Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Firestone did not altogether trust Hoover, believing him to be more interested in building power than in protecting an American industry. But he agreed that a serious attempt should be made to develop a domestic rubber plant, and he thought he knew the right man to undertake it. Thomas Alva Edison had recently been named “the greatest living American,” in a New York Times poll. Here was a challenge to his legendary powers of discovery.82

  COLD ON THE CONVEX

  Edison soon received from Akron a large, leather-bound book entitled Rubber: Its History and Development. “I hope it will prove interesting to you,” Firestone wrote in a covering letter.83

  The hint was unnecessary, because he knew Edison had always been interested in rubber. During a camping excursion some years before, Firestone had been amazed at his friend’s rubber expertise.84 But until the current crisis, that knowledge was primarily technological. Edison still thought of rubber as something manufactured, rather than seeping from trees. It was the elastomer that protected the conveyor belts of his rock-crusher in mining days, and in its softest, solute form had kept his early records slick and durable. Hardened into lattices, it insulated the electrodes of his storage batteries. A “dark box” of ebonite, polished internally, flashed with the “etheric force” he discovered back in 1875. If he took a sheet of the same material and bent it in his hands, it became cold on the convex and warm in the concave.85

  Firestone’s lavishly illustrated volume left Edison little the wiser.86 His laboratory work on a cheaper recording medium had already taught him much about the chemical properties of raw rubber. He knew how to vulcanize it by the Peachey process of double saturation with sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, and how to chlorinate it by predissolving crepe chunks in benzol. He could melt rubber in naphthalene and analyze it down to its most residual particles of manganese and copper. But how to produce it himself, and from what homegrown source of supply?87

  Unaware that he was embarking on the last great quest of his career, he read some botanical studies of rubber milkweed, wild lettuce, and hemp, and marked up a monograph by H. M. Hall and F. L. Long, Rubber Content of North American Plants, underscoring one passage in particular: “If natural rubber is ever produced in commercial quantities in the United States, it will be taken from a plant which will give large yields on cheap land, and one which can be handled almost entirely by machinery.”88

  “SEVENTY-FIVE SQUARES”

  The first indication that Edison’s experiments with rubber were maturing into biochemistry came around the turn of the year, when he jotted an entry in his pocket notebook, after many pages of record production data:

  Edison had no sooner jotted some preliminary biochemical ideas (Slice ⅛ inch Milkweed into water with HCL or sol that prevents Coagulation Stirring all the time then 150 mesh screen used to seperate the milk from debris of the weed) than the radio craze diverted his attention—so urgently, Firestone could only conclude that he had lost interest in rubber research.*7 Edison would not return to rubber research for another eight months, although occasional entries in his pocket notebooks indicated that he held it in mind.89 He needed meanwhile to fortify his entertainment business against collapse. Sales of Edison Diamond Discs were slipping almost as fast as those of Edison record cylinders. The only way of competing he could think of was to invent something so dramatically new, in the way of recording and reproduction, that even young flappers, with their preference for rhythm over melody, would be seduced back to the phonograph.90

  “I have set my heart on reproducing perfectly Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with seventy-five people in the orchestra,” he said at a ceremony to commemorate the forty-fifth anniversary of his invention. “When I have done that, I’ll quit.”91

  Edison had a theory, more imaginative than informed, that sound waves remained turbulent and unresolved until they traveled 125 feet. To test it, he ordered his machine shop to cast a brass recording horn of that length, confident that it would capture the instrumental timbres of a full orchestra. A Brobdingnagian monster slowly took shape, section by conical section.92 As each was finished, it was carted across to Columbia Street, where the Phonograph Division had a recording facility, for sequential assembly. The longer the horn got, the more it separated the performance studio—a two-story, barnlike structure, muffled with cowhide—from the adjoining “lathe shack,” where wax masters were engrooved. Fortunately the surrounding lot was spacious enough for the shack to be moved east as far as necessary. The horn’s great weight, increased by a total of thirty thousand rivets, was supported on a horizontal scaffold, and roofing and siding sheltered it from the elements. A telephone wire was strung up for communications between the two buildings, although talking proved simpler through the horn itself.

  Its small end, which connected to a diaphragm and cutting apparatus in the lathe shack, was only three inches in diameter. The other orifice gaped so large in the studio wall that a six-foot man could stand and stretch in it, Leonardo-style. On first trial, the horn proved dismayingly directional. It picked up some instruments much better than it did others, depending on their position and proximity.

  When Edison, who could not hear these imbalances, was told about them, he mapped out and numbered the studio’s floor tiles, as if he were plotting a giant game of snakes and ladders.

  “Have the saxophonist start on one and play ‘Leave Me With A Smile,’ ” he said to his music director, Ernest L. Stevens. “Have him go through those seventy-five squares, and I’ll go take a nap.”

