The Wizard of Menlo Park

by Randall E. Stross

  Only in folklore does the world beat a path to the inventor of the better mousetrap. In September 1895, the world simply shrugged when Armat and Jenkins publicly unveiled their new machine in a corner of the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. A local paper gave it brief mention, but only a few visitors stopped by, and the inventors had nothing to show for their first attempt at marketing. The two soon quarreled over assignment of the patents—given the dismal state of their business, this showed a hardy optimism—and dissolved their partnership.

  Edison’s largest kinetoscope distributor, Raff & Gammon, begged Edison in early October to complete the “Screen Machine” that he had promised them. The next day, Edison personally handwrote a letter that showed what was currently most on his mind. It was addressed not to Raff & Gammon, but to the Ingersoll-Sergeant Drill Company: “Gentlemen, We are using six of your drills at our mine and find them perfectly satisfactory.” One cannot help but admire the obstinate way in which Edison refused to let go of his failing mining project. He jeopardized his own role in the commercialization of fun because he was having a great deal of fun himself, pursuing at his ore mill his own bliss, in his own way. He was happily immersed even though it entailed living for long, lonely stretches up at the mine without Mina. (His letters reveal his loneliness. They also provide a tiny contribution to the history of sex. In one letter, he tells her a joke he had just heard: How can one recognize the modern woman, or so-called Coming Woman? “The answer is ‘Quite easily by their panting or short breaths.’” Concerned that she would not be able to “study out the joke,” he told her not to show it to just anybody “because it is bad.”)

  While Raff & Gammon beseeched Edison to invent a Screen Machine, young Armat, realizing he lacked the means to get the attention of the marketplace, approached Raff & Gammon about acting as his distributor. He received a skeptical reception—Edison himself was unable to produce a projection system that worked, so how could an unknown inventor succeed? Armat offered to pay Raff & Gammon’s expenses to come visit him in Washington to see for themselves. The phantascope proved to be all that Armat had claimed, and his patent solid. Raff and his partner prepared to abandon Edison and his instantly obsolete kinetoscope, if they could not persuade Edison to lend the one asset that he possessed that remained valuable: his name. Their plan also required Armat to swallow his pride and accept a marketing plan that depended on his remaining invisible. Explaining that they assumed that “you, like ourselves, have gone in this thing with a view to making all the money possible,” they explained that many people had been waiting for the past year for Edison to perfect a projector and would continue to hold off purchasing a machine offered by anyone else, no matter what its virtues. “In order to secure the largest profit in the shortest time it is necessary that we attach Mr. Edison’s name in some prominent capacity to this new machine…. We regard this assimply a matter of business and we trust that you will view it strictly in the same light.”

  Armat accepted the arrangement, and, more surprising, Edison did too, showing a willingness to use his name to market a better invention than he had been able to produce. He had not been willing to do the same when approached by the graphophone interests. To obscure its origins, the phantascope was given a new name, the Vitascope, and when it made its debut at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in New York in April 1896, projecting life-sized images on a screen twenty by thirteen feet, it was described as “the ingenious inventor’s latest toy.” Edison followed the script to which he had agreed and remained silent.

  In July, Los Angeles showed an appreciation of the vitascope that exceeded even New York’s. The inaugural film program offered a dancing sequence, then melodrama involving Uncle Sam knocking a diminutive bully, John Bull, to his knees, street scenes from New York, more dancing, and then the first medium-range close-up of a kiss. The Los Angeles Times said “the audience fairly shrieked and howled approval” and called the vitascope “an instantaneous success.” Sports programming demonstrated the technology’s capabilities in most thrilling fashion. At another site, the Corbett-Courtney fight was offered in a size that for the first time was like “actual life.” In the first week in Los Angeles, some twenty thousand people saw a vitascope program, and another ten thousand had to be turned away.

  The vitascope’s success was credited to Edison’s ingenuity, which gave a bright luster to his star. Edison also could derive pleasure as the head of a new business that had not existed before: film production. One of the prerogatives as studio head was the ability to sign off on the creative agenda. In 1897, one of his company’s twenty-second features, Mr. Edison at Work in His Chemical Laboratory, had a cast consisting of just himself, playing the role of wizard, missing only a costume and pointed cap. It was filmed in the Black Maria, which had been outfitted with shelves filled with glassware and with a workbench overflowing with retorts and burners, everything needed for a fake laboratory. By donning a costume—a white lab coat—and doing nothing but dash from one end of the stage to the other, moving this piece of lab equipment here, and then there, pretending to be engaged in an experiment so demanding that he had no time to look up from his work and peer directly into the camera, Edison could fully inhabit the persona that had been placed upon him twenty years earlier, when he more closely lived the part. He intuitively understood the way invisibility heightened celebrity, but it could not be taken to an extreme; he needed to make rare appearances, too. For the public hungry to see the man at work, the film appeared to give them exactly that, albeit a glimpse that only lasted twenty seconds.

