by David Baron
Like Barnum, Edison evinced an innate talent for self-promotion, and he too was in show business. Although the phonograph held potential practical value (Edison anticipated its eventual use in recording audio books and teaching languages), it was for the moment a toy, an oddity. The recently incorporated Edison Speaking Phonograph Company saw its best chance for making money through entertainment. It contracted the services of showmen to demonstrate the talking machine before audiences from Philadelphia, Washington, and Atlanta to Indianapolis, Toledo, and Oshkosh. When the phonograph came to town, newspapers listed it under “amusements”; in Chicago, it was up against a show advertised simply as MIDGETS! “[T]he midgets or dwarfs draw $1000°° houses while the Phonograph draws $50°°,” Edison’s local exhibitor complained. The business needed promotion. Barnum expressed interest in partnering with Edison, but Edison’s manager of phonograph exhibitions, James Redpath—who had made his name as lecture agent for such venerable orators as Frederick Douglass and Henry Ward Beecher—strongly and wisely objected. “It degrades the machine into the rank of humbugs for men like Barnum to have any thing to do with it,” he cautioned. The way to pitch the phonograph, it seemed, was to stress its genuineness, and that meant selling the authentic genius behind it.
In popular entertainment, a niche existed for authenticity. A common genre on stage was the frontier drama—the predecessor of the Hollywood Western—which featured Indians, outlaws, knife fights, horses, gun smoke, clichéd dialogue, and wooden acting. What elevated these plays from mere trifles was the presence, on occasion, of actual frontier celebrities. Two of the most prominent were William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his friend John B. “Texas Jack” Omohundro, charismatic army scouts and hunting guides who traveled the West when not on tour in eastern theatres. In June 1878, while the phonograph was on exhibition in Boston, Texas Jack opened across town in a mawkish melodrama called The Trapper’s Daughter; or, Perils of the Frontier. As one critic remarked, “There is much absurdity in the action as well as in the drama itself, but there is some satisfaction in seeing bona fide heroes instead of mock personages on the stage.” Yet Texas Jack’s authentic heroism had recently dimmed. The previous summer, while guiding English hunters on a tour of Yellowstone, he had bragged to the press of a dangerous encounter with hostile Indians. “I received a shot in my stirrup, exchanged shots with them, and returned to my party,” he telegraphed The New York Herald. But the Englishmen who had hired him soon told the papers a different tale—that their guide was a coward who had gotten them lost in the wilds. A witness to the supposed encounter with Indians claimed that it was Jack himself who had shot the hole through his stirrup. “Instead of being termed ‘Texas Jack, the well known scout,’ ” the man wrote in a letter to the editor, “it should be ‘Texas Jack, the blowhard.’ ” Such was the danger of basing one’s celebrity on a claim of authenticity. Critics might try to expose you as a fraud.
TEXAS JACK.
Edison seemed determined to avoid that risk. He and his promoters, investors, agents, and partners worked relentlessly to keep the newspapers on their side. Edison flattered and befriended journalists, granting the more obsequious ones liberal access to his lab. In late May, his phonograph exhibitor in Boston arranged a press junket that brought a half dozen reporters to Menlo Park. They were given the run of the place. They could leaf through the library, play with the phonomotor, tour the machine shop, and peer through Edison’s borrowed telescope to gaze at the cables rising on the Brooklyn Bridge. To the delight of his visitors, Edison demonstrated his telephone and phonograph and sent each guest home with a souvenir: his autograph elegantly written with the electric pen. The resultant gushing of praise in the Boston papers must have consumed gallons of ink. “ONE OF THE CURIOUS THINGS about the visit was the utter lack of any indication that Mr. Edison felt himself to be a great man,” read a typical comment, in the Boston Herald. “He chatted about his inventions with as great a degree of freedom from anything like egotism as it is possible to imagine.” Edison came across as an approachable genius, humble both in demeanor and in origins, a seductive character in an America that revered the upwardly mobile self-made man.
