Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Yet there was much that drew them together, as former boy mechanics in Michigan—a shared disdain for Ivy leaguers, alcohol, and haute cuisine; driving energy, graphic thinking, and delight in anything new. At this early stage of their relationship. Edison underestimated Ford’s intelligence, just as he went too far, later on, in granting him a poetic imagination. But when he noted that his friend possessed “the practical ability of an Irish contractor foreman and a Jewish broker,” he used only one adjective that Ford would object to.196

  After two weeks of birdwatching, fishing, and al fresco dinners on the terrace of Seminole Lodge, Ford returned north impressed with the beauty and tranquility of Edison’s winter estate. He was more in awe of his hero than ever, and ready, should the opportunity present itself, to buy a similar property on the banks of the Caloosahatchee River. “There is only one Fort Myers,” Edison joked to a neighbor, “and there are ninety million people who are going to find this out.” Mina and Clara Ford were cautious about the good-old-boy intimacy developing between the two tycoons, and in no hurry to follow suit.197

  Edison accepted Ford’s adoration with the same affable equanimity he displayed toward Hutchison and Meadowcroft and the dozens of other moths, male and female, who had fluttered about his flame for so many years. Although he was as liable as ever to irascible tantrums, they almost always related to business difficulties. Now that his battery and phonograph divisions were booming (Diamond Discs selling as many as fifty-seven thousand a day), he could open mail from West Orange without misgivings.

  He did not know that Charles had telegrammed Hutchison not to send “any news, good or bad to Father unless absolutely necessary.” So for six weeks of warming weather, Edison was free to potter in his bougainvillea-draped laboratory, chew cheap cigars (or a tobacco plug when Mina was not looking), sleep twelve hours a day, and indulge his favorite recreation—automobile excursions over the roughest possible roads. It was hard to resist his childlike charm when he was as relaxed as this. Madeleine begged her fiancé to come south and hear her father rambling engrossingly over dinner on whatever subject—parapsychology, physics, music, medicine—had his current attention.198

  Edison’s tranquil mood was unbroken even when he heard, despite Charlie’s mail ban, that a fire had ravaged his movie studio in the Bronx, causing $100,000 worth of damage. He merely expressed relief that most of the hardware had been saved, saying he wanted to transfer production to West Orange anyway. A new talkie studio was being constructed on the second floor of the Kinetophone building, where he would improve talkie technology “to the limit…show the theatrical people that scientific people can beat them at their own game.”199

  He was indirectly acknowledging that Edison talking pictures, after their initial rampant success, had proved a commercial flop. There were just too few operators sufficiently trained to deal with the spread of distribution to thousands of theaters. When such a picture as Mayor Gaynor and his Cabinet*33 was projected, amplified, and synchronized correctly, audiences still gasped at its truth to life. But more often the Edison advertising slogan “They Laugh—They Talk—They Sing” seemed to refer to talking and singing that bore no relation to screen action, and to laughter coarsened by jeers and catcalls. Complaints proliferated about actors taking a bow in mid-soliloquy and trumpets that blew ukulele music, as well as cramped stage movement and foreshortened plots. Hutchison felt that his misgivings about the Kinetophone had proved correct, but Edison was confident that its problems would be solved in time, as would those of the Home Kinetoscope and educational movies, which more and more school boards were rejecting. “There’s no hurry,” he kept saying. “There’s no hurry.”200

  Madeleine seemed to feel the same about her wedding, which she was miserably inclined to put off because Mina and Mrs. Sloane were now squabbling about the religion of any future grandchildren. Eventually Mina capitulated to a private Catholic ceremony, providing it was not empurpled by the presence of a cardinal. Edison gave his daughter away at Glenmont on 17 June, and Mina wished the young couple well in a letter edged with black.201

  NO HONOR OR GLORY

  Eight days later Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was assassinated in Sarajevo.

