Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Copyright © 2019 by the Estate of Edmund Morris

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Hardback ISBN 9780812993110

  Ebook ISBN 9780679644651

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Simon M. Sullivan, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Eric Baker

  Cover photograph: Getty Images/Library of Congress

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue · 1931

  Part One | Botany · 1920–1929

  Part Two | Defense · 1910–1919

  Part Three | Chemistry · 1900–1909

  Part Four | Magnetism · 1890–1899

  Part Five | Light · 1880–1889

  Part Six | Sound · 1870–1879

  Part Seven | Telegraphy · 1860–1869

  Part Eight | Natural Philosophy · 1847–1859

  Epilogue · 1931

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Select Bibliography

  Notes

  Illustration Credits

  By Edmund Morris

  About the Author

  I do not find it so easy to talk about my Father….I have yet to find a biography of him that satisfies me as a picture of the whole man. The emphasis is so much on what he did that few people know what he was.

  I have been astonished at times to find the general impression is that he was a sort of superhuman lightning rod, pulling down inventions from heaven at will—a miraculous robot who never got tired—a disembodied brain whose success, bringing fabulous riches, was effortless and assured, in spite of a background of abject poverty, almost total lack of education, and no personal life at all. I may say that the picture is not quite accurate.

  —MADELEINE EDISON SLOANE

  PROLOGUE

  1931

  TOWARD THE END, as at the beginning, he lived only on milk.

  When he turned eighty-four in February, and pretended to be able to hear the congratulations of the townspeople of Fort Myers, and let twenty schoolgirls in white dresses escort him under the palms to the dedication of a new bridge in his name, and shook his head at being called a “genius” by the governor of Florida, and gave a feeble whoop as he untied the green-and-orange ribbon, and retreated with waves and smiles to the riverside estate he and Mina co-owned with the Henry Fords, he declined a slice of double-iced birthday cake and instead drank the fourth of the seven pints of milk, warmed to nursing temperature, that daily soothed his abdominal pain.1

  From earliest youth he had half-starved himself, faithful to the dictum of the temperance philosopher Luigi Cornaro (1467–1566) that a man should rise from the table hungry. It was not always a matter of choice. At times during his teenage years as a gypsy telegrapher, he had wandered the streets of strange cities, unable to afford a cheekful of tobacco. But even in early middle age, while earning big money and enabling two successive wives to fatten on haute cuisine, he would eat no more than six ounces a meal—generally only four—and drink nothing except milk and flavored water. “A man can’t think clearly when he’s tanking up.” His one indulgence was cheap Corona cigars, which he smoked, or rather chewed, by the boxful and liked not for their price but for their strong, coarse taste.2 These “long-toms” jazzed his already hyperactive metabolism to the point that he could work fifty-four hours at a stretch. Until about two years ago, he had habitually run up flights of stairs, and could swing a spry leg over his desk. Long before that, his stomach had shrunk so much that anything more than a lamb chop or a couple of fishballs made him feel sluggish. At seventy-seven he reduced his daily diet to a slice of toast, a tablespoonful of porridge, another of spinach, a sardine, and four Uneeda biscuits, washed down with pint after pint of milk. At eighty-one he switched to milk entirely, except for a quarter of an orange at either end of the day. Now he was afflicted by a toxic mix of renal failure and diabetes. Famously indestructible, having near-blinded himself with the study of incandescence, suffered countless acid burns and electrical shocks, bombarded his arms and face with roentgens, and breathed enough mine dust to give a lesser man pneumoconiosis, he seemed at last to be in final decline—along with the national economy, about $15 billion of which derived from his inventions.3

  “My message to you,” he advised his fellow citizens in a valedictory radio broadcast from his botanical library, “is to be courageous. I have lived a long time. I have seen history repeat itself time and again. I have seen many depressions in business. Always America has come back stronger and more prosperous.”4