  Stevens woke him up an hour or two later. Edison listened to all the takes and selected the one he thought best represented sax timbre. “Now take every instrument of the orchestra and go through the same thing.”93

  It took several weeks before he thought he found the ideal spot for every player. But when he channeled more than two or three threads of sound into the horn, they came out so ill-balanced as to torment any listener with normal ears. A test take of Saint-Saëns’s contrapuntal Prélude du Déluge, played by the Haydn Orchestra of New Jersey, registered in the lathe shack as if all the string instruments had been stuffed with cotton. Only woodwinds floated clear. It did not seem to occur to Edison that the last remnant of his hearing was monaural, disqualifying him from any sense of sonic space. The purest tones he derived from his giant tube were those of Stevens playing solo piano, and a wind duo exquisitely performing Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home.”*8, 94

  Even then Edison fussed over false harmonics that may have pinged only in his imagination. He tried to eliminate an echo that developed in the horn at certain frequencies, first by packing ice around the tube, then by warming it electrically. One day Theodore, who helped out at the plant during vacations from MIT, found him puzzling over a volume of acoustical mathematics.

  “There’s an easier way to do this,” he said, knowing his father’s difficulties with numerical theory. But Edison pushed him off. “I’ll do it my way.”95

  SUGAR IN HIS SYSTEM

  Overwork, stress, and compulsive fasting took their toll on Edison that winter, and his departure for Florida in mid-March came none too soon for anyone in the family. “Father certainly must plan to stay more than the four weeks he was talking about before he left,” Theodore wrote Mina.96

  She replied that Edison was “miserable” with an acute attack of diabetes. “His stomach bothers him considerable and the doctor says that it is the sugar in his system that makes a tingling in his fingers.”97

  Edison remained ill through the end of April, by which time his walk had stiffened alarmingly and he had to be monitored for pneumonia. But he still limped daily to his garden laboratory for rubber-related experiments with milkweed and guayule, a southwestern desert plant that seemed likely to adapt to scientific cultivation. He was cheered to receive a report from Charles that battery sales were surging. “I am going to stop right here and enjoy it overnight,” he sa
id. Mina made him promise that when he returned north, he would pace himself and let Charles handle most of the general management of Edison Industries.98

  He did, if only because it took him another month to clear his urine and regain some strength. Relations between him and Charles warmed to the extent they could resume their old exchange of “negro jokes.” Then an old enemy, neuritis, struck. It nearly prevented him from attending Theodore’s graduation in Cambridge at the beginning of June. “He’s a good boy,” Edison told a reporter, “but his forte is mathematics. I am a little afraid of that for he may go flying into the clouds with that fellow Einstein. And if he does…he won’t work for me.”99

  Theodore Edison, 1924.

  The remark, coming at a time of personal frailty, was the first public hint of Edison’s desire to have Charles and Theodore inherit his business as chief executive and chief engineer, respectively. It also betrayed his concern that Theodore was an intellectual loner who might have different ideas. After the graduation ceremony he told Samuel Stratton, president of MIT, that he expected the young man to report for work in West Orange immediately.100

  Tall, thin, peppery, and garrulous, a chess player and lover of classical music, Theodore hankered for the very career Edison disdained: that of a pure scientist. But he quailed at the thought of disappointing his father. As gently as possible, he wrote him a letter promising to work at the plant “for a good long time,” if he could only return to college for a year of postgraduate study, and take the flanking summers off for travel. “I figure that this year and a half will mean a whole lot more to me…than will a year and a half of my services in the shop mean to you.”101

  Edison discovered that his youngest son was also his toughest, and Theodore got what he wanted.

  “I SHALL NOT GO INTO RADIO”

  By early summer, Edison felt he had perfected the Diamond Disc, after thirteen years of obsessive tinkering. “I sincerely hope that it is settled this time for good,” Mina wrote her sister Grace. “The surface is better than ever & Thomas is happy.”102

  Actually, he had succeeded only in perfecting an obsolescent technology. Acoustic recording—his proudest achievement—could not advance beyond certain mechanical limits. No matter how responsive a diaphragm might be to the force of sound waves, and warm wax to their transferral, there remained higher and lower frequencies that could not be reproduced mechanically. For some time Edison had been hearing from Walter Miller, the general manager of his Recording Division, that scientists at Bell Laboratories were at work on a new method of electrical recording that registered a frequency range of 50 to 6,000 cycles, well over twice the reach of any acoustic system. AT&T, Bell’s corporate owner, was looking to lease this innovation to phonograph companies when it became commercially available.103

  Ironically, Edison had pioneered two of the three devices that made electrical recording possible (the vacuum tube encapsulating thermionic emission, and the microphone translating sound waves into signals), as well as inventing the phonograph itself. In further irony, his long-ago discovery of “etheric force” was powering the radio boom104—a word more apt than ever, thanks to the bass-heavy magnetic speakers now installed in commercial receivers. Radio was no longer an unamplified, earphones-only medium. On the contrary, the new sets produced, for free, such astonishing volumes of sound that the Big Four phonograph companies—Victor, Brunswick, Columbia, and Edison—were at a loss as how to compete. Apart from Edison’s clearly doomed attempt to keep his thick disks and rosewood players at the top of the luxury market, there were only two choices: to cram radio receivers awkwardly into record players, or to unload an enormous inventory of acoustic machines and records in favor of a new generation of all-electric phonographs. Either way, there would be the cost of having to pay a per-record royalty to AT&T, unless some way could be found to avoid the numerous patents involved.105

