Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Japanese bamboo remained Edison’s wood of choice for filaments. But when he learned that there were over a thousand species of Bambusca phyllostachys growing worldwide, he gave letters of credit to six freelance explorers and told them to search the Caribbean, South America, and Asia for a cane close-textured enough to stand unlimited incandescence. It was a typical large gesture that over the next few years would cost him $100,000.82

  “Edison said to be progressing towards the perfection of his Electric Light & may soon be a very wealthy man,” the R. G. Dun credit agency reported. “He must have an income of a good many thousands a year but his constant experimenting eats up money exceedingly fast & it is thought he so far has not laid up much.”83

  In mid-November Edison heard that sixty bulbs designed by the inventor Hiram Maxim were working well in the Equitable Life Building in New York. Their light was said to be stronger than his own, albeit less steady, since it pulsed to the rhythm of a primitive generator. He remembered Maxim visiting Menlo Park earlier in the year and spending an entire day “looking over the whole place.”84 From what his spies told him, the new bulb was nothing but a copy of his own paper-fiber original, except that its filament was tweaked in the shape of an M.*21 But he could do nothing about a resultant whirlwind of competitive publicity, reversing the excitement he had whipped up in his own favor a year before.85

  Much of it came from the professoriat. Henry Morton, in a paper read before the National Academy of Sciences, stated that Maxim’s light was “more economical and efficient” than Edison’s. The astrophysicist Henry Draper held a reception in his laboratory to coincide with the meeting and illuminated it with Maxim lamps. George Barker, the University of Pennsylvania physicist who had been so complimentary earlier in the year, told The Evening Post, “There is no doubt in my mind or in that of Professors Morton and Draper as to the value of Mr. Maxim’s remarkable discovery….I do not say that Maxim is a better electrician than Edison, but he has invented a lamp which surpasses, I believe, even Edison’s dreams.”86

  Edison could afford to ignore Morton’s criticism as that of a man with little real experience of electricity.87 But Barker’s hurt. The two of them had been friends long before they went west with Draper in ’78 to observe the total eclipse of the sun. It was then that Edison had first conceived his idea of centralized electrical power, and Barker had become his most vocal academic supporter, praising him for having an “original and ingenious” scientific mind.88 Pointy-nosed and sycophantic, especially when he wanted to borrow Menlo Park equipment for his public lectures, Barker now seemed ready to rat aboard a less heavily loaded freighter.

  “I notice in last evening’s NYork Post,” Edison wrote him on 23 November, “what purports to be an interview with you & wherein you are made to say some things concerning my Electric Light work which I cannot bring myself to believe ever emanated from you. Will you be good enough to say if you even so much as supplied the reporter with a foundation upon which he could build such an interview.”89

  Before Barker could reply, Joseph Swan exhibited thirty-six linked, filamentary incandescent bulbs to Britain’s Society of Telegraphic Engineers. The meeting was attended by the flower of the English electrical establishment, including John Tyndall, Alexander Siemens, and William Henry Preece. Swan was coy about the substance of his carbon, saying he had a patent pending, but convincingly—and ominously—he showed it to be wire-thin and hard, yet pliable. He again claimed to have experimented with a carbonized-card conductor twenty years before and made no reference to his transatlantic rival except to recall the “non-success” of Edison’s earliest platinum lamp.*22 According to the official record of the proceedings, he was congratulated for the “beautiful steady light” of his demonstration display.90

  “Not a word was said on your behalf,” a sympathetic attendee wrote Edison, without explaining his own failure to stand up.91

  Barker, in turn, confirmed the substance of his remarks in the Post. In a letter that was at once polite and patronizing, he said he had come to the conclusion that Swan and Maxim had priority as inventors of practical incandescent lamps. He was especially complimentary about the latter, whose laboratory he had just visited. “I tell you in all frankness,…the method he has for making his carbon loops, consolidates them and gives them a wonderful resisting power and durability. He has run them up to 60 candles for an entire month and they are still good.”92

