by David Baron
IN HIS FINAL TRANSIT, Watson gained a share of what he so desperately craved: immortal fame. News of his death engendered effusive headlines—“The Most Brilliant of American Astronomers Suddenly Cut Off,” declared a Chicago paper—while dignitaries from Madison escorted his body back to his alma mater in Ann Arbor, where it lay in state in a hall draped in black, under the watch of a student honor guard. The school held an august memorial service during which former colleagues, in rhapsodic eulogies, recalled Watson as “the brightest scientific ornament of the University” and remembered “with what delight we received the news the day after the eclipse, of the triumphant success of his search.” But the nagging questions about Watson’s claimed discovery of Vulcan persisted, and his underground observatory remained unfinished.
The University of Wisconsin soon named Watson’s successor—Edward Holden, from the U.S. Naval Observatory—and before he had even moved to Madison, Holden received a letter from C. H. F. Peters, as surly as ever despite his archrival’s demise. “One thing I would beg you most earnestly: do not sit in that subterranean hole, to watch until Vulcan passes,” Peters implored. “Not that I apprehend you might discover him, not out of selfish obstinacy in my opinion, I beg you,—but it might deadly ruin your health, and you better fill up the hole.” Holden did not fill up the hole. He completed the underground facility and tested it, searching in daylight for the Pleiades and other bright stars. If the observatory enabled him to view these celestial objects in a blue sky, he reasoned, then he had a chance of finding Vulcan (if, that is, it existed). Almost two years after Watson’s death, Holden finally announced his results. “No stars were seen at any time,” he reported. “I am satisfied, therefore, that there is no use in prosecuting this particular experiment further.” The subterranean observatory was then “abandoned as entirely useless,” as one Wisconsin newspaper reported.
It would take almost forty years more for the Vulcan story to reach its dramatic denouement. Astronomers continued to look for the ghost planet—albeit fruitlessly and with decreasing zeal—at total solar eclipses in 1883, 1887, 1889, 1893, 1900, 1901, 1905, and, yet again, in 1908. Then, in 1915, it seemed the mystery might have been solved by none other than Albert Einstein. His new general theory of relativity stated that gravity warped the very fabric of the universe, which meant that Newton’s law of gravitation broke down near massive objects like our sun. When Einstein applied his theory to the orbit of Mercury, his calculations perfectly described the planet’s peculiar motion. In other words, there was no longer any need to invoke the existence of Vulcan—indeed, the planet must not exist—if Einstein was right.
In 1919, Einstein’s abstruse theory was famously put to the test at yet another solar eclipse. Two teams of British astronomers, stationed astride the Atlantic—in the north of Brazil and off the west coast of Africa—took a series of photographs during five minutes of totality, then carefully studied the exposures to assess how the hidden sun had bent starlight, and thereby to determine whether this deflection matched general relativity’s predictions. It did, and with that, Einstein supplanted Newton, and, as a consequence, the mythical Vulcan was soon forgotten, discarded as a relic of obsolete science.
James Craig Watson, however, had ensured that he would not be forgotten. Thanks to his assorted business enterprises, he had amassed considerable wealth for a college professor, and after his death, when his will was read, it was revealed that he had left the bulk of his estate not to his wife or mother, but to the National Academy of Sciences. (“[W]hile it demonstrates his large love of science,” one newspaper commented, “[it] speaks poorly for his humanity.”) Watson bequeathed the money to create a perpetual fund for two purposes: to continually track his asteroids so they should never be lost in the heavens, and to establish an astronomy prize to be awarded from time to time. It would be known as the James Craig Watson Medal, and it would bear his likeness in gold, so that long after his mortal remains had been buried at Ann Arbor’s Forest Hill Cemetery, his ego would endure.
