Edison

by Edmund Morris

  William begged his father to do something to protect the family’s “good name.” Edison thought it wise to comply, arranging privately to pay Marie twenty-five dollars a week if she would stop identifying herself with him.35

  Switching his attention back to the more congenial subject of cement making, he reconsidered the long kiln he had patented earlier in the year. It was intended to be the centerpiece of the great cement-making plant he was building at New Village, near Stewartsville,*9 New Jersey. Although the kiln was ready to ship, he could not resist the temptation to lengthen it during breaks from battery experiments. Walter Mallory found that Edison’s new idea of long was whatever volume of tube would disgorge a thousand barrels of cement a day. When the engineer warned him that output was 400 percent beyond the capacity of any burner in the industry, he came up with specifications for a kiln 150 feet long and nine feet in diameter, made up of fifteen cast-iron sections and rotating on fifteen bearings big enough to hold Nelson’s Column.36

  THE PRETTIEST PLACE IN FLORIDA

  By the new year of 1901, with two patents pending and more than a hundred laboratory staff assisting him in further development of the alkaline storage battery, Edison was unable to keep his grand project secret from speculators. A Swedish corporation, Ackumulator Actiebolaget Jungner, had already been formed in Stockholm by his only competitor, but its name did not resonate on Wall Street as much as that of the Edison Storage Battery Company, capitalized on 1 February at $1.5 million.37 Within eighteen days the New York trust attorney Louis Bomeisler offered Edison $3 million in cash for the right to market his new battery, even though it was still more of a theory than a product.

  Edison hedged. Bomeisler assumed he was looking for other offers and wrote in some irritation, “I do not want to do a lot of work on a matter of this magnitude, and find when ready to close that I am bidding against the field….[Hence] I suggested a figure which would be so high that you could not refuse it.”38

  It was in fact high enough to wipe out all Edison’s mining debts and pay for his cement mill as well. But he kept politely putting Bomeisler off (“I do not want to dispute your arguments”) until the lawyer, bewildered, realized he was a person who could not be bought.39

  The same could not be said of Thomas A. Edison, Jr., whose eagerness to sell his own name caused a defrauded investor in the Edison-Holzer Steel & Iron Process Company to sue him for $400,000 in mid-February. Warned by a third party that Tom might end up in jail, Edison replied with weary déjà vu. “As I know nothing about this matter, I prefer not to have anything to do with it. As the young man is of age I am not responsible for anything that he does.”40

  With that, he decided it was time he took a break from Julius Thomsen’s Thermochemische Untersuchungen, Gladstone and Tribe’s Chemistry of the Secondary Batteries of Planté and Fauré, and back issues of the Journal of the American Chemical Society. “I am going to Florida for a month to polish up my intellect,” he joked to a friend.41 For the first time in fourteen years he felt free to return to the estate in Fort Myers that he and Ezra Gilliland—more than a friend, once, before becoming more than an enemy—had bought together, back in the days when they called each other Damon and Pythias and Miss Mina Miller was Gilliland’s gift to him beyond price.*10 Plump Damon was dying of heart disease now, and he too had long been a stranger to Fort Myers, so there was no chance of them bridling at each other across the twenty yards of garden that separated their twin houses.

  In any case it was high time Edison checked up on a property he had allowed to deteriorate under a succession of vacationers and invalids since 1887.42 Mina accompanied him, along with their three children, two relatives, and a maid. The visit was more chastening than nostalgic. Their caretaker had attempted to freshen the house with dabs of paint, but there were hardly enough beds for a party of eight, nor was there a cook to feed them. The Gilliland house now belonged to a multimillionaire—Ambrose McGregor, president of Standard Oil—and looked it, in contrast with its weed-fringed neighbor’s. Nevertheless the surrounding park Edison had laid out with such symmetry in 1885 had lushly matured, and Mina with her gardener’s eye could see much potential for bringing it back into horticultural balance.

