Edison had encountered the phenomenon of “hunting”—the contrary torques of a rotary machine searching for a balance between the mechanical power applied to it and the electromagnetic forces inside it. But stability is key. The boards beneath the Pearl Street generators rested on a bridge of cast iron. Strong as it was, it stood free of the walls, transmitting the vibrations of each dynamo downward, in the same direction as gravity operated the Porter-Allen engine governors. They were extra sensitive and, confused by the electrical connections between dynamos that let one run as a generator one moment and as a motor the next, began to hunt wildly for equilibrium. The result was changes of speed in one dynamo that conflicted with changes in the other. It was a tussle between elephants no trainer could handle, complete with deep groans and shrieks. Edison was lucky not to lose his station.210
For once in his life he needed a slug of liquor and went across the street with Edward Johnson to get one. “Am I to drink the whole of that?” he asked as he watched the glass being topped up.
“Yes,” Johnson said.211
The next issue of the Electric Light Company’s promotional bulletin made no mention of the near-catastrophe but admitted that there had been problems at Pearl “of a peculiarly mechanical nature relating to the imperfect regulation of the engines.” Edison solved the problem by devising a tubular connecting shaft, full of trapped torsion, that brought the Porter-Allens into sync, but he thought it wise to order new engines with more centrifugally weighted governors from Armington & Sims. Meanwhile the station continued to operate, as it would do, with only two short service breaks, for the rest of the decade.212
NOW THAT IT LIVES
The transfer of a personal library from one home to another is always, for an intellectual, a sign of irreversible change, and for an inventor, a transfer of test tubes and precision instruments amounts to the same thing. Edison accomplished both at the end of September 1882, taking a two-year lease on a gray stone townhouse at 25 Gramercy Park and opening a new laboratory on the top floor of the Bergmann factory at Avenue B and Seventeenth Street in Manhattan. For the time being he held on to his country house but said that “because of the women constantly bothering him,” he would henceforth operate out of New York.213
Mary Edison was no doubt a member of this female lobby, along with his daughter and Mary’s younger sister Eugenia, a recent addition to the Edison ménage. Marion, at nine and a half, had endured a year in boarding school and looked forward to the more pleasant prospect of living with her parents in the most fashionable quarter of the city, while she and Tom attended Mlle. de Janon’s “English and French School for Young Ladies and Children” nearby.*38, 214
Edison grumbled to Insull about preferring life across the river, but the young man was not fooled. “Johnson and myself are of the opinion that it is six of one and half a dozen of the other,” he wrote Charles Batchelor, “and that he wants to come in just as much as the women do.”215
The lease on Edison’s new home included furniture and fittings but not, apparently, many books. To supplement those he brought from Menlo Park, he ordered sets of the novels of Dickens, George Eliot, Hugo, Cooper, and Hawthorne, as well as Don Quixote, Gil Blas, Longfellow’s complete poems, Macaulay’s essays, and a number of other volumes—“good solid binding only nothing fancy.” The house had been Mary’s choice out of nineteen other properties available, but he felt a sense of grand design when he explored the attic and found the private diary of Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraphic code that had once been—still was—his second language.216
The last woman to “bother” him in 1882 he scarcely knew and could not have cared less about, except that a New Jersey state court found on 18 December that he owed her $5,065. She was Mrs. Lucy Seyfert, and she based her claim on a promissory note he had written six years before while raising capital for the Automatic Telegraph Company. Edison remembered the note but also that it had not then been held by her. The blood of old Sam Edison, a compulsive litigant, arose in his veins, and he declined to pay. As a result, the case was referred for trial at the New Jersey Supreme Court.217
Except for that unpleasantness, promising more discord later, the year rang out happily for Edison. It would be a while yet before all the lighting enterprises he had started became profitable or even proved themselves individually viable. The Pearl Street project in particular had years to go before it would return a dime of its $600,000 capitalization. Its growth rate from four hundred subscriber lights in September to nearly five thousand in December looked impressive, but offering people power for free at first had much to do with their willingness to wire up. Still, there was no mistaking the admiration with which Britain’s newspaper of record recognized the “constant and equal” amperage put out by the central station and the superior effulgence of Edison’s bulbs over any manufactured in England. The success of his system, declared The Times, “is now beyond question.”218
Another money loser for the moment was the Edison Electric Lamp Company. Its hugely expensive factory in Newark was not yet at the break-even point of producing fifteen hundred bulbs a day. Each one had to go through two hundred delicate processes before shipping and sale, at forty cents apiece—a price that was sure to come down as output cranked up.219 Lamp life and lamp quality were steadily improving. If the plant ever reached its intended capacity of forty-two thousand bulbs a day, the rate it was designed for, it might well relabel itself the First Edison Bank of New Jersey.
