of his patent applications, such as one that month for a printer designed for the New York Cotton Exchange. It featured two typewheels mounted on a single shaft, one for characters and one for digits, as well as a polarized relay, characteristic of many of Edison’s telegraph designs. This “cotton instrument” so impressed Lefferts that he ordered a production run of 150 models. When Edison also turned out a dozen experimental universal private-line printers, Lefferts was emboldened enough to list him as an asset in negotiating a merger between Gold & Stock and the Western Union Telegraph Company, the most powerful conglomerate in America.23

Western Union was ruled by William Orton, an executive of commensurate stature. Widely respected, he was forty-five years old, an active Republican and Episcopalian, forceful, incorrupt, choleric, austere, and frail. Unlike many tycoons of the early Gilded Age, Orton was not just a financier. He had trained as a printer, written his graduate thesis on magnetic telegraphy, and risen through teaching, religious publishing, and politicking to become commissioner of internal revenue under President Andrew Johnson. His intellect was, like his prose style, clear and cold as glass, and his dignity such that the only nickname employees dared accord him was the single initial O.24

When Edison was presented to him on 13 February, he may not have known that a few years before, this affable slouch had been one of his army of gypsy operators, working in Western Union offices as far afield as Memphis and Boston. But Orton was already convinced that Edison was, as he put it, “probably the best electro-mechanician in the country,” and saw the value of acquiring his past and future telegraphic patents.25 Gold & Stock had a prior claim to them, and Lefferts made it a condition of purchase that they would remain within his firm, as a subsidiary of the larger company.

Negotiations toward the merger proceeded. Harrington followed them apprehensively, not wanting to lose the services of the Automatic Telegraph Company’s house inventor. On 4 April he took the precaution of reserving unto himself two-thirds of the patent rights to any invention or improvement that Edison might make, “applicable to automatic telegraphy.”26

A week after signing this conveyance, which included power of attorney, Edison was drawn back to Port Huron by the death of his mother. Nancy Edison was sixty-three. He had been her youngest child, and the one who most benefited from her store of bookish knowledge—if not her religious instruction. Back then she was, in his grateful memory, the only person who did not find him strange. “My mother was the making of me. She understood me; she let me follow my bent.”27

COOPERATION AND GOOD WILL

Further legal responsibilities piled up on Edison after his bereavement, ending what little remained in him of immaturity. On the first of May he and William Unger leased the third and fourth floors of a building on the corner of Ward Street and Pear Alley in Newark, “with the privilege of four horse steam power,” and transferred their thriving telegraph equipment works there. On the tenth, Harrington increased Edison’s obligation to the Automatic Telegraph Company by bringing in five more investors to share the burden of financing his other operation at 103 Railroad Avenue. It said much for Harrington’s reputation that he could recruit such distinguished partners and trustees as Gen. William Jackson Palmer, Erastus Corning, William P. Mellen, and Josiah C. Reiff, who all seemed eager to contribute more money to an operation that had already cost him $16,000.28

Two weeks later Marshall Lefferts and William Orton concluded an agreement for the sale of Gold & Stock to Western Union, with Lefferts retaining the presidency of the former company. Both executives congratulated themselves on securing “the cooperation and good will of Mr. Edison for the future.”29

On 26 May Edison signed a five-year contract with Lefferts that guaranteed him an annual salary of $3,000 a year if he continued to supply Gold & Stock with marketable inventions. It made particular mention of the universal private-line printer he had just finished working on. He was to receive the title of “Consulting Electrician and Mechanician,” and would be rewarded in addition with $35,000 worth of company shares. Assuming those went up rather than down, his total pay package might be much greater than its face value of $50,000.^*5, 30

Manifestly, Edison was being wooed by potent, grave, and reverend signors. But his new status also brought, in abundance, the jealousy that accompanies professional success. As part of the Gold & Stock/Western Union deal, the American Printing Telegraph Company he had formed with Franklin Pope and James Ashley ceased to exist. Although both partners were generously paid off, their severance did not compare to the size of Edison’s windfall, which they felt was partly due to work they had put into the patents concerned. Ashley especially would never forgive him.31

VERY HANDSOME EYES

One wet evening that spring three Newark schoolgirls took shelter from the rain in the hallway of Edison’s factory on Ward Street. They were invited inside by an employee who knew them, and came upon Edison working on a stock ticker. Mary Stilwell, aged fifteen and a half, was struck by him for two reasons. “First, I thought he had very handsome eyes, and next, because he was so dirty, all covered with machine oil, &c.”32

The eyes won out, and she was emboldened to ask him about his work. Outside as they talked, the rain grew worse. She and her friends decided they would have to make a dash for home. The man who had brought them in offered to escort two of the girls with his umbrella. It was not big enough for all of them, so by chance or more likely design, Mary found herself left alone with Edison. He pulled an overcoat over his work clothes and escorted her home himself.

When we got to the house I saw that he was determined to go in and I had to invite him, and when my mother came down she asked who that was. I told her and said that he had brought me home and she went in. I was in mortal terror lest she should ask him to stay, but she did, and then he got up and took off his overcoat and stayed till nine o’clock, and then when he went away he asked permission of my mother and myself to call again. When he got it he availed himself of it almost every evening, and at last after five months…33

GRAY MORNING SAUNTERS

During that long period of courtship, Edison discovered that the money due to him from his various contracts, though substantial, was not enough to meet the expense of maintaining three shops and a workforce approaching seventy. He also had to bear the necessarily expensive business of experimenting, and such essentials as patent fees, food, and cigars.34 He developed a severe cash flow problem, and dealt with it by paying his creditors only when their demands turned into threats. At the same time his perfectionism retarded delivery of factory orders and promised prototypes. “When are you agoing to have something to show in the way of the new Perforator and Printer?” Daniel Craig wrote in early June.35

When Harrington—always nervous about having to share him with Lefferts and Orton—also complained about an apparent lack of progress on the automatic telegraph, Edison was provoked into a rare outburst of anger. “I cannot stand this worrying much longer….You cannot expect a man to invent & work night and day, and then be worried to a point of exasperation about how to obtain money to pay bills—If I keep on in this way 6 months longer I shall be completely broken down in health and mind.”36

Harrington responded with a check that met his current payroll problem. Two days later Edison felt flush enough to invest $300 in a Port Huron liquor store. As he joked years later, “I have too sanguine a temperament to keep money in solitary confinement.”37

He was telling the truth, however, about working night and day. In June he delivered two prototypes of his most important invention to date, a universal stock printer, to Gold & Stock, and on 26 July he executed the first of two patents on improvements in automatic telegraphy to gladden Craig’s heart. He shuttled back and forth between his shops and office in Newark and the headquarters of his various clients in New York. Being peripatetic stimulated his creativity: “I have innumerable machines in my Mind.” Not wanting to lose any of them, he developed a lifelong habit of carrying pocket notebooks to record every inspiration.38

His principal interest at this time (aside from Mary Stilwell) was the electrochemistry of automatic telegraphy. A printing method invented by George Little in 1869 allowed signals to flow from a metal stylus onto paper sensitized with potassium iodide or some other aqueous solution. The marks were “fugitive” if the recording point was platinum, and permanent if it was iron. But recorders based on Little’s patent “tailed” terribly, encouraging Edison to come up with a superior method of his own. Harrington let him open a small research laboratory for the purpose, on the top floor of the Automatic Telegraph Company building in downtown Manhattan.39

Edward Johnson, the company’s superintendent, was deputized to work with him after being warned that Edison was “a genius…and a very fiend for work.”40 So began the most important friendship of Johnson’s life. “I came in one night and there sat Edison with a pile of chemical books that were five feet high when laid one upon another. He had ordered them from New York, London, and Paris….He ate at his desk and slept in his chair.” Within six weeks all the books had been read and reduced to a volume of handwritten abstracts. One result of Edison’s consequent erudition was that he was able to concoct a ferric solution for automatic reception that cost only five or six cents a gallon, as opposed to the seventeen dollars a gallon of Little’s.41

Johnson was awed. Hyperactive himself, wing-mustached and torrentially talkative, he was destined to become an excellent salesman for Edison products, able to prove or pretend their superiority in every particular. But his chief value at this early stage of their association was to help “the Old Man”—as Edison was already quaintly called—deal with the challenges of long-distance automatic telegraphy, a subject in which he was an expert.

They discovered they had a shared gift for penury. Often, Johnson recalled, they worked without dinner through dawn:

Along about daylight, when weariness and hunger combined to paralyze our mentality…we would find ourselves without so much as a nickel wherewith to purchase a bun, not to speak of a bed; and upon such occasion we would combat the weariness and the hunger by taking a brisk walk to Central Park and back, by which time the office boy at least would be on hand to assist us with a meager but grateful breakfast at Coffee Pat’s, a well-known penny-lunch establishment on Park Row, whose sole other patrons were the “printer’s devils” of the various newspapers in that vicinity.42

On one of these “gray morning saunters,” when they could not afford even to eat at Pat’s, Edison pointed at the decorations in the window and said, “Say, Johnson, we had better quit inventing and hire ourselves out as a pair of Chinese gods. We would be a more brilliant success. At least, we needn’t go hungry.”43

HOW TO TREAT A WOMAN

Edison’s wooing of Mary Stilwell became serious around the time of Thanksgiving, when he was taking her home from a walk. By now she was sixteen, and he, at twenty-four, was “Thomas” to her “Mame.” In the only interview she ever gave, she recalled how the unspoken issue between them came up.

“Have you ever thought you would like to be married, Mame?”

“Why no—not yet anyhow.”

“Well, I have and I would like to, and I would like you for my wife.”

“Oh I couldn’t.”

“Well, and why not? Don’t you like me well enough? Think, now, and try not to make a mistake.”44

Mary stammered something about being too young.

He waved her protest aside. “If you meant no you would say no, so now I’ll see your father tomorrow night, and if he says yes we’ll be married Tuesday.”

What Edison lacked in romance he made up in directness. “I love your daughter and I’ll make her a good husband,” he told Mr. Stilwell, holding Mary’s hand. “I am honest, and I am good, and I know how to treat a woman.”

He agreed to wait a week for Mr. Stilwell’s answer, which turned out to be positive.

“And so,” Mary told Olive Harper in the last year of her life, “we were married.”45

POPSY WOPSY

The wedding took place on Christmas Day 1871. By then Edison had bought a house at 53 Wright Street in Newark and delivered a lucrative shipment of six hundred universal stock printers to Gold & Stock. Thanks to this and other shop orders and the regularity of his salary as the firm’s consulting electrician, he was back in the black, able to lavish $2,000 on his bride for the acquisition of furniture, domestic help, and—important to her—a new wardrobe.46

Mary was a pretty picture in fine clothes, especially when she tied a sexy ribbon around her neck and let white ruffles spill out of her loose sleeves and collar. She was a slender, pensive-looking girl with lovely eyes, unused to money (Mr. Stilwell was a sawyer)^*6 but quite willing to spend it, now her husband had it.47

They were married by a Methodist Episcopal minister and spent their first night at home—Edison typically asking if he could stop by the factory for an hour or two to solve a consignment problem—before traveling to Niagara Falls and Boston for an abbreviated honeymoon. They were back home on New Year’s Day. After that their life together remained private except for two jocular complaints that Edison entered into his notebooks: “My Wife Popsy Wopsy Can’t Invent” and “Mrs Mary Edison My wife Dearly Beloved Cannot invent worth a Damn!”48

Mary Stilwell Edison, circa 1871.

He certainly could not say that of himself. During the first year of his marriage, and particularly in the months before Mary conceived her first child, he executed thirty-nine successful patents: printing telegraphs, typewheels, perforators, chemical papers, rheotomes, autotel instruments, electromagnetic adjusters, transmitters, unison stops, galvanic batteries, circuits, and signal boxes.^*7, 49 These were amplified by hundreds of notebook notions, some to do with a word-printing idea that had come to him on the eve of his wedding: that of interposing a band of silk, or some other resilient fabric, between a metal point and a roll of paper. The silk would be saturated in ink, and electrical impulses coming through the point would impress the paper with dots that formed letters. In an entry dated 18 January (“This is a novel affair”), he drew a batch of such points tapping down on the silk band as it flowed over the paper roll.50 More elaborately in the same note, he imagined an electrochemical recorder in which the roll became a “platina faced drum” and the points “platina pens” and the interposing band sensitized paper that, as the pens tapped down in response to charges agitating them, spelled out the word BOSTON.

Edison was doubtless unconscious that somewhere in the near future, like a shadow of these drawings thrown on an unseen wall, wavered the stylus, the foil, the cylinder, and the stippling vibrations of his most historic invention.51

Edison chemical printer spelling out the word “BOSTON,” January 1872.

COPPER AND TIME

When he needed a witness to countersign and date ideas that looked patentable, Edison turned more often than not to Joseph Murray, a senior machinist at American Telegraph Works. When in February Edison & Unger began to have trouble handling the volume of orders it attracted from telegraph companies (some of them as far away as England), he decided to make Murray his partner in a supplementary factory, manufacturing equipment primarily for Gold & Stock. On 5 February the new shop opened its doors on Railroad Avenue. This, with the addition of an annex Edison rented for himself on Mechanic Street, brought the number of his facilities in Newark to five, a total he soon found to be unsupportable administratively and financially. Again, in the rags-or-riches toggle that would always characterize his way of doing business, he found himself unable to pay bills on demand.^*8, 52

In July he worsened his difficulties by buying William Unger out for $17,100 worth of mortgage and notes, and concentrating all his manufacturing activities at Ward Street. The new firm was organized as Edison & Murray, and its payroll grew to an impressive seventy-four.

After the transaction a representative of the R. G. Dun credit rating agency noted that Edison was “talented in the way of inventive genius [but] Is at present Considbly spread out.” Although his ultimate success “might in a measure be Consid assured with Careful Management is Yet Consid problematical & cr[edit] shd be extended with a good deal of Caution.”53

Edison’s creative flow subsided only slightly in the second half of the year, while he fought off creditors and tried to apportion equal amounts of time to his competing clients, Gold & Stock and the Automatic Telegraph Company. That meant alternating, or concurrent, development of information-sharing devices for Lefferts and Orton, and automatic transmitters for Harrington.

In one experiment aimed at pleasing the latter, he achieved the almost incredible printout speed of eighteen hundred words a minute by changing his universal private-line printer into an electric typewriter.54 The device was of little immediate use to the Automatic Telegraph Company—it lacked a sending mechanism—but was a significant advance nonetheless. After working for years with dots and dashes, then with dots alone inscribing the shapes of letters, he was now producing neat roman capitals, and punctuation marks besides. “TO MR HARRINGTON,” the instrument rattled out, by way of demonstration, “THIS IS A SPECIMEN DONE ON THE PRINTING MACHINE—DO YOU THINK IT ANY IMPROVEMENT OVER THE LAST SPECIMEN, IT IS NOT SO VERY MARKED AS TO KNOCK A MAN DOWN BUT STILL A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION.”55

Edison & Murray workforce, Ward Street, Newark, 1873.

During the fall and early winter Edison (buoyed by a $4,000 development deal from Josiah Reiff) attained a high degree of sophistication in duplex telegraphy.^*9 It was a process, pioneered by Joseph Stearns and much pondered by himself, of sending simultaneous messages along a single wire. While one stream of signals dot-dashed its way from A to B, another stream did the reverse. The idea was to stagger the streams, so that going pulses would not collide with coming ones, just as pedestrians on a New York sidewalk avoided one another as they headed downtown or uptown.56

Edison’s initial duplex designs were sketched rapidly, yet with elegance and precision. Most of them violated normal telegraphic procedure by counterposing a neutral relay at one end of the line and a polarized relay at the other. He boasted that given enough funding, he could invent any number of such machines. “Very well,” William Orton told him, “I’ll take all you can make—a dozen or a bushel.” Huge as Western Union was, its size meant that it handled the bulk of the nation’s message traffic, and it was constantly on the lookout for devices that would speed up transmission. More than that, it was willing to buy patents of any sort that would cramp innovation among its competitors. Edison responded with twenty-one further designs, some penciled while he was waiting in Orton’s anteroom, all probing past duplex toward what he called “diplex” messaging. It was a method that dispatched signals the same way in pairs. He intimated that if he were allowed to use Western Union lines to test both kinds of transmission, he might even succeed one day in coordinating duplex and diplex signals to create quadruplex telegraphy, with enormous savings of copper and time.57

This idea was so audacious that Orton did not comprehend its import. He gave Edison permission to run night tests on a loop wire between New York and Boston, to occupy experimental space in the Western Union building for the duration, and to use the company’s own factory to fabricate necessary equipment. In return, Orton reserved first-refusal rights to any duplex/diplex patents that Edison might come up with.^*10, 58

A freehand sketch by Edison of his quadruplex system.

