Edison
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There remained only the purchase of a suitable structure to house his central station in lower Manhattan. Edison may not have been much of a money man, but he had a nose for real estate. It led him in more respects than one to the leather-trade corridor of Pearl Street. That part of the First District was especially aromatic in warming spring weather, because most of the ninety elevators that serviced its warehouses were horse-drawn. Drays ridden by boys could be seen on the flat rooftops, patrolling back and forth as bales of hides rose and fell. How the horses got up there was a question that Edison could investigate once he had made a deal to buy numbers 255 and 257, two conjoined four-story buildings on a lot five thousand feet square. He paid $65,000 on behalf of the Electric Illuminating Company, a pittance compared to what he would have had to shell out had Pearl Street been closer to the banking houses of Wall Street, five blocks away. But besides price, the site had the virtue of being—as required—central to the district, and the money he had saved buying it would enable him to reconfigure the buildings as extensively as he liked.142
He saw at once that the second floor of number 257 might collapse under the weight of the six dynamo-engine combinations he meant to install. Nor could he trust the north and south walls to support the heavy girders that would support them: what was necessary was for Clarke to build a complete internal wrought-iron bridge, almost as massive as an elevated railway. Beneath it, a battery of boilers would supply steam heat to the engines, and they would be fed by continuous conveyance of coal up from the basement. On the third floor he would place his voltage regulators, and on the fourth a bank of one thousand load-monitoring lamps would glow at all times. (The big advantage he had over the gaslight companies was that his power could be drawn on during the day, by sewing machines and the like.) The twin building next door at number 255 would serve for service, sleeping quarters, and storage.143
By 27 May Edison, working with manic energy, had started every project necessary to complete the First District within (he hoped) six or seven months. As yet all this peripheral activity—administrative planning at “65,” lamp production at Menlo Park, dynamo assembly at the Works, Kruesi casting miles of conductor pipes in a shop on Washington Street, Bergmann rattling out auxiliary appliances on Wooster—was ragged and unconnected, like the slow start of a storm system. But momentum was building, and concentration would come, until everything converged on the switch he would throw—with luck, sometime in November—to begin the incandescent illumination of the world.
THE BALLS OF THE FIRMAMENT
“Boulevard St Antoine that damnable merchants of inhumanity Citenian wharfrats. Why Centenus dost run a line already greased from Sirus to Capella with angularity,” Edison scrawled in the midst of a laboratory notebook otherwise full of engineering data, “whereon ten million devils slide down to the fathermost sag and piss into pendemonum.”144
He was either recounting a dream, or teasing Charles Hughes, the main keeper of the notebook, into thinking that he had lost his wits, or—more likely—amusing himself by seeing how much nonsense his pencil would write before the point wore down. “Tell me winged soldier of Hell if in the farthermost ends of infinity warted demons with carvernous mouths spit saliva on the balls of the firmament….”145
Some of the imagery in this stream of consciousness—the Rue Saint-Antoine, the wharf rats, the warted demons—pointed to the Paris of his favorite novelist, Victor Hugo.146 The jets of saliva might as well have related to something of contemporary concern to him: a report that workers at the lamp factory were salivating excessively as they worked the pumps. That was a sure sign of mercury poisoning. Much else, including references to water closets in the underworld and men sleeping on telegraph poles, sounded like deliberate nonsense, unless it related somehow to the work he planned downtown.
