Edison

by Edmund Morris

  The last word denoted every machine and immobile link that interposed between raw coal stored in the central station and light, or power, pouring out the other end. Young Francis Upton, in a magazine article timed to coincide with his boss’s application, extended the arc of translation even further, from sunshine to artificial sunshine, but Edison concentrated on the specifics of getting the job done.31

  He began with the prime motors, steam engines whose belts and shafts caused a group of generators to whir up a mass of electromagnetic energy, or “field of force,” that could be duplicated to any number the market called for. Having raised his favorite subject of electromagnetism, Edison treated himself to a somewhat rambling disquisition on the “extremely long” magnetic core of the bipolar dynamo he had patented the year before, to power his lightbulb experiments. He would have to rewrite this section of the application extensively to meet Patent Office objections, but when he did, he would make the important claim that “currents of the desired high electromagnetic force can be generated in armatures of low resistance, and the waste of energy in the form of heat in such armatures will be reduced to a minimum.”32

  Next came the copper cable conductors, or “mains,” along which the current flowed at a pressure controlled by regulators that sensed the fluctuating demands of customers turning their lights on and off. This maintained the high resistance, at farthest remove, of Edison’s uniquely efficient lightbulbs. He explained that a common differential of low resistance was what made the lamps of other inventors uneconomical. His use of multiple arcs meant that he could wire in any number of circuits without appreciably weakening the output of the generators. To ensure uniformity of pressure, he envisaged photometric test lights at the central station, along with galvanometers at any desired point, so that any drop or surge would be indicated by a change of light or deflection of a needle.33

  “For distributing the current thus generated and regulated,” Edison went on, “I prefer to use conductors within insulated pipes or tubing made water tight and buried beneath the earth, provision being made at suitable intervals for house, or side connections.” He had seen the crazy cross-hatch of telephone and telegraph wires that shadowed some streets in downtown New York, and he did not intend to tangle with it.*7, 34 If running conduits under the city’s sidewalks was going to cost the Electric Light Company vast amounts of money and labor—not to mention permission from city officials, and all the plain brown envelopes that entailed, then the investment must be budgeted for. The gas industry had installed its own piping decades before and gone on to profit enormously.*8

  Insulating pneumatic pipes, however, was a less fraught task than ensuring that no water or rodent teeth reached the copper in electrical conduits. Reliable seals were most important at nodes where branch wires ran up lampposts, or horizontally down side streets in subsidiary mains, branching out yet farther into every house or business establishment willing to subscribe to this newfangled system. That would require the emplacement at entry points of tamper-proof meters. Then the buildings themselves would have to be wired with derived circuits that fed light or power to as many switchable bulbs or live outlets as the customer wanted to install.35

  Edison of course already saw his patented globe as the crowning flower of this gigantic electric tree. But he felt free to continue developing it while he gave notice there were components he had yet to invent, such as safety fuses and centrifugal governors to control the running of motors as demand rose or fell. In the meantime he claimed to have listed thirteen wholly original contributions to electromotive science, and he sought protection for them in the plainest of words: “A system arranged as thus provides for all the conditions precedent to an economical and reliable utilization of electricity as a lighting or motive power agent.”36

  For the rest of the year he isolated himself at Menlo Park, turning his laboratory and its adjacent lots, sidewalks, and fields into a roughly one-third-size model of his projected “First” lighting district in New York City.37 He intended to generate enough power on the spot to illumine eight hundred lamps. Pennsylvania Railroad trains reverted to their customary policy of not stopping at the depot unless by advance reservation, but this did not lessen the public’s fascination with Menlo Park. At night, passengers traveling to or from New York crowded to look for it when the call came, “There’s Edison’s light!” Out of the darkness ahead a few bright pinpricks emerged, swelled, and whizzed by in a momentary splatter that soon gave way to darkness again.38

  INERT BODIES

  If Edison had been remarkable through his twenties for industriousness and executive will, he now became freakish in both respects—to his employees, an Übermensch; to his financial backers, an uncontrollable fantasist, half-genius, half-fool; to rivals, a publicity whore of no especial originality; to his wife and children, increasingly a stranger; to Patent Office examiners, a tireless nuisance, filing sixty applications in 1880 alone.*9, 39

