Edison

by Edmund Morris

  As indeed they were, once the general manager got wind of Dickson’s negotiations with the Lathams. On 2 April Gilmore accused him, in Edison’s presence, of corporate treachery. Dickson blustered that he had only been spying on the competition and demanded that Edison choose between him and Gilmore. His wish was gratified, but not the way he hoped.172

  Later it turned out that he had also given creative advice to American Mutoscope, a film company ambitious to advance beyond Edison Manufacturing in both peepshow and screen-machine technology.*43 All Edison would say publicly was “We are not the best of friends.” Dickson became Mutoscope’s globe-trotting cameraman—a career step-down from the prestigious position he had enjoyed under Edison. In later life he became, like Edward Johnson, Francis Jehl, Alfred Tate, and many other alumni of Menlo Park, a pathetic claimant for the notice of historians and biographers. He lied about his co-invention of the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope with such fanatical insistence—advancing every initial date by one year, in order to claim precedence for Edison over Marey and Friese-Greene—as to obscure the fact that he had done most of the work himself, and deserved principal credit.173 Not until almost a century after he quit Edison’s employ did a fragment of pristine cinematography, filmed in the garden of a Yorkshire house on 14 October 1888, prove that Louis Le Prince was the vanished precursor of them all.174

  A BUMBLE BEE IN FLOWER TIME

  Edison’s Kinetoscope business continued its precipitous slide through the spring. In a vain attempt to compensate, he introduced the “Kineto-Phonograph” he and Dickson had rigged up the year before, renaming it the Kinetophone. It was a combination cylinder and reel player equipped with two sets of rubberized earbud tubes, so that couples could watch peephole films together and hear background music blasting away as they did so. The instrument made no attempt at more subtle synchronizations and sold only forty-five units.175

  Leaving Gilmore to deal about the news that the Latham brothers had simultaneously and successfully demonstrated their “Eideloscope” projector in public, Edison returned with relief to iron mining.176

  “The mill as it stands today is the largest crushing plant in the world,” he boasted, in a draft report to investors. “It has double the capacity of the great crushing works of the Calumet & Hecla copper mines of Lake Superior.” When brought to full concentrating power, Ogden should be able to produce “from 1400 to 1600 tons of Bessemer briquettes daily.” It was modern in both machinery and method, automated “to the limit,” so that one day it might run under a single supervisor. “This venture has all the elements of permanent success.”177

  Nothing so ugly, certainly, had ever befouled the Appalachian skyline. At latest count—because he kept adding extensions—the works consisted of thirty-nine major structures at the crest of Edison Road above Ogdensburg. It was dominated by the cathedral-size magnetic separator building and webbed together with so many bridges, cranes, conveyors, steam pipes, power lines, and busy little railways that it looked like a compressed red-painted city. North, south, and west of its littered fringe, cliffs of gray rock were being blasted into slow retreat, while the surrounding forest (dangerously creviced in places by the shafts of ancient mines) retreated too, leaving behind a litter of felled or dying trees. A perpetual dust boiling out of the mill whitened every upturned surface and the clothes and hair of workers and executives alike. Those who cared about what they breathed wore sponge-filled rubber snouts. Seen from a distance of ten or twelve feet in the pale gloom, they could be mistaken for pigs walking upright.178 Only when rain rinsed the filthy landscape did Ogden temporarily become a place where a man could feel clean.

  That was not a sensation that Edison—to whom the plant was paradise—seemed to care about. Slovenly as he was at the laboratory, here he emulated the shabbiest of his employees. But the big head under the brown cap (slashed open and laced at the back for extra room)179 and the clean-shaven jowls (either chomping on a stogie or bulging with plug) flagged him everywhere as “the Old Man,” a benign autocrat always willing to stop, swap yarns, and spit.

