Edison

by Edmund Morris

  In November construction began at Ogden on a few rows of worker houses arrayed along the ridge of Sparta Mountain. Edison and Mallory both talked bravely of reopening the mill when the houses were occupied and leaves were back on the chestnut trees. But when Ogden’s balance sheet came in at the end of the year, it emphasized the vanity of human wishes. Since 1890 the New Jersey & Pennsylvania Concentrating Works had cost $2,600,942 to build and run, and sold a mere $180,688 worth of product. Edison was due $334,611 plus interest for cash advanced, and there was no money to reimburse him. He already owned most of the rest of the company’s stock in unredeemable paper. There was just one unfulfilled contract on its books: a two-year-old order for five hundred tons of briquettes for Bethlehem Iron, conditional on low phosphorus content. If he chose to honor it, at a time when the nation’s stockhouses were awash in cheap ore, he would have to do so at a competitive price that was sure to drive him even further into debt.276

  The memories of aging men, recorded after the plant became a clutch of ghost buildings, varied as to who made Edison realize it was facing bankruptcy. Charles Batchelor recalled bringing him a press report of John D. Rockefeller’s takeover of the Mesabi field, portending a vast increase in production, and shipments all over the world via the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence waterway. Improbably, though, Batchelor said the article made Edison burst into laughter before exclaiming, “Well, we might as well blow the whistle and close up shop.”277

  Thomas Robins claimed to have been a witness to the incident—“The Old Man and I were sitting astride a plank which rested between two horses”—but he remembered no laughter, only Edison’s kindly concern that if the mill shut, “this boy” would be out of a job. In 1899, however, Robins was long gone from Ogden, and so was Batchelor.278

  The account that rang most true was that of Walter Mallory, who for most of Edison’s time on the mountain had worked with him day and night. He said that when he first got the bad news, he could not bring himself to pass it on. Edison sensed something was wrong, and the two men avoided each other for three days, postponing a moment they both dreaded. Eventually they met in a bleak bedroom at the Lake Hopatcong Hotel. Mallory locked the door. Speaking as loudly as possible to give himself courage, he reported what he had heard.279

  Edison sat listening on the edge of the bed, nervously tugging at his right eyebrow. His initial reaction was predictable: “Yes, it’s a problem, it’s a problem. But worry won’t solve it. Brainwork will.”

  Mallory ventured to disagree, knowing that no amount of thinking could alter the laws of supply and demand.

  Edison waved him silent and brooded for a long time, still tugging at his eyebrow. Then in a calm voice he said, “We will stop work here immediately.”280

  There was little to stop, apart from the construction along the ridge. The mill itself had been inert for a year. Edison marked some machinery for transfer to a limestone field near Stewartsville, which he had chosen as the site of his new cement plant. But before that happened, he was determined to fulfill his contract with Bethlehem Iron, at the latest low prices. Ogden, his too-heavy phoenix, must try to rise one more time before sinking back for good.*52, 281

  The Ogden mill under snow, late 1890s.

  No matter how little Bethlehem paid, he would not accept bankruptcy. His sense of honor, incomprehensible to Tom and William, demanded that he settle all the mill’s debts. He displayed no embarrassment over its failure and for the rest of his life would look back on his mining days with nostalgia. Only once, on a return visit, was he heard to say, “I put three million dollars down that hole in the ground, and never heard it hit bottom.”282

  *1 The Edison General Electric Company had been incorporated in 1889 as a merger of three Edison electric light manufacturing companies.

  *2 Edison was, however, by no means a pauper in early 1890. His latest bank statement from Drexel, Morgan showed a balance of $465,440.25, or $12.5 million in 2019 dollars.

  *3 “The abscess on her back [inflicted] permanent injury to the spine,” Mrs. Earl wrote Mina on 10 March. “When they lanced it…she bled so profusely they feared for her life.” Hemorrhagic smallpox is almost always fatal.

  *4 The fee for two boarders at St. Paul’s in 1891 was $1,200 per annum, or $32,280 in 2019 dollars.

