Edison
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Name two locks on the Panama Canal.
What is the weight of air in a room 20 × 30 × 10?
Who invented logarithms?
What state is the name of a famous violin maker?
How fast does sound travel per foot per second?49
The last item was too much even for Albert Einstein. Sounding defensive when it was put to him, the father of relativity said through an interpreter that he saw no point in cluttering his mind with data obtainable from any encyclopedia. “The value of a college education,” Einstein huffed, “is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.”50
Nicola Tesla, Einstein’s rival in popular “genius” rankings, agreed. “Edison attaches too great a value to mere memory.” A professor of psychology at Boston University wrote Edison to suggest that all college students were intelligent, to the extent that they had qualified for higher education. Any questionnaire designed to contradict this must therefore be incorrectly framed—if not an exercise in personal vanity. “Are you not perhaps setting a standard for others by means of your own accomplishments, and yet we have but one Edison in the United States?”51
It was a shrewd thrust, to which Edison could reply only that his questionnaire was “in the nature of a rough test” to bring out the executive quality he prized most—curiosity. In a public statement, he added that he was not trying to measure “intelligence, logic, or power of reasoning.” He merely wanted to hire young men*3 who displayed “alertness of mind…power of observation, and interest in the life of the world.”52
This protestation did nothing to quell the delight with which humorists, professional and amateur, satirized his “Ignoramometer.” The length of a short circuit, the number of stripes on a zebra, and the provenance of “jazz” bow ties were urgently discussed, as was the etymology of the Mephistopheles mosquito. One cartoonist lampooned Edison as Diogenes, making tiny ignoramuses scurry from the glare of his intellectual flashlight. A group of Wellesley girls sent him a five-foot-long list of their own questions, including “What are the chemical properties of catnip?” and “When you turn off the electric light, where does the light go?”53
Edison groused that the newspapers “have balled me all up,” and threatened lawsuits if any more of his questions were published. Yet part of him—the attention-loving side—relished the sensation he had provoked. The New York Times published almost forty articles on the subject of “the Edison brainmeter,” while magazines of the caliber of Literary Digest, Harper’s, and The New Republic began a debate on intelligence tests that promised to continue for years. Edison’s multiphasic questionnaire was not the first such probe—in 1917 a War Department aptitude test had alarmingly suggested that almost half of America’s white population was “feeble-minded”—but it was deliberately unscientific and sought to illuminate character over cognition.54
As such, it was discounted, even mocked, by most professionals, and when it eventually proved ineffective, he abandoned it. But in time it would be seen as a reproof to the nonverbal, overquantified tests that thousands of corporations adopted in the age of Babbitt. The World remarked that at a time rendered dismal by depression and Prohibition, “Mr. Edison with his questionnaire has contributed to the gaiety of life but also to the dissemination of knowledge.”55
WHO’S GOT THE JULEP?
“Things look dark as far as business goes and Papa seems quite worried,” Mina wrote Theodore at the beginning of July. “There is a strangeness about everything—It seems like something sinister in the air. I wonder what is to happen.”56
What was, in fact, about to happen was an upturn in the national economy, thanks to President Harding’s willingness to let the depression run its precipitous course. Prices were at last so low that money had regained its fair weight in gold. But the recovery was not yet apparent to Edison—nor for that matter to Harding, who on 12 July made an appeal to Congress to vote down a popular bill awarding bonuses to veterans. In words that could have been uttered in the boardroom at West Orange, the president spoke of “the unavoidable readjustment, the inevitable charge-off” consequent to any period of overexpansion. Cost cutting was “the only sure way to normalcy.” Harding earned a standing ovation and widespread praise for his courage. The New York Times declared that he had risen above patronage politics and proved himself to be “President of the whole people.”57
Two weeks later Edison could judge this for himself in a meadow in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone corralled him, as they did almost every summer, into joining an automobile camping trip that purported to be recreational, but served as excellent advertising for Ford cars and Firestone tires. Since 1918 these “Vagabond” excursions had become more and more elaborate, the line of tourers and supply wagons lengthening and the two magnates looking ever sleeker—in contrast to Edison, whom they paraded as a shabby, overworked genius in need of fresh air. This year Firestone supposed that because Harding and Edison were, like himself, native Buckeyes, they would get on well.58 If a meeting between them could be arranged at some location convenient to the president, the Vagabonds would score their greatest publicity coup yet.
