Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Lathrop might as well have saved his ink. Edison had indeed lost interest in the novel. Obsessed with his mine and mills, he offered through Tate to compensate McClure. Lathrop considered it a debt of honor incurred by himself, and indignantly refused: “Nothing could induce me to accept pecuniary aid from Edison, although I appreciate his big-heartedness.”

  He thus faced years of privation, heavy drinking, and befuddlement while he tried to make plausible science fiction out of what he remembered Edison saying in their first few meetings. Eventually he would publish a pallid fantasy, “In the Deep of Time,” that had two men exploring Mars on mechanized, antigravitational stilts. It attracted almost no attention, despite being advertised as “by George Parsons Lathrop in collaboration with Thomas A. Edison.”*24, 83

  “CHASING AWAY FROM THE SUN”

  One day that summer Edison was eating lunch under a tree at the apex of a large iron conformation when he noticed that the needle of his pocket compass was trembling strangely. He had the momentary feeling that “signals sent through interstellar space might be responsible for the disturbance.” Then he remembered that he was sitting in the center of a body of magnetite five or six miles deep. No matter how low grade, it was at least a million times more responsive to the electromagnetic flaring of sunspots than whatever deposits underlay the Kew Observatory in England, where solar radiation was measured daily.84

  Intrigued by the notion that he might connect his own magnetic energy field to those on the sun, he strung a fifteen-wire copper power line on poles planted all around the iron bed, and ran it down to an ordinary Bell telephone receiver in the plant. He said it would enable him to listen in to sunspots, as well as observe them through his telescope. “Why, they are beautiful,” he said to a reporter from, appropriately, The Sun. “The disturbances are tremendous….Yes, sir, I can hear them with this telephone….The next time there is any violent change in the sun’s spots which disturbs the magnetic lines on earth I shall know it, and if 600,000 miles of hydrogen go chasing away from the sun I shall hear it.”*25, 85

  LOTS MORE RUBBER

  Edison’s peculiar delight in taking arms against a sea of troubles was never more evident than when Samuel Insull told him he was losing $6,000 a month on his Ogden venture. His reaction was to scrap much of the expensive machinery Livor had installed, order replacements of his own design, build a narrow-gauge railway along the foot of the western incline, and begin construction of an adjacent settlement, complete with post office, store, and saloon, to house his labor force of Italian and Hungarian immigrants. To nobody’s surprise, the village was named Edison, New Jersey.*26, 86

  A party of inspectors sent by Engineering and Mining Journal toured the plant early in the fall. Although some sections were idled for refurbishment and Edison was coy about showing any of his new machines, they could see that he already excelled at quarrying and magnetic separation, if not yet in the difficult processes of crushing and refinement. They were particularly impressed with his cableway system, every suspended “skip” delivering four tons of rock to the crushers at only twelve cents a load. But they predicted that in view of the low iron content of local ore, Edison would still have to spend a fortune and deploy “the utmost resources of engineering skill” to compete with Mesabi ore at 64 percent iron. “With his surpassing genius [and] capacity for taking infinite pains, it cannot be doubted that he will ultimately achieve success.”87

  Another visitor to Ogden was Thomas Robins, Jr., a twenty-two-year-old rubber salesman looking for a job in engineering. He noticed some canvas conveyor belts being changed and asked Henry Hart how long they lasted.

  “From six to eight weeks,” the superintendent said.88

  Robins examined a discarded belt. It was rubberized to protect it from the abrasive mass of tipped loads. But the laminate was so thin that he could penetrate it with his fingernail. Consequently the central strip, which bore the most weight, was eroded, and the edges were frayed where the belt had curled in its troughed bearings. He counted fifty conveyors in all, some of them longer than five hundred feet, and calculated they were costing the mill a fortune in replacements. What was needed was lots more rubber, so that resilience would replace resistance, and make for lighter belts lasting fifty times longer.89

  It was an aperçu that would win Robins the grand prize at the Paris Exposition in 1900. In the meantime it endeared him to Edison, who let him perfect his invention on-site over the next several years, making Ogden the cradle of the world’s first system of continuous mass-materials handling.90

  SOLAR SURPRISE

  Within six months of taking over management of the New Jersey & Pennsylvania Concentrating Works plant, Edison doubled the company’s subscription capital from $500,000 to $1 million.91 His fellow directors could see that he was prepared to double it again—and write checks of his own when they quailed—so sure was he that the day would come when orders flowed in, as fast as pure, phosphorus-free fines were trucked out.

