The Wizard of Menlo Park

by Randall E. Stross

  The Menlo Park laboratory was emptied, with just his junior assistant Francis Jehl left there to perform whatever miscellaneous tests of equipment he was asked to do. Jehl was certain that Edison would never close the laboratory completely, and would eventually return there after the temporary need to be in New York City had passed. But just three months after Edison had moved himself and his family to Fifth Avenue, he sent Jehl a short note telling him to pack up the remaining equipment and join him in New York. In Jehl’s memory, the orders were a surprise and meant he would have to give up the “soothing seclusion in God’s open country, away from the beaten tracks of men.” In retrospect, he should have taken heart in Edison’s example: Edison had the most reason to appreciate the seclusion of Menlo Park, and yet he acquiesced when necessity tapped on his shoulder, calling him to center stage.

  CHAPTER SIX

  IMMERSION

  FEBRUARY 1881–SEPTEMBER 1882

  WHEN THOMAS EDISON MADE plans to build his first centralized power plant in Lower Manhattan, the city had many surprises in store for him. Real estate presented the first problem. Edison must have been the last person in the country to notice that Manhattan is an impossibly expensive place to be. Only “the very rich can afford the expense,” said an observer—in 1882. Oblivious, Edison had drawn up blueprints for an installation that would require a single floor about two hundred feet square. He assumed that by selecting a “slum street” near the waterfront with the most dilapidated properties, he would be able to pick up the property he would need for about $10,000. He was way off the mark, however. The available properties were four-storied industrial buildings that were only twenty-five feet across, not two hundred, and only eighty-five or one hundred feet deep. Edison purchased two adjacent buildings on Pearl Street, which cost not $10,000 but $155,000. With much less space with which to work, he replaced the plan of his original layout with a creative revision. Gutting one of them, he reconstructed the interior with structural steel, building up instead of out.

  He took in stride his first serious financial setbacks. When the directors of the Edison Electric Light Company declined to invest in facilities for manufacturing the dynamos whose spinning generated electricity, Edison founded a new company, the Edison Machine Works, to take on the responsibility, and took over shipbuilder John Roach’s Etna Iron Works on the Lower East Side. Acting with admirable boldness for someone without adequate liquid assets. Edison directed George Gouraud, his representative in Europe, to unload Edison’s holdings in various telephone interests, such as the Edison Telephone Company of Glasgow. He wrote Gouraud that he would sell all his holdings before touching his shares in Edison Electric, which he wanted to hold “as long as possible.” (He eventually succeeded in getting the Machine Works funded without touching his prized shares in the light company.)

  The directors of Edison Electric wanted nothing to do with the manufacture of lightbulbs, either. Edison and his closest associates—Charles Batchelor, Francis Upton, and Edward Johnson—pooled $35,000 of their personal resources to found the Edison Lamp Company (“lamp” referred to bulbs). Edward Johnson, along with former Edison associate Sigmund Bergmann, founded still another company that would manufacture light fixtures, switches, sockets, and related hardware. Bergmann was a German-born machinist who had run his own machine shop after leaving Edison’s. A few years earlier, Johnson had provided Bergmann’s shop with a contract for small demonstration phonographs, a line of business that had not been successful but had brought the two men closer, leading now to the establishment of Bergmann & Company. The two partners decided it would be in their best interests to add Edison as a third equal partner. When they asked him if he were interested in joining them, Edison inquired, “For how much?” Without consulting his partner, Johnson said, “For nothing but goodwill,” and the deal was sealed on the spot with a handshake. Bergmann later said ruefully that he and Johnson left money on the table: “Edison would have been glad to pay us fifty thousand dollars.”

  In the push to commercialize his electric light, Edison had never taken on so much work, so much risk, and right in the center of the media capital of the country. Technical problems, business issues, personnel headaches—the obstacles in Edison’s path were of a size he had never encountered, yet he moved them out of his way, one by one. This was real-time invention and problem solving, in every imaginable technical and nontechnical domain, on an impressive scale. One reporter marveled at Edison’s quick recovery from dyspepsia that had briefly confined him to bed: “What a wonderful amount of nervous energy there is in this man.”