  For the next five weeks they made do, befriending the McGregors, eating out at the downtown hotel, and importing truckloads of soil for new plantings. Edison polished his intellect with a fishing rod, dragging a thirty-pound channel bass out of the crystal waters of the Caloosahatchee but failed in several seagoing attempts to land a tarpon. He told a reporter that he intended to make Fort Myers his regular winter home. “It is the prettiest place in Florida, and sooner or later visitors to the East Coast will find it out.”43

  WHICH?

  One of the first things Edison did after returning north was to attend an electrical lecture-demonstration at Columbia University by Nikola Tesla. Although as fellow innovators in the field they had about as much in common as the rival power systems they personified—direct versus alternating current—their relations had always been distantly cordial.*11 Edison could be unforgiving of any former associate who tried to get rich on things he had taught them (as Ezra Gilliland could attest). But Tesla had brought his own genius to the Edison Machine Works in 1884, and taken nothing else with him six months later, when he left to form the Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing Company.

  Edison was late arriving at Havermeyer Hall, and the audience erupted with applause at his entry. Tesla was already at work displaying the light effects of his electric oscillator, but at the sound of cheers he looked up and, in the words of a reporter, “saw the greatest of all American inventors….Mr. Tesla stopped his work and grasped Mr. Edison’s hand, which he shook as he led him to a seat,” to further cheers for them both.44

  Another interested observer was Guglielmo Marconi. At twenty-seven, the Italian engineer was not much older than the students in the room. He came to West Orange on 16 April to look at Edison’s old patent on “wireless telegraphy” and hear him ramble on for four hours about radiating sound waves that would one day encircle the globe and penetrate space.45 This was hardly a revelation to Marconi, who had already beamed Morse signals across the English Channel. But the patent was of great interest to him and worthy of more businesslike discussion as his own experiments proceeded.

  Shortly afterward a headline in Western Electrician speculated what the medium might best be called in the twentieth century—“SPARK, SPACE, WIRELESS, ETHERIC, HERTZIAN WAVE OR CABLELESS TELEGRAPHY—WHICH?”46 Not even Marconi had yet suggested the word radio.

  A PACK RATHER THAN A TANK

  On 21 May, the chief theoretician of Edison Industries, Dr. Arthur Kennelly, rose before the annual meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers to announce that his boss had invented a new type of storage battery. After some nine thousand personal experiments, Edison had discovered a pair of metals whose electrochemical properties corresponded so closely as to permit the practical realization of the reversible galvanic cell.47

  The paper Kennelly proceeded to present was technical, but its revelation that Edison had settled on a superoxide of nickel for his positive electrode caused what passed, in professional circles, for a sensation. Nickel was known to be nonconductive in its oxidized and reduced forms, and it was almost as expensive as cadmium if worked at all finely. Iron—his negative element—was a more predictable opposite, promising a large number of deep discharge cycles. Edison increased the conductivity of the positive electrode by mixing tiny flakes of graphite with nickel hydrate and tamping the resultant powders into the same pocketed plates he had used in his previous cell design. The graphite, pure crystallized carbon, took no part in the new battery’s action except to provide microscopic conduits within each compound. They enabled a free flow of oxygen ions from pocket to pocket, in a solution of 25 percent potassium hydroxide—Edison’s preferred alkaline electrolyte in all his battery experiments.48
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  Kennelly claimed, to the disbelief of some skeptics, that the nickel-iron cell had a storage capacity of fourteen watt-hours per pound, enough raw power to lift a load its own weight to a height of seven miles on a single charge. A lead-acid cell, in contrast, would rise only two to three miles before falling and making a significant dent in the earth’s surface. Edison’s battery was a pack rather than a tank, so solidly amalgamated that it could withstand all the shocks that automobiles were heir to, and (like its creator) superbly balanced. He admitted at the end of his presentation that the pockets had nevertheless caused Edison some trouble. Their expansion and contraction as they respectively lost oxygen, or recovered it, caused the “nickel” plates to swell slightly while the “iron” ones shrank, and vice versa during the next phase of the charge-recharge cycle. In either case, these internal pressure variations caused the cell’s thin steel walls to—as it were—breathe in and out but, he insisted, “well within the elastic limits” of the metal.