NIGHTS ALONE

The birth of a baby daughter, Marion, on 18 February 1873 enabled Mary Edison to begin a series of duplex transmissions of her own. She saw little of her husband that winter, as he was working at Edison & Murray by day and camping out in the basement of Orton’s headquarters most evenings. A Western Union employee recalled a week “during which time he never went to bed or had any regular hours for meals.”59 His model networks on the floor, which he webbed with copper wires unspooled from his pocket, threatened to trip unwary passersby:

When he was hungry, he visited a coffee and cake establishment in the neighborhood and absorbed what he was pleased to call the Bohemian Diet, and, returning with an unlighted cigar between his lips, he would begin his experiments anew. After a while, he would throw himself into a chair and doze, sometimes for an hour, and again for shorter or longer periods. He used to say that when he was thus napping, he dreamed out many things that had puzzled him while awake.60

Edison’s tests created as many problems as they solved, keeping him away from home for more than a hundred consecutive nights of experiment. At least one system that he sketched for possible patenting was labeled “Four-plex.” It laid out a circuit of intimidating complexity with the waggish addendum, “Why not.”61

He had to postpone any further work on this ne plus ultra of telecommunication in the spring, when Craig and Harrington sent him to England on a delicate assignment. He was charged with demonstrating to skeptical engineers of the British Post Office Telegraph Department that his automatic transmitter-receivers were faster than the so-called rapid printing telegraph of Charles Wheatstone.62

Edison packed a small satchel, stuffed three boxes with instruments, chemical paper, and preperforated message tapes, and sailed for Liverpool on 23 April, accompanied by an assistant, Jack Wright. The crossing on HMS Java was stormy. Having never navigated a body of water bigger than Lake Huron before, he only now discovered that he had an iron stomach. It was not until the green fields of Lancashire hove over the horizon that most of his fellow passengers came on deck for fresh air.63

He left Wright with some equipment in Merseyside and reached London at the beginning of May. Most other young Americans visiting the world’s largest city for the first time would have wanted to sightsee, but Edison was austerely focused on work.^*11, 64 On the morning after his arrival he set up automatic receiving apparatus in the Post Office headquarters on Telegraph Street. Examiners there wanted to see the quality of sample messages sent to him by Wright in Liverpool. One of them said, encouragingly, “You are not going to have much show. They are going to give you an old Bridgewater Canal wire that is so poor we don’t work it.” He was also informed that Wright would have to draw his signal charge from “sand batteries”—cells filled with a weak sedimentary electrolyte.65

Sensing that the odds were stacked against him, Edison sought the help of Col. George Gouraud, the Automatic Telegraph Company’s London representative. Gouraud was a large, majestic, expatriate American who had won a Medal of Honor during the Civil War and made the most of it in building a business career. Glossy of mustache and spit-polished shoes, he was a handsome man, except that his eyes, as a diplomat who knew him observed, “were not quite in tune.”66 Both of them, however, looked out for George Gouraud, and they reflected Thomas Edison as a comer worth cultivating.^*12

When asked if the company would stand for the purchase of “a powerful battery to send to Liverpool,” Gouraud said yes. The only one available turned out to be a monster unit that John Tyndall had used for demonstrations at the Royal Institution. It consisted of a hundred cells and cost a hundred guineas, and Wright had to come to London to get it. But when grounded and connected, it gave messages such momentum that test printouts on Telegraph Street were, in Edison’s words, “as perfect as a copper plate.”67

He had to wait three weeks for the Post Office trial. In the meantime, his stomach proved less able to tolerate English cooking than it had turbulence at sea. After forcing down repeated dinners of roast beef and fried flounder, he complained that his “imagination was getting into a coma” and rejoiced to find a French patisserie in High Holborn that soothed him with carbohydrates.68

On 23 May Edison was finally able to demonstrate the superior speed of his automatic telegraphy to that of the Post Office’s Wheatstone system. Wright sent him Morse messages at an average rate of five hundred words a minute over the next five days. The chief examiner thought this excellent, but pointed out that such an increased flow of copy would require the hiring of extra transcription clerks. The fact that the flow would, in turn, generate more telegraph income did not seem to outweigh the traditional British preference for muddling through.^*13, 69

Before returning to America, Edison won permission to conduct self-educating experiments on reels of transoceanic cable stored underwater at Greenwich. He was mystified to find that the signals he had received so sharply along the land line from Liverpool were distorted when sent through two thousand miles of coiled cable. A single dot printed out at the other end as a dash twenty-seven feet long. When after endless adjustments he managed to send whole words, only two or three of them dragged through per minute. Eventually he realized that the coil was the culprit—or rather, that electrical induction caused his signals to bleed from one winding to another.70

Those dark hours in Greenwich were as bleak as any he ever spent, the only hostelry open to him being a roach-infested snug for longshoremen. It purveyed molasses cake and coffee that tasted like burnt bread. Gouraud made the mistake of coming down once to breakfast with him there, and felt so ill afterward that he had to be revived with gin. Edison sailed home in mid-June with no particular desire to revisit the Old World.71

A PECULIAR EFFORT OF THE MIND

He was greeted in Newark with the disagreeable news that a sheriff had been bothering Mary about debts. Joseph Murray reported that he had lent her $200 to help, but she “did not pay one bill out of it.” Murray was a soft-hearted soul and quickly added, “I don’t Blame her or find fault with her”—as well he might, since she had a baby to feed and the household accounts were, after all, her husband’s responsibility. The larger problem was that the Edison & Murray shop was being bled white by the credit cost of buying out William Unger. And the largest problem of all was that the national economy, like Edison himself, was suffering the consequence of growing too fast and spreading too thin. The railroad-cum-telegraph expansion following the Civil War had petered out for lack of more places to go and a withdrawal of speculative capital. “Business is very dull money worse than ever,” Murray wrote his partner. “Believe I have had a hard time of it since you left. I lost 11 lbs in one month but I shall die in the Harness if I ever do die.”72

For the next year and a half Edison flirted with insolvency while his brain spouted inventions, and payments for them flew in and out of his pocket. A full-scale panic occurred in mid-September 1873, driving scores of banks under and triggering a depression that would last most of the decade. William Orton, conserving Western Union’s resources, declined to finance the diplex just as it evolved into a promising prototype model. He considered Edison “a very ingenious man, but erratic,” always with his hand out for laboratory funds. Gold & Stock cut back on its orders, compelling Edison & Murray to hustle for manufacturing contracts. The Automatic Telegraph Company, struggling to survive, looked around for a purchaser, even as a group of British investors paid $50,000 in gold for the foreign rights to its patents. Edison had to beg for his one-third share of that money, learning how his creditors felt when he imposed the same indignity on them. He had to beg again, this time to Orton, when a note for $10,000 payable to Unger became due, along with a threatened lien on his Ward Street shop. Orton gave him only $3,000 on account of unspecified future work. A sympathetic Automatic investor, William Seyfert, came up with $6,600 more to cancel Unger’s lien, generating another note that would one day trouble Edison severely.73

His rescuer then became his workbench colleague now. Charles Batchelor, who had shone as a precision machinist and mechanic on the factory floor at Ward Street, joined him upstairs in a series of quasi-scientific experiments provoked by Edison’s belated discovery of induction in the wet cables of Greenwich.74 Edison was not alone in being ignorant of the phenomenon, since American electricians had never had much to do with long-distance, undersea signals; they thought instead in terms of relay transmission overland.

He affected contempt for English innovators—“They do not eat enough pie”—but he had met and interviewed enough of them during his off-hours in London to realize that they were far more sophisticated than he in electrical matters.75 During the winter and spring of 1874 he somehow kept his financial troubles in one compartment of his mind while occupying the rest of it with intense self-education in the arcana of electromagnetic and electrochemical science.^*14 He unembarrassedly began with a primer, John Pepper’s Cylcopaedia of Science Simplified, then studied and annotated the telegraphic handbooks of Robert Savine and Latimer Clark before absorbing such formidable tomes as William Crookes’s Select Methods of Chemical Analysis and Charles Bloxam’s Laboratory Teaching. All these authors were British. Their erudition inspired him to such a degree that he began to write a book of his own, a telegraphic treatise based on his ongoing experiments with Batchelor. Although he never completed it, several chapters appeared in various trade journals, in probable imitation of the first-serial publication method of the great Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell.^*15

Out of this six-month swirl of personal and intellectual turbulence, like two great birds tossed up by a storm, came Edison’s most important contributions yet to the science of communications. The first was the quadruplex telegraph, which he had meditated on for years but made practical now through his new understanding of induction. On 8 July 1874 he let Orton observe it in action between New York and Philadelphia, conscious for the first time that he had an invention worth millions. “I had my heart trying to climb up around my oesophagus.” The demonstration was a success, and two days later The New York Times announced it to the world. Although Edison was mentioned only in passing, he got his first addictive taste of renown.76

In its planned form, which he would continue to elaborate and refine for years, the quadruplex was a superbly symmetrical grid that opposed two terminal stations, each sending and receiving two transmissions. The system allowed them to do so simultaneously—four signals bypassing one another along the same wire—a feat akin to playing Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge on a one-string violin. Edison added the further counterpoint of “phantom wires” at either end of the main line, duplicating the variations in its resistance and creating, in theory, another four transmissions. He allowed with some smugness that the overall concept “required a peculiar effort of the mind, such as the imagining of eight different things moving simultaneously on a mental plane.”^*16, 77

The dry language of his patent application explained that each pair of terminals transmitted mismatched signals. Sender A drew constant power from its source battery, the polarity of which reversed between every dot-or-dash pulsation of current, with no break in the circuit. Receiver A was polarized—a feature of most of Edison’s telegraph designs—and unsprung, so that it responded only to what it felt of the reversals coming its way. Sender B, controlled by a neutral relay with a retracting spring, was indifferent as to polarity, depending instead on varying strengths of induced current to keep in touch with receiver B.78

Orton was not sure if the beauty of the quadruplex as an electrical concept would make it a practical addition to his system. He needed to be persuaded of that by seeing it thoroughly tested on a Western Union line. But he did let company shareholders know that the quadruplex was “an invention more wonderful than the duplex,” which, coming from an executive famous for circumspection, amounted to a torrent of praise.79

NEW FORCE

In August Edison executed a flurry of patents in multiplex and automatic telegraphy, including one for his second great invention of the year, modestly entitled “Improvement in Telegraph Apparatus.” It arose out of his earlier discovery that if a positively charged piece of lead was pushed across a slice of damp chalk resting on a negatively charged plate, the current running through made the chalk surface slippery, and caused the lead to skate with such agility it could be impelled in any direction, with no apparent friction or inertia—“as upon ice.” Although at first the phenomenon had seemed to be simply a hydrostatic translation of electrical signals into motion, he now saw the lead as a potential pen point, and the chalk as a tabula rasa wanting to be written on. “Hence I term my invention the electric motograph.”80

Writing—or in telegraphy, printing—consisted of marks imposing themselves on blankness. White paper soaked in an electrosensitive chemical solution and drawn over a drum could substitute for white chalk, Edison reasoned. When a bolt of current vibrated the pen, the point would slide, and the paper beneath darken in reaction, as if inked. (Ferrocyanide of potassium turned Prussian blue.) Conversely, whenever the pen lost its charge, the paper would become less slippery, and there would be a microsecond of drag—the skater digging in—before the next charge, and the next mark. That meant economical printing, with not too much white space separating the characters.81

He congratulated himself, with reason, on having discovered a “new force”—so new that he could not for the moment figure how best to utilize it. Nor, since he was used to the ticking of telegraph recorders, did he pay due attention to that of the motograph. Every dash or dot that it registered on the ear as well as the eye; every advance of the paper recorded a downward vibration felt. Perceptively, the editor of Scientific American noted on 5 September, “The salient feature of Mr. Edison’s present discovery is the production of motion and of sound by the pen, or stylus, without the intervention of a magnet or armature.”82

THE PROFESSOR OF DUPLICITY

Edison sought to augment the professional respect he earned from inventing the quadruplex and the motograph by assuming the science editorship of a new telegraphic journal, The Operator. He contributed a series of articles, including one on the duplex for the 1 October issue that was so densely technical as to dissuade many a young electrician from taking up multiple telegraphy. It ended with a warning: “To be continued.” He wrote for other journals too, sometimes posing abstruse problems for readers to solve, and paid Robert Spice, a Brooklyn professor of natural philosophy, to give him a one-month crash course in chemistry.83

Although the extra notice accorded him as a result was modest (some of his articles were published anonymously), Edison began to attract those twin concomitants of celebrity, the sycophant and the scourge. George F. Barker of the University of Pennsylvania wrote on 3 November to congratulate him on his “remarkable little instrument,” the motograph, and asked if he would be “willing to come on and show it to the highest scientific body in the country, the National Academy of Science.” And James Ashley, still fuming over his deal with Gold & Stock three years before, began to mock him in The Telegrapher as “the professor of duplicity and quadruplicity.”84

Edison ignored Ashley and was unable to gratify Barker, perhaps because he could not afford the fare to Philadelphia. He was so desperate for money as the winter came on that he had to sell his house at a loss, and move his wife and daughter into an apartment over a drugstore in downtown Newark. The sale netted him nothing, relieving him only of attendant credit. His private anguish around this time was implicit in one of his periodic doodlings of dream imagery: “A yellow oasis in hell….the wrestling of shadow, a square chunk of carrion with two green eyes held by threads of gossamer which floats at midnight in bleak old rural graveyards.”85

By the beginning of December he could stand poverty no longer. The quadruplex was now testing superbly on Western Union lines from New York to Boston, Buffalo, and Chicago. Orton saw the system as a crucial asset to the company, worth at least $10 million in the near future and incalculably more beyond. But he had yet to make an offer for the patent rights. Edison, with the ingenuousness that was part of his charm and a large part of his deficiencies as a businessman, wrote him on the sixth: “I need 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, or 2,000 dollars—any one you would like to advance.”86

Orton met him halfway with $5,000 “in part payment” of a purchase price still to be negotiated, and Edison simultaneously got Harrington to roll over a due note for $3,351 that might otherwise have ruined him.87 With frigid weather and Christmas approaching, he had more than a hundred workers depending upon him in his various shops, not to mention Mary and Marion. He appealed to Orton for more money, saying that the quadruplex should pay him $25,000, plus annual royalties per circuit. “Edison is almost wild over the Quadruplex,” Orton told one of his officers. He was excited about it himself, in his phlegmatic way, but was in no hurry to conclude a deal, for the good reason that patents covering the system had not yet been applied for. Edison had withheld executing them until the last minute of development, in fear of anticipatory imitation.88 The most Orton would do, pending a formal application to the Patent Office, was to give Edison & Murray a manufacturing order, dated 17 December, for twenty sets of quadruplex instruments. It was worth $15,000 on delivery, but in the meantime Edison had to bear the cost of fabrication. When he appealed yet again, Orton treated him with Scrooge-like coldness (or so it felt to Edison) and departed for Chicago, saying he would be back after the holidays to resume discussions.89

At this juncture, like another Dickensian schemer looming out of the darkness, the financier Jay Gould paid a late-night visit to Edison’s shop on Ward Street. His ulster drooped shabbily to the ground, and he wore a hard black bowler.90 A mild, charming man despite his sharklike reputation, Gould owned several railroads plus the Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company. Unknown to Orton, he was about to acquire the Automatic Company from Harrington and Reiff, thus gaining control of Edison’s printers. He now sensed an opportunity to snatch the quadruplex too—along with its inventor.91

Edison was struck by his “far off look” as he listened to an explanation of how the system worked.92 Gould left without making a proposal. But a few nights later, before Orton’s return from Chicago, Edison found himself being escorted through the servants’ entrance to a house on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. There, in a basement office, Gould

…started in at once and asked me how much I wanted. I said—make me an offer—then he said—I will give you $30,000—I said I will sell any interest I may have for that money, which was somewhat more than I thought I could get. The next morning I went with Gould to Sherman and Sterling’s office and received a check for $30,000, with a remark by Gould that I had got the steamboat Plymouth Rock as he had sold her for $30,000 and had just received the check.93

The date was 4 January 1875, and at the flip of a millionaire’s deed to a yacht, Edison was on the way to becoming a rich man himself. If not one yet, he was relieved of his current despair and hurt pride. There would be other cash crises in his life, some of them acute, but not till after he was famous and able to rely on the credit that is fame’s reward.

