Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Edison was humiliated when the full Naval Consulting Board rejected his minority report and accepted that of the majority. Sperry, acknowledging that the vote had been more political than practical, sent him an apologetic private letter. “This is written to assure you that you have been an inspiration to us all by your example; and your devotion to the cause…touches us all deeply. So, my dear Edison, do not for a moment be discouraged, because it may all come out for the best.”311

  Daniels was even more sympathetic. He knew that Edison had also been badly bruised by a leak of another report: the recommendation of the technical panel appointed to examine the E-2’s power pack that “no Edison battery be installed on any of our submarines until further tests have shown that their disadvantages have been overcome.” Its implication that nickel-steel technology was inherently inferior to that of lead-acid cells (which needed just as much ventilation when recharging, on top of their propensity to cause chlorine gas accidents at sea) had struck to the heart of the old inventor’s pride. Hutchison warned Assistant Secretary Roosevelt’s chief of staff, Louis Howe: “As you have not seen Mr. Edison when he is enraged, it would be difficult for me to describe to you the effect this article had on him. He has not gotten over it by any means.”*52, 312

  Secretary Daniels was in an awkward position, feeling compelled to go along with the majority opinion while valuing Edison’s more—as well as being indebted to him for his declaration of support for Woodrow Wilson. As gently as possible, Daniels asked him to consider switching his vote from Sandy Hook to Annapolis, for fear of a much more parochial alternative. “The feeling here at the department among the experts is not in favor of either place; they prefer the District of Columbia.”313

  Edison responded with bitter dignity. “I have it fixed in my mind, whether right or wrong, that the public would look to me to make the Laboratory a success, that I would have to do 90% of the work. Therefore if I cannot obtain proper conditions to make it a success I would not undertake it or be connected with it in the remotest degree.”314

  He mailed the letter on 23 December and spent the last days of 1916 in bed, having accidentally seared his throat with nitrous acid fumes. He also had a heavy cold that threatened to turn to pneumonia. It was a season of cold comfort, too, for his “personal representative” on the Naval Consulting Board. Hutchison wrote in his diary, “If I could go back one year and avoid the explosion of E-2, I’d give many thousands of dollars which it has cost us and especially me. We were in no way to blame, but the odium has gone all over.”315

  INFRA AND ULTRA

  Edison’s pulmonary prostration in January 1917 made it easier for his colleagues on the Naval Consulting Board to exclude him from a committee appointed to develop and design the research laboratory, at whatever location Congress eventually chose. The anger of many members against him for refusing to endorse Annapolis turned to sympathy, even fear, when newspapers reported that he was critically ill. “Should anything happen to wink out your life at this time,” Hudson Maxim wrote, “it would be a human calamity of such magnitude as though another Atlantis were to go down under the sea.”316

  Maxim’s imagery echoed an announcement by Germany that effective the beginning of February, Unterseeboot attacks on Allied ships would be extended to any American vessel suspected of carrying contraband. The Wilson administration still feigned a policy of neutrality in the war, but as any “hyphenated” German-American could tell, its real sympathies were Anglophile. Within seventy-two hours, Berlin made good on its threat by sinking the USS Housatonic, which was full of nothing more lethal than wheat. Wilson expelled the German ambassador from Washington and warned his government against any further “overt acts of war.” The situation was fraught enough for Secretary Daniels to suggest that Edison forget about board responsibilities and become an inventor again, developing secret defense ideas with the help of a twenty-five-man support team that the government would pay for.*53, 317

  Recovering from his pulmonary ailments, the Commodore plotted a series of experiments for the detection of submarines. He used his status as a senior naval official to persuade the Essex County Park Commission to lease him a secure location atop Eagle Rock, in the mountains overlooking West Orange. He had in mind an elegant, two-storied folly known as the Casino.318 During the season it served as a restaurant, but now stood high, cold, and empty, its forty-mile vantage point perfect for his research purposes.*54 He wanted, for a start, to see if he could improve the vision of “splash observers,” sailors perched at masthead to track the accuracy of fire and—if they focused on the right patch of ocean—the slight trail of foam that indicated a submarine approaching beneath them.

