Edison

by Edmund Morris

  As for his secret hope that he would one day become president of Thomas A. Edison, Inc., it became increasingly obvious that Mina would not allow anyone other than Charles to succeed to that office. Relations between her and Hutchison exploded into open hostility in late January. “It makes me sick the way that man jinks,” she wrote Charles. They came to a truce out of concern for Edison, who was vaguely aware of some people quarreling somewhere beyond the music room of the laboratory. Hutchison tried to reassure Charles in long, disingenuous letters that he was nothing but a faithful servant of his father. “Every one of these [Kinetophone] outfits that is to go into practical use is worth so much a week to the Old Man,” he wrote. “I naturally am anxious to see as many of them in practical money-making as it is possible to get.”141

  Mina confirmed that Edison was facing one of his periodic cash flow problems, as a result of shipping thousands of expensive disk players while restricting production of the only records they could play. Acceptance of Dos Passos’s offer would have dispelled the cloud of insolvency darkening over him, but independence mattered more to him than security. She could only wait for him to turn the cloud to sunshine, as he somehow always managed to do.142

  Impatient as he was to closet himself again with the Insomnia Squad, Edison did what he could to help publicize the Kinetophone in the days leading up to its release. “Oh yes, I’ve plenty of time to see you,” he said to a reporter asking to see the system in action. He led the way to his private screening room (“This is my experimental theater”) and ordered the projectionist to put on the “Miserere” from Trovatore. The reporter boggled at the film’s visual and sonic power. Out of the corner of his eye, he discerned that while he was watching it, Edison was watching him, with a strange, quizzical smile. “Truly, the man of practical science, noting the effect of his latest creation upon mankind!”143

  At four P.M. on 17 February, Edison stood in the wings of New York’s Colonial Theater to monitor the reactions of more than a thousand viewers to his portfolio of demonstration shorts. The program began in expectant silence, with the usual shutter-flutter emanating from the projection box. But when Hutchison’s stentorian spokesman appeared on-screen and began to orate, there was a collective murmur of astonishment. The wonder grew when the pretty girl sang and Brutus and Cassius quarreled and Mephistopheles taunted Faust and a group of minstrels (two in blackface) launched into a medley of popular hits. The show climaxed with a chorus performance of “The Star Spangled Banner.” When it ended, the audience sat spellbound for a long moment, then burst into applause and shouts of “We want Edison!” He remained out of sight while the calls, punctuated with rhythmic handclaps, grew louder. After five minutes Frank Tate, an American Talking Pictures executive, came on stage to say that the inventor was unavailable. That did not quell the bedlam, which lasted until Tate reemerged to say that Edison was already en route to another show at the Alhambra, in Harlem.144

  It was lucky he chose to go there instead of downtown to the Union Square Theater, where he would have been humiliated by a ten-second slip in synchronism that had the audience hooting and jeering. During the “Edison Minstrels” short, the program announcer, wearing for some reason a powdered wig, sat down long before his amplified voice stopped speaking, while the singer he introduced launched into what The New York Times described as ten or twelve seconds of “fervent but soundless song.”145

  Theodore Edison claimed, with all the certainty of a fourteen-year-old, that union sabotage was responsible. In truth, the Kinetophone was much harder to operate in theaters than on the set. While the projectionist hand-cranked his machine, keeping one eye on the screen, he had to keep another on the synchronizer beside him, as well as listen through earphones to the sound of the distant phonograph.146 Hutchison tried to make his job sound easy in an FYI letter to Charles:

  There is a little indicator on this device which shows the operator whether he is turning properly or not, and by operating this little indicator, he can shove his Kinetoscope [projector] ahead of the phonograph, or vice versa, as the case may be.

