Before he transferred the bulk of his operation there, he wanted his systems analyst, Charles Clarke, to conduct a rigorous test of the whole Menlo Park system, to be sure that it could be economically duplicated to scale in New York.112 It was not necessary to include the new Porter-Allen engine, which had at last been delivered but not yet set up in the machine shop. He had other plans for it. In the meantime his old eighty-horsepower Brown unit, linked to eleven dynamos, could be trusted to drive the test.
As the most mathematical intellect on Edison’s staff, Clarke rejoiced in the algebra that thickened in his logbooks after the system powered up at 9:22 P.M. on 28 January.113 The ciphers 772t (W + wS + W1s) signified to him that a calorimeter had obtained the full value of the economy of the lamps under observation, while a certain amount of energy was being lost in the conductors. Edison was happy to take his word for it, and even happier to accept Clarke’s conclusion, at the end of the twelve-hour test, that all aspects of the system, from the “clear, free-burning egg coal” in the boiler to the last light in thirty-nine thousand feet of circuitry, were well coordinated. The most important figure in Clarke’s final report was a ratio of 7.25 lamps per horsepower, substantially better than that of gas, and he did not doubt that with improvements in dynamo design it could be increased. Delighted, Edison told him, “After this we will make electric light so cheap that only the rich will be able to burn candles.”114
YOUNG LADIES WHIRLED
January gave way to February, and the young men of Menlo Park, several of whom were now married, braced to hear which of them would shortly be ordered to find quarters in the city. For a year or two at least and perhaps forever, the Old Man was going to have to change his country hats for the bowlers and stovepipes of fashionable Manhattan. (Mr. Morgan wanted an Edison lighting plant in his house, and so did Mr. Vanderbilt.)115
Mary Edison—twenty-five years old, mother of three, universally liked for her sweet nature, if not her love of loud clothes—had as much reason as any to have conflicting feelings about the looming change.116 Her big house was the village’s social center, while she had only one good friend in New York. She was by no means a country girl, having grown up in Newark, and since she enjoyed spending money, her husband’s intent to reside on Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, not far from the couturiers and confectioners of “Ladies’ Mile,” sounded agreeable. But her working-class background might “show” more, in such a milieu, than it did in Menlo Park. Marion and Tom would no longer be able to roam freely about the countryside and make themselves pesky in their father’s laboratory. They would require a governess in town, not to mention a nanny for William, aged two. Mary would miss the live-in companionship of her sister Alice, who was sweet on William Holzer the glassblower, and she would not be able to drive twelve miles down the turnpike to see her parents whenever she felt like it.117
Edison had no intention of cutting all local ties, as long as the lamp factory, railway, and machine shop kept running. The laboratory too could be maintained by a skeleton staff, until he found a substitute location in town. And the house with its adjoining green fields would make a pleasant summer retreat, remote as that prospect might seem in the middle of a particularly white winter.
Mary made the most of her last days at home by doing what she loved to do—dress up and entertain. A reporter from The New York Herald, sent out to view the laboratory’s closing display of lamps, wrote a description of the little world she was about to leave behind:
Mrs. Edison’s parlors were brilliant indeed….You do not know what the Edison electric light in a house is until you have seen the pendant globes, spreading uninterrupted radiance on all beneath and around. There was a merry company, full of life and triumph. An Italian gentleman sang a Neapolitan impromptu to his own accompaniment. Young ladies whirled in the waltz….We went down to the depot, and as the train came thundering by to bring us to the city, the jingle of sleigh bells rang over the snow from near the Professor’s house, for there is no pleasure at Menlo Park like sleighing by electric lights when the public has gone away.118
YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN HER RUN
The Menlo Park diaspora began on 5 February with the departure of Charles Batchelor for Paris. He was charged with preparing an exhibit for the great Exposition Internationale d’Électricité, to be held in that city later in the year.119
Edison had hesitated before agreeing to take space in the show,120 just when he should be establishing himself in New York and beginning the biggest practical task of his career. But it would be the first such event devoted entirely to the science and technology of electricity. Maxim and Swan were bound to be there, attempting to dazzle the public and the press with their imitation lamps. There would be demonstrations, medals, and worldwide publicity. Edison did not see how he could avoid participating—except to send the all-capable “Batch” to deputize for him.
With Batchelor gone, and Upton put in charge of the lamp factory—now incorporated as the Edison Electric Lamp Company—the question arose as to who would become the boss’s new right-hand man. It did not remain unsettled for long. Two mornings after Batchelor sailed, Edison, bursting with energy and excitement, shouted across the laboratory at Charles L. Clarke, “Come on, Clarke; pack up at once and come with me to New York. We’re going to begin business right off!”121
By noon they were walking into a four-story, double-width brownstone at 65 Fifth Avenue. Edison announced it as the new headquarters of the Edison Electric Light Company.