Orton returned from his alleged “business” trip to Chicago, only to find that Edison had left town on an alleged “family” trip to Port Huron. They respectively took each other’s travels to mean that the one man declined to be hustled, and the other would not be toyed with. At all events Orton was the loser, and Western Union’s share value dropped four points when The New York Tribune (a Gould-controlled newspaper) announced on 15 January that the expanded Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company would shortly be putting one of Edison’s automatic systems into operation between New York and Washington, and that he would become the chief electrician of all its telegraph lines.94

The announcement was a major blow to William Orton. He tried in vain to “accept” Edison’s proposed sale of quadruplex rights for $25,000, then resorted to a Jarndycean lawsuit to claim them. If he had lived until 1913, he would have seen the quadruplex case’s final resolution and realized the importance of the great invention he had gambled away.^*17, 95

TO PRICK AS WE WRITE

Edison celebrated by splurging on scientific books and equipment and helping his father, brother, and in-laws out with loans and settlements. Mary celebrated too, throwing a masquerade party for her husband’s twenty-eighth birthday on 11 February and treating herself to a fresh wardrobe.96 She would not be able to wear the latest formfitting fashions for long. By the time the Edisons settled into a new house on South Orange Avenue in the early spring, she was again pregnant.

In May, Edison, wanting to free himself from manufacturing responsibilities, dissolved his partnership with Joseph Murray. At the same time he took advantage of Gould’s embroilment in disputes over the acquisition of his quadruplex and automatic system patents to fold up his tent as electrician of the A&P Telegraph Company and quietly steal away to the life he had always coveted—that of an independent inventor in a laboratory of his own.97

For the time being, it consisted of a few rooms in the Ward Street shop. He hired five extra men to assist him and Batchelor in their experiments. They were the machinists John Kruesi and Charles Wurth, both from Murray’s shop floor; James Adams, an old friend from Boston days; his nephew Charley, an excitable boy of fifteen; and the indefatigable Sam Edison, willing to do any job necessary, from carpentry to cleaning up, in return for twenty dollars per week. With occasional extra help from Edward Johnson (still working for A&P) and another former telegraph buddy, Ezra Gilliland, Edison now had the makings of a research and development team.98

They began work on 1 June with a list of nineteen experimental projects, including “a copying press that will take 100 copies.” The first such press was a messy device that saturated tissue paper with an ink of violet aniline dye and apple pomade. It was fragrant but ran slow, needing frequent blotting. Then on the last day of the month Batchelor noted, “We struck the idea of making a stencil of the paper by pricking with a pen & then rubbing all over with ink.”99

The “pen” was nothing but a platina point that had to be jabbed manually at the paper while it lay, like a flattened fakir, on a bed of miniature nails. “It is not much good,” Batchelor conceded, with English understatement. “Resolved to make a machine to go by clockwork or engine to prick as we write.”100

The Edison Electric Pen with batteries and press, 1875.

Thus was born Edison’s electric pen, a battery-wired stylus with a needle point that flickered in and out faster than a snake’s tongue. Held as steeply as possible, to balance the tiny electromagnetic motor on its top, it pricked a sheet of stencil paper in a near-continuous line, allowing the penman to write—or draw—any cursive shapes he pleased.^*18 The resulting perforate was framed, pressed against blank stationery, and ink-rolled to print as many sharp duplicates as required.

At first the electric pen was a cumbersome instrument, for all the mobility of its point, but Edison progressively miniaturized the drive components, making it lighter and less vibrant in the hand. Even so, it required considerable skill to use: an O, for example, would drop right out of the paper if inscribed too slowly. He assigned the manufacturing rights to Ezra Gilliland, and it became the showcase product of his Newark laboratory, ubiquitous in businesses and government offices as far away as Russia. Over the next ten years it would sell some sixty thousand units and be remembered as “the grandfather of automatic stencil duplication.”^*19 Edison gratefully gave Batchelor and Adams a percentage of the profits.101

Helping him develop the pen gave Batchelor an education in electricity, which he had understood imperfectly hitherto. It also introduced him to the charms of nocturnal labor. “We work all night experimenting & sleep till noon in the day,” he wrote his brother in England. “We have got 54 things on the carpet….Edison is an indefatigable worker & there is no kind of a failure however disastrous affects him. He stands today the foremost inventor & electrician in this country by far.”102 He showed his respect for the Old Man (who was more than a year his junior) by never addressing him as “Al” or “Tom,” as a few old friends were allowed to do. It was always “Edison” or “Mr. Edison,” while he in return was “Batch.”

TRUE UNKNOWN FORCE

By now Edison had lost interest in the multiplex and automatic aspects of telegraphy. Instead, he became fascinated by the “acoustic” or “harmonic” telegraph, which Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell were separately developing. It involved the transmission of Morse sound signals along a single wire by several differently pitched “reeds,” similar to tuning forks. If an identical array of reeds was mounted at the receiving end, each pair would vibrate at their mutual frequency, while the others stayed quiet. Ideally, though, all the pairs ought to commune simultaneously, enabling a greater message traffic than even the quadruplex could handle.

The science of sound was a new one for Edison, although it occurred to him that a relay he had invented in 1873, with an oscillating electrode varying the resistance of water or glycerine, could have been adapted to produce audible signals.103 He began a series of acoustic telegraph experiments for Western Union in November, assisted again by Batchelor and Adams. In less than a week he improved on Gray’s acoustic transmitter by employing a delicate balance of electromagnets, resonators, and spring pendulums, each connected to its own battery, responding to its own frequency, and moving in and out of circuit without breaking the flow of current through the whole. “I do not wish to confine myself to any particular form of vibrating pendulum,” he wrote in his caveat, “as a tuning fork or string secured at both ends, or wind instrument may be used.” He also claimed as unique his idea of keeping current waves distinct as they undulated over long distances (the old telegraphic problem of “tailing”) by placing the receiver in a derived circuit and shunting it with a condenser.104

At this time the same day the experimental trio were intrigued by a bizarre side effect of magnetizing a vibrator of Stubb’s steel. A spark leaped from the core of the magnet, larger and stronger than any that could have been caused by induction. Curiouser and curiouser, when a wire attached to the vibrator was connected to a gas pipe in the laboratory, all the other fixtures in the building sparked in sympathy. Whatever energy they shared followed none of the laws of voltaic or static electricity. It jiggled no galvanometer, lacked polarity, and did not even taste of electrical discharge. Yet a knife stroked across the stove twenty feet away drew a splendid chain of scintilla from the hot metal. “This is simply wonderful,” Batchelor jotted in a notebook entry, “and a good proof that the cause of the spark is a true unknown force.”105

For Edison, it was almost as if he had willed the phenomenon to happen. Five months before, in his list of projects for experiment, he had vowed to find a “New force for Telegraphic communication.” Already that imponderable looked to be something more marvelous than acoustic transmission. He, Batchelor, and Adams had much subsequent fun by applying the force to vibrators made of twenty-eight different other metals. Only two—boron and selenium—failed to react. Carbon and thallium produced “actinic” sparks; tellurium gave off with “a strong and disgusting smell of garlic”; cadmium outperformed bismuth; and silver produced the best flash of all, a spurt of “magnificent green.”106

Edison wondered if he could utilize these sparks to send messages on underground and underwater wires without insulation. It did not occur to him at first that he might not need wires at all. Then he discovered that a spark could be made to hover between two lead pencils if they were tilted so that their points almost touched, providing that one was grounded and the other hooked to about a foot of free wire. To view the phenomenon better, he enclosed them in a “dark box” that was penetrated by a pair of brass eyepieces.107

The next step toward magic was when he made a “trembling bell” generator of a spark coil inside an evacuated glass tube, and carried the dark box into another building with the free wire still projecting. Incredibly, the sparking persisted, though much enfeebled. He could only assume that his new force was reaching the pencils through the “ether,” to use the nineteenth century’s favorite word for whatever it was that separated matter from matter. And he would have to wait thirty or more years before his box set’s protruding wire could be called a radio antenna.^*20, 108

INVENTION FACTORY

The birth of Thomas Alva Edison, Jr., on 10 January 1876 saw his father immersed in a serious study of acoustics, and his grandfather constructing a long two-story shed on a hillside in Menlo Park, New Jersey.

Sam was an experienced builder, tough enough at seventy to hoist roof beams with men a third his age. Edison had given him carte blanche to find a rural location where he and “the boys” could live and work, far from the worldly distractions of New York City—but not so far as to inhibit business trips and deliveries of supplies. Sam loved a deal as much as he loved whiskey (four slugs of which he tossed back daily, to no apparent effect), and he saved his son many dimes by choosing Menlo Park, a failing, half-finished development planned along a convergence of the Philadelphia turnpike and the Pennsylvania Railroad. Its forty-odd houses and many empty lots overlooked a landscape of corn and fruit farms, with a small lake lying like a mirror in the middle distance and Manhattan, twenty-four miles away, clearly visible in bright weather.109

Edison bought two tracts for $5,200. The one smaller and closer to the railroad had a show house on it, big enough to accommodate his family, visiting relatives, and three black servants. The larger field up Christie Street (a steep, muddy boardwalk uninviting to Mary) became by spring a campus for the laboratory of his dreams—an isolated research and development facility, staffed by a team of talented young experimenters and serviced by a parallel team of machinists who would manufacture and sell whatever he invented. Soon to be known as Edison’s “Invention Factory,” it was a concept new to technology, and for that matter new to science too: communal, democratic, daring in the scope of its ambitions. With William Orton’s encouragement, he dedicated the facility first to the new science of telephony.110

If anyone that month had a prior claim on the word telephone (so far understood to mean the transmission only of pitched sounds, rather than speech), it was neither Elisha Gray nor Alexander Graham Bell but the German telegrapher Philipp Reis, who had invented a diaphragmatic Telefon in 1861. Edison had been familiar with its make-and-break circuitry as long ago as 1869. And in the summer just past, he had written the word speak above the resonant box of a sketched telephonic instrument, built around a tuning fork whose resistance was varied by mercury.

The idea had not worked, but now, on 14 January, he executed an acoustic telegraph caveat that contained what he afterward called, rather wistfully, the “First Telephone on Record”—a resonating receiver with a membrane vibrating to the incoming oscillations of the line wire, transferred via a tiny electromagnetized coil. Edison thought of it, however, only as a device for measuring wave sounds.111 Its adaptability to speech reception dawned on him only after Bell’s variable resistance telephone design was patented on 7 March.^*21

All three inventors, plus many others across the country, were preparing to show at the great Centennial Exhibition scheduled to open in Philadelphia in May. Edison secured a space of four hundred square feet, not as much as he wanted but enough to mount imposing displays of his quadruplex and automatic telegraph systems, the motograph and electric pen, and a range of printers, including those that operated chemically and spelled messages out in roman type. He elected not to provoke scientific wrath with a demonstration of “etheric force.”112

With many items still to perfect, he waited impatiently for Sam to finish the new laboratory. Mary Edison was less excited than he was about their impending move. She was still only twenty years old, and had spent her whole life in Newark. Knowing her husband’s eccentric work schedule, she was not looking forward to long nights alone in bed in an unlighted hamlet twelve miles from the nearest police station. Rosanna Batchelor—also a mother of two—had the same fear. The “surprise party” that some of Mary’s relatives gave her at home on 16 March was a probable attempt to cheer her up.113

Nine days later Edison opened the new laboratory, and life changed drastically for everybody in his immediate orbit.

THE SILENCE OF COUNTRY NIGHTS

For the next year or so, his band of familiars remained small, amounting to a dozen or so veterans of the Ward Street factory.114 Bergmann quit their ranks and set up an independent shop in New York, where he quickly prospered. Batchelor, Adams, Kruesi, Wurth, John Ott, and Gilliland all moved to Menlo Park—the last on the understanding that he would establish a factory for the electric pen in a shack alongside the railroad.115 Sam and Charley Edison came too, although the old gentleman was periodically obliged to return to Port Huron, where he had impregnated his housekeeper.116

One day he returned with torn clothes and many bruises, having leaped from the New York–Philadelphia express as it steamed past the depot at full speed. He said he had merely imitated what his son used to do with a bundle of newspapers when the evening train came home from Detroit. “I tell you, Tom, I wouldn’t do it again for ten dollars!”117

Edison was grateful to Sam for finding what he insisted was “the prettiest spot in New Jersey,” although Menlo Park’s beauty had to be taken on trust in the raw light of early spring. The laboratory was especially stark with its fresh white paint glaring in contrast to the dull yellows and browns of houses elsewhere in the hamlet. The only features that (invisibly) distinguished it from an elongated, double-story schoolhouse were two deep subterranean brick columns, to give it stability. A vibration-free floor was essential to Edison when testing acoustic equipment.118

He kept saying that he had come to Menlo Park in search of “peace and quiet,” not seeming to realize it was a strange remark for a near-deaf man to make. No less strange was the obsession with sonics that grew upon him now, unless the explanation simply was that the silence of country nights enabled him to measure frequencies that were disturbed by urban noise. He had never had any difficulty with the hard tapping and ticking of telegraph sounders, and he could “read” Morse by ear as easily as he swept his eye across pages of prose. But the much more complex harmonics and changing volumes of Bell’s speech telephony—early rumors of which reached him in April—came as a challenging shock. To catch up and then compete with Bell and Gray (even as they competed with each other), he would have to stop thinking of telegraphy as the rapid transfer of signals meant to be decoded as handwriting or print, and adapt to the notion of messages sent and received purely as sound—not even needing, in most cases, to be written down.119

The last twist he found hard to accept. Edison was a compulsive, even fanatical recorder of every word, thought, and deed that he deemed to be of practical value. Like another deaf scribbler—Beethoven—he was at a loss without a pencil, and perpetually stuffed his pockets with notebooks and loose memoranda. Missing as much as he did of everyday conversation—gossip at Mary’s parties, banter among “the boys”—he drew a distinction between it and communication, which he felt to be his specialty as an inventor. Never far from his mind, as he delved deeper and deeper into the intangibles of acoustics, was the recording point of his motograph, the ink wheel of his automatic printer, and the stipple of his electric pen.

