Edison
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*17 See Part Four.
*18 Tesla sent a message saying that he felt he “could not rise to the occasion” but congratulated Marconi on the steady advance of his “mind feelers.” Six days later he applied for a wireless patent of his own.
*19 Griffith may be seen acting uncredited in the Edison feature Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest, directed by Edwin S. Porter and J. Searle Dawley (1907).
*20 Electrocuting an Elephant has given rise to an internet myth that Topsy was deliberately killed by Edison in order to demonstrate the lethal danger of alternating current as opposed to his own preferred direct current. Her death was on the contrary ordered by Luna Park officials, who originally wanted to hang her. They were persuaded instead to adopt the triple method of poisoning, strangulation, and electrocution, with the approval of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Edison had no part in the filming of the documentary, although it was issued under his trade name. For his role in the development of the electric chair, see Part Four.
*21 Edison was bothered throughout his career by the attempts of imitators and swindlers to sell products under his name. This explains his furious reaction when his own sons misused it.
*22 The Edison Portland Cement Company settled with the widows of the dead men at $500 apiece. Injured personnel had to go to court to recover any damages at all.
*23 Motion pictures on film were not subject to copyright protection until 1912. If, however, they were printed as a series of stills, same-size on light-sensitive paper, they qualified for protection under existing law. The Edison studio took the trouble to do this, contributing significantly to the preservation of movies that might otherwise have died in nitrate form. Its archive dominates the Paper Print Film Collection at the Library of Congress.
*24 Not to be outdone, the independent filmmaker Siegmund Lubin produced a feature called Don’t Get Gay with Your Manicurist (1903).
*25 He also splurged $2,250 (more than $65,000 in today’s money) on a thirty-six-foot yacht, the Reliance, in Fort Myers. In 1908 he bought the Lansden Electric Car Company outright, becoming in that sense a car manufacturer himself. Albion, Florida Life of Edison, 60; Millard, Edison and Business, 188–89.
*26 Pierre Curie asked Hammer, in return, for a sample of the tungstate of calcium that Edison was using in some private lighting experiments.
*27 “It is certainly hard work to talk to him,” Frank Dyer complained in 1906. Edison underwent a second life-threatening operation for mastoiditis on 23 February 1908, making his hearing even worse.
*28 A recording of Edison telling one of his stories in 1906 is available from Michigan State University’s Vincent Voice Library at http://archive.lib.msu.edu/VVL/dbnumbers/DB500.mp3.
*29 There is some evidence that Tom also had an opium problem at this time.
*30 Edison’s cement was too smooth for the comfort of his competitors. “It would have been better for you to have made a cement similar to our own,” one of them grouched. Nevertheless the Edison texture became standard in the industry.
*31 Edison and his interviewer made the common mistake of using cement as a synonym for concrete. The former is merely an ingredient of the latter.
*32 These buildings, still in robust condition, may be seen as adjuncts to house tours of Glenmont, conducted by the National Park Service.
*33 Published in New York by Harper & Brothers in October, 1910.
*34 Dyer succeeded William Gilmore as business manager of the Edison plant on 23 July 1908.
*35 Although commonly described as wax or waxen, the Amberol medium was a soft-soap compound of stearic acid and sodium salt, hardened with ceresin and aluminum stearate.
*36 Edison’s addition of lithium hydrate to his electrolyte, significantly improving the A-cell’s capacity and stability, anticipated by sixty years the development of the lithium-ion battery, now a staple in power science. Francis T. Bonner of the Manhattan Project described the innovation as “a real piece of magic,” still not perfectly understood in the 1950s.
*37 He underestimated the longevity by more than ten times. Edison storage batteries were still working forty-five years later in various parts of the United States. In 2011 a researcher resurrected some eighty-five-year-old A-cells and found they still functioned perfectly.
*38 Edison posed this question in April 1909, six years before the publication of an English translation of Wolfgang Ostwald’s pioneering Handbook of Colloid-Chemistry.
Edison at his Ogden mine, 1895.
ON THE EVE of his forty-third birthday, Edison succumbed to an unusual attack of depression. He had only just recovered from the shock of seeing his proudest achievement, the Pearl Street generating station in New York, burned to the bricks, with seven of its eight great dynamos ruined. Thanks to quick emergency action by the local illuminating company, the system was back in service after only a few days. But the memory of seeing a powerhouse he had designed with such care standing blackened, drenched, and gap-windowed was still raw when he heard that Henry Villard, the multimillionaire president of Edison General Electric, wanted him to sacrifice a thousand shares of his stock in that firm, so that certain Vanderbilt interests—aided and abetted by the Drexel, Morgan banking house—could buy their way in.*1, 1
This casual assumption that he would allow himself to be elbowed still further down the board table of a corporation bearing his name (and how much longer would the financiers maintain that trademark?) enraged Edison, at a time when he would have preferred to unload some of the less gilt-edged assets in his portfolio. Having agreed to accept stock certificates, instead of cash, from the treasurers of dozens of isolated central stations he had installed around the country in the 1880s, he held almost $4 million in currently worthless paper.2 Having further agreed, perhaps foolishly, to Edison General’s absorption of all the electrical manufacturing companies he used to control, in exchange for a cash payment that somehow also turned to paper, he found that his income had fallen from $250,000 to $85,0003—too little to keep the West Orange laboratory going, unless he delved into his own pocket.*2
“Your request has worried me so much that it is the principal reason for breaking me down in spirits,” he wrote Villard, saying that he needed a vacation in the North Carolina mountains to refresh him, body and soul.
