Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Edison spoke disapprovingly of the monarchical system of government in Germany, and that country’s “great standing army,” not subject to the will of its people. At least the United States was able to keep its polity in balance through regular elections and constitutional amendments. He said he was for Roosevelt’s most radical proposal, the popular review of judicial decisions. The current Supreme Court was too powerful, and too conservative. “Precedent, all precedent!” he scoffed.

  It occurred to Irwin that every one of Edison’s thousand-odd inventions had been built on a precedent of some sort. Yet there was no irony in his claim to having been “a progressive always.” His entire career had been a drive toward modernity.

  “There’s the matter of injured workmen,” Edison said, citing the Court’s opposition to employer liability laws. “A laborer loses his right hand in an accident. It’s his capital. It’s as though my plant should burn down without insurance….I never heard a squarer and truer thing from Roosevelt than when he said the loss to workingmen by injury should be a tariff on the business, to be paid by the public in increased prices if necessary.”119

  Irwin was probably unaware that Edison’s first example related to a particular amputee in his memory—poor John Dally, radiated to death by their work on X-rays—and Edison himself did not know that he would soon enough experience the pain of the second.

  WE’VE HELD YOU DOWN

  Edison also followed Roosevelt in embracing the right of women to vote—to the displeasure of his ultraconservative wife and, surprisingly, that of his younger daughter. Since Madeleine’s sole attempt to get a paying job away from West Orange, she had been consumed only with the desire to marry John Sloane and have his children.*20 The female suffrage movement left her cold.120

  Not so Lucile Erskine, a young independent journalist and summa cum laude graduate of Washington University, who boldly asked Edison in an interview what he thought of her sex.121 His reply took her aback.

  “It will be three thousand years— at the shortest 2,500—before women are the intellectual equals of men,” he said.

  She came back at him. “Haven’t women any brains?”

  “There’s some there,” Edison conceded. “A little, not much. But women haven’t any cross fibers. That’s our fault! We’ve held you down. But now you’re beginning to evolute.”

  From the twinkle in his eyes, Miss Erskine realized she was being teased.

  “There was a chance to hurl the name of Mme. Curie at him,” she wrote afterward, “but the cruel lack of ‘cross fibers’ made one forget to put it in the right place.”

  CORPORATE REGRET

  Woodrow Wilson had no sooner won the presidency in November than Frank L. Dyer lost his. Ever since the formation of Thomas A. Edison, Inc., there had been speculation among employees as to how long the Old Man could stand for something incorporated in his name to be run by somebody else. Edison blamed Dyer for the Phonograph Division’s continued sales fallback behind Victor, choosing to forget that his own perfectionism (or obstructionism, as the long-suffering lawyer might call it) was a principal reason for the delay in getting its new, competitive products out.122

  “The coming of the Disk Phonograph I hope will mark a period of great prosperity for you,” Dyer wrote in his resignation letter, “and I think it better that my successor should take charge of the business at the start rather than later on.” Both he and Edison knew well who that successor would be.

  My present position is quite untenable. Many subordinates are reporting directly to you, and I have reason to believe that in a number of cases you have indicated to them that you have lost confidence in my ability or capacity. Rumors of this sort naturally spread very rapidly and destroy all possible authority….

  In my recent talk with you, you criticized me quite severely, but I do not think your criticisms were fair or just.123

  Dyer pointed out that it had been he who pushed the disk project to begin with, and that the company’s new line of Blue Amberol cylinders, only just coming onto the market, could have been released two years earlier, had Edison stopped fussing with its Condensite composition. He took credit for surging profits in the company’s battery and dictating machine divisions and particularly in his own creation, the Motion Picture Patents Company—a hugely lucrative trust that dominated the movie distribution market. Despite the indignity of never having been allowed a corporate electric car, issued free to most department heads, he assured Edison that “I shall always entertain for you the strongest feelings of admiration and personal affection.”124

