Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Last May’s catastrophic earthquake in San Francisco revived an idea he had had when the cement mill was first ready to roll. He saw low-cost, molded concrete houses replacing the fragile wooden boxes in which most Americans lived—houses that contractors would mix from cement (with a colloidal additive for grit suspension) and spill on the spot into prefabricated forms. A three-story house could be poured in six hours and set in less than a week. The forms could be detached, section by section, and used for as many duplicate dwellings as the neighborhood would tolerate. Not that they had to be identical. “There will probably be hundreds of designs,” Edison told a representative from the magazine Insurance Engineering. “The architects will have a fine time, for they can pour statuary and all sorts of ornamentation while they are completing the walls. Thus, we will have small palaces renting for about ten dollars a month.”150

  “And the roofs will be made of cement also?”

  “Yes, the whole thing—all poured cement construction.”*31, 151

  He had to admit that the individual kits, consisting of nickel-plated cast iron parts, would be expensive, at around $25,000 apiece. But they would pay for themselves in frequency of use and universality of detail, molding mantelpieces, banisters, dormer windows, conduits for wiring, “and even bathtubs.” Having made the investment, a contractor could pour a new house every four days. Each could be sold for $500 or $600, enabling millions of low-income Americans to become homeowners for the first time, with no need to worry about earthquakes, hurricanes, or fire. “I will see this innovation a commonplace fact,” Edison promised, “even though I am in my sixtieth year.”152

  Edison and model cement house, circa 1906.

  Builders around the country reacted with cautious skepticism. They had heard about concrete houses before, but never from a visionary so determined and capable. “This idea is one of the insanities of genius,” said a concrete layer in New Castle, Pennsylvania. “Edison is crazy. He wouldn’t be a great inventor if he were not….A man who can solve the automobile question with cobalt batteries for electric machines can do almost anything else.”153

  AN ACCOMPLISHED FACT

  As things turned out, Edison would be sixty-three before he poured his first few exhibition houses (including two in Llewellyn Park)*32 and introduced his radically redesigned car battery. By then cobalt scales were as much a figment of another season as last year’s leaves, and he was already venturing into fresh fields. One was that of autobiography—or rather random reminiscences that he jotted down for a pair of insatiably curious Boswells. They were Frank Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin, the editor of Electrical World, who had known him since 1877. Both men were blessed with clear, cool minds that showed in their prose. They took their task—a two-volume, authoritative study entitled Edison: His Life and Inventions*33—with the utmost seriousness, but also with reverence, casting a hagiographical glow over nearly a thousand pages of otherwise scholarly text.

  Edison’s deafness prevented them from asking oral questions, so their “interviews” with him were scripted on both sides. His answers were fragmentary and nonsequential, for the most part jovial and unreflective, the memories of a man afflicted by no trauma worse than the deaths of his mother and first wife, and betraying little vanity beyond a fierce pride in his patents. He wrote most evocatively about his childhood in Ohio (“Lockwoods boy & I went swim he went down I waited then went home”) and his early days in New York, before he set up shop as an independent inventor:

  One day [in 1869] after I had exhibited and worked a successful device, whereby if a ticker should get out of unison in a broker’s office and commenced to print wild figures, it could be brought to unison from the central station and which saved the labor of many men and much trouble to the broker. [Marshall Lefferts] called me into his office and said, “Now, young man, I want to close up the matter of your inventions, how much do you think you should receive?” I had made up my mind that in taking into consideration the time and the killing pace I was working that I should be entitled to $5,000, but could get along with $3,000, but when the psychological moment arrived, I hadn’t the nerve to name so large a sum, so I said, “Well, General, suppose you make me an offer.” Then he said, “How would forty thousand dollars strike you.” This caused me to come as near fainting as I ever got. I was afraid he would hear my heart beat. I managed to say that I thought it was fair.154

  While the literary Frank Dyer worked with Martin and William Meadowcroft to polish the Old Man’s grammar and tone down his breezy references to “J.C.” and “jews,” Dyer the corporate tactician discreetly maneuvered him into positions that benefited them both.*34 He seized on two 1907 court decisions recognizing rival cinematographic patents held by the Edison and Biograph companies to propose that the litigants move toward the establishment of a “trust” that would pool their rights with those of other major studios, to the exclusion of independent producers and piratical exhibitors. This led to the organization in December 1908 of Dyer’s proudest creation, the Motion Picture Patents Company. Its participant moguls paid court to Edison at a celebratory banquet in the laboratory library. He was as genial as ever, and bored by the whole idea of movies as entertainment. After dinner, when the legal papers came out, he said, “You boys talk it over, while I take a nap.” He retired to his cot behind one of the book stacks and woke up to find himself in executive control of 90 percent of the American film industry.155

