Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Diamond Disc retail advertisement, 23 December 1913.167

  The National Phonograph Company’s old townhouse at 10 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan was luxuriously refurbished as a four-floor showroom for the new machines, issued in five sizes as models A80, A150, A250, A300, and A450 (“Louis XVI Circassian Walnut, Metal Parts Gold Plated”). When visitors realized that the numerals signified dollars, it was all Edison’s chief salesman, Percy Morgan, could do to get them to listen to a sample Diamond Disc. Usually a minute or two was enough to convince even skeptics that the Wizard of Menlo Park had “done it again.” Their reactions (which Morgan noted verbatim and sent weekly to West Orange) almost unanimously expressed amazement that recorded music could sound so full and sweet.169

  This was also the general opinion of browsers and buyers at thirteen thousand stores around the country. Audio fanatics—already a distinct species—agreed that the Diamond Disc phonograph’s combination of floating-weight reproducer,*26 geared tracking, and records of adamantine smoothness was superior to any other sound system on the market, other than Edison’s parallel line of Amberola players and superb Blue Amberol cylinders.*27, 170 “I would have thought, had I not known differently, that the songs from the machine were really being sung by singers in the room,” one of them wrote, giving Edison an idea for future publicity. A University of Chicago professor praised “the clear articulation, the plastic roundness of tone, and the fine balance of parts” of the A250 instrument, and although he already possessed a Victrola, he immediately treated himself to an upgrade.171

  Edison A-100 “Moderne” Diamond Disc phonograph, 1915.

  The willingness of such enthusiasts to spend half or a full month’s salary on a player that accepted no other records bore out Frank Dyer’s prophecy that the Diamond Disc would restore the fortunes of Thomas A. Edison, Inc.*28 Before long, the company indeed derived a large income from it. This was in spite of the fact that Edison, growing more autocratic by the month, did his perverse best to sabotage sales by imposing his own musical taste—or lack thereof—on everybody in the phonograph business, from performers in the studio to customers in stores.

  He used the personal pronoun forty-seven times in an interview entitled “Edison’s Dream of New Music,” published in Cosmopolitan magazine. Acknowledging that he could neither read nor sing a note of music, he nevertheless declared that it was an art “in the same backward state today that electricity was forty years ago. I am going to develop it….I shall also make the phonograph the greatest musical instrument in the world.”172

  Although Edison was not averse to Beethoven, or the occasional aria by a composer whose name ended in a vowel, his favorite repertory remained the moony melodies he and “the boys” used to caterwaul legato e doloroso in Menlo Park days, to the strum of Ludwig Böhm’s zither—songs like “My Poor Heart Is Sad with Its Dreaming” and “I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen.” He could not hear the latter tune often enough and recorded it numerous times. Its sweetness and simplicity were worth more to him than the unresolved harmonies of Debussy, which he likened to “interrupted conversations.”173

  That particular comment was acute, but professional musicians winced at some of Edison’s other aperçus, which he voiced with the hortative smugness of Bernard Shaw. Mozart was “the least melodic of composers.” He liked “the 7th Nocturne of Fields [sic]” because it had “no dissonance.” After listening to 2,700 waltzes, he found that “they consisted of about 43 themes, worked over in various ways….Of course, I do not include Chopin in this, as his waltzes are not conventional waltzes.” There was apparently “no such thing as a definite musical term relating to time.” As for the art in general, “I have already discovered that music is pitched too high.”174

  His pickiness in the classical repertory extended to any Tin Pan Alley “hit” that he considered untuneful. He had no general prejudice against popular or vaudeville music,*29 even sanctioning, as the premier Diamond Disc release, a comic “coon” duet entitled “Moonlight in Jungleland,” with chimpanzee chatter and birdsong obbligato. But he still insisted on approving every run of records that issued from his factory. As a result, the Blue Amberol and Diamond Disc catalogs grew at a slow pace quite unrelated to market demand. Jobbers became frustrated at the paucity of available titles and Edison’s indifference to their repertory suggestions. Nor did his no-names policy convince them he was being anything else than perverse in withholding vital sales information.175 Their protests grew so strident that he was called upon to explain it:

  One of several reasons why I do not publish names of the singers is the “faking” going on in the musical world. There are many singers today with reputations upheld by advertising of the Italian & Jew*30 syndicates who never should be permitted to sing on any stage. They have no voices—just personality. The Composer & those artists who have beautiful voices [but lack] syndicated reputations, are ignored and the public made to believe that only Grand Opera artists can sing properly. The Victor Co. has carried this to the extreme….

