The Wizard of Menlo Park

by Randall E. Stross

  His battery was released, but its performance was less than he had led everyone to expect. His experiments continued and improved batteries followed, but the electric car remained a novelty. This did not cause him to alter his predictions for the car’s future dominance, however. Ten years after his first pronouncement, he was excited to see that the sales of “family electric carriages” were increasing “very rapidly” and predicted that their lower maintenance costs would lead to their “probably” displacing gasoline-powered cars.

  At the very moment Edison was rather too optimistic about the prospects for the electric car, he was insufficiently appreciative of the commercial potential of the music business. As always, it was technical problems that interested him more than commercial ones, and it was the challenges in the laboratory that kept him absorbed in batteries, to the exclusion of other possible business opportunities. His personal interest in working on the phonograph had waned, then returned, and then waned again. The technical advances that would finally, three decades after its invention, make it a commercial success were a reliable spring motor and the manufacturing technology for making multiple duplicate copies of a musical recording from a single master. Even before these pieces were in place at the very end of the nineteenth century, and sales of phonographs and recordings zigged skyward, Edison was puttering elsewhere in the laboratory, at work on his automobile batteries.

  The public had no reason to doubt that Edison was giving anything but his full attention to the phonograph. His imprimatur was critical to its marketing, and retail distributors relied upon his celebrity. Prospective customers were told that the Edison phonograph had received the great man’s “constant care,” the only invention of his to receive this favored attention. In at least one instance, a Des Moines, Iowa, retailer went too far, appending a counterfeit “Thos A. Edison” signature to a typewritten letter sent out in a mass mailing that requested that the recipient send in his or her impressions of the latest Edison phonograph. “Will you drop me just a line—address it to me personally and mark it care Edison Laboratory, Orange, N.J.?” When the letters came into the laboratory, Edison’s staff was so aghast that his name had been borrowed by one of his dealers that they held off mentioning the matter to him. They also knew that the letters came with idiosyncratic requests (one man, writing from Marcus, Iowa, was quite particular: He wrote Edison that he wanted “a personal letter from you, not a type written letter, but just a good plain written letter written with your own hand”). William Maxwell, the vice president for sales, wrote the Des Moines dealer, “You can readily see that it will not do at all to have people writing in here to Mr. Edison” and demanded an explanation of the dealer’s presumptuousness. The dealer replied, not very credibly, that he had simply forgotten to get permission to use the facsimile of Edison’s signature.

  Edison had retained the patent rights and business stakes in the phonograph, so when the business came into its own, he approved the construction of expanded manufacturing facilities adjacent to his laboratory to handle the orders that poured in. This was followed by still more growth, and more building: An entire block adjacent to the laboratory was filled with five-story hulks. By 1907, as the company erected its sixteenth building, Edison boasted of “the largest talking machine factory in the world.” All the buildings were built with concrete, which, Edison proudly pointed out, was “absolutely fireproof.”

  Edison and his copywriters were inclined to say too much when extolling the virtues of the Edison phonograph. A pithy rubric, like “Made in America in 1888—Made Perfect in 1914,” would be dwarfed by long columns of text that brought out every subtle advantage to be gained by the consumer who chose the Edison machine. The praise in an advertisement that ran in the Detroit Times went on at such length that Maxwell wondered if it was a bit much. “I wish I knew whether people will read that much copy. Farmers will, we know—but do city people?”

  Once Edison’s marketers squarely addressed the urban middle class, they devised advertising that made prospective customers feel as entitled to enjoy the pleasures of recorded music as anyone. “When the King of England wants to see a show, they bring the show to the castle and he hears it alone in his private theater.” So said an advertisement in 1906 for the Edison phonograph. It continued: “If you are a king, why don’t you exercise your kingly privilege and have a show of your own in your own house.”