  “Today has been hotter than the seventh section of Hades reserved for Methodist ministers,” he wrote Mina on 9 August. She was making her annual pious retreat to Chautauqua. “The dust in the air was frightful….I feel lost in not going home to see my darling dustless Billy. What am I to do without a bath, some smartweed seeds have commenced to sprout out of the seams of my coat….Think of it Billy darling your lover turned into a flower garden.”180

  Twelve days later he had more serious problems to report. The bricking plant was plagued by a breakage rate of over 50 percent, and there were frequent accidents farther up the line, causing labor unrest and expensive safety changes. Edison had to sell another batch of General Electric shares just to keep production going through the summer.181

  Everything seems to go wrong and I fear we shall have to close the works for want of money….

  I have had 6 hours sleep in 4 days & am trying to pull it through. Especially the Bricker for when that goes the whole problem is solved & we actually know what we can do. I shall run till Saturday night & if I have good luck will probably go ahead if not I shall probably shut down until I see my way clear for money. While raising money I can have time to get a rest and go over the whole thing carefully so that when we start up again we will be OK—Mallory is the most dejected man you ever saw. The master mechanic and Mr Conley are completely discouraged while your lover is as bright & cheerful as a bumble bee in flower time.182

  It occurred to Edison that he could drastically cut costs by reducing the number of men he employed, now that the major phase of plant construction was over. He boggled at a group photograph Dickson had taken in 1894, showing at least four hundred workers massed in the mill yard and clustered like ants on rooftops and steam lines. Then, they had looked like a contented lot—even the pitmen and muck makers and coal passers who earned no more than $1.30 a day. But now they were threatening to walk off their jobs, due to Edison’s refusal to pay extra wages for overtime work.183

  He saw an opportunity to speed them on their way when he heard that a strike meeting would be held at the end of the workday on Thursday 22 August. Five minutes before quitting time, Edison put up a large sign outside the assay house reading WORK IS SUSPENDED AT THE MILL EMPLOYEES WILL BE PAID IN FULL SATURDAY THE 24TH.184

  The result was an angry mass exodus over the weekend and a resumption of mill operations on Monday with a residual force so small that Mallory was surprised to see how well much of the line operated without human assistance. His spirits lifting, he persuaded himself that soon, thanks to Edison’s unstoppable drive, “we will be able to turn out product at a very considerable profit.”185

  The Ogden mine workforce, circa 1895.

  Decades later, when the red city had disappeared and the forest reclaimed the mine, Mallory wrote:

  You cannot live with a man without learning a great deal about him; that he wears two or three suits of underwear instead of many sweaters and coats when it is cold; that he steps out of his clothes at night, leaving them on the floor so they will be easy to step into again next morning; that he loves pie; that he is inordinately fond of smoking cigars. Little things, all of them, but they set off the big things. There were many big things. All of us associated with Edison knew, from the first, that we had to deal with an extraordinary man.186

  “A MORE ORIGINAL GENIUS”

  From now until the end of the decade, Edison spent the bulk of his time at Ogden, working an average of sixteen to eighteen hours daily and returning home to Glenmont only on Sundays. He stopped and started production so often (“New problems to be solved come up every day”) that his predictions of imminent fabulous success began to sound fabulous indeed. The mill crushed more money than magnetite, and to keep himself, if not it, flush, he had to accept a $15,000 retainer from General Electric to develop a squirted-cellulose lamp filamen
t.187

  This nuisance did not last long, but another distraction temporarily, and irresistibly, diverted him in the first week of 1896. News came from London that the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen had discovered a mysterious green “X” ray that emanated from an electrified glass vacuum tube and caused a barium platinocyanide screen nine feet away to fluoresce, even if a sheet of the thickest cardboard was placed in between.188 The ray had a similar and even eerier effect when the body it penetrated was that of a human being, making solid flesh resolve itself into a mist in which bones stood out with a sharpness half erotic, half frightening. “Ich habe meinen Tod gesehen,” Röntgen’s wife said after he irradiated her hand and wedding ring. “I have seen my own death.”189

  Edison was instantly consumed with desire to explore, and possibly exploit, this electromagnetic phenomenon. Ten hours after hearing about it, he began to construct a special darkroom in West Orange. “How would you like to come over and experiment on Rotgons [sic] new radiations,” he wrote Arthur Kennelly. “I have glassblowers and Pumps running and all Photographic apparatus. We could do a lot before others get their second wind.”190