  Pausing only to attend a fifteen-hundred-seat lunch at the plant in honor of his seventieth birthday, Edison established himself on the second floor of the Casino and returned to the study of optics, a science brought to his attention by Eadweard Muybridge in 1888. Sending along a pair of service volunteers to an ophthalmologist in New York, he wrote, “Please examine these two men and report if they will be O.K. for using Homatropin.”319 The drug—addictive and best kept under lock and key—dilated the pupils of the eye. He thought it might aid night vision, as well as the ability to pick out unfriendly shapes in dense fog. With medical permission, he administered it in solute drops, then put the men in a darkroom before a phosphorescent screen, tuned so low that for half an hour they might as well have been blind. Gradually they became aware of a patchy glimmering that resolved into readable letters.*55

  This and other experiments along the infra and ultra ranges of the spectrum (“Want to keep all light out of the eye except Red & want different shades of red”) taught him nothing beyond the obvious fact that the last thing a lookout needed, at sea and in sunshine, was a paralyzed optic nerve. The best he could do was build a massive handheld visor that cut out ambient glare, not concerning himself about how it could be carried up a mast ladder. Going to the other extreme, he devised a low-slung glass bull’s-eye for the observation of periscopes in silhouette, and he invented a submarine searchlight, after many measurements of the absorption of light in tubes of seawater. He tested the opacity of various chemical fumes as marine “smoke smudges,” and the viscosity of oils that could be sprayed on the sea surface to blear periscope lenses. He mastered enough geometrical theory to bounce “dots” and “dashes” of light off tilted mirrors inside a ship, for emergency communications if its telephone wires were shot out. Perhaps his most ingenious radiant invention was a gyroscopic, disk-divided convoy lamp that flashed horizontally from vessel to vessel, uninflected by rolling, its sliced beams invisible at water level.320

  WATER FALLING FROM WHITECAPS

  By early spring Edison was in need of a laboratory with sea access, and quit Eagle Rock for Sandy Hook. Its panorama of New York Bay was wider and closer than the Casino’s, and its secluded western shore, half holly forest, offered a sweep of quiet water for some ballistic experiments he had in mind. The location was also ideally secure, being shared only by a Coast Guard station and Fort Hancock Army Base, which came with its own proving ground. He had only just built a shack for himself and his team on a pier south of the base when President Wilson asked Congress to declare war against Germany, in view of the continued “wanton and wholesale destruction of the lives of noncombatants” by U-boats.

  Edison’s first thought, even before Wilson signed the declaration on 6 April, was that his chemical and storage battery facilities were now vulnerable to domestic sabotage. He telegraphed Newton D. Baker, the secretary of war: “PERSISTENT RUMORS OR THREATS TO DAMAGE SOME OF MY MOST IMPORTANT PLANTS COMPEL ME TO ASK THAT YOU GIVE THEM IMMEDIATE MILITARY PROTECTION.” The request was referred to a distant department of the army, filed, and forgotten. However, the Office of Naval Intelligence considered his work to be important enough to supply him with a bodyguard.321

  He threw himself into experiments with redoubled urg
ency. Conquering his aversion to men with degrees, he corralled four scientists from Princeton to advise him on the arcana of trajectory graphics, radio resonance, air and sea navigation, and gyroscopics. He was happiest, as ever, when inventing sonic devices—a waterproof microphone, an airplane direction finder, a depth charge that literally took “soundings”—or practicing chemistry,*56 as when he packed charcoal and soda lime into a gas mask that immunized masthead spotters from the narcosis of stack gas.322

  One of his new recruits, Karl T. Compton, was a physicist well qualified to observe Edison as a body in perpetual motion.

  Barely taking time to say “how do you do,” he took out his pencil and began to describe a problem which had been put up to him by the Naval Consulting Board—the problem of increasing the efficiency of the driving mechanism of a torpedo so that a larger amount of explosive could be stored in it without changing its range or size. He gave me a very brief history of the development of the present torpedo…and told me to come back and see him when I had a solution.