Harding was pleased to get out of Washington, if only for a couple of days. Congress was still in extraordinary session, debating economic policy. Apart from occasional workouts in a White House closet, he had enjoyed few diversions from affairs of state since his inauguration. His acceptance of Firestone’s invitation to camp out on the weekend of 23–24 July near Peckville, Maryland, caused the motorcade to swell to its largest size yet, with wives, children, about seventy servants, and even a Methodist Episcopal bishop, the Rev. William Anderson, in attendance. Firestone rounded up six thoroughbred horses in case Harding wanted to ride, Ford provided a refrigerator truck with three hundred dressed chickens, and Edison, ever the technologist, set up a “wireless” radio telephone for communications with the capital.59
The president arrived at noon on Saturday morning, trailed by bodyguards, aides, and reporters. Edison seemed determined not to be seduced by Harding’s good-natured charm and declined his offer of a cigar. “No, thank you, I don’t smoke.”
This was so patently untrue that Firestone boggled. But Harding took no offense. “I think I can accommodate you,” he said, pulling a big plug from his pocket.
Edison helped himself to a large cheekful. Later Firestone heard him say, “Harding is all right. Any man who chews tobacco is all right.”60
Ford’s cooks prepared lunch. Soon the humid air was fragrant with the fumes of roasted Virginia ham, lamb chops, and sweet corn. Edison ambled off into the woods and returned with a fistful of mint. “Who’s got the julep?”61
When the company sat down to eat, at a round table whose inner hub rotated for condiment delivery, Harding found it impossible to talk into Edison’s deaf left ear. He had no better luck later, when the men adjourned to a “smoking parlor” of camp chairs beneath a giant sycamore. Reporters cordoned off thirty yards away heard the president’s stentorian attempts at conversation:
Q. What do you do for recreation?
A. Oh, I eat and think.
Q. Ever take up golf? [Louder] Ever take up golf?
A. No. I’m not old enough.62
Harding gave up after that and retreated behind a newspaper. Edison elected to take one of his famed on-the-spot naps. Careless of his white linen suit, he flopped down on the grass and slept like a child. Harding continued reading, and then, in an oddly tender gesture, rose and laid the newspaper over the old man’s face. “We can’t let the gnats eat him up, now can we?” he said to a little girl watching.63
Edison napping in front of Harvey Firestone and President Harding at Vagabond camp, 23 July 1921.
A KALEIDOSCOPE OF RUDE AWAKENING
By the fall of 1921 it was clear that the United States was in a roaring economic recov
ery. Housing starts doubled, automobile production cranked up by almost two-thirds, and inventory bloat sweated away. But for a reason not yet clear to Edison, the phonograph industry remained stagnant. Cabinet and records sales had always been the most profitable part of his business. So why was Thomas A. Edison, Inc., still encumbered with $2.3 million of recessionary debt? Encouraged all the same by an order from the builders of New York’s Yankee Stadium for forty-five thousand barrels of his patented portland cement, he began to rehire factory and office workers. Charles responded with a letter that came close to grovelling.64
Yours truly has experienced a kaleidoscope of rude awakening. There were times when I felt you had stuck the spurs in so deep that I’d surely bleed to death. [But] since about last January I have not opposed in principle one solitary thing you have wanted to do….
What I want you to believe is that for some time past any pride in the air castle organization I helped to construct during the past few years is gone—completely, absolutely, unequivocally gone….