THERE WAS, THOUGH, FAR more Barnum in Edison than Edison let on. He was an unflagging salesman who, whether out of naïve enthusiasm or strategic wiles, effortlessly embellished reality, exaggerating the progress of his work and downplaying obstacles. When he spoke of his latest inventions—the aerophone, telephonoscope, phonomotor—he portrayed them as successful machines even as they remained mere concepts and prototypes. This was true of the tasimeter. “Well, is it perfected yet?” a reporter asked in early June. “It has not got its fine clothes on yet. That’s all,” Edison replied.
In reality, the tasimeter remained naked. All he had built was the device’s central component, which he strung together with other parts on his laboratory bench top to demonstrate the basic principle. As a scientific instrument, it remained far from practical. Yet when astronomers read Edison’s earnest comments in the papers, they were eager to try it. Samuel Langley, who had encouraged Edison to create the tasimeter in the first place, was making plans to observe the solar eclipse from Colorado. He hoped to measure how much energy was given off by the sun’s corona, which could help reveal the true nature of that mysterious halo. “I expect to go in the beginning of July,” Langley wrote Edison in late June. “[I]f the tasimeter arrived this month, I might perhaps be able to put it to practical trial at once in Eclipse work.” Other scientists—one from Chicago and a duo from Princeton—also expressed interest in using the tasimeter during the eclipse.
The much-touted invention, however, remained an unproven work in progress. Edison had said that the tasimeter could measure one millionth of a degree Fahrenheit and could detect the heat of a distant star, yet he had provided no evidence to back up either claim. And if the device was anywhere near that sensitive, how would he shield it from extraneous temperature swings? The slightest breeze, even the body heat of the scientist using it, might throw off any meaningful measurements.
Having staked his reputation on a device that did not really exist, Edison now scrambled to bring that device into being. He reconceived the tasimeter’s design and had his workmen build this new version. It was small and squat, easily held in one hand. A heavy brass casing surrounded the essential element—the strip of hard rubber that expanded with heat—shielding it from the outside world, except in one direction, where a metal cone projected. The cone looked like the bell of a trumpet, but rather than letting sound out, it funneled heat radiation in. Aim the device through a telescope at a star or the sun’s corona, and it would measure the minuscule radiant heat received. At least that was the concept.
The Tasimeter.
Edison, however, had little time to experiment with his new tasimeter; he faced a constellation of other obligations. He was busily improving his phonograph and telephone. He had become mired in a nasty public spat with an inventor in London whose new device for amplifying sound, called a microphone, worked on the same principle as Edison’s carbon telephone. (Edison accused the man, David Hughes, of “stealing” his invention.) Every day brought a flood of letters from admirers and beggars seeking money, employment, cures for chronic pain and for deafness. And then there were the visitors, many uninvited and some by the trainload, who swarmed Edison’s laboratory as if taking in an amusement park. “Mr. Edison says that the bores are coming upon him so thickly,” wrote the New York Sun, “that one of his earliest inventions in the future must be something by which he shall be protected from their disastrous inroads.” He later wished for something else to keep the crowds away. “I have prayed for an earthquake,” he said.
It was all getting to be a bit much, even for the seemingly unstoppable Edison. “I am pretty badly used up just now—tired out,” he admitted in mid-June, and then fell sick. Newspapers reported that he was suffering from nervous prostration. As one put it, “Edison is laid up for repairs.” Concerned friends encouraged
him to escape the stress of the laboratory. They invited him to the White Mountains, the Great Lakes, the Atlantic shore. Then came a more alluring invitation.
GEORGE BARKER, EDISON’S FRIEND from the University of Pennsylvania, had never witnessed a total solar eclipse, and he was eager to do so. In April, he had approached Simon Newcomb to see if he might secure a slot on a government expedition to the West, assuming Congress provided funding. But soon after Congress did provide funding, all of the slots were taken. “I have heard nothing from you about the eclipse, and am sorry to find you are not in the list made up at the [Naval] observatory,” Newcomb wrote to Barker in early June. Meanwhile, Barker made other plans.
HENRY DRAPER.