It followed that his first five patents at Menlo Park were all described as “telegraphs,” even though three of the designs were really telephonic, thrumming with multiple reeds, electromagnets, bulb and tube resonators, and sounder boxes, all tuned in pairs to different frequencies. He executed the last of them on 9 May, the day before the opening of Centennial in Philadelphia.120

His display there attracted less attention than it should have. He mounted it late, and rashly accepted an offer from William Orton to trade his own space for a share of Western Union’s. Orton did not want Thomas Edison to look too independent at a time when the company was financing most of his work. The electric pen and automatic telegraph, however, were exhibited separately, and both won prizes, as did the quadruplex. Sir William Thomson, the British mathematical physicist and chairman of the awards committee, praised the pen as “an invention of exquisite ingenuity.”121

But the quiet sensation of the show was Alexander Graham Bell’s demonstration on 25 June of his telephone to a private audience including Thomson, Elisha Gray, Josiah Reiff, and Edward Johnson. As the son of the creator of an instructional method for the speechless deaf, and a teacher of the deaf himself, Bell had an understanding of phonetics far more sophisticated than that of Edison, who was not present. He modestly described his membrane transmitter and linked, iron box receiver as “an invention in embryo.” It was just as well he did, because when he called Sir William in another room, Johnson saw that the judge, ear to the flapping lid of the iron box, was bewildered.^*22 Gray applied his own ear and heard at first only “a very faint, ghostly ringing sort of a sound.” Eventually he caught the phrase “Aye, there’s the rub,” and was able to inform the rest of the party that Bell was quoting Shakespeare.122

REEDS, FORKS, BELLS, TAUT STRINGS, TIN TUBES

If Edison attended the Centennial, he did so unobtrusively. He was still so little known in Pennsylvania that a local paper referred to him as “an Englishman named Edison who has detected what is described as a new natural force.” A more sharply etched image was necessary if he was to imprint himself and his work on the public mind. Working in Newark and New York, he had at least been in the way of capturing press attention; as far removed as he now was, the best he could hope for was more respect from the trade. “I’m going to send something within next six weeks to patent ofs,” he scribbled in a note to an old operator buddy, “that will make the Teleghers [sic] eyes stick out a little.”123

This turned out to be a supersystem of acoustic transfer telegraphy, which he detailed in a lengthy caveat filed on 8 July. It required the synchronization of multiple stations in a frequency range “only limited to the amplitude of vibration which is practicable to give the reeds and the delicacy of the receiving instruments.” Edison’s novel idea was for acoustic signals of different length to swap intervals of wire time, so rapidly and smoothly that the flow of mainline current was never interrupted, nor would the messages themselves sound broken up at the ends of their respective branch lines. It was a concept of electrical time-sharing or, in future jargon, time-division multiple access.^*23 He supplemented it with thirteen elaborate technical memoranda, entered and indexed in a set of notebooks he had initiated to keep track of experiments at Menlo Park. The record amounted to a retrospective survey of all his telegraph inventions, as well as a grounding for the specialized research he now undertook in the field of sound.124

While still working on multiple telegraph technology, he conducted a series of experiments in telephone transmission, sure he could improve on the weakness of Bell’s short-range signal. By speaking into a magnetized brass diaphragm held under pressure of a damp felt washer, he succeeded in getting a parchment receiver to say “How do you do.” But that nonsibilant phrase hardly matched the complexity of “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you,” a message Bell claimed to have sent coherently four months before. Edison proceeded to stick tiny tacks to diaphragms at various degrees of the curve to gauge where best he might cut in for particular pitches, and explore the acoustic potential of his electromotograph, which he found activated tuning forks as well as electromagnets. If this discovery was still more relevant to telegraphy than telephony, it at least taught him something about Helmholtz’s use of forks and magnets to study the mechanics of speech.125

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments—reeds, forks, bells, taut strings, tin tubes—would hum about his ears:

and sometimes voices:

It was not always clear to him which discipline—acoustic telegraphy or telephonic transmission—he was exploring, or even if he was dimly envisaging another, not yet invented. Again and again cylinders and disks invaded his drawings. A cylinder might be an empty drum with a resonant base, or a hand-cranked harmonic receiver, or a roller duplicating lines of perforated print, or a spinning electromagnet,^*24 or a telescopic tube that would enable him to gauge, precisely, the “column of air” necessary to send the “th sh ch s and other hissing sounds” so resistant to electrical dispatch. A disk might be stiff waxed paper revolving under the stylus of a “recorder-repeater,” taking a message in dots and dashes that spiraled inward from the perimeter, or an electrochemically coated plate turning in a telephone receiver, or a hard rubber button coated with carbon and touching the vibrant tinfoil face of another disk—a pairing he thought promising, but unaccountably delayed acting on.126

The most beautiful, and technologically pregnant, instrument to come out of all this speculation was the Edison translating embosser of 3 February 1877. Despite its name, it was not a linguistic device. It merely sped up the distribution, or “translation,” of enormous quantities of telegraphic text, such as presidential addresses, down long-distance wires.^*25, 127 Nor was it acoustic in operation. But its design was so sleekly geometric, with twin turntables and twin recorder/reproducer arms tracking volute grooves, that it would look contemporary to audio engineers a century later.

The machine held blanks of oiled paper (Edison found that lard lubricated best) under its circular clamps, pressing them flat against the grooved platen of each turntable. Incoming electromagnetic pulsations caused a lightly sprung embossing point to indent the paper of the first turntable, rotated by an electric motor, while the recording arm, wormed to the platen’s degree of spiral, made sure the point stayed on track. A hidden double lever started the second turntable the moment the first was full. Repetition (to use the current term for reproduction) was a simple process of letting the sprung point ride again at high speed over its own indentations, sending the recorded signals on to as many subsidiary stations as could be connected to a sounder in the embosser’s circuitry.128

MOLECULAR MUSIC

In that same February that saw Edison turn thirty and show his first streaks of silver hair, he and Batchelor began a new series of experiments on what they called, variously, the “telephonic telegraph,” the “speaking telegraph,” and the “talking telephone.” This confusion of names was common in the communications industry, and would last as long as Americans took to adjust to the startling notion that an electrically transmitted message did not necessarily have to be transcribed. It was beyond even Bell’s imagination that people might one day use his invention just to chat. As far as Edison was concerned, the telephone was a device to speed up the process of turning words into pulsations of current, then turning the pulsations back into words at the other end—words intended to be heard only by a receiving operator, who would then (as Edison had done thousands of times as a youth) copy out the message for delivery. Hence the instrument really was, for all its crackly noise, telegraphic in function.

Edison’s embossing recorder-repeater, February 1877.

Audibility was key, and he had failed so far in his efforts to improve on the wretched Bell magneto transmitter. He thought he might achieve full vocability through the principle of variable resistance within a closed circuit, which he held essential to the electrification of speech.129 Working often through the night, he and Batchelor made transmitters out of membranes that shifted rollers or pins along graphite tracks in circuit, but when they tried to speak clearly through them, got only “a mumbling sound.” Not until they returned to Edison’s old idea of a wired button held against a diaphragm, and molded it out of crushed black lead instead of rubber, did they achieve a dramatic increase in clarity. “With this apparatus,” Batchelor recorded on 12 February, “we have already been able to distinguish clearly (known) sentences well between New York and Menlo Park.”130

The excitability of pure carbon under pressure was a major discovery—or rather, rediscovery. Four years before, while constructing a tubular rheostat, Edison had found that the electrical resistance of packed, powdered graphite shot up and down, like a rogue barometer, “with every noise, jar or sound.” Eerily, when a carbon button was framed in an iron ring and warmed with the heat of his hand, it gave off creaky, harmonic tones that he called “molecular music.”

If so oversensitive then, surely carbon could not be too much so now, when he was looking for a relay that would accommodate the infinite gradations of the human voice—even to the nonvocal breaths, sighs, coughs, and hesitations that punctuated speech?131

The question was how compressed the texture of his button should be, or how loose, to give the widest resistance range.^*26 Carbon came in an infinite variety of forms, from softest lampblack to rocklike anthracite. He would have to compound and test most of them for resilience and porosity, with the aural help of Batchelor and Adams. “I am so deaf that I am debarred from hearing all the finer articulations & have to depend on the judgment of others.”132

UTTERANCES

That May Edison was in the midst of sketching some devices for the capture of sibilants when Rep. Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts challenged him to invent a telephone recorder that would convert sound into text. Edison brooded for a day or two, then came up with the opposite idea.133 He drew what looked like a xylophone floating in space and scrawled:

Keyboard Talking Telgh,

I propose to have a long shaft with wheels on having breaks (ie electrical) so arranged with a Key board that by depressing say the letters T H I S simultaneously that contact springs will one after another send the proper vibrations over the wire to cause the Emg^*27 & diaphragm to speak plainly the word this….No difficulty will be had in obtaining the hissing consonants and as the break wheels & contact springs may be arranged in any form and as many as required used the overtones harmonics of the parts of speech can easily be obtained Turn this over in your mind Mr E & hoop it up.134

The xylophone bars turned out to be lettered keys, each ending in a tiny metal wheel serrated to make or break signals in the high frequencies. Edison apparently thought he could play the keys—one for each unit of the alphabet—in such legato combinations that T would blend into H, then into the vowel I, which would sharpen into a hiss as the last key was depressed. It was hardly the text recorder Butler had suggested, nor was it workable. Edison soon realized that letters had little to do with phonetics. Instead, he had dreamed up something truly radical: the notion of text transformed digitally into sound.^*28, 135

Impractical as it was, the keyboard talking telegraph—which he believed could be made to print as well as speak—marked a significant advance in his acoustic understanding. It featured, at least in theory, “tonewheels” rolling out the shapes of sound waves, an acknowledgment that speech consisted of overtones as well as volumes of air pressure,136 and the double embrace in one instrument of recording and reproducing functions.137

Sibilants continued to elude Edison through June. Until he could get a diaphragm to articulate such a word as scythe, he felt he could not realize the full potential of his carbon rheostat. In its current experimental form, it took the form of a granular graphite disk about the width of a dime, sometimes sheathed in silk. When laid on the cupped poles of an electromagnet, then compressed beneath a battery-connected armature, the buttons were put in local circuit with them and a sounder. An inflow of main line current lightened the magnetic “weight” of the armature, reducing the resistance of the carbon to a mere few ohms; withdrawal of the current had the reverse effect, increasing resistance to several hundred ohms and again activating the sounder. In an article headed “Edison’s Pressure Relay,” the Journal of the Telegraph remarked, “It is probably the only device yet invented which will allow of the translation of signals of variable strengths, from one circuit into another, by the use of batteries in the ordinary manner.”138

Despite the ongoing problem of high-frequency registration, Edison was able by midmonth to construct a combination telephone transmitter-receiver that tested “far plainer and better than Bell’s.” The normally phlegmatic Batchelor was so pleased with it that he boasted to his brother, “We have just got our ‘speaking telegraph’ perfected.” That turned out not to be the case, and the pace of around-the-clock sonic experiments increased to the point that the Operator reported, “T. A. Edison is gray as a badger, and rapidly growing old.”139

If so, Edison was not lacking in vitality. He was flush with contractual money from Gold & Stock and Western Union and enjoying the first of the “insomnia” blitzes that would characterize his life as an inventor. Not until 16 July did he feel he had a telephone worth patenting. The application he signed that day specified multiple tympani that “reproduced” vocal inflections and a sibilant-sensitive diaphragm with a layer of platina foil interposed between it and the contact point. But a laboratory visitor (spying for Alexander Graham Bell) found the instrument more powerful than clear, with the word schism sounding more like kim: “If Edison gets the articulation more perfect, which he is now working at, he can talk in thunder tones any distance.”140

“We have had terrible hard work on the Speaking telegraph,” Batchelor complained to Ezra Gilliland. “This last 5 or six weeks frequently working 2 nights together until we all had to knock off from want of sleep.”141

Edison’s gray look may well have come from the rub-off of carbon dust, platinum black, hyperoxide of lead, graphite, and other sooty conductors that besmirched him as the summer progressed. After one of these adjournments Mary entered the spare bedroom of her house and found an apparent chimney sweep lying dead to the world “on my nice white counterpanes and pillow shams.”142

VOICES

“Just tried experiment with a diaphragm having an embossing point & held against parafin paper moving rapidly,” Edison wrote on 18 July. “The spkg vibrations are indented nicely & theres no doubt that I shall be able to store up and reproduce automatically at any future time the human voice perfectly.”143

When exactly, that summer, did the sum total of all Edison’s past work on the sending and reception of sound coalesce into his greatest invention? As a discovery, it was so sensational that legends began to accrete around it almost at once, and his own memories of the moment swam confusedly. Perhaps it was when, listening to the hum of his elegant translating embosser—not an acoustic instrument, yet strangely melodious when its disks whirled at high speed—he thought he heard voices, “apparently talking in a language which could not be understood.” Again, it was the faint sound of his own voice reciting the alphabet, when he retraced some diagrammatic scratches he had made on a strip of paraffined paper. Again, it was when he shouted “Halloo! Halloo!” into the mouthpiece and, pulling the paper through a second time, heard as from the far side of a valley, ^{“Halloo! Halloo!”} Yet again, it might have been the behavior of a voice-activated toy he made of a little man sawing wood to the loud recitation of any nursery rhyme. Or it was the sight, rather than the sound, of a needle attached to a live diaphragm, punching out oscillations as he said into it, “A—A—A.” It may even have been when, absent-mindedly caressing such a needle as it vibrated, he felt a prick on his thumb—a sonic wave inscribing itself in his own flesh.^*29, 144

“Kruesi—make this,” he recalled saying to his master machinist, giving him a drawing of a mounted, foil-wrapped cylinder, with a handle on one side to turn it, and a vibrant mouthpiece projecting a stylus that just touched the surface of the wrap.

I told him I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted Mary had a little lamb, etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I never was so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked for the first time….But here was something that there was no doubt of.145

The “reproducer” was simply the mouthpiece assembly going back over its tracks and throwing back into the air the same waves of nursery rhyme that, a moment before, had gone into it. What awed Edison beyond any other thought was that the moment did not have to be a moment; it could be a century, if the foil and the stylus were preserved; and then in 1977, if some unborn person turned this same handle, the voice of a man long dead would speak to him. No wonder Kruesi, listening with incredulity to the thing he had made talking with Edison’s voice, exclaimed, “Mein Gott im Himmel!”146

All those who heard the miraculous machine in the ensuing months, from the president of the United States on down, reacted with equal disbelief. Since the dawn of humanity, religions had asserted without proof that the human soul would live on after the body rotted away. The human voice was a thing almost as insubstantial as the soul, but it was a product of the body and therefore must die too—in fact, did die, evaporating like breath the moment each word, each phoneme was sounded. For that matter, even the notes of inanimate things—the tree falling in the wood, thunder rumbling, ice cracking—sounded once only, except if they were duplicated in echoes that themselves rapidly faded.

But here now were echoes made hard, resounding as often as anyone wanted to hear them again. Breath had been turned into metal, metal was convertible back into air. It was a form of resurrection harder to credit (since faith was unnecessary) than that of Jesus Christ, which may have been why the most eloquent of the talking machine’s early witnesses was an Anglican priest, the Rev. Horatio N. Powers. He not only wrote but spoke into an Edison cylinder the first poem ever written for acoustic preservation. It was entitled “The Phonograph’s Salutation.”

I seize the palpitating air. I hoard

Music and speech. All lips that breathe are mine.

I speak, and the inviolable word

Authenticates its origin and sign….

In me are souls embalmed. I am an ear

Flawless as truth, and truth’s own tongue am I.

I am a resurrection; men may hear

The quick and the dead converse, as I reply.147

IT WOULD GIVE US THE SPEECH

When poetry and myth are correlated with more factual records of Edison’s invention of the phonograph (a name he gave it himself, based on the Greek particles for “sound” and “inscription”), they are not wholly disproved. Something extraordinary happened between his application for a new telephone patent on 16 July and his confident prediction, forty-eight hours later, that he would soon be able “to store up and reproduce” the human voice at will.148

Around daybreak on the seventeenth, amid a swirl of acoustic drawings and consonant-laden phrases—Hemidemisemiquaver, Protochloride, The majestical myth which Physicists seek—he wrote in his notebook, “Glorious = Telephone perfected this morning 5 am = articulation perfect got ¼ column newspaper every word. had ricketty transmitter at that.” Clearly an epiphany of sorts had occurred. His note said nothing about playing back the sounds he had heard.149 But on a fragment of the same date he sketched both his telephone and his translating embosser and wrote the scattered words reproduced, indenting, and needle. The embosser was shown as a spiral platen with two tonearms, and the telephone had a strange device attached that might be a wheel, but on the other hand might not: if a wheel, why were two points stroking its circumference—one from the receiver and the other from what was clearly a reproducing diaphragm? The note’s purpose became even clearer if the stroked outline was seen as the side view of a cylinder. Here was Edison (signing his name above, with Batchelor and Adams below as witnesses) thinking in terms of sending sound, receiving sound, inscribing sound, and playing sound back—all in one connected sequence.150

Supplementary testimony as to his moment of epiphany was supplied later by Charles Batchelor, a matter-of-fact man not given to Edisonian flights of fancy.

