Edison

by Edmund Morris

  NO SUCH FIFTH ACT

  The German writer Emil Ludwig visited Seminole Lodge in late February. He had just published a best-selling biography of Napoleon, but if he was thinking of Edison as another heroic subject, he found only an abstracted old man who had reacquired some of the wonder of childhood:

  I saw him step from the door of his flower-covered workshop….He was wearing his white suit, his head was bowed. In his right hand he held a small plant, and his face was filled with joy. For the plant had yielded a good percentage of rubber.

  He led us to a rubber tree, which he pierced with a knife, then collected the white liquid that dripped from the cut, meanwhile talking to us in terms of figures and percentages. Then he led us back to his shop, where he showed us preparations he had made from the juice of all gum-producing plants, from oleander to honeysuckle. They had all been weighed and distilled. Lovingly he picked up a tube that contained sap from the leaves.

  “Here is the main thing—chlorophyll,” he said.

  What a drama in the life of this man! Since Goethe’s last years there has been no such fifth act!180

  By early summer Edison was able to note, “I have tested 2250 wild plants in Florida, of which 545 have rubber.” He also designed a variety of crop-handling machines, including a leaf stripper that could denude twenty thousand oleanders a day. That was still too slow for him: “Must have 160,000 in 8 hours. 2 acres per man.”181

  Meanwhile his efforts to develop a more sophisticated extraction technology were blocked by the difficulty of finding a coagulating agent that precipitated anything less tacky than globules, impossible to vulcanize. But he typically regarded every failure as a step toward success, and told Mina that the past five months had been the happiest he had ever spent.182

  She could not say the same, feeling again and again the loneliness of a wife waking up nights to find the bed beside her empty—sometimes not even slept in. “Father dear is certainly pushing the rubber idea for all it is worth,” she wrote Theodore and Ann one sleepless morning. “He is over at the laboratory now working on his solvents, etc. and it is 2:30 A.M.”183

  Mina’s desolation was augmented by letters from Theodore and Charles, full of their enjoyment of life, marriage, and work. She would have preferred family news of a more intimate sort, although she did not expect it from Charles. He was now thirty-eight, and Carolyn considerably older, despite a policy of celebrating her birthdays in reverse order. Mina’s hopes focused on Ann, but that purposeful young woman seemed more interested in studying economics than stitching baby clothes.*13, 184

  Innocent or uncaring of her angst (“Ask me nothing about women—I don’t understand them”), Edison continued to ponder the seed, the wind, the sapling, the tree, the branch, and the leaf.185

  NO NEW “PUPS”

  In early June the spacious new green-painted laboratory across McGregor Boulevard began to fill with staff and equipment. It was sequentially laid out, with the crushing and drying rooms servicing the chemical processing tables, and machine and glassblowing shops set alongside. Some visitors assumed it was modeled on Ford’s famous production line at River Rouge in Detroit. They did not realize that Ford himself had been inspired by Edison’s “beltway” mining complex in the 1890s. And that, in turn, had owed much to the workbench layout at Menlo Park a quarter-century before—so much so that Fred Ott, looking around the long, two-bay-by-four room with its twelve double bays of tables and tubes, could be excused a pang of nostalgia. Except that this laboratory’s cabinets were crammed with seed banks, solvents, slicers, grinders, percolators, Büchner funnels, screens, pans, and porcelain balls. Soxhlet extractors sprouted like glass reeds from the farthest tables, their bulbs refracting the tall windows that overlooked the plantation.

  Thomas Edison brooding in chem lab.

  Mina forbade her husband to work there just yet. The new roof was not yet covered with creepers, and she worried about summer heat beating down on him. It was time, she said, to return to New Jersey for the summer.