  As the chemistry of war percolated toward explosion in Europe and Russia, Edison like most Americans was concerned only with the pursuit of happiness in the world’s freest, safest, and most technologically advanced polity. He had never confused the pursuit with attainment—“Happiness is only for the honest—that’s a law that runs through matter as undetectable as gravitation”—but as long as the United States maintained its own peace, he saw no immediate threat to the national stability. To be sure, there had been a disturbing increase in violence on both sides of recent strikes organized by the socialistic Industrial Workers of the World. But they were mild compared to the prerevolutionary conflicts portending overseas, between emperors and peasants, autocrats and anarchists, colonialists and voteless majorities. Fortunately, three thousand miles of salt water separated Montauk Point from Land’s End. Edison had seen all he wanted of the Old World on his recent tour of the nations now bristling at one another, and he was content to spend the rest of his life in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, whose copper skirts he had “felt like kissing” when the Amerika glided past them on her way to the dock at Hoboken.202

  Being an avid newspaper and magazine reader, Edison was well informed on political affairs without being particularly concerned with them. Except for his brief flirtation with Progressivism in 1912, he had never deviated from the orthodox, isolationist, pro-business Republicanism of his youth. Added to that, and congruent with his own domineering nature, was a strong belief in centralized power. “There’s an open-mouthed philosophy of indolence today which finds a fine name in socialism….I have more faith in governments based on oligarchy; the few govern the many through a law of evolution. The purest democracy shows that a few picked mentalities rise as instinctively to the ruling top as bubbles break on the surface of a stream. They are surcharged with the great initiative intelligence which contributes actively to the general good.”203

  If such a view made him a Social Darwinist, it did not extend to love of war. He read Friedrich von Bernhardi’s protofascist Germany and the Next War with contempt, scribbling beside a passage in praise of bloodshed, “War kills off the best animals & leaves the degenerates to breed, a misapplication of Darwin’s law.” As for romanticizing battle as the breeding ground of heroes, “the thinking world can certainly find no honor or glory in it.”204

  SPEED HE HAD

  Edison did not have to think much himself to infer, when the guns of August began to fire, that American industry would soon face a critical shortage of organic chemical imports from Europe. “Substitutes! Substitutes! We’ve got to find them….It has been too easy for us to import our materials.” He was himself the nation’s largest consumer of German and British phenol, mixing a ton and a half of it every day into Condensite, the varnish that slicked Diamond Discs. It also happened to be a basic ingredient of high explosives, so foreign munitions factories would have a lock on it in the future.205

  The chemist in him reasoned that phenol was a volatile derivative of coke. But few domestic coke ovens were designed to capture it. After inquiring in vain for an emergency supply of phenol from several chemical companies, Edison decided to synthesize the compound himself. Within three days he had invented a ten-step process of crystallization by sulfonation fusion. “It works beautifully,” he told a friend, “and really it is indispensable.” He then led another Insomnia Squad of forty draftsmen and chemists, working around the clock to design and construct a phenol facility at Silver Lake.206

  Mary Childs Nerney once remarked that no one ever saw Edison rush at a thing: “Speed he had but not haste.”207 At all times, even in a crisis, he projected an air of catlike calm. Yet because his energy seldom slackened and he spent little tim
e eating or sleeping, his achievements seemed sudden. The new plant opened on 8 September and became a cornucopia of the purest phenol he had ever used. So much of it poured out that he sold four or five surplus tons a day to envious competitors and expanded production to a second factory near Johnstown, Pennsylvania.208

  His success enabled him to contract with coal tar companies to attach equipment to their ovens that sucked off rich gases for purification, liquefaction, and crystallization. One such extractor produced eighteen thousand gallons of benzene a day. He thus became a wholesaler of such valuable intermediates as antiseptic acetanilide, fragrant mirbane, toluene solvent, aniline salt, and—“Here’s a jawbreaker,” he used to say—paraphenylenediamine, the only known dye that turned gray furs black. Demand for it grew so great that he built a third plant to produce it exclusively. As a result, the discoverer of thermionic emission in vacuo found himself trading with furriers and fashion houses. Eventually Edison would have nine factories producing chemicals in short supply because of Britain’s naval blockade of Germany.*34, 209

