Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Charles felt that innovation was the only way to compete with sonic rivals. Victor had adjusted to the radio boom by introducing its hugely popular Orthophonic Victrola with built-in RCA receiver; Brunswick was marketing an all-electric radio-phonograph, the Panatrope; and Columbia was profitable after combining with its British namesake and signing up for Western Electric technology. Alone among the Big Four recording companies, the Edison Phonograph Division was languishing, its instruments too expensive, its vertical-cut disks and cylinders unplayable on other models, its sales force unable to persuade young customers that Frank Lucas “the Accordion King” was a better entertainer than Al Jolson. Only the Ediphone dictating-machine department was doing well—which was ironic, because Edison had originally conceived the phonograph for just that purpose.148

  As far as he was concerned, his sons were trying to do too much, too late. But Mina agreed with them that “one has to move with the times.” She risked divorce by installing a five-tube radio set at Glenmont, and was soon addicted to its coverage of political events. Edison could hardly object to her having something to fill the emptiness of the big house when he was at work, and his deafness prevented him from being bothered by the noise. But he was sure Charles would regret investing in the new medium. “In three years,” he warned him, “it’ll be such a cutthroat business that nobody will make any money.”149

  With that valedictory, he let the long horn on Columbia Street go quiet, and returned to his experiments in polyisoprenic chemistry. In Mina’s words, from the moment her husband turned eighty on 11 February 1927, “Everything turned to rubber in the family. We talked rubber, thought rubber, and dreamed rubber.”150

  PRIME FOR GREAT THINGS

  Edison’s obsession had burgeoned over the last three years in inverse ratio to the flow of imported rubber into the United States. Except for a freak, temporary shortage in 1924—more of a hunger pang than a famine—the Stevenson Scheme had proved a failure, due to the inability of the British Colonial Office to control competitive Dutch competition in the Far East.151 Neverthless, Harvey Firestone was as evangelical as ever in trumpeting the slogan “America Should Grow Its Own Rubber,” and Henry Ford, as well as Commerce Secretary Hoover, joined him in encouraging Edison to proceed with deep research.

  Before announcing that he was now a full-time botanist, Edison had to submit to a birthday luncheon in Newark, attended by well over a hundred “Edison Pioneers”—grizzled veterans of the great days in the ’70s and ’80s, when their boss was inventing something new every two weeks. The seven-course menu, featuring cream of asparagus soup, shad stuffed with its own roe, and sweetbread patties, was notably easy on the gums.152

  Such occasions were torture for Edison. He was repulsed by the overeating, tired of being told that he was an intellectual superman.153 His disclaimer that genius was “one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration,” had become a cliché, yet the Pioneers clung to it—except perhaps the few who could remember him when he had been young, and they even younger: Francis Jehl and William Hammer, witnesses to the night his first viable lightbulb had burned and burned and burned; Charles Clarke and John Lieb, who had helped him power up that first square mile of Manhattan in ’82; and Sammy Insull, his former factotum, richer now than everyone else in the room, with the exception of Henry Ford.154

  The latter had become so besotted with Edison that a newspaper publishing a photograph of them in conversation, mouth to ear, felt obliged to explain to its readers, “Ford isn’t kissing his aged but still vigorous chum.” Ford planned to establish a $5 million Edison Institute of Technology in Dearborn, Michigan.155 It would feature a re-creation of his hero’s first laboratory, stocked as authentically as possible, down to the last jar of aqua regia. One of the first items he solicited was a testimonial, suitable for framing, that the phonograph had been invented in that shed half a century before. Edison obliged with a letter showing he could still wield a pen beautifully at age eighty.156

  Ford began by purchasing the scrubby hamlet that had once been Menlo Park, New Jersey. Next, he carried off every brick and board of the original complex, and foraged the soil for experimental detritus. To Mina’s mounting irritation, he also became a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles around Seminole Lodge, where his immaculate trouser seat was seen protruding from a barrel of old lamps. He proposed appropriating Edison’s laboratory there too, in exchange for a modern facility more tailored to rubber research.157