  Finally Kennelly half-answered the one question every Exide man in the audience wanted to ask: “As regards cost, Mr. Edison believes that after factory facilities now in the course of preparation have been completed, he will be able to furnish the cells at a price per kilowatt not greater than lead cells.”

  A NEW EPOCH IN THE CEMENT BUSINESS

  A distance of sixty miles and seventeen stops on the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad separated Edison’s two factory projects that spring. He became a commuter between them, supervising every detail of construction and pondering their likely output. One Saturday at 10:40 A.M. he arrived at New Village and took a tour of the cement mill from the quarry to the packing house. Seven of its eleven steel-and-concrete buildings were complete or nearly so, and the rest looked to be ready and fully equipped by midsummer.49 Although what he saw was already the fifth-biggest cement plant in the country, he decided to increase its capacity from four hundred to a thousand barrels a day. He spent the afternoon brooding on-site, then took the five-thirty train home. Working from memory through the night and on into Sunday afternoon, he made a list of nearly six hundred necessary changes to the mill’s design, including dimensions for new machinery and an order for two Carnegie steam shovels to open up more of the underlying cement rock vein.*12, 50

  Only after the list had been copied and sent to the superintendent did he inform Harlan Page, a director of the Edison Portland Cement Company, that the firm would have to sell “say $400,000” of its preferred stock to pay for the modifications he required. “I am sure this Mill will establish a new epoch in the Cement business.”*13, 51

  Walter Mallory, part of whose job was to keep men like Page happy, knew from ten years’ experience in the mountains that Edison designed more by instinct than by reason. “I cannot help coming to the conclusion,” he remarked later, when the long kiln was turning and the plant was producing over eleven hundred barrels of cement a day, “that he has a faculty not possessed by the average mortal, of intuitively and correctly sizing up mechanical and commercial possibilities.”52

  WHAT HAPPENED ON TWENTY-THIRD STREET

  The first suggestion in the American press that Edison was not alone in developing an alkaline car battery appeared in The Marion (Ohio) Democrat on 8 June 1901. “Mr. Jungner of Stockholm, a Swedish engineer, has invented a new accumulator,*14 which, in spite of its extraordinary light weight, is said to have a great capacity….A vehicle equipped with this [device] made on a trial trip 95 miles, without it having been necessary to recharge….The scheme seems to be similar to E’s last invention.”

  The interest of Buckeye newspaper readers in Swedish auto traction was slight, but Edison evidently knew all about the accumulator by the beginning of July, when W. N. Stewart, an entrepreneur in London, offered him a chance to combine Jungner’s European patents with his own. “The experiments of Prof. Jungner (who seems to be a most able chemist) cover a term of seven years, and are of great value….I may say, also, that Prof. Jungner has a very high opinion of your work in this field, and that he makes no conditions of an embarrassing nature.”53

  Edison reacted dismissively, as he always did to direct competition. “I was surprised to learn that you had bought Jungner’s patents. You will find that they have no value, because they are based on theory. An actual experiment will prove his patents bad in every particular.”54

  Instead, he sold his own past patents, plus any new ones he might win over the next five years, to the Edison Storage Battery Company for $1 million. He took only $100,000 in cash and trusted he would earn the rest in stock earnings. If he had known that he would be awarded sixty-two more electrochemical letters patent in that period, he might have valued his expertise more highly.55

  That was not the case with a movie patent he had been trying to profit from for years, which at this moment emerged from litigation and promised him fabulous royalties. On 15 July the U.S. Circuit Court in the Southern District of New York ruled in Edison v. American Mutoscope and Biograph Company that he was the original inventor of the Kinetograph movie camera and could therefore block others from capitalizing on any of its features without a license. The decision was subject to appeal but temporarily made Edison the most powerful film executive in the United States.56