  Edison reserved judgment on the M-lamp. But he was aghast at Barker’s “ignorant” assertion that the coarse carbon stick that Maxim had sought to patent on 4 October 1878, was anticipatory of his own carbonized cotton filament, successfully held in incandescence a year later. More disgraceful still, from a professional point of view, was that Barker, who served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, seemed willing to embrace Swan’s completely undocumented claims, as reported in Chemical News.93

  “This is a mean thing to throw at me at this late day,” Edison complained, sending a copy of Barker’s remarks to Henry Rowland. “Have you noticed lately the utter indifference of the technical press in giving credit [for] scientific work to ‘previous or first publication and public exhibition.’ ” It was as if his past willingness to let any competitor visit Menlo Park and see and test his inventions counted for nothing in journals that were supposed to be objective about the empirical process. Apparently a summary of a lecture was as good as a patent. Only one magazine had come to his defense and said that “it would be interesting to know where Mr. Swan’s labors may be found in printed form” previous to Edison’s own publications and exhibitions.94

  He was particularly bitter because he had tried hard in recent months to present an image of himself as a scientist as well as an inventor, going so far as to bankroll a new weekly, Science, out of his own pocket.*23 But the effort had been in vain. Ever since his invention of the phonograph, there had been a swelling chorus of establishment attacks on him as “the great successor of Barnum,” an unschooled self-promoter greedy for money rather than the austere accolades of learned societies. The latest crescendo, joined by Barker, was so shrill he felt he was being penalized for “my criminal efforts to devise a subdivided electric light.”95

  Rowland was a scientist of impeccable probity, and for that reason he thought Barker had no business talking to reporters. “I was as much surprised as you were to see the statements about Maxim’s lamp,” he wrote Edison. “Of course it is only yours with a slight modification in the method of making it….You alone will show the world what you have done and dispose of all these petty hangers on.”96

  The fact remained, however, that Maxim had filled a public building in Manhattan with incandescent light, while Edison was still rusticated in Menlo Park, with another winter coming on. When he heard that Ludwig Böhm was now blowing glass for Maxim’s United States Electric Lighting Company, he put zwei and zwei together and decided to sue for patent infringement.97 There was nothing he could do about Joseph Swan’s claim to have lit up a paper carbon in vacuo somewhere around 1860 until that inscrutable inventor’s specifications were made known.*24

  A GASLESS NEW YORK

  Edison could have recalled all his bamboo explorers in December, because by then one of them, William H. Moore, had sent him an ideal variety for his filaments: Yawata madake, a giant timber from the Kansai forest of Japan.*25 Its long, steel-strong fibers were built up of eight-sided cells that carbonized with uniform density and stiffness, held the shape of the mold when electrified, and rated an average 2,450 hours of life.98

  Francis Upton tried hard to prove on paper that a central station electric illumination franchise in Manhattan would be profitable, despite delay and the physical, political, and financial obstacles still to be surmounted before the first dynamos began to spin. Working with insurance maps and his beloved slide rule, he estimated that it would cost $150,680 to wire up an initial downtown d
istrict, plus $45,989 for patent rights and other expenses. If customers plugged in ten thousand lamps and ran them five hours a day (based on current gas consumption averages), receipts should total $136,875 a year—and then would surely increase at a compound rate, as more and more New Yorkers converted to the safety and economy of incandescent light. Upton therefore felt confident in recommending that the company capitalize the plant at around $300,000, with an expectation of a payable dividend of 30 percent and a 60 percent annual return on its investment.99