  In about three weeks I reported to him that I had found three fuels which seemed to offer possibilities. He disposed of these solutions in three sentences: “Fuel A can only be obtained in Germany. Fuel B has been tried but discarded because of the danger of explosions. Fuel C [containing alcohol] is no good because the sailors drink the damn stuff.”323

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  COMPTON MARVELED AT the organic imagination Edison applied to the fabrication of low-resistance granules for his marine microphone. He bought hog bristles from a brush factory, electroplated them, then chopped the shining filaments with a microtome into tiny metal-rimmed platelets. Next he washed away the keratin in a solution he described as “the stuff men dissolved their murdered wives in,”*57 and packed the remnant rings into a diaphragm that he linked to a telephone receiver and amplified with a triode vacuum tube. After all this trouble, the granulated diaphragm did not satisfy, so he shaved down a disk of mica that worked much better. “He was uncommonly ingenious in figuring out ways of designing apparatus to do what he wanted it to do,” Compton wrote, “and he was one of the most patient and persevering men who ever lived in carrying through his ideas to the last stage of comprehensive test.”324

  As finally rigged, Edison’s underwater listening device let freighter crews hear the engine revolutions of a U-boat more than a mile away. It consisted of a cone dropped from the bowsprit ten or twenty feet ahead of the ship, where there was no sound of turbulence aft. The force of water flowing into the cone was counterbalanced by that of air compressing behind the diaphragm, allowing it to vibrate freely at any number of knots. He found that by swiveling the angle of reception, he could determine the path of an approaching torpedo. But the cone then became so sensitive that it registered distracting amounts of interference.325

  Edison had to draw on all his acoustical knowledge to solve the problem. His explanation, in “Report No. 31” to Daniels, dated 30 April 1917, was not calculated to make the secretary look forward to Report No. 32:

  The greatest trouble is the sound of the water falling from whitecaps. But to day I have finally finished a lot of tests for cutting out the noise almost entirely by means of a mechanically operated resonance column.

  While listening for submarines, the water column moves up and down continuously, making a cycle in 6 minutes. Any movement of water by the movement of boat does not change the pitch, which is lucky. Any note from 2500 per second to 70 per second is picked out of the mass of sounds, making it conspicuous and by a brake on motor held there. If there are two more sounds and they repeat themselves and if no boat is in sight it is sure that they come from a submarine as no sound of high periodicity comes from the sea.326

  SHADOW SAILING

  For the next year and a half,327 Edison labored on land and at sea to perfect thirty-nine new devices, systems, strategies, and tactics of defense. Some of his ideas, such as a mast extension that lofted lookouts dizzily high in the sky, were landlubberly enough to amuse naval scientists.*58 But as long as a thing worked, he scoffed at their criticism: “My private opinion is that most of them lack imagination.” He saw the war as a contest of technologies, not ideologies, and explored every notion that might help win it: a wireless telegraph message scrambler; a nocturnal telescope; cannon-fired steel mesh drapes to slow the momentum of enemy torpedoes; a turbine-headed shell that obviated the need for rifling; underwater coastal surveillance stations; a grease of Vaseline infused with zinc dust for rustproofing submarine guns; a silicate-of-soda fire extinguisher that glazed coal embers; and a water brake for quick turns of ship. In a particularly exuberant flight of fancy, he even proposed the dispatch of a fleet of self-steering skiffs to mine Belgium’s Zeebrugge Harbor.*59, 328

  Almost more remarkable than this frenzy of invention—his last—was Edison’s self-control in not boasting about it to reporters. He was as scrupulous about secrecy as he was about spending the government’s money, constantly assuring Daniels that innovation could be economical.*60, 329 Working twenty-hour days and financing some projects himself, he encouraged his academic recruits to work without pay, as a patriotic duty. The only perk he insisted on was a large yacht, and the navy’s attempts to fob him off with inferior vessels in the early summer of 1917 made him threaten to “quit on experiments requiring a boat.” Hutchison came to the rescue when he arranged with Assistant Secretary Roosevelt to lease a 210-foot “submarine chaser” to the Commodore indefinitely.330