  Edison’s energies continued to be applied exclusively to his business interests. The family doctor was concerned about Mary Edison’s state of mental health, but as had been the case before, Edison did not change his own plans to attend to her. “She seems very nervous and despondent and thinks she will never recover,” the doctor wrote Edison in January 1882. He suggested that Edison take her to Europe for a few months; at the least, “something ought to be done.”

  Edison remained immersed in his work, however. He spent most of his time at the Pearl Street station, or nearby. Often he napped on the premises, sleeping on top of an electrical conduit that was stacked in the cellar. It was both cold and damp, but Edison did not mind. Later, he recalled that two Germans who were employees who worked in the cellar doing tests caught diphtheria there and died, but he was never affected.

  One component of the project was designing, then building and installing, the dynamos for the Pearl Street station. He insisted on custom building a dynamo far larger than the ones he had used before, conceived on a scale that required special tools. Another component was laying the lines that Edison was determined to place underground, a more difficult undertaking than stringing them overhead, where there already existed a tangle of lines owned by Brush Electric and a multitude of telegraph, telephone, and fire alarm companies. Edison had originally planned to offer service to the entirety of south Manhattan, south of Canal Street and north of Wall Street, but engineering considerations forced him to carve out a smaller district, bounded by Wall, Nassau, Spruce, and Ferry Streets. Still, his company had to place underground some eighty thousand linear feet of electrical wire. This had never been attempted before, so it should not have been a surprise when H. O. Thompson, the city’s commissioner of public works, summoned Edison to his office to explain that the city would have to be assured that the lines were installed safely. Thompson was assigning five inspectors to oversee the work, whose cost would be covered by an assessment of $5 per day, per inspector, payable each week. When Edison left Thompson’s office, he was crestfallen, anticipating the harassment and delays ahead that would be caused by the inspectors’ interference. On the day that work began, however, the inspectors failed to appear. Their first appearance was on Saturday afternoon, to draw their pay. This set the pattern that the inspectors followed as the work proceeded through 1881 and into 1882.

  The public was reminded of the lethal potential of electricity while Edison’s crews dug up the streets. They read in the newspaper that a thirty-year-old dock laborer who was touring the Brush Electric Light Company’s Buffalo plant had leaned over a railing and gripped two hanging wires. He dropped onto the railing, dead. In England, a series of fatal accidents to workmen drew remarks about how “the electric Frankenstein turns now and then upon the magician who has raised him.” About the same time, a German proposed building an electric chair for executing criminals, which would bring death “instantaneously.” He tried out the concept on dogs, a horse, and an ox.

  Edison’s company did its best to distance itself from Brush and the other arc light companies, arguing that the others used a form of electricity that was as dangerous as Edison’s was harmless. At this point, before the “battle of the currents” had formally begun, the public was not informed what exactly distinguished Edison’s direct current from arc light’s alternating current. Direct current flows in the same direction; alternating current flows i
n one direction, then reverses and flows in the other, continuously changing. Both forms of current could electrically shock a human being, causing sustained contraction of muscles. Alternating current poses an especially dangerous risk, however, because its rapid discontinuous movement—flowing in this direction, then that one—is more likely to scramble the neural subsystem that serves as the heart’s guiding metronome. Once the signals are scrambled, fibrillation follows: rapid, ineffective contractions of the heart muscles that fails to pump blood as it should. Alternating current’s propensity to induce fibrillation gives direct current an edge in terms of safety.

