Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Commodore Edison and the crew of USS Sachem, 1917.

  The suite Daniels found for him in the Navy Annex could not have been more imposing. It was the former sanctum of Adm. George Dewey, the hero of Manila Bay, who had died earlier in the year. But neither it nor Edison’s own eminence had much effect on the line officers he tried to cajole. Hutchison was no longer available to help. His wings were so clipped by the management reforms Charles had instituted at West Orange, and by a new congressional ban on conflict-of-interest lobbying, that it was inevitable he must quit his job—but not so soon as to avoid responsibility for a sheaf of corporate lawsuits arising out of the E-2 disaster.340

  Edison expected to remain only a few weeks in the capital. His researches into marine optics had gotten him interested in camouflage and other trompe l’oeil phenomena, including the ultimate one of darkness. Before returning to his marine laboratory, he needed to make use of Washington’s reference resources to find out where, and at what time of day, most U-boat sinkings took place in the war zone. The result was such an avalanche of charts and statistics that he used three aides to help collate them. In the process he began to see an offensive pattern around the British Isles that was not countered by defensive moves on the part of Allied shipping companies.341

  “Just about what I expected,” he said to Thomas Robins. “Those captains of the ships that do business from Norway to Greece don’t know any navigation, they simply sail from one lighthouse to another, the Germans know that and sit there and wait for them.”342 He began a laborious effort to turn himself into a cartographer, on the assumption that Sir Eric Campbell Geddes, Britain’s new first lord of the admiralty, would thank him for advice as to how the Allies could stanch the attrition of vital imports. In the process he discovered that statistical analysis was not much different from his deductive experimental method. By 21 November he had eight policy recommendations and forty-five “strategic maps” to send to Sir Eric. It did not occur to him that a member of His Majesty’s Government might resent being patronized by an amateur American incapable of self-doubt. Anyone with “imagination,” Edison wrote—again implying that few nautical men had it—could see that 94 percent of Allied losses occurred by day. Hence, “no cargo boat should enter or leave any English or French port except at night.” This did not apply to convoys, which could more effectively be choreographed in at dawn and out at dusk, with such coordination that half the time, destroyer escorts would not be needed. A trinational routing office, working around the clock, would ensure that no lanes became overcrowded. Steamers from abroad should stop veering toward the lighthouses of the Irish coast, the Isles of Scilly, and the Severn Estuary, and steer a mid-channel course where U-boats were few. They should burn smokeless anthracite coal and drastically modify their silhouettes. Periscope observation, being low, depended on perpendiculars. “Cut off the masts, which are no longer of any use; cut down the smokestack to a minimum; close the gaps between the various deck constructions on the ships by canvas [flanks] to make an even contour….In addition to this, all boats which cross the danger zone in an easterly or westerly direction should sail in line with the rays of the sun, or what I call ‘shadow sailing.’ ”343

  When he tried to apply his ideas stateside, “in the event that enemy submarines start operations along the American coast,” he found that he would have to compile the charts himself, for lack of relevant records. The task kept him in Washington for another two months and caused him to brood more and more about governmental “red tape” and his thwarted plans for the naval research laboratory.344

  Mina visited her husband at his hotel in mid-January 1918 and saw possible signs of depression. She itemized them for Theodore:

  Suit a sight with spots

  Shirt, dirty—when he changed, left studs & buttons in….

  Socks all holes

  Glasses broken

  Room, as if a cyclone had struck it

  Suitcase not even unpacked345

  A terse letter from Frank Sprague, complaining that the naval research laboratory was still unbuilt and unlocated ten months into the war, hardly improved Edison’s mood. The irascible engineer pointed out that only one member of the Naval Consulting Board sites committee was responsible for blocking its construction at Annapolis. Because of the “intolerable” delay, sentiment in the Navy Department and on Capitol Hill had now swung toward the Bellevue Magazine site in Washington.346

  “Frankly, we have no right to let this matter drag along further,” Sprague wrote. He recommended the board vote unanimously in favor of Bellevue, or, what was even more embarrassing, ask to be relieved of expressing any preference whatever.347

  Edison lost patience with the national capital and its endless political compromises. He ordered the Sachem to join him at Key West Naval Station in Florida, and he moved there with Mina at the beginning of February. William Meadowcroft sensed his acute frustration. “He does not wear his heart on his sleeve…only those who know him well realise how greatly he was discouraged.”348

  Explaining himself to Daniels rather than Sprague, Edison wrote on 4 March that he had always envisaged the laboratory as a place of rapid product development, not solely devoted to research.

