Edison did not pretend to have invented magnetic separation. He emphasized in a research paper coauthored with John Birkinbine and published in Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers that various forms of it had been tried in the Adirondacks and countries as remote as Bohemia and New Zealand. But few of them matched the effectiveness of the seven separators Edison had patented since 1881, most recently one that combated the problem of too-dry ore clumping as it fell, so that grains of chert blocked the extraction of grains of iron. He fed crushed rock directly into a tank of water, then agitated it in a revolving, magnetized drum that freely dispersed all particles. The fines clung to the poles of the drum as it emerged from the water and could be scraped off afterward, like black toothpaste.23
For Ogden, he now sought to patent a sophisticated separator in partnership with his most talented engineer, the Scottish photographer William Kennedy Laurie Dickson. It monstrously resembled a secret camera they were working on, in its combination of drive wheels, spools, and rolling belt loaded with granular product:24
A snake feeder screwed ore, wet or dry, into a hopper that fed the fines one way, and the rough another, while four giant magnets pulled the iron powder onto the belt in a series of ripples that grew denser with every transit of the poles. Demagnetized as it proceeded, the powder fell from collecting pockets into a delivery container. Fans whirled away collateral dust and filtered it for “float iron.” The overall system was unique in the way it repeatedly counterposed gravitational and magnetic forces to enrich the concentration of fines, resulting in a high degree of purity by the time they settled.25
In May, Edison ordered a series of preliminary tests at Ogden. He left them to be conducted by Dickson and returned to West Orange to plot a major expansion of the facility in the fall. If other eastern “iron men” were struggling to produce a thousand tons of ore a day, he intended to mine and mill five times as much.26 In his haste to make plans, he probably never read a story that appeared in the Pittsburgh Dispatch on 11 May: “NEW IRON TERRITORY—INDICATIONS OF A RICH FIND IN AN UNEXPLORED FIELD OF MINNESOTA.”
The range was called Mesabi, and its wealth of red hematite was reportedly so prodigious that three local entrepreneurs were already building a rail link from Duluth to export it to the world.
YOU OUGHT TO BE VERY THANKFUL
Marion Edison escaped the worst ravages of smallpox, thanks to the care of one of Dresden’s best physicians. But her face was so pitted that she shrank from reentering European society until the crimson scars faded. Edison sent the doctor a magnificent set of silver and rented her a villa on the French Riviera, where she could recover in seclusion with Mrs. Earl. It would be months before Marion could be persuaded to leave the house without a veil. She continued to pine, mostly in vain, for some written words from her father, while berating herself for being a burden to him. “It makes me sick when I think of the money [I] cost Papa,” she wrote Mina.27
For obvious reasons, the young woman could no longer be expected to attract an early marriage proposal and so relieve Edison of responsibility for her. Half homesick, half proud, wholly aware that another child was about to swell his second family, she clung to Mrs. Earl and accepted her fate as an invalid in exile.