  *5 Between 1888 and 1891 Edison conducted a mammoth dip-needle survey of the Appalachian ironlands from New York State to the Carolinas, buying up in the process title to “97% of all the concentrable ore” within practical range of eastern blast furnaces.

  *6 See Part Five.

  *7 According to Alfred Tate, Edison was at this time supervising seventy-two projects.

  *8 See Part Five.

  *9 Most film historians date Edison’s development of the Kinetograph from the time Dickson rejoined him at the laboratory in October 1890. But as early as February that year, the Orange Journal reported: “For many months past Mr. Edison has been at work on a series of experiments in instantaneous photography which have at last been successfully concluded.” In April Western Electrician described a mysterious Edisonian projection at the Lenox Lyceum in New York: “A magic lantern of almost unimaginable power casts upon the ceiling…such pictures as seem to be the actual performances of living beings!” That same month the Minneapolis Times stated that he was experimenting with a horizontal-feed spooled motion picture machine (“he calls it the Kinetograph”) and also was planning to equip it with synchronized sound: “When it is completed…it will be possible not only to hear the voice of a person…but to see the person’s face just as it was at the time the words were spoken, with every change of expression, the movement of the eyes, etc.”

  *10 The complex chronology of the invention of cinema, involving simultaneous experiments and claims of precedence in France, Britain, and the United States, is a subject of unresolved debate by scholars in all three countries. Edison’s relations with Étienne-Jules Marey and his pioneer work on the Kinetoscope in 1888 and 1889 will be discussed in Part Five.

  *11 Dickson wrote that he got his filmstrip idea after a glance at Edison’s “perforated paper automatic telegraph.” Dickson, “Brief History.”

  *12 In 1911 Sprague heard with modified rapture that the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers had awarded him its highest honor, the Edison Gold Medal.

  *13 By 1898, this mass was already known to geologists as “Edison gneiss.”

  *14 See, e.g., his claim in 1906 that the Edison works at New Village produced “60,000,000” tons of portland cement a week, the correct figure being $600,000. In May 1891 he told a reporter that the amount of iron in the Ogden mine was “2,000,000,000,000 tons.”

  *15 Edison was familiar with Marey’s pioneering work and could not fail to recognize its superiority to his own. He was also at least dimly aware of that of William Friese-Greene. The British inventor wrote to him on 18 March 1890, to say he was sending by separate post “a paper with description of Machine Camera for taking 10 a second.” There is no trace of this paper in ENHP, but receipt of the letter was acknowledged.

  *16 One of the reporters who attended Edison’s oracular presentation in Chicago was Frank L. Baum, a cub recently hired by the Chicago Evening Post. He was fascinated by Edison’s top-heavy appearance. “Of medium height is the Wizard of Menlo Park…a massive head is his,” wrote the future author of The Wizard of Oz.

  *17 Brother and partner of Frank Dyer, the future president of Thomas A. Edison, Inc.

  *18 See Part Five.

  *19 Dickson appears to have convinced Edison of this. Marey shot at speeds ranging from thirty to fifty frames per second.

  *20 The Phonogram, Edison’s house magazine, predicted in 1892 that with all other lighting companies included as liable in the infringement decision, Edison General Electric was due as much as $50 million in back damages and $2 million a year in future royalties.

 
*21 Judge Wallace’s decision was upheld by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on 4 October 1892, more than twelve years after the issuance of the electric light patent. An identical opinion affirming the originality of Edison’s invention overseas was handed down by an English court in Edison and Swan United Electric Light Co. v. Woodhouse and Rawson (1887).

  *22 Edison made no attempt to patent the Kinetograph overseas. This was probably because he quailed at the cost and difficulty of claiming precedence over the rival inventions of Marey, Le Prince, Friese-Greene, and others. But he thereby lost millions and enabled such French competitors as Lumière and Pathé to make substantial inroads into the U.S. market.

  *23 Named, coincidentally enough, “Ellison.”

  *24 Lathrop, emotionally damaged by debt and the loss of his only son, died of alcoholism in 1898, aged forty-six. His last literary project was a biography of Edison.