  The phonograph is, of course, located behind the screen. First the title is thrown on the screen from the Kinetoscope. Although the phonograph motor is running, the cylinder is not, and the reproducer is properly placed at the beginning of the record. After the title is shown, there is a blank space of one second, and just as soon as the blank space ceases to exist, and the picture comes on, the phonograph operator presses a button which throws in the clutch on the cylinder, and causes the phonograph to proceed to play or talk….If the phonograph operator is a little slow in pressing this button, he will, of course, throw the outfit out of synchronism, and it is up to the operator of the Kinetoscope to hang back on the Kinetoscope until it is in step with the phonograph.147

  Hutchison needed another half page to describe the workings of a supplementary telephone rig, which the projectionist, if he happened to have a third arm, could use to contact his invisible colleague. He complained of having to train twenty-one engineers to instruct operators in only eleven theaters, as well as dealing with fire inspectors and “unbusinesslike” impresarios. “I have never come across anything that has as many angles to it as this infernal talking picture proposition.”148

  But when the Kinetophone system worked well—which it mostly did at first—it succeeded so brilliantly as to promise a huge return to its backers. “EDISON’S TALKING PICTURES THE GREATEST SUCCESS IN YEARS,” Edward F. Albee of B. F. Keith’s Theaters telegraphed his regional managers. “THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE TURNED AWAY…STORMS OF APPLAUSE…WE WILL HURRY A MACHINE TO YOUR CITY AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.” With the Orpheum and United Booking circuits joining in, shows spread to more than a hundred theaters. Hutchison had to dispatch his operational instructors farther and farther afield and ordered double-shift production of projectors to meet the demand. Foreign rights were sold to exhibitors in South America, Europe, and Asia. Edison seemed assured of at least $500,000 in royalties by the end of 1913.149

  Audiences had difficulty believing that the sounds they heard were not emanating directly from the images moving before them. “It is all so natural as to appear almost uncanny,” the Philadelphia Item reported. “I have heard a photograph bark,” the syndicated columnist Arthur Benington wrote in The World Magazine. “I have heard a photograph squirt water from a siphon and splash in a bathtub.” A music critic in Fort Worth, Texas, marveled at the synchronism of the Faust film. “The work was so perfect that the mechanized details were forgotten.” Several reviews praised the beauty of the diamond-reproduced sound, and the fidelity that captured even a slight lisp in an actor’s enunciation. “No, Silas, they can’t fool me—there was a man back of that curtain,” the usual little old lady was quoted as saying after a show in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.150

  RATHER THAN WITH THEIR MINDS

  Unusually, for a lifelong self-promoter, Edison never expressed much enthusiasm for the Kinetophone. He kept saying that it was a long way from perfection, that major problems had to be solved before the talking picture stood a chance of supplanting the silent. Among them were constricted stage action, limited feature length, underpowered amplification for large halls, and—most challenging of all—the recalcitrance or incompetence of operators whose numbers soon put them beyond Hutchison’s instructional reach.

  Edison tried to deal with the action problem by inventing an overhead miking system that extended sound intake to the limits of the stage. It consisted of an adjustable-height canopy impregnated with miniature receivers, electrically linked. “I collect the sound at a plurality of points…and transmit pulsations or impulses corresponding to the collected sound waves to a single recording device.” He also allowed for similar reception, if needed, beneath grilles on the stage floor.151 His patent application, dated 6 March 1913, was successful, but the system was apparently never installed at the Bronx studio.*24

  Perhaps because of hi
s deafness, or the dismay he sometimes betrayed at being seen as a purveyor of mass entertainment, Edison was interested in talkie technology primarily as a means of elevating popular taste: he wanted “to make it possible for the poorest families in Squeedunk to see the same operas and plays that are produced in New York City for an admission price of five cents.” He also recognized its enormous historical potential as a recorder of current events. Already he had a Kinetophone cameraman, James Ricalton, filming the war between Bulgaria and Turkey.152

