Edison

by Edmund Morris

  From the front, it looked like a simple, one-story Federal structure. Only when Edison stepped down into the back garden did lower and upper floors disclose themselves above the slope of the bluff.

  “Does the old home look familiar to you?” Henry Ford shouted into his right ear.

  Reporters in the street had no difficulty hearing Edison’s reply. “Yes, it does.”115

  He seemed more interested in the view downtown than in the house itself. But where a boy, seventy years before, had been able to survey a freshwater harbor jostling with barges, all his white-haired self could see now was a depressed townscape. Wild scrub and weeds traced the line of the old canal, long drained and silted up. A shabby cannery squatted in the curve of the road once jammed with wagons waiting to unload their grain. Milan and its waterborne economy had never recovered from the advent of the railroad.116

  When at last Edison took his party into the house, he was astonished to find that Cousin Metta still used kerosene lamps. So much for his success at giving the rest of the world electric light. He led the way to the little northeast bedroom, feeling whatever a man feels when he contemplates the first walls he ever saw. Then he went out onto the porch and posed for a photograph, standing alone with the setting sun on his face.117

  Metta said, “Tom, you’ll have to go to the square and make a speech now, or the town will be heartbroken.”118

  There followed the usual ceremony saluting him as “the greatest inventor in all the world,” and the usual disappointment when he politely refused to reply. “I’m too deaf to speak,” he explained, and emphasized the point by cupping his ear when the brass band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  Although Mina could see that he was tiring fast, he endured a long hand-shaking ritual afterward, saying over and over, “I remember, I remember, yes, I remember.”119

  THE DIVERSITY OF THINGS

  After leaving Milan, Edison joined his fellow Vagabonds on a camping trip to the upper peninsula of Michigan. He remained in a pensive mood, and taught Firestone’s twenty-five-year-old son, Harvey Jr., his theory of “memory swarms” that perpetuated human character. “The microscope cannot find them at all….When these entities leave the body, the body is like a ship without a rudder—deserted, motionless, and dead.”120

  Edison flattered himself that he was talking metaphysics, but the tortuous lengths he went to to avoid using the word God betrayed, more than concealed, an aging man’s need for some sort of divine reassurance that death was not final. Two summers before, at the Vagabond camp in Maryland, he startled Bishop William Anderson with the question, “Tell me what is to become of us and where are we to be when this short life ends?”121

  That was, of course, one of the basic questions of human existence, and science could not answer it any more than reason. For most of his not-short life, Edison had been a disciple of Thomas Paine, about whom, around this time, he wrote:

  I have always been interested in this man. My father had a set of Tom Paine’s books on the shelf at home. I must have opened the covers about the time I was thirteen. And I can still remember the flash of enlightenment which shone from his pages. It was a revelation, indeed, to encounter his views on political and religious matters, so different from the views of many people around us….

  Many a person who could not understand Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp….

  He has been called an atheist, but atheist he was not. Paine believed in a supreme intelligence, as representing the idea by which other men often express the name of deity.122

  Edison’s self-identification with the great rationalist showed when he praised Paine the inventor. “He conceived and designed the iron bridge and the hollow candle, the principle of the modern central draught burner. The man had a sort of universal genius. He was interested in the diversity of things.”123

  If that suggested they shared a purely mechanistic pantheism, Edison now found himself going beyond the artificiality of manufactured “things” and studying natural ones more. There was a diversity more awe-inspiring than anything in Paine’s purview. “The Book of Nature never lies; in it may be found lessons concerning almost every fact of life, death, and perhaps immortality.”124

  THE PROTOPLASM OF THE OLEANDER

  Returning to West Orange in September, Edison tried again to save the acoustic phonograph—tinkering endlessly with his long horn, putting Theodore to work polishing diamond needles, and resisting the desire of both brothers to enter the radio business. But he devoted increasing amounts of time to studying the mysteries of biochemistry, often spending sleepless nights in his laboratory library and private experimental “Room 12” on the floor above. He authorized a bifurcated rubber research project that would operate simultaneously in West Orange and Fort Myers, and had no qualms about charging it to the corporate budget. Thanks to robust cement and storage battery sales, Thomas A. Edison, Inc., was once again in the black.125

  “Until a man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge,” he assured a former employee, as he realized how much botany he had to learn.126 The breadth of his erudition in other sciences was extraordinary, but it was also linear, in the sense that a common force—electricity—had linked his experiments in telegraphy, telephony, sound and light technology, magnetic mining, movies, and battery design. Now he needed to embrace systems of growth, morphology, and propagation that were in no way electrical.

  It meant that he must saturate himself in the technical literature and work harder than ever before in his life, until comprehension came, and with it success. Surely in time he would be able to coax rubber from plant tissue, as he had once coaxed music out of tinfoil.