CHAPTER 19
SHADOW AND LIGHT
SEPTEMBER 1878–OCTOBER 1931
EDISON’S LIFE TOOK A VERY DIFFERENT COURSE FROM THAT of James Craig Watson’s in the years immediately after the eclipse. While the astronomer’s apparent coup in Wyoming eventually led to tragedy, the inventor’s exploits pushed him toward one of the most celebrated feats in the history of technology, for as soon as he returned from the eclipse expedition, Edison turned his attention to the problem of electric lighting. By the time Edison took up this challenge, other men—able competitors—had for years been exploring ways to convert electricity to illumination. Edison was, in fact, late to enter the game, and it was one he was far from certain to win.
In 1878, electric lights were already being used in limited settings. Arc lamps, which shine by means of a glaringly bright spark, had been installed in factories and warehouses, as well as outdoors—notably in Paris, where they glimmered along the cosmopolitan Avenue de l’Opéra. Bringing the light indoors for domestic use, however, required a softer radiance, akin to gaslight. The solution appeared to lie in incandescence, the heating of a thin element until it glowed, but incandescent lamps had so far proved impractical; they were expensive to operate and tended to fizzle out quickly. Solving these problems became Edison’s frenzied preoccupation for several years, a complex drama involving scores of players and multiple acts that began when he returned from observing the total eclipse of the sun.
“My dear Edison,” George Barker wrote upon his arrival back in the East. “I am greatly indebted to you for the Western trip.” The physicist and the inventor had, during their long hours together—traveling to Wyoming, then California, then St. Louis—spoken at length about electric power and lighting, and Barker now urged Edison to join him on a scientific field trip. “I have arranged the trip to Ansonia that we spoke of, for Sunday next,” he wrote. The attraction in Ansonia, Connecticut, was a new dynamo that illuminated a factory with a bank of dazzling arc lights. When Edison beheld the installation, he was transfixed and “fairly gloated over it,” according to a New York journalist who had, unsurprisingly, been invited along. “[Edison] ran from the instrument to the lights, and from the lights back to the instrument. He sprawled over a table with the simplicity of a child, and made all kinds of calculations.” Edison saw not just the promise of electric lighting, but how a power grid, similar to the network of pipes that supplied gas for domestic lighting, could illuminate a whole city.
A week later, Edison convinced himself that he had also cracked the problem of how to make a practical incandescent bulb, and he announced as much to the press. “I have it now!” he told the New York Sun. “When the brilliancy and cheapness of the lights are made known to the public—which will be in a few weeks, or just as soon as I can thoroughly protect the process—illumination by carbureted hydrogen gas will be discarded.” The public response was immediate. Gas company stocks plunged. Wealthy investors hounded Edison, eager to get in on the ground floor. Before long, the Edison Electric Light Company had been incorporated with a capital stock of $300,000, and Edison was expanding his workshop to bring the new lamp to fruition.
There was, however, a problem: Edison had made his pronouncement based on sheer self-confidence. It was the same modus operandi he had employed over the summer with the aerophone, phonomotor, and tasimeter—dream up an idea, proclaim it a reality, and only then figure out how to make it work. “When do you expect to have the invention completed, Mr. Edison?” he was asked in October 1878, a month after he announced his breakthrough in electric lighting. “The substance of it is all right now,” Edison replied confidently, “but there are the usual little details that must be attended to before it goes to the public.” In truth, those “little details” were everything. Edison did not know how to make a practical lamp, a fact he soon came to realize.
At this time, the tasimeter, too, was revealing its impracticality. After returning from Wyoming, Edison received i
nquiries from amateur astronomers and professors alike who were eager to try the delicate heat measurer themselves. Uncharacteristically, Edison chose not to patent the invention—“it is of no interest to the people, but only to scientists,” he explained—and he permitted two companies, one in London and one in Philadelphia, to make and sell the instrument without paying him royalties. When scientists finally had a chance to test the device, however, they discovered its deficiencies. “The movements of the needle are very erratic,” one scientist complained. Another wrote that “the instrument has been generally regarded as peculiarly inconstant and unreliable in its indications.” Although the tasimeter could detect minute amounts of heat, it could not dependably quantify that heat. In other words, it did not really measure anything; its results were irreproducible. As a newspaper remarked after the eclipse, “Edison’s tasimeter was like the woman who recently cut off her husband’s head because he found a fly in the butter—too sensitive by half.” Scientists tended to agree, and they soon lost interest in the tasimeter. Even Edison acknowledged years later that his eclipse experiment had been of no consequence. “My apparatus was entirely too sensitive,” he admitted, “and I got no results.”