  Mina threatened to contribute her own dead body to this scheme. She had never been able to understand her husband’s goodwill toward Ford or Firestone, and considered them both to be hucksters, capitalizing on his fame. It did not occur to her that maybe Edison was, in turn, capitalizing on their wealth and willingness to finance his work.158

  Since 1912 he had tolerated Ford’s obsequiousness as interest on the corporate loans and battery orders that flowed his way from Dearborn. It had been less easy for him, in recent years, to accept leather-bound volumes of The International Jew, a series of antisemitic newspaper articles in which Ford felt impelled to warn Aryans against such threats as the “Jewish Plan to Split Society” and “Jewish Jazz—Moron Music.” Edison avoided embarrassment by having his staff noncommitally acknowledge receipt of the books for him. “I know very little about Mr. Ford’s efforts. I do not want to get into any controversy about the English Irish Germans or Jews—even Yankees.”159

  Feeling himself thus unsullied, he agreed to accept Ford and Firestone as partners in establishing an official “Edison Botanic Research Corporation” to seriously address the issue of American dependency on foreign rubber.

  WHERE LIGHT CAN’T STRIKE

  Ford would have preferred to delay publicity for the new venture until all details of financing and staffing had been worked out. But Edison at eighty was as incapable of withholding big news as he had been at thirty. He had no sooner transferred to Fort Myers than he granted a series of “exclusive” interviews to various reporters and press agencies.

  “Thomas A. Edison,” The New York Times announced, “is working way past midnights in his laboratory here on an experiment which he believes will revolutionize the world’s rubber trade and change the South from the land of cotton to the rubber planting center of the United States.” Other dispatches described the great inventor’s dream of a patchwork of plantations, spreading north as far as Savannah and west into guayule terrain, that would supply all the nation’s rubber needs in time of war. Right now Edison was reportedly designing a machine that would reap, crush, press, and suck the rubber globules out of a plant he might breed himself—some milksappy vine or weed or shrub that would grow fast, with minimal maintenance, and reproduce easily. His current focus of interest was a variety of Cryptostegia native to Madagascar. A shipment of rare seeds from that island was on its way, paid for by Henry Ford.160

  Edison cleared ground for the new plantings across the avenue from Seminole Lodge, where his four-year-old grove of fig and rubber trees already stood tall and deep-shadowed in the humid riverside climate. “I am of the earth, earthy,” he exulted. By late spring he had sixteen species of laticiferous plants under cultivation across nine acres, including one hundred Ficus elastica and 350 Cryptostegia madagascariensis. The latter plant thrived to an almost predatory extent, making it difficult to control and impossible to harvest mechanically. Herbaceous things, Edison realized, were less tolerant of automation than the inorganic materials he had dealt with in the past. Beyond this problem were the paradoxes of nature. He puzzled over the green cambium beneath the dead bark of Hevea. “Why does the plant place chlorophyll where light can’t strike it?” Rubber-bearing plants grown in greenhouses, where there were no insects, secreted less latex and more resin. Was latex some sort of bug repellent?161

  Henry Ford, Edison, and Harvey Firestone in Florida, circa 1928.

  He made full use of his dusty Model T, explori
ng the wilds of central Florida for specimens. He learned how to pull a leaf apart and examine the “gossamer threads” that dangled from split capillaries. (“If there is some rubber they will not sag but will stretch out one-quarter to one-half inch.”) He anointed a freshly slashed Ficus with glycerine and found that it doubled the latex flow. Unfortunately the polyol also retarded coagulation. Pine trees were not laticiferous, but he tapped one anyway, to see how fast it dripped gum: in this case, one bead every eighty-two seconds.162 By way of relaxation, at night, he studied rubber-industry periodicals, or sat at his desk doodling botanical sketches.

  Edison botanical sketch, 1920s.