  “I don’t want to leave, but she makes me,” Edison joked, as they boarded the northbound train on the twelfth.186

  After ten months of organization, the Edison Botanic Research Corporation was now a bipolar but smoothly functioning unit. Around its northern and southern ends swirled many institutions interested in “war rubber,” such as the New York Botanical Garden, the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Commerce, the Army-Navy Munitions Board, and the Ford and Firestone companies. Their various force fields were held together by Edison. No experiment could be undertaken, no new “pups” planted or seeds solicited, without his approval. Even senior scientists were expected to obey his constant stream of orders, oral, written, or telegrammed. To their relief, his disability prevented him from using the telephone.187

  He made the twenty-four-man Florida campus responsible for analysis and domestication of foreign rubber plants. West Orange handled an ever-swelling inflow of specimens from Botanic Research Corporation collectors in the field. As though this were not enough, Edison spent $8,000 to turn his garden at Glenmont into a Florida-style plantation, growing over five hundred varieties of herbs and weeds in straight rows, to the modified pleasure of neighbors. It was no wonder that his assistant William Meadowcroft, overcoming two decades of deference, complained, “This rubber business seems to stretch out to infinity.”188

  A VERY BIG THING

  Mina held her “important” family conclave about Jubilee planning at Glenmont on 20 August. Edison was represented, for once, by his eldest son. Tom had been brought back to the plant as an Edicraft engineer, testing electric toasters, amid general sympathy for his fragile health and marital distress. (Beatrice was cuckolding him with a handyman.) Charles, Theodore, and Ann Edison attended, along with Mina’s brother John V. Miller. The only outsider was John Lieb, sitting in on behalf of the Edison Pioneers.189

  Mina dominated the discussion. As far as she was concerned, General Electric had forfeited any right to celebrate her husband in 1892, when it dropped his name from its title. Lieb, pushing for the Pioneers, said that the company would compensate him now, to the tune of $100,000 a year, and build an Edison museum in Schenectady if he would give his blessing to a festival there. But Mina, still seething over a betrayal she blamed on Samuel Insull, rejected the offer. She confirmed that Henry Ford was prepared to spend as much as $15 million on his proposed Edison Institute, and approvingly cited the magnate’s “desire to make this a very big thing—a national affair.”190

  A vote was taken, unanimously favoring Ford and Dearborn. Lieb mangaged to negotiate an agreement whereby General Electric would still sponsor “Light’s Golden Jubilee,” albeit in Michigan, while Ford simultaneously publicized the opening of the Edison Institute. In time the latter’s museum would house the bulk of the Pioneer collection.191

  Edison thus had to brace for apotheosis a year hence, when all he wanted to do was produce some homegrown rubber that did not stick to his fingers.192 Already other Greeks sought to ply him with gifts. At the suggestion of Treasury Secretary Mellon, Congress awarded Edison its Gold Medal for “illuminating the path of progress.” He said he was too busy to visit Washington to receive it, so on 20 October Mellon came north with an official party to pin it on him in his laboratory.193

  A radio audience of 30 million heard the secretary praise him as “one of the few men who have changed the current of modern life and set it flowing in new channels.” Edison thanked him for the medal, but sounded more pleased when presented with an artifact of duller metal: his first phonograph of 1877, deaccessioned with the utmost reluctance by the Science Museum in London.194

  HURRAH!!!

  Seventeen days later Herbert Hoover was elected president of the United States. One of his earliest votes came from Edison, who could not be sure that Hoover would support domestic rubber research in the White House.195 Whatever
the case, he himself meant to continue his botanical quest for as long as it took to succeed—or until either his body or brain failed.

  The latter organ showed no decline as far as curiosity and retention of complex information were concerned.196 But its tolerance of other points of view, never remarkable, was almost gone. Henry Ford’s occasional snits were nothing to the spectacle of Edison roaring like a blast furnace when he heard—or misheard—something not to his liking. The bristling brows would contort, the always-jerky gestures become spasmodic, and the voice hoarsen, as if he were convinced that everyone around him was mentally deficient.

  Mary Childs Nerney, a cataloguer hired by Charles to organize the papers of Thomas A. Edison, Inc., had just begun to work in the upper stacks of the laboratory library when she became aware that the founder of the company was below.197

  Never shall I forget my first sight, or rather sound of him. High voltage invectives winged their way past in mass formation and in solo flight….I looked over the railing of the gallery.