  *25 Edison proposed in 1920 that a “scientifically-kept watch for interstellar signaling should be established in Michigan, where enormous masses of ore might be expected particularly to attract magnetic signals from space if any should be sent.”

  *26 Not to be confused with modern Edison, New Jersey, a town in Middlesex County that memorializes the original site of Menlo Park.

  *27 See Part Five.

  *28 Kennelly’s experiments with “magneto-therapy,” part of a major magnetism research program initiated by Edison at this time, anticipated by nearly eighty years the modern technology of magnetic resonance imaging.

  *29 Orson Welles once cited Insull, rather than William Randolph Hearst, as a role model for Citizen Kane—“a real man who built an opera house for the soprano of his choice.” Unlike Kane, however, Insull lost his wealth when his $500 million electrical empire collapsed in the Great Depression. He was prosecuted by the federal government on antitrust charges and, although found innocent, never recovered from the attendant opprobrium.

  *30 There is a full-size reconstruction of the Black Maria at Thomas Edison National Historical Park.

  *31 A restoration of The Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1894 or 1895), the first sound film in movie history, has been jointly accomplished by the Library of Congress and the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archive of Recorded Sound in New York. It may be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=Y6b0wpBTR1s.

  *32 Budget figures prepared for Marion’s information by John Randolph in the fall of 1894 indicate that Edison was currently spending $33,220 a year on household expenses, or just about $1 million in today’s money.

  *33 Blacksmith Scene may be viewed online through the peephole of YouTube, at https://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=FaFqr7nGsJM.

  *34 Edison exaggerated the kinetic force of his crushers, which was more realistically the equivalent of seven tons, ample to shatter a five-ton rock.

  *35 Kinetograph henceforth meant only the talking camera.

  *36 A word search of American newspapers in 1894 indicates that the phrase moving pictures was first used to describe the illusion of photographic movement when Edison announced his Kinetoscope on 10 March. Previously it referred either to still pictures that appealed to the emotions, or to mobile tableaux onstage. On 21 July the American Encyclopedic Dictionary announced that it was the first reference book to define “Kinetoscope” and [sic] “kinetograph.” The word cinema would not enter the language until after the Lumière brothers patented their Cinématographe camera-projector in 1895. Motion picture appeared in 1896; movie around 1908. Edison, as has been seen, coined the word talkie in 1913.

  *37 See, e.g., http://earlysilentfilm.blogspot.co.uk/​2013/​08/​peerless-annabelle-symphony-in-yellow.html.

  *38 Or more than $7.1 million in 2019 dollars.

  *39 Tate did not mention in his memoir that Edison, whose fits of anger were always short, gave him a farewell loan of $800, saying he could pay it back whenever he earned his “first stake” as a self-employed businessman. Twenty-six years later Tate took pleasure in sending him an interest-included check for $2,060.

  *40 According to one source, Tesla counted his jaw movements while chewing, and always used eighteen napkins.

  *41 In addition to bearing three children, Mina Edison had at least one and possibly three miscarriages.

  *42 Edison never explained why he abandoned the projection method (calcium-lit images, slotted rotary shutter, magnifying lens, and screen) that he tantalized the Sun reporter with in 1891. It is described by the Dicksons in chapter 22 of Life and Inventions. They refer specifically to “exhibition evenings” in the “projecting-room” of Edison’s photographic department, its walls “hung with black” to prevent reflection from “the circle of light” [sic] emanating from the screen at the other end, and “the projector” similarly draped so as to expose only “a single peephole for the accommodation of the lens,” connected to an electric motor running with “a weird accompanying monotone.” They even report that some images were “projected stereoscopically” with “a pleasing rotundity.” These evenings can have occurred no later than September 1894, when their book went to press, and presumably no earlier than October 1893, when Cassier’s Magazine published a shorter version of this chapter that made no mention of projection at all. If the images thrown on the screen were as “life-like” as the Dicksons claim, then Edison was the father of movie projection. The enlargements, however, were apparently “not…much more than ten times the original size [of a 35-mm. frame],” too small for commercial viewing.