ALTHOUGH EDISON’S TRIP TO Wyoming had been a bust scientifically, it had been a great success in another way—as a demonstration of his mastery of public relations. Edison had generated enthusiasm about the tasimeter even before he had built it, and he sustained that interest despite the invention’s failings. This was no small matter. Indeed, these same skills now proved critical to the success of his electric lamp. Having announced to the world that he had solved the problem of incandescent lighting—when he had not—and having raised money on that promise, Edison was in a fix. Weeks passed, then months, as he and his men worked incessantly. To create a viable lamp, they needed to find a filament (a term Edison coined in this context) that would glow when heated but would not melt or burn out quickly. To prevent the filament’s combustion, they had to devise new methods for creating a near-perfect vacuum inside the bulb.
Meanwhile, Edison designed other elements of the system in which his bulb would operate, including improved electric generators, an electric meter, and insulated underground wires that could safely distribute electricity to homes. Still, even a year after he claimed to have solved the problem of incandescent lighting, he had not created a workable bulb, and he was forced to delay, time and again, his promised demonstration of the invention. People began to wonder if the Wizard was a sham.
Edison’s relationship with the press now proved critical, for he needed to prevent the public and his investors from abandoning him. One tack he would soon take was to go into publishing himself; he would underwrite the launch of a weekly magazine, called Science, which would defend him in its editorials without ever mentioning his financial involvement. A more immediate concern, however, was the newspapers. Once again Edison relied on a key ally, his roommate in Rawlins, Edwin Marshall Fox of The New York Herald. “[K]eep yourself aloof and reserved,” Fox urged, advising Edison to be more discriminating in the reporters he talked to, and in what he said. “Every word that you utter for publication should be to accord with your reputation like thunderbolts.” The two men forged a mutually beneficial partnership. Edison fed Fox scoops and, occasionally, money: a $125 loan and a gift of eight shares in the Edison Electric Light Company, an obvious conflict of interest that worked in the inventor’s favor. In return, Fox wrote flattering profiles, and, toward the end of December 1879, after Edison had finally devised a workable bulb—using carbonized paper as a filament—it was Fox who broke the news in a lengthy feature headlined “The Great Inventor’s Triumph in Electric Illumination.” Fox called the light “a little globe of sunshine, a veritable Aladdin’s lamp.”
Scientists, however, were not convinced that the lamp was as magical as Fox portrayed. Would it prove cost-effective and durable enough for everyday use? How did it differ from incandescent lights being developed by competitors? Fueling the skepticism was the fact, now abundantly clear, that Edison had been stringing the public along for more than a year by telling what could generously be described as embellishments, more reasonably termed lies, about his progress on the invention. Some scientists who knew Edison well, who had been with him on the American frontier for the eclipse of 1878, came to disavow his membership in their fraternity. Britain’s Norman Lockyer, who after seeing Edison at work in Rawlins had praised the inventor as “no unwary experimenter,” now denounced his actions as exposing an “absolute incompatibility with a truly scientific spirit,” and added sharply, “Let scientific men once and for all repudiate these false and unwholesome displays of ignorance.” Henry Morton, who had perched with Edison on the Union Pacific cowcatcher and had privately expressed himself “under so many obligations to your kindness,” now became one of Edison’s severest critics. Morton called Edison’s electric light “a conspicuous failure, trumpeted as a wonderful success . . . nothing less than a fraud upon the public.” Even George Barker turned traitorous at one point, publicly praising one of Edison’s rivals for inventing “a lamp which surpasses, I believe, even Edison’s dreams.”
