EPILOGUE

 

1931

SEVENTY-TWO YEARS LATER, as Edison lay dying, it was suggested to President Hoover that the entire electrical system of the United States should be shut off for one minute on the night of his interment. But Hoover realized that such a gesture would immobilize the nation and quite possibly kill countless people. Nor would he countenance an alternative idea, that he order the extinction of all public lights at that moment. It was not only inconceivable, it was impossible that America could recapture, even for sixty seconds, the dark that had prevailed in 1847, when Thomas Alva Edison was born.1

The president emphasized this in a statement dated 20 October. “The dependence of the country on electrical current for its life and health is itself a monument to Mr. Edison’s genius.” Acknowledging, however, that there was “a universal desire” to pay personal respect to the old man as a benefactor of humanity, he called on all private individuals and organizations to put out their lights from 10:00 to 10:01 P.M., Eastern time, the following evening—which turned out to be, appropriately, the anniversary of the night in 1879 when Edison achieved his first viable lamp.2

He was buried at dusk in Rosedale Cemetery, Montclair, New Jersey. The sun went down behind Eagle Rock just as his coffin was lowered into the grave. Across the river in Manhattan, an immense crowd began to assemble along Broadway between Forty-second and Forty-third streets. At two minutes before ten, the CBS and NBC radio networks broadcast an advance reminder of Hoover’s call, some stations playing Haydn’s setting of the words of Genesis, darkness was upon the face of the deep.3 On the hour in Milan, Ohio, the town clock struck, and Edison’s birthplace went dark as the chimes continued to toll at six-second intervals. All lights in the White House were doused, including the big globes surrounding Executive Park, and large areas of the national capital and its suburbs followed suit. In New York Harbor, the torch held by the Statue of Liberty flickered out. Simultaneously the billboards and marquees of “the Great White Way” faded, and a hush descended on the crowd, which by now extended north into the Fifties. The absence of sound was more remarkable than that of light, because some small stores continued to glow. Not a vehicle moved in the entire theater district.4

Midway through the fight program at the American Legion arena in Ybor City, Florida, gloves dropped and the audience stood in darkness as the gong sounded taps. In the movie houses of Reading, Pennsylvania, talkies stopped talking and the picture faded from the screen until nothing could be seen but the dim red glow of exit lights. The small city of Franklin, at the opposite end of the state, attempted a total blackout, but was foiled by a wash of autumn moonlight. Chicago skyscrapers lost their sparkle, and several high beacons turned off, posing a momentary threat to air traffic. Farms and villages in occluded parts of the country vanished like crystals dissolving in ink. The Pacific Gas & Electric Company doused all its lights in northern California. A strange hush obtained over urban areas on the West Coast. Pedestrians came to a halt as streets darkened. Men took off their hats, and women bowed their heads.5


EDISON’S DEATH LEFT behind a legend so potent that it quickly grew to the dimensions of myth. For a quarter of a century he was deified in adulatory biographies and movies, to the mingled satisfaction and perplexity of his wife and children, none of whom could escape the stretch of his shadow. They tried to adjust to its inhibiting chill with varying degrees of success.6

Mina Edison married again in 1935 to Edward Everett Hughes, a rich old businessman who persuaded her, before his own death in 1940, to enjoy the pleasures of cocktails (frowned on in Chautauqua) and world travel. She took his surname but was quick to jettison it upon resuming widowhood. For the last seven years of her life, which she divided between Glenmont and Seminole Lodge, she was again, imposingly, Mrs. Thomas Alva Edison.

Tom died cuckolded and alone in a Massachusetts hotel room in 1935, allegedly of heart failure. William retained his coarse vitality to the end, patenting five radio devices and signal systems before his death in Wilmington, Delaware, two years later. Marion never remarried. She survived in Norwalk, Connecticut, mourning Tom and consoling herself with opera, until 1965. Charles ran the huge but atrophying conglomerate of Thomas A. Edison, Inc., until it was absorbed by the McGraw Electric Company in 1957. In wordly terms the most successful of Edison’s sons, he was appointed assistant secretary of the navy by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937, and was promoted to secretary before resigning in 1940 to campaign for the governorship of New Jersey. He served as governor for only one term, then returned to business and became, in wealthy old age, a crotchety red-baiter. Childless, like all his siblings except Madeleine, he died in 1969. She followed him ten years later, having produced four sons by John Sloane. Theodore was the last of the primary family to die, a scrupulously principled intellectual, conservationist, and—in old age—opponent of the Vietnam War. After his death in 1992 the name of Edison lingered only among descendants of the Sloane family. Of old Sam Edison’s lusty blood, no patrilineal trace remains.7


ONE OF THE imponderables of a dying inventor’s coma is that watchers around the bed can never be sure what dreams of fact or imagination may be playing inside his motionless, white-haired skull. When he is, on top of everything, stone deaf, that makes his last consciousness even more private.8 But if Edison’s aural memory in October 1931 was capable of reaching back beyond his mysterious inner-ear ailment at age twelve, who knows but what he heard again the harmonious noises that made Fort Gratiot such a haven of natural sounds before the loud arrival of Grand Trunk Railroad trains: the tooting of bugles on the parade ground; and before that the spring chorus of skylark and blackbird and quail around the house in the grove; and before that the humming of Port Huron’s seven sawmills; and before that the crunch and thump of logs in the St. Clair River; and before that his mother’s voice calling “Alva” as she summoned him to his lessons; and earlier still, among school bells and church bells, the songs of shipyard workers he had memorized in Milan—his first recordings!—and farther, even subliminally back, whatever outside sounds penetrated the encompassing dark of his first nine months of life.