  As a pacifist, if not as a Democrat, Edison supported President Wilson’s declaration of American neutrality in the “European” war. He was willing to profit by it—secretly selling phenol even to the German-based Bayer Corporation*35—as long as he did not get into the armaments business. “Making things which kill men is against my fiber.”210 His conscience was untroubled by the fact that his S-type battery was designed to improve the performance of a torpedo-carrying vessel. Until the last day of summer, the submarine was still perceived around the world as a defense device, a protector of home ports.

  But then on 22 September a German U-boat patrolling invisibly off the coast of Holland sank three British ships in less than ninety minutes. The news made clear that the war was going to be as different at sea as it already was on land, with the submarine and machine gun equally willing to abolish old notions of chivalry and fairness in warfare. It coincided with a secret report that made Josephus Daniels, Wilson’s reform-minded secretary of the navy, receptive to everything Miller Hutchison had been saying about the dangers of lead batteries underwater. Submarine E-2 had suffered an internal leak of sulfuric acid while taking a dive in the Atlantic. It was brought to the surface with difficulty, and all nineteen crew members suffered lung burns. Investigation showed that the acid had eaten through the walls of the ballast tanks and mixed with seawater, filling every compartment with the same chlorine gas that Germany would soon use against the French in Belgium.211

  Hutchison heard about the accident on one of his Washington visits. He leaped at the opportunity to invite Daniels to come north and see a pair of Edison S-type batteries being stress-tested in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. As an extra inducement, he suggested a preliminary visit to West Orange, where the secretary could get to know Edison over lunch, then drive with him to the Yard in one of Hutchison’s limousines. Daniels not only accepted the invitation but, hearing that Edison had never been aboard a warship, arranged for a dreadnought and a submarine to be made available for his inspection on the appointed date, 10 October.212

  The secretary was a portly, soft-spoken fifty-two-year-old North Carolinian, entirely unreconstructed in his vested suits and country bow tie. Wealthy and powerful as the longtime owner/editor of The (Raleigh) News and Observer, he had helped put Woodrow Wilson in the White House, and shared the president’s patrician and racial prejudices. These were little in evidence now that he had moved to Washington and become an unctuous political operator. Only when his rigid Methodism was challenged, or when he allowed Hutchison to address him in slave dialect, did “Marse Josephus” reveal the bigotry that had made him a force in the Wilmington, North Carolina, race riot of 1898.213

  Like most first-time visitors to the Edison plant, Daniels was awed by its size and complexity, and was even more humbled to meet the great inventor in his laboratory. He recorded his somewhat incoherent feelings on a Blue Amberol cylinder for the Phonograph Division archives:

  The mecca of America is not in the national capital but at Edison’s works. It is a great pleasure to see this wonder-working man at his task, and to find that although he is superman to all the world, he is very human….In Europe today it is Edison who has made war more terrible, and therefore, let us hope, made it shorter, and that when this war ends, we will have no more wars.214

  It was not clear what Edison was supposed to have done either to worsen the war or to hasten its conclusion. Neither suggestion made much sense, unless Daniels, also a pacifist, meant that modern technology in general made the future frightening.

