Ford apparently believed that the life-changing impression left upon him by Edison eleven years earlier had been equally memorable to Edison. He may also have felt a comfortable familiarity because he had recently been contacted by Edison’s son William, now twenty-nine years old, who was attempting to sell Ford Motor Company spark plugs of his own design (Will, who had briefly attended Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School and was determined to succeed on his own, had not kept his father informed about his activities).
If Edison remembered the earlier encounter with Ford, his response to Ford’s simple request for a photograph seems strange: Edison instructed his secretary not to respond. This was likely prompted by a spasm of competitiveness: Ford was one of many internal-combustion-engine-equipped car manufacturers that competed with the electric car equipped with Edison’s newly developed alkaline battery. Or Edison’s rebuff may have been the reaction of a famous person irritated by the presumptuous familiarity of an utter stranger whom he had no memory of ever meeting.
The episode is of interest because it occurred when Henry Ford was not yet a household name and was merely one of more than a hundred automobile manufacturers. The next year, he introduced the Model T, his fame swiftly reached the ethereal altitude of Edison’s, and his business success far exceeded that of the older man’s. This change in relative status made possible a friendship, not because Edison sought the company of the famous and successful—he did not seek the company of anyone—but because it removed the basis of Edison’s fear that a business acquaintance sought to move close for ulterior reasons. As for celebrity, the two men now shared personal knowledge of the tribulations that came with fame.
Such was Edison’s inherently solitary nature, however, that he would not likely have been willing to meet Ford in person again had it not been for the behind-the-scenes arrangements of William Bee, the sales manager at the Edison Storage Battery Company. In April 1911, Bee persuaded Edison to make amends for ignoring Ford’s earlier request for a photograph and prepare one inscribed with a carefully measured compliment: “To Henry Ford. One of a group of men who have helped to make U.S.A. the most progressive nation in the World.” Bee sent it off to Ford with a cover letter claiming that “Mr. Edison was only too glad to send you his photograph.” At the same time, Bee sent through an intermediary a note inviting Ford to visit Edison at his laboratory. Ford accepted. That was the easy part for Bee. Persuading Edison to make himself available for Ford’s visit required months of unsuccessful efforts. Finally, after Bee had arranged for Ford to pay his visit in January 1912, Edison reluctantly acquiesced: “Guess I will be here on the 9th.”
Ford arrived in Orange eager to make a pitch to his hero: Would Edison be willing to design an electrical system—battery, generator, and starter—for the Model T? The car in its current incarnation had none. It was started with a hand crank, which was at best inconvenient to use, and when it kicked back, dangerous. Edison did not accept Ford’s offer immediately but was sufficiently intrigued to mull the proposition over and return with a counterproposal later in 1912. Would Ford be interested in financing the development work on Edison’s battery? His note to “Friend Ford” explained that he had self-financed his battery experiments with profits from other lines of business but these funds limited what he could do. Alternatively, “I could go to Wall St. and get more, but my experience over there is as sad as Chopin’s Funeral March. I keep away.”
No major business figure detested Wall Street as much as Thomas Edison—except Henry Ford. The two men had this in common. “Wall Street” was less a geographic place than a shorthand for grasping Jews. The two men had lots of things to say about Jews, Ford doing so publicly and Edison, privately. If Jews “are as wise as they claim to be,” Ford wrote in his autobiography, “they will labor to make Jews American, instead of labouring to make America Jewish.” Edison sent Ford clippings to add to his file on “The Jewish Question.” “Please read this—it’s very funny,” Edison added as an annotation to the text of a speech delivered to a convention of the National Builder’s Supply Association that he sent Ford. Edison helpfully highlighted with pencil the two paragraphs at the beginning, which were the speaker’s opening jokes. As a self-identified Irishman, the speaker, one Herbert N. Casson, claimed to speak for all Irish, lamenting their willingness to fight someone else’s war and then lose whatever it was they were supposed to have gained. “I have generally found that after the fight some Jew has got what we started out to get.” The audience’s laughter was transcribed along with the punch line.