  CHAPTER TEN

  KINGLY PRIVILEGE

  THE PUBLIC’S INTEREST in Thomas Edison’s inventions rose and fell, as announcements of coming wonders would pique interest and then delays in the delivery of those wonders would disappoint. Over time, however, his fame acquired an indestructible sheath and eclipsed the attention accorded to the individual inventions themselves. It was Thomas Edison, the person, to whom the public became most attached during his lifetime. Edison realized this, and worked unceasingly to protect the most distilled expression of his person: his name. “Thomas A. Edison” was an estimable invention, too.

  In the public’s view, by the late 1890s anything associated with Edison’s name was presumed to be blessed by the inventor’s brilliance. The passage of time worked in Edison’s favor, erasing from collective memory the earlier disappointments that had followed hyperbolic predictions. So positive was the association with his name that it was attached to a boggling array of goods, such as those offered by the Edison Chemical Company, a manufacturer of printing ink. If customers failed to make the connection between the name and the famous inventor, they could not miss the “Wizard” that was featured in its advertising. What the company did not draw attention to was this fact: The Edison Chemical Company had no tie to Thomas Edison. Its founders had found a man with the last name of Edison—one C. M. Edison, no relation—who was willing to license marketing rights to his name for a fee.

  This had vexed the other Edison, Thomas, who won a court order that enjoined the company from using his surname. The matter did not end there, however. The Edison Chemical Company reorganized itself as the Thomas A. Edison, Jr., Chemical Company, having enlisted the famous man’s twenty-five-year-old namesake son.

  Thomas Edison Jr., Edison’s second oldest child from his first marriage, had left St. Paul’s preparatory school without a diploma, hoping to become an inventor, too. His father had created positions for him at the West Orange laboratory and up at the Ogden mine, but Junior felt extreme frustration with his father for not recognizing his inventive talents. He was also frustrated with himself, for being intimidated by his father and remaining mute. In May 1897, then twenty-one-year-old Junior wrote Mina, his stepmother, from the mine about his relationship with his father:

  I probably never will be able to please him, as am afraid it’s not in me. But I shall never give up trying. If I could only talk to him the way I wa
nt to, perhaps everything may be different. I have many ideas of my own, which sometimes—yes—I may say on all occasions I would like to ask him or tell him about but they never leave my mouth, and are soon forgotten, perhaps where they belong, perhaps not. This I would like to have him to decide.

  Later that year, writing from a hotel in New York City, Junior again confided to his stepmother that his father often told him that he was “impractical.” He vowed to do his best to become a practical person, “but it is a difficult matter to change one’s nature in a short time.” His ambition to become an inventor remained firm.

  Within a few days, his dream was realized: He became a famous inventor, at least in the eyes of the New York Herald, which ran a long, credulous profile titled “Edison, Jr., Wizard.” The young man was credited with inventing an incandescent bulb superior to his father’s and “developing a formidable rivalry to his illustrious parent in his own line.” The powerful effect of his name mesmerized the Herald’s reporter, who took on faith Junior’s claims about his invention, about financial backing from unnamed powerful figures, and about his autobiography (he claimed he had left school at the age of eleven and subsequently continued his education at his father’s elbow).

  Junior’s claimed invention and related business interests were not verified by independent sources. He discovered, however, that his fame, even if inherited, led to new opportunities. He soon landed a publicly visible role at the Electrical Exhibition staged in Madison Square Garden in 1898. The position did not come with major responsibilities—he was head of the decoration committee, whose largest contribution to the exhibition was an illuminated fountain—but Junior used the opportunity to speak to the press about the life he led as inventor. A small accident that damaged his desk, caused by a fireworks-sized explosive used in an exhibit of miniature gunboats, gave him the opportunity to set his jaw bravely and proclaim his lack of fear as he persevered down the dangerous path he had chosen. “I never expect to die a natural death,” he said in an interview; “I feel confident I will be blown up some day.”

  In fact, Junior was not actually staring down death in dedicated pursuit of new inventions. His assignment was to design the arrangement of decorative electric lights for the exhibition’s fountain. The most plausible explanation for why the exhibition’s sponsor had hired Thomas Edison Jr. is that he possessed a brand name suitable for marketing the show, which immediately followed another show in the Garden that pioneered the exploitation of famous names, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Thomas Edison Sr. would have been the best draw, perhaps even better than Annie Oakley, but he was not available; the next best thing, therefore, was Thomas Edison Jr. So it was he, and only he, who was mentioned by name in the New York Times as the guest celebrity on hand at the exhibition, sipping tea that had been boiled on an electric range, a novelty, and munching a tiny biscuit cooked in an “electrically heated oven,” another novelty. This time he was not credited with anything but being the son of the “Wizard.”

  When the exhibition closed, the spotlight moved on, and Junior had to find another sponsor who would pay him for the aura of fame attached to his name. Fortuitously, investors appeared to form the Edison Jr. Steel and Iron Process Company, providing the younger Tom Edison with one-third of the company’s stock. Edison Sr. was outraged that his ne’er-do-well son continued to exploit the Edison name and broke off communication with him, letting his next-eldest son, Will, deliver the news. Tom Jr. wrote his father in reply that he intended to “go on just as I have been doing.” He maintained that his family name had been a “detriment” to his business career, as no bank believed Junior’s claimed need for credit. “If my name was Smith,” he said, “I would be a rich man today.” He added a gratuitous insult about his father’s bumbling in business. “You should have been—‘ask any body’—a millionaire ten times over if you knew how to handle your own achievements.”