  What I am trying to do is search the world for fine voices & instrumental soloists & to record & re-record their songs, etc. until they are musically perfect or as nearly so as possible & sell the records on their merits, giving the names after the public itself has given the verdict.176

  The awkwardness of Edison’s language suggested he did not altogether understand what he was saying. At any rate, the policy was soon reversed, and his artists got due credit—which was just as well, given his stinginess with recording fees. Rather than pay the enormous sums demanded by stars of the caliber of Caruso and Paderewski, he looked for talent that was younger, hungrier, and willing to indulge a deaf man’s belief that he knew more about music than they did.*31

  One who auditioned for him was Samuel Gardner, a twenty-year-old Russian-born violinist with great gifts but, as yet, no recognition. Instead of asking him to play, Edison, “very gruff, very kindly,” asked him to comment on two violin records just received from Germany.

  He said, “They’re very bad. These people who play have a shaky bow—woa, woa, woa.”…I listened to one of them. The piece that was played was the “Ave Maria” of Schubert, arranged by Wilhelm. The first sounds I heard, I recognized a great artist immediately….I heard a good strong vibration, very steady tone, and I wondered what he meant by the bad playing. That record was made by Albert Spalding.

  Then, he said, “I want you to listen to another one,” the same piece by another player. Little different sound, but an artist. That was Carl Flesch. And this old man—I don’t think he even knew the names of what he was listening to, he said, “These people have a shaky bow. They go woa, woa, woa.” And I remember asking him, “How do you figure that out, Mr. Edison?” Well, he couldn’t hear….He gave me a microscope, a little glass, to look at the grooves. I looked and looked, but I didn’t know what I was looking at. He said, “Don’t you see how uneven those grooves are. It must be a straight line in the grooves.”

  Wasn’t much I could say.177

  Gardner realized that no matter how Edison cupped his right ear to any music, he could not help receiving acoustic waves wrongly. The sea wall of his head had too narrow a sluice, breaking every high swell into foam. Because he was compelled to hear (or in this case, see) sound at the closest possible range, he could tolerate only the flattest undulations. What registered as full and rich to a normal ear, with the special overtones that made every instrumentalist’s timbre and every singer’s voice unique, was torment to him, and he could not understand why nobody else flinched at the discord.178

  “Mr. Edison,” Gardner said, “that’s not right. Your opinion isn’t right.”

  Meadowcroft, who as ever stood at the boss’s elbow, was horrified. “You musn’t talk to Mr. Edison that way.”179

  Edison took no offense and asked the young man to record the “Ave Maria” wit
hout any left-hand vibrato. Gardner was desperate for the ten-dollar fee he would earn but could not bring himself to strip the bloom from Schubert’s melody. “I’m just starting my career as a violinist,” he pleaded. “I don’t want to kill it right at the beginning.”180

  It occurred to him as he spoke that the cold, white, “spooky” tone Edison wanted might suit at least one piece: Chopin’s Funeral March. He played it that way, hating the sound, and was rewarded with a check for ten dollars. At his insistence, the resultant record was issued without his name on it.

  Gardner went on to have a long and honorable career as a performer, teacher, and Pulitzer Prize–winning composer. Asked in old age if he thought Edison’s appreciation of music was hampered by poor hearing, he had a succinct reply. “His deafness had nothing to do with his musicality, because he hadn’t any.”181

  WHO TOLD YOU YOU WERE A PIANO PLAYER?