  It was not generally known that fifteen months before, on his visit to the White House, Edison had invited President Taft to become an audiovisual candidate for reelection. Taft had just completed a cross-country tour that lasted eight weeks and exposed him to more than three million people. Edison suggested he use the Kinetophone as a “campaign machine.” He could record his stump speech, get the Republican National Committee to distribute it to theaters nationwide, and reach 60 million voters without missing a day at his desk. But Taft was the wrong person to lobby on this subject. There was nothing he loved more than getting out of Washington, so he passed on the opportunity to pioneer an electronic medium that would one day define the democratic process.153

  Edison showed much more passion—in his own words, “I was on fire”—when pushing his idea that film would be the educational medium of the future.*25, 154 His long-standing interest in the subject had been stimulated by the difficulty of finding words to answer some of the questions his son Theodore kept asking (just as young Al Edison had tormented a teacher in Milan, Ohio, sixty-six years before). Deafness, too, made him preternaturally aware of the value of lessons in things seen, not just described. The most he could hope for at present, given the militant protectionism of America’s teachers, was that a scaled-down version of his projector, known as the Home Kinetoscope, would appeal to some progressive school boards as a classroom tool especially suited to lessons in geography. In time, its effectiveness (indeed its superiority to the oral method of many blackboard thumpers) should sell it to a much larger market. He could then increase the variety of subject reels to be produced by his studio. “We shall aim to teach not only geography but science, mechanics, chemistry, botany, entomology, and, in fact, all the regular branches of study.”155

  When a sample program of Edison instructionals was screened in sixteen New York schools, eleven of the audiences, consisting of senior staff, board members, city officials, and parents’ associations, were highly enthusiastic, and six voted to buy a projector right away. The cost of the machine and the expense of renting films put off some other would-be purchasers. But a similar demonstration in Schenectady went badly. It took place at the annual general meeting of the New York State Principals Association, and the membership, composed largely of small-town pedagogues, rejected the Home Kinetoscope as a threat to their trusted “old ways” of teaching.156

  This did not bode well for acceptance in states west of the Hudson, not to mention the extremadura of Texas, where an agent for the southwestern schoolbook publisher Silver, Burnett & Co. warned Edison that it would be many years before a regional school board could entertain the notion of children studying “with their eyes and ears rather than with their minds.”157

  Edison refused to believe this. “Books,” he blustered, “will soon be obsolete in the public schools.”158 This statement caused the biggest sensation since his denial of immortality in 1911, and a heavyweight delegation of teaching authorities came to West Orange at the height of summer to see if he could possibly be serious. They included the philosopher John Dewey, Leonard P. Ayres of the Russell Sage Foundation, and Arthur D. Dean of the New York Education Department. The visit was sponsored by the sociological magazine Survey, which reported it on 6 September in a symposium entitled “Edison Versus Euclid: Has He Invented a Moving Stairway to Learning?”

  That Edison was serious was at once apparent. The delegation found that he had a production list of nearly a thousand educational “scenarios.” Besides those already in the can, there were fifty or sixty ready to shoot, covering such subjects as astronomy, bacteriology, physics, forestry, fine art, and zoology. The technical excellence of the films Hutchison screened in demonstration amazed everybody, although reactions as to their effectiveness varied according to professional prejudices. Marietta Pierce Johnson, founder of a progressive school in Alabama, remarked that Edison had found a way to bring “joy” back to education. Rudolph Reeder, the superintendent of the New York Orphan Asylum, was impressed by the “unlimited possibilities” of observational instruction on film, while asserting that some subjects were still better taught with “words, words, words.” Leonard Ayres marveled at an animated depiction of the Bessemer steel process and the beauty of time-compressed sequences showing crystal formation and the metamorphosis of a caterpillar. Edison, he thought, had devised “an educational tool of great value.” However, the “very perfection of detail” that made cinematography so hypnotic made him worry that it would alienate students from one another. “When they sit silent in a darkened room, they are individual and exclusive. When they are making something material or abstract, because they need it in their business, they are active and alert. When they watch moving pictures…they are passive and inert.”159