  Of course the board can do what in their judgment they think best, but they cannot expect me to agree to recommend what I firmly believe will be a failure….I am so deaf that I have seldom attended meetings of this consulting board and am so entirely out of touch with it that it seems to be a species of deception for me to continue as its head, so I think I had better disconnect and work directly for the Navy, the board electing a young and aggressive man in my place.349

  A SORT OF GRUDGE

  Daniels ignored this letter, perhaps on the grounds that a “president for life” would have to die to make his resignation effective. The alternative was for Edison to calm down on a tranquil, palm-shaded naval base as far south of Washington, D.C., as possible. He proceeded to do just that in Key West as the guest of the station commandant, Capt. Frederick A. Traut, a gentlemanly sophisticate who did much to restore his jaded opinion of naval officers. As an attaché in prewar Berlin, he had had extensive contact with Kaiser Wilhelm II and naturally knew much about German offensive technology. Traut insisted that the Edisons stay in his spacious villa on the base, and he further endeared himself to them by offering to find Theodore an uninhabited island on which to test his killer wheel.350

  The arrival of the “boys of the Sachem” cheered Edison further. He at once began experiments with them, making use of the base’s nautical, aerial, and wireless facilities and spending much time at sea, testing his quick-turn anchor. He even essayed a silvery sailor’s beard. Mina sensed that she was again femina non grata, and removed in something of a huff to Fort Myers.351

  Charles paid her a consolatory visit there, bringing with him Carolyn “Pony” Hawkins, his girlfriend of several years, a small serious woman furtive about her age and family circumstances.352 One day the couple came in from the pier and announced they “wanted to get married right away.” Mina was still struggling to recover from this when Edison telegraphed his approval to Charles from Key West: “IF YOU HAVE DECIDED IT MUST BE THEN THE SOONER THE BETTER. CAN’T BE ANY WORSE THAN LIFE IN THE FRONT LINE OF THE TRENCHES.”353

  The wedding, attended only by Mina, Charles’s former nurse, and a butler, took place on 27 March between a camphor tree and a cinnamon tree in the garden of Seminole Lodge.354 Few spots in the world were more fragrantly remote from the Kaiserschlacht, the German spring offensive then reaching its peak in France. As Edison’s mischievous wire implied, Charles, by marrying at twenty-eight, had further ensured he would not be called up anytime soon.

  That did not stop another Edison fils from enlisting in the tank division of the army at the age of thirty-eight. Like many a lost soul in ordinary life, William saw the war as his chance
to prove himself as something more than a playboy turned poultry farmer. He throve under military training and soon won a sergeant’s stripes. When the time came for him to be sent overseas, Mina suppressed years of dislike and traveled to Gettysburg to wish him well.355

  There was no question of sickly Tom doing anything as rashly brave at forty-two. He had had no more luck growing mushrooms than trading away his famous name in dissolute youth. All he wanted was what he had so long been denied: a job using his gifted hands somewhere in Edison Industries.*63 The firm had recovered from the E-2 disaster, and under Charles’s progressive leadership, its phonograph, battery, cement, and chemical factories were registering record profits. Fond of Tom and increasingly self-confident as chairman of the board, Charles decided to give his half-brother a break, once the war ended.*64, 356

  He also rid the company—at last, and at great expense—of the suave services of Miller Reese Hutchison, canceling the last of his commission privileges in exchange for a severance package of $112,589. Edison made no protest. Hutchison resigned with worldly ambitions intact, rented an office suite in the crown of New York’s Woolworth skyscraper, and looked around for new business opportunities.*65, 357

  On 23 April, Edison wound down his experiments at Key West and transferred what was left of them to his garage at Glenmont, where he continued to putter and sketch with diminishing energy. The strain of working what he described to Josephus Daniels as “eighteen months steady for 17 hours per day” was at last taking its toll. So was a gathering suspicion that neither the navy nor the army would ever adopt any of his ideas. Madeleine noticed that the very sight of a uniform coming through the door at Glenmont drove her father into a sulk. “He seems to have a sort of grudge against the service.”*66, 358

  In August, Edison joined Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, and John Burroughs on a camping trip along the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains. Burroughs was struck by his new tendency to sit apart and brood. “Occasionally around the camp fire we drew [him] out on chemical problems, and heard formula after formula come from his lips as if he were reading them from a book.”359

  When a submarine explosion almost identical to that of the E-2 occurred in Brooklyn Navy Yard on 5 October, killing the captain and one officer, Edison noted that this time the hydrogen was given off by a lead-acid battery pack. This only reinforced his feeling that he and Hutchison had been discriminated against by the naval court of inquiry—even though a sympathetic Daniels was still suppressing its final report.*67, 360

  By now the end of the war was imminent, but Edison continued doggedly to foist himself on the Navy Department, demanding a vessel larger than the Sachem to test the latest version of his underwater microphone. Daniels tried to make him understand that he had done more than enough to help defend his country. Edison’s response was to say that the invention would be just as useful in peacetime as an anticollision device.361

  William got to the Western Front just two weeks before the Armistice on 11 November. He survived and was soon pestering his father for money to bring him home.362

  THE THANKS OF THE NAVY

  Commodore Edison at Key West Naval Station, spring 1918.