  Other advertisements developed the theme of the phonograph as the great leveler. In 1908, a man in formal wear and his slender wife stood on one side of a table, upon which sat a phonograph; on the other side stood four servants, wearing smiles and expressions of curiosity. The caption said that the Edison phonograph had brought the same entertainment enjoyed by the rich within the range of all. The credit for making the phonograph “the great popular entertainer” was to be bestowed upon Thomas Edison. “He made it desirable by making it good; he made it popular by making it inexpensive.” Another advertisement promised that the phonograph would “amuse the most unresponsive,” adding reverently, “It is irresistible because Edison made it.”

  In truth, the Edison phonograph fell short of being irresistible; nor did it lead the industry in technical innovation. It was the Victor Talking Machine Company that made discs a practical medium. The disc’s flat dimensions offered a more convenient means of storing many songs than the three-dimensional Edison cylinder. It was Victor that came up with a disc that offered four minutes of capacity when Edison’s cylinder’s had only two minutes. And it was Victor that introduced the pricey, and very successful, Victrola, which hid the horn of the phonograph within a wood cabinet, transforming it into a piece of fine furniture—and a very profitable item for its manufacturer.

  Edison’s offerings may have lagged, but such was the demand for kingly entertainment enjoyed at home that the Edison Phonograph Works prospered along with Victor and Columbia, the two companies that with Edison comprised the dominant three in the industry. Edison’s cylinder, which cost about seven cents to manufacture, sold for fifty cents, providing a nice gross margin that covered all manner of strategic missteps. One of those was Edison’s conviction that there was no need to switch to discs. When he finally gave in and brought out discs, he could not bring himself to relinquish cylinders, so resources had to be spread across two incompatible formats. Nor would he permit his standards for sound quality to be compromised. He insisted that his discs be twice the thickness of those produced by the competition and much heavier, which provided for better sound but made them far more cumbersome.

  Edison was adamant that Edison recordings would be played only on Edison phonographs. His competitors, Victor and Columbia, shared the same playback technique, etching a laterally cut groove that sent the needle moving horizontally as the record played. Their recordings could be played on one another’s machines. Edison, however, adopted his own design, a groove that varied vertically, called at the time a “hill-and-dale” cut. An adapter permitted Victor records to be played on an Edison Disc Phonograph, but Edison forbade the sale of an attachment that permitted his records to be played on the machines of the competition.

  Edison had never shown a talent for strategy, and he did not give the subject close study. He spent most of his time working on problems related to industrial chemistry, principally, those related to batteries, and secondarily, those related to mass production of cylinders and discs. Yet he did take time to make decisions about music, personally approving—and, more often, disapproving—the suggestions of underlings about which performers should be recorded. His dislike of various musical genres and artists was strong and encompassed almost everything. Popular music—“these miserable dance and ragtime selections”—had no chance of receiving his blessing. Jazz was for “the nuts”; one performance reminded him of “the dying moan of dead animals.” But he was no elitist. He also dismissed the members of the Metropolitan Opera House as lacking tune. Sergei Rachmaninoff was just “a pounder.”

  In 1911, Edison wrote a correspon
dent that he had had to take on the responsibilities of musical director for his company because the incumbent had made what Edison deemed to be awful decisions, permitting players to play out of tune and, most egregiously, tolerating a defective flute that “on high notes gives a piercing abnormal sound like machinery that wants oiling.” How these dissonant sounds had escaped the notice of others is a question that Edison did not address.

  Edison approached music as if it were a cryptographic puzzle to be solved; musical composition was merely a matter of formula, and in most cases, in his judgment, was unoriginal (he did except Beethoven from this criticism). His daughter Madeleine recalled in 1972 an occasion when she was a young girl, growing up in Glenmont, when her father was determined to personally select waltzes that would be recorded by his company. He hired a pianist and had her play loudly no fewer than six hundred. The experience was not enjoyed by Madeleine and the other members of the family. She remembered, “We just about left home that time.”