  Edison assured a reporter, “I can’t get interested in inventions for war,” but from the moment he and the secretary arrived at the Navy Yard (to the sound of nineteen guns, and the sight of admirals saluting), he behaved to the contrary. Pacing the deck of the dreadnought New York, then descending into its supersecret control station, he marveled at the equilibrium of Elmer Sperry’s gyrocompass. “It ought to have been discovered years ago—it’s a cinch.” He asked ordnance officers whether shells that smashed through armorplate were more lethal than those that exploded on impact. In the cramped torpedo compartment of submarine G-4, he boasted that he could easily devise a system of mechanical gills that would extract oxygen from seawater and allow the boat to remain immersed for months on end.215

  The climax of the visit, as far as Hutchison was concerned, occurred when the commandant of the Yard showed Edison a steam-powered rig that was subjecting his S-type cells to a punishment no gyroscope could withstand. “Yes sir, we’ve rocked your batteries back and forth at all speeds and angles for the major part of two months and they haven’t leaked yet.”216

  Edison was dismissive of the tossing, slamming machine. “Key it up, make it roll further and faster,” he said. “The battery is all right.”217

  A BEAUTIFUL SIGHT

  If Edison still nurtured hopes that his talking and teaching movies would succeed at a time when culture itself seemed to be in retreat, they went up in smoke at the plant on the night of 9 December 1914.218 Just after sunset, at 5:25 P.M., spontaneous combustion took place in the film inspection building, a wooden, single-story structure crammed with nitrate stock. As the reels caught fire, they generated their own oxygen, transforming the little building into a tinderbox that soon touched off a nearby lumber shed, two alcohol tanks, and the five-floor “Wax House,” where hundreds of cylinder blanks were stored, along with twenty tons of highly volatile phenol. That building became an inferno of such intensity that some of its concrete columns fused and flowed like candles.

  Ladder companies from six surrounding towns fought to saturate the brick walls of the laboratory complex in the southwestern corner of the block. Their hose work was hampered by inadequate water pressure, even when a line from Edison’s own artesian well was added to the main feed. A north-blowing wind came to their aid and fanned the blaze toward the carpenter shop and veneering department, both stacked with rare hardwoods. By six-thirty the fire was out of control. Undeterred by concrete or cinder block, it leaped east into the shipping, packing, assembly, and film print buildings, penetrating them through their dozens of wooden sash windows and crumpling tin doors like foil. Half an hour later the two main structures in the western yard, occupied by the Phonograph Division, were aflame too. The huge record building, holding nearly forty tons of Diamond Discs and Blue Amberol blanks, lit up with sequential evenness, window by window and floor by floor, as if a mobile flame thrower were advancing inside.

  Among the crowd of twelve thousand townspeople who flocked to watch on the valley slope overlooking the plant was Edison. He was strangely calm, even cheerful after seeing that his laboratory was safe, screened from the wind by the long cement mass of the storage battery building across Lakeside Avenue. “Get Mother and her friends over here,” he said to Charles. “They’ll never see a fire like this again.”*36, 219

  At seve
n-thirty a terrific explosion signaled that a benzene deposit had been breached. Multicolored flames shot into the night sky, illumining the landscape for half a mile around, while snowflakes fell indifferently.220 The conflagration reached its height around nine o’clock, by which time it had engulfed thirteen buildings across more than half the complex. Destructive as it was to their contents, it collapsed only one top corner of a tall unit, number eleven, where finished Amberolas stood in crates, ready for shipping on the Erie Railroad. There the heat equaled that of a blast furnace. Slag dripped from buckling girders, and melted glass ran like water.

  Edison surmised, as if he were monitoring an experiment, that some chemical vats on the fourth floor had burst. The resultant spill would have mixed nitric, hydrochloric, and sulfuric acids into an aqua regia solution, corrosive enough to crumble masonry.221

  The last open flames went out around midnight. “Mr. Edison, this is an awful catastrophe for you,” an executive from the advertising department said in a shaking voice.

  “Yes, Maxwell, a big fortune has gone up in flames tonight, but isn’t it a beautiful sight?”222

  The great fire of 9 December 1914.

  When daylight came, he returned to his laboratory—wet-walled and sooty but intact—having been on his feet for more than twenty-four hours. He penciled a brief statement to give to reporters. “Am pretty well burned out—but tomorrow there will be some rapid mobilizing when I find out where I’m at.” Then he stretched out on a bench, rolled his coat into a pillow, and went to sleep.223