  Before returning home at winter’s end to New Jersey, he prayed to some power other than God (whose existence he denied) to be spared long enough to finish his current round of botanical experiments. “Give me five more years, and the United States will have a rubber crop that can be utilized in twelve months’ time.”5

  It was clear, however, when he arrived at the station in Newark, that he would not see another spring. He was frail and stooped under his thick fall of white hair, and needed help to walk. Three of his six children were on hand to greet him. Outside, a warm thunderstorm was pounding down. Mina threw a protective rug over her husband’s shoulders as he tottered toward a waiting automobile for the short drive to West Orange.6

  Next morning, employees at his vast laboratory complex up Main Street waited for the Old Man—as he had been known since his twenties—to punch in early as usual. But for the rest of June and all of July, he uncharacteristically remained at Glenmont, his mansion in the gated confines of Llewellyn Park. On the first day of August he appeared at the front door, dressed for a country excursion, only to collapse and be carried upstairs to bed. Three physicians arrived in a hurry, one of them by chartered plane. That night they announced that their patient was “in failing health,” afflicted by chronic nephritis on top of his metabolic disorder. Aware that Wall Street would react negatively to this news, they added, “The diabetic condition now is under control, and the kidney condition seems improved.”7

  * * *

  —

  NEWSROOMS AROUND THE world hastened to update the obituary of Thomas Alva Edison. They had been doing so for fifty-three years, ever since his self-proclaimed greatest invention, the phonograph, won him overnight fame.8 Then and now, journalists marveled that such an acoustic revolution, adding a whole new dimension to human memory, could have been accomplished by a man half deaf in one ear and wholly deaf in the other.

  Even the most text-heavy periodicals lacked enough column inches to summarize the one thousand and ninety-three machines, systems, processes, and phenomena patented by Edison.* (Not to mention an invention impossible to protect, yet as seminal as any—his establishment of history’s first industrial research and development facility, at Menlo Park, New Jersey.) Although his disability was progressive—“I haven’t heard a bird sing since I was twelve years old”9—he had invented two hundred and fifty sonic devices: diaphragms of varnished silk, mica, copper foil, or thin French glass, flexing in semifluid gaskets; dolls that talked and sang; a carbon telephone transmitter; paraphenylene cylinders of extraordinary fidelity; duplicators that molded and smoothed and swaged; a pointer-polisher for diamond splints; a centrifugal speed governor for disk players; a miniature loudspeaker utilizing a quartz cylinder and ultraviolet
light; a dictating machine; audio mail; a violin amplifier; an acoustic clock; a radio-telephone receiver; a device that enabled him to listen to the eruptions of sunspots; a recording horn so long it had to be buttressed between two buildings; bone earbuds that could be shared by two or more listeners, and a voice-activated flywheel.

  He was even more legendary for his creation of the long-burning incandescent lightbulb, accompanied by two hundred and sixty-three other patents in illumination technology. That number could be increased by one, had he not made his X-ray fluoroscope available without license to all medical practitioners. Most spectacularly, Edison had designed, manufactured, powered, and built the world’s first incandescent electric lighting system. At the flick of a switch, one September evening in 1882, he had transformed the First District of lower Manhattan from a dimly gaslit warren into a great spread of glowing jewels.