  The scope of his project dwarfed anything in the history of electrical engineering to date and was, besides, so new in most of its parts that he could not think of embarking on it without the recruitment of an expanded and intellectually upgraded team of helpers. With the exception of old James Mackenzie, who had taught him telegraphy as a boy, and “Pop” Edison, who came and went with the unpredictability of a septuagenarian Huckleberry Finn, they were all young. Their number rose from sixty-four in the spring to about seventy-five in the fall.40 Edison had his pick of job applicants and paid them little or nothing to start, on the grounds that those with talent would soon earn their worth, and those lacking it, or requiring a normal amount of sleep, would drop off by natural selection. Consequently he rarely had to fire a man.

  Charles Batchelor, his impassive, black-bearded deputy of the past nine years, remained indispensable—faithful, meticulous, dull, a cool English breeze whenever Edison blew too hot. Francis Upton combined the manners of Phillips Academy and Princeton with a mastery of mathematics and scientific theory.*10 Edison nicknamed him “Culture,” and John Lawson, an argumentative assayer who insisted that basic oxides required special heat treatment, as “Basic” Lawson. Martin Force, the laboratory handyman, inevitably became “Fartin’ Morse.” The cerebral Charles L. Clarke, who had a master’s degree in science from Bowdoin College, was hired at twelve dollars a week for electrical systems analysis, but proved to be more valuable as a draftsman, his sketches as precise as steel engravings. William J. Hammer at twenty-two was already a gifted electrical engineer, close-cropped, military-neat, supercilious to anyone junior to himself. These included the teenage office boys “Johnny” Randolph and George Hill, as well as neighborhood urchins who hung around the lab hoping to steal cigars or explosive chemicals. Stockton “Griff” Griffin acted as Edison’s private secretary, a job Randolph would one day inherit. Francis Jehl, nineteen, was passionately interested in electricity, but had such bovine strength that the general manager, William Carman, made him responsible for keeping the vacuum pumps topped up with mercury, which was much heavier than lead. Wilson Howell was a bespectacled youth eager to do odd jobs without pay, as were several other aspiring lab workers hopeful that Edison would eventually take them on.41

  Members of the Menlo Park laboratory team, 22 February 1880. From left, Ludwig Boehm, Charles Clarke, Charles Batchelor, William Carman, Samuel Mott, George Dean, Edison (in skullcap), Charles Hughes, George Hill, George Carman, Francis Jehl, John Lawson, Charles Flammer, Charles Mott, James MacKenzie. (Library of Congress.)

  A large Germanic quotient affected Menlo Park’s habits of delegated procedure and fanatical record-keeping. Johann (“Honest John”) Kruesi, the master machinist, was Schweizerdeutsch; Ludwig Böhm, Edison’s leather-lunged glassblower, his assistant blower William Holzer, and the chemists Otto Moses and Dr. Alfred Haid were all German-born; John and Frederick Ott and Francis Jehl had grown up speaking German at home; and even Upton, Yankee to his fingertip
s, had spent a postgraduate year at Berlin University studying under Hermann von Helmholtz.42

  Despite their common work ethic, everyone had to adapt to Edison’s decidedly un-Teutonic attitude toward the clock. His day was punctuated only by breakfast at seven and midnight “lunch,” and he was capable of forgetting about each. When tiredness overwhelmed him, usually around four A.M., he would curl up beneath the stairs like a tramp and sleep on a pile of old newspapers. As a result it was not uncommon to see inert bodies at various points in the building and at various times of day or night, while experimental activity went on busily around them.43

  MYSTERIOUS BLUE HALO

  Allowing for national and other prejudices, Edison’s doubters were correct in saying that he had not yet developed a perfect lightbulb. The paper-derived filament was brittle and hard to install, breaking sometimes even in Batchelor’s nimble hands. It glowed beautifully when seated on its carbon clamps, but the glass crown beneath had a tendency to crack around the lead-in wires, causing a loss of vacuum and consequent oxidization of the carbon.44

