Edison

by Edmund Morris

  With refinements such as an electric headlight, signal bell, and fringe-topped observation car, the train became a popular tourist draw, although on hot days the odor of armature wafting back from the engine, mixed with that of the tar-soaked sleepers, could offend delicate nostrils. Mary Edison waited for a cool evening before she took some of her friends on what was probably history’s first electrically illuminated railway excursion.58

  By early June the “Edison Express” was attaining speeds of forty miles an hour, enough to whiten what was left of Grosvenor Lowrey’s hair. “We ran off the track,” he reported to his fiancée after a day on the railway that threatened to be his last.

  I protested at the speed on the sharp curves (designed to show the power of the engine) but E. said they had done it often & finally when the last trip was taken I said I did not like it, but would go as long as Edison did. The train jumped the track on a short curve, throwing Crucy [Kruesi] who was driving the engine, with his face prone in the dirt and another man in a comical somersault through some underbrush. Edison was off in a minute, jumping and laughing & declaring it a most beautiful accident. Crucy got up, his face bleeding & a good deal shaken; & I shall never forget the expression of voice & face in which he said (with some foreign accent) “Oh yes, pairfeckly safe!”59

  Edison applied for a patent on various aspects of his railway, but claimed no overall priority on the system.*16 He emphasized to reporters that Werner von Siemens had invented and operated an electric train in Berlin the year before. When news broke in July that an American engineer, Stephen Dudley Field, had been awarded letters patent for a locomotive looking remarkably like his, he reacted with jovial unconcern. Field’s claim rested solely on the novelty of a trailing arm that took current from a conductor running between or to one side of the tracks. “It is a curious thing how vague the ideas of the general public are on the question of patents….A man…draws an entire machine with his ‘improvement’ in it, and people think he has invented it all.”60

  The Edison electric train, Charles Batchelor driving.

  The good humor and objectivity of remarks like these, exemplifying Edison’s absolute refusal to be discouraged in any endeavor (even when the Patent Office declared his application an “interference” with Field’s), came as a tonic to pessimists like Lowrey, who worried that he was playing with ships and trains when he should be devoting all his energies to the light. Portly, bug-eyed, fiftyish, and bruisingly widowed, the little lawyer had known and loved Edison since 1869.61 He had always felt responsible for protecting his client from the push and pull of too many ideas fighting for precedence at any given time. Now the time was especially critical. As corporate counsel for the Edison Electric Light Company, Lowrey knew that its directors were concerned by the accelerating rate of Edison’s laboratory expenses, in contrast to what appeared to be halting progress toward his announcement of a central station in New York.

  The appearance was true. Week by week Edison was confronted by a proliferation of development problems that would have caused any project manager less positive to see failure looming ahead, like the still-unsolved blackening of his bulbs. One day Lowrey, confessedly “ultramarine” with depression over the Electric Light Company’s finances, came out to Menlo Park to be cheered by his client, and was not disappointed: “An hour with Edison has restored [my] spirits….Perhaps I’d better marry him, since he cures me.”62

  GOD ALMIGHTY’S WORKSHOP

  Mindful of his own remark on the tendency of “people” to intuit the whole from the particular, Edison waved aside a growing number of press suggestions that his municipal lighting scheme for New York was a chimera. He ascribed them to lobbying by the gas industry. “I am superseding a system of artificial lighting in which is invested about $850 million,” he said to a representative of The Boston Globe. “This cannot be done in a day.”63

  The reporter, more objective than Lowrey, scrutinized him as he talked, and got a distinct impression of monkishness.

  He resembled a young man who had spent several years of probation in the novitiate of a Roman Catholic religious society. He had a tired appearance; his face was almost expressionless and his general ensemble made a suggestion of close confinement within doors and unceasing application and thought….His eye is brilliant, emitting a sort of electric light that bespeaks keen penetration and rapidity of perception. It illuminates his whole face, which is otherwise passive….His sandy hair is streaked with gray.64

  That summer, while Francis Upton calculated the market mathematics of electrifying lower Manhattan, and Kruesi dug up Menlo Park’s red clay to bury an experimental conduit system, Edison and Batchelor absorbed themselves in filamentary experiments. The lamp factory was due to begin operations in the fall, with a projected annual output of half a million units, and they had to have the basic bulb standardized by then. There had been enough failures among lamps tested in the laboratory to recall what du Moncel had said about the atrophy of incandescent elements. Edison distrusted the mealy texture of his bristol board carbons: “Paper is man made and not good for filaments.” No matter how hard and shiny the little loops baked, they could not be relied on for equable distribution of heat under electrification.65

  For week after week the two men cut, planed, and carbonized filaments from every fibrous substance they could get—hickory, holly, maple, and rosewood splints; sassafras pith; monkey bast; ginger root; pomegranate peel; fragrant strips of eucalyptus and cinnamon bark; milkweed; palm fronds; spruce; tarred cotton; baywood; cedar; flax; coconut coir; jute boiled in maple syrup; manila hemp twined and papered and soaked in olive oil. Edison rejected more than six thousand specimens of varying integrity, as they all warped or split: “Somewhere in God Almighty’s workshop there is a vegetable growth with geometrically powerful fibers suitable to our use.”*17, 66

