Edison felt that any judge able to see past his wig flaps should understand that there was a difference between a flexible black fibrous hoop that incandesced cleanly, and a brittle stick that smoked up its bulb in less than an hour. (Swan’s more recent parchmentized cotton filament was not part of the priority issue.) Johnson repeated his urgent suggestion that there should be a merger of the Edison and Swan United Electric companies.244
Reluctantly, Edison agreed. But he made it as difficult as possible for Swan to agree too, by insisting that the joint concern “shall be distinguished by my name in its title solely.” He disclaimed, with an ingenuousness sure to make Swan’s representatives groan, “any such feeling as might naturally be imputed to me of wishing to gain in this way a concession as to the disputed claims of Mr. Swan and myself concerning lamp patents.” On the contrary, he would be happy to drop out of the British market altogether, were it not for the importance of having his rights to all other aspects of his system recognized around the world.
I remain in this country, and wherever else I can, as large an owner as possible in my inventions. I have never parted with any of my holdings except when compelled to in order to carry on my various works….I am bound by pride of reputation and by pride and interest in my work, to remain interested in the business. I expect to be a large owner in all companies employing my inventions after most persons now interested shall have sold out and retired with their profits.245
Before signing off on a letter that was supposed to be a sober statement of terms, he could not resist adding a sarcastic suggestion that if Swan had contributed as much to the science of lighting as he had, “then his friends may with equal force say what I have said.”246
Johnson could only allow him to send it off as Exhibit A in what was sure to be a legal battle. Then he, Insull, and Edison turned their attention to the more immediate exigence of making the Construction Department viable.
OUT OF THE DAM-D HOLE
They found that there was a budgetary penalty to Edison’s public offer to plan, wire, and light any town or village “within sixty days.” Before a contract could be drawn up, the distribution area had to be surveyed and canvassed street by street, so that Insull could figure how much revenue to expect, and how many physical obstacles to overcome, in arriving at a quotable price. This cost serious money. More often than not, the outlay had to be swallowed when towns (including several Edison had boasted about) chose not to proceed. If they did, he was charged with the initial costs of manufacturing the necessary hardware, plus providing transportation and on-site labor—not to mention teaching the local illumination companies how to maintain their systems. Since everything about central station technology was so new, capable engineers were almost impossible to find. Edison therefore needed to establish a school at the Machine Works to train men for the job and persuade them that life in places like Canyon, Arkansas, was just as interesting as life in New York.247
There followed the difficulty—often the impossibility—of getting paid in cash for each central station installed. As early as mid-September, five regional utilities owed Edison $43,000. Others were too poor to pay at all, and he had to accept their promises of stock dividends. It was better than nothing, which he often had to settle for. He spent $10,400 to canvass eighty cities and towns, only twelve of which ordered systems.248
The only encouraging aspect to his enterprise was the steady increase in customers once a community lit up. But that meant future, not present income, and meanwhile most of the Construction Department’s assets and liabilities accrued to his personal account. He was rich—incalculably rich—in expectations, and poorer by the day in reality.
An expense he could cut was that of his posh townhouse in Gramercy Park. He had been falling behind on rental payments for several months. “Would get out of the dam-d hole if could,” he scrawled on one of James Pryor’s bills, referring it to Insull for inaction. (One of the reasons Edison liked his secretary was that Insull was a virtuoso prevaricator.) Mary’s invalidism gave him an excuse to beg for cancellation of his two-year lease. “I very much regret to say that owing to the illness of my wife it has become imperative that she should give up housekeeping in accordance with the Doctor’s instructions.”249
Pryor declined, with contempt for this hiding behind skirts, but agreed to let him sublet the house and “lighten the burden under which you find yourself placed.” Edison removed his family to a luxury annex of the Clarendon Hotel, which was twice as expensive but at least had a more corporate tolerance of credit.250
He was not as short of money as Insull made out, since he repaid two loans totaling $42,806 to Drexel, Morgan in December. At the same time he instructed his counsel in the Lucy Seyfert case to postpone “just as long as possible” any settlement of the judgment against him. He preferred to risk the wrath of the Supreme Court of New Jersey than to lose the goodwill of Wall Street.