I have been under a desperate strain for money for 22 years, and when I sold out [to Edison General], one of the greatest inducements was the sum of cash received, which I thought I could always have on hand, so as to free my mind from financial stress, and thus enable me to go ahead into the technical fields. To put it back into the business is something I have never contemplated….I feel that it is about time to retire from the light business and devote myself to things more pleasant, where the strain and worry is not as great.4
Villard dismissed this threat as the kind of cri de coeur to be expected on occasion from a temperamental genius. “No cause for worry,” he replied. “With long rest I am sure you will return in better spirits.”5
SPOTTED LIKE A LEOPARD
Actually Edison was remarkable for hardly ever losing his cheerful equanimity. Not since the death of his first wife, five and a half years before, had he shown such emotion. But the decade had certainly opened with a pileup of worries for him—in contrast to the 1880s, which had been one long crescendo of celebration and success. Now he was again a plaything of financiers (Villard suggested he borrow to make up for his lost income), contractually compelled to work up to nine hours a day, unpaid, on electrical problems that should have been handled by engineers in the field. That left another nine hours—eighteen being his habitual schedule—for him to devote to problems closer to home, such as a faltering start to the production of Edison talking dolls, a sharp decline in phonograph and record sales, two looming court decisions that could well humiliate him, bad news from an experimental iron mine he had opened in Pennsylvania, and
even worse news from Germany, where his eldest daughter had been struck by smallpox.6
Marion lay now in a Dresden hospital, her seventeen-year-old body “spotted like a leopard only more so,” in the words of Elizabeth Earl, her governess and chaperone. She had been touring Europe for ten months, partly to finish her education but mostly to keep an ocean between herself and Mina. As far as Edison could see—which in domestic situations was a matter of millimeters—Tom and William had recovered from the loss of one mother and adapted to another without much difficulty. But Marion’s memories of Mary went further back (the golden hair, the chocolates, the laughter). She could not forgive Mina for supplanting her. Mina had been unable to fill the void in the girl’s heart, and Marion herself had decided to go abroad.7
Marion Edison as a teenager.
That venture itself cost Edison plenty, and now he was faced with thousands of dollars in medical and recuperating expenses, assuming Marion survived—there was some evidence that her case was hemorrhagic.*3, 8 Mina’s budget for the rest of the family also showed inflationary tendencies. The boys had their names down for fall attendance at St. Paul’s in Concord, New Hampshire, a boarding school that was by no means cheap.*4 And she was pregnant with her second child.9
As long as Edison was flush, he willingly supported all the minor or impecunious family members who depended on him, from his eighty-five-year-old father to little Madeleine, not yet two. But his charity went no further than signing checks. He saw no reason to write sympathy letters in addition—not even to Marion, suppurating in a foreign sanitarium. She could count on all her bills being paid, no matter how long it took for her pitted face to heal. Surely that permitted him to ignore the suggestion of a past governess that what Marion needed most of all was “a loving letter from her Father.”10
Affable to every stranger who waylaid him, generous with advice even to competitors, Edison was unaware of how often he hurt the feelings of intimates. He was at once gregarious and distant, willing to admit that “I live in a great, moving world of my own,”11 like the flickering figures seen through the peephole of his Kinetoscope machine. Even when alerted to the pain, or loneliness, or shame, or other neuroses of people who were less successful than himself, he seemed puzzled that they did not cheer themselves up by embarking on some bold venture, as he was about to do.
MORE AND BIGGER ROCKS
Iron, more than fresh air, was what he sought in the mountains of North Carolina, on the basis of prospecting rumors. For years he had dreamed of becoming a mining mogul, in about the greatest conceivable contrast to his work as a laboratory engineer. The fantasy went back to his discovery in 1881 of a black beach at Quogue, Long Island—sheet upon sheet of powdered magnetite shifting and resettling in the sand every time the wind changed or the tide went out. Then and now, Atlantic Slope iron oxide looked like gold to him, although it was inferior both in quality and quantity to the great ferric oxide deposits around Lake Superior.12
He wore down many 4B pencils calculating how much low-grade Appalachian magnetite he would have to concentrate to undercut the price to local furnacemen of Michigan hematite, which was softer and richer but cost a fortune to haul east along a thousand miles of railroad. Edison’s equations were conditional upon many variables, among them his ability to design excavating, crushing, grinding, and separating machines of such size and sophistication as to remain competitive even as other mills in the region closed and midwestern production increased.13 Also he had to be sure that whatever deposits he found were enormous enough to guarantee he would never run out of ore.
