Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Young read out some congratulatory telegrams from Guglielmo Marconi, the Prince of Wales, President von Hindenburg of Germany, and Admiral Byrd, who was experiencing even worse weather in Antarctica. “And now, ladies and gentlemen…Mr. Thomas A. Edison.”

  Edison hitched himself up, to applause that was but a rustle in his right ear. His horror of oratory came not from shyness but from uncertainty about the volume of his own voice. Would those whom he could not hear be able to hear him?

  What they did hear was a forceful if croaky light baritone, breaking when he pushed it too hard in the direction of a dangling microphone.243

  “Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I am told that tonight my voice will reach out to the four corners of the world….”244

  As far as he could see in the dazzling light reflected from gloss-painted walls and pilasters, it embraced a cathedral-like space lined with long tables and, beyond the transept, many more tables receding in perspective. Arranged along every front were some five hundred white-tied grandees and their women—Rockefellers and Morgenthaus and Rosenwalds and Kahns, Orville Wright and Lee DeForest, George Eastman and Will Rogers, university presidents and industrial tycoons. All of them were beholden to him for their telephones, dictaphones, stock tickers, and record players and movies, as well as the extra hours of work they could get out of their employees and servants, thanks to the billions of Edison bulbs now illuminating the world.

  “I would be embarrassed at the honors that are being heaped on me on this unforgettable night,” Edison continued, “were it not for the fact that in honoring me you are also honoring that vast army of thinkers and workers of the past”—his voice grew rough—“and those who will carry on, without whom my work would have gone for nothing.”

  Charles and Theodore and their wives, along with a large contingent of Mina’s relatives, tensed with fear that Edison would break down.245 But he drove himself to finish, his voice rising to a panicky yodel.

  “This experience makes me realize as never before that Americans are—are s-s-sentimental, and this great event, Light’s Gold Jubilee”—he began to weep again—“fills me with gratitude. I think—I thank our President and you all.”

  Edison turned to his right. “And Mr. Henry Ford, words are inadequate to express my feelings. I can only say that in the fullest and richest meaning of the term, he is my friend. Good night.”

  The last two words came out in a half-shout that took the last of his strength. He would not stay for the president’s speech, and he had to be helped back to the anteroom by Dr. Boone. Lying there too weak to move, Edison heard nothing of Hoover’s affectionately witty thanks to him for the gift of electric light.246

  It enables us to postpone our spectacles a few years longer; it has made reading in bed infinitely more comfortable; by merely pushing a button, we have introduced the element of surprise in dealing with burglars….It enables our cities and towns to clothe themselves in gaiety by night, no matter how sad their appearance may be by day. And by all its multiple uses it has lengthened the hours of our active lives, decreased out fears, replaced the dark with good cheer, increased our safety, decreased our toil, and enabled us to read the type in the telephone book. It has become the friend of man and child.247

  After this, Einstein’s German tribute, broadcast through a storm of static, left few auditors the wiser, although some may have caught the words Visionär, Ausgestalter und Organisator, and at the end, his attempt at five words of English: “Good night, my American friend.”248

  FRAUGHT WITH GOLD

  His apotheosis over, and his strength restored by two days of rest on the Ford estate, Edison returned to West Orange. “I am tired of all the glory, I want to get back to work.”*16, 249 He arrived home in time to hear two pieces of catastrophic news. On Tuesday 29 October the stock market fell with such violence that ticker tape printers kept chattering far into the night, unable to keep pace with the volume of selling. And on that same day Arthur Walsh, a vice-president of Thomas A. Edison, Inc., announced that the Phonograph Division was ceasing all production, “in order to devote our great record plant to the production of radio….This step is being taken regretfully because the phonograph for home entertainment was one of Mr. Edison’s favorite inventions.”250