  *43 It ultimately became the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, under which name Edison sued it in a marathon patent infringement case that was eventually resolved in his favor.

  *44 These experiments were briefly interrupted by the death on 26 February of Sam Edison, age 91. Edison traveled to Port Huron for the funeral.

  *45 Edison was to repeat this experiment in 1917, when researching the optics of night vision for the U.S. Navy.

  *46 A young American dancer, Loie Fuller, visited Edison in his darkroom at this time, and had an epiphany of herself performing in costumes permeated with his radiant salts. They experimented together with initial success, but the fluorescence kept fading. In her later career, Fuller won fame for light-based choreography, while also becoming an amateur expert on radiology.

  *47 Edison’s license lasted only a year. On 30 November 1896, he brought out his own highly praised projector, and in 1897 reassigned the Phantoscope patent to Armat.

  *48 https://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=lW3uIm82hpY

  *49 Blackton took a bow at the end of this ninety-five-second short and went on to become a major movie producer and the father of film animation.

  *50 According to the appropriately named Niagara Falls Cataract, 20 November 1896, Edison pressed his aching eyes shut after a long spell of work on X-rays and found that he could still see his hands.

  *51 Edison was serious. He bought a two-year lease on fifty-four thousand acres of low-grade gold sands at Dolores, in the Ortiz Mountains, and by the summer of 1898 he had put a preliminary dry placer plant into operation extracting gold by a magnetic drum process. The mill grew to Ogden-like proportions, cost him half a million dollars, and was a complete failure. “I lost the usual amount,” he joked.

  *52 The plant did reopen for a few months in 1900 but failed to satisfy Bethlehem Iron’s low-phosphorus requirement and was forced to dispose of its remaining briquettes below cost. It closed finally for dismantlement at the end of that year.

  Thomas Edison refracted.

  IN HIS THIRTY-THIRD year Edison embarked on what he afterward called “the greatest adventure of my life…akin to venturing on an uncharted sea.”1 His challenge was to take the small incandescent thing he had just perfected—history’s first reliable electric bulb—and turn it into a vast urban illumination system, every part of which would have to be invented, manufactured, and installed by himself.

  Since the extraordinar
y display of linked lamps that he had staged at Menlo Park on New Year’s Eve 1879, he had moved in popular esteem from being the “wizard” of recorded sound to the “genius” of electric light. He scoffed at the latter label, which had been overused since the deaths of Beethoven and Goethe. “You know well enough I am nothing of the sort,” he remarked to an old associate, Walter Phillips, “unless we accept Disraeli’s theory that genius is prolonged patience. I’m patient enough, to be sure.”2

  The trouble with being so endowed was that Edison always made himself available to visitors, few of whom had the delicacy to wonder whether they were not intruding upon him. Overnight, and for as long as the Menlo Park light show lasted, his rural laboratory had become a fashionable destination. He had achieved a spectacular public relations coup in opening its doors to the public.3 But the financiers committed to support his looming “subdivision of the light”—potentially the most revolutionary invention since the telegraph—were aware that every hour he spent sharing cigars and jovial indiscretions with strangers was an hour to the advantage of rival electrical engineers striving to overtake him both in the Patent Office and the marketplace. The key elements of his high-resistance, coiled-carbon, fused-glass, evacuated lamp were known, and it was critical that he protected them at once, or Edisonian lightbulbs would soon sprout like snowdrops on both sides of the Atlantic.

  “If I had my way,” an attorney in charge of his patent assignments wrote, “I would not allow half the publicity that has been given by Mr. Edison.” Already Menlo Park was having to deal with the consequences of it. The depot, formerly so little used that Pennsylvania Railroad trains sped by without stopping, became mobbed every late afternoon with hundreds of curiosity-seekers. Most wanted simply to gawk at the great inventor. A large number of lighting professionals, including George Westinghouse, Charles Brush, Edward Weston, Elihu Thomson, William Sawyer, and Hiram Maxim, came bent on industrial espionage.4