After an unrewarding six-week search for iron formations along the Blue Ridge (“I go out to prospect a property here, I meet a negro, who refers me to another negro, and finally I find the mine—a dental drill vein”), he returned north convinced that his best bet lay in the wooded highlands of his own home state, near Ogdensburg.*5 He had recently acquired a sixteen-thousand-acre tract there on Sparta Mountain, including abandoned excavations left over from the days when the only iron was eastern iron. According to his estimate, the Ogden mine had a potential yield of 200 million tons of low-grade magnetite just in its central three thousand acres—enough to make him a billionaire if he exploited it the way he intended: “The ores of New Jersey are in the primal rocks and if these mineralized rocks can be worked commercially, there is more iron ore in the state of New Jersey than in any other area of equal size in the world.” Just across the border lay the struggling but still active foundries of eastern Pennsylvania, and the anthracite mines that provided them with natural blast-furnace fuel. “The market is here in their midst,” Edison wrote in a rationale for his scheme. He noted that local labor was cheaper, and the supply of skilled managers greater this side of the Alleghenies. “The only thing necessary is cheap ore. With abundance of that commodity…the center of iron production in the US would be brought back easterly many miles and Western [exporters] would not underbid the Eastern mills at their very doors.”14
He needed no further inducements to resurrect Ogden under the grand name of the New Jersey & Pennsylvania Concentrating Works. A phoenix rising from the ashes of his old Edison Ore-Milling Company, the plant would have all the features of a legally established corporation, with a small board of directors and a capital stock of $250,000. He was determined to keep it off the open market and was prepared to finance its future expansion himself, instead of depending, as in the past, on tightwads like J. P. Morgan for development money. For now he was content to be the major shareholder, with such loyal friends as Robert L. Cutting, Jr., Charles Batchelor, and Sammy Insull backing him up.15
A dinner in New York on 24 March, hosted by Henry Villard and attended by many senior figures in the lighting industry, confirmed his long-held suspicion that Villard was working on a merger of the Edison General Electric and Thomson-Houston Electric companies—a move that, if successful, would combine their respective strengths in illumination and motor technologies. Edison objected to the idea because Thomson-Houston would be able, through cross-licensing, to trade on his patents, and he was not sure he would receive fair compensation. Besides, Thomson-Houston had adopted an alternating current system, which was more efficient than his own and therefore detestable.*6 Whether or not the deal came off, he had had his fill of electrical invention after twenty years of connecting wires to other wires. It had left him no wiser as to what electricity was. Except when current pulsed under his fingers, or shocked or heated them, he had no sense of dealing with something substantial.16
As a boy reading R. G. Parker’s Natural Philosophy, he had learned that science was divided between “ponderables” and “imponderables,” that is, agents with or without mass.17 So far he had dealt with the weightless phenomena of telegraphy, sonics, and light. Now he wanted to measure his strength against the material massiveness of the world. He longed in body as well as mind to crush more and bigger rocks than any man before him and to use magnetic force to drag the iron out of their dust.
An editorial in the trade journal Iron Age warned that such desire was addictive and potentially ruinous:
There is something very fascinating in the production from lean ore of a concentrate in which very few particles of foreign matter can be detected. No one who has approached this subject has escaped the glowing enthusiasm and the air of triumph of an inventor over such an achievement….Yet there are very few of the promoters of such work who have an adequate conception of the costs and of the losses involved….
We do not mean to convey the impression that magnetic concentration has not a brilliant field before it; but, generally speaking, hopes have been raised on the basis of underestimates of costs, which are sure to lead to disappointment.18
BLACK TOOTHPASTE
To Edison, the greatest of all mysteries, surpassing even that of electricity, was “the mystery of what passes between the north and south poles of the magnet.”19 That ha
d not stopped him, in youth, from writing learnedly about the behavior of magnetism in self-adjusting telegraphic relays and wondering if it might be used to deflect the iron ray in the solar spectrum. He had gone on to invent a myriad of electromagnetic and pyromagnetic devices, including a rhomboid bridge that measured the integrity of various metals with extraordinary accuracy. His most imaginative use of the force had been to apply it to bent lamp filaments. They magically straightened when he passed a magnet close by: “One pole attracts while the other repels the charged carbon.” Lately he had put on exhibit in West Orange a soft-iron magnet of great ore-separating potential. It was six feet long and two and a half feet wide, heavily wound with copper wire, and weighed well over three thousand pounds.20
Contrary to his reputation among pure scientists as being a technological experimenter only, Edison read deeply in the analytical literature and was familiar with all aspects of natural force theory, including the writings of Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. His research into such phenomena as the effect of diamagnetism on magnetic stress, or the loss of conductivity in ferromagnetic materials, was limited only by his lack of mathematics. For that extra dimension of understanding, he had become dependent on Arthur Kennelly.21
Right now he could live with magnetic mystery, as long as what fell past the poles was a thin, broad stream of ore, with the blackish part of it wavering sideways while the shiny remainder dropped straight. The first separator he ever designed (out of the blue in 1880, at the height of his frenzy to perfect his incandescent lightbulb) had been so simple a device as to look almost silly: a wooden lamppost, a dangling hopper, a mounted electromagnet, a bifurcated bin. Yet it worked well on ferrous beach sand, using only gravity and magnetism, the most fundamental forces in physics.22