  To Edison, the technical problems posed in recording sound by purely mechanical means, prior to the development of the microphone, were far more absorbing than business issues. He allocated his time accordingly. He spent a year and a half overseeing research on how to record and clearly reproduce the word “sugar” perfectly. Two more months were needed to master “scissors.” He wrote, “After that the phonograph would record and reproduce anything.” This was not wholly true. Recording an orchestra with pre-electric acoustic technology presented insoluble problems. He did his best, ordering the construction of the world’s largest brass recording horn, 128 feet long, 5 feet in diameter at the end that received sound, tapering down to 5⁄8 of an inch at the other. Its construction required thirty thousand rivets alone, each carefully smoothed on the interior surface. It was a marvel of metalwork, but as an instrument for recording sound, it never worked very well. (It did serve its country well, however, being sent off for service in World War II in a scrap drive.)

  Edison’s partial loss of hearing prevented him from listening to music in the same way as those with unimpaired hearing. A little item that appeared in a Schenectady, New York, newspaper in 1913 related the story that Edison supposedly told a friend about how he usually listened to recordings by placing one ear directly against the phonograph’s cabinet. But if he detected a sound too faint to hear in this fashion, Edison said, “I bite my teeth in the wood good and hard and then I get it good and strong.” The story would be confirmed decades later in Madeleine’s recollections of growing up. One day she came into the sitting room in which someone was playing the piano and a guest, Maria Montessori, was in tears, watching Edison listen the only way that he could, teeth biting the piano. “She thought it was pathetic,” Madeleine said, “I guess it was.”

  Edison, though, was undaunted by the limitations of his hearing, which would make for an inspirational tale, were it not for the fact that he was the self-appointed musical director of a profit-seeking record business, whose artistic decisions directly affected the employees of the Edison Phonograph Works. His judgments and whims met no obstruction. One employee, A. E. Johnson, recalled the disillusionment that followed his being hired. He said of Edison, “I found out that he could make awful mistakes, and I also found it didn’t pay to tell him about his mistakes. Let him find them out himself, and if you did that cleverly you were all right.” Workers spread word daily about Edison’s mood. “The Old Man is feelin’ fine today” was welcome news. But if the word was “the Old Man’s on the rampage,” employees dove for cover, “as in a cyclone cellar, until the tempest was over.”

  Not just his employees, but also the general public, angered Edison. He was exasperated by a public that clamored, he said, “for louder and still louder records.” He believed that “anyone who really had a musical ear wanted soft music.” And it was those customers, the “lovers of good music,” who Edison in 1911 said would be “the only constant and continuous buyers of records.” This was wishful thinking. What was plainly evident to everyone else was that the only constant in the music business was inconstancy, the fickle nature of popular fads. The half-life of a commercially successful song was brief. By the time Edison’s factory shipped the first records three weeks after recording, the flighty public had already moved on.

  Even then, in the founding years of the recorded-music business, the economics of the industry was based upon hits, the few songs that enjoyed an unpredictably large success and subsidized the losses incurred by the other releases. On rare occasions, Edison grudgingly granted this. Then he would concede that the popular music he disdained was in most demand, and he took what comfort he could in the thought that the “trash” his company reluctantly released did help to sell phonographs and indirectly help him to provide “music of the class that is enjoyed by real lovers of music.”

  This business was not so easily mastered, however, and the contempt with which Edison regarded popular music did not help him understand his customers. They would purchase the records of particular performers whom they had heard of but shied away from the unknown artists. Decades later, economists who studied the workings of the entertainment industry would identify the winner-take-all phenomenon that benefited a handful of performers. The famous become more famous, and the more famous, the richer. Everyone else faces starvation. This was the case at the turn of the twentieth century, too.

  The management of the Victor Talking Machine Company understood these basic market principles long before Edison absorbed them. Shortly after the company’s founding in 1901, Victor signed Enrico Caruso to an exclusive contract, paying him a royalty that was rumored to be 25 percent of the $2 retail price of a Caruso record. His estimated annual earnings from royalties in 1912 was $90,000, at a time when the second-most-popular singer only earned $25,000. The others whom Victor signed were notables, too: Farrar, Schumann-Heink, Galli-Curci, Ponselle, Tetrazzini, Melba, McCormack, Paderewski, Cortot, de Pachmann, Heifetz, Elman, Kreisler, Zimbalist, Toscanini, Stokowski, and Muck.