  Never having been interested in the creative side of moviemaking, he was content to leave his house director, the gifted Edwin S. Porter, in charge of production while he spent six weeks in Canada, seeking a source of nickel for his new battery. The metal was only slightly less expensive than cadmium or cobalt. He needed a private supply of it at cost if the chemical plant Arthur Kennelly had mentioned (rapidly rising at Silver Lake) was to be profitable. Assuming the battery survived a punishing series of vibration tests he had ordered, he planned to start producing it about a year and a half from now.

  By early August he was cruising north through Lake St. Clair, the transitory body of water, half American and half Canadian, that divided Lakes Erie and Huron.57 He had sailed these same waters as a child, on another voyage between opposites—from his birthplace in Milan, Ohio, to the big white house at Fort Gratiot, Michigan, where he had begun to be a man. There was no time now for him to disembark in Port Huron and revisit any boyhood haunts, because the ship was heading for the nickel-rich town of Sudbury, Ontario.58

  He was swatting blackflies and prospecting with a magnetized needle for a seam to claim, on the day Porter set up a camera in New York and filmed a new Edison short, What Happened on Twenty-third Street. It caught the moment when a young woman, strolling the sidewalk in midsummer heat, stepped over a ventilating grille and felt her skirt billowing upward, to the voyeuristic pleasure of passersby.59

  OMNIPOTENT POSSESSION

  Edison returned home with a successful mine claim in his pocket—he had discovered dense deposits of nickel ore in the East Falconbridge area of Sudbury*15—to find that he was once again a man with family problems. There had been a foiled kidnap threat against his younger children, and Madeleine’s governess was so distraught over it she had committed suicide. Tom had managed to keep out of jail, but was bouncing checks and advertising something called the Wizard Ink Tablet (“We have testimonials from 1,000 banks”) over the logotype of the Thomas A. Edison Jr. Chemical Company. William was quiet for the moment, but his lulls usually preceded storms.60

  Business at least was good, despite the shock of President William McKinley’s assassination on 6 September at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo.*16 Newsreel coverage of his dying days and the assumption of power by Vice President Theodore Roosevelt had unfortunately rendered trivial some exquisite footage shot by Porter of the exhibition grounds illuminated at night—one slow pan resembling a spill of diamonds across black velvet.61 Otherwise, Edison’s film studio was doing well. So was National Phonograph, his recording firm, outselling every competitor despite the formation of an aggressive, disk-cutting newcomer, the Victor Talking Machine Company. The c
ement mill was complete, the chemical plant almost so, and the storage battery was getting some rhapsodic press comment. An illustrated article on its “wonders” in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle showed a seated man holding up the slim metal box with one arm. “This latest achievement of Edison is probably destined to work as great changes in its way as did the electric light,” the text commented. “The fact must be easily apparent to everybody that the ability to carry around in the palm of one’s hand the power that can, so to speak, move mountains, would be almost an omnipotent possession.”62

  On 16 November Edison received a long letter from the inventor of the Phantoscope movie projector, which had become his own Vitascope in 1896 by right of patent purchase.*17 Thomas Armat begged him to consider, in the light of his recent court victory over the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, withdrawing from the case now under appeal. “Hopeful as you may feel over the result of that suit, you probably realize, as I do, that the decision, while probable, is anything but a sure thing.” The case’s cumulative effect so far had been to deny all parties to it the profits they would have earned, while “hundreds of ignorant or illiterate infringers of patents” had gotten rich at much less cost.63

  Rather than continue to litigate, Armat wrote, the major players should agree to the formation of a consolidated motion picture company, or “trust,” that would pool all their patents. “This combined action would establish a real monopoly, as no infringer would stand against a combination of all these strong elements.” Edison’s reward for cross-licensing his unmatched number of letters patent would be royalty and manufacturing privileges more than equal to their aggregate value.64