Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Unlike the usual wheedlers who looked to Edison for jobs or endorsements, Hutchison was independent-minded and wealthy. He earned a fortune in annual royalties from one invention alone—the Klaxon horn, whose gargly, turkey-like call was one of the reasons the automobile was hated by peace lovers around the world.*4 His own luxury cars of choice were a Packard and a six-cylinder Pierce-Arrow, either of which put to shame Edison’s little Bailey Electric Victoria phaeton.14

  Exactly what Hutchison wanted by hanging around the laboratory nobody could yet figure, but the fact was that Edison, normally aloof from intimacy, had begun to enjoy his company and admire his social poise. They presented an amusing contrast when seen together—the younger man saturnine, elegant in dress and manners, smoking choice Havana cigars; the older white-haired and slovenly in suits that had often been slept in, chomping on a wad of the cheapest tobacco. Hutchison had an extraordinary voice, melodious and almost Levantine with its rolled rs (“thirty-fourr hundrred my-ils”).15 He addressed Edison as “Misterr Edi-sohn,” and although always respectful in conversation, he was adept at scribbling the sort of smutty thigh-slappers that had the “O.M.” rocking back and forth in his chair with laughter:

  A young man with blackened eye was interrogated as to its cause. He replied, “I was kissing my girl good night and her elastic garter broke.”16

  Hutchison’s guests this day were young submarine commanders who wished to explore the possibility of developing the Edison storage battery (“Built Like a Watch, But Rugged As a Battleship”) for underwater use.

  Edison had experimented with defense technology before, working on a dirigible torpedo with W. Scott Sims in 1889, fantasizing aerial-dropped torpedoes and “dynamite guns” during the Venezuela crisis of 1895, and inventing an explosive illuminant during the Spanish-American War. But after that he had paid no more attention than the average newspaper reader to John Philip Holland’s long struggle to sell the navy a revolutionary new weapon—the attack submarine. Only when President Theodore Roosevelt startled the world by vanishing into the depths of Long Island Sound for two hours in a Holland boat did Congress become seriously interested, and authorize the construction of seven bigger submarines in its defense appropriations for 1906 and 1907.17

  That did not prevent Luddites in the Navy Department from continuing to resist improvements in submarine technology. “Innovation,” Holland complained, “acts on these timid souls just as a sudden plunge into ice water.” The Bureau of Steam Engineering was especially obstructive. It had mandated for years that submarines should be powered, illuminated, and controlled underwater by the force in its purview, instead of by electric motors connected to the Exide batteries Holland recommended: open-top, lead-acid cells that required lengthy recharging after the boat surfaced.18

  To Hutchison, the bureau’s objections were not unreasonable. A few weeks before, he had taken a dive with one of his current companions, Lt. Frederick V. McNair, Jr., in the submarine Cuttlefish. He was supposed to be demonstrating a marine speed indicator he had invented, but he became curious as to why McNair never dove at an angle exceeding fifteen degrees. The commander explained that a sharper inclination would cause the sulfuric acid in the vessel’s battery compartments to slop over and “attack the steel plate of the main ballast tank.” Should the tank then rupture under pressure, it would flood with seawater, the salt of which, split by the acid, would offer all on board a Hobson’s choice between drowning or suffocating from chlorine gas.19

  This had given Hutchison the chance to remind the navy that after a decade of ceaseless refinements, Thomas Edison had perfected an alkaline nickel-steel battery so benign that, even if keelhauled across Chesapeake Bay, it would throw off nothing sourer than a little iron chloride. What was more, it preserved steel through the use of noncorroding potash. Lighter and longer-lasting than lead units and almost completely reversible, it was designed for electric cars and trucks, but Hutchison felt confident that a giant version could be evolved for naval purposes.20

  Hence the appearance now, at West Orange, of McNair and his fellow officers, traveling at their own expense. They spent two hours with Edison (Hutchison already functioning smoothly as interlocutor), briefing him on the liabilities of the lead-acid submarine battery and asking whether the capacity of his largest alkaline unit could be increased from 225 ampere hours to “several thousand.” Going beyond questions as the meeting progressed, they told him “it was his duty” to help the navy solve one of its most dangerous problems.21

  Edison agreed at least to try a range of experiments, and Hutchison wrote in his diary for the day: “The beginning of the Edison Storage Battery for submarine use and the beginning of my association with Thomas A. Edison.”22

  AN AUSPICIOUS DAY

  Whether Edison saw this new challenge as “duty” or not, it had the attraction, always compelling with him, of difficulty.23 The specifications his visitors had laid down were much more demanding than those for land batteries. They wanted an alkaline power pack strong enough to illuminate, operate, and maneuver a 105-foot, 273-ton vessel underwater for days on end. Less realistically, they hoped it would be deliverable at a price Congress could stand. This ignored the fact that the initial cost of nickel-steel cells was high, due to the extreme complexity of their internal design. The kind of monster unit McNair was talking about would cost at least $45,000—three times as much as a lead-acid equivalent.24 If, as was likely, Edison took a long time to develop and test such a battery, its price could only soar, and Hutchison would have a hard time arguing that it would pay for itself in less maintenance and greater capacity.25

  There was no question, however, that Edison stood to make a mint of money if he could produce a noncorrosive battery that would become standard on all U.S. submarines. Other navies around the world were sure to follow suit, and either order from him direct or buy foreign rights to his patents—a business he projected at $20 million a year.26 But to win the vital first contract from Washington, he would need a supersalesman—charming, hyperenergetic, and expert in electrochemistry.