The men’s anti-Semitism shaped their business plans. Henry Ford would not permit “Wall Street” to get hold of his revered Edison. He stepped forward to offer Edison forgivable loans, at 5 percent annual interest, to finance the development work on the battery. The loans were secured by future royalties that Edison’s laboratory would earn from batteries; Ford said Edison could expect sales to Ford Motor of $4 million a year. The package on offer had everything Edison could ever want: It paid homage to his expertise in electrical systems; it gave a new direction for his battery work, in case the electric car did not succeed commercially; and it provided complete autonomy, free of obligation to report to Wall Street financiers about his spending. Once staff members for Ford and Edison worked out legal and financial details, Edison signed off on the agreement in November 1912. The next month, the first slice of $150,000 arrived; the following March, another $100,000; and by the end of the year, Edison had borrowed a total of $700,000. More payments from Ford followed.
Edison did not abandon his previous ambitions to make a success of an electric car; he simply made Henry Ford his new partner. In January 1914, Ford announced that he planned within the year to begin manufacturing an electric car using a lightweight battery that Edison had been preparing for some time. Ford told reporters, “I think Mr. Edison is the greatest man in the world and I guess everyone does.” Ford, who had also just announced the adoption of the “Five-Dollar Day,” effectively doubling the wages of virtually all of his workers, was at this historical moment the single most influential businessperson in the country. The New York newspapers, however, had not realized it. When they reported on the plans for the Ford-Edison electric car, they mostly paid compliments to Edison. Ford was portrayed as the party in the transaction who was most in need (“Henry Ford Seeks Mr. Edison’s Aid.”).
Edison was not averse to the flattery, but more important, he responded to the opportunity to have a relationship with an equal, another technically inclined person who had been pushed into the strange land of the extremely famous. The two men brought their families together, too, intertwining personal and business ties. The Edisons visited the Fords at their home in Dearborn, Michigan; the Fords came down to Fort Myers, Florida, to share a winter vacation, discuss their mutual interest in gardening, and “motor” together in the Everglades area. Edison did not realize that the combination of the two families would increase a celebrity index exponentially greater than his alone, drawing reporters and curiosity seekers and unwanted attention to his remote winter hideaway. On the evening that the Fords arrived, two thousand townspeople came out to welcome them and ogle. Seeing reporters present, Edison is said to have complained, “There is only one Fort Myers, and now ninety million people are going to find out.”
It was fitting that Fort Myers would play a role in the broadening personal relationship between Edison and Ford. The last time that Edison had let down his natural guard and spent vacation time with a business colleague as he did with Ford was when he and Ezra Gilliland had bought twin plots in Fort Myers thirty years earlier. Gilliland had introduced Edison to his future wife, but the two men were not equals in the shared realm of the phonograph business. When Edison thought that Gilliland had taken pecuniary advantage of him, the relationship had ended acrimoniously. Since then, Edison had deliberately kept acquaintances from coming closer. “Mr. Edison has few friends,” Mina once observed. “Because of his work he has had to live a great deal by him
self and in himself—shut out from the social contacts open to most men.”
Now, in the company of Ford, someone much wealthier than he, Edison did not need to worry about behind-the-scenes machinations. He relaxed. Ford became his neighbor—just like Gilliland, though undoubtedly unaware of the earlier history—when Ford bought a plot of land for his winter vacation home adjoining Edison’s.
Except for vacations, the two men did not have many opportunities to spend time in person with each other, and they did not, as a rule, correspond with each other. If they needed to communicate, they relied upon their secretaries to relay messages. One exception, and a revealing one, is a letter that Ford wrote Edison in March 1914, after returning home following his first visit to Fort Myers. He maintained a formal tone when addressing Edison, sixteen years his senior—“My dear Mr. Edison,” he began. He and his wife wished to thank him for the enjoyable vacation they had had with the Edisons. No, that did not capture his feelings; this vacation was “in fact the most enjoyable one we have ever had.” With the thank-you out of the way, he added a little bit of small talk, one manufacturer addressing another.