Also that I look to you for and only to you for leadership.65
* * *
—
“POOR DEARIE, HE is hurt clean thru,” Mina told Theodore. “Papa does not realize how deep a hurt he has made.”66
Edison realized only that his company had come near to bankruptcy.67 If it had, he as the single largest shareholder would have been wiped out. His personal cash reserve at the end of 1921 was just $84,504.*4 Although that was more than the average American earned in a lifetime, it still represented a 50-percent loss over the last two years. Admittedly, some of that could be ascribed to the constant appeals of his older children for money (Marion’s Swiss exile allowance; Tom’s medical bills for a two-month recurrence of chronic “brain spasms”; William’s dollar-devouring poultry business; even Madeleine leaning on him to get her car fixed).68
The trappings of wealth meant nothing to Edison. Were he not married to a woman who had been brought up rich and wished to stay that way, he would have been ready to plow every spare cent back into his business and live like a laborer. For a while in the 1890s he had done just that, crashing through more than $2 million, and he looked back on it as a period of acute happiness. His most urgent task now was to return Thomas A. Edison, Inc., to solvency. He had fired some seven thousand employees, and needed to cajole the rest into keeping it at the forefront of chemical and electronic technology.69
Or more precisely, what he perceived to be the forefront, in an age of change that was fast leaving him behind. “Everything is becoming so complex,” he complained, “…so intricate, so involved, so mixed up.”70
CAN YOU GET ME AN OLD INDIAN CYCLE
Edison’s perception excluded the new phenomenon of commercial radio, which by the new year of 1922 was booming nationwide. Station 8ZZ in Pittsburgh had found, after its pioneer coverage of Harding’s election, that its tiny, headphone-hugging audience liked to hear music between news reports. Renaming itself KDKA, it stepped up its biweekly “broadcasts” to an hour every night and greatly strengthened its signal, wildly exciting a schoolboy who picked it up as far away as Dixon, Illinois.*5, 71 A new magazine, Radio Broadcasting, hailed the “almost incomprehensible” increase in the number of people who spent at least part of their evening listening in. Purchasers of “wireless” equipment, it reported, were standing five feet deep in radio stores, while ready-made sets sold “before the varnish was scarcely dry.”72
Edison could not long ignore the phonograph-threatening radio craze, with station WJZ-Newark starting up just eight miles east of his laboratory. But he discounted the appeal of a medium hampered by a burring, crackly “static” that was the aural equivalent of cataract vision. “Music is considerably mutilated, and always will be on Radio apparatus,” he scoffed. “Can never be a true reproduction.” He was prepared to bet that in the end, music lovers would prefer to hear their own selections in their own time, sans “atmospherics” and through a fine speaker.73
Accordingly, he redoubled his efforts to perfect the acoustic recording process, confident that his infallible sonic and musical instincts would put the Edison Phonograph Division in the black again. The work was bound to be exhausting, given the boneheadedness of everyone he dealt with, and the fact that he was about to turn seventy-five. But he had been through these developmental frenzies before, and invariably succeeded. All that was required was to work harder, sleep less, and starve himself more.
A stream of eccentric record-producer notes began to emit from his office:
Benny
Can you get me an old Indian cycle using one cylinder controlled by a knob
I want the exhaust to beat time in a Jazz Orchestra
Hitting wood is not loud or sharp enough—see me
Edison74
I AM STILL A BOY
“Papa has just come in after working all night,” Mina informed Theodore a few days before Edison’s birthday. “This is the second time in a week, and the trouble seems to be with the [disk] presses. It is just too bad for him to do it as he looks ashen this morning. He has not the strength for that kind of work any more.”75
And a couple of months later, “He is getting to be so very deaf.”*6, 76
Thomas and Mina Edison on his seventy-fifth birthday, 11 February 1922.