“The company has made you chief engineer,” he said, rushing Clarke upstairs. “This is your office, the furniture will be here this afternoon. Furniture for your living room upstairs will be here too—I want you on hand all the time!”122
The brownstone quickly became known as “65.” It stood on the east side of the avenue just south of Fourteenth Street, its sixteen tall windows unfurling striped awnings against the afternoon sun—which at this time of the year set, symbolically enough, over Menlo Park.123
Edison could have moved his family into a suite on the top floor. But he chose to use it as a laboratory and looked for an apartment elsewhere, pending a house rental somewhere in the neighborhood.*26 For the rest of that month Mary and the children remained in the country, while he supervised the transfer of staff and equipment across the Hudson.
As Edison’s behavior with Clarke indicated, he was in one of his periods of cyclonic overcharge, excited by the project ahead of him much as a dynamo is “excited” by connection to a start-up machine. The comparison became actual on the twenty-eighth, when he and Clarke reunited at Menlo Park for an experiment that nearly became the last for both of them.
One integer of Edison’s central station plan—the most important of all—was still unsatisfactory: its generation plant. Eleven bipolar dynamos had been able to handle the demands of the model system and electric railway, but a plant many times more powerful would be needed to light up the First District. He had realized this since last spring, when he assigned Upton and Clarke, his two experts in electromagnetic theory, to build him a dynamo with sixteen times the capacity of any previously made. The spinning armature alone would weigh one and a half tons.124
It was for this leviathan that he needed his hundred-horsepower Porter-Allen steam engine. Clarke believed that the optimum rotor speed for the new dynamo should be 350 revolutions per minute. Edison, just to make sure, had asked Charles T. Porter to build a machine fast enough to drive a locomotive. Part of the delay in delivery lay in his extra demand that the engine be configured to couple directly with the dynamo by means of a mutual shaft, in a union of steam and electricity sure to incite coarse jokes among the “boys.”
Hitherto all generators had been linked to their driving engines indirectly, through geared wheels and belting. Edison saw that much energy was lost that way. He was hoping that direct transfer, high speed, and low internal resistance might giv
e him as much as 90 percent efficiency, rather than the 60 percent generally considered the limit any electrical engineer could expect from a dynamo.125 But the imponderable was vibration—hence the two-foot depth of the Porter-Allen’s cast iron bed, and the massiveness of its foundation in the machine shop.
The combined unit was now assembled and ready to test at Menlo Park.126 Charles Porter, summoned from Philadelphia, was given the honor of operating his own engine. Feeling too nervous to do so at close quarters, he attached a chain to the throttle and backed away as far as possible before pulling it. Steam pressure built up slowly while Edison, stopwatch in hand, kept calling for more power. Then the governor took hold, and the dynamo accelerated at a compound rate until, in Clarke’s words, “all the moving parts became a blur like that produced by flies’ wings.” Not only the foundation but the entire shale hillside began to shake underfoot. If any Wagnerian had been present, he might have called it der Erdenton, the bass note of all creation, but there was only Edison, stopwatch in hand, yelling “Hup…hup.”127
Clarke could feel the hair rising on his neck. At Edison’s signal he activated the speed indicator and found that the dynamo was spinning at 750 RPM. That being dangerously close to its disintegration point, Porter was allowed to throttle the engine down. Clarke was not happy with the performance of the armature, but Edison felt confident, now, that he had a prototype for six even larger dynamos to install in his central station. Years later he boasted to the editor of Electrical Review about the time he nearly maxed out a big Porter-Allen: “You should have seen her run! Why, every time the connecting rod went up she tried to lift the whole hill with her!”128
A PRIVATE SECRETARY BEYOND PRICE
Edison installed his family in the Chipman Boarding House at 72 Fifth Avenue on 1 March 1881. It was a date that coincided with the entry into his life of Samuel Insull, fresh off a steamer from England. Twenty-one years old, short and skinny and side-whiskered, with popping eyes and a humorless manner acquired from reading the motivational tomes of Samuel Smiles (Self-Help; Character; Thrift; Duty), Insull did not look like a youth destined to become one of the richest men on earth. However, he came highly recommended by Edward Johnson, who had known him in London and thought Edison could use someone with a bookkeeper’s brain to take charge of his personal and financial affairs.129
Insull was well qualified, having worked as the factotum of Edison’s chief European representative, Col. George Gouraud. During that time he had become a passionate subscriber to the Edison legend, and could have dreamed of no greater good luck than to be hired sight unseen by “one of the great master minds of the world.” Johnson escorted him up the steps of “65” and introduced him to Edison in the bare back office. Insull’s first reaction was surprise that anyone so famous would wear a seedy black three-piece suit and rough brown overcoat. But the face over the carelessly knotted white silk neckerchief was unforgettable. “What struck me above everything else was the wonderful intelligence and magnetism of his expression, and the extreme brightness of his eyes.”130
That same night, Insull discovered that his new boss was something of a child about money. Edison pulled out his checkbook and revealed without embarrassment that he had $78,000 cash in the bank. Which of his European telephone securities, he asked, should he sell in order to capitalize three private ventures right away—a bigger lamp factory, a works for the production of dynamos, and a company to lay tubes under the streets of New York?131
Insull was able to answer on the spot, because he had made it his business to read all Edison’s contracts passing through Gouraud’s office. He had a photographic memory for stocks and shares, and told Johnson, who was returning to Europe to handle the transactions, exactly which ones to divest and where. Edison had, for example, a reversionary interest in the United Telephone Company of London worth around $100,000, and he might get as much again from a deal Gouraud was trying to swing with the Bell Company in the Far East. By four o’clock in the morning Insull had been through Edison’s books and compiled a schedule of foreign patent rights as collateral against which further funds could be borrowed. If Edison was not yet assured by this performance that he had acquired a private secretary beyond price, then he was by Insull’s ability to work through the night without apparent fatigue. A mutual contempt for the clock was to prove their strongest bond in the years to come.132
FACTORIES OR DEATH
Charles Clarke thought that Edison’s impatience to start up three manufacturing adjuncts to the central station project, all independent of the Electric Light Company, was due to his “bull-like” overconfidence. He blamed himself for reporting so favorably on the Menlo Park system that the Old Man assumed it would work just as well when duplicated on a huge scale downtown.133 By the same token, any small problems he had glossed over were likely to loom large.