  His joyful sense of freedom to build and rebuild came in contrast to the impotence he felt as the owner of only 10 percent of Edison General Electric. In that company’s stately headquarters in downtown Manhattan, Henry Villard reigned supreme, and the avid interest of Wall Street was increasingly felt at board meetings. Unrestrained by Edison, a habitual absentee, Villard was again trying to sell his majority holding and amalgamate Edison General with Thomson-Houston. In recent years the latter firm, run by a brilliant business tactician, Charles A. Coffin, had taken advantage of Edison’s prejudice against alternating current systems and built itself up to the point that its paper worth, in early 1892, was $18.4 million, ahead of Edison General’s $15 million. In fact, it was a smaller, less profitable concern, its products inferior and its business practices not far removed from larceny. Edison General, in contrast, ably served between four and five thousand customers and pulled in $1 million worth of business every month. It had fourteen acres of manufacturing plant to Thomson-Houston’s eight. But Coffin saw that it had a weakness—a $3.5 million floating loan—that he could exploit, with the secret approval of his banker, J. P. Morgan.92

  The news of their combined intent leaked out on Saturday 6 February, four days before Villard planned to announce it at the annual meeting of Edison General Electric trustees. It created an instant sensation. Ever since Judge Wallace had sanctioned the primacy of Edison’s electric light patent, received wisdom held that his company would devour all its competitors. Instead, the shark was poised to swallow the whale. Villard put a brave face on it when he confirmed that “negotiations are in that direction…and are progressing rapidly.”93

  That weekend, in a macabre concatenation of electrical violence with the takeover of Edison General Electric, one of the largest geomagnetic storms ever recorded began to move across the surface of the sun, while in Ossining, New York, a convicted murderer, Charles McElvaine, prepared to be executed on Monday morning. Edison’s connections with both events were more than metaphorical. He had wired his “cosmic telephone” at Ogden for just such a solar surprise and advised the authorities at Sing Sing prison that a sixteen-hundred-volt charge sent through McElvaine’s wrists was likely to kill him faster than one through the head, blood being less resistant than bone.94

  The execution was a reminder of a publicity campaign Edison would as soon forget, his battle in the late 1880s to brand alternating current as a lethal force ideally suited to capital punishment.*27 Reserving judgment on the merger until he heard from Samuel Insull, his personal representative at the negotiations, he sent Arthur Kennelly—currently testing the therapeutic effect of electromagnetism on the brains of a dog and a boy*28—to monitor the execution, while he tracked the sunspot.95

  At 11:32 A.M. on Monday McElvaine was strapped into Sing Sing’s electric chair. It had been reconfigured so that his arms were forced down into two cans of salt water, wired in series to the prison’s AC dynamo.
“In the execution of Mr. Elvaine,” the officiating physician told witnesses, “a new method, suggested by Mr. Thomas A. Edison, will be tried.” An initial jolt lasting forty-nine seconds proved that Edison’s theory of enhanced conductivity was wrong. McElvaine seemed still to be alive. One electrode was hurriedly applied to his skull. He died afterward, stiff in his straps and transpiring puffs of steam.96

  Winter winds, meanwhile, kept blowing over Edison’s poles on Sparta Mountain, frustrating his efforts to hear the crescendo of heliomagnetic signals impinging on observatories around the world. For the rest of the week he clung to his telescope, showing more interest in the cosmos than in Insull’s efforts to protect him from the rapacity of Coffin and Morgan.97

  “It was a beautiful sight, that aurora borealis last night, wasn’t it?” he said on Saturday, exultant after the sunspot passed the solar meridian.98 By then his fellow directors had officially approved the absorption of Edison General Electric by Thomson-Houston. The name of the resultant conglomerate had not yet been decided, and for the time being Villard was technically its president, but power had switched to more power, and soon the name of Edison General Electric would be shortened to just two depersonalized words.