  He soon produced X-rays of his own, and was shooting and printing radiograms by the first week of February. Journalists plagued him for images to print. William Randolph Hearst begged “as an especial favor” a picture of the human brain. Edison failed to achieve this ne plus ultra of invasive photography with the standard Crookes tube Röntgen had used. Instead he designed a range of variant bulbs, with platinum wires and thinner glass to enhance emission. Imaging interested him less than the invisible, undeflectable streaming of light that was not light: “I want to see if the Roentgen rays are really perpendicular to the cathode plate, or if they curve between the cathode and the anode in a manner analagous to magnetic rays.”191

  Absorbed in his work, he paid scant attention to a report from Paris that the Lumière brothers had perfected an intermittent-action projector, the Cinématographe, and exhibited moving pictures to a paying audience. When William Gilmore suggested that he move at once to acquire the rights to a rival American projector, the Phantoscope,192 he agreed with the equivalent of a shrug and plunged back into radiation experiments.*44

  One evening that month a representative of Metropolitan Magazine found Edison in his darkroom, regulating the balance of electricity and airlessness in a long bulb. He seemed “oblivious to everything in the world but the gradation of light within the tube.” Coaxed out of his trance, he said that he was now trying to determine whether the X-ray was “ethereal” or “allied to coarser matter.” The vagueness of these terms indicated that his researches were still unscientific. He was enjoying, as boyishly as the four young laboratory workers assisting him, the thrill of exploring a new technology that so far seemed benign. They worked far into the night, photographing the effects of various degrees of radiation on opaque substances. Every strip received a twenty-minute exposure. Not until two A.M. did he leave the photographs to dry and invite the reporter to join him and “the boys” (one of whom turned out to be Thomas Edison, Jr.) for dinner. He could not stop talking, as he ate, about the practical implications of Röntgen’s magic ray.193

  Somebody managed to change the subject from fluorescence to incandescence and asked if he would undergo a test to see if the human retina stored light. Edison agreed. He sat for two minutes with his eyes shut, then opened them to the glare of a lamp positioned inches away, on top of a camera. He withstood the glare for another two minutes, after which all lights were switched off and the camera simultaneously clicked. It captured a momentary double gleam at the back of Edison’s vision that, when printed, made him look less human than feline, a great cat in the dark.*45, 194

  Edison was by no means the only, or even the first experimenter with X-rays in the United States. Röntgen’s announcement had galvanized many of the country’s finest electrical engineers, including Elihu Thomson, William F. Magie, and Nikola Tesla. Aware that they were all, like himself, venturing into a strange new world, he ceased trying to keep ahead of the competition and on 18 March published the results of his research so far in Electrical Review. Among them were two findings that illustrated the Carrollian contrariness of X-ray behavior: first, that the lower the vacuum and the dimmer the fluorescence within the tube, the greater the radiation without; second, that the sharpest “shadowgraphs” were registered by the shortest bulbs and got sharper with distance.195

  On the same day and in the same periodical, Tesla, who had taken almost a year to recover emotionally from the loss of his laboratory, described his own radiation experiments. He boasted that thanks to his recent invention of an oscillating steam generator, he had succeeded in throwing X-rays forty feet or more. And he, too, had tried to photograph a brain—in this case, his own. He had bombarded it at close quarters for more than half an hour, but found only that the treatment made him sleepy. Edison sent him an encouraging note: “I hope you are progressing and will give us something that will beat Roentgen.”196

  Notwithstanding their mutual—if guarded—goodwill, an article in that month’s issue of Scribner’s Magazine did its best to set them up as David and Goliath. The author, C. Benjamin Andrews, president of Brown University, opined that Tesla was “a more original genius than Edison” because he had eliminated the wiring inside lightbulbs and sent bolts of high-tension current through his own body. “He surrounds himself with a halo of electric light and calls purple streams from the soil. His aim is to hook man’s machinery directly to nature’s.” Edison let this hyperbole speak for itself. But the “genius” comparison rated headlines in many newspapers across the country and set him and Tesla up as rivals for glory at the National Electrical Exhibition, scheduled to open in New York on 4 May.197