  He was much less amenable to Dyer’s urgings that he permit the development of a disk phonograph technology to match that of the upstart Victor Talking Machine Company. Inexplicably to Edison, many record buyers were opting for the novelty of flat hard records that sounded as if they had been sandpapered, rather than his cherished two-minute cylinders, marketed in heavy cardboard canisters that gave off a sweet savor of wax when opened—and which played melodiously through his phonographs with their big “morning glory” horns.156 It was almost satisfying to him that a federal appeals court had voided his old patent on a celluloid recording medium, because as deaf as he was, he could not see that volume of tone was preferable to fidelity. National Phonograph’s whopping sale of seven and a half million cylinders in 1907 suggested he was not alone in that prejudice. When American Graphophone, his principal competitor, launched a six-inch cylinder playable for four minutes, his response was to issue a new black wax record, the Amberol, that fitted the standard Edison mandrel but was microgrooved at two hundred threads per inch. It played as long and less harshly, but its “hills” were fragile and encouraged needle skip.*35 Dyer could only wait for Edison to admit that the days of soft sound were over. When the Amberol and its companion player, the Amberola, failed to arrest a sales slide of more than 50 percent by February 1909, Mina was able to report to Theodore, her most tech-minded child, that Papa was working on a new disk machine and having a terrible time with the reproducer: “I wish you were able to give him some points on it to help out with the difficulty.”157

  Whatever Edison’s problem, it hardly compared with the nine years of intellectual, mechanical, and chemical labor that led up to his announcement on 26 June that “the storage battery is an accomplished fact.” Reporters had heard him make the claim so often that the story rated few headlines and even fewer front pages. Only when the first 1.2 volt A-cells appeared in July—slender, light, and lustrous, so intricately engineered that they approached solid state—did awareness spread that Edison had pulled off a revolution in electrochemistry.158

  Edison’s A-12 storage battery, 1909.

  He had done it by returning to flake technology, using nickel leaf this time, plating it so thin that it floated on the air like gossamer. Two hundred and fifty sheets would have to be patted flat to match the thickness of a visiting card. They were drawn off rotating drums that he dunked, alternately and rapidly, into baths of copper and nickel electrolyte. Each deposition was washed and dried, the accumulated
layers building up hardly more substantially than crossed shadows. When they laminated out at .3969 of a millimeter, the sheet was stripped and cut into tiny squares, which were then soaked in a solution that ate away the copper. This left 120 nickel flakes, each about 1/25,000 inch thick.159

  Edison’s A-12 storage battery, 1909.

  The subsequent electrode-loading process that had cost Edison so many years and $1.5 million of his own money was performed with the most delicate machines he had ever designed. One repeatedly drove slender rods into the A-cell’s perforated steel tubes, packing them with seven hundred disks of powdered nickel hydrate and nickel flake. The tubes were of spiral-wrapped construction now, reinforced with seamless steel rings to withstand the insertion force of two thousand pounds per square inch. Their ends were mashed shut, much as he had pinched the evacuation points of his lightbulbs, before they were mounted in parallel on the positive grid. A similar but simpler process tamped the flat negative plate pockets with exceedingly fine iron oxide, unimpregnated with flake because its resistance was lower than that of the tubes.160

  Each cell consisted of five negative and four positive plates insulated with hard rubber and then rigidly sandwiched together, before being canned in sheet steel and saturated with lithium-tinged potassium hydroxide.*36 Edison boldly welded the can tops, to signal that they need not be opened for as long as the cell lasted—four years at least, by his calculation.*37 The only extrusions were twin tapered terminals, a lidded aperture for water replenishment, and a valve for the liberation of hydrogen bubbles.161

  Not wanting to be humiliated again by a market recall, he subjected random cells of his new battery to brutal physical tests. Cells selected at random were thudded up and down on “a solid block, about two million times,” then banged against “a brick or stone abutment five hundred times at speed of fifteen miles per hour at moment of impact.” If they withstood this punishment at no loss of capacity, he could be sure they would pass the ultimate test of going into service in New York. “I expect soon to see every taxicab run by the new storage battery,” Edison boasted. “Automobiles, too, and other pleasure vehicles.”162

  In some respects his dream came true. He soon had more orders than he could fill from cab, streetcar, and delivery companies, and the silent, odorless strength of his alkaline power pack so scared the manufacturers of lead-acid units that one of them issued a similar-looking battery called the “Ironclad,” even though it contained no trace of anything ferrous. Over the years various sizes of the “Edison A” would power more than half of the nation’s electric trucks, as well as railroad signal and time clock systems, miner’s lamps, detonation devices, central station backups, and marine radios. An ambitious young engineer hanging about the West Orange campus would even build one big enough to drive a submarine. But Edison had lingered too long to combat the rocketing popularity of the “pleasure vehicle” powered by internal combustion. His battery went on sale a year after the Ford Motor Company of Detroit introduced its low-priced, high-mileage Model T car, hastening at a compound rate the day when the word electromobile would begin to sound quaint and drop from everyday speech.163

