Edison

by Edmund Morris

  By the time the court of inquiry was over and its secret report sent to Secretary Daniels, Edison had lost patience with prejudgmental headlines blaming Hutchison—and by extension, himself—for the deaths in Brooklyn Navy Yard. He issued a public appeal for industry support, accusing his competitors of “a colossal attempt to bring ruin to a product on which I have spent many millions of dollars and years of unceasing labor.”283

  He conceded that his chief engineer had been responsible for installing four nonsynchronous cells in the submarine, and negligent in not warning the Navy Department about the S-type’s hydrogen potential until the day before the explosion.*46, 284 But Lieutenant Cooke should have kept the battery alive while the E-2 lay in drydock and not allowed spark-prone metal work to proceed at the same time as the cells were being discharged inboard.

  Daniels was sympathetic, and suppressed the report while appointing a technical board of examiners, including Nimitz, to decide once and for all if the Edison battery, properly handled, was superior to the Exide. This did little to ameliorate the damage that had been inflicted on Edison’s reputation, just when his regular line of nickel-steel batteries was providing light and signal power to the nation’s largest railroad systems, and traction to one-third of all electric trucks. In hindsight, he might have paid more attention to Hutchison’s overdevelopment of the S-type. But for two years the monster battery had performed without fault on the navy’s floating cranes in Boston and Honolulu—not to mention its secret success in foreign submarine operations. All that shining achievement was now bespattered with the blood that had to be hosed out of the E-2.285

  “Yes, this is pretty bad,” Edison consoled an anguished assistant. “However I can stand it.”286

  In the circumstances, he could have expected some aggressive questioning on 15 March, when he presented his plans for a national research laboratory to the House Naval Affairs Committee. But his charisma—in part the aura of world fame, in part the force of his jerky energy and blunt speech—cast a spell over the hearing room. There was also the always shocking effect of seeing how deaf he was, how dependent on Hutchison for shouted repetitions of everything said to him. It made him seem formidable and vulnerable at the same time. Perhaps in consequence, the E-2 explosion was not mentioned.287

  “The object of the laboratory is to perfect all the different details, or one unit of the war machinery, and do it quickly,” Edison said in his opening statement.

  When I want to make a thing quickly, I put a hundred men on it instead of a few men, to carry it along for weeks and months; I put everybody in the shop on it….

  In this laboratory I have all kinds of machinery; not manufacturing machinery, but all universal machinery, the same as they use in the great tool shops for making tools….I can do almost anything in that shop….I have laid it all out here; I have all the details of it, as far as I have gone, and the minimum amount for the land and the buildings and the machinery that we will want, I cannot figure it any lower than a million and a half, approximately; but I have left it so that you can increase it if you want it.288

  Evidently Daniels, who sat listening, had persuaded the Naval Consulting Board to moderate its initial start-up estimate of $5 million. But he made clear that he foresaw “a very much larger laboratory” in future years, and showed a casual disregard for committee concerns about its upkeep in time of war.

  REP. WILLIAM D. OLIVER (D., ALA.): How much would it cost?

  EDISON: Well, we would work in three shifts of eight hours each—never stop—and I should say over a million. You could string it along, if you wanted to.

  REP. ERNEST ROBERTS (R., MASS.): Do you think you could get technical and scientific men enough to work three shifts?

  EDISON: Yes, sir; I can get all the muckers we need—a lot of them.

  HUTCHISON: Mr. Edison calls experimenters “muckers.” He is president of the muckers’ association in his own plant.

  REP. ROBERTS: Suppose in a laboratory like this there was developed a satisfactory aeroplane, and the next day some inventor outside put on the market a superior aeroplane engine. How much do we gain by the enormous amount of money we have spent in the laboratory to perfect an engine?