When Christmas came, Mary let no financial considerations cramp her style. She loved giving presents, some of which—for lack of any later ones—Marion remembered with especial vividness: “a first edition of La Fontaine Fables, with beautiful etchings, a ring with diamonds and turquoise, a Le Maire mother-of-pearl Opera Glass which was in a blue velvet case.”251
Edison’s personal gift to himself was the knowledge that he now had 12,843 lamps shining around Pearl Street, plus a further 64,856 nationwide.252
YOURS DEVOTEDLY
Around this time he became aware of a twenty-three-year-old Scotsman with a ridiculously long name hanging around the testing room at the Machine Works. “W. Kennedy Laurie Dickson,” as this engineer signed himself over a double curlicue, had been hired by Insull several months before, on the strength of a recommendation that spoke to his electrical training and mastery of French and German. Dickson was also a master of flattery, to which Edison was not immune. “If you only knew how I am heart [and] soul in all your inventions & all you do,” he wrote, in a note attached to some lamp designs, “you would now & then stoop to assist & better my prospects in life.”253
Edison ignored the lamp designs but gave Dickson two of his own to test. They looked like regular T models except for an unusual tongue of platinum inside the hoop of the carbon. It was separately wired and, when the filament incandesced, deflected a galvanometer needle. This indicated a ghost flow of electromagnetic force within the lamp’s vacuum and was further proof of thermionic emission, the famous Edison Effect. Its discoverer, apparently forgetting that he was supposed to be a businessman only, wanted to patent it as an “electrical indicator” that would gauge and regulate the voltage of lamps connected in multiple arc.254
Dickson reported favorable results to Edison one night in the cavernous testing room. The scene registered in his photosensitive memory in such detail that he could draw it forty years later: bare brick walls ascending to a galaxy of pendant bulbs, a German silver (as in French door: an alloy, not silver) shunt in one corner, two assistants pottering, a central stove discharging heat. Edison, his hair disheveled, sat tilted back in a Windsor chair, one foot up on the work table, idly playing with one of the test lamps while Dickson talked to him.255
Shortly afterward he executed his patent for the indicator, U.S. 307,031. The device did not work well, and he was too busy with other projects to develop it. But in its use of thermionic emission for a practical purpose, it was technology’s first attempt at what would one day be called electronics.*42, 256
As for Dickson, he had at last been noticed. He was soon put in charge of the testing room and began his long rise to obscurity.257
“THE FOLLOY OF HIS WAYS”
By the new year of 1884 Edison was back in his laboratory on the top floor of the Bergmann building, trying to develop synthetic filaments from various gelatines and researching electrodeposition techniques that he hoped might precipitate gold foil.258 Such absorption in experiment, with his hands
moving and his deafness muffling outside noise, was usually a sign that he was tired of pretending to be what he was not: a man of the world comfortable in society, savvy about money, adept at boardroom maneuverings, and interested in politics, women, and children.