  In the dog days, as heat beat down on straw hats and rattan parasols, the idea of bamboo suggested itself to him. Nothing in nature grew straighter and stronger than this pipelike grass, so easy to slice from the culm and to bend, with its silicous epidermis taking the strain of internal compression. It had the additional virtue, ideal for his purpose, of being highly resistant to the voltaic force. When he carbonized a few loops sliced off the outside edge of a fan, they registered 188 ohms cold, and one glowed as bright as 44 candles in vacuo. That particular specimen, being cheap Calcutta bamboo, blued at the clamps and went out after an hour or so. Splints from the Far East proved to be of much finer grain, and carbonized so well that they could take a white heat that melted the platinum clamps they stood on. Böhm blew a new pear-shaped bulb to accommodate their typical bend. In a decisive experiment on 2 August, some Japanese samples lasted nearly three and a half hours at the dazzling incandescence of 71 candles—well over four times as much light as was needed for commercial purposes. Another, reduced to the comfortable glow of sixteen candles on a current of 110 volts, burned for an astonishing 1,589 hours. On the evening it registered that record, William Hammer ran up the laboratory steps bulb in hand, like an eager knight brandishing the Holy Grail, to share the news with Edison, Batchelor, and Upton. An impromptu conga line developed behind the four men as they danced in serpentine fashion around the workbenches, then downstairs and out into the night, singing and cheering.67

  From that day on, the words bamboo and filament were synonymous in the shop talk of Menlo Park.

  Stages of splitting and shearing a splint of madake bamboo into filaments ready for carbonization.

  LONG RIPPLES

  John Kruesi was the most gifted mechanic in Edison’s employ, Swiss-trained in geometrics and physics, equally adept at precision machining (he had built the prototype phonograph) and the hard labor of laying out the world’s first underground electrical distribution system. His long arms and slope-shouldered stoop seemed to incline him naturally toward any manual task that lay within reach. He was
so objective in addressing technological problems that he had to be kept away from investors. Edison tried without success to make him understand the difference between truth and “deferred truth.”68

  Nevertheless, Kruesi had intuition enough to render his boss’s sketchiest diagrams into logically functioning models. The most inspired of these was a feeder-and-main principle of distribution that at one stroke solved a problem the mathematicians had been struggling with all year: how to conduct electricity through block after city block without using enormous amounts of copper. At an estimated eight hundred thousand pounds for just nine blocks, costing in excess of $700,000, the metal could have made it impossible for Edison to undercut the price of gaslight as much as he needed to, if customers were to allow him to snake wire into their premises.69

  Kruesi’s invention, just as vital as that of the lamp itself, replaced the “tree” system he had originally planned. That had essentially been a trunk of copper emerging from the central station and thinning into branches and stems that then “translated,” to use his own word, into leaves of platinum and carbon. The massiveness of the trunk was necessary to convey as much electrical sap as possible to the top of the tree. Even so, Upton had warned of a 30 percent drop in power there, because of resistance along the way.

  “The object of this invention is to obviate such danger and to maintain practically throughout the entire system an equal pressure,” Edison wrote, in the first of two patent applications for his feeder-and-main concept. He drew a blocky square labeled “CS” for “central station” and surrounded it with four square borderlines that expanded symmetrically, as did the lots, blocks, and districts of a typical American city. Each side of the CS square radiated a pair of lines that fed north, south, east, and west, into the resultant grid. Long ripples showed where each feeder ran to its destination main. They graphically, if unintentionally, conveyed the flow of current around the whole, in an exquisite distribution of balanced forces. Its practical effect at 110 volts*18 was to reduce copper cost by seven-eighths, and almost completely absorb the energy loss to be expected of lamps farthest from the central station, with no visible dimming of candlepower anywhere.*19, 70

  When Sir William Thomson, Britain’s most eminent electrical scientist, was asked why no one else had dreamed up a system so simple, yet so efficient, he replied, “The only answer I can think of is that no one else is Edison.”71

  In physical reality, the system was more complex than it looked on paper. Edison’s second application—one of seventy-seven that he executed for the distribution system alone—featured zoom-in diagrams and explanatory paragraphs not likely to win him speedy approval from the Patent Office: “In Fig. 6 is shown direct or main feeding circuits 1 2 and 5 6 with lamp-circuits 3 4 and 9 10 with branch feeders 7 8, 15 16, and 21 22 leading into side streets, supplying lamp-circuits 17 18, 19 20, 23 24, and 25 26, the branch feeders being derived circuits from the main feeders.” But his overall claim of providing a consumption circuit that spread drops in voltage so widely that the candlepower charge of individual lamps remained, to the naked eye, imperceptible, was so strong that letters patent were almost immediately granted him in Canada, Italy, Belgium, France, Austria, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, and India. His American patent would not arrive until after the “lamp-circuits” he designed were glowing five thousandfold around the First District in Manhattan.72