  These were thermal problems that Edison was confident of solving. He was mystified, however, by the tendency of his lamps to darken inside after a week or two of life. It was as if an invisible soot—“carbon vapor,” he called it—were being given off by the filament that became apparent only as the molecules thickened on the glass close by, clouding it at first, then blackening it. Yet soot was the product of flame, and there could be no fire in his airless bulb, only incandescence. Nor was the blackening uniform. From a certain angle it seemed to show a negative shadow of the filament, most noticeable on the positive side of the horseshoe. William Hammer related it to a blue fluorescence that appeared around the clamps and was weirdly responsive to magnetism, draggable from one pole to the other. Edison thought the blueness was gas given off by the clamps, but when he substituted copper ones, the same “halo” wavered about them. He painted a filament with zirconic oxide, and the blueness deepened to violet. Fascinated, he inserted a wire between the poles and ran it out to a terminal via a galvanometer. The needle at once showed that there was an arc of subsidiary current linking them. This did not, however, explain the “carrying by electrification of the carbon from one side of the carbon horseshoe,” a phenomenon that was reversed when the current was reversed. Perhaps heat loosened their cohesion within the baked body of the filament itself, and caused them to migrate to the cooler surface nearby. “The amount of such carrying,” Edison wrote, “depends upon the resistance of the filaments, the degree of incandescence, the electromotive force between the clamping-electrodes, and the state of the vacuum.”45

  He did not understand, even though his language repeatedly edged toward it,*11 that he was on the verge of discovering electronics.46 The theory of the electron, or charged subatomic particle, would not be propounded by J. J. Thomson for another seventeen years.*12 What now became known, half mockingly, as the “Edison Effect” was thermal electron emission.*13 It was a nuisance as far as lighting was concerned, yet novel enough for him to ask the Princeton astronomer Charles A. Young to make “an examination of the mysterious blue halo by spectroscope.” The results were inconclusive. Edison continued to experiment with wireless molecular transfer for three years and eventually patented the phenomenon, with a view to “the utilization of this discovery for indicating or regulating electromotive force.” But he never realized its world-changing potential as radio.*14, 47

  A SIMILAR CONSTELLATION

  By March, Edison had 220 lamps burning night and day around Menlo Park. He invited Charles Young and another Princeton physicist, Cyrus F. Brackett, to visit the laboratory and make an independent assessment of his generation system. The result was a report, published in the June issue of American Journal of Science, so astonishing that the academic community as a whole refused to believe it. Brackett and Young found that Edison’s bipolar dynamo had a total efficiency rating (electrical output proportionate to mechanical input) of 89.9 percent. Even if it consumed four points of that output internally, it still made a mockery of the theoretical maximum potential/industrial average of 70 percent.48

  Two further physicists, George F. Barker of the University of Pennsylvania and Henry Rowland of Johns Hopkins, reported almost as favorably in the same periodical on the thermal efficiency of the Edison bulb. “Provided the lamp can be made either cheap enough or durable enough, there is no reasonable doubt of the practical success of the light.” Again, this praise was widely dismissed, instilling contempt in Edison’s bosom for the pure-science fraternity that time would increase.49

  He could have lit hundreds more lamps after adding a two-ton dynamo to the smaller units already in the machine shop, were it not for the hours it took to manufacture every bulb by hand. The glass had to be blown, the filament baked and mounted and wired, the air pumped out under blowtorch heat, the evacuation point sealed and cooled, then the whole tested, not always with success. Some perfect-looking specimens just would not light, or did so dimly, or flared and burned out due to reventilation. Microscopic cracks appeared not only at base level but at the “two o’clock spot” on the round of the globe, for a reason nobody could figure. On average, however, the bulbs shone for 686 hours, with a quality consistent enough that Edison was emboldened to accept a commercial order that required the opposite of street lighting.50