  Coincidentally, they were both developing fluorescent lamps that they hoped to be able to show in time. Tesla claimed his would have 250 candlepower and a light efficiency of 10 percent; Edison aspired to 12 or 15 percent efficiency and said that by coating the inside of his tube with a secret material, he had harnessed some of the electromagnetic energy of X-rays: “I have turned them into a pure white light of high frangibility.”198

  He kept the coating (calcium tungstate) secret only because he had used it in another device that was sure to be the sensation of the exhibition if it, too, could be made ready for display. Edison the chemist had discovered, after testing eighteen hundred fluorescent salts in 150 tubes, that the phosphor CaWO4 came brilliantly alive when its fused crystals were excited in a vacuum. He applied it to the screen of a portable visor, flared in shape and fitting snugly to the face, that took an instant X-ray picture—even a moving picture, if desired—of whatever lay before it on a radiant box. “You can see all the bones of the body and the heart beat plainly,” he told Mina.*46 This capability of what he called his “fluoroscope” was of obvious benefit to medical personnel who, in emergency situations such as a shooting, would not want to wait two hours for a radiograph to be exposed and developed. He therefore declined to patent it and sent an early model to one of his fellow experimenters, Michael Pupin of Columbia University.199

  “It is a beautiful instrument,” Pupin wrote in surprised gratitude, saying that he had demonstrated “its miraculous power” in three public lectures, to much applause. He doubted, however, that fluoroscopy “would entirely supersede the photographic method of diagnosis in surgical work,” where record keeping was vital. To that end, he was already testing the idea of contact prints that could be taken directly from Edison’s “very excellent” screen. “Your success will be received with great delight by all scientific men.”200

  Edison was not used to reading such compliments, especially on stationery headed “University Faculty of Pure Science.” Touched, he replied that he was working on some other tubes that “I think will surprise you and aid you in your scientific investigation, which is out of my line.”201

  There wa
s no point in being secretive anymore about his calcium-tungstate bulb, because the fluoroscope quickly preempted it as a news sensation in the weeks preceding the electrical exhibition. Advertisements guaranteeing that “Edison will be there. And Tesla will be there” only increased the demand for tickets, as did an announcement that any attendee with the courage to hold a hand under the magic machine could get a bone examination for free.202

  The distraction saved Tesla from having to answer too many embarrassing questions about why his own lamp was not on display. Edison had never thought much of him as a lighting engineer and knew he was having difficulty with it. But he begged the editor of Western Electrician not to publish a “foolish” letter comparing their respective molecular-impact systems unfavorably to the new glow discharge tube of Daniel McFarlan Moore. “I don’t care what is said, but Tesla is of a nervous temperament and it will greatly grieve him and interfere with his work….It must not be forgotten by Mr. Moore that Tesla is an experimenter of the highest type and may produce in time all that he says he can.”203

  His request was of course unheeded, and press speculation grew that Edison and Tesla were rivals. Unnoticed in the general publicity was a brief report in The New York Times that both men complained that long exposure to X-rays hurt their eyes.204

  PERFECTLY BAKED AND HARD AS GRANITE

  As the technology of moving pictures advanced, patent and copyright offices were deluged with so many Greek and Latin brand names, most of them ending in -scope, that even entertainment lawyers had difficulty remembering the difference between the tachyscope, eidoloscope, mutoscope, bioscope, parascope, veriscope, magniscope, and kalatechnoscope, not to mention the cinematograph, centograph, projectograph, and kineopticon. Edison was fortunate in being so famous that he had merely to attach his name to the Kinetoscope and Kinetograph to imply that they were somehow superior to the rest. Gilmore urged him to bestow similar cachet upon the phantoscope, even though it was the invention of Thomas Armat, a young engineer who had licensed it to him in exchange for exhibition royalties.205 He agreed to market the projector as “Edison’s Vitascope” and “Edison’s Latest Triumph” and, in doing so, became party to a deal that did much to harm his reputation for proud individuality.*47