  Kruesi and his gang of six diggers had no sooner finished interring Menlo Park’s subterranean experimental conduits—five miles of wired, four-by-four pine scantling boxes, each sixteen feet long—than two weeks of rain liquefied the clay that covered them. Red dribbles leaked into some of the boxes and short-circuited the conductors, even though each pair lay in grooves well sludged with coal tar and capped with extra wood. The entire grid had to be exhumed while Kruesi applied himself to the unstudied subject of insulation. He wrapped various lengths of copper cable with white rubbercloth, muslins, and marline hemp, all soaked with hot coal tar or cold paraffin or linseed oil, or smeared with resinous gums, or stewed in black pitch, pine tar, cottonseed oil, and various other proofings, but none were sufficiently water-repellent. Edison gave young Wilson Howell free rein of the laboratory library and chemical room to boil a series of compounds, some so noxious that even Otto Moses, used to pungent odors, was driven to seek fresh air. Eventually a blend of “refined Trinidad asphaltum boiled in oxidized linseed oil with paraffin and a little beeswax” was chosen, and fifteen men and boys deployed to apply it to the cables. They elevated the bare wire on sawhorses and straddled it in groups of three, each pair of hands tightly winding a spiral of sticky muslin ribbon that advanced, inch by inch and layer by layer, toward an end that never seemed to get any nearer. When, however, it eventually did, the triple-wound cable was found to resist the leakage of both current within and water without.73

  The first fully insulated line was reburied and reconnected in time for Election Day, 2 November. It was looped to the laboratory and ran for a mile northeast, parallel to Thornall Avenue and the railroad. When evening came on, Edison, a staunch Republican, said to his switchboard operator, “If Garfield is elected, light up that circuit. If not, do not light it.”*20, 74

  Returns began to chatter through the laboratory’s telegraph sounder soon after dark. Edison maintained full steam in the engine room, ready to trigger the line dynamo on command. When a swing toward Garfield became evident around nine o’clock, he gave the order for power. A mile of bamboo-filamented streetlamps lit up all the way from the depot to the barn behind his house.

  They stayed on until nearly midnight, in the first use of incandescent light to salute the victory of an American presidential candidate.75

  “NOT A WORD WAS SAID”

  Edison had little else to celebrate that fall. He was under intense pressure from the board of the Electric Light Company to demonstrate the main elements of his proposed First District illumination plan to a delegation of New York City aldermen. But he was unable to do so until a new hundred-horsepower Porter-Allen steam engine he had ordered to power Menlo Park’s enlarged plant was ready. It was still under laborious construction in Philadelphia. “Every little delay is embarrassing to us at this time,” he wrote to its builder, “and we cannot wait longer.”76

  But he had to. Rumors multiplied in industry circles that after two years of announcing that he had solved the problem of subdivided electric light, the Wizard was defeated by its complexities. Meanwhile his senior glassblower, Ludwig Böhm, departed Menlo Park mit Sturm und Drang, saying in a resignation letter he was tired of being bullied by “the boys” in the laboratory. “Yesterday Mr. Batch and I had a disagreement from a cause not worth to be mentioned, which went so far that I had to hear that you were a dem side [sic] better if I were not here.”77

  Edison had been depending on Böhm to help him start up the world’s first electric lamp factory—an elaborate, self-financed, $10,000 conversion of his old electric pen works down by the railroad. It had long been evident to Upton and Clarke, as they projected the labor costs involved in competing with gas illumination in New York, that some sort of molding machinery would have to be devised to speed up the production of bulbs. Deprived of Böhm’s expertise and faced with multiple other start-up problems, Edison subcontracted with the Corning Glass Company to supply him with blank globes at five dollars per gross. They arrived every day in two freight cars, thirty thousand at a time, punctual as the morning milk.78

  His principal challenge at the factory was the installation of 476 towering mercury pumps. For coordinated day-to-day operation, they could not be modeled on the delicate Sprengel-and-Geissler hybrid that Francis Jehl sweated over in the laboratory. It pumped well, if slowly, as gravity pulled the liquid metal down, each drip sucking the “atmospheres” out of an attached bulb blank. But it was so encumbered with extra gauges and tubes that it required constant maintenance and repair. Edison offered a prize to any employee w
ho could design a simpler version. Not surprisingly, Jehl won. He was rewarded with a certificate of 1.6 Electric Light Company shares and a fatherly admonition from his boss: “Keep it under your cap, Francis.”79

  The efficiency of Jehl’s prototype did not alter the fact that it too worked by gravity and therefore depended on a constant circulation of mercury. Edison saw that twenty-five tons of the liquid metal would have to be held in suspension at all times in his factory line. To attain this he invented what was, in effect, a superpump for the pumps on the Archimedean screw principle. Instead of using steam energy, he drove the entire evacuation system by means of an electromotor connected to his central station, in a pioneering step toward the industrial application of electric power.80

  He also had to fabricate huge carbonizing and annealing ovens for the mass production of filaments. Batchelor designed beautiful molds for them. But the first test batch of ninety bulbs to come out of the factory had an average life of only 25.8 hours, compared to the 132 days racked up by Hammer’s laboratory-made record breaker. This was less the fault of the ovens than the propensity of certain coarse-fibered bamboos to warp while incandescing. Some bent so far as to touch and melt the inside of the globe.81