  He did not have to look far. Miller Hutchison, who had the extra benefit of a military education, was confident of successfully lobbying everyone in the Navy Department, right up to Adm. George Dewey. On 25 August Edison authorized him to start doing so. Like a triggered dynamo, Hutchison spun into instant action. He was back within forty-eight hours to report that he had spent “an auspicious day” pitching the Edison battery, if not to Dewey, at least to Adm. H. Ingham Cone, chief of the Bureau of Steam Engineering. Cone had referred him to William Avery, his top electrical expert, and to R. H. Robinson, the naval constructor. Both men would have to pass on any matter of submarine redesign. Hutchison had not failed to treat Avery to a carriage drive in Rock Creek Park and dinner at the New Willard Hotel.27

  Edison was sufficiently encouraged to say he would begin building an experimental big battery at once. But he could not give it much of his own time, because he was working on two major projects—movies that would talk and sing, and a supersmooth plastic to replace the hard wax on his current line of Amberol record cylinders.28 Hutchison would have to supervise most of the prototype’s development, and he should not expect an early success. Memories were still raw among Edison’s chemical staff about the long agony of producing the A-4 automobile cell. It made them less than thrilled about the challenge of devising a unit ten times as powerful, soon enough to equip a new generation of submarines.

  MERCY? KINDNESS? LOVE?

  The advent of the second decade of the twentieth century, with the Western world increasingly, if unconsciously, preparing for a mechanized war, brought about such an angry escalation of the debate between science and religion that Theodore Roosevelt attempted to resolve it in an essay entitled “The Search for Truth in a Spirit of Reverence.”29 The philosopher William James virtually embodied the controversy, being both a psychologist and a quasi-m
ystic willing to believe, or at least speculate, that the soul was a detachable entity, capable of returning to earth after death of the body.

  To Edison, this theory smacked less of Resurrection theology than of atomic physics. Insofar as he understood either, he had no doubt that Truth was scientific, and that reverence for it must therefore exclude faith. James’s death that August prompted Edward Marshall, a feature writer for The New York Times, to ask Edison if he had ever discovered laboratory evidence of the soul.30

  “Soul? What do you mean by soul? The brain?”

  “Well for the sake of argument, call it the brain, or what is in the brain. Is there not something immortal in the human brain—the human mind?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  They were sitting in Edison’s great, dim laboratory library. He liked to keep it shuttered in summer, to block out the heat. But enough sunlight seeped in for Marshall to notice that the inventor’s face, normally smooth and untroubled, broke into fine wrinkles when he pondered an abstract question. Sometimes he squeezed his eyes shut before answering.

  “My phonograph cylinders are mere records of sounds which have been impressed upon them,” Edison said. “Under given conditions, some of which we do not at all understand, any more than we understand some of the conditions of the brain, the phonographic cylinders give off these sounds again….Yet no one thinks of claiming immortality for the cylinders or the phonograph. Then why claim it for the brain mechanism or the power that drives it? Because we don’t know what this power is, shall we call it immortal?”

  He insisted that the brain was a “mere machine.” It could be willed to record an infinite number of things other than sound, but eventually always broke down and therefore could not be immortal.

  “Is the will a part of the brain?”

  Edison said he was not sure. “The will may be a form of electricity,*5 or it may be a form of some other power of which we as yet know nothing. But whatever it is, it is material; on that we may depend.”

  He was willing to grant that certain aspects of “the thing we call life, or the soul,” endured after death, in the chemical sense that all matter continues to exist through change. But change did not imply transference to another, imagined world. There was only the world of here and now, and it was plenty occult enough for any metaphysician. “Heaven”—the sentimental paradise where good souls were supposed to live forever—was nothing but “the ignorant, lazy man’s refuge” from the mysteries that confronted him on earth. “There are plenty of savages, you know, who still call fire immortal.”

  Marshall asked how he, as a scientific materialist, would analyze the soul.31

  Edison felt it could only be done at a microscopic level, by examining sentient units small enough to pass through glass. “Each part of us is made up of millions of cells,” he said, and argued that the ability of skin to replicate an abraded fingerprint, for example, implied a physical if not spiritual uniqueness. His own individuality was nothing more than a “collection” of nervous or chemical or electrical impulses, just as New York was a collection of people “continually dying, moving away, and being replaced.” He had about as much chance of an afterlife, from his cells holding together, as the city had of going to heaven.

  Marshall tried repeatedly to get him to address the fashionable topic of psychic research, but Edison, his face wrinkling, would not be drawn. “I don’t go into the psychic much,” he said, dismissing its practitioners as “desirous of believing.” With the naïve frankness that endeared him to reporters, he admitted to wishful thinking himself. Once, experimenting with a certain ore, he had selected what he thought were some random pieces to analyze.