  PEOPLE WILL FORGET

  Many years later Alfred Tate wrote that Edison blanched when he heard that he was the victim of a hostile takeover. “I never before had seen him change color. His complexion naturally was pale, a clear healthy paleness, but following my announcement it turned as white as his collar.” Mina, too, ranted in old age about Insull selling her husband out and leaving him almost bankrupt, while laying the foundation of a vast fortune for himself.99

  Memory tends to melodrama. Edison blustered at the time that he approved the merger.100 Far from being impoverished by it, he believed Morgan’s offer to exchange his 10 percent sharehold in Edison General Electric for a similar stake in the new company would “result financially to my advantage.” And he was still the owner of several “large shops” not included in Thomson-Houston’s purchase, the latest and most promising being his iron-concentrating works in New Jersey. He confessed to some disappointment at Insull’s performance in the negotiations. However, “We are on the best of terms now. I expect he will come with me again when the consolidation has been completed.”101

  The first of his predictions, at least, turned out to be true. Morgan capitalized the combine at $50 million, making Edison richer than he had ever been in his life, with around $5 million in cash. Samuel Insull also did well, in spite of dashed hopes that he, and not Charles Coffin, would become its general manager. He was offered instead the post of second vice-president, two rungs below. No other Edison executive was so favored. This fueled angry speculations among his colleagues at West Orange and Schenectady that “Sammy” had sold them and the Old Man out.102

  When, providentially, the directors of the Chicago Edison Company asked Insull to find them a new president, he suggested himself and was accepted. Edison let him go without protest. Unpopular as the little Englishman had always been, with his clicking, cash-register efficiency and Ozymandian sneer, he received a valedictory dinner at Delmonico’s attended by Edison, Villard, and virtually every heavyweight in the electrical industry. Insull was still only thirty-two. Ahead lay all the glitter a lowborn lad could wish for—success beyond imagining, the beautiful actress wife, the thirty-one-thousand-square-foot mansion, the $20 million opera house—and in further prospect, the desiderata of pulp fiction: financial ruin, flight from the law, and death on a foreign railway platform, with only a silk handkerchief and the equivalent of eight cents in his pocket.*29 For the moment all Charles Batchelor, another guest at the dinner, could say was: “I think a very wise move for him.”103

  On 15 April the organization of “General Electric” was formally announced. Edison uttered no public protest about the exclusion of his name from its trademark. Nor could he consider himself snubbed, unless Elihu Thomson and Edwin Houston did too. He was appointed a director of the new behemoth but attended only one of its meetings.104 The only hint he gave of deep hurt at being erased from the history of the industry he had founded came in conversation with his private secretary.

  Tate, if you want to know anything about electricity go out to the galvanator room and ask Kennelly. He knows far more about it than I do. In fact I’ve come to the conclusion that I never did know anything about it. I’m going to do something now so different and so much bigger than anything I’ve ever done before, people will forget that my name was ever connected with anything electrical.105

  PANTING OR SHORT BREATHS

  In July Edison learned that his mining venture had so far cost him $850,000, including some $100,000 that could not be accounted for. A profit-killing amount of money was being lavished on labor that simply loaded and unloaded rock at either end of the conveyors. The jaw crushers took too long to do their work and often broke down, necessitating expensive repairs. The magnetic separators, plagued by screening problems, were concentrating only 47 percent iron—far less than the 66 or 70 percent he needed to match the richness of Great Lakes ore. He was still digesting this information when a stockhouse under construction at Ogden collapsed, killing five men and injuring twelve. Lawsuits alleging negligence were filed by bereaved families.106

  A newspaper clipping he carried in his wallet read, “Thomas Edison is a happy and healthy man. He does not worry.” As usual he countered the pull of bad news by pushing forward harder. Rather than continue to “improve” Ogden with ad hoc adjustments, he increased the capital of its parent company to $1.25 million, then shut the plant for a tear-down rebuild that would expand it enormously and make it a showpiece of automated design.107 No sooner had a new separator house gone up than he decided it needed some screening towers, and should be constructed all over again.