  Out of his teeming brain and ever-mobile hands (the rest of him rigid with concentration, as he hunched over his tools and flasks) came the universal stock ticker, the electric meter, the jumbo dynamo, the alkaline reversible battery, the miner’s safety lamp, slick candy wrappers, a cream for facial neuralgia, a submarine blinding device, a night telescope, an electrographic vote recorder, a rotor-lift flying machine, a sensor capable of registering the heat of starlight, fruit preservers, machines that drew wire and plated glass and addressed mail, a metallic flake maker, a method of extracting gold from sulfide ore, an electric cigar lighter, a cable hoist for inclined-plane cars, a self-starter for combustion engines, microthin foil rollers, a sap extractor, a calcining furnace, a fabric waterguard, an electric pen, a sound-operated horse clipper, a moving-sphere typewriter, gummed tape, the Kinetograph movie camera, the Kinetoscope projector, and moving pictures with sound and color. He built the world’s first film studio, the world’s biggest rock crusher, tornado-proof concrete houses, scores of power plants, and an electromagnetic railway complete with locomotive, trolleys, brakes, and turntable. He dreamed up a Goldbergian set of variations on the theme of telegraphy, including duplex, quadruplex, and octoplex devices that transmitted multiple messages simultaneously along a single wire, “grasshopper” signals that leaped from speeding trains, and receivers that chattered out facsimiles or turned dots and dashes into roman type. If he had not been so busy inventing other things in the early 1880s, he could have combined his discoveries of etheric sparking, thermionic emission, extended induction, and rectifying reception into the wireless technology of radio.

  His lifelong policy (adopted at age fourteen, when he wrote, printed, and published an onboard train newspaper) had been to create only what was practical and profitable. But in aspiring to be primarily an entrepreneur, with over a hundred start-up companies to his credit, he did not have to admit that his need to invent was as compulsive as lust. Each of his honeymoons had triggered a concurrent flood of technological ideas. On a single day, when he was forty and full of innovative fire, he had jotted down a hundred and twelve ideas for “new things,” among them a mechanical cotton picker, a snow compressor, an electrical piano, artificial silk, a platinum-wire ice slicer, a system of penetrative photography (presaging radiology by twelve years), and a product unlikely to occur to anyone else, except perhaps Lewis Carroll: “Ink for the Blind.”

  At fifty-nine, he solved in two hours a hygroscopic problem that had baffled a professional chemist for eleven months.10

  Only when old age advanced upon him did his shafts of perception slow. He executed a mere 134 patents in his sixties, less than half that number in his seventies. He filed just two in 1928—a year more memorable for the award of a Congressional Gold Medal to the “Father of Light”—and none at all in 1929 or 1930. His final successful application—a mount for the electroplating of precious stones—had come in the early days of this, the last year he would see.11

  * * *

  —

  AFTER A WEEK in bed, Edison rallied enough to read a textbook on insulin therapy, as if erudition might help him fix the workings of his pancreas. Although he did not claim to be a pure scientist, he had always kept abreast of the latest professional literature, arguing that expertise should precede experiment. The doctors dispersed. But the chief of them, his personal physician, Dr. Hubert S. Howe, was only guardedly optimistic. “I do not think he will ever be out of danger.”12

  By mid-August Edison was ambulatory and talking, with little conviction, of returning to his laboratory. He had an old rolltop desk there, in a library filled with a lifetime’s worth of scientific and technological literature. Throughout his career he had demonstrated an almost dissociative ability to function in different disciplines, moving on a typical day between chemistry, radiography, mineralogy, and electrical engineering. For the last eight years he had been obsessed with botany, struggling to produce rubber from domestic laticiferous plants, including Solidago edisonia, a variety of goldenrod developed by himself. It was a project financed by his good friends Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, both of them wholly dependent on foreign rubber. After testing seventeen thousand native plant species, ranging from tropical ficus to desert shrubs, Edison had fixed on goldenrod as the most promising source, and been encouraged by Maj. Dwight Eisenhower, U.S. Army, to develop it as a strategic war reserve. However, impurities in the weed’s watery latex kept frustrating his attempts to concentrate its polyisoprenic particles. Now at last, four chunks of springy coagulum vulcanized by his Florida research team were pressed into his hand.13

  Charles Edison, president of Thomas A. Edison, Inc., announced that the Old Man was “very happy” to receive them.14

  * * *

  —

  THERE HAD BEEN a time when Thomas A. Edison, Jr., hoped for Charles’s title. As Edison’s eldest son by his first wife, Mary, Tom claimed it by right of primogeniture—only to be slapped down as unworthy. William, Tom’s brother, also nourished a sense of early rejection, its sting sharpened now, in middle age, by what he took to be his father’s “intense dislike.”15 Marion, the elder sister of both men, was only slightly less starved for paternal affection. For a while, after Mary’s mysterious death in 1884, she and Edison had been of comfort to each other. But that intimacy had not lasted much longer than the year and half it took him to marry a girl straight out of finishing school.