“Grif!” Edison shouted to his personal secretary, Stockton Griffin, on a day when the barrage of insults grew too much to bear. “When I am through with my light, when it is running all right in New York, I’m going to attend to these men,” Edison said, imagining his revenge. “I’ll build a monument with a base fifty feet wide. On this I’ll put the names of all of these so-called scientific men, together with what they have said of my light. The column shall be capped with an ass’s head, and this inscription, ‘But remember, my masters, that I am but an ass; though it be not written down yet, forget not that I am an ass.’ ” Edison then completed the mental picture. “At night,” he concluded, “I’ll have the thing lighted up with electric jets.”
EDISON’S CHANCE TO CONFUTE his critics arrived the following year, in the fall of 1881, when the world came to Paris to celebrate the dawn of a new age. On a triangle of land between the Champs-Élysées and the Seine, inside the gargantuan Palace of Industry, the International Exposition of Electricity was underway, showcasing myriad and novel uses for the mysterious force once caught by Franklin’s kite. There were electric lathes and clocks, electric hairbrushes and stove tops, an electric piano and an electric dumbwaiter. Edison’s team displayed its electrical wares upstairs in the eastern pavilion, in two opulent rooms with paintings on the walls and, on tables in the middle, his many newfangled contraptions, including the carbon telephone, the quadruplex telegraph, and the tasimeter, which still held interest for the public if not so much for astronomers.
The exposition’s real attraction, however, occurred at night, when the lights came on—hundreds of them. Arc lights blazed across the hall’s expanse, while mellow incandescent bulbs glowed in chandeliers and lanterns and globes. The lights represented the work of more than a dozen inventors, including Edison—who had by now switched to a more durable filament, Japanese bamboo—and in this way the Paris show provided a venue for the public to compare rival systems of illumination side by side. “Surely the game of ‘throwing light’ could hardly be played with a finer company of contestants or on a fairer field,” remarked the New-York Tribune.
L’EXPOSITION DE M. EDISON PARIS. — L’EXPOSITION INTERNATIONALE D’ÉLECTRICITÉ AU PALAIS DE L’INDUSTRIE
This was, indeed, a contest. Like Philadelphia’s Centennial, Paris’s exposition had impaneled a jury of scientists to bestow medals based on an array of criteria. “In the matter of the diminutive incandescent light alone,” The Cleveland Leader reported, “it will be necessary to determine as to its intensity, steadiness, and color; the number of lights in a series; the tendency to become extinguished; the motive power per candle, distance of generator, thickness of wire, and most important, the cost for power.”
The jury weighed and deliberated, and on October 21, 1881, distinguished guests crowded Paris’s Conservatory of Music to he
ar who would receive the awards. It was a grand ceremony, laden with speeches and a choir’s performance that “filled the hall with anthems of success for the exposition and for the future of electricity.” Edison, however, was not there to learn the results. He was an ocean away, already working to commercialize his invention—tending to his new lamp factory in New Jersey and constructing a power network in New York that would soon electrify Manhattan’s financial district. The news from Paris arrived by wire.
“Accept my congratulations,” read the message from a judge. “You have distanced all competitors and obtained a diploma of honor, the highest award given in the exhibition.” Edison’s lamp had prevailed. “No person in any class in which you were an exhibitor received a like award,” the cable concluded. It was signed: “George F. Barker.”
IN THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED, as his public acclaim and wealth continued to grow, Edison reconciled with America’s scientific elite, if somewhat tepidly at times. In 1889, Henry Morton acknowledged of the electric light: “It is to Mr. T. A. Edison, without doubt, that we owe many of the simplifications and modifications which . . . have extended its range of use and its usefulness to a remarkable degree.” George Barker, again one of Edison’s staunchest allies, in 1908 pressed to have his friend elected to the elite National Academy of Sciences. (The academy would induct Edison, but not until 1927.) Yet Edison did not call himself a scientist in those later years. He came to realize that he and the academics differed fundamentally. They were in the business of discovering reality; he aimed to create it.
In a bigger way, Edison reflected—and helped define—what it meant to be American. Like the young country that had forced its way across a continent to build cities and railroads, and then emerged as a global power at astonishing speed, the inventor evinced an unwillingness to be held back by the past and what others said was impossible. He envisioned a bright future, and he pushed all obstacles aside to reach it.