Then Ford arrived at the primary reason for writing: to make a request. During the recent vacation, the two men happened to talk about the harmful effects of cigarette smoking. Ford recalled Edison’s remark that the damage it caused was incurable. Would Edison be kind enough to write a letter that explained the nature of the harm and why it was irreversible? With Edison’s permission, Ford planned to use the letter in his antismoking campaign among workers. In asking Edison to serve as a quotable authority on the subject, Ford reveals his understanding of how celebrity—his, Edison’s, anybody’s—confers, in the eyes of the not-famous, expertise on all manner of subjects. Edison could speak about the deleterious effects of smoking not because of a background in respiratory disease or epidemiology, but because he was Edison. If Ford’s fame alone could not persuade his employees to quit smoking, perhaps the combination with Edison’s would be persuasive.
Edison sent off the requested letter in his best handwriting. He did not pause to first have it proofread, so Ford had his secretary, Ernest Liebold, write Edison’s underling, William Bee, about the delicate matter of two misspelled words. “I know Mr. Edison would prefer to have it correct if given publicity,” Liebold wrote, sending along a sheet that Edison could use to recopy the letter. Edison complied without complaint.
The injurious agent in Cigarettes comes principally from the burning paper wrapper. The substance thereby formed is called “Acrolein.” It has a violent action on the nerve centers, producing degeneration of the cells of the brain, which is quite rapid among boys. Unlike most narcotics this degeneration is permanent and uncontrollable. I employ no person who smokes cigarettes. Yours, Thomas A. Edison
Edison had not, in fact, excluded smokers from his employee rolls. After the letter had been drafted, he hurriedly had signs posted at his plants: “Cigarettes Not Tolerated. They Dull The Brain.”
If Ford anticipated the firestorm of criticism from the tobacco interests that would surely follow, he did not warn Edison, who appears to have been completely unprepared. Edison was accustomed to having his own tobacco habits treated by the press as a subject of amusement, such as when he was vacationing in Florida and sent word to the laboratory in New Jersey that he needed a replenished supply of chewing tobacco from one of his employees, Red Kelly in Building 18, who “knows a good chew,” to be sent “in a hurry.” He did not have to answer questions from the press about his fondness of cigars. Reporters had listened respectfully when he criticized only one form of tobacco consumption, cigarette smoking, which happened to be the one form that he disliked. He explained, with the tone of a world-renowned expert addressing a lay audience, that poisonous cigarette papers dulled the mind, and that is why Mexicans, whom he had heard were heavy smokers, “as a race are not clear headed.”
Then, with the arrival of the controversy when Ford published Edison’s letter, the same press turned on Edison, treating his disquisitions about cigarettes derisively. A New York Times editorial, “An Inventor out of His Field,” wondered aloud about his lack of scientific authority on this subject. If, as Edison claimed, cigarettes dulled the mind, so, too, did a good dinner and a good sleep. Edison’s own habits were examined. Should not Edison consider the effects on the mind of “irregular meals and excessive hours of continuous work”?
Percival Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, led his industry’s counterattack with a devastatingly polite response to Edison’s letter. Hill publicly dared Edison to repeat his charges while naming in particular any of the brands of American Tobacco. Should he do so, Hill promised to initiate legal proceedings to obtain damages. Whatever sums Hill recovered, he would donate to charity. Edison elected not to accept the challenge.
Following Hill, James Zobian, the advertising representative of Philip Morris & Company, published in the New York newspapers full-page open letters addressed to Edison that were reprinted and quoted at length elsewhere. Zobian had sent cigarette papers used by Philip Morris to an independent laboratory and now brandished the certificates attesting to the lack of “any poisonous ingredients therein.” Granting that Edison had acquired his “prominence and fame” in an honest and deserving way, Zobian said, “When it comes to analytical chemistry, I believe Mr. Edison himself will admit that supremacy in that branch of science belongs to others!”