  It came from the railroad tycoon Henry Villard, who was building a steamship, the Columbia, for service on the Pacific coast. Villard had attended Edison’s “Village of Light” exhibition and wanted to float a similar constellation out to sea—specifically, to sail around the Horn on his ship’s maiden voyage to San Francisco in early May. Although this fantasy disrupted Edison’s plans for a lighting district in New York, it was irresistible from many angles, not least that of publicity. The shortness of the deadline helped weld the Menlo Park team together as a productive unit, while the Columbia’s compact hull—332 feet from bow to stern, with a beam of 38½ feet—enabled him to integrate at close quarters all the elements that would one day comprise his city district. Villard called for 120 lights in “all-glass chambers,” one in each first-class stateroom and chandeliers in every saloon.*15, 51 He provided enough rear hull space for four 110-volt dynamos, three of them belted to a countershaft driven by vertical engines and connected in parallel to the light circuits. A switchboard in the engine room sent power throughout the ship via stranded cables insulated with soft rubber tubing. The strands (cotton-covered and painted red or white to indicate polarity) radiated in seven independent feeder circuits, each of which subdivided again to feed lamps distributed among the upper and lower decks. For extra safety Edison invented an array of tripping devices, with fusible wires in each circuit and single-pole breakers fixed to the saloon lamps in tiny glass tubes, so that in the event of a power surge, no drops of molten lead alloy would fall on anybody’s dinner jacket. Also new to his illumination technology were the keyed sockets and brackets that held each lamp, and the ceiling fixtures that allowed chandeliers to sway gently at sea. Switches were locked inside rosewood boxes sunk into the ship’s paneling, accessible only by stewards.52

  Despite these protective devices, Villard’s shipbuilder was so afraid of electrical fire that he refused to have anything to do with the system. Edison and Batchelor therefore gained the useful experience of supervising the installation themselves. By the time Upton arrived with the bulbs, borne in an immense basket and individually wrapped like fresh eggs, they had in effect created their first “isolated” lighting plant.53

  The Columbia itself became the world’s first all-electric ship. It lay fully lit at its pier in the East River on the evening of 27 April, when Edison escorted his wife aboard for a celebratory reception. A promenade band on deck serenaded several hundred of Villard’s elegant friends as they danced below in the ballroom and went forward for supper, bathed all the time in soft incandescent light. The occasion was a rare treat for Mar
y, who did not have much opportunity to show off her fine wardrobe at Menlo Park. And it was yet another public relations coup for Edison. His fixtures attracted more admiration than any other of the ship’s lavish appointments. The Columbia set sail for the Horn ten days later, streaming its long lines of glowing portholes past New Jersey and Delaware until the horizon blotted them out.54

  A MOST BEAUTIFUL ACCIDENT

  Without doubt, the most bored worker at Menlo Park that spring was “a red-haired, freckle-faced Irish boy with a face like a hop-toad” who was seen sitting all day out of doors, dipping cordwood rail ties into a barrel of boiling asphalt. He was rendering them nonconductive for an experimental electric railway Edison was building north of the laboratory. It was another transportation project financed by Henry Villard, and was gladly undertaken by Edison as an opportunity to study the laws of motor mechanics and load balancing—both of which were important aspects of his urban lighting plan.55

  The track (upon which two other urchins nearly fried themselves when they stood on opposite rails and shook hands) ran uphill across open country to a wooded ridge for about a third of a mile, then curved west for another third before looping back toward the laboratory.56 If its trajectory was slyly patterned on that of a gigantic filament, the resemblance was lost on Villard, who had been born Heinrich Hilgard in Speyer, Bavaria, and was not known for his sense of humor.

  Edison excited the railroad circuit with two of the same generators he had installed on the Columbia. He assigned one of his top engineers, Charles T. Hughes, to turn a third into a locomotive by bolting it flat onto an iron truck just big enough for two men to sit behind. The driver controlled the traction of two massive fore wheels with a long friction-gear lever that came in handy as a vaulting pole at times of imminent derailment. One wheel drew power from its rail and transmitted it via a brass hub and brush to the spinning bobbin, or armature, of the motor, while the current rushed on and out the other wheel. Edison’s engine made its first trial run on 18 May and proved powerful enough to pull two cars carrying twelve to fourteen passengers, or the equivalent weight of freight.57 As such, it was a partial realization of a vision he had had four years before in the Midwest, of driverless electric trains loaded with corn crisscrossing the plains on wheels that would “grasp the track like an iron hand,” deriving their power from wind dynamos.