Edison

by Edmund Morris

  It was a raw and ugly scene in a landscape not yet broken into leaf. There were no accommodations for Edison’s labor force of several hundred mostly Italian immigrants, who had to crowd into tenements in Ogdensburg, half an hour’s trudge down the hill. For himself, there was at least the hospitality of a farmhouse to the east of the plant. He was invited to stay there whenever he came up from Glenmont, sixty miles away.53

  TRAILING ZEROES

  Harry Livor, the general manager at Ogden, tried to obey Edison’s order to start milling at once. But the system was so intricate that it did not crank into a semblance of production until the beginning of April, and even then it was plagued by numerous mechanical and coordination problems. Raw ore from the quarry was often wet, filthy with clay or fibrous with torn roots, jamming the machinery and clogging screens. Or it gave off clouds of dust that mixed with grease on cableway wheels and abraded them, necessitating frequent shutdowns for replacement and repair. The jaw crushers were of frustratingly small capacity, and the six belt separators needed constant regulation. Undiscouraged, Edison went to Pennsylvania in search of foundry orders for his iron concentrate. He figured he could supply it at a richness rate of 66 percent (up from 25 percent in ore) for $5.28 per ton, earning a $2.62 profit for himself.54

  John Fritz of the Bethlehem Iron Company was less persuaded by his figures than by the scope of his ambition. “Well, Edison, you are doing a good thing for the Eastern furnaces….I am willing to help you. I mix a little sentiment with business, and I will give you an order for one hundred thousand tons.”55

  Or so Edison chose to remember the conversation, with his habit of trailing zeroes after any number that pleased him, like soap bubbles from a pipe.*14 Fritz’s order was actually for one hundred tons a day, conditional upon the smelting performance of an advance consignment. The Pennsylvania Steel Company and North Branch Steel made similar commitments. Livor managed to deliver at the pace Fritz wanted but could offer only forty tons a day to the other customers, and the quality of his product declined. “Bethlehem complains iron running down phosphorus running up,” Edison warned him. “Be careful or we will be ordered to stop shipping.” Livor in turn grumbled that he was not getting enough marketing support: “There apparently seems to be no vigorous effort to dispose of our product….Someone of some little knowledge of the business ought to be at the furnaces very quickly after the ore reaches them.”

  This was not the right tone to strike with Edison. Livor was soon dismissed, as was a “damned fool” of a mining expert who dared to predict that Ogden’s quarry-and-concentrate method would never be profitable.56

  “SUCH A HAPPY COMBINATION”

  As Edison feared, Bethlehem Iron canceled its order after buying only a few thousand tons of his concentrate. It cited phosphorus levels, furnace blowback, and caking as the principal faults of Ogden fines.57

  He decided that the only person who could get his grand scheme going was himself. That meant prolonged stays in the mountains and possible further redesign and reconstruction. He felt quite up to the task: “I feel that I am in my prime, and I suppose that I am a better man than I have ever been.” But first he had a major patent infringement case to prosecute—Edison Electric Light Co. v. United States Electric Lighting Co., in the Circuit Court of the Southern District of New York—that could be worth millions if Judge William J. Wallace ruled in his favor. Then he had to prepare two prohibitively difficult patent applications, covering his still-secret Kinetograph technology. Dickson and Heise had improved the camera and its attendant player enough to begin to demonstrate them to carefully selected audiences. But there were enough competitive devices under development in France and Britain (Étienne-Jules Marey’s exquisite “chronophotographs” of undulating sea horses and anemones had recently been featured in Scientific American) as to cast doubt on Edison’s chances of winning any but the narrowest claims of exclusivity on his own.*15, 58

  It occurred to him that George Lathrop, still pining for his collaborative attention, would be the ideal scribe to publish an article on the Kinetograph that might subliminally influence Patent Office examiners in its favor. Lathrop jumped at the chance, and began to research a long piece for Harper’s Weekly. Edison thereupon yielded to the temptation to start talking about it in advance, and scooped his chosen publicist.

  At a meeting on 12 May with some commissioners of the great World’s Fair planned for Chicago in 1893, he told them that he would exhibit something that would cause a revolution in home entertainment:

  Such a happy combination of photography and electricity that a man can sit in his own parlor and see depicted upon a curtain the forms of the players in opera on a distant stage, and hear the voices of the singers. When this system is perfected, which will be in time for the Fair, each little muscle in the singer’s face will be seen to work; every color of his or her attire will be exactly reproduced, and the stride and positions will be as natural and varied as those of the live characters. To the sporting fraternity I will state that ere long this system can be applied to prize fights. The whole scene, with the noise of the blows, talk, etc., will be truthfully transferred.59

  Asked what the new invention would be called, Edison uttered its name publicly for the first time. “The Kinetograph. What does that mean? The first half of the word means motion, and the other half write. That is, the portrayal of motion.”60