  Edison was not alone among phonograph executives in refusing to acknowledge that acoustic recording (with its unbalanced intake and uncontrollable output) was going the way of the dodo. Columbia and Brunswick also ignored AT&T’s initial advances. Eldridge Johnson, who had built Victor up into a cash cornucopia with sales of $51 million a year, suffered a nervous breakdown over the threat of the electrical system. A year and a half of desperate strategizing began in Big Four boardrooms, while a new entertainment behemoth, the Radio Corporation of America, doubled its earnings to $55 million, and the nation’s broadcast frequencies filled with sounds and sweet airs that muffled an old man’s cry in West Orange, “I shall not go into radio.”106

  GUAYULE

  That June Edison issued a new standing order at the laboratory for “Experimental work on Extraction of Rubber-like sap from various plants.” It looked strange in a progress report that otherwise tracked the activities of men on machines.107 Even stranger—except to his eyes—were the stream-of-consciousness jottings in his pocket notebook, with song titles jostling botanical, chemical, and other data:

  Get lot thistle leaves Milkweed & Experiment

  Strip 1st—wash off Latex & filler

  When the Swallows Homeward Fly

  My pretty pretty primrose

  Guylue Plant Dry Weight 8 individual plants 3.638 lbs108

  He soon learned how to spell guayule correctly, and focused on it, in preference to milkweed, as a researchable source of domestic rubber. It grew wild in arid conditions north and south of the Rio Grande, could be uprooted easily, and regenerated at once. By late summer, with the help of his beloved set of Watts’s Dictionary of Chemistry, he had developed a method of extracting its huge polyisoprenoid molecules.109 Working on some samples from Mexico, he calculated that he could get seven and a half grams of rubber out of every plant. “They occupy a horizontal space of about one foot, and probably grow 40,000 bushes to an acre,” he wrote Henry Ford, who was as nervous as Firestone about the effects of the Stevenson Scheme. “This would give 680 pounds of rubber per acre, worth $183.”110

  If Edison’s arithmetic was correct (not always the case), homegrown guayule rubber could conceivably sell at twenty-seven cents a pound—about the current price of foreign crude. But he warned Ford that extensive work was necessary to determine whether guayule, Parthenium argentatum, would adapt to plantation culture in the United States as well as Hevea brasiliensis had in the East Indies. He intended to try growing Hevea, a prodigious latex bleeder, on his Florida estate, although it had never flourished in North America. In the meantime, he was planting guayule seeds both there and in the greenhouse at Glenmont.111

  That was normally the domain of Mina’s roses and orchids, but since she had grown up in Akron, Ohio—“Rubber Capital of the World”—she should be tolerant of the invasion of a rubber-bearing species.

  I REMEMBER, I REMEMBER

  Edison’s own half-forgotten Buckeye background thrust itself back into memory when Warren G. Harding died of a heart attack on 2 August 1923. The shock loss of the president, eighteen years his junior and to all recent appearance a superb physical specimen, was a reminder that life could be short. Accompanied by Mina, the Fords, and the Firestones, Edison attended the funeral ceremony eight days later in Marion, Ohio, then took the opportunity to show them his birthplace in Milan, only sixty miles north. The property belonged to him, but he had seen it only a couple of times since moving to Port Huron, Michigan, in 1854. A distant cousin, Miss Metta Wadsworth lived in it as caretaker.

  The party set off along Route 4 in three new Lincoln touring cars, rolling on enormous, low-pressure “balloon” tires that partially explained Firestone’s greed for rubber.*9, 112 Twin branches of the Huron River flowed in the same direction, as if escorting Edison to their confluence near where he was born. He had to brace for an onslaught of primary memories. For him, this was a journey both linear and circular, weirdly connecting Harding’s grave in Marion to that of Marion, his eldest sister, in
Milan—even as Marion, his elder daughter, planned to end her exile in Europe.

  Edison liked to joke to geologists and paleontologists that he was too interested in the future to bother about the past. This was certainly true of his first seven years, only three or four of which he could recall.113 Although they had been flush years for his father—and golden ones for Milan, with its canal basin and warehouses full of wheat—he associated the town with painful events: a public whipping, the loss of a fingertip to an ax, a swimming buddy left to drown, a teacher complaining that young Al Edison seemed “addled.” By contrast, he had always regarded Port Huron as a place of ecstatic self-discovery.

  Late in the afternoon, some beautiful hills ahead parted to reveal Milan.114 Two or three thousand citizens were waiting to greet him in the public square, the scene of his chastisement some seventy years before. But the convoy proceeded without stopping to the highest point of the hogsback overlooking the basin. There stood the elegant little seven-room house Sam Edison had built with his own hands in 1841, its redbrick walls and tall, stone-linteled windows solid and straight as ever.*10