  Unlike most people with an aural problem, Edison went out of his way to publicize it as a professional asset. He willingly posed for a photograph to illustrate the Cosmopolitan article that showed him auditing a Diamond Disc with his right ear jammed right up to the speaker grille. “Beethoven, playing the sonatas that his deaf ears would not let him hear, formed no more pathetic picture than does Edison, with his gray head pressed against the machine that he made talk and sing,” the caption read.182

  It was just as well that the photographer did not know about the more extreme method Edison resorted to when he wanted to capture the last vestiges of a pianissimo emanating from a phonograph. “I hear through my teeth, and through my skull,” he explained. “I bite my teeth into the wood, and then I get it good and strong.” Many were the oak or rosewood Amberolas that he chomped in order to divert their reverberations into his brain. Because it was difficult for him to do so without slobbering, some cabinets lost their surface stain and looked as if they had been savaged by an enormous rodent. He even bit into the grand piano at Glenmont when one of the family was playing something he liked. A house guest that December, the educator Maria Montessori, was moved to tears by the sight of Edison attached to the frame, as though he were trying eat its sound.183

  He insisted it was a “blessing” to be able to hear this way, because his cranial bone filtered out the haze of background noise—breathing, rustling, shoe creaks, heartbeats, subliminal vibration—that occluded the pure tones of music even in a muffled studio. “I have a wonderfully sensitive inner ear. I do not know that, in the beginning, it was any more sensitive than anyone else’s, but for more than fifty years it has been wrapped in almost complete silence.”184

  What he called sensitivity was his inability at any distance to hear higher (or very low) musical frequencies. It threw the mechanical noises of sound production, such as the thump of a piano hammer, or the skitter of a violin bow playing spiccato, into abnormal relief.185 Sound engineers were amazed that he could detect recording flaws they had missed in the studio. After subjecting an orchestral recording to a dental audition, Edison correctly traced a flaw in its sound to the top desk of the woodwind section. “The keys on that fellow’s flute squeak.” He used a felt-lined ear trumpet with a rubber diaphragm to measure the frequency of overtones by some method inscrutable to science. “I could strike any note on the piano anywhere and he could tell the exact vibrations,” his music director, Ernest L. Stevens, testified. “I don’t know how he ever did it….It was remarkable, really.”186

  The same acuity, however, made Edison react pathologically to two effects essential to good tone production. One was the vibrato that so disturbed him in Gardner’s playing. The other was tremolo, or rapid, single-note pulsations in the throat of a singer—an entirely natural phenomenon, albeit exaggerated by some show-off performers. To Edison, it was an aesthetic insult, “the worst defect a voice can have.” He tried to stop it by making singers drink ice water before they stepped up to the horn, and on one occasion wondered aloud if taping a soprano’s breasts flat might do the trick.187

  When Sergei Rachmaninoff, arguably the world’s greatest pianist, auditioned for a contract with Edison Records, Stevens neglected to warn him, “Don’t play anything that’s going to hurt the old gent’s ears.” After the first three thunderous notes of his Prelude in C-sharp minor, Edison interrupted to ask, “Who told you you were a piano player? You’re a pounder.” Rachmaninoff rose from the keyboard in silent outrage and reached for his hat. It was all Stevens could do to persuade Edison to let him record some further sessions, which included a crystalline performance of Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody.188

  Although Edison’s aural dicta were more than most self-respecting musicians could bear for long, some—notably the lovely opera singer Anna Case—stuck with him because of his avuncular charm, the prestige of his name, and the unsurpassable quality of Diamond Discs. Their deep-lodged sonority and trueness on the turntable gave the illusion that the performers were somehow “present” inside the cabinet. Miss Case was the inspiration behind a dramatically effective advertising campaign that took advantage of this fidelity.