  WE LIVE LIKE SQUATTERS

  The end of the decade found Edison happy in the success of his cement and battery innovations and looking forward to the wealth they would surely bring. Apart from his now-serious deafness and chronic attacks of stomach pain, he was as energetic and scientifically curious as a postgraduate student. “Did you ever realize that practically all industrial chemistry is colloidal in its nature?” he asked a pair of old associates.*38 Having for forty years averaged one invention every eleven days, he was in no mood to take the advice of his cousin, old Lizzie Wadsworth: “My dear Alva…I think it is about time you rested that Brain of yours, you have given to the World enough & now take a well earned rest the rest of your life.”164

  He thought he might work productively for twenty years more before handing his businesses over to his younger sons. The elder ones remained splinters rather than thorns in his flesh, unfelt at times, hurting at others. Probably they would continue to do so as long as he lived (unless they carried out their occasional threats of suicide). “Burton Willard” was the sadder of the two, laboring with desperate energy on his mushroom farm when he was well, but having to beg for help when he was not. His latest series of brain seizures had prostrated him in a Philadelphia hospital for seven months.165

  William and Blanche still engaged in moonlit flits from one “hell hole” to another, pursued by enraged landlords while splurging Edison’s weekly checks on such essentials as champagne cruises in Chesapeake Bay. When Will’s supplementary appeals for custom clothes and a Pierce-Arrow car were denied, he wrote his father so pettishly that Frank Dyer at last threw aside all lawyerly courtesy and replied, “I have no doubt that if we turned $100,000 over to you, it would be spent in idle foolishness in two months and that at the end of that time we would hear the same complaints and fault findings….I have no sympathy with you when you act like a child.”166

  Edison showed some interest in Will’s design of a double-acting spark plug but could not help seeing it as a token of the new, unwelcome age of the gas-powered car. He sounded both worried and hopeful about the future when he lunched with an old friend, the artist and philosopher Elbert Hubbard. They were founder-members of the Jovian Society, a group of environmentalists promoting electricity as the clean energy of the future. Taking out a fresh cigar (“Just pass the matches, thank you!”), Edison launched into a polemic against other ignescent devices:

  Someday some fellow will invent a way of concentrating and storing sunshine to use instead of this old, absurd Prometheus scheme of fire. I’ll do the trick myself if someone doesn’t get at it….

  This scheme of combustion in order to get power makes me sick to think of—it is so wasteful….We should utilize natural forces and thus get all of our power. Sunshine is a form of energy, and the winds and the tides are manifestations of energy. Do we use them? Oh no; we burn up wood and coal, as renters burn up the front fence for fuel. We live like squatters, not as if we owned the property. There must surely come a time when heat and power will be stored in unlimited quantities in every community, all gathered by natural forces. Electricity ought to be as cheap as oxygen, for it cannot be destroyed.

  Now, I am not sure but that my new storage battery is the thing.167

  *1 Marion, married in Germany, was about to turn twenty-seven.

  *2 “We used to speak French quite as fluently as English,” Charles recalled.

  *3 In 1900 steam vehicles accounted for 40 percent of the U.S. automobile market, electrics 38 percent, and gas cars 22 percent.

  *4 The words battery and cell are confused today to the point of interchangeability. In Edison’s time, a battery was a group of cells.

  *5 Now known as the Edison-Lalande battery. By 1900 Edison was selling hundreds of thousands of these cells annually to railroad companies for use in signals.

  *6 Edison allowed Tom a similar amount. At this time he was also paying mortages for both sons, but on what properties is unclear.

  *7 The current price of cadmium was $1.20 per pound, as opposed to four cents a pound for lead.

  *8 Marie had left Tom bereft of cash and clothes while vacationing with him in early August on Lake George. She returned to New York with another man, while Tom, distraught, followed on another train. He could not afford to ride any farther south than Yonkers and was obliged to complete his journey on foot. On 16 August The New York Times announced Marie’s return to the stage of the Casino Theater in a musical comedy, The Liberty Belles. Tom disappeared for six weeks, possibly on an alcoholic bender. Edison had to enlist William and the Pinkerton agency to search for him.

  *9 Ruins of the plant, once the biggest in the world, may still be seen in New Village, New Jersey.

  *10 For the early relationship and ultimate
estrangement of Edison and Gilliland, see Parts Five and Six.

  *11 Edison once sent Tesla a photograph of himself, eloquently inscribed “To Tesla from Edison.”

  *12 Edison also designed the largest automatic lubrication system in the country to install at New Village. It distributed oil to ten thousand bearings across a distance of half a mile.

  *13 By 1924 Edison-length kilns had become standard in the American portland cement industry.

  *14 A term commonly used in Europe for the storage battery.

  *15 Edison’s attempts to sink a workable shaft at Falconbridge in 1902 and 1903 were defeated by layers of quicksand. He eventually abandoned the mine.

  *16 An aide to the stricken McKinley, remembering Edison’s invention of the fluoroscope in 1896, begged his laboratory to send “an X-ray machine” to Buffalo, in the hope that radiation might somehow save the president’s life. A crew was duly dispatched from West Orange, but McKinley’s doctors ruled that he was too weak to receive radiation.