  Predictably, John Dewey contributed the most thoughtful essay to the Survey symposium. “That Mr. Edison has a sound psychologic basis in relying upon the instinctive response of human beings to what moves and does something is unquestionable….But I was also impressed by the fact that, after all, seeing things behave is a rather vicarious form of activity, and there is some danger of the better becoming an enemy of the best.”160

  CRAMPS

  Dewey was not so cerebral that he did not boggle at the amount of money the Edison company must be investing in so ambitious a scheme, quite apart from its development of the Kinetophone and disk phonograph. Edison himself was so strapped at this time that he accepted a short-term personal loan of $50,000 from Hutchison. The latter had plenty of cash to spare. He had just sold the rights to his Klaxon invention for $142,500 and was happy to earn 5 percent interest on part of that windfall. But any employer with an ego less impregnable than Edison’s would have felt embarrassed to be beholden to a subordinate.161

  On 24 June the financial pressure on Edison eased, with a $100,000 second installment of Henry Ford’s business loan, and royalties coming in from “Edison talkies,” which he was now producing at the rate of five or six new titles a month. He announced that his next steps in the movie business would be “the production of multiple-reel screen dramas, colored pictures, and possibly stereoscopic films with the effect of actual depth,” but he filed only one patent for the color process before showing symptoms of exhaustion and a return of his old enemy, gastrointestinal cramps.162

  Mina insisted that he join her and the children for a summer vacation on Monhegan Island in Maine. She had been depressed for much of the year. What with Madeleine obstinately getting engaged to John Sloane, Charles falling for a girl in Boston, and the hated “Hutch” seeing more of her husband than she did, she complained that she was “crowded out” of the lives of her loved ones. “I can feel every minute the losing game, and it makes me feel unloving and hard.”163

  The most Edison would grant her of his company was a ten-day spell in late August. He prepared for it in typical fashion, working through the night on the eve of his departure and arriving at Monhegan more dead than alive after a three-day car journey. He remained ill throughout his stay there, suffering intense abdominal pain. Returning south with his family after Labor Day, he insisted on stopping off in Boston to meet Henry Ford. The motor magnate was there with another personal hero, the naturalist John Burroughs, and during a long morning of “chinning,” as Madeleine termed it, a triadic friendship was born.164

  Edison was pronounced “a very sick man” by a doctor who examined him in West Orange and diagnosed his ailment as either galls
tones or an abscess on his gallbladder. Preparations were made for an operation, but applications of ice soothed his pain, and he was soon back in the laboratory, working up to twenty hours a day.165

  “I am simply living up to the laws of my own being,” he said to the writer John H. Greusel, who asked why he felt the need to deny himself food and sleep.

  Greusel was unable to fathom what those laws might be or why they were so compulsive. “The strangest figure of our time,” he concluded. “Aloof, enigmatic, unamenable to the rule of averages in human life.”166

  WOA, WOA, WOA

  With the Christmas sales season approaching, it was urgent that Edison introduce his disk phonograph and complementary record catalog. When he did so at the beginning of December, the publicity campaign highlighted the jewel on which the whole technology rested.

  Copywriters, bill posters, and sandwich board men made a mantra of the brand phrase EDISON DIAMOND DISC, so phonetically suggestive, with its repetitive dentals and sibilants, of the polished hardness of the stylus (“No Needles—No Trouble”) and the clarity of the sound that poured from the hidden horn. The disks, unplayable on any other phonograph, were as extraordinary to look at as to hear: a quarter of an inch thick and inflexible as stove lids, with narrow grooves that packed in five and a half minutes of music, much more than the contents of a ten-inch Victor disk. No paper label obtruded on their glossy blackness, intensified by one of Edison’s old laboratory standbys, lampblack. They had to be angled to the light before his portrait could be seen, impressed in halftone beside the spindle hole, along with his name and signature and the record title, but—bewilderingly—no performer credit. “I have very excellent reasons for not putting the names of artists on our records,” Edison informed a jobber, without further explanation.168