  Even if comparatively safer, however, direct current was capable of inducing harmful, even fatal, shocks, too. Edison Electric was not wholly honest with the public about its own safety issues. When the Pearl Street station was running tests prior to the official launch of the service, a police officer noticed that horses that passed a certain spot near the corner of Nassau and Ann Streets would bolt, or drop to their knees, or perform “certain equestrian antics such as had never before been witnessed,” wrote Francis Jehl. Almost inevitably, a crowd gathered for the free entertainment. When a horse-drawn wagon approached the place where the electrical “juice” was leaking, the people who stood on either side maintained blankly innocent expressions for the wagon driver, silently urging him to proceed. Then the horse was shocked and bounded off, out of control. The police officers present also thought the horses’ reaction was highly entertaining. Only when the crowd of onlookers grew too large did they tell Edison Electric to cut the power and find the problem. Edison went to see for himself and thought the shocks amusing, too, even as he directed a crew to locate the leak. The next day, a visitor came to his office wishing to buy apparatus that he could install at a horse market, where, in Edison’s description, he “could get old nags in there and make them act like thoroughbreds.”

  As soon as the newspapers had received word of the Nassau Street shocks, reporters headed to the Pearl Street station to ask questions. Charles Clarke, a Bowdoin classmate of Francis Upton’s who had joined Edison’s staff in 1880, served as reluctant spokesperson. “We have no evidence that the shocks, if there were any, came from our station,” Clarke said cautiously, having delayed answering by taking off his glasses and rubbing the lenses for a long while. The reporters pressed, and Clarke ended up conceding that it was theoretically possible, and even drew a sketch of how the leak may have occurred.

  The president of Edison Electric, Major Sherburne Eaton, resorted to what appeared to be the easiest course: emphatic denial of a problem. He explained that he himself had “taken the full force of the entire current with my naked hands, and have seen hundreds of others do it, both men and women, and always without the slightest shock.” Eaton was publicly expounding upon the impossibility of Edison Electric’s current producing a shock at about the same time that Edison was privately telling Charles Clarke that, yes, the company’s workers had accidentally spiked one of the electrical tubes in that spot, and the current was not dissipated harmlessly through the earth, as Eaton was telling reporters would be the case even had a rupture occurred.

  The Edison Electric Light Company in 1882 launched a counteroffensive to direct public attention to its most vulnerable competitors: the gas companies. The arc light companies could not be attacked without hurting the image of everyone in the electric power business; the lay public could not readily distinguish between direct and alternating current. The threat to public safety posed by gas, however, was easily understood. The Bulletin of the Edison Electric Light Company devoted considerable space to reports of devastation and death caused by gas. A man was found dead in his hotel room—with the gas turned on. Two young girls found dead in bed—gassed. An explosion blew out heavy plate glass from windows in a downtown office building—again, gas. Standing alone in a room lit with gas was no different from standing “immured with 23 other persons all taking oxygen from the atmosphere,” according to the author of an article titled “How to Escape Nervousness.” After several hours of oxygen deprivation, was it a surprise that “your nerves should rebel as far as their weak state permits, and that your head should ache, your hands tremble, and that your daughter’s playing on the piano almost drives you wild?”

  Gaslight customers could appreciate the simple physical fact that an electric light did not affect the quality of the air, nor generate heat in a room. The gas industry, however, slyly instilled fear, uncertainty, and doubt among customers who were considering an alternative. The public was warned that the electric light projected a toxic ray that would turn the complexion of survivors green—and swell the death rate. Those claims clashed with positive ones issued by entrepreneurs touting the healthful benefits of electricity. An electric corset, for example, was advertised that would “cause the wearer to grow plump and to enjoy the very best of health.”

  The prospective advantages of replacing gaslights with electric ones were clear enough to the warden of the Maryland state penitentiary in Baltimore, who had seen the electric lights in the Menlo Park demonstration and was eager to install them, “without any red tape,” he promised. This would have entailed installing a small power plant, like the one serving the laboratory in Menlo Park or the company’s office in the brownstone on Fifth Avenue. Such installations, which Edison Electric called “isolated lighting,” did not help the company advance toward its strategic aim of building an electrical utility that served an entire city, however. Edison asked that word be passed on to the state penitentiary that his work was organized to build a complete system. He acknowledged the paradox that “I could very much easier light up a square mile with 1500 to 2000 houses than I could a single building.”