Edison completed four pages, ending with an assertion that Thomas De Quincey, “had he a brain 300 miles in diameter full of opium,” could never have comprehended the passion of the lovers in Longfellow’s poem Evangeline—another of his favorites. Then he flipped the last page, scratched a tight, symmetrical zigzag, and left his screed for posterity to puzzle over.147
LA GRANDE GÉNÉRATRICE
As it happened, opium was a problem in his own family. Mary took so much of it, in the form of medicinal morphine, that her friends feared she might one day take too much. She was often plagued with neuralgia, that common complaint of housebound nineteenth-century women,148 and when it struck, she could not rely on her peripatetic husband to nurse her.*29
Edison was closemouthed about Mary in public, and only on the rarest occasions hinted, obliquely to intimates, that she was the girl he should have left behind. After meeting Kate Armour, the gifted young Canadian his attorney had married, he burst out with, “Why is it, Lowrey, that so few women have brains?”149
The question excluded Kate, whom he took to at once and presented with one of his souvenir calligraphed notes: “How do you do my dear Miss Armor? The Electric Light is a success, take my word for it.” Lowrey was surprised and told Kate, “I never heard him refer to any woman the second time.” He liked Mary but thought her ill equipped to be the helpmeet of a genius. “Edison’s experience,” he confided, “is of the slightest and poorest.”150
For the moment Mary seemed well enough. She took full advantage of the stores along Ladies’ Mile, wearing ever more brilliant outfits and parading Marion in party dresses of nile green or yellow satin, with hand-painted flowers.151 She loved going to the theaters and music halls, and even bought tickets to the occasional society ball, but her husband invariably bowed out on account of his deafness, so she had to rely on the company of friends.
It was fortunate for Edison, busier than he had ever been,*30 that Mary had the house at Menlo Park to retreat to when the weather warmed in Manhattan. Her absence across the river this summer enabled him to supervise preparations at the Machine Works for the imminent international exposition in Paris. Ever since his decision to participate, Charles Batchelor had been working to fill two halls of the Palais de Champs-Élysées with a display of all his electrical inventions to date—the vote recorder, the duplex and quadruplex and octoplex telegraphs, the electric pen, the phonograph, the tasimeter, and dozens of others—all to be bathed in the incandescence of his latest and greatest. And the pièce de résistance was to be a dynamo even bigger than the one that had shaken the hillside at Menlo.152
Resistance, indeed, was key to its performance. Edison’s theory of generator design was that the larger the armature, the fewer ohms would inhibit its flow of current. Accordingly he gave it a spinning core of laminated iron and heavy copper bars connected in pairs, fore and aft, to aureole-shaped copper “tits.”153 The field magnet, nearly six feet long, consisted of eight solid iron cylinders, each wound with more than two thousand turns of insulated copper wire.154 Rotational power was applied directly, as to the dynamo’s predecessor. But because the fast Porter-Allen engine had never worked well in a close embrace, causing dynamos to spark and build up heat, Edison ordered a 125-horsepower Armington & Sims unit that would run slower and, with luck, cooler.155
When all the components of this colossus were bolted together at the Works, its thirty-ton bulk inspired awe. It measured fourteen feet in length and towered taller than Francis Upton. Edison had spared no expense to perfect it, even gold-plating lugs and screws to lower resistance. Energy reduced to essence, it was a thing of brutal beauty, with all the basic forms of geometry massed around the invisible confluence of electrical and magnetic waves. But when tested at the end of June, it too got hot and sparked, with arcs cracking between adjacent induction bars. Edison began to lose hope that the machine would be ready in time for the opening of the exposition on 11 August. He ordered an emergency reconstruction and rewinding of the armature, deploying two shifts of fifty-five and sixty workers around the clock for eight days. While they dismantled the core, he filled twenty-thre
e pages of his notebook with wiring diagrams of almost astronomical beauty.156
Eventually he settled on a combination of slimmer bars painted with zinc white, wrapped in japanned paper, and cooled by a fan blowing air through the interstices. Voltage dropped as a result, so he added two extra electromagnets to the upper field cores. This threw the circuit somewhat out of alignment, but restored tension to the point that the dynamo efficiently lit seven hundred lamps at 350 revolutions per minute.157 But he made a mistake in amalgamating the commutator and brushes with an excess of mercury, to keep resistance to a minimum. Those surfaces oxidized in time and threw off such clouds of toxic vapor that attendants at the Works salivated as badly as their mates in the lamp factory.158
Shell winding for Edison’s large magneto dynamo, February 1879.