Actually Edison already felt around his neck the “leaden collar” of corporate caution, personified by Sherburne B. Eaton, general manager and vice-president of the company. Eaton was a Civil War veteran who liked to be called “Major,” and though small, occupied the largest office at “65.” Even before they each moved in, Eaton had made it plain that his fellow directors believed their prime asset to be the patents they had acquired from Edison in 1878, in return for financing his development of the electric light. The time for experiments, Eaton’s neat little goatee seemed to say, was now over, and the company’s last great investment must be in construction of the First District.134 If it was as successful as Edison promised it would be, cities around the world would clamor to replicate it, and his patents would become so priceless that he would never need lay another cable.
Consequently, most board members were opposed to getting into the manufacturing business, which they viewed as an unnecessary indulgence. They had put more than $130,000 into Edison’s scheme without seeing so much as a cobble lifted downtown. Budget watchers at Drexel, Morgan failed to see why tubes and dynamos could not be bought instead of being expensively custom-made. Nor could they understand why he would want another lamp factory. The one at Menlo was blowing one thousand bulbs a day, and madake filaments were coming out of the ovens uniformly carbonized after being packed in with peat moss.135
Edison believed that it would be profitable in the long run to manufacture every part of the central station system. He was so convinced of this that he did not quail even when told that he would have to pay the Electric Light Company for the right to use his own patents. It was worth it in order to keep control of the whole operation. In any case, who but he could make things that nobody else had ever made—switchboards, regulators, current indicators, conduits, feeder-and-main junction boxes, connectors, meters, and house wiring, down to the very sockets that held his lamps?136
“Since capital is timid,” he told Major Eaton, “I will raise and supply it. The issue is factories or death.”137
Insull had no sooner snatched his first few hours of sleep in America than he found himself being hustled down to 104 Goerck Street, near the East River, to see the first of these facilities—an immense old iron-making shop now emblazoned EDISON MACHINE WORKS in letters three feet high. Edison had leased, refurbished, and equipped it for $65,000, contributing 90 percent of that sum himself, and Charles Batchelor was putting up the rest.*27, 138
In view of what Insull already knew about Edison’s finances, he uttered no protest when he heard that he was to be paid only $100 a month, half what he had earned in London. His discretion was rewarded. As Edison proceeded to organize subsidiary after subsidiary in years following, Insull was appointed corporate secretary of all of them, and each paid him a salary to match. He even received, unasked for, a stock bonus of $15,000 after twelve months’ service. “If you pushed Edison in money matters, he was as stingy as hell, but if you left the matter to him he was as generous as a prince.”139
Another immediate start-up was the Electric Tube Company, to be run o
ut of a shop on Washington Street by John Kruesi. It began to wire up subscriber buildings as soon as the city issued its ordinance of approval on 19 April. The franchise, negotiated by Grosvenor Lowrey, could hardly have been broader. It gave Edison the right to “lay tubes, wires, conductors and insulators, and to erect lamp-posts within the lines of the streets and avenues, parks and public places of the City of New York, for conveying and using electricity or electrical currents for purposes of illumination.” He could do so not only in his chosen First District but in another one uptown if he wanted.140
In the same month two veterans of Edison’s earliest days in Manhattan, Edward Johnson and the fabricator Sigmund Bergmann, partnered to form Bergmann & Co., with a contract “to produce electric-light fixtures”—switches, bulb-holders, panels, meters—that were too small for the mighty machines on Goerck Street. Edison contributed almost half the firm’s capital, much more than Johnson’s 12 percent, but as with the Tube Company, he took no titular credit—possibly to prevent his corporate backers from thinking he was spreading himself too thin.
However, when he put $5,000 cash down in early May on another vast complex in East Newark, New Jersey, reserving it for lamp production once the Menlo Park factory became too small, his pride in the basic bulb that had triggered all this expansion could not be suppressed. The factory—three massive wings linked with bridges, covering a whole city block—was acquired for $52,250 under the aegis of the Edison Electric Lamp Company.141 As such it constituted the fourth and final arm of his new industrial empire.*28
Edison Page 45