The first experiment, as I remember it, was made in this way: Mr. Edison had a telephone diaphragm mounted in a mouthpiece of rubber in his hand, and he was sounding notes in front of it and feeling the vibration of the center of the diaphragm with his finger. After amusing himself with this for some time, he turned round to me and said, “Batch, if we had a point on this, we could make a record on some material which we could afterwards pull under the point, and it would give us the speech back.” I said, “Well, we can try it in a very few minutes,” and I had a point put on the diaphragm in the center….We got some of the old automatic telegraph paper, coated it over with wax, and I pulled it through the groove, while Mr. Edison talked to it. On pulling the paper through the second time, we both of us recognized we had recorded the speech. We made quite a number of modifications of this the same night, and Mr. Edison immediately designed a machine which would be better adapted for giving us better talking.151

Just how “immediately” that design ensued, neither man could be sure. For ninety-one years another signed document was taken as proof that Thomas Edison saw the phonograph whole, in three dimensions, on 12 August 1877. It was his order to Kruesi to “make this”:152

Edison’s sketch of his first phonograph, circa November 1877.

Not until 1968 was it discovered that while the drawing may have been original, the inscription was of much later date, scrawled by Edison to please a publicist when he was too old to recall, or care, just when the model was built. But he did file a provisional British patent specification on 30 July, to confirm as discreetly as possible that he had been able “to make a record of the atmospheric sound waves” of human speech. He might have followed up at once with construction of a model in proof—except that the articulation he was getting from handheld diaphragms and strips of paraffin paper did not yet suggest any practical mechanics. Before there was a model, there had to be a design. It would take all that summer and much of the fall for Edison’s mental pairings of waves and grooves, disks and buttons, drums and cylinders, point and pen, and script and sound to merge into an instrument that talked just as he talked, and remembered better.153

THE ILLUSION OF REAL PRESENCE

The prototype phonograph he received from Kruesi at the beginning of December was as simple and solidly built as a railway coupler. It consisted of a small brass cylinder, spirally engrooved, with an axle and turning handle cut at the same pitch, so that the advance of the needle (recording or reproducing) from left to right was identical with that of the cylinder. A sleeve of tough, yet indentable tinfoil was clamped on for every fresh recording, and the diaphragm units were toggled so only one vibrated at a time.

After much experimenting with needle design, a rounded rather than chisel point was found to press the foil into the groove more gently, and hence more faithfully, responsive to the vibrations of the diaphragm above. Edison’s original stylus had been so sharp that when he recited “Mary had a little lamb” into the mouthpiece, all Batchelor heard was ary ad ell am—“Something that was not fine talking, but the shape of it was there…we all let out a yell of satisfaction and a ‘Golly it’s there!!’ and shook hands all round.”154

Now, with the cylinder turning steadily and the reproducer riding smoothly in its groove, there was no mistaking Mary or the dimensions of her lamb, and every sibilant in “its fleece was white as snow” sounded clear. By the end of November, Edison was ready to demonstrate his “talking machine” to the world.

Thanks to the evangelism of Edward Johnson, who had appointed himself a roving huckster for Menlo Park products, word had gotten around that a young engineer in New Jersey had invented a “recording telephone.”155 But the difficulty most professionals had in believing such a story had prevented it from becoming news. Edison decided to let the machine announce itself.

On 8 December Scientific American went to press with the biggest scoop in its history.

THE TALKING PHONOGRAPH

Mr. Thomas A. Edison recently came into this office, placed a little machine on our desk, turned a crank, and the machine enquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial good night. These remarks were not only perfectly audible to ourselves, but to a dozen or more persons gathered around, and they were produced by the aid of no other mechanism than the simple little contrivance explained and illustrated below.156

There followed a technical drawing that needed only four indicative letters to show A, the comfortably curving rubber mouthpiece, B, the cylinder on its shaft, C, the crank handle, and D, the reproducing speaker. Indentations in the foil wrap could be seen. “There is no doubt,” the magazine continued, “that by practice, with the aid of a magnifier, it would be possible to read phonetically Mr. Edison’s record of dots and dashes,^*30 but he saves us the trouble by literally making it read itself. The distinction is the same as if, instead of perusing a book ourselves, we drop it into a machine, set the latter in motion, and behold! the voice of the author is heard repeating his own composition.”157

Scientific American needed more than fifteen hundred words to describe the phonograph’s deceptively intricate operation. “No matter how familiar a person may be with modern machinery and its wonderful performances, or how clear in mind the principle underlying this strange device may be, it is impossible to listen to the mechanical speech without his experiencing the idea that his senses are deceiving him.” And the imagination also boggled at the uses its technology could be put to. Great singers would continue to sing, in their prime, long after they had lost their voices and died. Witnesses in court would have their testimony recorded down to the last stammer of denial. The children of the rich would hear proof of Papa’s determination and soundness of mind when deeding all to his mistress. And if one day, mirabile dictu, some other Edison were “to throw stereoscopic photographs of people on screens in full view of an audience [and] add the talking phonograph to counterfeit their voices…it will be difficult to carry the illusion of real presence much further.”158

TINFOIL COULD TALK

Edison did not wake up, in clichéd fashion, to find himself famous after the Scientific American article. Professional and popular plaudits were inhibited at first by the almost occult nature of his invention. When he applied for a patent on Christmas Eve, its originality so stunned examiners at the Patent Office that they issued one without question, not having any precedent to judge the instrument against. Then in an article published on the last day of the year, the Daily Cincinnati Enquirer referred to him as “Professor Edison,” and soon the honorific was applied routinely.159 Joseph Henry, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, called him “the most ingenious inventor in this country,” adding after a pause, “or in any other.” To Sir William Thomson, he was the “first electrician of the age.” The French Académie des sciences allowed Tivador Puskás, Edison’s hastily appointed European agent for phonograph sales, to exhibit the instrument to its members. They greeted it with a reported “storm of applause,” even though many of them were aware that Charles Cros, a Parisian amateur engineer, had filed specifications for something similar, when Edison was still working on his motograph telephone receiver.^*31 From London to Milan to San Francisco, the phonograph was the subject of scholarly lecture-demonstrations and celebrated as the greatest acoustical phenomenon of the century. Its inventor was compared to Franklin and Faraday, and became the subject of schoolgirl essays, religious editorials, and cartoon caricature. By March the “fire of genius” could always be seen burning in his “keen gray eyes,” hitherto blue. Then on 10 April The Daily Graphic hailed Edison as “The Wizard of Menlo Park,” an appellation that stuck even after Menlo Park was no more.160

His laboratory lost its status as a secluded retreat. “Every day a dozen of the heavy lights of literature and science come here,” Edison complained to Benjamin Butler. Journalists and sightseers came up the boardwalk in such hordes he talked of “taking to the woods.”161 In fact he loved publicity and cultivated more of it, going so far as to thank The Daily Graphic for its coverage of the phonograph in an exquisitely calligraphed letter. His signature at the end was anything but modest —

Edison’s letter of thanks to The Daily Graphic, 16 May 1878.

—and in due course was adopted as his trademark.162

Celebrity became eminence on 18 April, when he accepted an invitation to present the phonograph to the National Academy of Sciences during its spring assembly at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Before he was introduced at the afternoon session, George Barker of the University of Pennsylvania arranged a comparative hookup of Bell, Phelps, Gray, and Edison telephones. The first three systems, all magnetic, were plagued by weak signals and interference along a line to Philadelphia, whereas the last, boosted by its carbon button transmitter, sounded sharp and clear.163

Edison declined to appear onstage and instead held court behind a desk in the president’s adjoining office. There was such a press of academicians wanting to see him that the doors to the room had to be taken off their hinges. Meanwhile he sat with the phonograph before him, nervously twisting a rubber band between his fingers. Never having been mobbed before and inhibited by his deafness, he proved a shy, awkward public figure and let Charles Batchelor do most of the demonstrating.164

The machine—longer than the one he had shown to Scientific American, its rotation steadied by a flywheel—performed well, if not loudly, dropping some sibilants but responding with fidelity to some of the shouts, songs, whistles, and laughter projected at it by scientists forgetful of their dignity.165 They were uniformly amazed that tinfoil could talk. When the astrophysicist Henry Draper sought to resume the formal proceedings with a lecture on spectrography of the sun, he was hard put to make his own voice sound as thrilling.

Edison relaxed as the day wore on. An interviewer dispatched by the Washington Evening Star noticed how animated he became in describing the latest products of his laboratory. He said he had just invented a device to measure the heat of stars. As for acoustic instruments, he was developing a disk phonograph “three or four times more powerful” than the cylinder model, and a “sort of improved ear trumpet,” with an air chamber inside, which should help him listen to far-off sound “with perfect distinctness.”166

Quizzed about his deafness, he said it did not bother him. If he needed to hear the output of his acoustic devices clearly, he simply put a stick into his teeth and jammed it against the speaker diaphragm. That way, he explained, “I can hear more plainly than through the external ear.”

For the rest of that night until two A.M., and through an equally long day following, he and Batchelor wore through yards of foil for the entertainment of Washington’s elite, from hundreds of lawmakers in the Capitol to a private demonstration for the commanding general of the U.S. Army, William Tecumseh Sherman. By way of a climax, an invitation came for Edison to do the same for President Rutherford B. Hayes—who would not let him leave the Executive Mansion until after midnight.167

He sought relief in the Smithsonian museum from incessant gasps of astonishment and requests for replays of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” There he discovered, to his evident surprise, that in 1860 Scott de Martinville had used a needle-bristling membrane to trace speech patterns laterally on glass blackened with soot.^*32 One of Scott’s “phonautographs” was on display and proved to be primarily a visual device, meant to show the unique waves of every voice. As such it was a recorder only, incapable of sonic reproduction. Edison remarked that Scott would have been the father of the phonograph, had he been smart enough to inscribe in tinfoil instead of on glass.168

Before heading home for Easter, he stopped by Mathew Brady’s photograph studio on Pennsylvania Avenue, sat in a chair that may once have been warmed by Lincoln, and posed with a hand on his lustrous invention, looking too tired to crank it one more time.169

WHISPERS

Surprisingly to some, Edison seemed to want to free himself of the phonograph after inventing it, patenting it, publicizing it, and licensing it out to the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company.170 This venture, organized on 24 April, listed Edward Johnson as its general agent and made the risky decision not to sell phonographs, but to exhibit them to paying customers. While Johnson took a machine on the road to regale lecture audiences with recorded “Recitations, Conversations, Songs (with words), Cornet Solos, Animal Mimicry, Laughter, Coughing etc.,” Edison made side deals for the marketing of talking toys and clocks, demanding a 20 percent royalty on every item sold and offering no help with the mechanics involved.171

Before moving on to a project he considered more to his serious purpose as an inventor, he executed the first of two British phonograph patent applications that amounted to an astonishingly prescient survey of all the improvements and alternative designs he and other acoustic engineers would essay over the next quarter-century—disk records as well as cylinders; wax grooves instead of tinfoil ones; electromagnetic recording and reproduction; mass duplication by electroplating and the use of printing presses; even compressed-air amplification. For no inferable reason other than haste, he neglected to file for protection of these ideas in the United States and thereby committed himself to years of bitter later litigation.172

As soon as he could, he resumed work on the telephone, seeing that it needed his carbon button to realize its prodigious business potential. The Bell Telephone Company evidently felt the same, and tried in vain to buy the device from him. But Edison turned instead to Western Union, demanding $100,000 for a virtually solid-state transmitter that combined an induction coil with a disk of pure lampblack, tamped right against the diaphragm, doing away even with a needle.173

In offering this breakthrough device to William Orton, he was sure it would be judged fairly. Orton had always been a hard bargainer—too hard, in one instance—but had never held Edison’s defection to the A&P Telegraph Company against him, nor hesitated to give him more assignments, out of frank respect for his inventiveness. Edison privately admitted to loving the man, despite their past squabbles over money, and was cheered that Orton did not flinch at his demand, stipulating only that the transmitter be tested first. It functioned perfectly on Western Union’s wires, picking up whispers from three feet away and sending them without interference for seventy miles. A Bell transmitter, in contrast, failed to carry a shouted call from New York to Newark.174

The last thing Edison anticipated at this moment of triumph was that Orton, who was only fifty-two, would die on him. But no sooner had they agreed on his own specified terms of sale—“six thousand dollars per annum for seventeen years payable in monthly installments”—than Western Union announced that its president had been felled by a stroke.175

“His last words to me were of you,” Grosvenor Lowrey wrote Edison.176

The company’s directors could well have renegotiated the pending deal. But they chose to honor it—not surprisingly, since Edison had as usual undersold himself. His carbon transmitter would remain a staple of American telephones for another century.177

At the time, he thought he had behaved like a canny businessman. “I knew that I would soon spend this money experimenting if I got it all at once,” he reminisced when he was older and not much wiser. “I fixed it so I couldn’t.”178

CLEAR STEALING

Notwithstanding Edison’s attempt to dam one income stream, others flowed pleasantly into his personal account. They included a $10,000 development grant from the Speaking Phonograph Company, which also guaranteed him 20 percent of all exhibition receipts, carbon button purchase orders (he retained the manufacturing rights to that item), and royalties on the sale of his telephone sets, five hundred of which went to Chicago alone. Wanting to share his good fortune, he awarded Charles Batchelor a 10 percent share of phonograph royalties, offered his father a tour of Europe, and bought Mary an elegant team of horses for her spring outings.179

He also hired a personal secretary, Stockton Griffin, to handle the sacks of mail and interview requests that came with his new fame. This relieved him of bureaucratic paperwork just as his output of laboratory notes swelled enormously. He perfected the astronomical device he had mentioned in his Washington interview, calling it at first a “carbon electro-thermometer,” then a “tasimeter.”180 It was based on his discovery that a rod of hard rubber was so supersensitive to heat as to register even that of a star when aimed correctly. Its expansion altered the resistance of an adjoining carbon button, which could then be calibrated electrically on a galvanometer. He also adapted the principle of variable resistance to a plethora of “phone” products—an aerophone that used compressed air to blast speech at large crowds or wandering children; a megaphone that served the same purpose; a telephonoscope that reportedly picked up conversation from two miles away; an auriphone that did the same, in miniature, for deaf persons; and a phonomotor that converted sound waves into rotary mechanical action, allowing compulsive talkers to bore in more ways than one.^*33, 181

In mid-May he was upset by the public claim of David Edward Hughes, a British experimental physicist, to have discovered variable resistance in packed semiconductors long before him. The Royal Society was reportedly in receipt of a “Hughes Telephone” that featured a solid-state carbon transmitter like his own. “Evidently Mr H don’t read the papers,” Edison wrote William Preece, the newly appointed electrician to the British Post Office. “That is nothing but my carbon telephone…I’ll bet £100 on it.”182

Pique turned to anger when Preece, in reply, not only denied this but supported a new claim by Hughes to have invented a “microphone” featuring the carbon button. Edison had regarded Preece as a friend since his visit to London in 1873, and relied on him to act as his advocate before the local scientific establishment. Less than a year before, he had welcomed the Englishman to Menlo Park, and shown him all his sonic devices featuring pressure relays. Now Preece wrote with apparent relish, “The recent discoveries of Professor Hughes have thrown your telephone completely in the shade.”183

There was a degree of truth to these words, because Edison had recently sent some demonstration telephones to Britain, in hope of breaking into the local market, and they had proved so vulnerable to interference as to be unworkable. He had forgotten that most lines in England were laid underground, unlike the high wires that gave him clear transmission in America. “You were on the very threshold of a great discovery,” Preece lectured him, “…had it not been for the phonograph distracting your attention.”184

The interference problem Edison was sure he could solve. But he was enraged by what he saw as Hughes’s “piracy” and Preece’s disloyalty, and decided to make a public issue of them. He brushed aside the argument of Sir William Thomson that while he was the real inventor of the microphone, Hughes had developed one independently. “It is not coinvention,” Edison wrote an English acquaintance, “because after a thing is known all over the world for two years its sudden reinvention is clear stealing.”185

A prolonged battle of claim and counterclaim ensued on both sides of the Atlantic, waged mainly in newspapers and technical journals.^*34, 186 It embittered Edison’s relations with Preece and slowed his development of an improved phonograph for exhibition purposes. Physically spent, he spent some days in bed toward the end of June. When Professors Barker and Draper invited him to join a scientific expedition to Rawlins, Wyoming, to observe the total eclipse of the sun on 29 July he accepted, seeing it as a chance to try out his tasimeter almost seven thousand feet above sea level.187