He solved the problem by reamalgamating often and polishing with the care of a silversmith.*31 That lowered resistance to less than one-hundredth of an ohm. But so many other “bugs” required fixing that Charles Batchelor, representing him at the exposition, had to fall back on two smaller dynamos to illuminate the Edison rooms. Opening day came and went. Visitors hoping to see la grande génératrice d’Edison were told they might have to wait another month before it could be exhibited.159
By the end of August it seemed ready to ship. Edison had to go west to pick up Mary, who had been taken ill on a family visit to Port Huron.160 Some instinct prompted him to test the dynamo one more time before he left. No sooner had it powered up than the crankshaft shattered and flew across the room. Fortunately no one was killed. He examined the broken iron, cursing, and was amazed to see that Armington & Sims had failed to anneal it.161
When he got back from Michigan early in September, the dynamo was working again with a new steel shaft and was at last ready to ship. It was booked on the French liner Canada, departing 7 September for Le Havre. With only four hours to go before the hold closed, sixty Machine Works employees disassembled the dynamo and packed it into 137 crates, while Edison leaned on Tammany Hall to give his delivery trucks quick passage to the loading dock. Police held up traffic, and a fire bell cleared the way as the horses sped across town. Stevedores were waiting at the Compagnie générale transatlantique pier. The last box was taken aboard with an hour to spare.162
“FIVE GOLD MEDALS”
As things turned out, he need not have hurried. The Paris exposition, plagued by power problems, had not so much opened as half-opened, offering only dull or dark displays at first, except for a bluish mix of arc and incandescent light near the ground-floor entrance. Edison’s lamps at least shone steadily, if not strongly, while Batchelor and William Hammer coaxed as much current as they could out of the main line at their disposal. The arrival of the great dynamo from America on 23 September caused widespread excitement, since it was four times the size of any generator yet seen in Europe. Edison had given it the model mark C, to distinguish it from his smaller bipolars, but because of its elephantine proportions, it soon acquired the nickname “Jumbo.”163
When it brought Edison’s exquisite lamp displays to full brilliancy, a tone of rueful admiration crept into the commentaries of French scientific writers, who for the last couple of years had vied with their British colleagues in mocking the promises of le solitaire de Menlo-Park. They could hardly avoid seeing that he had put together all the elements of a complete lighting system—as opposed to Swan and Maxim, who exhibited lamps and chandeliers only. “Edison is not a myth,” Le Figaro had to admit. Henri de Parville wrote in Le Journal des débats, “Times have certainly changed. All doubts are gone. Those who want physical evidence, like Saint Thomas, can see his lamps now with their own eyes.”164
Edison’s “Jumbo” dynamo at the Paris Electrical Exposition, 1881.
Perhaps the most influential of these skeptics was Théodose du Moncel. He published a long article in La Lumière électrique retracting his former dismissal of Edison as a “pompous” poseur—as well he might, because the Electric Light Company was now paying him a thousand francs a month to represent its interests in Europe. Nevertheless, an international panel of examiners found in mid-October that Edison’s bulbs, boosted by his three-thousand-watt power plant, had an efficiency rating of 12.73 lamps per horsepower. Swan’s rated 10.71, little better than those of his compatriot George Lane Fox at 10.61 and Maxim’s, at 9.48.165
On 22 October Grosvenor Lowrey, who was in Paris representing the interests of the Electric Light Company, cabled Edison in New York:
OFFICIAL LIST PUBLISHED TODAY SHOWS YOU IN THE HIGHEST CLASS OF INVENTORS. NO OTHER EXHIBITORS OF ELECTRIC LIGHT IN THAT CLASS, SWAN LANE FOX AND MAXIM RECEIVE MEDALS IN CLASS BELOW. THE SUB-JURIES HAD VOTED YOU FIVE GOLD MEDALS BUT GENERAL CONGRESS PROMOTED YOU TO THE DIPLOMA OF HONOR CLASS ABOVE. THIS IS COMPLETE SUCCESS THE CONGRESS HAVING NOTHING HIGHER TO GIVE.166
Almost simultaneously another cable arrived at 65:
EDISON N.Y.—YOU HAVE RECEIVED THE HIGHEST AWARD THE JURY HAD TO GIVE. I CONGRATULATE YOU.