Charles Edison arrived on 3 August. “You are a lucky woman Mama,” Marion wrote when she heard the news, “and you ought to be very thankful you have one of the loveliest of men for a husband, a sweet little baby who will do you credit, money, beauty. For my part I don’t know what else you want in this world to make it a Paradise.”28
“SOCIETY OF HARMONIC CURVES”
Edison’s “Ogden baby,” as he jokingly referred to his other neonate acquisition, proved much less able than Charles to ingest processed helpings. Dickson ran some of the local rock through crushers rented from the Brennan company and found the resultant pulver far different from beach magnetite. It powdered in dry weather, abrading the oiled joints of machinery and penetrating the thickest of respirators. When wet, it sweated clay and clogged the rotating screens it was supposed to fall through. Ominously, Sparta Mountain’s iron quotient turned out to be leaner than Edison had hoped, averaging only 16 percent. A previous generation of miners had carved away the four most workable seams, leaving it to him to figure how to excavate the rest.29
He was not discouraged when Dickson reported that the initial tests were “n.g. with a vengeance.” Stimulated as usual by difficulty, he undertook to design new screening and drying systems that would meet all Ogden’s challenges, and shut the plant, hoping to make it fully operational in the spring of 1891. That committed him and his nervous board to a carrying cost of $20,000 to $30,000 a month, just as news came of more and more hematite findings in Minnesota.30
In September an ambitious writer, George Parsons Lathrop, came to stay in West Orange, hoping that Edison would now have time to work with him on a project inspired by the phenomenal success of Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward. Lathrop was the author of “Talks With Edison,” a magazine article published earlier in the year that made much of his subject’s affable approachability. He had been so impressed with the inspirational, quasi-poetic way Edison dreamed up inventions—“These ideas are occurring to me all the time”—that he suggested they collaborate on a science fiction novel, to be called Progress. To his surprise, Edison not only agreed but waved aside any question of a fee. It was enough that Lathrop would do the writing, while he, simply for fun, came up with futuristic notions to embellish the story. He even offered to illustrate it with his own drawings.31
Their collaboration was to be kept secret, under a first-serial-rights contract with the McClure newspaper syndicate. “There would be some money in it for you and me,” Lathrop informed Alfred O. Tate, Edison’s secretary and an intermediary in the arrangement. No doubt the novel could then be issued as a best-selling book. In that case he would offer Edison a share in the royalties, “tho’ I fancy that it will not be much of a consideration in his eyes.”32
At thirty-nine, Lathrop was no literary lightweight. He was married to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter and had published several volumes of fiction and poetry, as well as founding the American Copyright League and serving as an associate editor of The Atlantic Monthly. These achievements had not saved him, however, from the twin liabilities of a freelance writer’s career, anxiety and alcohol.33 Over the next nine months he was to discover, with frequent relapses into both, that Edison was possibly the busiest man in America.*7
The delay-prone tempo of their “collaboration” was set in mid-October, when Edison sent Lathrop thirty-three pages of notes, scrawled so fast as to be barely readable in places. Some were surreal, others visionary, but most read like experimental prompts from Edison to himself, as if he had forgotten they were supposed to inform somebody else:
Lubrication at high temperature by the Bromine substitution
Mfr oxygen by passing over molten Titanium
Disassociation of all the Halogen group by incandescence34
Lathrop feigned delight at being vouchsafed such jottings—“I have copied them. They are immense!”—and returned the manuscript to Edison, red-penciled with many requests for elucidation. It was not clear to him what a “Society of Harmonic Curves” might be, or how vaporized mica might be turned into microfilm by electrical excitation. He also needed help on the technologies of cable telegraphy powered by “etheric force,” screwless steamships, climate change, aerial navigation, hypnotizing machines, phonographic newspapers, Saharan canals, mother-of-pearl room panels, and colored music. Edison was unavailable for an interview but promised to record some explanations on wax cylinders. Lathrop waited for them in vain. He was not mollified to receive another batch of enigmatic memoranda and two sketches of an “air-ship.” Edison finally saw him for a hurried discussion that left Lathrop no wiser than before.35
With his advance money
dribbling away and McClure asking awkward questions, he tried to make literature out of the notes he had. It was difficult to do so even when they were not technical. Edison’s few efforts at science fiction could have been written by a schoolboy (“Person inside a non conducting chamber…passing limits of our atmospheric shield adjusted to attain speeds of 100,000 miles per second there being no friction in vacuous spaces”) or by a tired man half asleep, drowsiness turning into dream (“Glow worm—not popular—striving for perfect steadiness, beautiful eyes.”)36
Lathrop cobbled together some initial chapters and sent them to Edison for approval. Six weeks slipped by with no answer.37 He could only plead with McClure for an extension of his contract and hope that whatever in the world was distracting Edison’s attention would permit them soon to resume their imaginative journey into another.
