Edison

by Edmund Morris

  All the same, he had to acknowledge the superior durability of Aylsworth’s plastic, which was nonfibrous and consequently smoother. If he could design a floating-weight reproducer it would not shrug off, it promised permanent fidelity. Since even Aylsworth had difficulty pronouncing the name of its condensed hardener, hexamethylenetetramine, they settled on the brand name Condensite. Edison allowed the chemist full patent credit and put it into bulk production at Glen Ridge, New Jersey.*8, 59

  Although he would cling to the cylinder as his preferred recording medium for another eighteen years, he was astonished at how good Condensite sounded when engrooved in disk form. But the disk had to be absolutely flat. If not, the vertical needle movement he insisted on (as opposed to the wall-banging, lateral swing his competitors preferred) tended to exaggerate any surface warp, with resultant distortion and pitch variations painful to his strangely sensitive remnant of hearing. This mandated an extra-heavy disk base, which might put off some customers.

  Mina wished he would give up on the phonograph altogether, sell up, and retire. Seminole Lodge beckoned her, with its fruits and orange blossom, but Edison said he was too busy to go south. As it was, he seldom slept. “Papa is in the laboratory tonight working away at his disk,” she wrote Charles on 6 March. “He cannot get the pure tones and it is worrying him greatly.”60 As always, Edison’s solution to any problem was to pile experiment upon experiment (more than two thousand on the reproducer alone) until he dropped from fatigue.That same night Hutchison photographed the Old Man napping on a workbench in the chemistry building:

  Edison asleep in his laboratory, 6 March 1911. (Photograph by Miller R. Hutchison)

  If he did not come home at four-thirty A.M., only to bolt back to work after breakfast, he would stay away for days, until Mina went down and forced him to eat, bathe, and shave.

  Edison was so driven, in both senses of the word, that when he had dry cleaning to drop off at the Armenian laundry on Valley Road, he would order his chauffeur to maintain speed and, en passant, hurl out his dirty suits. Rose Tarzian, the young immigrant inside the shop, got used to hearing the thump of the bundle on her screen door. Sometimes his vests would be virtually uncleanable, being burned by acid or spattered with wax. Beads of Condensite were of course unremovable. “You’d think he’d have an apron on, a leather apron!” she complained.61

  After doing her best, Rose would return the suits to Glenmont, climbing the long slope of Llewellyn Park on foot. If Mina came to the door, she could count on a fifteen-cent tip. If the master of the house did, she got nothing.62

  HE IS OPENING UP

  Although Edison treated Hutchison and a New York Times reporter to a preview of a new “talking pictures” system he had devised, he said he was not satisfied with it yet. “I want to give grand opera….I want to have Teddy addressing a meeting.”*9 Characteristically, he waved aside its main problem, synchronism, sure that he would be able to fix it once he was finished with his recording project.63

  He was, in any case, still involved in development of the submarine battery, if only because Hutchison sought the special intimacy with him that comes when men work side by side late at night at the same experimental table. They performed safety tests on the prototype, checking its water resistance and equipping it with an overcharge alarm. Its cells—suitcase-size six-hundred-pound steel jars—emitted large quantities of hydrogen at the beginning of their recharge cycle, so they subjected them to a series of internal detonations, to ensure the steel was thick enough to contain the explosive force.*10 “He is opening up to me more and more all the time,” Hutchison wrote on 22 April. And a month later: “Long talk with TAE. Gradually making myself more valuable to him.”64

  Often as not, it was he who drove the Old Man home at dawn. Sometimes he would return at once to the laboratory, eschewing sleep altogether, in the hope that his dedication would be noticed. It was. Edison soon rewarded him with free office space in the storage battery building across Lakeside Avenue. That was enough encouragement for Hutchison to move his wife and four sons to a rental property in West Orange, while keeping a beady eye on real estate opportunities in Llewellyn Park.65 Discovering that Edison loved to be driven through the New Jersey countryside, he treated him and Mina to long jaunts in his Packard, and showed them where he lived. Mina began to be as suspicious of him as she was of Madeleine’s rosary-rattling boyfriend. Was “Hutch,” as he insisted on being called, also seeking a filial relationship with the world’s greatest inventor?

