A short train ride out from New York City, but half a world distant, Menlo Park was the site where a real estate developer’s ambitions had ended in bankruptcy. It consisted of about thirty large homes spread out on large lots, connected by a boardwalk and dirt roads. No town hall, school, or church. One saloon.
William Preece, a telegraph engineer for the British Post Office, happened to pay a visit to Edison’s new Menlo Park laboratory in May 1877 when the rest of the world knew nothing about Edison’s existence, nor Menlo Park’s. The town was too small to merit its own identifying sign at the train stop, and Preece almost missed it, hurriedly hopping off the train after it was in motion again. When he did so, he found himself at a desolate station in rural New Jersey. It was a blazing hot day and no porters were on hand.
Preece provides a unique account of one not-famous Englishman paying a call on a not-yet-famous American and fellow telegraphy expert. Before taking the train to Menlo Park, Preece had been most entertained in New York City by the nineteenth-century version of The Fast and the Furious, illegal street racing with lightly harnessed horses, roads lined with spectators, and frequent “collisions and rows” that brought unwanted attention from the police. In the little residential development of Menlo Park, however, such excitements were nowhere in evidence. Built up too recently to have the benefit of protective shade trees, the houses sat exposed to sunlight.
Starting from the Menlo Park station, Preece passed a substantial three-storied frame house, wide and shallow with cross-gables, that sat next to the tracks—this had been the sales office for the development and now was the Edison family’s house—and climbed up to the top of a hill, which offered a prospect from which one could glimpse the spire of Trinity Church in New York City. On the hilltop sat a long, two-storied plain white building variously described as “an elongated schoolhouse” or a “country shoe factory.” This was Edison’s laboratory. On the outside, the bucolic setting was not wholly intact. At the rear of the building was an old apple tree, around which were arranged discarded barrels, wheels, and machinery. The second story drew in twelve telegraph lines that came up from the station. This was not incidental; discovering improvements in telegraphy was the laboratory’s raison d’être and the primary interest of Preece.
The first floor of the laboratory was divided into a reception room, an office, a library, a machine shop, and a storehouse; the upper floor comprised one long room, filled with workbenches and machines, and lined with glass cases holding chemicals and sundry materials. A “spider web” of telegraph wires covered the ceiling of the laboratory’s main room, converging on a large battery placed in the center of the room. The twelve or so workers on hand were directed by a disheveled figure of medium height. He had grimy hands, wore a collarless shirt and a seedy black jacket, and his hair was uncombed. Most striking were eyes that impressed visitors as penetrating, and later inspired flights of poetical description by hagiographers (“the fire of genius shone in his dark deep gray eyes”). The man was only thirty years old, but he carried an aura of authority and a tendency toward curtness that suggested advanced years. Thomas Alva Edison was already “the Old Man” to his employees.
The Menlo Park lab had not yet attracted the attention of the general press, so Preece’s visit went unremarked. Nor did Edison record his impressions. The only notes are in Preece’s diary, which is full of praise for Edison, whom Preece described as an “ingenious electrician.” He goes on at great length about the train’s whistles (“the most horrid howls—more like an elephant’s trumpet than anything else”) but has nothing in particular to say about the apparatus upon which Edison was working. What is most remarkable is how unremarkable Preece found the inventive activity there.
The isolation of the Menlo Park setting infused the laboratory with a feeling of unbounded creative freedom. It encouraged an outlook that saw far, which also meant that little interest could be mustered for fixing problems with older products like the electric pen. Royalty checks for the pen were not adding up as Edison had expected because it had been sent into the field without anyone at the laboratory noticing that it was rather difficult to hold and use. It was likened by one unhappy customer to holding “‘the business end’ of a wasp on a sheet of paper and letting the insect sting holes into the sheet while you move him back and forth.” A sales manager reporting to Edison tried to strike an impossible balance of optimism and realism: “The thing is highly praised everywhere but it will be harder to sell than you anticipate.” The fault, Edison was told by another manager, was with the customers’ “prejudice and stupidity.” (The pen would enjoy a second life years later, in the 1890s, when converted into the first electric tattoo needle.)
Despite the ideal conditions, big ideas did not materialize in Menlo Park. Instead, odds and ends were turned out and marketed by another company that Edison established for this purpose, the American Novelty Company. It sold duplicating ink, an electric drill, an electric engraving machine for jewelers, an electric sheep-shearing machine, and other oddments. At least it could be said that these used the laboratory’s expertise in electrical engineering, even if they comprised an incoherent line of offerings. Still other curiosities were added to the mix, such as Batchelor’s “Office Door Attachment,” an exceedingly low-tech sign to show the occupant’s presence or, if absent, time of return. An idea for a “Flying Bird,” capable of flying to an altitude of a thousand feet or higher, and to be used as either “a pleasing Scientific Toy” or perhaps for “carrying communications short distance,” was scribbled in a notebook, but never was worked up into a prototype. Having tried all sorts of products, and focusing on no single one, the American Novelty Company failed about eight months after it was incorporated.