PERSISTENCE OF VISION
That fall Edison, working secretly in the “precision room” of the laboratory, was developing a device far more fantastical, in its practical effect, than any novelistic machine. It was his Kinetograph motion picture camera, a radical redesign of the cylinder-based Kinetoscope he had conceived two years before.*8 W. K. L. Dickson (back in West Orange for the winter, while Ogden’s new buildings arose) had persuaded him that a strip of translucent film, winding sideways across the viewer from spool to spool, could present hundreds of much larger, sharper images at a speed of ten frames per second.*9, 38
The proof of this, around November, was Monkeyshines, a blurry sequence of movements by one of Edison’s Greek employees in a belted fustanella, energetically waving his full white sleeves. It lasted less than half a minute and was so diffuse at times as to resemble the pulsations of a jellyfish. Yet it was performance and photography combined, and history too, the first moving picture ever produced in the United States. Dickson and his assistant, William Heise, did most of the mechanical work.*10, 39
The filmstrip that made Monkeyshines possible was cut from photosensitive cellulose nitrate plasticized by George Eastman of Rochester, New York. Thin, springy, and sweetly redolent of bananas, it came in rolls seventy millimeters wide. Dickson thought that unnecessarily broad. He sliced it in half before perforating one edge to fit the Kinetograph’s sprocketed wheels. The result was a thirty-five-millimeter film that (to his pride as a forgotten old man) would become the standard stock of cinematography.*11, 40 Monkeyshines was followed by a better-focused sequel and a series of progressively improving “camera tests,” but myriad drive and darkroom problems kept postponing the moment Edison could announce his invention publicly. The escapement mechanism chattered too slowly or too fast; patches of film emulsion frilled off the negative in development, leaving oleaginous images at the bottom of the trough; perforations snagged; torque yanked the pictures out of alignment.41 “Persistence of vision”—a phrase Edison loved to use when explaining the eye’s inability to separate a rapid succession of stills—began to look more like the orneriness of a new medium, as yet too raw to synthesize.42
PETTY SPITE AND LOVE OF REPUTATION
On 1 January 1891 Edison was annoyed to see himself advertised by The Sun, along with Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling, as the author of an important forthcoming work of fiction. The news spread as far as Germany, where it was described as an “electrical novel” in two volumes that he would subsequently adapt for the stage. The Hartford Courant expressed mock horror: “Let him keep outside literature pure and simple where he belongs not.”43
Edison blamed his collaborator for the story, calling it “an act of bad faith” and threatening to repudiate their partnership if any more embarrassing publicity ensued. Lathrop protested his innocence, pointing out that “the Sun’s misstatement injures me, by ignoring my name.” He was forgiven, but from then on Edison became even more inaccessible to him. When Lathrop appealed to Mina for the return of the sample chapters he had sent to Glenmont, they came back evidently unread.44
Except on the unique occasion when Edison shared a patent with W. K. L. Dickson on their new magnetic separator at Ogden, he disliked having his name coupled with that of any other creator—whether a minor talent like Lathrop or an inventor as brilliant as his onetime employee Frank J. Sprague. He had been careful in the 1880s not to involve Sprague in his experimental electric railway project, thus losing out on Sprague’s later, seminal innovations in rail traction technology.45 That false pride showed now on a visit to Buffalo, when he told a local reporter that Edison General Electric was “going to furnish the power for your street railway system.”
“But is the company here not going to use the Sprague system?”
“Yes. But it is not known as the ‘Sprague’ system. It is the ‘Edison.’ We have absorbed and improved the Sprague.”46
Edison General had indeed recently bought the Sprague Electric Railway and Motor Company, acquiring its invaluable patents and burgeoning goodwill (well over a hundred urban systems installed or contracted for since 1887) while providing it with the capital it needed to expand.47 But Edison’s royal-plural boast that he had “improved” its technology enough to substitute his name for Sprague’s sounded like a slap at the latter for resigning after the acquisition. At thirty-three Sprague was hungry for renown and blamed both Edison General and Henry Villard for withholding it from him:
Your company, instead of being managed in the best interests of its stockholders and to make the most of its property and connections, is conducted in the personal interest of Mr. Edison and his representatives and has become an active agent for my personal, professional and business injury, in which jealousy, petty spite and love of reputation, however attained, are the strongest motives….