  William Meadowcroft announced Dyer’s departure with the usual expression of corporate regret, followed by: “Mr. Edison takes the presidency in order that he may direct the policy of the Company in addition to the technical details which he has always had charge of.”125

  AND WHAT FLESH

  At the end of the year Edison was working past midnight in his laboratory, with Miller Hutchison close by as usual. Distant steam whistles announced the arrival of 1913. The two men shook hands, and Hutchison wished his “Big Chief” well—as indeed he might, since Edison had just wiped off a record with potassium cyanide and was beginning to feel ill. But before taking to his cot in the library, he held a phonograph horn to his ear to hear the whistles better.126

  Hutchison recognized the amplifier as part of Edison’s new Kinetophone talking picture system, which he would soon have to introduce to reporters and exhibitors. He was not looking forward to the task. It was bound to be confused with the unsuccessful audio peepshow device, also called a Kinetophone, invented by Edison and W. K. L. Dickson in 1894—not to mention their even earlier attempt to make the prototype Kinetograph camera responsive to sound. Hutchison doubted that this modern enhancement, a complex hookup of hitherto independent machines, would work as “perfectly” as Edison claimed when put in the hands of untrained or half-trained operators. So far his experience with the theater owners and projectionists he had signed up for the launch had not been sanguine. “If ever a fellow was up against a tough game,” he wrote Charles Edison, “it is yours truly.”127

  Edison had been the first movie pioneer to equate pictures with spoken words and music: “I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear.” But after the failure of the first Kinetophone, he had abandoned the idea.128 For the rest of the nineteenth century in America, nickelodeon managers clicked coconut shells behind the screen to simulate the sound of trotting horses, hammered metal bars in time with on-screen blacksmiths, and blew bugles or popped Chinese crackers during battle scenes. Some employed hidden actors to utter aloud what their filmed counterparts were supposed to be saying. Rubber-lipped virtuosi who could imitate ship sirens or creaking floors or the whooshing of wind earned excellent money. Music, live or recorded, was a common background effect. Lyman Howe, the wandering “phonograph entertainer,” cheekily used Edison machines to accompany movies from other studios.

  Meanwhile in France, dozens of inventors pursued the chimera of images parlantes with a variety of systems that all, sooner or later, fell victim to the medium’s peskiest problems, synchronization and amplification. The only way “live” sound recording (as opposed to a later dub) could be matched with cinematography was to position a phonograph as near as possible to the action, and have the cylinder roll in tandem with the camera. For as long as the phonograph was able to record before running out of wax—no more than two minutes—an illusion of synchronism could be enjoyed by cast and crew. But when cylinder and film were separately duplicated and installed in theaters of varying dimensions, it became almost impossible to maintain a convincing pas de deux. The devices had to be linked by an electric wire or geared shaft, generally run under the auditorium floor, and subject to such interferences as rat suicide or vibratory dislocation. Any skip or splice in the projecting reel might cause Sarah Bernhardt, melodr
amatically dying on-screen, to start talking like a man, or even worse, break into song. Audiences reacted with predictable outrage, and many an impresario went bankrupt on the huge costs of production and exhibition.

  Even when so gifted a showman as Clément-Maurice Gratioulet premiered his Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre at the Paris Exposition in 1900, he had to rely on a projectionist skilled enough to hand-crank the film at varying speeds, while listening via telephone to the dialogue weakly sounding from a Lioretrographe player in the orchestra pit. The man must have had phenomenal hand-ear coordination, because at first Gratioulet prospered mightily, earning rave reviews for his presentations of such spectacles as the ballet L’Enfant prodigue and the duel scene from Rostand’s Cyrano. “Here are beautiful sounds and beautiful gestures which are fixed for eternity,” Le Matin declared. But the beauty the newspaper ascribed to the Lioretrographe was that of novelty, more than true acoustics. Amazement at being able to hear, as well as view, the exquisite Cléo de Mérode perform her danse orientale wore off when theatergoers realized they could see her do it in the flesh—and what flesh!—at the Folies-Bergère. Moreover she danced to the chimes of a live gamelan band, rather than indistinct noises from a tin horn.