Edison acknowledged that his disability was now almost total, but he was less bothered by it than those who struggled to communicate with him. “Do not mind it in the least,” he scribbled on a letter of inquiry, “in fact I consider it an advantage as it has preserved me from the distractions of a noisy world.”77
The “trouble” Mina cited was caused by his determination to maintain his thick, ten-inch Diamond Disc as the standard by which all other records were measured. This was in spite of the fact that most buyers were more interested in “hit” tunes than in high fidelity. (To Edison’s horror, the younger ones often cranked up the r.p.m. of their turntables to make tunes sound zippier.) By quixotically trying to improve sound quality and reduce manufacturing costs at the same time, he succeeded only in slowing production down. He replaced the resinous wood-powder core of his blanks with unwarpable China clay, and then—after glossing them with four coats of varnish that needed time to dry naturally—grooved each under incremental steam pressure of one thousand pounds per square inch. He executed a pair of new patents to reduce blunting of originals in duplication, and water-cooled mold frames so that they would eject every “round” of twelve disks smoothly. The result was a per-press output of only 250 disks a day.78
Edison also tried to stave off the collapse of his Blue Amberol cylinder record business by eliminating its dependence on celluloid, an expensive compound due to the rarity of camphor. Retiring to his private chemistry laboratory, he searched for a new varnish formula. At once he became happy. It occurred to him that this was how he had started out at age ten: juggling flasks and retorts and breathing pungent vapors. “I am still a boy,” he wrote a correspondent, “and still experimenting.”79
A TOUGH RUBBER BAND
In October the British Colonial Office, presided over by Winston Churchill, announced that it would henceforth restrict the supply, and drastically raise the price, of rubber—a commodity over which it enjoyed a near-monopoly worldwide. This move, known as the Stevenson Scheme, was a reaction to a postwar production glut that made such rubbers as Malayan ribbed smoked-sheet crude cheaper than canned figs from California. Edison, with his phonograph and battery factories, was such a large purchaser of the polymer that he was planning to open his own rubber factory in Bloomfield, New Jersey. But his need for pressed jelutong sheeting did not compare with the voracity of Harvey Firestone, whose plant consumed 10 million pounds of crude a month. And the two million Model Ts that Henry Ford expected to sell next year would need four rubber tires apiece just to roll out of the showroom.
Other manufacturer
s of tires and automobiles were just as dependent on the sap of Britain’s East Indian plantations. Indeed, it was hard to think of an American industry, from transportation to textiles, that did not utilize rubber in some form. The United States consumed more than three-fourths of the world’s entire output. What petroleum would one day be to developed nations, rubber presently was: a raw material essential enough to provoke armed conflict.
Germany’s rubber famine had contributed much to the stasis of the Great War. In 1917 Bernard Baruch of the War Industries Board had rated rubber the most vital commodity that the government should stockpile in an emergency. Ever since then, various Cassandras had repeatedly warned Congress against being lulled into a false sense of security by the renewed abundance of foreign rubber. It was the word foreign, they said, that should give any thinking American pause. As one of them pointed out, “It is the only important commodity to modern warfare which we have not yet learned to produce.”80
The principal alarmist was Firestone. He recognized, as did his fellow moguls at Goodyear, Geneva Tire, and B.F. Goodrich, that if rubber prices fell below seven cents a pound, it would bankrupt many British plantation owners and likely cause an industrial catastrophe. Firestone was prepared to pay any reasonable rate that would prevent that. But he was not optimistic that Britain would always be able to control its centers of rubber production. If the Russian Empire could be toppled by a small gang of Bolsheviks, how stable was Whitehall’s loose clutch of colonies? What if Japan, which already had naval dominance in the Pacific, conquered all of Southeast Asia one day and wound a tough rubber band round the neck of the American economy?
These and similar questions possessed Wall Street and Washington—not to mention West Orange—as the spot market price of rubber tripled to twenty-three cents, and British authorities warned that they would halve the supply, if necessary, to increase it still further. Herbert Hoover, President Harding’s hyperactive commerce secretary and “undersecretary of everything else,” undertook to work through diplomatic channels for repeal of the Stevenson Scheme. Knowing his chances were slim (Britain needed every export shilling it could get, to repay its huge war debts), Hoover backed a legislative proposal by Senator Medill McCormick that the United States should consider establishing its own plantations abroad, and also research the possibility of growing rubber at home.81