  A man of medium height and stocky build stood by the inventor’s desk. He was slightly stooped. He had a magnificent head to which his snow white hair gave a venerable look. His fine eyes flashed as he let loose his amazing vocabulary. Could it be—it was—the Old Man himself.198

  The impression of stockiness she got was caused by Edison’s quaint belief that any clothes that fit too well bruised the microvessels of his skin and caused internal damage. So he wore the largest and lightest possible suits, left his high collar loose, and scuffed around in shoes two sizes too big. In winter he declined to wear an overcoat, on the antithermal theory that stiff sleeves let cold air run up his arms. Instead he kept himself warm with two or three layers of underwear—even four in blizzard conditions. Despite the almost invariable shabbiness of his vests and trousers, his shirts were spotless. This was probably due to Mina, yet Edison had an odd love of fine linen, in the form of black satin string ties, Indian silk handkerchiefs one foot square, and enormous pongee nightgowns that billowed around him. It did not stop him from bespattering them with tobacco juice, or from rolling up his jackets to serve as pillows when he napped after lunch.199

  That meal consisted, these days, of nothing more than a few crackers washed down with warm milk.200 Dinner, when he bothered to eat it all, was equally frugal. He insisted that solid food dulled the brain, that he needed all his wits to adapt his extraction techniques to the biochemistry of thousands of specimens.

  “I am always defeated by the tenacity of the solvents remaining in the rubber extract,” Edison complained, despairing of ever getting a precipitate that would toughen enough to vulcanize.201 Notwithstanding his successful patent for extraction by aqueous flotation, he found the “dry chemistry” of the Soxhlet extractor more efficient. In its tall, teetery, glass-tubed intricacy, it looked not unlike the Sprengel-Böhm pumps he had used in his early lightbulb experiments, striving for a perfect vacuum. Both devices used gravity and airlocks.

  The Soxhlet stood on a hot plate that warmed a flat-bottomed flask of solvent (Edison tried ninety different formulas) enough to vaporize the liquid and send it up to a top-mounted, water-cooled condenser. As the vapor reliquefied, it trickled down into a cylinder stuffed with plant pulver and plugged with a thimble of porous paper. The solvent soaked through the pulver, absorbing rubber molecules as it went, forming a slightly syrupy filtrate that was then siphoned back into the warming flask. There the entire cycle of vaporization, condensation, dissolution, and dribble was repeated until virtually all the rubber had been leached out. Decanted into a porcelain drying dish, the syrup solidified into a “stiff tremulous jelly” that was never dry enough, or elastic enough, to please him. Physics kept violating the purity of his residue. He got different results according to how he stirred, kneaded, or washed the coagulum. Even weather, or the kind of light that played on the Soxhlet during extraction, seemed to affect its molecular structure.202 But then, on 7 November, after applying some dilute sulfuric acid to the powdered leaves of a black mangrove, Avicennia germinans, Edison joyfully reached for his pencil and wrote

  THE PLANT OF PLANTS

  Success with one solvent on one species of plant, however, did not bring Edison appreciably close to the river of domestic crude that he dreamed of diverting into the nation’s strategic reserve. At the beginning of 1929 he claimed to have examined fifteen thousand plants and gotten nothing better than a 6.91 percent yield from the milkiest. “I may say that the patience of Job has been considerably overrated,” he told a reporter from The Saturday Evening Post.203

  As his eighty-second birthday approached, he could identify with Job’s sufferings, both mental (“Where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding?”) and physical. Exhaustion, self-starvation, and a restlessness akin to panic whenever his studies were interrupted took a toll on his health. He was racked with stomach cramps and suddenly began to look frail.204

  There was no lightening of his workload when he went south. The laboratory in Fort Myers was as busy as the one in West Orange. “He just works and nothing else,” Mina wrote to Theodore. “Leaves here about nine and crosses over there until six and comes home exhausted. After a spasm of pain lasting the last three nights about two hours he falls off to sleep…until 11:30 and then up again reading until 1:30 or two.” Edison blamed his pain on indigestion. But as both he and his doctor were aware, he was suffering from chronic diabetic gastroparesis.205