Mary was five months pregnant with her third child and not happy to be left alone. He was barely a week from home when Griffin wired him to ask, “How long are you going to stay there Mrs E wants to know.”188

SOMETHING LIKE NIGHT

It was clear from Mary’s querulous inquiry that Edison had said nothing to her about his intent to continue west after the eclipse, until the Pacific Ocean stopped him. “This is the first vacation I’ve had in a long time, and I mean to enjoy it,” he told a reporter, saying he wanted to see Yosemite and San Francisco. But first he was determined to measure the heat of the sun’s corona at the moment when the moon blocked out all the photosphere.189

The tiny town of Rawlins, which he reached on 18 July, was hard put to accommodate a trainload of scholarly strangers hauling almost a ton of astronomical and photographic equipment. It consisted of little more than a long street of bars and bawdy houses that sometimes echoed, at night, with the sound of gunfire settling local disputes. There was a hotel of sorts that found space for Edison only by doubling him up with Edwin Fox, a reporter for The New York Herald. Their sleep was disturbed that night when a drunk frontiersman barged into their room and said he wanted to see the famous inventor he had read about in the newspapers. He introduced himself as “Texas Jack” and demonstrated his skill with a gun by shooting through the window at a weather vane. When Edison, who did not sleep well for the rest of the night, inquired about him downstairs, he was assured that “Jack was a pretty good fellow” and not one of the “badmen” who frequented the town.190

He looked around for a suitable site to set up his tasimeter and found that the scientists had bagged all the most sheltered places for their telescopes and Draper’s big wet-plate camera. Rawlins was on the cusp of the Continental Divide, exposed to the atmospheric turbulence that a total eclipse can cause. Edison had no choice but to establish himself in a henhouse, temporarily displacing its current residents, and pray for calm weather.191

The activities of the astronomical delegation caused much local rubbernecking. Edison and his fellow observers gave notice that they should be left undisturbed during the short “totality” of the eclipse, when their instruments would have to be kept perfectly focused. Law enforcement authorities in Rawlins were sympathetic and gave them permission to shoot any unqualified intruder “on the spot.”192

On Sunday 28 July there was a dawn-to-midnight rehearsal of all the telescopic, spectroscopic, and other procedures that would have to be coordinated when the cosmic moment arrived. Edison sacrificed sleep altogether that weekend, trying to ensure that nothing but solar rays would strike the infrared sensor of his invention. The tasimeter was a camera-like, slit-visored box built around a lampblack button that was pressed between two battery-connected disks of platinum and backed up behind an expansive disk of vulcanite. An adjacent mirror galvanometer, playing a spot of light along a graduated scale, registered degrees of heat as minuscule as one-millionth of a degree Fahrenheit. Any stray source of warmth—even his little finger moving past the visor five feet away—edged the light spot sideways. For that reason the box had to be aligned with a roof telescope precisely aimed at the target pulsator. He practiced by focusing on two bright stars, Arcturus and Vega. Rawlins was scheduled to rotate through the lunar shadow at three-fifteen on Monday afternoon, and he would have less than two and a half minutes to register the corona at full flare.193

Encouragingly, the day began with pristine weather. “Not a cloud obscured the heavens,” the Laramie Daily Sentinel reported, “and the air had that clear, deep blue which is found nowhere else but in the mountain region.”194 Later on a mass of cumulus drifted toward the sun and thickened, casting gloom over the landscape as well as on the astronomers. They were cheered when it passed away around noon, but then a wind began to blow, as if agitated by the darkness fast approaching from the northwest. It grew to gale force, buffeting through Edison’s henhouse. Feathers and thistledown filled the air. He tried in vain to balance his telescope as the moon notched across the sun and the light faded. At five minutes past three only one-eighth of the sun still shone. The citizens of Rawlins watched through pieces of smoked glass as the crescent pared down. Something like night descended. Cattle along the ranges stopped grazing. The eclipse was total at three-fifteen, but Edison’s rig was still unsteady. Then with only one minute of totality left, the wind dropped, he got a fix on the corona, and was rewarded with a rightward sweep of his graduating light.195

But he discovered that the tasimeter was ten times too sensitive for the rays it was receiving. It was thrown off scale, and he had no time to adjust it for further measurements before daylight returned, and puzzled cocks began to crow.196

STREAMERS OF THE SUN

Many years later, after the tasimeter had been shelved and forgotten, a western legend grew up that Thomas Edison “invented the electric light” while stargazing, or sunscoping, in Rawlins. Another story had him accidentally dropping a bamboo rod into a campfire and seeing it glow in the flames.197

The yarns were of course fanciful, since various forms of incandescent light had been invented (or at least attempted) before, from Jacques Thénard’s briefly luminous platinum wire of 1801 to Stanislas Konn’s self-destructing carbon rod lamp of 1873.198 Edison had already experimented with some makeshift lamps at Menlo Park, firing them up from batteries and concluding, like so many electricians before him, that there was no way an incandescent element could shine for long without suffering a total, and permanent, eclipse of its own.199

If he did not experience an epiphany during his stay in Rawlins, he definitely mused about ways of harnessing electric power for work and light after visiting San Francisco and Yosemite in the first week of August. Recrossing the Sierras and Rockies, with their tumbling rivers, he wondered why hydroelectricity was not being used to drill mines and detect ores. The harvest-ready flatness of Iowa’s cornfields, with overloaded wagons crawling toward distant elevators, cried out for electric trains—even automatic trains—speeding along lines that matched the geometry of the landscape.200

Throughout his career so far, he had thought of electricity solely in terms of telegraphy and telephony, the tasimeter being little more than a by-product of his experiments in variable resistance. It had, however, interested him in astronomy. (On reaching home, he meant to use it to sweep the sky for undiscovered stars.) And working with Henry Draper had also made him curious about the new science of spectroscopy. Even more “illuminating,” perhaps, was the fact that he had just experienced, at close hand, a cosmic event withheld from the sight of most human beings. Edison would have been less than flesh if he did not experience some Kantian emotions when he connected with the light of Arcturus and the streamers of the sun, through the open roof of a henhouse in Wyoming.201

Before returning east via Chicago, Edison was invited to present a report entitled “On the Use of the Tasimeter for Measuring the Heat of the Stars and of the Sun’s Corona” to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St. Louis on 23 August. He had a terror of public speaking, and had an excuse not to break his journey after receiving a disturbing letter from his secretary. “Mrs. E’s health is not of the best,” Stockton Griffin wrote. “She is extremely nervous and frets a great deal about you, and about everything. I take it to be nervous prostration—She was so frightened yesterday for fear the children would get on the [railroad] track that she fainted.” Griffin had summoned the family physician, Dr. Leslie Ward, and Mary was better again, but “needs a change and right away.”202

The total eclipse seen from Creston, Wyoming, 29 July 1878. Astronomical drawing by E. L Trouvelot.

There was a slight tone of reproach in the last words, since newspapers were saying how tanned and healthy Edison looked after his sojourn in the mountains. He felt obliged, however, to accept the AAAS’s invitation, if only because Barker and Draper wanted to induct him as a member. No sooner had he done so than Griffin wired him to “return at once,” as Mary had had a relapse. Edison left St. Louis immediately after delivering his address.203 He reached Menlo Park on the twenty-sixth to find that the cure she needed was to have him back.

Later that day he was seen in a rockaway buggy cresting the hill above the hamlet, with Mary driving and his children nestled behind him.204

TO BE ABLE TO SUBDIVIDE

Within twenty-four hours of returning home Edison had sketched something he labeled “Electric Light,” although it looked more like a battery-operated thumbscrew. On close examination, the pressure points of the rack were shown to be platinum, and the small element between them was either boron or silicon. Current passing through was supposed to produce an arc of light for as long as the element separating the points remained in place.205

It was not the first time he had doodled a scintillant or luminous device. During his early experiments with variable resistance, he had noticed that a piece of metallic silicium held between two live carbons took on a steady glow that might well empower “a Common Electric Light,” if only the problem of burnout—oxidation and fusing of the incandescent element—could be solved. He had experimented with wicks of carbonized paper, electrifying them in weakly evacuated glass chambers, but gotten little more than a brief radiance, then smoke. In the spring he had talked of “subdividing” electric light into a multiplicity of lamps after hearing that the veteran inventor Moses Farmer had helped William Wallace, a wire manufacturer in Ansonia, Connecticut, build an eight-horsepower dynamo. But telephone work had prevented him going north to see it, despite the plea of one of Wallace’s engineers that “it will be a blessing to the world, to be able to subdivide.”206

While out west he had discussed the dynamo with George Barker, who knew Wallace and suggested they visit Ansonia together sometime soon. This suggestion rekindled Edison’s dormant interest in illumination technology. “He came home full of projects for producing light in large quantities and distributing it in small units as is done by gas,” Batchelor wrote, in a reminiscence of his boss’s high state of excitement after the eclipse. The two men sat up several nights “figuring out stations that could deliver current to houses which could be used equally for light, or for small powers such as pumps, sewing machines, printing presses & all sorts of manufacturing—All these could be turned on or off at will without affecting any other.”207

Barker and Batchelor accompanied Edison to Ansonia on the afternoon of 7 September. A fellow passenger on the train was amused to see Edison, wearing a frayed straw hat and long linen duster, squeezed into the amen corner of the parlor car, with the professor’s considerable bulk crowding him.208

The same duster ballooned back from his legs next day as he stood facing the rotary whir of Wallace’s little machine, ruminatively chewing tobacco and figuring out how it worked. He did not hear the other three men talking and joking around him. When Batchelor interpreted, he laughed but was soon absorbed again. The dynamo ignited eight dazzling carbon arc lamps via a single thick copper wire. Edison visibly gloated in its promise of long-range distribution. In the words of a reporter present, “He sprawled over a table with the simplicity of a child, and made all kinds of calculations. He calculated the power of the instrument and of the lights, the probable loss of power in transmission, the amount of coal the instrument would save in a day, a week, a month, a year, and the result of such saving on manufacturing.”209

Eventually he told Wallace that a machine that lit only one lamp per horsepower was not what the world was looking for. “I believe I can beat you in the search,” he said.210

A BIG BONANZA

Edison did not mean to be critical of the dynamo itself, which he arranged to buy on the spot. Here was a single machine generating more power than all the batteries he had ever handled, illuminating a whole foundry as it did so. But the steadily eroding carbons, as well as the red heat and quarter-inch thickness of the copper conductor linking them, made him optimistic that he could “beat” Wallace, and other experimenters too, in attaining the double chimera of incandescence and subdivision. “It was all before me,” he said afterward. “I saw that the thing had not gone so far but that I had a chance….The intense light had not been subdivided so that it could be brought into private houses.”211

That same night in Menlo Park he doodled some electric arc and kerosene lamps, in the apparent hope of creating a fire in his mind. One drawing in his notebook showed a pair of spiral wires around metal poles sitting on switches. He wrote beneath, It may be possible that one regulator at the Central Station may be made to do it for all the main current being regulated by the heat of a large spiral. Then it occurred to him that an incandescent lamp could be made to regulate itself in such a way that its wire never melted. Over the next few days he and Batchelor sketched forty-five variations of this idea and filed a caveat to protect them. On 13 September Edison telegraphed Wallace, HURRY UP THE MACHINE. I HAVE STRUCK A BIG BONANZA.212

As always when diverging into a new course of experiment, he saw himself at the glorious end of it, rather than the fraught beginning. He forgot that he was now so famous that he could no longer afford to boast an invention without being sure that it would work. “I have it now!” he said to one of the newspapermen who had found that Edison loved to give interviews. “When ten lights have been produced by a single electric machine, it has been thought to produce a great triumph of scientific skill.”213 With weird precision, he described what he was going to achieve in the immediate future:

With the process I have just discovered, I can produce a thousand—aye, ten thousand from one machine. Indeed, the number may be said to be infinite. When the brilliancy and cheapness of the lights are made known to the public—which will be in a few weeks, or just as soon as I can thoroughly protect the process—illumination by carburetted hydrogen gas will be discarded. With fifteen or twenty of these dynamo-electric machines perfected by Mr. Wallace I can light the entire lower part of New York City, using a 500 horsepower engine. I propose to establish one of these light centers in Nassau Street, whence wires can be run uptown as far as the Cooper Institute, down to the Battery, and across to both rivers. These wires must be insulated, and laid in the ground in the same manner as gas pipes. I also propose to utilize the gas burners and chandeliers now in use. In each house I can place a light meter, whence these wires will pass through the house, tapping small metallic contrivances that may be placed over each burner. Then housekeepers may turn off their gas, and send the meters back to the companies whence they came. Whenever it is desired to light a jet, it will only be necessary to touch a little spring near it. No matches are required.

Again, the same wire that brings the light to you will also bring power and heat. With the power you can run an elevator, a sewing machine, or any other mechanical contrivance that requires a motor, and by means of the heat you may cook your food. To utilize the heat, it will only be necessary to have the ovens or stoves properly arranged for its reception. This can be done at trifling cost.214

Virtually every electrical device Edison described had yet to be invented, and he would soon start building his own dynamos too. The words volts, amperes, and ohms were not yet in parlance. When, on 5 October, he executed his first lighting patent, it only presupposed with the miraculous subdivision process he claimed to have devised. With deceptive modesty, he claimed an “Improvement in Electric Lights,” exemplified by a design plucked more or less at random from his regulatory caveat. Nevertheless it was the first incandescent lamp he ever invented, and as time passed, its originality became more apparent. A spiral of platinum, or any wire with a high fusing point, hung in a glass cylinder and wrapped itself loosely around a vertical zinc rod. The rod lengthened as the wire incandesced and depressed a lever, just as the spiral shone with maximum brilliance and was about to melt. The lever shut off current to the spiral, allowing it to cool while still glowing. Meanwhile the rod contracted and another surge of current flowed into the cylinder. The make-and-break cycle recurred with such rapidity that the human eye was not much aware of fluctuations in the light. But in practice the rod kept bending and the constant vibration of metal against metal caused the lamp to literally die of fatigue. Edison experimented with some other thermostatic devices, but they all failed.215

He had to accept that it would be a while yet before he strung ten, let alone ten thousand lights across “the entire lower part of New York City.” So great was his reputation, however, that the mere fact he was confident of doing so prompted the avid interest of Wall Street. While gas stocks slumped on both sides of the Atlantic, Grosvenor Lowrey drew him into negotiations with a group of financiers associated with Drexel, Morgan, & Co. The bank graciously offered to relieve Edison of all financial distractions in exchange for title to his lighting patents, present and future. J. P. Morgan sought to market those rights in Britain and Europe, seeing vast imperial revenues once Edison managed (as surely he would) to subdivide the light. “Impossible overestimate result if such success attained,” Morgan cabled his London partners.216

Edison hesitated. He had already promised to let George Gouraud and Tivador Puskás handle his foreign patent sales, but their influence did not compare with Morgan’s. He absolved himself of guilt in the matter by handing over power of attorney to Lowrey, telling him, “All I want is to be provided with funds to push the electric light rapidly.” The result was the hasty formation on 16 October of the Edison Electric Light Company by a board of blue-chip incorporators representing the interests of Western Union as well as Drexel, Morgan. They awarded Edison $250,000 in stock, an experimental budget of $130,000, a guaranteed minimum share of annual royalties, and other allowances for a total of $395,000.^*35, 217

“With the English patents,” Lowrey told him, “I think we can get money enough to set you up forever.”218

TWO YEARS, OR MORE

Edison’s sudden semi-deification as the modern Prometheus, without yet having brought light to anybody, made him realize, with more private apprehension than Lowrey could imagine, the consequences of too much braggadocio. If he failed to deliver what he had so airily promised, he would be humiliated and likely ruined. That prospect loomed almost at once, when trustees of the Light Company pressed for a demonstration of the system they were investing in. He dared not risk showing them the few fallible models he had so far managed to construct. Burner after platinum burner was fizzling out or fracturing in his hands. Nor could he prove his claim to have “just discovered” the secret of subdivision. He began to show signs of stress and closed the doors of his laboratory to visitors.219