The last time Edison had been the subject of widespread criticism had been three years earlier, when he had casually announced that he planned to offer furniture made of concrete, providing a full line to complement the concrete cabinet for his phonograph that he had already made. Claiming that the surface could be stained to resemble any kind of wood desired, he said his concrete furniture would “make it possible for the laboring man to put furniture in his home more artistic and more durable than is now to be found in the most palatial residences in Paris.”
At least the hoots that followed were brought upon Edison entirely by his own misconceived plans. Some commentators were not even certain that Edison was serious (he was). Cartoonists had no difficulty extracting humor from Edison’s announcement (sample: Edison tells two moving men straining under a concrete sofa, “Don’t be afraid of hurting it, boys, but look out for your feet”).
The cartoons and jokes soon passed, and the controversy came and went without challenging Edison’s authority as a technical expert. The cigarette flap, however, was hurtful because his technical expertise was directly questioned—his critics paid no attention to his claims that his extensive research on paper filaments for the lightbulb had acquainted him with the poisonous substances in cigarettes. And the criticism was harder to bear because the controversy had been incited by someone else, and Edison had been pulled in without anticipating what would follow. He would never repeat the mistake of publicly following Ford into new campaigns and controversy.
Once past the cigarettes episode, Edison derived nothing but benefits from his association with Henry Ford. Edison and his family members were the recipients of gifts personally selected by Ford. Some were expensive: Tom and Mina Edison received so many Ford cars that it is not possible to tally exactly how many. Other gifts showed great expenditure of that most scarce resource, Ford’s attention. Edison would receive from him a birthday telegram; Mina, a birdhouse. The adult children were not neglected, either. In 1914, thirty-eight-year-old Tom Edison Jr., now living on a farm his father had bought for him in Burlington, New Jersey, and tinkering with carburetors, received from Henry Ford a Model T engine that he had requested for experimenting, followed by a new car. Twenty-four-year-old Charles Edison received one of Ford’s prized rifles in a custom-built case. When Theodore Edison, the youngest of Edison’s six children, turned sixteen in 1914, he found a new car waiting for him, sent by Ford.
On one occasion, in 1916, when Ford heard from his dealer in Fort Myers that Edison had just paid for a new Ford touring car to be readied for delive
ry the next day, Ford had the dealer present the car to Edison with Ford’s compliments and a refund of the purchase price. (The dealer turned out to be quite vexed when he learned afterward that no one in Henry Ford’s office had given thought to the commission he lost because of the gift; much correspondence went back and forth between Michigan and Florida about this single transaction.)
The gifts flowed almost totally in one direction, from Ford’s family to Edison’s. It was not in Edison’s nature to come up with gift ideas, but he was responsive if a suggestion was placed in front of him. When Ford first visited Fort Myers, he noticed a steam engine on the property that Edison had decommissioned upon the arrival of a gas engine. When he returned to Michigan, he wrote Edison explaining that it had sentimental value to him. Could he purchase it for the price Edison had paid for his new engine? Edison instructed his secretary to ship it to Ford as a present.
It was business that engaged Edison more than personal matters, and he found a number of Edison products to sell to Ford Motor Company that had nothing to do with automotive electrical systems. Movies made with Edison equipment were to be used to train new hands on the Ford assembly line, at least according to Henry Ford in January 1914, speaking without having tried using the medium for this purpose. Edison dictating machines were installed in Ford shops and were utterly useless (they lacked sufficient volume to be audible). Cement made by the Edison Portland Cement Company would be the sole source in all construction at Ford Motor Company. Ford Motor’s chief architect could not believe initially that Henry Ford would have agreed to an exclusive arrangement with a single supplier and had to be sternly instructed by Ford’s personal secretary to follow Ford’s wishes in the matter.
The Wizard of Menlo Park Page 27