  THICK WHITE SAP

  Edison was unaware till he returned to New Jersey for the summer that the National Academy of Sciences had voted to honor him after all. At its latest meeting, an unidentified advocate more eloquent than Robert Millikan had shamed the membership by quoting a French academician’s epitaph to Molière. “We cannot afford to say when Mr. Edison dies, ‘Nothing can add to his glory, we can only regret that he does not add to ours.’ ”163

  He accepted the diploma in writing with an especially graceful signature but otherwise showed no interest in it. By now he was so fixated on polymers that when Mina put a carnation in his buttonhole one morning, he asked if she had tested its stem for latex. He was soon seen at the New York Botanical Garden, abusing various species of Euphorbia “by cutting plant stems, catching the thick white sap in his hand and rubbing it to test its elasticity.” Staff at the garden were honored to have so distinguished a vandal on the premises. John K. Small, the head curator, schooled him in the cataloging, preservation, and labeling of specimens.164

  On 29 July Ford and Firestone officially established the Edison Botanic Research Corporation, with parallel field and laboratory operations ongoing in West Orange and Fort Myers. Its initial capitalization was $93,000, with the two magnates each putting in $25,000 and Edison insisting—over their objections—on contributing an equal amount. He hired fourteen field botanists and gave them each a Ford car and a tent, with orders to fan out across America and “cut every plant in sight” that might suit his purposes. Within a month, he was receiving dozens of express-mail specimens daily, each labeled by genus, finding date, and location soil type. He asked the agents of western railroads to check their rights of way for laticiferous-looking shrubs. Frank Stout, his estate manager in Florida, was told to add more varieties to the plantation there—Ceara trees from Brazil, Landolphia vines from Liberia, Indian figs, guayules, poinsettias, and scores of other specimens. Meanwhile Edison himself analyzed the enzymes and proteins of as many as fifty plants a day. Aware that most species required two to five years to maximize their rubber cell inclusions, he wrote his doctor that he was embarked on “a race with the Angel of Death.”165

  Mina noticed that he was losing weight, and worried that he was trying too hard to live up to what Ford and Firestone expected of him. But she understood that he was by temperament and disability insulated from praise or gratitude, “simply being impelled to do.” At least he was no longer fretting about the Phonograph Division. “He is happy and busy with this rubber research. Just thinks of nothing else.”166

  That made Charles happy too. In a note addressed to “Father: Dept. of Rubberology, Edison Laboratories,” he wrote, “I have come to the conclusion you really do want to concentrate on rubber and not bother much with the details of the business.”167

  It spoke much for Charles’s confidence that he got away with such a tease. But Edison was, as Mina saw, back in the single-minded mode that had preceded his major accomplishments in the past. If he could live just as long as it took for a guayule shrub to grow, he might surprise the world yet again.

  Or not. “I have worked too hard,” he said to Marion when she came upon him one day, stone deaf and weary at his desk. In his youth, he had found the difficulties of electric light technology addictively challenging. Now those of botany often bewildered him. He told Popular Science Monthly that rubber research was “the most complicated problem I have ever tackled.”168

  At least he could confirm that guayule was not the plant he was looking for. After purifying a large quantity of its secretions and sending the coagulum to Akron for molding, all he got back was a set of fragile tires that cracked and split. Losing interest in desert species, he spent the rest of the year working his experimental way through the Euphorbiaceae, Asclepiadaceae, and Apocynaceae families, and assuring reporters, “We have only just begun.”169

  IMPALPABLE PULP

  That winter Edison executed his one thousand ninetieth patent and his first ever in botanical technology, “Extraction of Rubber from Plants.” It claimed to be unique in that it was designed (like his magnetic ore separator of forty years before) to precipitate what was valuable in material that was largely valueless.170

  He described a two-stage process by which small, air-dried, rubber-bearing plants were first passed through heavy metal rollers “so as to open up the pith seams and break the bark,” as well as the woodier stems, branches, and roots. The half-crushed mass was chopped into short strips and soaked until the bark and pith softened, then poured into a water-filled pebble mill, in which tumbling balls pounded the remaining solids, gently separating wood from pulp. In an hour or so the resultant slurry could be decanted from the mill through a fine screen and washed. “The woody material thus retained by the screen,” Edison wrote, “is very clean and almost snow-white and in the case of some plants…can probably be advantageously used for making paper.”171