  Edison’s most serious rival in the audiovisual field—and an unabashed infringer of his sound and movie patents—was Léon Gaumont, whose Chronophone apparatus featured several innovations, such as a transmission clutch, to improve synchronism. But Gaumont also tried to solve the amplification problem by squirting compressed air into the reproducer of his phonograph, which added more hiss than volume to its sound stream. And his device enabling the projectionist to adjust the RPM of the cylinder whenever the film jumped or lagged made for queasy changes of pitch.

  Nevertheless, by the time Edison decided to resurrect his Kinetophone idea, the basis of all the French systems, Gaumont’s phonoscènes were being successfully shown all over Europe. Some, with hand-tinted enhancements, made their way to North America. Their sound, however, remained thin and weak. Edison was confident that he could succeed where so many had failed. As president of two of the world’s largest film and phonograph studios, he was in a unique position to combine the experimental resources of each. And as chairman of the powerful Motion Picture Patents Company, he could make sure no further Gaumonts arose to poach on what he regarded as his intellectual property.129

  The new Kinetophone apparatus that he developed in an access-restricted, asbestos-padded tent athwart his laboratory*21 only superficially resembled its predecessor of 1894. There was still a wax cylinder for recording, betraying Edison’s continued preference for that format over the disk. Only now it was a fat, foot-long drum that could hold six and a half minutes of dialogue or music, enabling Edison’s talking pictures director, Oscar Apfel, to shoot the prison scene from Gounod’s Faust in one take. The wax, moreover, was so pure and smooth under the recording needle it could have been frozen butter. It picked up the softest sounds—sighs, stealthy footsteps, creaks—from thirty to forty feet away, through a twelve-petal horn that expanded and tilted toward sound like a great lily seeking sunlight. The phonograph itself was immobile (it weighed seventy-four pounds) and unseen below the frame. This cramped lateral movements onstage, because Edison found that the horn’s receptivity to voices faded at a compound rate when actors walked away.130 As a result, the half-dozen features he prepared to demonstrate the Kinetophone’s adaptability to various entertainment genres all had a centered, “tableau” look, in contrast to the fluid action of silent films.

  A high-tension belt of unstretchable silk connected two wheels, one revolved by the phonograph axle, and the other driving a “synchronizer” that was in turn geared by means of a worm shaft to the camera. Thus the Kinetophone, unlike its French predecessors, recorded and shot at a speed controlled by the revolutions of the cylinder, rather than the rotations of the camera’s shutter. When the film was printed and the cylinder duplicated in Condensite, neither could be edited, or the sounds and images would at once separate. “A variation of one-fifth of a second is fatal,” Edison admitted.131

  The shorter and tighter the silk belt, the better the synchronism while filming.*22 But the reverse process of projection—with the phonograph in playback mode, hidden behind the screen and “talking” through a small gauze grille—almost always involved a lengthy extension of the system, via pulleys, to the booth whence another unseen device (endlessly fascinating to children) sent forth its moving fingers of light. Every show, starting with the press preview Edison hosted at the laboratory on 3 January, required the services of a brace of operators: one to crank the picture, and one to activate the phonograph on cue. This occurred when the opening credits (displayed in silence, to save cylinder space) faded from the screen and gave way to the image of an actor in full evening dress entering a luxuriously furnished room. He advanced, stationed himself between two potted plants, and opened his mouth.132

  ALL THE RREALISM OF NATURE

  “A few brrief years ago,” the mouth said in a clear tenor voice, rolling its rs and articulating every syllable, “Mr. Thomas A. Edi-son prresented to the world his Kinetoscope.*23 Inventors the worrld over have endeavored to synchrronize the phonograph and motion picture. But it remained for Mr. Edi-son—”133

  Was a mouth indeed saying these things, or was a diamond-point reproducer vibrating somewhere below the potted plants, camouflaged with photography? To most people in the room, the illusion was total. Gasps of surprise and wonder could be heard on all sides as the actor continued reciting the words Hutchison had written for him.134

  “—to combine his two grreat inventions into this one, which is now entertaining you, and is called the Kinetophone. The Edison Kinetophone is abso-lutely the first genuine talking picture ever prroduced.”