  Edison’s backers, however, had learned to look first and count twice before approving any scheme emanating from Menlo Park. On 17 December nine directors of the Edison Electric Light Company, led by Grosvenor Lowrey, formed a majority of the board of a new corporation, the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York. Its urgent mandate was to transfer Edison’s operations to Manhattan as soon as City Hall could be persuaded to give him permission to start digging up the streets. Edison sensed from the board’s composition, which notably represented the interests of some of the most powerful financiers on Wall Street, that he would lose much of his independence when he moved. In a vain gesture of protest, he declined to serve as a director. Lowrey slapped him down. “I shall not present your letter of resignation as Mr. Fabbri [of Drexel, Morgan] very strongly objects to your leaving the Board. His impression was that ‘Edison’s name is a tower of strength to us, and if he never attended a meeting, it would be a great loss if his name should not appear at all times among the names of the Directors.’ ”100

  The Illuminating Company was duly organized and capitalized at $5 million. Five nights before Christmas Edison showed his ability to épater le bourgeois when a large party of municipal dignitaries, including eight aldermen, arrived at Menlo Park by special train.101 The sun had just gone down, and some two hundred freshly polished streetlamps were already glowing up the hillside. A little tavern by the tracks stood ready to slake the thirst the visitors had worked up on their journey. But they were corralled without refreshment into the laboratory, where for two hours Edison, wearing a sealskin skullcap, explained the intricacies of multiple-arc circuitry, feeder-and-main distribution, metering by copper deposit, and the cold ohm resistance of various bamboos. The aldermen were less interested in these subjects than whether he would entertain them to dinner at an hour earlier than one of his famous “midnight lunches.” Inexorable, he led them to a tour of the machine shop and the generation room, where the bed, if not yet the body of his new Porter-Allen engine sat on its massive foundation.

  It was eight o’clock when he escorted his wilting guests back upstairs to the laboratory. The long room had been darkened during their absence, but as they crested the stairs, its thirty-seven ceiling lamps (one enclosed in a globe of shimmering water) burst into light, and a U-shaped dining table was revealed against the backdrop of Hilborne Roosevelt’s pipe organ. White-gloved waiters stood ready to serve champagne. A banquet catered by Delmonico’s ensued. Grosvenor Lowrey sat at the head of the table with Edison on his left and Chief Alderman John C. Morris, who was known to oppose the central station plan, on his right. The wine flowed copiously (Edison diluted his with liberal splashes of water), giving way to Kentucky bourbon as course followed course. By the time cigars were handed out, Morris had become an ardent advocate of municipal incandescent lighting. He told the table that Edison was “entitled to the thanks of the world for bringing this light to such perfection that it can now be made to take the place of gas.”

  The superintendent of gas, Stephen McCormick, allowed that electricity was a safer illuminant. It was too easy for a hotel guest in New York to blow out his lamp on retiring “and wake up dead.” Parks Commissioner Andrew Green said that at last Central Park would have lights that did not burn foliage. Alderman John McClave waxed prophetic, seeing a gasless New York in 1900. “If at any time my voice or vote can be used to advocate the beautiful electric light which I have seen here tonight, you may count on me to use them.”

  Lowrey stood up and proposed a toast to the inventor. As the rest of the company reached for their glasses, Edison remembered he was still wearing his skullcap and awkwardly snatched it off. The toast, accompanied by loud cheers, was drunk standing.

  NO GOING BACK NOW

  On the following morning, New York newspapers announced that the Illuminating Company had a permit to bring incandescent electric light to fifty-one blocks downtown. Its First District, one of a projected twenty-six, would run from the East River to Nassau Street in the west, Wall Street in the south, and Spruce in the north. That square mile encompassed some of the densest real estate in the city, including the headquarters of several major financial institutions (notably Drexel, Morgan & Co.) and many townhouses and tenements.102 Somewhere in the parcel, wherever Edison might find a lot that suited him, he could build his central station, and the streets were his to dig—subject to approval by the next board of aldermen, taking office in the new year.