  Since life was short, and the regenerative cycle of most plants long, he decided to postpone any further attempts to improve the quality of his extracts, and breed for quantity instead. On 25 January Edison selected about forty plants that he believed might produce double-digit rubber. When he listed them by their Latin names, the genus Solidago appeared more often than any other. As a boy among millions of other midwestern children, he had known it as goldenrod—the wild plant whose yellow bloom, every August, warned that schooldays were about to resume. (Might the charged curvature of its tiny bulblike buds, balanced on their stems before exploding into flower, have reminded him of a similar configuration bursting into light, fifty “golden” years ago?) In terms of yield, Prairie goldenrod led the other species—Mexican, Tall, Sweet, and Pine Barren—by more than a full percentage point, save for one Florida specimen so anonymous that Edison simply cataloged it as “Fla. 201.” All he noted now was that at 4.15 percent, it was perennial and a “good plant.” He would need a few more months to identify it as Solidago leavenworthii, and conclude it was the plant of plants that most excited him.206

  NO APPARENT ROSETTE

  Seventeen days later Edison held his usual birthday press conference, this time in the charming hideaway that Mina had built for him, as a surprise, on the estate. Questions—mostly fatuous—were presented to him in writing. He could have answered aloud, for the benefit of a new breed of reporters, the “talking newsreel men.” But his mood was subdued, and for most of the time he merely took each slip of paper and penciled a terse reply on it, as if dealing with nuisance mail. When asked what was his recipe for “a happy life,” he scrawled, “I am not acquainted with anyone who is happy.”207

  An hour later, however, he was. President-elect Hoover arrived by yacht at the Seminole Lodge dock. Big and calm, tanned from a cruise in quest of marlin, Hoover was the picture of American success, at a moment when the polity he represented—ultracapitalistic, giddily speculative, awash in dividends—was at its apogee. For the next few hours, as he toured Edison’s estate and rode with him in a motorcade through Fort Myers, he gave off such waves of pleasure and good nature as to belie his reputation for dourness.208

  All the same, his visit indicated a concern among public figures that the “Father of Light” might die before his Golden Jubilee. Henry Ford used the occasion to announce his endowment of the Edison Institute of Technology. He released an architectural drawing that projected a five-gallery indus
trial museum bigger than Versailles and the Kremlin combined, centering on an overscaled replica of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. His reconstructions of Menlo Park and Fort Myers laboratories were not included. Subsequent news reports, issued by the publicist Edward L. Bernays, confirmed that they were to be the core of an adjoining “Greenfield Village,” an attempt by Ford to re-create the small-town America his automobiles had done so much to despoil. The entire complex covered 542 acres.209

  Edison was more interested, that spring, in the nine acres he had under cultivation across McGregor Boulevard—particularly a bed of Solidago leavenworthii root cuttings. After six weeks of potting and two more in the ground, they had sprouted as high as fourteen inches. At the end of March he calculated that if they maintained their vigorous growth rate, “possibly and probably [they] will give one ton of leaves for an acre.”210

  The more he looked at this species of goldenrod, the better he liked it. By May he concluded it had the best potential of all the plants he had tested. “No apparent rosette, fast grower, occupies smallest area, 6 x 6, without crowding…and mostly forty inches high though not yet in flower.” The rubber was concentrated in its leaves, and they were luxuriant all the way to the ground, so if he bred a sufficiently straight stem, they could be stripped by machine. At an extraction rate of 6.9 percent, that projected a per acre rubber yield of 138 pounds, meaning that his entire plantation might generate about fifty-four Firestone balloon tires a year. This was a slight yield by Hevea or even guayule standards, but Edison was sure that by massive propagation of the best rootstocks, he could squeeze an additional 2 or 3 percent of rubber molecules into their leaf tissue and greatly increase plant size.211