One of the few who still managed to get in was, inevitably, another reporter. He bribed his way upstairs with a cigar and found “the Professor” much more subdued than normal. With rain falling outside and blue smoke curling over his head, Edison admitted that he might need two years, or more, to make all the improvements necessary to his electric lamp. He connected one workbench model to the Wallace dynamo, just delivered, and its platinum strip glowed an intense, cold white before he prudently turned the current off. “Now, old man, get out and let me go to work.”220

The interview was published on 20 October, and Edison felt renewed pressure to “show and tell” his new invention. Sleepless and half-starved, with bloodshot eyes and a week’s worth of beard, he strove to construct a light that would last as long, or even half as long, as a candle. After three days of further failure he was felled by a slashing attack of facial neuralgia that kept him bedridden for the rest of the month.^*36 Mary, suffering hardly less pain, gave birth to a twelve-pound son, William Leslie, on the twenty-sixth.221

Edison had not fully recovered when he heard that the Light Company believed a rival lamp designer, William E. Sawyer, might have anticipated his recent patent. “I was astonished at the way Mr. E received the information,” Stockton Griffin wrote Lowrey. “He was visibly agitated and said it was the old story—i.e., lack of confidence—The same experience which he had had with the telephone, and in fact with all his successful inventions….He said it was to be expected that everyone who had been working in this direction…would immediately set up their claims upon ascertaining that his system was likely to be perfect.”222

Actually, Sawyer, an impoverished and unstable alcoholic living in New York, thought the opposite of Edison’s chances. He knew from experience that the self-regulating platinum lamp would never work, being an impossible balance of cost and inefficiency. With his partner, Albon P. Man, he now claimed to have invented “a means of making carbon incandescent without consuming it.” Edison tried to downplay this disturbing news, telling Griffin that the line he was developing was “entirely original and out of the rut.”223

SUCH A DREARY PLACE

When in December the directors and bankers of the Light Company were finally allowed to visit Menlo Park, their image of Edison as a solitary, inspirational genius was, in Lowrey’s tactful phrase, “somewhat tempered.” The much-publicized white laboratory on a green hillside overlooking New York was now the center of a muddy construction site. Bricklayers and carpenters were racing the onset of winter, getting ready a new office-library building in the front yard and a massive machine shop at the back. The laboratory itself was in a state of apparently chaotic expansion, as Griffin’s clerks and file cabinets and Kreusi’s artisans and heavy equipment moved out of the ground floor to their new accommodations. The space vacated was already filling up with new experimenters and researchers, many of them with university or polytechnic degrees. With wads of Morgan money in his pocket, Edison was recruiting at a rate that would more than triple the size of his workforce over the course of the next year.224

“Such a dreary place,” a young Princetonian, Francis Upton, wrote his father. “The work of course keeps my mind full.”225

The directors were concerned at his profligacy and dismayed to find little going on in the lighting department. Edison seemed to be concentrating all his intellectual effort on the design of a generator that looked like nothing more than a monstrous tuning fork. He explained that it was a “magneto-electric machine” which, if successful, would give him as much electricity as twenty or thirty Wallace generators. Before there could be a successful lamp, there had to be a steady flow of power, and since power could derive only from mechanics—something Edison understood better than any electrician in the world—he had invested heavily in two big new engines and boilers, fixed to deep foundations at the end of the machine shop.226

Lowrey, shuttling between the separate planets that Edison and his backers lived on, begged him not to resist corporate scrutiny, while persuading the board of the Light Company that its funds were being wisely invested. Both sides were in any case pretty sure, as the year came to an end, that no other inventors had the capital and creativity vital to subdivision of the light—not Sawyer and Man with their brittle carbons and cracking glass tubes, nor Hiram Maxim with his graphite rod glimmering in a globe of hydrocarbon vapor, nor the Englishman St. George Lane Fox-Pitt with his iridium loops trying to keep aglow in nitrogen.227 None of these money-strapped men had the benefit of the unique research, developmental, and manufacturing facilities of Menlo Park. Lowrey assured Edison that his backers trusted him and wanted only to feel they were partners in his endeavor:

All they, or I, shall ask from you is to give confidence for confidence. Express yourself, when you come to a difficulty, freely. You naturally, having an experience of difficulties and of the overcoming of them, in your line (which none of the rest of us can have), may feel that it would be prejudicial, sometimes, to let us see how great your difficulties are, lest we, being without your experience in succeeding, might lose courage at the wrong time.228

THE BUSIEST MAN IN AMERICA

“He is an untiring genius,” the R. G. Dun & Co. credit assessor wrote in his latest report on Edison, “apt to run from one effort at invention to another without fully completing the work he is on.”

That was less true in 1879 than in previous years, for his pursuit of universal electric light—what William Preece in Britain publicly called “an absolute ignis fatuus”—preoccupied him to a degree that soon became obsessive. “I think there is no doubt I am the busiest man in America,” he informed a more sympathetic English friend, the otologist Clarence Blake. “The phonograph gets very little consideration from me nowadays.”229

Yet his fascination with sound persisted, especially after Blake gave a lecture on the telephone in London and closed with a tribute to Alexander Graham Bell without mentioning Edison’s carbon button transmitter. George Gouraud, who was desperate to open a telephone company in England before Bell attained a full monopoly there, kept beseeching Edison to finish and send over a receiver he had invented some months before, in the hope that it would circumvent Bell’s British patents. It was a startlingly loud device based on the motograph principle of a reproducing point traveling over an electrosensitive surface—in this case, a thimble-size cylinder of hard chalk, slicked with water and rotated by hand. If it was spun fast enough, a person calling in normal tones from New York could have his voice amplified in Menlo Park to a field outside the laboratory.230

Edison had handed the receiver over to his nephew Charley to develop. Now, with his competitive instincts aroused by Gouraud’s pleas, he ordered Sigmund Bergmann to make him two wall-mounted telephones with the new instrument boxed inside. The handle protruded on the right, a central lever pressed a wet roller up against the chalk, and a mouthlike orifice, complete with what looked like lips, emitted the vibrations of a hidden diaphragm. An erectile transmitter tube curved up from below the box for outgoing calls. It was the ugliest instrument Edison produced in a life generally unchastened by aesthetics. But its speaking volume and almost stereoscopic fidelity put the phonograph to shame. No less a British authority than John Tyndall postponed a lecture he was due to give on Edison acoustic devices at the Royal Institution, in order to add it to his program.231 The two sets were ready by the end of February and sent to London under Charley Edison’s care.

Tyndall was delighted with them. He demonstrated the chalk receiver during his lecture, getting Charley to call from Piccadilly Circus so he could beam the young man’s voice distinctly to scientists in the audience. “I congratulate you with all my heart on this beautiful achievement and realization of all your promises,” Gouraud wrote Edison. “After this people will doubt you less concerning the Electric Light.”232

THE DARKNESS OF IGNORANCE

If by people Gouraud meant the discerning sort who lived in England and read the London Times, he was too sanguine. On 22 March their newspaper of choice reported that “Mr. Edison has failed in his experiments.” Fourteen of his sixteen claims to have advanced the technology of light had been rejected by the U.S. Patent Office. “The most he has ever yet accomplished has been to maintain 400 coiled iron wires in a state of partial incandescence with a 16-horsepower steam-engine.” So much for his promise to ignite twenty thousand lights from one central station. The attempts of “this impulsive man” to make a self-regulating lamp with a platinum burner had all been unsuccessful, leading to “great discouragement at Menlo Park.” Platinum had to be heated to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit before it shed any appreciable light. It melted so quickly thereafter that his vaunted switch-off rod could not expand in time to stop the runoff. That was why Edison had not mounted a single public exhibition of his work so far.

A favored few who have been admitted to his laboratory at Menlo Park have beheld it—a single lamp, enclosed in a glass globe, beautiful as the light of the morning star. But he has refused to let anyone inspect it closely, and has never allowed the exhibition of it privately to last long. He has never been able to depend on its durability. His apparatus is as far from perfection as it ever was, and, in fact, well-informed electricians in New York do not now believe that Mr. Edison is even on the right line of experiment.233

Edison reacted both defensively and humorously, telling the The Daily Graphic that he had “never before read a statement containing so many lies.” However, the Times had done him a favor: its false report had thinned out the crowd of visitors who constantly encroached on his time at Menlo Park: “I have prayed for an earthquake or something of the sort to keep some of them away.” Far from being bothered by abuse from overseas, he said, “I rather like it, and it wouldn’t bother me a particle if they kept up the cry—at least until I am ready to show what I have accomplished.”234

He also insisted that his employees were “as happy as clams,” but that was not altogether true. Francis Upton, for one, was losing heart. “The light does not yet shine as bright as I wish it might.” After working long nights all through the winter at Edison’s side, he foresaw no imminent success, if indeed subdivision of the light could be achieved at all. What the Times had to say about the nondurability of platinum lamps was true, and his boss seemed to be the only man in the lab (apart from the inscrutable Batchelor) who refused to accept that.235

Upton was a brilliant young man of mathematical and statistical bent, and because of those qualities, he was slow to comprehend the way Edison’s mind worked. To him, four months of failed experiments on one intractable thing meant that the thing was no good. To Edison, failure itself was good. It was the fascinating obverse of success. If studied long enough, like a tintype image tilted this way and that, it would eventually display a positive picture.

He almost blinded himself by peering through a microscope at the incandescence of platinum, iridium, and nickel burners, observing—as if he were still focusing on the sun’s corona—that they mysteriously cracked and popped just before melting. After seven hours his eyes began to throb “with the pains of hell,” but he was able to confirm the Russian physicist Alexander Lodygin’s discovery that certain gases, including oxygen, seeped out of fusible metals at white heat. This made the maintenance of any kind of vacuum in a lightbulb impossible after sealing.236

Edison understood from the start of his experiments that oxygen in any appreciable quantity decomposed a wire even as it incandesced. But having only a hand pump in the laboratory, he could never suck more than a token amount of air out of his experimental lamps. Gaseous occlusion at le moment critique tantalizingly shortened the lovely mellow glow he got from a platinum spiral. Around the same time he noticed that the finer the wire, and the tighter it was wound, the greater its luminosity. Or to put it another way, the higher the resistance of the filament, the more efficient the lamp. This phenomenon, simplified, led him to formulate Edison’s Electric Light Law: “The amount of heat lost by a body is in proportion to the radiating surface of that body.”237

This was a key insight—a tilt of the tintype—that stimulated another, just as radical. If his lamps as resistors increased the dissipation of energy as heat and light, they would commensurately decrease the size of the conductors needed to feed them with current. Edison thus reversed the consensus among illumination engineers that an extended network of subdivided lamps would offer as little resistance as possible to the circulation of current was ludicrously wrong, calling for prohibitive amounts of copper. He likened the flow of unresisted electrical power to that of city water rushing through overlarge pipes, losing pressure at the same time as it drained the reservoir upstate. The central station’s “reach” could be infinitely extended if only a minuscule amount of current was allowed to trickle into each burner in the circuit.

He further insisted that electrical conductors should be looped in multiple arc—not in series, like telegraph relays—so that if any number of lamps were switched off, the rest would continue to shine.^*37, 238 Upton, his studies at the University of Heidelberg still rigidly in mind, could not adjust to these arguments when Edison first advanced them. They conflicted with orthodox opinion and must therefore be wrong. As he ruefully conceded in 1918, “The one great impression of my years in Menlo Park [was] how impenetrable the veil of the future seems to be when new problems are to be solved, and how simple the result often is when the darkness of ignorance is lighted by the genius of one man.”239

LINES OF FORCE

In April, Upton as mathematician, Batchelor as technician, and Edison as designer achieved a major breakthrough in dynamo design, obsolescing that of any other generator on the market. Having already tried two of William Wallace’s dynamos and found them wanting, Edison was convinced—again contrary to general belief—that those of Zénobe Gramme and Werner von Siemens did little more than consume their own energy. Over the course of the winter he had tested the European machines with dynamometers, bearing always in mind that they had to be powered with coal and steam before they could pass on any power of their own in the form of electricity. Batchelor drew many graceful graphs to plot the ideal curvature of armature windings, and Upton, probably the only man in Menlo Park who understood the theories of James Clerk Maxwell, translated the graphs into electromagnetic algebra and converted the energy output of each generator into foot-pounds. At basis was the team’s uncertainty whether the new dynamo should adopt the “ring” winding pattern favored by Gramme, with wires coiled in series around a revolving wheel, or the “drum” pattern of Siemens, which had a continuous wrap of wire encircling a fat cylinder. Edison decided on the latter configuration.

In a more seminal decision, guided by instinct rather than theory or even experimental evidence, he specified two unusually massive field electromagnets and an armature of extremely low resistance. The latter was designed to conserve as much energy as possible within the dynamo and maximize its efficiency—again, a notion counter to standard practice, which was to maximize output instead. When integrated into a phalanx of duplicate dynamos and connected to a complete illumination system (such as Edison intended to set up and exhibit in Menlo Park soon), the resultant strength of field would be regulated to supply only as much electricity as was called for in the mains—each machine sharing an equal amount of load, whatever the demand for power from outside.240

The prototype bipolar dynamo looked so lankily strange, as it stood on its armature like the bottom half of Paul Bunyan, as to evoke the hilarity of engineers more used to squat generators. John Tyndall, who had lavished such praise on Edison’s loudspeaker telephone, mocked it as “wholly new” and wholly misguided. Writing in the Journal of Gas Lighting, he harrumphed, “It is difficult adequately to express the ludicrous inefficiency of the arrangement; but one thing is abundantly certain, and that is that the person who seriously proposed it was wholly destitute of a scientific knowledge of either electricity or the science of energy.”241

All Edison knew in his American ignorance was that when he put the dynamo through its first paces, “it developed so much power that the coil on the bobbin [armature] was torn to pieces and I had to stop.” He made no apologies, then or later, for the slenderness, and minimal winding, of its four-foot iron poles. As far as he was concerned, their diameter was simply based on the resistance of the magnet, or the number of lines of force it could furnish, rather than the length or space through which the lines of force were propagated. He placed greater emphasis on their length, which governed how far the lines extended into space. It was that dimension, and the sheer intensity of the magnetic field around the armature, that had wrecked the spinning bobbin. “This fact seems never to have been brought out by any person in connection with dynamo machines but it is of the greatest importance. It explains the reason of my employing long magnets.”242

Countless small modifications were necessary before the machine’s performance was smoothed out, but its eccentric design made ultimate sense, and by July Upton could justifiably boast, “We have now the best generator of electricity ever made.”^*38, 243

THE MOMENT WHEN

That summer, the last of the decade, brought a general relieved sense among Americans that the dragging depression of 1873 had at last run its course. Edison received a $24,500 advance royalty payment from the backers of his chalk telephone in Britain, and gave Mary a thousand to spend on herself.244 He splurged on five hundred books and periodicals for his brick library and hired some new assistants with a view to making a final, all-out blitz on light development in the fall. The young men were given quarters in a boardinghouse on Christie Street operated by “Aunt Sally” Jordan, Mary’s stepsister.