  As the weather warmed, she moved to detach her husband from his clutches, and her daughter from those of John Sloane. She declared that it was high time the Edisons—her Edisons, excluding of course Tom and William—took a grand tour of Europe. They should stay away all summer, exploring northern France, the Alps, the Danube valley, and Germany. Perhaps a reunion could be arranged with Marion Edison Öser, the half-sister Theodore had never seen, and Madeleine and Charles could hardly remember. Marion was married, happily by all reports, to a German army officer and lived in Mühlhausen.

  Edison was not averse to a sabbatical. Having patented eighteen phonograph improvements in as many months and designed a prototype disk player (not to mention an apparatus to add sound and color to movies), he admitted to being exhausted.66 He had not taken a real vacation since 1889, his winter retreats to Florida—when he took them—being little more than transfers from one laboratory to another. But he still would not leave until the disk player was ready to show at the National Association of Talking Machine Jobbers convention in July. After that he had yet another patent to file, for the reclamation of wash water from electroplate cathodes, and Hutchison needed help in the manufacture of nickel flake….67

  Mina, Madeleine, and Theodore sailed for France on 24 June, leaving Edison to follow with Charles at his leisure.

  A GREEN SEVEN-SEAT, OPEN-TOP DAIMLER

  “I want to get away and do a little worrying,” Edison joked to reporters when he finally boarded the Mauretania at the beginning of August. He said he had been too busy to indulge that luxury at work, and now had at least two months to make up for it.68

  On the first day out to sea, Charles came of age. He celebrated by smoking his first cigarette, a practice he would maintain as continuously as possible for the rest of his life. His father nudged him further into his future course with a gift of 505 shares in Thomas A. Edison, Inc., phonograph stock.*11 Charles by no means disliked the idea of taking the company over one day. But first, there were the fleshpots of Europe to look forward to. The astute Madeleine sensed that Charles had “Bohemian” tendencies. “He likes queer—out of the ordinary things and places.”69

  If by expressing a desire to “get away,” Edison imagined he would escape his own celebrity, he soon discovered that it traveled with him.70 He became a fixture in the first-class smoking room, where fellow passengers hung on his cigar-chomping monologues. One of them was Henry James. “The great bland simple deaf street-boy-faced Edison is on board and I have talked with him,” James wrote in a letter describing the voyage. He added that he was touched by the kindness and sympathy with which Edison had asked after his favorite niece, a victim of depression. Charles was amused to see the author of The Wings of the Dove throwing paper darts on deck with his father, in an apparent investigation of the laws of aerodynamics. “The days of steam power are about to finish,” Edison observed as it thrummed beneath him. “Flight will be the future transport phenomenon.”71

  News of his imminent arrival in London reached the highest levels of the British government. Arrangements were made to receive him in the House of Commons on the evening of 8 August, in spite of the fact that the Liberal government’s Parliament Bill, the most controversial legislation since the Reform Act of 1832, was scheduled for debate that night. Hard as it was for Edison to comprehend, Britain was in a prerevolutionary state over the measure, which sought to deprive the unelected House
of Lords of its power to control public spending.

  His legal affairs representative in Britain, Sir George Croydon Marks, MP, met him after he checked into the Carlton Hotel and escorted him and Charles to Westminster. By order of the Speaker, they were accommodated in the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery of the Commons and looked down on a scene of extraordinary rhetorical venom. The debate was dominated by Winston Churchill, who as home secretary of the governing Liberal party accused his old Tory colleague, Lord Hugh Cecil, of trying to provoke “riot and disorder” by resisting evolutionary change. Cecil declared that Prime Minister H. H. Asquith and his cabinet were “guilty of high treason” in seeking to overthrow a thousand years of aristocratic privilege. Arthur Balfour, leader of the opposition, defended a panicky amendment aimed at protecting the monarchy itself from violence at the hands of Liberal demagogues like David Lloyd George. Cries of “traitor” echoed across the aisle.72