  The second stage of his process amounted to a refinement of the first, producing an “impalpable pulp” that slowly liberated and agglomerated all the rubber particles in the mix.172

  Edison’s principal claim of uniqueness for his invention was that it enabled the harvesting and concentration of laticiferous plants containing less than 1 percent of the polymer.173 Two years later the Patent Office approved this claim, but by then he had lost interest in low yielders and fallen in love with one of the most ignored weeds on the American roadside. For the moment, he kept its name to himself.

  HOLIER RED CLAY

  “Won’t you let us go into radio?” Charles pleaded, as he saw his father off to Florida early in the new year of 1928. Farther down the platform, six Botanic Research Corporation aides were loading a hundred boxes of biochemical equipment aboard the train.

  “Well if you want to be a damn fool, go ahead,” Edison replied. “You’ve got my permission, but I’m telling you it’s no good.”174

  * * *

  —

  SEMINOLE LODGE WAS at its most beautiful that January. Mina rejoiced to see her flowers and orchids blossoming, and orange and mango trees bearing almost summerlike loads of fruit. Across McGregor Boulevard the rubber plantation looked equally lush, but the view was spoiled for her by the sight of ground being cleared for a new chemical laboratory, courtesy of Henry Ford. She braced for the disappearance, plank by plank, of the dim old studio Edison had built in the first year of their marriage. He himself was unsentimental about it, pointing out that he needed more space for his burgeoning team of “rubberologists.”175

  William Benney, one of the patient, bull-strong helpers Edison relied on for eclectic duties around the clock, was appointed laboratory superintendent. Francis S. Schimerka, an Austrian-born chemist, headed the analysis and extraction efforts, assisted by a professional botanist, a machinist, and five or six other functionaries of varying usefulness. These ranged from a teenage specimen collector to old Frederick Ott, whose ability to sneeze on cue had made him the first of Edison’s film stars.176

  Mina warmed toward Ford when he arrived in midmonth, full of plans for his projected Edison Museum. She could not help being touched to see the world’s richest man worshipping the ground her husband walked on—literally, because Ford was adamant that when the old laboratory was transported, it
should take a one-foot depth of Florida soil with it. He intended to do the same with the even holier red clay of Menlo Park, together with whatever fragments of Edisonia remained embedded in it.*12, 177

  Ford had no idea that he was giving birth to a science which would one day be called industrial archaeology. He knew only that his museum would not be complete without the acquisition of a collection jealously held by the Pioneers—models and machines from all periods of Edison’s career, including a magnificent chronological run of his lightbulbs, assembled by William J. Hammer. The Pioneers wanted to display these treasures in a gallery of their own, possibly at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.178

  On another front, the Ford Motor Company faced a challenge from General Electric as to which firm should sponsor the anniversary on 21 October 1929 of Edison’s breakthrough incandescent lamp. Given Ford’s ability to lobby the Old Man by simply stepping across the lawn that separated their winter villas, it seemed an unequal contest. Yet GE had the powerful support of the Pioneers, and was prepared to reward them and the Smithsonian in return if “Light’s Golden Jubilee” could be staged in its hometown of Schenectady, New York.

  Edison appeared not to care less about the location of the festival or the enshrinement of his memorabilia. Ford therefore courted Mina, telling her that he was prepared to spend $5 million, if necessary, to achieve both ends at the Edison Institute in Dearborn. She undertook to hold a family conference on the question when she and her husband returned north for the summer. It was unlikely that Edison himself would participate. He no longer had any appetite for public honors. When told that he had been voted one of the three greatest men alive, along with Ford and Benito Mussolini of Italy, he waggishly imitated a Jewish pawnbroker, saying, “Vell, dey vas great men, yes, but de man vot invented interest vasn’t no slouch.”179