The most important of these recruits was Ludwig Böhm, a glassblower trained in the celebrated Bonn workshop of Heinrich Geissler. He played the zither, sported the red student cap of an elite German university, and liked to recite his many social distinctions, humor not being one of them. As a result he was hazed so unmercifully that Edison took pity on him and let him stay in the attic of a little glass shop adjacent to the laboratory. When not puffing hundreds of globes and tubes for the lamp team, he would retire to his room and yodel Alpine songs until silenced by pebbles hurled against the pitched roof. The only person who liked him was six-year-old Marion, for whom he made many colored glass animals.245

There was no question of his skill with a long pipe. He effortlessly blew flasks and tubes of flamingo-like delicacy, some of them, designed for mercury pumps, with an internal bore of only an eighth of an inch. They lightened the labor of Francis Jehl, a stocky eighteen-year-old who wanted to be an electrician but was assigned most of the time to the exhaustion of blank bulbs, exhausting himself in the process. Until the laboratory acquired its first Geissler and Sprengel evacuators, which operated automatically, Jehl had to bear down with both arms and shoulders on a stiff piston pump, seesawing it until the gauge told him he was within a few millimeters of a perfect vacuum. The difficulty of maintaining that state in a bulb, once the base burner unit was introduced, sealed, and wired up, was extreme. At first incandescence, the platinum curl would give off its occluded gases, lessening the vacuum unless they were at once pumped out. If any gas remained once the bulb was “necked off” with an oxyhydrogen flame, they would reenter the wire and weaken its structure.246

Edison’s infatuation with platinum, protracted by his delusion that somewhere in the world a vast lode of the precious metal could be found and mined to bring its cost down, lasted through the summer. He used an electric pen to duplicate fifteen hundred querulous letters to local authorities as far away as St. Petersburg, Russia—“Dear Sir: Would you be so kind as to inform me if the metal platinum occurs in your neighborhood?”—and sent a prospector all over Canada and the American West in the hope of striking lucky. Although the search yielded him nothing, he developed an interest in mining and mineralogy that would profoundly affect the future course of his life.^*39, 247

By the end of August, when he went with Mary to Saratoga Springs to attend the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Edison was persuaded that he at last had the makings of a workable electric light. He had several bipolar dynamos built or nearly finished, bulbs evacuating to a degree of 0.00001 atmospheres, and test filaments of various metals glowing for as long as four hours before they immolated themselves. In two days at the resort he wrote a triumphant paper, “On the Phenomenon of Heating Metals in Vacuo by Means of an Electric Current,” and got Upton to read it for him.^*40 He claimed to have produced an unoccluded platinum that was the best of all elements for the production of domestic electric light—“a metal in a state hitherto unknown, a metal which is absolutely stable at [a] temperature where nearly all substances melt or are disintegrated, a metal which is as homogenous as glass, as hard as steel wire, in the form of a spiral…as springy and elastic when dazzling incandescent as when cold.”248

But on returning to light experiments in September, Edison had to acknowledge that platinum had other liabilities besides its cost. One was the tightness with which it had to be wound to produce the radiance, and resistance, he wanted. Some of Batchelor’s spirals were so fine they could be straightened to a length of thirty inches. What was more, a superfine coating of “pyro-insulator”was needed to prevent them from short-circuiting on the curl.249 This delicacy, plus an obstinate tendency to oxidize even in Jehl’s best vacuums, forced him to return, almost in despair, to carbon as a potential source of lux aeterna.

As with his invention of the phonograph two years before, the moment when he discovered his first viable filament (or when it discovered him) became myth so quickly that he could never be sure how and when the miracle happened. It must have been after Böhm blew together an amalgam of Geissler and Sprengel mercury pumps and permitted a bulb vacuum of nearly one million atmospheres, in the first week of October. It must have been after Charles Batchelor began to carbonize soft spirals of lampblack, scraped from the funnels of smoky oil lamps, in the second week of October. It could not have been when Edison had to deal with a crisis involving the chalk telephone in Britain, and his nephew Charley’s mysterious death in Paris,^*41 in the third week of October.

Most probably—even certainly, according to the compulsion of all concerned to fix a momentous event in time—it was at the beginning of the fourth week and on the night of Tuesday 21 October blending into the small hours of Wednesday, that a length of carbonized thread, or a twist of carbonized paper, or a carbonized fishing line, or some other carbonized fiber began to glow in vacuo with a light that would not go out. The delight of watching that one filament shine and shine was so great that Edison could be excused for saying, later on, that it incandesced for “over forty hours.”250

According to Batchelor’s contemporary notes, the light lasted no longer than thirteen and a half hours, but that was more than enough to signal that the Old Man was destined, in spite of all doubts, to make it shine as long as he chose.

BRIGHTENING OF THE HUMAN OWL

On the eve of New Year’s Eve, when all the excitement was over, and Edison’s “Eureka” moment (he actually wrote the word in his laboratory logbook) had been headlined around the world, and fifty-nine reliable lamps were strung up around Menlo Park, ready for the grand public exhibition he had so long promised, “the boys” gathered in the laboratory for an anticipatory celebration. Edwin Fox of The New York Herald was there to record the occasion.251

At first, he wrote in his account of the evening, Edison was nowhere to be seen. Batchelor prevailed upon Ludwig Böhm to bring up his zither from the glass shop. “Play us something with those shake notes in it. They go right down my back.” Böhm obliged with an exquisite melody.252

Charles Batchelor in the Menlo Park laboratory. The first photograph ever taken by incandescent light, 22 December 1879.

During the playing a man with a crumpled felt hat, a white silk handkerchief at his throat, his coat hanging carelessly and his vest half buttoned, came silently in, and, with his hand to his ear, sat close by the glass blower, who, wrapped up in his music, was back perhaps in his native Thuringia again.

“That’s nice,” said he, looking around. It was Edison.

The glassblower played on, and the scene was curious. Standing by a blazing gas furnace he had lighted, Van Cleve,^*42 with bare folded arms, listened or else shifted the hot irons [of the filament furnace] with his pincers, but he did it gently. Edison sat bent forward. The others who had taken up one tool or another moved them slowly. Far back through the half-darkened shop young Jehl might be seen lifting the heavy bottles of gleaming quicksilver at the vacuum pumps, and the soft music was delicately thrilling through it all. It was the wedding of spirit and matter, and impressed me strangely.

“Can you play The Heart Bowed Down?” said Edison, suddenly.

“No, I cannot.”

“Here—whistle it, some of you.”253

Five or six obeyed, but Böhm shook his head. Edison lost interest in the music. He took a pad and pencil out of his pocket, sketched a glass implement, and held it out to Böhm.

“Can you blow that?”

“Yes,” said the youth, and hurried back to his shop. It was ten-thirty P.M., and Edison was clearly ready to begin one of his nocturnal workbench sessions.

During the hours that followed, Fox was struck by the acuteness and force of Edison’s remarks as he attacked theoretical scientists. “Take a whole pile of them that I can name and you will find uncertainty if not imposition in half of what they state as scientific truth….Say, Van Cleve, bring me the Dictionary of Solubilities.”254

He scornfully pointed out an entry stating that platinum was infusible, except in the heat of an oxy-hydrogen flame. “Come here; I’ll melt some in that gas jet….Look in here now. You see along the magnified wire a number of little globules? That is where the platinum has fused.”

Next he turned to the subject of electrical illumination. “The peculiar moonlight color in the voltaic arc light is due to the impurities in the carbon, magnesium among the rest. What’s the matter with you, Francis?”255

JEHL: I’m hungry.

EDISON: Where’s the lunch?

JEHL (Despondently): There was none ordered. We didn’t think you were coming back to work all night, and now we’re here and there’s nothing.

EDISON: Get something to eat. (To FOX) You see, the carbon used is made out of a powder, held together by various substances….George, get me a stick of carbon and a filament.256

He proceeded to demonstrate, explain, and propound some of his discoveries, reeling off chemical and metallurgical names with what Fox described as “the peculiar nocturnal brightening of the human owl.” Midnight came and went. Unstoppably garrulous, Edison reverted to his idée fixe about the superiority of the empirical over the academic scientist. “Professor This or That will controvert you out of the books, and prove out of the books that it can’t be so, though you have it right in the hollow of your hand and could break his spectacles with it.”257

Edison’s “New Year’s Eve Lamp,” 1879.

When, at length, “lunch” arrived, all Jehl had managed to buy at the depot was a brown paper bag of smoked herring, and another of crackers. Van Cleve found some lager to wash the repast down, but Edison chose a tin mug of water.

By the time he stopped talking it was four A.M., and everybody but the reporter had fallen asleep (Jehl with his head on the Dictionary of Solubilities). Only then did Edison take off his coat and look around for a bench to nap on. Fox went out into the night feeling both inspired and bilious. “I shall place those smoked herrings, biscuit and cold water on a high shelf, a very high shelf, in my memory; my stomach may never forget them.”258

The night was cloudy, and snow was forecast for the morning.259 Menlo Park’s two hundred other residents were asleep. In about twelve hours their peace, and the isolation of the hamlet from the rest of the world, would be disturbed by pilgrims to the Festival of Light.

*1 John Ott suffered a crippling stroke in 1895. Edison continued to employ and support him for life.

*2 Over the next three years, Edison manufactured and sold 3,600 gold printers at home and abroad.

*3 A characteristic of Edison’s orthography was his use of the sign = to signify something more than a dash and less than a period. His odd distribution of initial capitals (mostly cursive ones), seems to have come from simple enjoyment of the way they looked as he inscribed them.

*4 Between October 1870 and May 1871, Edison spent about $11,000 of Harrington’s money on experiments alone, and probably twice as much of Lefferts’s. Equipping the Ward Street factory cost Harrington a further $16,000.

*5 Equivalent to $1.06 million in 2018.

*6 Nicholas Stilwell’s occupation was probably the reason Edison included, in his last notebook entry before the wedding, a double-tooth design to prevent bandsaws from running out of line.

*7 At this point, notice might be taken of the remarkable early parallels between Edison’s marriages. In both cases he fell in love with a schoolgirl in the spring, courted her assiduously through the summer, made a formal request for her hand in the fall, wed her under the rites of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and overflowed with inventions in the months immediately following. Each wife presented him first with a daughter, then with two sons.

*8 Threatening letters did not prevent Edison borrowing $3,100 to help his impecunious brother Pitt start up a street railway in Port Huron.

*9 Reiff, unaware of Edison’s lifelong habit of getting Peter to pay for Paul, was under the impression he was financing developmental work on the automatic telegraph.

*10 Edison’s specific mandate was to develop duplex or diplex designs that would amplify but not conflict with the Stearns patent, which Western Union owned.

*11 He seemed unaware that his lodging, the famous “Hummums” of Covent Garden, was a favorite haunt of Dickens, Thackeray, and Lewis Carroll and had a lubricious reputation as a hotel/bathhouse for single gentlemen checking in pseudonymously.

*12 Gouraud became Edison’s London agent on 1 June 1878.

*13 Despite the Post Office’s decision to pass on Edison’s system for this and other reasons, it was considered so promising that two British investors bought the foreign rights to it. They were unsuccessful in their subsequent efforts to introduce it in England.

*14 “At that time I was very short of funds and needed it more than glory,” Edison recalled in later life. “I was paying a sheriff $5 a day to withhold a judgment which had been entered against me in a case which I had paid no attention to.”

*15 Edison’s book has been reconstituted from various archival sources. It is available in the digital edition of the Papers of Thomas A. Edison, under code NS7402.

*16 Later in life Edison remarked that his incandescent light system was “simple” compared to the quadruplex.

*17 Orton’s bill of complaint, filed 28 January 1875, cited the fact that Edison, the previous summer, had allowed Western Union’s chief electrician, George B. Prescott, to assume co-ownership of the quadruplex in return for vital access to the company’s wires. Prescott contributed almost nothing to the design of the system but insisted on a half share of its rights bounty. Competing claims and counterclaims disputed the interests of Harrington, Jay Gould, and Edison himself. The quadruplex case, which over time jarndyced into three state and three federal proceedings, as well as others administratively involving successive directors of the Patent Office and secretaries of the interior, is summarized in appendix 3 to volume 2 of the book edition of The Papers of Thomas A. Edison.

*18 Edison’s electric pen was the first consumer product to use an electric motor. It was also the first mass-copy duplicator and the precursor to A. B. Dick’s mimeograph, which is often misattributed solely to Edison. See Bruce Watson, “A Wizard’s Scribe,” Smithsonian, August 1998.

*19 One of the electric pen’s satisfied customers in 1877 was Lewis Carroll.

*20 Edison announced his discovery of what he called “etheric force” to newspaper reporters on 28 November 1875. The headlines created considerable popular interest. But he failed to publish his findings in proper academic form, and they were largely mocked by the scientific community. His future industrial rivals Elihu Thomson and Edwin Houston conducted a series of related experiments that proved to their satisfaction that the force was nothing but electrical induction. Edison had, however, discovered high-frequency electromagnetic waves, as confirmed in theory by James Clerk Maxwell and in later practice by Hertz, Lodge, and Marconi.

*21 In 1880, when Gray’s and Bell’s rival claims to have invented the telephone were being hotly contested in court, Edison claimed that in July 1875 he had sketched three acoustic telegraph devices with liquid transmitters that permitted the phenomenon of “undulating” or variable resistance current, the fundamental principle of telephony. These remarkable sketches do exist but are undated. There is no surviving evidence that Edison built a model based on one of them around November of that year. He frankly confessed, however, that the model did not work and always gave Bell full credit for his invention.

*22 Not to mention another auditor, the Emperor of Brazil.

*23 TDMA is an essential operating system for mobile phone networks, which have the same synchronization challenges that Edison posed for acoustic transfer telegraphy in 1876.

*24 Edison typically segued at this point in his notebook jottings to the notion of an artificial rose buttonhole drawing its perfume from a tiny phial of attar.

*25 Edison meant it to improve on the already impressive performance of his automatic telegraph, which on 5 December 1876 transmitted President Grant’s 12,600-word annual message from Washington to New York in just over an hour.

*26 That of anthracite coal, for example, varied from 300 to 1,700 ohms, yet Edison complained that it was good only for the o in coach and failed to register “the lisps & hissing parts of speech.”

*27 Electromotograph receiver.

*28 Today’s text-to-speech computer applications are the realization of Edison’s dream of 1877.

*29 When talking on the telephone, Edison started using the greeting “Hello” rather than the old-fashioned “Halloo” and Bell’s preferred “Ahoy!” In 1987 the audio historian Allen Koenigsberg established, with the agreement of editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, that the word hello was indeed coined by Edison. He wrote it for the first time on 15 August 1877, in a note boasting that his latest telephone receiver did not need to ring, “as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away.” By 7 September 1880, delegates to the National Convention of Telephone Companies were wearing HELLO buttons on their lapels. See Allen Koenigsberg, “The First ‘Hello!’: Thomas Edison, the Phonograph and the Telephone,” Antique Phonograph Monthly 8, no. 6 (1987).

*30 [Sic]. This reference to “dots and dashes,” rather than the hill-and-dale continuity of Edison’s grooves, shows how hard it was even for a scientific journalist to adjust to the newness of the phonograph in 1877.

*31 On 18 April 1877, Cros, too poor to apply for a patent, filed a letter with the Académie describing his idea of a paléophone that would reproduce sound by combining the “phonautograph” voice-sketching method of Scott de Martinville with duplicative photoengraving, an almost prohibitively difficult process. Cros never built a working model. Despite conspiratorial theories to the contrary, he and Edison do not appear to have been aware of each other before December 1877.

*32 Modern computer programmers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories have dramatically translated some of Scott’s visual patterns into actual audio.

*33 Edison’s need for instrumental names was so great in the spring of 1878 that he ordered his bookseller to get him a copy of Jacob Boyce’s Etymological Glossary of Greek-derived words. Papers, 4.247. Charles Batchelor teasingly signed off a letter to him with “Yours phonographicarbontelephonically, Batch!!!”

*34 Although at least one British journal, Engineering, deliberately suppressed data that supported Edison’s case, his reputation in Britain suffered as a result of bringing it. Late in the year Thomson criticized him for failing to acknowledge that he had overreacted: “There is no doubt he is an exceedingly ingenious inventor, and I should have thought he had it in him to rise above…the kind of puffing of which there has been so much.”

*35 Equivalent to $10.3 million in modern money.

*36 Trigeminal neuralgia, or tic doloureux, is one of the most painful afflictions known to medicine. It is a spasmodic condition often brought on by stress.

*37 Multiple-arc circuitry is now generally known as parallel wiring.

*38 Late in 1879 Francis Hopkinson of Great Britain showed that the efficiency of the bipolar dynamo could be further improved by simple dimensional changes. In doing so, he legitimized Edison’s radical invention.

*39 Seven of the five hundred volumes Edison ordered for his library in 1879 were studies of mineralogy and mining.

*40 Edison overcame his stage fright enough to read another paper, describing his invention of the chalk cylinder telephone receiver while Alexander Graham Bell sat in the audience. As far is is known, this was the last time he delivered a speech in public, until his shaky appearance at Light’s Golden Jubilee fifty years later.

*41 Charley Edison died in October in the midst of what appears to have been a homosexual entanglement with an English friend. His uncle had to pay for the expatriation of his remains and subsequent funeral in Port Huron.

*42 Cornelius Van Cleve, a carbonizer married to Mary Edison’s half-sister.