  One day I walked into a shop, and they were playing one of my records. When I walked in the door, I started singing with the record and making my voice sound exactly like it….They asked me to go on a concert tour with the machine. I gave a recital at Carnegie Hall, standing beside the machine, and copied the recorded sound. They didn’t know when I was singing and when I wasn’t. Of course, they could see my lips go, but by the tone quality, they couldn’t tell the difference.189

  Other famous artists were hired to conduct “Edison Tone Tests” around the country, sometimes concealing themselves and the phonograph behind a curtain and challenging listeners to distinguish between live and recorded sound. The test results were equivocal enough to sell many millions of Diamond Discs through to the dawn of the electric recording era.*32, 190

  BUSINESSMAN JEKYLL

  When Charles Edison reported for work at his father’s plant in January 1914, he was twenty-three years old, a cheerful dropout from MIT, and had sown a considerable number of wild oats across the country, from Boston to Colorado to San Francisco. Although his seed-scattering days were by no means over, he was eager now to become a mature executive and learn all he needed to become second in command of Thomas A. Edison, Inc. If Miller Hutchison still nurtured a fantasy in that direction, Charles quickly dispelled it by visiting him at home one Sunday evening and grilling him until two A.M. on “all aspects of the business.”191

  Edison gave no sign of wanting to hand over power for some years yet. But neither did he try to impose his own management style (“An autocrat is the best kind of man to run an industry”) on his son. Charles was both more willing and more able to hear the complaints of the Old Man’s five thousand employees, whom he was distressed to find a demoralized lot. They had little corporate spirit, and were constantly on the lookout for jobs that paid better and abused them less. We must never be paternalistic, Charles told himself as he worked his way through department after department with the vague title of “Assistant to Mr. Edison.”192

  It was good for Mina to have him back home—not that she saw much of him at night. Like his father, Charles was usually out the door after dinner. But when they passed through the rock-walled gate of Llewellyn Park, the paths of father and son diverged. Edison swung left toward the laboratory, while Charles, mutating from businessman Jekyll into bohemian Hyde, headed for the railroad station and New York.

  Mina clung ever tighter to Theodore, dreading the fast-approaching day when Madeleine would become Mrs. John Eyre Sloane and move in the same direction. Despite the efforts of both sets of parents, the young couple had overcome their own religious and emotional doubts and settled for a spring wedding. John had started an aeronautical manufacturing business in Long Island City, so they planned to rent an apartment in Manhattan. Conveniently for Charles, it would be in Greenwich Village.

  ON THE BANKS OF THE
CALOOSAHATCHEE

  The Edisons went to Florida at the end of February for a final vacation together as an unbroken family. Madeleine was amazed to see a parade of Ford cars waiting to welcome them in Fort Myers, signaling the presence in town of her father’s wealthiest friend. Edison had invited the Ford family and John Burroughs south for a long visit. He said it would be good for them to “get away from fictitious civilization.”193

  Madeleine liked the “awfully nice” Fords, but did not take to Burroughs. She found him aware of his own importance as one of America’s most beloved writers.194 Long-winded, simplistic, white of beard and low of brow, he carefully cultivated a folksy image not unlike Edison’s, except that in his case it was unaccompanied by any hint of originality.

  A cross-country automobile expedition to the Everglades in early March cemented the friendship of the three men, and presaged more such “vagabond” excursions in future. Hitherto, Ford had been the least popular of the trio, celebrated more for wealth than for charm. But he gave off a justified glow at the moment, having just announced a five-dollar daily wage for his workers in Detroit. This benefaction—far more than any other industrialist considered compatible with profits, and twice what Edison paid—had transformed the Ford Motor Company overnight into a mecca for skilled labor.195

  Like most people rich or poor, Ford needed to be loved, but he was too attention-craving, too gauche in his enthusiasms (high-kick contests, bluegrass fiddling, health food) to hold on to public affection for long. Socially he was an incongruous combination of humor and humorlessness, intelligence and apparent idiocy. Rail thin and always immaculately dressed, eschewing the top-hat-and-cane uniform of other industrial magnates, he somehow lacked elegance. His bony awkwardness contrasted amusingly with Edison’s relaxed ability to conform to the curve of any perch, whether it was a boulder or the shell of a rowboat. Ford could no more snooze in public than he could coax his jerky handwriting into calligraphy or match Edison as an easy, unhurried storyteller.