The Machine Works (which Batchelor had successfully duplicated at Ivry-sur-Seine in France) had the contrary problem of being so productive that it was warehousing seven unsold jumbo dynamos—“very heavy stuff for us to carry,” Insull complained, with his English tendency to make lame puns. Despite this $140,000 liability, it was at least in the black and had already paid Edison $38,000, the first decent stash he had pocketed all year.220
By far the most lucrative of his start-ups was the Edison Company for Isolated Lighting. One hundred and thirty-seven domestic or small-business plants were now on its books, all running Edison dynamos and burning Edison lights. The most prestigious of these was in J. P. Morgan’s midtown mansion on Madison Avenue, where it short-circuited frequently, set fire to the mogul’s desk, frightened his horses, and drew noise complaints from neighbors, but otherwise gave complete satisfaction.221 Better reports came from distant locations, none more remote than a sawmill at Yväskylä, Russia, north of the sixty-second parallel. The town councilors were so pleased with its light that they had voted to upgrade to a central station. In the shipyards of Glasgow, Scotland, crowds queued in drenching December rain to tour a new Edison-illuminated steamer. Even its shaft tunnelway was aglow.222
Edison foresaw many corporate problems in the immediate future, as he sought to lean on the Electric Light Company directorate for more central station capital and they looked for easier money by offering “help” with his independent companies. He wrote in a draft memorandum to the English Light Company, “I have nursed the baby so far & I believe I can continue to do so without any extraneous aid, especially from those who said the baby would never be born & when born would never live, & now that it lives wants to change the manner of nursing. If I should fail in any particular it will then be time to call in other inventors.”223
IS NOT A PATRON
Except for another Florida vacation with his family, which he cut short before February was out, Edison was not seen much in public in the early months of 1883. He luxuriated in the spaciousness of his sixth-floor laboratory in the Bergmann building, discovering, typically, that the elevator ride up there lasted as long as it took him to wind his watch. When he held the grilled stem against the shaft column as he rose, he saved his thumb and forefinger much labor and arrived at the top fully wound.*39, 224
He had become so identified with electric light innovation since 1880 that occasional news reports noted, almost with surprise, that he
was still capable of inventing other things, such as a horse-drawn truck that scooped up snow, compressed it by 90 percent, and deposited it in the form of neat ice blocks that left the rest of the street clear. He also toyed, for reasons best known to himself, with the idea of vacuum-packing bran. Much to his regret, he had to give up on another device that he had patented out of farthest left field two years before. It was a magnetic iron ore separator, designed to refine the sheets of black sand that covered the beaches of Quogue, Long Island, and Quonochontaug, Rhode Island.225 Major Eaton had become as excited as he at the ferric richness of those deposits, in some places twenty feet deep. Yet the Edison Ore-Milling Company they formed together had never flourished, not least because the sea that had washed up the deposits in the first place kept reclaiming its own. As Edison later groused, “It was too much like taking out a mortgage on a school of herring.”226
The winter somewhat strained his relations with Grosvenor Lowrey, hitherto his best friend on the board of the Electric Light Company. A Wall Street man at heart, Lowrey waved aside the complaints of Edison, Upton, and Johnson that the company was greedy in taking ten cents for every lamp it sold, at cost, for forty cents. Major Eaton, who was now president, darkly hinted that the autonomous manufacturing shops they represented—the Machine Works, plus the Lamp, Tube, Isolated, and Bergmann companies—would be better off under corporate patronage.227
Every hackle Edison possessed rose at this takeover threat. He and his partners signed a joint nonnegotiable declaration of independence, reminding Eaton that the Electric Light Company had been ungenerous to them back in the days when they were trying to capitalize their shops. The letter was drafted by Johnson, who may have recalled the cry of another Johnson, to another plutocrat, 127 years before: “Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?”228
AMERICAN CERTAINTY
“How your genial—delightful light spreads—and it spreads—and spreads and spreads,” Edouard Reményi wrote Edison from Lincoln, Nebraska, on 25 April. He had just attended a banquet where he had basked in the double glow of Edison lamps and his own intimacy with the man who had made them: “I—old fiddler I brag that I am your faithful and affectionate friend and your court musician.”229
Edison was aware of the spread himself. He had already taken steps to go after the “Village Plant Biz” by forming the Thomas A. Edison Construction Department, an independent company that would install cheap, overhead-strung central lighting systems in the provinces. Although the name of his new venture was strange—how could a department be a company?—and seemed contrived to disguise its purpose, he headquartered it at 65, as if to reprove Major Eaton for not being more interested in central stations outside New York.230
He wrote to tell Edward Johnson, who had gone back to London to straighten out the tangled affairs of the local Edison Electric Light Company, that it would be as well to let the management there muddle along and come home for good. “Just now we are doing all we can to rush the Village business. There is immediate money and plenty of it in that….Here we can get things done just as we say, and I therefore think that it is better to concentrate our efforts on American certainty rather than an English possibility.”231
Johnson was respected in London and did not want to be seen there as a quitter. He needed a couple of months to finish his task before joining the Construction Department. Besides, he wanted to help a London barrister argue a patent infringement injunction suit Edison had insisted on, against Joseph Swan in the High Court.232 The prospects for a favorable decision were not good, considering that the court building was illuminated with Swan bulbs.