  Neither denouement came as a surprise to Edison. During his birthday press conference earlier in the year, he had spelled out the consequences of overspeculation: “Ultimate panic. Loss of confidence.” Now, and for the next forty-eight hours, many of the plutocrats who had sat listening to him the week before saw their wealth evaporating like acetone. None suffered more, in the long run, than Samuel Insull, who had leveraged his $2 billion empire of electric utilities to an extent that no amount of extra credit could save him from ruin, and eventual fugitive exile.251

  There had been plenty of hints from Charles that the Phonograph Division was (like its founder) succumbing to sheer old age. The latest Edison electrical players and records were of superb quality, but it had proved impossible for them to succeed, given the company’s well-earned reputation for stuffy design, dull repertory, and mediocre artists.252

  Edison could only lash out at Charles in a final burst of impotent rage before returning to botanical research.253 “I can’t get my mind off rubber just now.” At the beginning of December he announced his choice of goldenrod as the best guarantee of American rubber independence. After testing seventeen thousand plants, he was convinced it could produce a good tough polymer at sixteen cents a pound—less than the current spot price for foreign crude. But some years of development were needed to bring the weed to its maximum polyisoprenic richness.254 Since his own years were obviously numbered, he would not stop for his usual Christmas at home.

  On the sixteenth Time magazine reported:

  Thomas A. Edison in a fringed muffler, Mrs. Edison, four servants, a dozen laboratory assistants and five carloads of laboratory gear and raw materials, all rolled southwards from New Jersey towards Fort Myers….Inventor Edison, having celebrated the golden jubilee of his electric lightbulb, had signalized his annual winter hegira by an announcement that sounded fraught with gold.255

  *1 Around this time Edison also exhaustively studied analytical atomic spectroscopy, as described in his annotated copy of The Nature of Matter and Electricity, by Daniel Comstock and Leonard Troland (1919).

  *2 The equivalent of $125 million in 2018, according to the “Purchasing Power Calculator” at measuringworth.com.

  *3 Although women constituted a number of the Edison Industries workforce in 1920, their jobs were either menial or secretarial.

  *4 The equivalent of $1.2 million in 2018.

  *5 The boy’s name was Ronald Reagan.

  *6 A silent documentary filmed that summer, A Day with Mr. Edison, can be seen on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=ep5NGVOi6QE. It poignantly conveys his energy, tetchy decisiveness, and extreme deafness.

  *7 In Washington, on 27 February, Firestone publicly called for American rubber independence. The House voted a $500,000 appropriation to research the project, and President Harding signed the McCormick Bill in early March.

  *8 Ernest L. Stevens survived into the age of stereophonic recording and remained proud of the Diamond Discs he recorded for Edison. “They sound exactly as if you’re listening to a piano in the room,” he said in 1973. “No overtones, no vibration or anything—the best piano record on the market, in tone quality.”

  *9 Edison’s personal dark green Lincoln is now an exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn.

  *10 The Thomas A. Edison Birthplace Museum is now a National Historic Landmark.

  *11 The banyan tree at Edison-Ford Winter Estates is now the largest in North America.

  *12 According to Francis Jehl, Ford also managed to salvage “nearly all the timber of the old laboratory, with the doors and most of the window stiles.”


  *13 In an unguarded moment, Mina voiced concern to Emil Ludwig over her husband’s lack of a grandson. “After marrying twice and producing six children, none of them have perpetuated his name.”

  *14 In May 2013 one of Edison’s rubber notebooks from this period, featuring his drawing of a goldenrod in flower, was offered by the Paul Fraser auction gallery for sale at an estimated price of $120,000.

  *15 It is possible the letter was never sent. Edison would easily have identified its purported author as Charles Sumner Williams, a vice-president of Edison Industries, and fired him for apparent interference in family affairs. Williams was known in the company as “Charles Edison’s right hand man.”

  *16 Edison’s “glory” in October 1929 was amplified by the first honorary Academy Award, “in grateful recognition of your eminent service in the creation and development of the motion picture.”

  Edison and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels aboard USS New York, 10 October 1915.