  EDISON: Well…Drop the other one and take the new one.289

  At another point he had the whole floor laughing when Roberts asked him if patented parts might cause a problem in the manufacture of munitions. “I would not pay any attention to the patents,” Edison replied. “Settle afterwards.”290

  Although he talked about the facility as if it were already built and managed by himself, he conceded with a shrug that it could be run by “the Navy Department, I suppose.” But its creativity would depend on the services of civilian scientists and engineers working not for love but for money. “If the other fellow will pay $12,000 a year, you will have to pay 14,000, or you will not get them.”291

  “I move,” said Representative Oliver, when he was through, “that we rise as an expression of our respect and appreciation.”292

  Spectators were treated to the extraordinary sight of twenty-one congressmen standing and applauding as Edison gathered up his plans and quit the testimony table.293

  IF HE COULD ONLY FEEL RICH

  After a vacation in Fort Myers sweetened by Madeleine’s delivery of Thomas Edison Sloane, his first grandchild,*47, 294 Edison returned north to march in New York’s great Preparedness Parade on 13 May.

  Any hopes Daniels might have had that his celebrity recruit would support President Wilson’s pacifist reelection campaign were dashed that same day, when Edison was quoted on the front page of The New York Times saying that Theodore Roosevelt was “absolutely the only man” to lead the country for the rest of the decade. “He has more real statesmanship…and a greater executive ability to handle the big international problems that will arise at the close of the war, than all the other proposed candidates put together.” The paper also printed Roosevelt’s emotional response. “My dear Mr. Edison: I am so profoundly touched by your letter concerning me, that I shall ask the Roosevelt Non-Partisan League to give the original to me. I wish to hand it over to my children.”295

  TR was not a serious candidate, although he had recovered from his attack of Progressivism and was willing to let his name be put forward at next month’s Republican National Convention.296 Ever since the sinking of the Lusitania, he had been the nation’s most ardent advocate of intervention in the European war. All that was lacking to increase the impact of the endorsement was for him and Edison to stride together beneath the ninety-five-foot American flag strung across Fifth Avenue at 55th Street. But the colonel was detained at a Boy Scout function on Long Island. So Edison marched instead with his fellow board members and 125,000 other patriots, waving so many smaller flags that for eleven hours Fifth Avenue was a slowly flowing river of red, white, and blue pointillé.*48

  He dominated the Preparedness Parade, stimulating a roar among bystanders as he strode along, waving and smiling, with the energy of a twenty-year-old. (Mina, wearing a large violet sun hat, tried to keep pace with him on the sidewalk, terrified that he would be attacked by pacifists.) But Edison’s appearance of blitheness was deceptive. He was a careworn man at this time, sleeping uncharacteristically long hours and beset by money and other worries. “Poor dearie, if he could only feel rich once in his life,” Mina wrote Theodore. Apart from the ruinous effect of the E-2 disaster on Edison Storage Battery Company sales—just when the National Defense Act was about to create a huge demand for portable power—he was beset by labor unrest and a pollution lawsuit at one of his phenol plants. Although the breakup of the “Edison Trust” had not yet been confirmed by the Supreme Court, his movie business was in terminal decline. The House Naval Affairs Committee disappointed him by recommending a $2 million appropriation for his dream research laboratory—exactly as much as he had asked for, but far less
than he hoped he might get, in response to his heavy hint, “you can increase it if you want.” He drafted an angry letter to Sen. Benjamin Tillman, Democratic chairman of the parallel committee in the upper chamber, saying that if the $2 million was in any way reduced by Congress, “it would be better to drop the whole thing altogether.”297

  Another worry was what to do about Hutchison. Stephen Mambert and Charles were demanding that the chief engineer’s profiteering at the expense of the Edison Storage Battery Company be restricted henceforth.298 Looking askance at “Colonia,” the mansion Hutch had acquired in Llewellyn Park (and staffed with three Japanese servants), they sought to impose new rules upon him that would restore the company’s right to market its non-submarine batteries to the government. Edison felt obliged to agree, since Charles was now officially—as of 12 June 1916—chairman of the board of Thomas A. Edison, Inc.