Edison appointed him a partner in absentia, along with Batchelor, Insull, and Eaton, who could hardly be left out. The little major was a good-natured, if cautious person, the sort of gray bureaucrat who burrows molelike into positions of great power. Somehow he had become president not only of the Edison Electric Light Company, but of the Isolated Company too. The cooperation of each was necessary if Edison was to use his own patents for Construction Department projects. In return, the parent company would have a share of the income from every new station that joined the spread of his “delightful light.”233
For Insull—another burrower, but much more aggressive and devious than Eaton—his partnership amounted to a reward for two years of self-sacrificing service to Edison. It came with the proviso that he must handle the new Department’s finances, which were bound to be complex, as well as run its head office, while Johnson functioned as sales director and the Old Man supervised designs and installations. Still, the more power he got, the happier Insull was—especially when Edison agreed to pay him an annual minimum of $2,400 on all regional plant profits, plus a generous 20 percent of the rest. On 3 May Insull also took financial control of the Machine Works, potentially the most lucrative of all Edison’s businesses.*40 The manager of that enterprise “kicked,” he wrote Johnson, but “Edison supported me in a bully fashion & I came out top of the heap.”234
BUSINESS PURE AND SIMPLE
Except for a highly successful, nontaxpaying enterprise undertaken at age twelve, to do with the sale of candy, fruits, and newspapers, Edison had never before acted alone as a businessman. The Construction Department was his own commercial conception and responsibility, launched with $11,000 of his own money and likely to enrich him, or impoverish him, to a far greater extent than it would his partners. For every twenty dollars they won or lost, he would gamble sixty.235 Consequently he had to forsake what he loved most—experimenting and doodling in notebooks—and take on a new identity that shocked many who knew him.
Mary Edison and feathered friends, 1883.
“What has happened to ‘the wizard of Menlo Park?’ ” a Brooklyn Daily Eagle correspondent wrote on 29 July. “The last time I saw Edison he had grown very stout, and no longer wandered around with a misty far off look in his eye and a battered felt hat on his head. Instead he wore a shiny beaver, gold eye glasses, and looked fashionable….Perhaps too much prosperity—for Edison has made a vast fortune—has driven all ideas of inventing out of his head.”236
There were elements of caricature in this description, although Mary Edison had certainly discovered that her abstemious husband had a weakness for pie. She was partial to it herself, as well as to expensive Huyler chocolates, which she ate by the pound.237 Her gowns grew larger and more elaborate by the season. She posed in one brocaded creation for a studio photographer, who needed all the focus he could get to delineate the dead, stuffed, red-and-black birds pinned to her breast and thigh.*41
Edison confirmed in an August interview with The Evening Post that he was taking “a long vacation” from his workbench. “I am going to be simply a businessman for a year….I won’t go near a laboratory.” Sounding more like Insull than himself, he ran off a long list of the contracts the Construction Department had already signed with regional municipalities: “Sunbury, Pa., where we are putting in 500 lights; Shamokin, Pa., 1,600 lights; Brockton, Mass., 1,600 lights; Lowell, Mass., 1,200 lights; Lawrence, Mass, 4,000 lights.” Before he ran out of breath, he had strung imaginary wires across Ohio, Wisconsin, and Minnesota as far west as Davenport, Iowa. “I am so convinced of the system’s success that, as I said before, I have given up inventing and taken to business pure and simple.”238
The trouble with such interviews was that they were read by Edisons less fortunate than he, such as his fifty-two-year-old brother Pitt, a farmer in Port Huron:
Dear Bro
I see by the papers that you are agoing to be a buisness Man for a year…I keep a good man on the farm so it is not nessesary for me to be thare much of the time for a year at least now al can’t you place me somewhere for that time thare is lots of work for me yet I would not care whare I was placed in New York or any whare Else239
; Edison replied, “I think the best thing that you can do is to look out for something where you are.”240
Another reader of the Evening Post article may have been Henry Rowland, the Johns Hopkins professor who had praised the efficiency of his lightbulbs three years before. Edison’s worldly success since then, together with speculation (incorrect, as it turned out) that he was now a millionaire, was evidently on Rowland’s mind when he delivered an impassioned “Plea for Pure Science,” at the August meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Minneapolis. Refusing to dignify such “conveniences” as telegraphs and electric lights by the name of science, he said that money-seeking, manufacture, and the pursuit of fame were hindrances to intellectual progress. “It is not an uncommon thing, especially in American newspapers, to have the applications of science confounded with pure science; and some obscure American who steals the ideas of some great mind of the past, and enriches himself by the application of the same to domestic uses, is often lauded above the great originator, who might have worked out hundreds of such applications, had his mind possessed the necessary element of vulgarity.”241
As Rowland proceeded with his address, it became clear that he was pleading, not for pure science per se, but for more funding for university laboratories—a complaint that would be renewed a century later.242
BOUND BY PRIDE
By now Edward Johnson was back from London. As he expected, the High Court had rejected Edison v. Swan as a suit of no value. Mr. Justice Chitty held that the plaintiff had failed to show any fundamental dissimilarity between his filament and the defendant’s spaghetti-thin carbon rod. Edison’s case would have been stronger if he had not carelessly neglected to describe, in his own application for a British patent, the unique “running on the pumps” method he had devised to suck occluded gases out of a bulb when the carbonized element was first heated in vacuo.243
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