Telegraphy trumped toys. Great sums of money would go to the inventor that solved the telegraph industry’s most pressing need: finding ways to pack more messages into a telegraph line. Acoustic telegraphy, also called harmonic telegraphy, opened up a new way to send more than one message at a time. This approach took advantage of the fact that a tuning fork will respond to the vibrations of another fork with identical characteristics and ignore others. By utilizing in a telegraph network many pairs of vibrating reeds that acted like tuning forks—one of each pair placed at the sending station, the other at the receiving station—each set could be operated as a separate channel of communication, unaffected by the others.
It was while Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant were experimenting with acoustic telegraphy that Bell accidentally, and famously, discovered that the instruments could convey any form of sound. The precise moment of discovery, in June 1875, did not involve speech in crystalline form. Bell, with ear pressed against a vibrating reed, could hear the faint blurry sound of Thomas Watson’s voice, but could not make out any words. This was sufficient to provide Bell with the insight that led to the telephone. (The more famous rendering—“Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you”—came almost a year later, after Bell had filed the patent for the telephone and built a working model.)
Young Bell and Edison were the same age, each improving the major invention that the other had come up with first, Edison following Bell, then Bell following Edison. Edison, in fact, had been close to devising a working telephone himself. After Bell’s success, the next best thing for Edison was to come up with an indispensable improvement, the carbon transmitter that captured the human voice far better than Bell’s magnetic design. Edison also devised an entirely new kind of receiver based on his electromotograph, which involved a chalk cylinder, chemicals, friction controlled by varying current, and a hand crank; it would never prove to be a practical design for the ordinary speaking telephone, but it could reproduce music clearly and at an astounding volume. Initially, Bell and Edison were direct competitors in the brand-new telephone business, playing upon the public’s interest in musical performance to show off their wares by holding telephone “concerts” in exhibition halls.
Bell lacked the gifts of the born showm
an, however. In May 1877, he offered a concert-lecture to an audience of three hundred who had gathered at Chickering Hall in New York City for an evening heavy on lecture, light on concert. The New York Times described Bell’s presentation on “Sound and Electricity” to be “exhaustive”; the lecturer’s supplemental visual aids were panned as “complex and not very intelligible.” At last, the audience was treated to what we may guess they had been waiting for most eagerly, the novelty of hearing recognizable organ music, piped via telegraph connection, from a location miles away.
Edison was no showman, either, and, being partially deaf, hated speaking before a group. He could rely, however, upon an energetic promoter as his proxy: Edward Johnson, a former telegrapher himself (and former sales agent for the Inductorium). Johnson was technically knowledgeable, had his own ideas for invention, and possessed a gift for extolling the virtues of whatever was his preoccupation of the moment. (Johnson’s excitability, on occasion, led to misplaced enthusiasm, such as his eagerness in April 1876 to persuade Edison to lend his name to Johnson’s invention of an improved tobacco pipe that Johnson hoped to market as “Edison’s Perpetual Segar.”)
Edison, Batchelor, and Johnson oversaw preparations to launch their own concert tour of the musical telephone. About the time of Bell’s concert-lecture in New York City, Edison and his assistants were still working out the kinks while giving concerts in nearby Newark. Edison had yet to show the public a telephone that conveyed human conversation in addition to music, but he had local boosters. The Woodbridge Independent confided, “We should not be at all surprised if Edison taught this child of his inventive fancy to talk.” “Mr. Edison has been so often scoffed at,” the Newark Daily Advertiser observed, “that it has no other effect upon him than to stimulate him to increased study and labor.” In what readers of 1877 were expected to regard as a humorous touch, the reporter concluded that were Edison to succeed in devising a telephone for speaking, “what an instrument of torture it would be in the hands and at the mouth of a distant and irate mother-in-law.”
The big-city debut of Edison’s musical telephone was arranged for Philadelphia in mid-July 1877. A three-way contest was under way. Alexander Graham Bell’s musical telephone had been eclipsed by the recent debut of a competing musical telephone developed by rival inventor Elisha Gray. Would Edison’s, in turn, best Gray’s? The competition was as keenly followed as a sports rivalry. The New York Times did not even wait for the formal debut of Edison’s telephone; the paper dispatched a reporter to the public rehearsal held the day before.
The early Times’s verdict: awful. Compared to Gray’s, Edison’s telephone was not nearly as loud, its notes not as “sweet.” It might work well as a practical instrument in sending telegraphic messages, the paper reported, but as a device producing sounds intended to please the human ear, it lagged the competition.
When Johnson saw the review, he was in Philadelphia overseeing preparations for the performance. He wrote Edison that “the N.Y. times [sic] man is a fool,” but he was happy that the rehearsal had come off, period. His Edison telephone was behaving erratically, and he begged Edison to send him a new, more dependable one from the laboratory. He also had to pay off the newspapers, which had their hands out. The New York Daily Graphic explained that it was “customary” for subjects to order extra copies in order to indirectly reimburse the newspaper for the additional expense of providing engraved illustrations that would accompany the upcoming story. For the “Puff,” Johnson agreed to take one hundred copies and asked Edison to sign up for a similar amount.