JOSEPH W. SWAN*32, 167
BOTH OF THEM DIED
Edison received the news of his five medals without comment. He was at work on another generator—“Jumbo No. 2”—even bigger than the one in Paris. Edward Johnson had ordered it for an exhibition to be held at the Crystal Palace, London, in January 1882. A New York Times reporter was given the honor of a private demonstration in the Machine Works. It took place at four in the morning, an hour more convenient to his host than to himself.168
“You are seeing what nobody else ever witnessed before tonight,” Edison said, rubbing his hands with glee as a rheostat turned and row after row of lamps ignited on the test room’s high ceiling. “A thousand electric lights, all from one dynamo.” The armature accelerated to 360 RPM, flickering with an electric nimbus so strangely colored that the Times man could only describe it as “indescribable.”169
It would be equally hard for any chronicler to find words for the blur of energy that Edison himself had now become. Thirty-five and at his mental and physical peak, he was everywhere and nowhere to those who tried to keep up with him or merely corner him long enough to get a recall of the old Menlo Park experimenter, always willing to stop and chat, doodle out tunes on the organ, and swap lunch boxes—even, on occasion, shutting up shop, renting a boat, and taking the “boys” out fishing off Sandy Hook. Over and above medals, he had gotten what he most wanted from the exposition—international respect.
This, however, did not help him much in downtown New York, where Kruesi’s Electric Tube Company was finding the work of completing the First District’s distribution system almost prohibitively slow. The businessmen and householders who had signed up for electric lighting were wired up and waiting to see and smell the last of their gas mantles. But the city would not allow the laying of mains and feeders under the streets during the day, and the delayed delivery of copper cable and parts had prevented a start to nighttime excavations until the fall. A troop of Irish navvies was racing to dig as many trenches as possible before the subsoil froze. Edison saw that he would have to abandon his dream of illuminating the District in November, and that he would be lucky to do so within the next year.170
The navvies had fifteen miles of iron pipes to connect, twice that length of half-moon conductors to thread, hot insulation compound to pour, and heavy junction boxes to bolt down, toiling beneath harsh arc lamps and enduring the ire of pedestrians who wanted to know why current could not be distributed via overhead wires. It was difficult for them to understand that something as bodiless as electricity needed protection. The work was filthy and dangerous, with accidental gas leaks and at least one short-circuit that lifted a passing horse off the wet cobbles.171
Edison often helped out in the trenches, as if his own muscle would accelerate the Tube Company’s forward progress of no more than a mile a week. He rejoiced in hard labor and often did not go home to
sleep. Instead he napped on the spare tubes that Kruesi stored in the cellar at number 255, half-fulfilling his fantasy of men who slept on telegraph poles. He did not seem to care that the iron rounds were tarry and striped his overcoat. Nor was he bothered by the damp as winter approached. “I had two Germans who were testing there,” he reported, “and both of them died of diphtheria.”172
In contrast to these nights downtown, he enjoyed cerebral evenings at Delmonico’s with a new friend, the great Hungarian violinist Edouard Reményi. They could hardly have come together from cultures farther apart, but to Reményi, Edison’s technological talk was a new kind of music. “Since I was with Victor Hugo and Liszt,” he wrote after one of their dialogues, “I was never so much in intellectual heaven.”173 He jokingly appointed himself “court musician” at the Machine Works, as he had once been at Windsor Palace, and treated Edison to several private recitals there and at 65, weeping as he played. When Edison asked why, he said, “I always weep when I hear really good music.”*33, 174
By November the Works had geared up to the extent that it had a backlog of well over 130 smaller generators for sale, along with successors to the giant Paris and London machines. This contrasted with a double decline in productivity and quality at the Lamp Company in Menlo Park. Edison resolved on “a grand bounce of the bugs” before he moved that facility to its new quarters in East Newark. He recrossed the river and within eight days had lengthened lamp life from four hundred hours to six hundred. “I had just 18 hours sleep that week without my boots being off.” Not trusting Francis Upton to improve on his improvement, he elected to stay at the Park all winter if necessary, until his bulbs were twice as energy-efficient as they had been.175