Henry Draper, the New York University professor with whom Barker had observed the transit of Mercury, was assembling a small private eclipse expedition. Although trained as a physician and employed as a chemistry professor, Draper was most passionate about astronomy, especially celestial photography. Even while serving as a young Civil War doctor at the Union garrison in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), which would soon fall ignominiously into Confederate hands, Draper had found his mind drifting toward the heavens. “This morning I was up in time to see Venus quite distinctly,” he wrote his brother in 1862. “She looks splendidly and would photograph easily.” Draper’s wife, Anna, a striking redhead, shared her husband’s passion for astronomy and inherited a fortune from her father, which enabled the couple to equip an impressive private laboratory in Manhattan as well as their observatory in the country. Henry Draper was acquainted with Edison and, while corresponding with him on scientific matters the previous summer, had urged Edison to visit. “I will try and call at your place and see how you peek at the almighty through a keyhole,” Edison replied.
Draper’s nascent eclipse party included yet another friend of Edison’s. Henry Morton was president of the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, and had organized a government-sponsored eclipse expedition to Iowa in 1869. In 1875, Morton had provided Edison with equipment for his etheric force experiments, and Edison had recently returned the favor by providing Morton with a phonograph. “I am under so many obligations to your kindness,” Morton wrote, “that I hardly know how to express my appreciation of your amiability in this relation.”
George Barker was then invited to join Draper’s eclipse expedition, and the Pennsylvania professor in turn extended an invitation to Edison. It was just what Edison needed: a chance to escape the stress of Menlo Park, far from the parade of curious fans and profit seekers. The expedition also offered Edison another opportunity to put the etheric-force debacle behind him, by spending time in the company of eminent scientists and showing himself to be one of them. In fact, he could bring his tasimeter to conduct his own experiments on the eclipsed sun. “Have seen Professor Barker,” Edison wrote to Henry Draper, “and arranged to accompany you as proposed.”
The New York Herald broke the news in late June. “The latest marvel from Menlo Park is the ‘tasimeter,’ ” the paper reported. “It is to be used in the scientific experiments to be made by astronomers from all parts of the world at Denver, Col., next month during the total eclipse of the sun, visible at that place. Professor Edison starts for that State on the 8th of July, accompanied by Professors Draper, Barker and other scientists from this section of the country.” (Actually, by this point, Draper had shifted his expedition’s destination from Colorado—his original plan—to Wyoming, after Simon Newcomb advised that the odds of clear skies were more favorable farther north.)
The article in the Herald, one of the nation’s most influential newspapers, generated widespread coverage, both excited and fanciful. “Edison is coming West,” gushed the San Francisco Chronicle. “He will . . . experiment on the moon with his moonograph.” “EDISON, the inventor, of phonograph fame, is coming to Colorado ostensibly to witness the eclipse next month, but really with a view to try and connect the other planets with the earth by a telephone wire,” mused the Rocky Mountain News. More seriously, Philadelphia’s Press predicted that Edison’s decision to go west would do no less than shift the nation’s attention. “Now that Mr. Edison has joined the astronomical party to observe the solar eclipse,” the paper editorialized, “the event will suddenly be invested with an importance not before dreamed of by the general public. It will at once be concluded that where Edison is, some great discovery will be made.”
Indeed, the American people were by now following the inventor’s exploits with the same passion they exhibited in devouring serial novels—desperate each month to read the next installment—and there was no chance the public would miss the coming chapter in the adventures of Thomas Edison. An ex-telegrapher friend of Edison’s, Edwin Marshall Fox, worked as a journalist for The New York Herald. It is not clear who proposed the idea, but a plan was hatched for Fox to join the expedition. He would meet up with the scientists once they settled themselves in the West, then send dispatches back to New York. Edison would travel with his own eclipse correspondent.
THE NIGHT BEFORE HE LEFT Menlo Park, Edison once again demonstrated his unrepentant eagerness to please the press. The evening, mercifully mild after a long hot spell, found the inventor reposed in an armchair on the upper floor of his laboratory while an artist, at the request of a magazine, cast his head in plaster. Edison’s face disappeared within a heavy, solid block. As the plaster set, he breathed through paper tubes inserted in his nostrils, unable to see or talk. His nephew, who was supporting Edison by the shoulders, felt his uncle grab for his hand. Edison tapped on his palm. It was Morse code. “If I should fall back,” Edison wrote, “it will break my damn neck.” Removing the plaster proved yet another ordeal. It carried away clumps of hair, leaving the normally unkempt inventor even more disheveled than usual.