On the day of the concert, Edison responded at last to Johnson’s pleas, and placed a new telephone on the 8:00 A.M. train bound for Philadelphia. Alas, when Johnson arrived at the Pennsylvania Railroad depot to pick up the package, it could not be found. It turned out to be in the hands of an express company and would not appear until too late that evening. In the end, Johnson had to use the defective equipment that had been used in the rehearsal.
The demo gods gave their blessing to the event, however, and now the Times was impressed in every aspect. The volume was excellent, the sound being easily heard by the crowd of 3,500 (Johnson, fond of exaggeration, boasted to Edison that the crowd was even bigger, six thousand people). The songs were deemed “musically enjoyable” and one even was “encored,” though the performers were five miles away.
Johnson knew that “by the turn of a hair” the performance “might have been the most ridiculous farce ever heard of,” yet the narrow aversion of disaster did not slow down his calculations of future profits to be earned charging admission to similar exhibitions. Johnson was as sanguine as any businessperson in the new telephone business about the commercial potential in using telephones to deliver music, but even he could not keep up with the general public. Let the credit for the most farsighted vision of that moment go to one Joseph Hipple, of Spruce Mills, Iowa, who in March 1877 had a fully developed scheme for piping music directly to the home rather than to exhibition halls. Hipple proposed that relay teams of musicians could perform at one central location during the late afternoon and evening hours, providing music on tap, “the same as water and gas.” (Hipple’s idea of music-on-demand was beautiful in conception but advanced no further than Hipple’s exposition in a letter to the editor of the New York Daily Graphic.)
At that moment, when Edison’s telephone was better suited for conveying music than the human voice, when the music-loving public was willing to traipse to a concert in which the players were not physically present and was willing to pay for the privilege (at least until the novelty wore off), when it was possible to imagine individual households paying for satellite-radio version 0.1, pre satellites, Edison was in the perfect position to realize the business potential in music. But he did not; telegraphy remained his principal interest. Around the time of the telephone concerts, he redoubled his efforts to complete a complicated contraption of thirty wheels that would convert taps on an alphabetic keyboard into unique vibrations for acoustic telegraphy. He did have a vision of delivering signals directly to households, but it involved sending the human voice, not music. By attaching telephones to gas pipes that were already in place in the home, Edison thought it should be possible to use the gas, instead of electricity, as a medium for conveying sound waves.
The musical telephone offered the opportunity to enjoy live music without being immediately present. The constrictions of geography were loosening, but not those of time: one could listen to performances only synchronously, that is, at the same time the players performed. In retrospect, one can see the need for an invention that permitted the enjoyment of music asynchronously, at a time of the listener’s own choosing. Edison came up with the first gadget that would eventually fill this need. The process that produced the invention could not be called careful planning, but it was something more than pure serendipity. It was the by-product of working on state-of-the-art communications technology, while remaining receptive to chance insight and recombining bits of recently secured experience. Bell invented the telephone while tinkering with acoustic telegraphy; Edison invented the phonograph while tinkering with the telephone.
Initially, telephones were regarded as instruments to be used only by telegraph company employees. Instead of sending messages in Morse code, the operator would transmit the message verbally, but if the message had to be transcribed manually at the receiving end by a human operator, the capacity of the system to carry a given quantity of messages would be dramatically constricted. Some way needed to be devised to record the message mechanically—the practicality of the telephone appeared to hang in the balance.
The very variety of Edison’s previous inventions served him well for tackling the problem of recording. His automatic telegraph used a stylus that rested on a strip of paper that ran continuously beneath it—that paper would be part of Edison’s solution. For another project, making electrical condensers, Edison’s laboratory staff had learned how to apply a wax coating to paper, and Edison h
ad tried to peddle it as a sideline to food producers, with no apparent success (the New York Paper Barrel Company explained that the paper “must be Sweet & Pure free from oder [sic],” a tough requirement for Edison’s grimy laboratory to meet). A legacy of this work in the laboratory was a cupboard well stocked with coated and uncoated paper, cut to various sizes.
A sketch and brief caption in a notebook entry dated 17 July 1877 recorded an idea for putting the paper to use on the telephone problem: Edison and his assistants sketched in bare outline a system that the telegraph company could use to record spoken messages. How exactly the recording would be accomplished was treated as incidental—the paper could be embossed, or perforated with needles, or inked using the electromotograph. The principal point was to enable the company to send the recording for playback and transcription by low-paid copyists, who could work at the rate of twenty-five words a minute, rather than have highly skilled—and highly paid—operators try to record the message in real time at one hundred words a minute as it arrived.
The Wizard of Menlo Park Page 3