It contents itself with the promulgation of circulars known to every railway man in this country to be untrue, and has set out to do everything possible to wipe out the Sprague name and to give to Mr. Edison the reputation properly belonging to other men’s work….He finds most favor who is most abusive of all things Sprague, and he meets with a cool reception who does him the smallest reverence. The Edison fetish must be upheld, and the Sprague name abolished: that is the law….
Not only Mr. Edison’s subordinates and those who bask in the sunshine of their smiles, but Mr. Edison himself, forgetful of his dignity and jealous of any man who finds in the whole realm of electric science a corner no matter how small not occupied by himself, loses no opportunity to attack and to attempt to belittle me.48
Sprague, who went on to become an equally distinguished inventor of vertical traction systems, would complain for the rest of his life about the world’s failure to recognize his genius, and its contrary insistence on keeping Edison at the summit of Parnassus.*12, 49 He never acknowledged that his achievements, great as they were, were confined to “the whole realm of electrical science,” and that he would have been lost in such foreign fields as harmonics in music, illusionism in moving pictures, dispersion of rubber molecules in Soxhlet extractors, and magnetic separation in the highlands of northern New Jersey.
ROSY FOLIATIONS
Edison’s impatience to start mining and refining at Ogden as soon as the ground unfroze—it had been a brutal winter—was stimulated, rather than slowed, by news in early February of a phenomenal gain in Edison General Electric stock. Speculators ascribed the surge to a rumor that Henry Villard, hard up for cash, was about to sell his majority shares to someone associated with “the Vanderbilts.” No such sale ensued, but it was not the first time Edison had heard the names of Villard and Vanderbilt bracketed in the same sentence. He was disagreeably reminded that the bulb he had invented, the dynamos he had built, the industry he had founded, had become corporatized far beyond his control.50
Mid-March found him heading north to gear up his new plant for production. A little mine train picked him up at Lake Hopatcong and began to ascend a back spur of Sparta Mountain. It passed the old Hurd mine, abandoned a century before, then rose
further through thick forest still bare of leaves. No ferns or creeping vines yet obscured the errant boulders that lay everywhere on the slope, some looking ready to roll down and crush the train. When it reached twelve hundred feet, it puffed to a halt, leaving Edison to climb the last half-mile to Ogden on foot.
The slippery trail led to a quarry face known as Iron Hill, the most accessible part of his vast domain. It was a tabular sheet of gneiss four miles long,*13 running along the southeastern slope of the Beaver Lake anticline, parallel to the general corrugation of the Appalachian range. Wherever spring rains washed the rock clear of mud and snow, flecks of mica caught the light. Rosy foliations in the gneiss showed the dissemination of magnetite crystals, dense in a few places, disappointingly sprinkled in others. But who knew how deep and rich the seams might be, where they receded into the slope or dived almost vertically into bedrock? Edison guessed at least four hundred feet and a mile in each direction. He was prepared to carve away the whole mountain, if necessary.51
Seen from this vantage point between the ridge and a reservoir to the east, the New Jersey & Pennsylvania Concentrating Works had a certain flow-through continuity—albeit hampered by his decision to adapt as many of the old mine buildings as possible. He had spent nearly $54,000 on a new magnetic separation house, as well as adding some storage hangars and several miles of railroad track. The existing stone powerhouse now contained the four-cylinder, triple-expansion vertical engine he had treated himself to at the Paris Exposition in ’89. A chain-and-bucket cableway was braced on the upper bench of Iron Hill, ready to convey hand-loaded chunks of ore (as yet he lacked a crane to lift larger boulders) four hundred yards down to the mill, where seventeen jaw crushers would bite them down to pebbles. From there they would proceed through a series of grinders and rotating screens that would reduce them further, from gravel to grains. Then the magnetic separators would divide them into iron “fines” for storing and shipping, or gritty “tailings” to a dump for separate sale as sand. Elsewhere in the congeries two millhouses loomed, one old and one new, a machine shop, and a black-towered pump sucking floodwater from an abandoned shaft in the heart of the complex.52
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