  The Edison Jr. Steel and Iron Process Company was followed by the Thomas A. Edison, Jr. and William Holzer Steel and Iron Process Company, which also failed. Junior was married, then swiftly not married, to a woman whose profession (chorus girl) was mentioned in newspaper accounts as a compact summary of her character. Her former husband’s family viewed her as a gold-digging strumpet who had entered marriage with nothing but avarice in her heart. If the unflattering characterization were true, it suggests her eyesight was poor—Junior possessed no gold to be dug. His brother Will reported to the family that Tom Jr. had had to leave town to escape thousands in debts and a pursuing sheriff. “He is the laughing stock of business men,” Will said.

  Unemployed and estranged from his father, Tom Jr. was exactly the person that the Edison Chemical Company was looking for. Yes, a court order had forbidden the company from using the Edison name, but what if, instead of relying on C. M. Edison to justify use of the name, it could use that of Thomas Edison’s own eldest born, who had been endowed at birth with a name that was now world renowned? Tom Jr. was agreeable, believing that his own inventive talents would finally be recognized. He had come up with a “Magno-Electric Vitalizer,” a remarkable device that cured “Paralysis, Rheumatism, Locomotor Ataxia, and Nervous Prostration,” and all other maladies that Junior called the “so-called ‘incurable’ complaints.” The company added the Vitalizer to its line of wares, including the “Wizard’s Ink Tablets,” and renamed itself the Thomas A. Edison, Jr., Chemical Company. Junior was provided a vice president’s position, a $5,000 initial payment, a monthly stipend, and royalties.

  Edison Sr. was upset beyond measure. He communicated his feelings to Junior, and Junior’s resolution to make his way on his own crumbled. In December 1902, he wrote his father with an offer to give up “all future rights to the name of Edison for the purpose of obtaining money,” and left the monetary terms of the agreement to be set by Tom Sr. In the father’s retrospective account of the episode, reconciliation with his son came about because it was he who offered his son “more money than the men he was associated with would pay him.”

  Having paid for the cooperation of his son, the elder inventor then filed a lawsuit against the company for use of the Edison name and for the moniker “Wizard.” A press account in a local newspaper described it as “one of the most peculiar suits in the history of the court,” as it featured a dispute that centered around protecting the inventor’s name by restricting commercial use of the son’s.

  Edison’s attorneys had a more difficult case to make against the Thomas A. Edison, Jr., Chemical Company than they had had against the Edison Chemical Company. They offered two arguments. First, customers were being misled to assume that Edison was the inventor of the Wizard’s Ink Tablets and the Magno-Electric Vitalizer. (The future would bear this out: Years later, customers would still send to Edison’s laboratory their Vitalizers for recharging—and the lab would send them right back, untouched, with a note explaining “we know nothing whatever about them and have no way of charging them.”) Second, Tom Jr. could not legitimately claim to be an inventor. To bolster this contention, Tom Sr. supplied an affidavit that said Junior had no regular occupation, had never produced a single practical invention, and—this must have hurt—was “incapable of making any invention or discovery of merit.”

  Edison was more concerned about his name than about the commercial fate of any of his inventions, none of which had ever moved him to say anything equivalent to what he told a reporter in 1904: “I’ll protect my name if it costs me every dollar in the world I possess.” Having extracted his son from the Thomas A. Edison, Jr., Chemical Company, he did not have to spend more of his own money, however, to end the company’s poaching of his good name. Contending that selling the Vitalizer perpetrated a fraud upon the public, the U.S. Postal Service halted delivery of all mail to the company, which had to close its doors.

  This should have brought this public unpleasantness for the Edison family to a close. But the usually taciturn Edison had much still to say, including his thoughts about the shortcomings of his h
apless son. He told the New York American that Tom Junior was incapable of building a Magno-Electric Vitalizer. Or anything else; he simply had no inventive talent. “I could not get him to attend school because he wished to become famous and have it said that he, too, never had attended a college.” His son would struggle to support himself for the remainder of his life, but the lack of a college education would turn out to be a lesser problem than alcoholism and mental illness.

  During the fight over use of the Edison surname, when Tom Jr. had flung the charge that his father did not know how to convert technical achievements into commercial success, his criticism had been spot on. As time passed, his father subsequently did no better in the timing of his launch of new business ventures. He followed the debacle of his ore-milling venture with a new obsession, electric cars. In 1900, and ahead of Henry Ford, Edison articulated an ambition to make automobiles “the poor man’s vehicle.” Edison’s vision, however, centered upon using improved batteries to make electrically powered vehicles superior to gasoline-powered ones. Eking out greater range from batteries became his new, all-consuming preoccupation. By 1901, he had a prototype electric car that could reach seventy miles per hour, offering a ride Edison called “the sport of kings.” By 1902, he claimed his car had a range of eighty-five miles without recharging, and he expected to have a battery on the market within months, just as soon as final road tests were complete. He predicted, “It will be but a short time before demand for storage batteries will create one of the most enormous industries in the land.”