  “I assayed them very carefully, intelligently, and scientifically, and they showed 20 percent. I then took the same ore in quantities and crushed it, and assayed it, and it showed 17 percent….I tried again and again, and each time the same result. I could not understand it. So I went again to the ore heap, shut my eyes, and grabbed, taking whatever pieces of ore I happened first to touch….[They] assayed the same as the crushed ore. But if I took pieces while my eyes were open I always took bits which assayed high.”*6, 32

  The fact that his eyes were capable, within milliseconds, of detecting a 3 percent differential in ore content did strike Edison as remarkable. He was more interested in showing Marshall a worn photograph he kept on his desk. It bore the stamp of a Russian portrait studio. “That’s Mendeleev. See his autograph down at the bottom?”

  Gazing at it as he talked, he explained that Mendeleev was the “great generalizer” who had discovered the periodic table of the elements. “Existing experimenters seem to be working, all of them, with details.”*7 One day a man of comparable intellectual breadth would study the mysteries of the soul, and do so scientifically. “He will work through the material.”

  The phrase through the material obviously meant much to Edison, because he repeated it in a low voice. “That Russian is dead. Now where is his will? He was a very great man. His will was the greatest part of him….What has become of that will?” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  Marshall saw a chance to get him onto the subject, so far avoided, of the existence of God. “For that will to have entirely ceased when Mendeleev’s body died would indicate a loose system in nature, would it not?”

  “It would seem so,” Edison said, “and yet nature’s systems—nature’s methods—are not loose. It’s hard to figure out. Perhaps matter is getting to be more progressive. That may be it. But—God—the Almighty? No!”

  The journalist had his scoop. Edison had expressed agnostic doubts in public before, but never atheistic ones. It was plain as he went on that, unlike Roosevelt and James, he wanted no compromise between faith and reason.

  “Mercy? Kindness? Love? I don’t see ’em. Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of the religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me—the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness love—he also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do his mercy, kindness and love for that fish come in?”

  Edison continued to talk in this vein for some time. Marshall was struck by the forcefulness with which he expressed his convictions, his huge head tossing for emphasis and his face growing flushed. But he ended up grinning. “Nature seems to be a very undesirable member of society.”33

  “PROOF! PROOF!”

  The New York Times made the most of Marshall’s article, spreading it across the front page of its Sunday magazine section on 2 October under the headline “ ‘NO IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL,’ SAYS THOMAS A. EDISON.” The reaction was extraordinary. Within two weeks, it generated at least three pamphlets, as well as a double avalanche of protest mail to the newspaper and to Edison himself. “Perhaps no utterance by any man of science,” Marshall boasted two weeks later, “has created a sensation so extensive within the past decade.”34

  Fanning the flames, he interviewed one of the most outraged respondents, Dr. William Hanna Thompson, whose book The Brain and Personality Edison admired. Speaking as a man of faith rather than a clinical neurologist and former president of the New York Academy of Medicine, Thompson harrumphed that “people who do not believe in immortality are abnormal, if not pathological.” He criticized Edison for making some “very unscientific” claims, while not refraining from one himself. (“The brain…offers a colored or distorted lens to the Personality that looks through it.”)35

  Preachers predictably assailed the blasphemer as an “intellectual anarchist” and ingrate who “seemed to have not one touch of disappointment” in denying himself the consolations of religion. “What metaphysical problems has Mr. Edison ever solved?” the Rev. Charles F. Aked, pastor of the Fifth Avenue Church in Manhattan, wanted to know. As an inventor, he had brilliantly dealt with technological ones. “But what has he ever done to entitle him to be heard as an au
thority on the human spirit and its relation to God?” The Times voiced similar sentiments in an editorial. It condemned the interview (which it nevertheless reprinted in six languages) as an example of how savants granted “preeminence in one or other domain of knowledge…often make amusing and even pathetic displays of overconfidence in their own judgment…in regard to matters lying outside the field of their special competence.” The most eminent cleric to censure Edison was Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore, who remarked that he had “maimed his own mind, just as Darwin did by a too one-sided exercise of its power.”36

  Edison was dumbfounded to have caused a theological scandal that had few freethinkers coming to his support. All he had done was voice, amid many expressions of uncertainty, a metaphysical opinion prompted by fifty years of empirical observations of nature. Nobody seemed to have noticed that he had discussed an array of purely scientific subjects with Marshall, including Hertzian waves, Brownian motion, attrition of memory in the Broca’s fold of the brain, and the revelations of the ultramicroscope (“We may, eventually, be enabled to see the inner structure of matter”), as well as making an astonishing prediction: “The time will come when a man with a bad kidney…will be able to go into the open market and purchase a good kidney of some one else who has a good one…and have it inserted in the place of his imperfect one.”

  Replying to his critics in the pages of The Columbian Magazine, he said he could not help thinking the way he did.

  I honestly believe that creedists have built up a mighty structure of inaccuracy, based, curiously, on those fundamental truths which I, and every honest man, must not alone admit and earnestly acclaim….