  It was clear from his emphasis on sound effects, color, close-up camerawork, and projection that his imagination had moved far beyond the silent flickerings that Dickson and Heise had conjured up in a peephole box. He said nothing about the mechanics involved. “But that doesn’t matter to Edison,” The Philadelphia Inquirer remarked. “With him, to conceive is to execute….He talks freely and seems to defy anybody to steal his designs even after he has given a clue to them.”*16, 61

  Two weeks later he sat in court in Manhattan, tensely chewing a toothpick, as his patent lawyer, Richard N. Dyer,*17 summed up the Edison company’s seven-year-old case against United States Electric.62 Since the latter firm was now owned by George Westinghouse, Dyer’s argument was a final offensive in the “current war” that had done so much to embitter Edison against his rival in the last decade.*18

  Dyer argued for four hours that Edison’s basic electric light patent of 1879 was original and unprecedented in its claim of a “receiver made entirely of glass,” with conductors passing through into a carbon filament held in near-perfect vacuum. Consequently, an older and faulty patent held by Westinghouse, U.S. 204,144, amounted to invalid competition and did not entitle him to market lamps clearly modeled on Edison’s own. Since United States Electric had been doing so since 1880, Westinghouse could owe Edison General Electric as much as $15 million in back royalties—not including another $2 million payable before Edison’s patent ran out in 1897.63

  The appellant complaint involved so many boring technical data, along with the deposit of seven volumes of evidence in front of the judge, that the public benches of the court soon emptied. Edison alone remained, in company with two or three newspaper reporters. Bored, he willingly submitted to some sotto voce questioning about the Kinetograph from the representative of The Sun and invited him to come and see it in West Orange.64

  This gave both men an excuse to stay away from the rest of the trial, which went on for several more days and ended with Judge Wallace promising a decision early in the summer. Meanwhile Edison, back at the laboratory, not only demonstrated his “phenomenal machine” in action but drew a sketch of it for his guest, to George Lathrop’s jealous distress:65

  Edison’s sketch of his tabletop Kinetograph, 28 May 1891.

  He explained that A was the sound amplifier, B the phonograph, C the camera, and D a primary battery powering the whole synchronized system. It was clear that he still thought of the Kinetograph as an audiovisual device, although for patent purposes he would have to describe on
ly C. Less clear from the sketch was whether that component was designed only to shoot pictures or project them as well. He insisted that the objects on the table were capable of recording whole scenes of an opera in both sight and sound. “Marie Jansen comes out and sings, and the band will play a charming waltzing minuet, and then she dances around and the audience applauds.”66

  “How do you expect to do all that, Mr. Edison?” the reporter asked.

  Edison went into full imaginative mode. “I will get the company to give a dress rehearsal for me. I place back of the orchestra on a table a compound machine consisting of a phonograph and a Kinetograph, with a capacity of thirty minutes’ work. The orchestra plays, the curtain rises, and the opera begins. Both machines work simultaneously, one recording sound and the other taking photographs, recording motion at the rate of forty-six photographs per second.”67

  He said that in his opinion that shutter speed gave the most realistic illusion of continuous movement.*19 “Afterward the photographic strip is developed and replaced in the machine, a projecting lens is substituted for the photographic lens, and the reproducing part of the phonograph is adjusted. Then, by means of a calcium light, the effect is reproduced lifesize on a white curtain.”68

  Just such a sheet was hanging in his laboratory library. But Edison was coy about showing any projection more extensive than the one lit up within the Kinetograph itself. Running upstairs with the energy of a boy, he opened what looked like a plain pine box and displayed a ribbon of “gelatine” film three-quarters of an inch wide, perforated along one edge, threaded horizontally between two spindled, velvet-lined reels, and printed with tiny but pristine photographic images. Each frame portrayed a young man—W. K. L. Dickson—reaching by infinitesimal degrees for his hat. But when Edison closed the box, switched on its electric drive, and applied full power to the take-up spool, Dickson seen through an inch-wide peephole lens became a figure of miraculous mobility, uncovering, shaking his head, waving, and laughing. Only as the power scaled down did his movements become jerky and finally freeze.69

  “I can put a roll of gelatine strip a mile long into it if I like,” Edison boasted. He said that would accommodate 82,800 images a half-inch square and a half-inch apart and, at forty-six FPS, make for a moving picture of half an hour’s duration.

  The reporter noted that his math was faulty but did not have the temerity to correct a genius.70

  The next day, 28 May, The Sun made the most of its exclusive story, running it as a front-page lead headlined “THE KINETOGRAPH—EDISON’S LATEST AND MOST SURPRISING DEVICE—PURE MOTION RECORDED AND REPRODUCED.” Under the circumstances, there was little more that Lathrop could report when his own piece came out in Harper’s a few days later. He did, however, have a quote in which the inventor acknowledged his debt to such pioneers of “instantaneous photography” as Muybridge and Marey. “All I have done is to perfect what has been attempted before, but did not succeed. It’s just that one step I have taken.” Edison was referring neither to sound nor to projection experiments but to the precise coordination of his rotating shutter and leaps of frame. At forty-six advances per second—about as fast as the vibration of a hummingbird’s wings—they found time to both expose and transpose the film, so a fresh square was ready for each new shaft of light.71

  Lathrop was awed by the potential of the technology to distract human beings from one another and away from reality itself: “We seem to be nearing a time when every man may reach the old philosophical idea of a microcosm—a little world of one’s own—by unrolling in his room a tape which will fill it with all the forms and motions of the habitable globe.”72

  BETTER THAN THAT

  Edison was asleep at Ogden at noon on 14 July—he had worked right through the previous day and night—when Henry Hart, the mine superintendent, touched him.