  Meanwhile Edison, unable to understand a word, pondered the deficiencies of the chamber’s ventilation system. It was a hot night, and he asked if there were no means of cooling the room. Marks replied that generally, when temperatures became unbearable, iced water was sprayed onto the windows outside. Edison listened wide-eyed. “Do you tell me so? I could not have believed anything so stupid.”73

  Bored by the debate, which went on until after midnight, he sought relief on the terrace, where a steady procession of MPs paid homage to him. Lloyd George, a jovial little Welshman, asked if he could “invent something for getting bills quickly through Parliament.” The Irish nationalist leader T. P. O’Connor received the same impression of naïveté that struck Henry James. “He is like a great schoolboy….The simplicity of genius was never before so remarkably illustrated.”*12, 74

  Next morning, as newspapers shouted news of the government’s victory, a fire burned the Carlton Hotel to the ground. Since it was the traditional haunt of British bluebloods visiting town, Lord Cecil no doubt saw its immolation as symbolic of the vote. But by then Edison and his son had checked out, and were on their way to Folkestone and the ferry to Boulogne, where Mina, Madeleine, and Theodore awaited them in a green seven-seat, open-top Daimler.75

  MR. VALENTINE

  The car, rented for them by the ever-resourceful Hutchison, came with a chauffeur, as befitted a conveyance warranted to the British royal family.76 Edison delighted in its size and power. One of his quirks was that he had never learned to drive, although he always sat forward, giving peremptory directions.

  For the next six weeks he occupied this vantage point, enjoying panoramic views of northern France, the Loire valley, Burgundy, Switzerland, the Austrian Tyrol and Italian Dolomites, Hungary, Bohemia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Prussia. Every prospect was partially obscured by the American flag that Theodore—at thirteen a patriot contemptuous of all things foreign—insisted on flying from a pole on the front bumper. Edison protested in vain that the sight of Old Glory doubled or tripled the prices that innkeepers quoted them en route.

  Sometime after leaving Paris, the travelers became aware that they were being followed by another car. It turned out to be carrying a representative from The World who, when confronted, protested that he was under orders to cover their every move in Europe. “You know we newspaper men have to do these things.”77

  Edison refused to have anything to do with him but nevertheless provided him with a scoop when the Daimler, approaching Interlaken, skidded into a ditch and had to be hauled out by horses. Thereafter the reporter could not be dislodged. The younger Edisons felt sorry for him, because he turned out to be underpaid, sickly, and endearingly incompetent.*13 They delighted in his name—Edward Abram Uffington Valentine—dubbing him “Feb. 14” for short. Edison yielded to their entreaties to grant him the occasional reluctant interview. When in the Austrian town of Bludenz he accidentally overdosed on strychnine*14 and nearly died, Mina nursed him with a calm competence that surprised her children. He was too weak to file his next report, so Charles wrote it for him.78

  Impatient to get on, Edison showed little sympathy for the hapless scribe, nor for any of the dirt-poor peasants they saw as the Daimler continued east. (Charles remained behind, to follow with Mr. Valentine once the reporter recovered.) Their next destination was Budapest, which Madeleine and Mina both longed to see. If they imagined its remoteness would allow them to visit like any ordinary American family, they were progressively disillusioned. No matter how small the village or how large the city on either side of the Danube, from Klagenfurt to Vienna to Györ, crowds besieged them.79

  In Budapest a wistful, bowler-hatted figure from Menlo Park days accosted them. It was Francis Jehl, whom Edison had sent abroad as an engineer twenty-nine years before and subsequently lost interest in. Jehl was now working for the Budapester Allgemeine Elektrizitäts Aktiengesellschaft, burdened with an invalid wife and resentful of the fact that he had never shared in the fabulous riches deriving from his pioneer involvement in incandescent lightbulb technology. As far as Edison was concerned, he hadn’t either. But to Jehl, the great car, the royal suite in the Grand Hotel Hungaria, and the crowds in the street spoke gilt-edged volumes.