  IN HIS SIXTY-THIRD year, Edison presided over an industrial complex so vast that only he knew what was going on in all its departments. “Say, I have been mixed up in a whole lot of things, haven’t I?” he said, awed in spite of himself by the constellation of invention that swirled around his rolltop desk in the laboratory at West Orange.*1 From its farthest reaches nationwide—41 million Edison lightbulbs powered by six thousand municipal stations and one hundred thousand isolated plants—down to the pigeonhole in front of him, stuffed with notes of “new things” he meant to develop when he had time, the revolving mass had but one center of gravity. It was, however, expanding at a rate that threatened disintegration if his holding strength should fail.1

  The six brick buildings that comprised his relocated laboratory of 1888 (itself an enormous enlargement of the old facility at Menlo Park) were now dwarfed by seven multistoried concrete structures, covering four city blocks. They and twenty-one smaller buildings scattered around the complex co-produced motion pictures, phonographs and records, primary and storage batteries, business machines, and chemicals. All were certified as fireproof—a vital attribute, considering the volatility of most of the materials that crammed them. The National Phonograph Company, as Edison’s sound division was known, produced 130,000 records a day and six thousand phonographs a week, for an annual return of $7 million.*2 His movie factory shot out 8 million feet of nitrocelullose film stock a year. He employed more than 3,500 people, most of them highly skilled, few of them female,*3 all underpaid—chemists, cabinetmakers, talent scouts, diamond cutters, opticians, patent lawyers, screenwriters, lapidaries, machinists, and musicians, down to a little old Greek who did nothing all day in his lean-to except roast scraps of marble for lithium.2

  Edison’s commercial holdings extended far beyond the thirty acres of the West Orange complex. He owned, in addition to thousands of acres of mountain minelands upstate, a limestone quarry and the world’s largest cement mill in the Delaware Valley, an equally immense chemical plant at Silver Lake, an electric car shop in Newark, a recording studio and showroom on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and a glass-roofed film facility in the Bronx that was larger than the Metropolitan Opera and shot two or three movies a week. He maintained agencies in London, Paris, and Berlin to handle the intricate marketing of his inventions under the patent laws of many countries, plus an export office at home that shipped tons of records and players weekly to places as remote as Madagascar, French Indochina, the Falkland Islands, and British East Africa.3

  Edison film studio in the Bronx, circa 1910.

  TOO NEAR THE SUN

  Edison was, to outer percept and certainly in his own mind, a gifted businessman. Every brick and balance sheet that comprised the fabric and worth of Edison Industries derived from his inventive genius, dating back to the day he opened his first independent shop in Newark, forty years before. “I measure everything I do by the size of the silver dollar,” he liked to boast—not choosing to remember the millions he had lost in a career remarkable for profligate spending and wasted opportunities.4 Even when he restrained his natural impulsiveness and sought to behave like a canny Scot, he managed to lose again. Old associates still spoke bemusedly about the time Edison, arguing that he needed steady income, waved aside a huge British cash offer for telephone rights in favor of annual payments that he would have earned anyway, as interest on the lump sum.

  One reason for his business failures was, paradoxically, the characteristic that had made him triumph so often over rival entrepreneurs: an impatient willingness, compulsion even, to take enormous risks. To this might be added such other quirks as his certainty that any idea, no matter how revolutionary, was realizable through sheer doggedness of experiment (witness the nine years it had taken him to perfect his alkaline storage battery), along with his habit of excitedly publicizing breakthroughs in advance, and his contempt for speculators, which did not stop him betting on himself. He was bored by what he called “the humbuggery of bookkeeping,” while indulging an obsessive need to calculate costs to the last penny—although any accountant could see that budgeting was as alien to him as football.5 Edison was both stingy with wages and overgenerous with bonuses when (on rare occasions) he felt that a colleague shared credit for an invention. He was personally honest and honorable, yet tolerant of whichever shady operator might help him beat another man to the patent office. If he had to choose between paying an overdue bill and emptying his bank account to buy a new piece of equipment, he did not see why he and his creditor should not face privation together.