  The three children he proceeded to have with Mina—Madeleine, Charles, and Theodore—were better mothered if not better fathered. “He is so shut away from us,” Madeleine complained. When Edison took enough time off his work to notice them, he felt they were an improvement on Mary’s brood. Theodore in particular was a scientist of considerable brilliance. But to varying extents, all six siblings were crushed by the weight of their sire’s overpowering celebrity. Only Madeleine had given him any grandchildren—four sons, who bore his name secondarily.16

  Not that it was likely to be forgotten. Edison had always, with fanatical thoroughness, identified himself with every business he founded, from 1869 on: Pope, Edison & Co., Edison’s Electric Pen and Duplicating Press Company, Edison Ore-Milling Company, Edison Telephone Company of London, Ltd., Edison Machine Works, Thomas A. Edison Central Station Construction Department, Edison Phonoplex System, Edison Wiring Company, Edison Phonograph Company, Edison Iron Concentrating Company, Edison Manufacturing Company, Edison Industrial Works, Edison Ore-Milling Syndicate, Ltd., Edisonia, Ltd., Edison Portland Cement Company, Edison Storage Battery Company, Edison Crushing Roll Company, Edison Kinetophone Company, and Thomas A. Edison, Inc.—not to mention such polysyllabic affiliates as Compañía chilena de teléfonos de Edison, Société industrielle et commerciale Edison, Société Kinetophon Edison, and Deutsche Edison-Gesellschaft.17

  A separate constellation of lighting firms blazed his name around the world, some in characters too strange for Western eyes to read.18

  * * *

  —

  IN THE SECOND week of September his health began to fail again. He sensed that he was dying and s
aid goodbye to his wife and children. Dr. Howe issued daily pessimistic bulletins. One stated that Edison had Bright’s disease, and stomach ulcers complicating his uremia and diabetes. He was having dizzy spells and losing his sight as well as the last of his hearing. The only voice he seemed to recognize was that of Mina yelling “Dear, how are you?” into his right ear, her hand cupped against his cheekbone. By early October he was ingesting only milk, although one morning Dr. Howe got him to swallow a few spoonfuls of stewed pear. After that he lay inert, except for the obstinate beating of his pulse.19

  Word spread that he could die at any moment. President Hoover asked to be kept informed. Pope Pius XI cabled twice to express his concern. A woman in Kansas offered her own blood, if it would keep the old inventor alive. Newsmen began an around-the-clock vigil in a press room set up over Glenmont’s garage. Others hung around the laboratory downtown, as if half-expecting its founder might still emerge in the small hours, silver-stubbled, reeking of chemicals, spattered from collar to cuffs with tobacco juice and beads of wax, and saying with a wink that he had to go home to save his marriage.20

  The mansion filled up with family. Notwithstanding the ancient split between Mary’s and Mina’s children, they clung together in the den downstairs. The sickroom upstairs glowed through dawn, as Dr. Howe and a relay of nurses kept watch over their patient. The gates of Llewellyn Park were closed to motor traffic. Neighbors refrained from entertainments, forgetting that Edison had never been aware of outside noise.

  Howe gave up hope on the fifteenth, when his patient briefly opened his eyes—large, blue, and blind—then slipped into a final coma. From time to time his hands made kneading movements, as if he were still testing the malleability of rubber. “Father can’t last much longer,” Charles told reporters. An urgent call came from Henry Ford, asking for the great man’s last breath to be preserved in a test tube.21