  USS Sachem had a crew of twenty and was captained by Lt. J. N. Patton, an experienced deep-sea navigator. Besides a large cabin earmarked for Edison, it had guest bunks for ten researchers, a conference room, and enough deck space to accommodate projectile launchers and observational gear.331 Its only deficiency—not surprising in a warship—was that there were no amenities for a female passenger. The navy had a traditional prejudice against petticoats at sea, and Patton boggled when he heard that Edison wanted Mina to sail with him.332

  This request had less to do with septuagenarian insecurity than with a deaf man’s need for interpretive services. It was so unprecedented that Daniels stepped in to order the captain to comply. Mina was flattered to be acknowledged—for once—as someone Edison could not do without. But she looked forward with little enthusiasm to weeks, if not months, of being caged in a swaying stateroom, far from her garden, birds, and children. Theodore was back home from Montclair Academy, nineteen years old and ardent to sign up for military service, as John Sloane had just done. Mina, remembering the loss of another Theodore—her brother, killed in the Spanish-American War—was terrified that the boy might be in uniform when she saw him again. (She had no such worry about Charles, who had registered for the “managing director” class of draft exemption and claimed also to be going deaf.)333

  President Wilson asked to see Edison and hear something of his plans before he went to sea. Impressed by their interview on 20 August, Wilson vowed to do anything in his power to help him. “I was an undergraduate when his first inventions first captured the imagination of the world,” he told Daniels. “Ever since then I have retained the sense of magic which what he did then created in my mind.”*61, 334

  Twenty-four hours later the Commodore and his wife were piped up the gangway of the Sachem at Hoboken. It set sail immediately for Sag Harbor, Long Island, where Edison had established a torpedo research station. He planned to use New London, Connecticut, as an alternate base for experimental cruises in the sound. After the first of these, Mina decided to make as much use as possible of onshore accommodations. “Papa and I sleep on a board bed with simply a mattress,” she wrote Theodore, “and I can tell you it is hard.”335

  Captain Patton treated her with a strained courtesy that darkened to surliness as the weeks went by. Periodically she fled back to Orange for a few days of recuperative gossip with Madeleine, who was pregnant again and dreading John’s imminent
departure as a private attached to the Army Aviation Service in Washington.336

  Meanwhile Edison saved Theodore from the draft by cannily advising the secretary of war, “I have come across many things that would be of value to the army,” and would develop them if only he had a few extra engineers to help. Baker at once authorized him to hire “thirty men of the kind you have in mind.” Theodore was the first qualifier, and Edison gave him an aircraft direction finder to try out at Hazelhurst Field in Mineola, New York. But Theodore’s independent nature soon asserted itself, and he began work on a fearsome weapon of his own design, a self-propelled, unattached, toothed wheel loaded with TNT that was supposed to bite its way across the Western front, heedless of barbed wire, and explode in targeted trenches. It would keep him dangerously occupied for the duration of the war.*62, 337

  At first Edison enjoyed experimenting at sea. It was a novelty to be saluted as an officer of high rank, even though he stuck to his usual shabby suits and treated all hands on the Sachem with affable informality. But by Labor Day he was already bored by the claustrophobia of shipboard life and the slowness of port procedure, which was constantly subject to weather and communications delays. When Charles and Theodore paid a surprise visit to the yacht, Mina noticed how much he had been missing them, and how he clung to her after their departure.338

  Another frustration for him was the apparent determination of the Navy Department, pace “friend Daniels,” to block every one of his technological initiatives. He fumed over what he considered to be its anticivilian prejudice, although most of the rejections he received were respectful and exhaustively argued. In early October, he put a deputy in charge of ongoing experiments aboard the Sachem and took a temporary office in Washington to confront the bureau chiefs more directly.339