  THE HIGHEST KICK I HAVE EVER SEEN

  After Theodore Roosevelt dropped out of consideration for the Republican presidential nomination in favor of Charles Evans Hughes, a fence-sitter of almost gymnastic equipoise, the way was clear for Edison to yield to pressure from both Tillman and Secretary Daniels to come out for Woodrow Wilson—to whom, after all, he owed some fealty in his position on the Naval Consulting Board.

  He did so in a letter released by the Democratic National Committee for maximum impact on Labor Day weekend. “They say [Wilson] has blundered,” he wrote. “Perhaps he has, but I notice that he usually blunders forward.” The endorsement rated national headlines. It warranted a warm welcome from Secretary Daniels in Washington two weeks later, when Edison, Hutchison, and eighteen other members of the Naval Consulting Board officially became officers of the navy and swore to “defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.”*49, 299

  They were compelled to take the oath under the authority of the recent Navy Bill, which gave a broadside of instructions as to what Congress expected of them in return for its $2 million appropriation:

  Laboratory and research work on the subject of gun erosion, torpedo motive power, the gyroscope, submarine guns, protection against submarines, torpedo and mine attack, improvement in submarine attachments, improvement and development in submarine engines, storage batteries and propulsion, aeroplanes and aircraft, improvement in radio installations, and such other necessary work for the benefit of the government service, including the construction, equipment and operation of a laboratory, [and] the employment of scientific civilian assistants as may become necessary, to be expended under the direction of the Secretary of the Navy.300

  Edison was less concerned by the contradictory length and vagueness of this list, which could be left to subcommittees, than by ominous signs that Washington bureaucrats disliked his idea of a naval research laboratory operating far from their purview. Already there had been a move on Capitol Hill, fortunately quashed in the Senate, to order its construction in the District of Columbia. All Edison’s board colleagues joined him in protesting this preemption of their advisory privilege. “They attach great importance to having the location question decided upon after conference and investigation,” Daniels advised Rep. Lemuel Padgett, chairman of the House Committee on Naval Affairs.301

  At the general meeting of the board that morning, 19 September, Edison was elected head of a six-man committee tasked with reporting on some fifty possible sites for the laboratory. The other members were Sprague, Baekeland, Robins, Whitney, and Addicks. Secretary Daniels, attending as an honored guest, assured them, “I wish you gentlemen to understand that I have no views myself at all as to the place where it shall be located.” But he privately allowed to Padgett, “It may be that Washington is the best place.”302

  On 6 October, Daniels, as a loyal Democrat anxious to reelect President Wilson, traveled to New York in a desperate effort to sock Edison and Henry Ford for campaign funds. American voters seemed to dislike both major party candidates equally, so Charles Evans Hughes’s lack of charm was not proving the hindrance Democratic strategists had hoped for. There was a chance that “the Bearded Lady,” as TR called him, might win. To emphasize the seriousness of the situation, Daniels brought the chairman of the Democratic Party, Vance McCormick, with him. The meeting, over lunch in the Biltmore Hotel, did not go well, as Daniels recounted in his memoir.

  I do not suppose anything so strange ever occurred at a luncheon in New York and elsewhere….After the first course, Edison, pointing to a large chandelier, with many globes, in the middle of the room, said, “Henry, I’ll bet anything you want that I can kick the globe off that chandelier.” It hung high toward the ceiling. Ford said he would take the bet. Edison rose, pushed the table to one side of the room, took his stand in the center and with his eye fixed on the globe, made the highest kick I have ever seen a man make and smashed the globe into smithereens. He then said, “Henry, let’s see what you can do.” The automobile manufacturer took careful aim, but his foot missed the chandelier by a fraction of an inch. Edison had won and for the balance of the meal or until the ice-cream was served, he was crowing over Ford, “You are a younger man than I am, but I can out-kick you.” He seemed prouder of that high kick than if he had invented a means of ending the U-boat warfare.303

  When Daniels broached the subject of campaign finances, Edison made a convenience of his deafness. Ford was just as tightwadded, although he did consent to place a number of paid endorsement articles in national newspapers. These may have helped Wilson’s subsequent victory, attained by a margin so slim that for fifteen days Hughes refused to concede.304