  One New York company, the lithograph firm of Hinds, Ketcham, succeeded in buying its own power plant from Edison Electric. The electric light was much superior to gaslight for work that required distinguishing colors, and the firm provided a testimonial that the light was “the best substitute for daylight we have ever known, and almost as cheap.” The Blue Mountain House, a hotel that sat thirty-five hundred feet above sea level in the Adirondacks, got an Edison power plant, too. Located forty miles from the nearest railroad, the machinery had to be packed onto the backs of mules, and once installed the boilers were fed by wood. With a printing firm grateful for the quality of the light, and the resort hotel grateful for electric light of any form, these early installations offered Edison Electric good references from customers less concerned about the economics than others would be.

  Well before Edison’s Pearl Street station was ready, Brush was selling its arc lights to businesses for interior use, too, with power supplied from its own central station. In December 1881, the only thing that kept Brush from moving faster was a shortage of machinery needed to expand its generating capacity. Its system in Manhattan supplied 550 lights, outdoors and indoors, and could have supplied light to more offices if it had had more power to distribute in the late afternoon and early evening. In winter, its outdoor lights uptown along Broadway came on while downtown offices were still open, creating peak demand for electricity that exceeded the limited supply of power.

  While Brush was hampered by insufficient capacity and the gas companies were unable to persuasively portray electric light as intrinsically more dangerous than their own, Edison Electric could have grabbed all the business it could handle by responding to requests for lights powered by on-site plants. In the three months following the Menlo Park demonstrations, the company received three thousand to four thousand separate applications—so many it had lost accurate count. Thomas Edison’s determination to spurn these opportunities to quickly commercialize the electric light, and instead to remain focused on the more difficult, but ultimately more significant, task of launching his own central power system, proved to be a brilliant stroke. It was not the result of formal study, or broad consultation with his lieutenants. Instead, it was an intuitive hunch that demonstrating the viability of a centralized system would be strat
egically more important to the business than accepting orders from individual customers.

  The laying of the mains had begun in April 1881, but by December, only one-third of the district had been wired. Work was slowed by shortages of wire and the iron pipe through which it was threaded. Suppliers reneged on contracts signed before inflation had sent prices higher, and Edison filed lawsuits to enlist the authority of the courts to enforce the earlier agreements. In addition, the lines could advance only at night because the city prohibited work during daylight hours so that traffic would not be disrupted. Work stopped completely when winter set in and the ground froze. Edison Electric had to issue a disappointing announcement: Downtown would not be lighted until the spring.

  Incandescent lighting did not hold the nation’s interest during the hard slog beneath New York’s streets. For the city that sought the latest lighting technology—and what city did not?—a new possibility had appeared the previous year: placing arc lights high enough to project an intense light for many blocks in all directions. In Wabash, Indiana, four enormous three-thousand-candlepower arc lights were suspended in 1880 from a flagstaff atop the courthouse. The light was said to be bright enough to throw shadows of cows standing five miles away. Other cities followed, mounting lights upon iron towers that rose hundreds of feet above the central business district. In San Jose, California, the publisher of the local newspaper raised cash contributions from the general public for the erection of a four-legged, 237-foot monster of a light tower, believed to be the tallest in the country. (Wild fowl crashed into its upper structure and dropped into the street below, providing an income supplement to police, who sold the birds to local restaurants.) In Detroit, the Brush Electric Light Company built 142 masts, each 200 feet high (and when it lost its contract with the city, refused to turn them over to the successor contractor, which added another 100 towers to the blight). A British observer marveled at Americans’ tolerance for such breathtaking ugliness, “the most defiant appearance of utter disregard for every other claim except utility.”