  Men who had to do business with him marveled at his inability to see money as anything of value unless it was invested in technology. Ralph H. Beach, president of the Federal Storage Battery Company, noticed him reach into his pocket one hot day for what he thought was a plug of tobacco. “In fact it was a wad of money bills that had evidently been there undisturbed for some time and possibly owing something to the sweat in his old alpaca pants.” Edison gazed at the wad in obvious disappointment, and Beach suggested he could use some of it to buy a new hat.

  “Yes I know, but I really haven’t the time.”6

  If he had not traded away the securities of his greatest corporate creation, the Edison General Electric Company, to finance his greatest folly, iron mining, Edison might by now be as rich as Samuel Insull—the icily arithmetical assistant who kept him solvent when he tried, against his nature, to be an executive only. During those often perilous years, one of his English directors had said of him, “Like all creative and poetic minds he sees no difficulties where men of ordinary understanding require to make their ground good. This is one of the distinctive qualities of genius, their flight is so high and strong that they are apt to forget they may fly too near the sun and have their wings melted. This, I suppose…explains Mr. Edison’s own pecuniary straits.”7

  The comment was made in private, and Edison would have scoffed to hear it. He flattered himself that he had, “beside the inventor’s usual make-up…the sense of the business value of an invention.” Yet as Insull’s successor Alfred Tate observed, he was so arithmetically challenged he could not understand the figures in a balance sheet.8 For all his laborious budgeting, he was cavalier about the worth of his own services. He either inflated them beyond reason or was naïvely amazed that any investor should offer him more than he expected. Nor was he a good judge of men, except in selecting (by attrition) laboratory staff who could stand his own pace of work. Optimistic and good-natured—as long as he was not crossed—he was quick to forgive associates who served him badly. Yet he had no sympathy for veteran employees who left him and fell on hard times, like Tate or Francis Jehl.9 This had earned him a reputation for ruthlessness that was justified only in the sense that anyone out of his sight was thereafter out of mind.

  Edward H. Johnson, the struggling milk carton merchant who, of all these forgotten men, had served him most faithfully and knew him best, cited haste as his most
fatal business flaw. Edison was always in such a hurry to move from invention to invention that he would often leave a major one undeveloped, in order to experiment on a device as hard to sell as the tasimeter, which sought to measure interplanetary heat. Or he would lavish so many improvements onto something as marketable as his top-class Amberola record player that the Phonograph Works never had time to put the latest model into mass production. Over the years, by insisting on vertical control of all his companies and departments, rather than integrating them horizontally in approved corporate style, he had brought Edison Industries to the brink of financial collapse.10

  Time had only reinforced the “opinion of many true friends,” first expressed by Johnson in 1893, that “both the world and Mr. Edison would have been gainers if he had left the conduct of the purely business side of his affairs to associates of special commercial training and instincts.”11

  WHAT HUTCHISON WANTED

  On 17 July 1910 a short, sleekly handsome entrepreneur of thirty-four escorted three naval officers onto the West Orange campus. Miller Reese Hutchison was no stranger at the gatehouse, having paid court to Edison for at least nine years in the hope of gaining business and other, more personal favors. By his own account, he had been a “worshiper” of the “Big Chief” since he was a boy in Alabama. After a privileged education in military schools and a Jesuit college, as well as polytechnic and medical institutes, Hutchison had flourished as an inventive electrical engineer, winning gold medals for a portable hearing aid that helped Queen Alexandra of Great Britain overcome her deafness.12 His attempts to do the same for the most famous deaf man in America had failed when he realized that Edison liked being wrapped in a cocoon of near-silence. But that did not stop Hutchison from continuing to visit the laboratory, often with potential customers in tow, until he was so much of a persona grata that he was even allowed to conduct tours of the complex.13