  Edison secluded himself in his laboratory library, studying Alfred Allen’s Commercial Organic Analysis to see which alcoholic solvents would give him the most viscous rubber extracts, and William H. Johnson’s The Cultivation and Preparation of Pará Rubber for advice on the coagulation and purification of latex. He also read and heavily annotated Kurner von Marilaun’s Natural History of Plants. Soon he felt knowledgeable enough to dismiss Frank Braham’s Rubber Planter’s Handbook as “a hash…untechnical,” and challenge many of the conclusions in William Wicherley’s The Whole Art of Rubber-Growing. Brailsford Robertson’s The Chemical Basis of Growth and Senescence impressed him with its scholarship, which muted some of the things the book had to say about his own bodily decline.127

  MILKY VARIETIES

  For most of 1924 and 1925 the pattern of Edison’s supplementary research in his private laboratories, and what came to be known as “the hay fever room” at the West Orange plant, was haphazard, depending on the availability of seeds and specimens. He seemed unable to drive past a New Jersey weed patch without jumping out in search of milky varieties. To eyes other than his own, his pocket notebooks for the period were a manic collage of disparate data: Latin plant names, lists of organic solvents, sizings of the pores in sponge rubber, mechanical drawings, geographical and climatological statistics, an acoustical analysis of the theme of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, urinalysis results, and (since he could not shake his interest in defense technology) deception systems to deploy in warfare.128

  Although he told Henry Ford, early on, that he had devised “a very good method of extracting the rubber” from guayule, that was just his habitual way of imagining success far in advance, as a goad to himself.129 From time to time he penciled the word PHENOMENON into his notebook, but often as not it denoted a hard-to-understand failure. He began to infer that finding an appreciable amount of good rubber in any plant other than Hevea brasiliensis was the botanical equivalent of getting blood out of stone.

  Guayule was hopefully classified by the USDA as a domestic sour
ce of the polymer in an emergency. Edison sowed some beds with it at Fort Myers, but the seedlings came up so slowly that he calculated the shrub’s reproductive cycle at four to five years—far too long for practical cultivation. Nor did he like the fact that guayule’s rubber molecules were dispersed colloidally in the parenchyma of root, stem, and branch bark, as well as in the more crushable leaves. Unless he could devise a better extraction method than flotation (the whole shrub pulverized, then steeped in dilute sodium hydroxide until its woody dirt sank and rubbery “worms” swam up for skimming), he doubted that the soft, sticky end product could ever compare with, say, fine pure plantation Pará, or even the mats of Pontianak crude he imported for vulcanization in his battery division—tough and dark, slicing white with a moist sour reek.

  For these reasons, he decided that guayule could never be grown profitably.130 The inventor in him, forever wanting to be original, tested other polyisoprenic varieties less favored by the government. He was excited by the potential of Cryptostegia grandiflora, a fast-growing vine with exceptionally virile seeds. Its latex rubber content averaged only 3 percent, but he believed he could triple that by judicious breeding. The plant had one major disadvantage: its sprawling habit militated against a mechanical harvester. Next he considered the rubber fig tree Ficus elasticus, a white-sapped banyan that milked as easily as Hevea. However, it too was antimechanical, since it spread by sending out flying buttresses that swooped downward and rooted themselves, creating aisles and transepts irresistible to children but not to any tapping device Edison could conceive. That did not stop his planting a specimen of the giant variety, Ficus benghalensis, at Fort Myers, unaware that in another century it would become a green cathedral covering almost an acre of his estate.*11

  ONE GOOD ONE

  To Mina’s consternation, an ambitious, cigarette-smoking, “flapperish” Modern Girl appeared in West Orange in the summer of 1924, engaged to her favorite son. Miss Ann Osterhout was a twenty-three-year-old medical student from Massachusetts. “I love Ted to the limit,” she assured Mina, although she had been reluctant to give up her dream of becoming a doctor for married life in New Jersey. Mina, who thought housekeeping (with plenty of servants) and motherhood were the twin peaks of femininity, half-hoped Ann would return Theodore’s ring—being confessedly in love with him herself.131

  Edison, in contrast, looked favorably upon Miss Osterhout, if only because her father was a Harvard biochemist.132 He was sufficiently impressed with the young woman’s own scientific bent (she had an avid interest in the new subject of colloidal behavior) to allow her to work with Theodore in the research department of his laboratory, hitherto exclusively male. It was about time, he told Mina, that he had “one good one” among his children’s disappointing set of spouses.133

  Marion’s husband, Oscar Öser, was a case in point, his infidelity and post-Versailles hatred of Woodrow Wilson driving her home to America in the fall. Rusty-tongued after thirty years of speaking German, she thought of settling somewhere near Tom and William in New Jersey, but was not sure her father would approve. “I have been hungry for years for some sign of affection from you,” she told him, adding that she regretted her teenage rebellion against him for marrying Mina. “If I had not loved you so much I would not have been so jealous.”134

  Mina fought, as she had done many times before, with aversion for Edison’s “other family.” They had never made it easy for her—Marion least of all, as the eldest and most rebellious of the three. Mina tried to make the refugee welcome in West Orange. Marion was grateful, but eventually chose to settle in a Manhattan residential hotel.135

  Theodore and Ann married in the spring of 1925 and took an apartment not far from the laboratory. This confirmed, for the time being, Theodore’s commitment to work for his father. Edison was so relieved not to lose him to the airless world of academe that he drafted a telegram of thanks in his most elegant calligraphy, forgetting that it would be transmitted as dots and dashes. Mina was touched by “the look of pride on his face” as he inked each letter.136