  To Daniels’s barely concealed irritation, Edison ignored the peace and kept behaving like a naval scientist through the summer of 1919. He failed to take a hint when Assistant Secretary Roosevelt withdrew the Sachem from service and provided him with a rusty substitute slated for demolition. When it too was withdrawn, in favor of a yacht lacking fifteen feet of bow, Edison asked if he was expected to end his marine experiments. On 10 September Roosevelt informed him that due to retrenchment throughout the service, it would not be possible to supply him with any further hulks: “I beg to extend to you now the thanks of the Navy for the efforts you have made.”363

  Edison replied with equal coldness, saying he would find it “quite satisfactory” to return to private life and “close my connection with the government.” He did so without yielding to Daniels’s plea that he bestow his valedictory blessing on a naval research laboratory to be built in the District of Columbia, “[on] government owned land and under the jurisdiction of the Navy Department.” For the rest of his life he would chafe at the thought of this perversion of his original concept, presented to Congress with such high hopes three and a half years before, at the cravenness of the Naval Consulting Board in ultimately approving it, and most painful of all, at the failure of the armed services to accept a single one of the contributions he had vouchsafed them. “I made about forty-five inventions during the war and they pigeonholed every one of them.”364

  The only balm to his hurt in the last days of the decade came not from any official at land or sea but from an ambitious, Havana-smoking promoter of technological progress in the air. An immense Handley Page bomber flew low over Llewellyn Park and dropped a tribute to Edison deus ex machina:

  THE GREATEST LAND TYPE AEROPLANE IN THE WORLD SENDS ITS GREETINGS TO THE GREATEST INVENTOR IN THE WORLD.

  HUTCH.365

  *1 Edison by the middle of 1910 had applied for 1,328 patents, or about one for every eleven days of his inventive career.

  *2 Equivalent to $191 million in 2018.

  *3 Aside from movie actresses, the only women Edison employed were stenographers, packagers, and cooks.

  *4 In 1910 Hutchison’s Klaxon royalties alone totaled $41,921, equivalent to well over $1 million in 2018.

  *5 A century after Edison ventured this opinion, a team of American neurophysiologists endorsed it in their own language. They studied the movement of 1,019 neurons in twelve subjects exercising acts of free will and concluded, “There is substantial evidence implicating the parietal and medial frontal lobes in the representation of intention and in initiation of self-generated activity.” Itzak Fried et al., “Internally Generated Preactivation of Single Neurons in Human Medial Frontal Cortex Predicts Volition,” Neuron 69, no. 3 (February 2011).

  *6 Again, Edison anticipated the findings of modern neuroscientists that purportedly “random” selections are in fact deliberate choices made by the brain, often hundreds of milliseconds before it persuades itself to the contrary. See P. Haggard, “Human Volition: Towards a Neuroscience of Will,” National Review of Neuroscience 9, no. 12 (December 2008).

  *7 William James had voiced a similar complaint in his last book, A Pluralistic Universe (1909): “The over-technicality and consequent dreariness of the younger disciples at our American universities is appalling.”

  *8 No sooner had he done so than a rival product, Bakelite, was developed by the New York chemist Leo Baekeland. For the next several years, Edison’s Condensite Company of America had to fight a patent infringement suit from Baekeland, although its product was purer and harder. In 1917 Condensite was awarded priority, but by then Aylsworth was dead.

  *9 TR was at this time reemerging as a political force and possible candidate for a third term in the White House. Edison never made a talking picture of him but did issue four cylinder records of his campaign speeches in 1912.

  *10 At one point Edison got Hutchison to detonate a cell inside a slightly inflated balloon, anticipating the modern automobile airbag.

  *11 This gift was worth $50,575 in 1911, equivalent to $1.4 million in 2018.

  *12 Edison was presented with a copy of the Parliament Bill signed by Asquith, Lloyd George, and other senior government members.

  *13 Valentine, Joseph Pulitzer’s special foreign correspondent, published a novel in 1912 entitled Hecla Sandwith. It did not sell well.

  *14 In 1911 small doses of this deadly poison were considered to enhance heart performance.

  *15 See Part Four.

  *16 According to the physicist Robert Woodward, president of the Carnegie Institution for Science, Edison received only three votes “because of the profound prejudice among our academic colleagues against any kind of work not done in their charact
eristic ways.”

  *17 By now, Hutchison was earning 20 percent on all battery contracts.

  *18 The situation was especially critical because eager dealers had already ordered more than 175,000 unproduced disk records. Meanwhile the Edison Phonograph Works had run up an operating loss of $65,000 on top of a gross deficit for 1911 of $126,154.

  *19 Railcars designed by Ralph Beach and battery-powered by Edison had been in service in New York City and on the Pennsylvania Railroad since the summer of 1911. The batteries were underslung and propelled the car with twenty-four passengers well over one hundred miles per charge, often through heavy snow.

  *20 A letter around this time from Madeleine to Mina makes clear that by then she and John were lovers. The document’s woman-to-woman confidentiality implies that Mina was expected to keep the secret from Edison.

  *21 Edison’s idea in erecting this marquee was that its canvas drape would obviate the “echo effect” of solid walls.

  *22 Edison’s directors clapped two halves of a coconut shell together at the start of each take.

  *23 The reference is to Edison’s motion picture camera, patented 31 August 1897. By 1913 the trademark terms Kinetoscope, Kinetograph, and Kinetophone were frequently confused in the public mind. For their changing meanings in the 1880s and ’90s, see Parts Four and Five.

  *24 Motion picture miking remained static until Walter Wellman devised the overhead boom on the set of Beggars of Life in 1928.