  This was of course not true. Gratioulet’s Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre had achieved a similar if less precise verisimilitude twelve years before. But Hutchison, an early exponent of the art of movie hype, evidently thought the adjective genuine meant something.

  “The actor,” said the actor, moving freely about the stage, “performs exactly as he does upon the stage, moving freely about, and his everry word and every action are simultaneously recorded, with all the rrealism of nature.”

  He proceeded to demonstrate the Kinetophone’s fidelity by smashing a china plate, blowing a horn and a whistle, and introducing some musicians, including a pretty girl who sang “The Last Rose of Summer.” In a crescendo of noise, he brought on a pair of barking dogs.

  Edison, chomping on a big black cigar in his front row seat, chuckled at the din and nodded at the actor’s prediction that the world would be watching such performances “one hundred years from now.” But he frowned when his signature flashed on the screen and he heard himself described as “that Wizard of sound and sight, Mr. Thomas A. Edison.” Hutchison had not yet learned that the W-word irritated him.135

  The show continued with six more demonstration shorts: the “Miserere” from Il Trovatore, a scene from Planquette’s operetta The Chimes of Normandy with clinking coins and carillons, the quarrel of Brutus and Cassius in Julius Caesar, and three comic sketches that restored Edison’s good humor. Afterward, however, he was cautious in accepting the congratulations of reporters. “No machine is perfect,” he said. “Man is not perfect.” Nevertheless he could not disguise his pride in achieving a synthesis of all his experiments in phonography and cinematography. He said that he had “arrived at a place where ‘the movies’ are also to be known as the ‘talkies.’ ”136

  Within twenty-four hours the word talkie entered the vernacular. There was a rush by entrepreneurs, including Edison’s conniving son William, to acquire Kinetophone exhibition rights.137 The Chicago financier John R. Dos Passos offered a down payment of $1 million for a controlling interest in the venture. His envoy was staggered when Edison “just laughed” at the certified check, saying that he intended to “opera
te the machines and market them himself.” The successful bidder, representing a combine of the nation’s three largest vaudeville networks, accepted these conditions and named itself the American Talking Pictures Company. It contracted with Edison to manufacture three hundred systems and produce a steady supply of features to feed them. A national release date was set for 17 February, much to Hutchison’s dread. The press preview had gone well because the room was small and the operators were well trained. But he did not see how he could ensure synchronism when the cord linkage expanded to the huge proportions of theaters like the Colonial in New York, let alone persuade unionized projectionists to learn a complex new technology. “This entire apparatus is the most unsatisfactory product we have ever turned out,” he warned Edison. “I can see all sorts of trouble ahead.”138

  As far as Edison was concerned, that was Hutchison’s problem. Never having cared much for movies as entertainment, he had an overriding interest in adapting the medium—with or without sound—for education.139 Besides, he wanted to get back to the improvement of his disk records, which did not satisfy him and were still unavailable for general distribution.

  Hutchison, having gotten the job of chief engineer through what he believed to be adroit manipulation of “the Old Man,” was entitled to wonder who had manipulated whom. The fat commissions he looked to as Edison’s storage battery sales agent had only just begun to accumulate, thanks to encouraging orders from train and delivery truck companies. But the navy was tying so much red tape around the installation of the S-type unit in a trial submarine as to raise questions about its willingness to switch from acid to alkaline cells. Meanwhile Edison had been quick to take advantage of Hutchison’s status as an unsalaried employee, heaping responsibility on him for all the plant operations his title embraced.140