  “What is it?”

  “I have good news for you.”

  “I know. The screening plates have come.”

  “Better than that.”73

  Hart handed over a telegram, and Edison sat on the edge of the bed reading it. Judge Wallace had upheld his electric light patent. After all the imitations, challenges, and outright infringements of the past eleven years—most annoyingly, those of George Westinghouse—his basic bulb of 1880 shone undefiled at last.

  He could think of nothing to say but “Ain’t it a daisy?” before joining Hart and his fellow miners for lunch.74

  Westinghouse was certain to appeal, although the decision was grounded on such specific design details that his motive could only be to delay the date he would have to start paying royalties. Edison had no power in the meantime to demand the $15 million arrears United States Electric technically owed him—the technicality being that his patent now belonged to Edison General Electric and would have to be litigated by the company’s full board. A suit for so enormous a sum was bound to drag on far beyond 1897, and involve such commensurate costs as to bankrupt Villard in the process.*20, 75

  Nor, for the same reasons, could Edison expect to prosper much after the appeals court found in his favor. His experience with important patents was that seventeen years—the maximum protection period allowed by law—was scarcely long enough to defend them, let alone profit from their true worth. “What I have made has been because I have understood the inventions better, and have been able to manipulate the manufacturing of them better than the pirates.”*21, 76

  He had not yet reached the point when, in extreme bitterness, he would complain of never having made a cent out of his patents in electric light and power. And now that the Kinetograph was publicized, he was quick to execute two patents covering it both as camera and player.*22 But he sympathized with any inventor who could not afford to fight for protection: “His certificate of patent is merely a certificate to the poorhouse.”77

  THE LARGE END OF THINGS

  Edison had moved full time to Ogden, vowing to stay there half a year if necessary, because he felt he could not trust anyone else to manage the mine and the mills properly and solve the problems inherent in launching such a complex operation. A reporter found him there late one afternoon, just as the big engine in the powerhouse had ceased its throbbing. The sun was setting over Sparta Mountain, and cowbells tinkled in the valley. Yet a file of Italian laborers was heading up Iron Hill, where a pyramid of cream-colored rubble awaited transportation to the crushing plant.78

  “We do not pause here day or night,” Edison said, pointing to a row of arc lights near the quarry, ready to illuminate the evening shift. Taking obvious pride in the immensity of the scene—six miles in all directions, all owned by himself—he declared that there was enough ferrous rock in the mountain to be mined for at least a century.

  A hill-shaking explosion came from the upper bench. “Well, there go five thousand tons more,” he said, grinning.79

  Like many another private person, Edison enjoyed confiding in strangers. “I like to begin at the large end of things. Life is too short to begin at the small end. The larger includes the smaller, the details grow out of the principle….We are apt to be impressed by the boulder before us and not reason with the mountain above us, that the boulder rolled down from. Did you ever read Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Domain of Arnheim’?”

  He explained that it was the tale of a wealthy man*23 who loved beauty and sought, unwearyingly, to realize it on a monumental scale. “He sought to do rather than be known as achieving, and Poe says of him that in contempt of ambition he found the principle of earthly happiness.”80

  When his secretary, Alfred Tate, told George Lathrop that Edison was now working full-time at Ogden (“He has practically been retired from the world”), the bewildered writer vented his frustration in the angriest letter Edison had ever received. He reminded him that fourteen months had passed since they had first talked of doing a book together, “and you gave it your cordial assent, even suggesting the i
dea of cuts to be made from sketches of yours.”81 On the strength of that encouragement, “Mr. McClure has made me certain payments which I am not in a position to refund.”

  I ought not to be left liable to be called upon to refund them, through delay on your part in completing the notes on which I depend….

  I can understand how—preoccupied as you have been, and especially if you have somewhat lost interest in the plan of the book—my recurring to the subject may seem to you a sort of nuisance. But, on the other hand, I will ask you to try to realize what it is to me to be forced to hang around like a dog waiting for a bone—& not even getting the bone….

  It is only fair that you should give me a chance to consult with you about the book, in the same happy & genial spirit with which we began upon it. I have been willing to wait, to travel to the mines or anywhere with you, in order to carry the thing out. But Mr. McClure is now promising the story in his newspapers for October; & there is no time to wait any longer.

  I am a man of my word; & you are a man of your word. I have praised you to the skies, right & left, as being a man not only of supereminent genius, but also faithful to his promises; whose word is even better than his bond—as you once told me it was. I wish to hold you to that belief, & be justified in it.82