  “Is the Old Man all right today?” a fireman whispered to the chief rigger. “He told me to get it down to the foundations.” Forty men were needed to do the job.108

  Construction crews often found Edison working, eating, and even sleeping beside them. He loved hard labor and the luxurious tiredness it induced when he finally flopped onto a bed or the nearest heap of soft pea coal. In a letter to Mina that looked as if it had been scrawled upside down, he signed himself “Your Lover always the same (who sleeps with his boots on & smokes 23 cent cigars).”109

  She could have used his company at Glenmont, because she had a discordant household to run. Marion, aged nineteen, was at last back from Europe. Her smallpox scars were sufficiently faded for her to face a reunion with Tom and William, themselves home for the summer from boarding school. It was an open question how long the boys would remain at St. Paul’s, a school they both hated—and for that matter, what success Mina would have integrating Mary Edison’s children with her own. For the time being she felt capable of managing both broods, with the help of a nanny for Madeleine and a nurse for little Charles. But to Marion, desperate to resume intimacy with her father, it was inevitable that sooner or later Mina would insist on privileged possession of him and the fruits of her own body.

  The longer Edison stayed on Sparta Mountain, the more he lusted for that body—olive-skinned and stocky, not yet coarsened by the passing of youth. “Our dear little Mamma don’t want to leave her nice home & come up to keep company with her lover—Why? no real love is the answer.” He showed no awareness, as he teased, that she might feel the same way. In letter after letter he hailed “the 649th grandchild of Eve” with apostrophes of adoration: “Darling darling Billy Edison & 2 angels besides,” “Darling Sweetest Loveliest Cutest Extra Billie Edison,” “Sweetest on this ball of granite, verdure and H2O.” His sign-offs were even more figurative: “With love Andesian in dimensions I am your Lover TAE,” “With a kiss like the Swish of a 13 inch cannon projectile I remain as always your lover sure solid & unchangeable.”110

  He wrote about wanting to see her so much that he had
resorted to searching around for a photograph of her and was frustrated by its inadequacy. Knowing that she enjoyed jokes about sex (behind a veil of Methodist decorum), he shared one that he heard at the plant. It was a question: “How to recognize the Modern or so called Coming Woman.” Answer: “By [her] panting or short breaths.” In his next letter he said he had more stories of the kind to tell her when they met up. “I suppose you saw the point of the ‘Coming Woman’ joke, if not I will bring diagrams and explanatory notes.”111

  FAULT LINE DEVELOPING

  In October Edison assigned Walter Mallory, an experienced iron and steel man fast becoming his closest associate, to supervise the transfiguration of Ogden. He reestablished himself in West Orange and worked with Dickson on an improved version of the Kinetograph, which he wanted to patent and exhibit at the Chicago World’s Fair next spring. His announcement to that effect in The Phonogram magazine made clear, once again, that he conceived of the new machine as an audiovisual device: “The Edison Kinetograph is an instrument intended to produce motion and sound simultaneously, being a combination of a specially constructed camera and phonograph.” With its thirty-five-millimeter film now feeding vertically rather than horizontally, a double row of perforations holding the frames steady as they were exposed forty-six to the second, and electrical connection to a recording device, it was the prototype motion picture camera of the coming century.112

  While vast new structures arose on Sparta Mountain, a smaller and peculiarly ugly one was built by Dickson in a vacant lot behind the West Orange laboratory. Black-painted, pitch-roofed, and pinned together with great sheets of felt siding, it was windowless except for a small rectangle of red glass and an angled aperture open to the sky. It also lacked foundations, riding instead on a circular wooden path, so that at any time of day it could be aligned with the sun. It was the world’s first movie studio, making use of natural light rather than the hissing, sparky flare of arc lamps or the soft glow of what were now “GE” lightbulbs. Dickson needed all the illumination he could get when shooting at forty-six FPS. He enclosed the rear of the stage in a fourteen-foot cone to give a dark background to foreground action and mounted the Kinetograph on rails, in order to dolly forward for limited zooms. There was a phonograph for sound-synchronism experiments, a central stove, and a darkroom in the rear. In inclement weather, the skylight could be closed with a flap of tar paper, black sealing in black. The shed became known as “Edison’s Black Maria.”*30, 113