  Alternately obsequious and querulous, he mustered the courage to tell his former boss that he, Edward Johnson, Francis Upton, and William Hammer felt unrewarded for their services. Johnson was now “a milkman,” and Upton was “selling sand.” Edison’s response was to shrug and say they ought to have helped themselves.80

  Jehl nevertheless proudly escorted him to Brünn on 13 September, in order to show off the theater he had fitted out with incandescent lights in 1882, on behalf of the Compagnie Continentale Edison. Next morning Edison and his party—amplified now by Marion and her German husband Oscar, traveling in Mr. Valentine’s car—left for Prague. The Daimler got under way first, with a police escort, amid cheers and a shower of flowers. Jehl stood in the road with his hat off until it disappeared from sight.81

  A SMALL BOY DASHING

  Madeleine took an instant liking to her half-sister, a stout, vivacious forceful woman of thirty-eight. She also took to Oscar, an echt deutsch army officer who spoke little English. “He seems an awfully nice man, rather jolly or rather genial and good-natured and adores her.”82

  Over the years Marion had become more German than American. She even looked it, with her knotted blond hair and massive build. Fluent also in French, with an acute ear for opera, she had a sophistication that Madeleine admired, while lacking the means to live well. She was possessed of her mother’s love of money, and like Tom and William, felt that Edison had never given her enough of it. She showed no envy of Madeleine’s Bryn Mawr cachet, although she would one day remark that “my father’s idea of an education was that I shouldn’t get any.”83 In her heart, and on her lightly pockmarked face, Marion bore scars of Edison’s neglect of her at age seventeen, when she lay ill with smallpox in France and he declined to visit her, or even write.*15 But her adulation of him was still so plain that he was flattered into a renewal of the love he had shown her after Mary Edison’s death.

  “My best invention?” he said, in response to a question from Oscar. “You own it.”84

  The couple’s German came in useful—critically so—on Sunday 17 September, when the Daimler cruised into the Black Forest village of Lauf and smacked into a small boy dashing across the street. He was clubfooted and had probably tripped in an attempt to play chicken. An angry crowd collected at once. Edison and Mina jumped out of the car to try to prevent someone from lifting the boy, for fear he would choke on his welling blood. But then they saw he was already dead.85

  It took some time for Oscar and Marion, traveling miles behind with Mr. Valentine, to arrive. The situation grew ominous until local police confirmed that the accident had been the boy’s fault. Even so, Oscar’s military bearing and Marion’s interpretive skills helped quell the horror of the incident, enough for the Edisons to get some fitful slee
p in an inn that night. An official inquest the next day cleared them of negligence, and Edison left four hundred marks behind to compensate the boy’s indigent mother.86

  The remaining ten days of the tour were hard to enjoy. Mina had been hoping that Madeleine would go to Italy for the rest of the year and, with luck, forget about John Sloane. But she had no heart to protest when the girl said she preferred to go home.87

  Before kissing his other daughter goodbye in Dresden, Edison sensed her desperate desire for a car. He told her to buy a Mercedes-Benz and charge it to him. From Berlin, he sent the Daimler back to Paris, then took the rest of his family by train to Hamburg. On 28 September they embarked in the German liner Amerika, and the first person they saw on arrival in New York, snapping photographs as they came down the gangway, was Miller Hutchison.88

  ANOTHER AND GREATER ARCH

  Edison’s oracular tendency, which had grown on him since his pronouncements on the afterlife, did not permit him to come home without letting American reporters know exactly what he thought about modern Europe. “What is my impression of the people on the other side? Well, I’ll tell you. For the most part they are too thick—too wide.”89

  In a variety of interviews, he criticized the “lazy” English for consuming too much “beef and porter,” dismissed the illuminations of Paris as “twilight” in comparison with those of Broadway, and complained about the feminine fashions he had seen there and in Prague. “Primary colors in a toilette are a sign of an undeveloped sense….A woman’s skirts should bow in curved lines from her hips.” As for the urban scene east of the Rhine, “Something is wrong with the German aesthetic lobe. They ice their brains with too much beer. The result is beer architecture.”90