It was in this condition that, on Saturday, July 13—five days later than the originally announced departure date—Edison said goodbye to his children and pregnant wife, then headed toward New York to meet his traveling companions. The others—Henry and Anna Draper, George Barker, and Henry Morton—had already shipped nearly a ton of scientific equipment to Wyoming. Edison carried his handheld tasimeter. He had continued to modify its design until two days earlier. With no time to test the device and with the world watching, he did not know if it would work.
Although Edison possessed neither academic credentials nor experience with eclipses, the young inventor attracted the lion’s share of press attention. While waiting with his party for the Pacific Express train at the Pennsylvania Railroad depot, he was approached by a reporter who inquired about the journey ahead. Edison could barely contain his excitement. “If the sun’s corona has any heat of its own or possesses any heat-reflecting power the tasimeter will measure it accurately,” Edison said. “I can hardly wait until I get there. This is the first vacation I have had in a long time, and I mean to enjoy it.”
PART THREE
1878
CHAPTER 10
AMONG THE TRIBES OF UNCIVILIZATION
JULY 1878—
Wyoming Territory
IN THE ARID TERRAIN OF SOUTHERN WYOMING, IN A BLEACHED landscape of sage and greasewood, the Continental Divide divides, forming a high basin from which water cannot escape except by evaporating. The region is alkali desert, home to horned toads and rattlesnakes and exceedingly few people. “The eye has no joy, the lips no comfort,” a visitor wrote in the 1860s. “[T]he sun burns by day, the cold chills at night; the fine, impalpable, poisonous dust chokes and chafes and chaps you everywhere.” Travelers in the nineteenth century generally traversed this wasteland as quickly as possible; it was a hell to be endured, not a destination. But for scientists heading west to view the eclipse of 1878, this was a garden spot, because here, in Wyoming’s Great Divide Basin, lay the intersection of two long ribbons across the earth: the transcontinental railroad and the path of totality.
“I arrived here about 12.30 P.M. Laramie time,” an assistant astronomer from the U.S.
Naval Observatory, A. N. Skinner, wrote to Washington from a remote rail stop on the Union Pacific. “Creston Station is in the midst of an immense elevated plain,” he reported. “The only inhabitants here are Station Master who is a telegraph operator[,] his wife and a few Chinamen.” A water tank stood beside the station. Opposite, on a side track, sat the railroad postal car that had ferried telescopes and other scientific equipment from the East. Discarded tin cans and the skull of a cow or buffalo littered the sand. A small graveyard lay nearby. “It is as still as death here,” Skinner wrote. “If I had nothing to do I should find it unendurable.”
There was much to do, however. Just fifteen days remained before the eclipse, and the junior astronomer was part of an advance team, sent to various sites in Wyoming and Colorado, charged with setting up camp before the arrival of the other, more senior scientists. A local carpenter was already on his way to Creston with a load of lumber to erect a makeshift observatory; its plank sides would shelter the telescopes from the wind, while its canvas roof would allow quick access to the heavens. The U.S. military stood ready to help, too. The army’s commander, General William Tecumseh Sherman, renowned in the North but despised in the South for his Civil War rampage through Georgia, ordered logistical help to be provided by Fort Fred Steele, a frontier post that sat along the railroad east of Creston. The fort dispatched a four-mule wagon—it carried a mess tent, a cooking tent, and soldiers to help run the eclipse camp—and would later send fresh supplies of ice and hay.
BY MID-JULY, an impressive assemblage of scientific brainpower never before seen in this remote western expanse was headed toward Creston and other points along the path of totality. Astronomers boarded trains at Boston, Providence, New York, Baltimore, and Washington, and farther inland at Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago, for the long trek by rail. “The ride to Harrisburg was excessively disagreeable, being hot, dusty, and smoky,” a student from Johns Hopkins complained at the start of his journey to Colorado. Another young astronomer, an associate of Simon Newcomb’s, found Pittsburgh “simply dreadful—I’ve never seen any description of it that I can now pronounce overdrawn—dark, dusty, down in a gully, everything full of smoke & coal-black, & the air of the entire place scandalously vile with coal gas—which almost suffocated me.” But soon the landscape opened up—“fields & fields of corn, growing luxuriantly, comprising hundreds of acres, extending nearly as far as the eye can reach.”