  Her own feelings were less triumphant. For as long as her sons had remained single, she had felt of some motherly use. But now, with yet another bedroom at Glenmont empty, she lapsed into despair. “All my life,” she wrote Theodore, “I had had love, attention, admiration without any effort on my part but now my attractions are diminishing, which were mostly looks, and I find myself floundering. Re-adjusting! It comes hard.”137

  Every now and again, goaded by some imagined slight, Mina would lash out, and then for weeks afterward be overcome with remorse. “I am terribly spoiled and it behooves me to take on Sack-cloth and ashes.” Charles and Theodore were sympathetic, knowing that a large part of her problem was their father’s genial absenteeism. Whenever she barged in on him—even in the midst of an experiment—he would melt her heart with his ready smile. But there was something exclusionary in his willingness to be interrupted, as if he had all the time in the world to wait for her departure.138

  When Edison, in turn, barged in on an interview Mina was having with a pair of reporters over lunch, they were struck by the fact that though present, he seemed to be elsewhere.

  “Mr. Edison has few friends,” Mina told her guests after he abruptly left the room. “Because of his work he has had to live a great deal by himself and in himself.” Admitting that the “intensity of his application” excluded her from what mattered most to him, she said she felt fulfilled all the same. “I have had a definite life job—the intimate service of Thomas A. Edison. And it has been worth everything I could give.”139

  “BEING THE FIRST”

  With his ninth decade looming, Edison took steps to free himself from all responsibilities not directly connected to rubber research. On 1 February 1926 he executed a last will and testament, awarding his corporate holdings—the vast bulk of his estate—to Theodore and Charles. “My dear wife, Mina M. Edison, is already adequately provided for through gifts from me or otherwise.” He bequeathed small cash amounts to three longtime employees, and directed that his remaining assets be put in a trust, the proceeds of which “shall be divided equally among my six children.”140 Simultaneously, he sold all the patents he still held to Thomas A. Edison, Inc., for $78,200.

  It was a token sum, but he was enriching himself anyway as a major shareholder in his own company, which—along with most American industry—was piling up profits at a record rate. This encouraged him, at last, to hand over the title of president to Charles. His mood on finding himself a laboratory man again, after fifty-six years of executive responsibility, was ebullient. “The secret of staying afloat, Jimmie,” he said to James Newton, the young manager of an estate adjoining his in Fort Myers, “is to create something that people will pay for. I didn’t work at inventions unless I saw a market demand for them. I wasn’t interested in making money so much as in being the first to invent something society needed. But if you do that, the money comes in.”141

  The distinguished astronomer and Nobel laureate Albert A. Michelson did not have to overhear this boast to block his nomination for membership at the spring meeting of the National Academy of Sciences. Prejudice against Edison as a mercenary, publicity-seeking technologist was strong in the organization, as it had been ever since he invented a theoretically “impossible” dynamo in 1880.142 Nevertheless Robert Millikan, the chairman of Caltech, had the courage to stand up and—nervously balancing up and down on his toes—suggest that it was time for the great inventor to be recognized. “I am sure that no physicist would wish to oppose Mr. Edison’s nomination.”

  Michelson rose from the front row and said quietly, “I am that physicist.”143

  That was enough for Millikan’s move to be defeated. Edison was not surprised by the rejection, having invited it with his many jibes against “lead-pencil” theorists.144 “An inventor is essentially practical.” But he felt that he had made at least five genuine scientifi
c discoveries in his career, and listed them in response to an inquiry from Electrical World magazine. They were the “Edison Effect” of electronic transmission, “now used in Radio bulbs”; the motograph principle, which smoothed the passage of a stylus over a charged electrolytic surface; the “etheric force” spark, subsequently credited to Hertz; the reversible nickel-iron galvanic cell; and the phenomenon of variable resistance of substances under pressure, embodied in his carbon button telephone transmitter.145

  Of these claims, the distinguished physical chemist Michael Pupin accepted only the motograph as an original discovery. The others, Pupin said, had been either anticipated or were not purely scientific. “There is no doubt that Mr. Edison is a most resourceful genius in eliminating technical difficulties in the course of technical development of a scientific idea. I do not think that in this respect he has ever had an equal. [But] his true distinction lies in the field of applied, rather than true science.”146

  Edison, stung, dashed off another list of his scientific “firsts,” including the X-ray fluoroscope, mica insulation in dynamo commutator bars, and the electrochemical receptivity of tellurium in telegraph recorders. In his haste he forgot to mention the tasimeter, and the papers he had written in youth on magnetic conductivity and the pyromagnetic dynamo. But academic opinion denied him the honor he thought he deserved.147

  ONE HAS TO MOVE

  Charles and Theodore were now at liberty to publicize some Jazz Age initiatives that they had kept secret for fear of annoying their father. These were a switch from acoustic to electrical recording (which they neatly branded as “Edisonic” technology), an experimental issue of twelve-inch long-playing records, and plans to enter the radio market both as manufacturers and as producers—ultimately, perhaps, creating the company’s own broadcasting network.