  Lowrey was uneasy about the permit, which could be revoked at any time. What he needed from the new administration was a formal ordinance, and knowing the ways of City Hall, it was bound to be expensive. But that was his problem, not Edison’s. There could be no going back now on the revolution engineered at Menlo Park. After four and a half years of monastic seclusion and communal experiment, the inventor and his “boys” (many of whom had had their own champagne party at the tavern, with bottles purloined from the laboratory stash) were going to have to face the pain of diaspora—and with it, what amounted to the end of youth.103

  Heavy snow fell on the twenty-seventh, whitening the little clutch of buildings that Henry Ford would one day resurrect in another state, in another century.

  THE PATIENCE OF JOB

  Menlo Park in the winter of 1880–81. Painting by Richard F. Outcault.

  The advent of 1881, accompanied by a partial solar eclipse, portended great changes but found Edison in a melancholy mood. It was evident that the recent assaults on his reputation still stung. “I think I ought to have credit for what I have accomplished,” he complained to a correspondent of the Chicago Tribune. “Only a year ago the subdivision of the current for lights was declared a practical impossibility….Everybody was down on me, and now a fellow named Swan is making an exhibition in London of my incandescent lamps.”104 The possessive pronoun betrayed his fury that William Spottiswoode, president of the Royal Society and titular descendant of Sir Isaac Newton, should announce that Swan had at last solved the problem of the electric light.

  Edison threw up his hands. “What’s the use of a man trying to do anything anyway? If he keeps things secret and will not tell everything, he is denounced as a mountebank, and if he does things openly, they steal all his ideas.”105

  It did not occur to him that Old World sensibilities, attuned to the virtues of self-deprecation and proper procedure, recoiled from his American tendency to overshare—exactly what he was doing now—and his naïveté in assuming that every invention he boasted about, or let competitors borrow for testing, would not soon be imitated. To establishmentarians like Spottiswoode, a product of Eton, Harrow, and Oxford, Edison was an embarrassing example of the genus Americanus egotisticus, lacking Latin and even guile, which made him anybody’s fool.

  Guile was a quality Joseph Swan possessed in abundance. It had enabled him to climb in British society far above what Spottiswoode would call his “station,” a working-class niche considerably lower than Edison’s. He too had little formal education, having been apprenticed to a chemist in his teens and employed in a provincial pharmacy before he began experimenting with lightbulbs. This was, according to his first recollection, in 1855, a date that he and his family would progressively push back to 1848, the year of Edison’s first birthday. Since then Swan had made all the right career moves, setting himself up in London as a gentleman-inventor and waiting twenty years to patent his filamentary lamp.106

 
“Talk about the patience of Job,” Edison scoffed.107

  LOVE OR MONEY

  On the Feast of the Epiphany three kings of the New York financial world—John Pierpont Morgan, Egisto Fabbri, and Jacob C. Rogers—paid a late-afternoon visit to Menlo Park to convince themselves that they were wisely investing in his system. The sight of five hundred lamps casting pools of orange-tinted light on the snow at a flick of Edison’s wrist was all the evidence necessary. “I don’t believe you could buy a share of this stock for love or money,” one of them remarked.108

  Edison had recovered his good humor by now, and drew an aide’s attention to the sight of the great “J.P.” leaning thoughtfully against one of the laboratory worktables and flicking his shoes with an ivory-topped umbrella. “Hammer, look at Morgan, you would not think he had $100,000 in this, would you?”109

  From then on Drexel, Morgan & Co. acted as the Illuminating Company’s bankers, promoted its interests abroad, and managed Edison’s personal portfolio.110

  As expected, the new mayoral administration of William Grace proved avid for tax money in return for its blessing on the First District lighting scheme. Its initial demand was for more than $1,056 per mile of street conduits, plus a 3 percent share of all gross receipts once the system commenced business. But Morgan’s lobbying power was formidable, and the city eventually settled for a mere trench fee of five cents per linear foot. Its only other demand was that Edison reimburse the cost of having inspectors on site at all times during the installation period. (He was soon to find out that “at all times” meant a brief appearance on payday.) Otherwise he was free to start laying tubes as soon as the ground of lower Manhattan thawed.111