  WE WERE IN NO WAY TO BLAME

  Although Edison stayed away from almost all meetings of the Naval Consulting Board, he threw himself with passion into the tasks visited upon it by the Navy Bill. Making his first foray into ballistics, he invented a large-caliber, self-stabilizing shell that obviated the need for rifling and thereby reduced gun barrel erosion. He attended target practice exercises off the Virginia Capes and made sarcastic notes on the low standards of fire control*50 on even the newest battleships. The USS New Jersey had overly vibrating rangefinders, the New York’s weak searchlights were good only for letting “the Enemy know where you are,” not one of the Nebraska’s 185 guns scored a hit, and the Florida’s “appalling” command communications network would infuriate a housewife calling her grocer. “Here we have the entire nervous system of the ship’s battle organization,” he wrote, “depending for its operation on a system that even in the piping times of peace will not stand the strain of ordinary drills.”305

  His main compulsion in the last weeks of 1916 was to persuade the other members of the committee on sites to recommend Sandy Hook, New Jersey, as an ideal location for the naval research laboratory. He stressed its easy connection by speedboat to Manhattan and Brooklyn, while not mentioning the equal proximity of West Orange. “Rough and quiet waters on the two sides, twenty feet or more at the old Railroad Dock where steamers for New York departed—now abandoned. The Government has a Railway running full length of the Hook….There are 1300 acres and the Laboratory could easily get 100 to 150 acres and have the use of much more for special experiments.” There was a fort and proving ground at the tip of the promontory, ideal for testing the big guns he intended to design and forge on the spot. Nearby on the mainland was a bluff with views of the whole of New York Bay. Edison thought this vantage point would be ideal for marine visibility tests, essential for the development of submarine detection technology.306

  Baekeland, who favored building the laboratory in Annapolis, observed that Sandy Hook had “the very great defect” of being remote from the national capital. “If the Lab is to be a success,” Edison countered, “it should be as far from Washington as possible.”*51, 307 Other members of the sites committee shared Baekeland’s preference for Annapolis, pointing out the advantage of having the Naval Academy next door as an intellectual resource. It was true that congressmen and
navy bureau chiefs were more likely to pay visits to the small city on Chesapeake Bay than to a sliver of sand and saltings 225 miles farther north, but since the products of the laboratory would have to be approved, sooner or later, by those same officials, Baekeland saw an advantage in making it reasonably accessible to them.

  The result, much to Edison’s annoyance, was a report prepared for him to sign, declaring, “We are unanimous in favor of Annapolis.” An overriding consideration, in view of “the great and regrettable reduction” in Congress’s appropriation to the board, was the fact that the land available at the mouth of the Severn River was already owned by the government, and could presumably be gotten free. And instead of Edison’s original idea of a troika command representing military, naval, and civilian interests, the report recommended a single navy officer in charge, responsible only to Daniels.308

  After forty years of having his own way in planning laboratories, Edison was outraged at this attempt to coerce him. He refused to sign, on the ground that a facility so closely allied with the Naval Academy would become scientific rather than technological, and would manufacture theories instead of sophisticated new weapons. “I believe that I am right in re Sandy Hook & of a Rapid Constructing Laboratory,” he wrote Hiram Maxim, “and I am going to stick to it. I shall never attach myself to a dead Government operated concern. If I can’t get quick results & plenty of them then I will not play the game.”309

  Ignoring an appeal from Frank Sprague to accept a revision of the report that would include arguments for and against the Hook, he wrote a seventeen-point dissent of considerable force. It argued that uninhabited remoteness was essential to security, that the fragility of such a wisp of sea-washed land almost duplicated marine conditions, that the dunes were perfect for “aeroplane” development, and that New York’s wealth of specialist shops could be relied on to supply the most obscure raw materials at an hour or two’s notice. He envisioned a secret factory of invention operating “on a war basis” twenty-four hours a day. “As to the management of the proposed Laboratory, I believe it should be civilian.”310