  At the same time Victor was writing checks for the leading talents of the day, Edison brought out his checkbook reluctantly and rarely. One exception was when in 1910 he signed the woman who way back on a wintry night in 1879 had visited his Menlo Park laboratory: Sarah Bernhardt.

  In the Edison Phonograph Monthly, the company’s internal trade organ, much was made of the difficulties that had had to be overcome in order to land an artist such as Bernhardt. She had had to be persuaded to discard her “professional aversion to exploiting her talent in this manner.” The monetary terms supposedly were not an issue (“Bernhardt is an extremely rich woman”). The sticking point was her concern that crude recording technology would leave posterity with a sound inferior to her voice. According to the company’s publicists, a demonstration of the phonograph persuaded her that Edison would produce “perfect Records.” The company urged dealers to write their local newspapers and reap free publicity: “No paper will refuse to publish the news, as everything that the Immortal Bernhardt does is eagerly seized upon by the press.”

  We do not know whether Bernhardt ruled out commercial considerations (she did endorsements for commercial products like a dentifrice for a fee, but she did draw the line when P. T. Barnum offered her $10,000 for the rights to display a medical curiosity: her amputated leg). We do know that Edison hated the negotiations with recording stars, which entailed monetary demands far in excess of what Edison considered reasonable. He complained that despite their talk about their love for their art, “it is money, and money only, that counts.” Even the large sums paid to the most famous failed to secure their loyalty. He grumbled that artists would bolt “for a little more money offered by companies whose strongest advertising point is a list of names.” When Edison read that Stravinsky had written “the tempo of America is greater than the rest of the world. It moves at a wonderfully swift pace,” Edison added in the margin: “Yes, with a metronome of money.”

  Edison convinced himself—without consulting others, in
typical fashion—that he could simply opt out of competition for stars. He tried a small-budget alternative, scouting undiscovered voices among local choirs in Orange and Newark. He wrote a correspondent in 1911, “I believe if you record Church Choir singers and Musical Club, Glee Club, etc., singers, that we shall be able to discover a lot of talent just suitable for the phonograph.” He was pleased to have found locally two tenors that “can beat any Opera tenor except Caruso.” Over time, Edison did add Anna Case, Sergei (“the Pounder”) Rachmaninoff, and a few others. But he permitted competitors to snatch up other talented performers, like Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Fanny Brice, and Al Jolson. The first record to sell 1 million copies was Vernon Dalhart’s hillbilly ditty, “The Prisoner’s Song.” Not surprisingly, it was a Victor recording, not an Edison.

  The fame of the performers whom Victor Talking Machine astutely signed did more than bolster record sales; it also added great luster to Victor’s brand. “Victrola” soon replaced “phonograph” as the generic term, a development that caused Edison considerable distress. His office would receive letters from confused customers who assumed that Edison had introduced the Victrola. In 1912, the chairwoman of the Immigrant Aid Department of the Council of Jewish Women wrote to ask Edison to donate a Victrola for placement on Ellis Island. It would offer a little cheer to the immigrant detainees awaiting processing—and in some cases deportation. In the margin of the letter, Edison drew a line near the reference to the Victrola and scribbled a note of irritation to his secretary: “Here is another of the innumerable instances where the public misunderstands.” He directed that the correspondent be referred to the Victor Company.

  Edison dealers grumbled among themselves, too. The Topeka agency, for example, complained in early 1915 to the one in Des Moines, “We have no artists of any note on the Edison.” It fell to Edison’s salespeople to explain their absence on the Edison label. A sales manual from this time laid out the company’s defense, which directed the public’s attention to “the great Wizard” who personally tested voice samples using techniques of his own devising and selected “those voices which are most worthy of Re-Creation by his new art.” Only the voice, not the reputation, mattered to the Wizard.