The Construction Department had been his attempt to show Grosvenor Lowrey, Sherburne Eaton, and other directors of the Edison Electric Light Company that the traits that distinguished him as an inventor—contrary thinking, obstinate repetition, daydreaming, delight in difficulty—would bring about the demise of the gas industry much faster than their insistence on cautious progress. He had expected them to admire him for his courage in daring to launch a new enterprise on his own nickel. But although the Department had signed up many towns and cities, its expenses were outrunning its income at a compound rate. Moreover, the quality of its work—rushed through as fast as possible, to collect fees—was often shoddy. There was a sour joke going around about “Edison’s Destruction Department,” and he now faced the prospect of having to ask Sherburne Eaton if the Electric Light Company would defray his personal deficit of $11,000. Since Eaton was likely to say no, his high laboratory offered both refuge and solace.259
Eaton did turn him down. Edison’s hurt anger (the Light Company, after all, stood to gain hugely from his patents) was gratifying to Insull. Daily more powerful as he acquired financial and administrative authority, the secretary saw a corporate crisis coming that he could turn to his own advantage. “There is no one more anxious after wealth than Samuel Insull,” he admitted. Edison made no effort to restrain him. He was grateful for the icy efficiency with which Insull kept creditors at bay, while always coming up with whatever cash he and Mary needed.260
Insull’s secret plan was to relieve Edison, as tactfully as possible, of responsibility for the Construction Department. He intended to amalgamate it with the most successful of his boss’s ventures so far, the Edison Company for Isolated Lighting. At the same time he wanted to bring down the man they both now saw as their corporate opponent—Sherburne Eaton—and Grosvenor Lowrey too. His target date for this coup was 29 October, when Eaton would preside over the parent company’s annual board meeting. That gave Insull most of the year to gather enough shareholder support to force the election of a new president, who would be beholden to him rather than to Drexel, Morgan & Co.261
Eaton was a courtly man who had never gotten used to Insull’s brash lack of manners. He made a mistake in trying to be acerbic when he sent Insull a memo on 18 February, drawing attention to one of Edison’s Construction Department shortfalls. “I have no doubt that he will see the folloy [sic] of his ways after having learned experience at heavy and unnecessary cost.” Insull may have been self-serving, but nobody ever criticized his adored boss without penalty.262
THE DEMON SHARK
Edison was then in Clay County, Florida, letting Insull act for him while he and Mary treated themselves to their most extended vacation yet. This time they left the children behind, traveling instead with Mary’s good friend Josie Reimer and her husband. Edison had $1,500 in Construction Department funds in his pocket, charged up, truthfully enough, to “Expenses South.”263
Mary, her daughter noted, was never happier than when she had Edison to herself in Florida—enjoying white glove service at the Magnolia Springs Resort Hotel, lolling in the warm baths, and cruising with him down the St. John’s River between palms and sour-orange plantations, while he scribbled laboratory ideas in his pocket notebook.264
“Stay away as long as you feel like it,” Insull wrote Edison on “Birthington’s wash Day,” one of his occasional attempts at humor.265 “At least give me till 1st April before you show your face in New York. I am conceited enough to want to try & get some work single handed for Const Dept.”266
Edison was not sorry to be relieved of that responsibility for a while, and did what he was told. He was at last able to accept that his affairs were too complex for him to manage alone, with new lighting systems, wholly owned or affiliated, opening up almost weekly around the world, and competition harder and harder to restrain. For that reason he agreed, after all, to let Joseph Swan join names with him in the union of their British interests, henceforth to be known as the Edison & Swan United Electric Company, Ltd. He also consented to the incorporation of his Lamp Company and Machine Works, while continuing to resist Eaton’s desire to add them and the Tube Company to the portfolio of Drexel, Morgan. Of Insull’s private intent to the contrary, he had, as yet, no idea.267
He continued to fill his notebook with mostly electrical notions but omitted to include one that instantly became one of Florida’s taller fishing yarns. In the last week of March he was seen by a reporter escorting Mary (“a superb blonde”) aboard a yacht in the harbor of St. Augustine, accompanied by the Reimers and a small black boy toting a basket of what onlookers assumed was champagne.268 The yacht pulled out to the fishing ground off the lighthouse, where for years a “demon shark” had consumed multiple blackfish and bass and, reportedly, one or two swimmers. Lines went overboard, one of which unspooled from the basket and proved to be a regular telegraph wire insulated with gutta-percha. It was attached to a powerful battery, and baited at the other end with an electrode. Within fifteen minutes Edison and the captain were hauling in a mortally shocked seven-hundred-pound shark. It ended up on permanent display in the local Vedder Museum, labeled:
THE DEMON SHARK.
CAUGHT BY T. A. EDISON,
WITH ELECTRIC BAIT.269
HUBRIS
Sharks of another kind (or so Edison chose to see them) gathered when he resumed work in New York at the beginning of April. During his absence Major Eaton had menacingly attempted to glean full details of the finances of his profitable manufacturing shops. The Electric Light Company derived no proceeds from them, whereas Eaton kept receiving bills for “sundry” Construction Department expenses that Edison seemed to think he should pay. Eaton was not sure that he would, and pressed his demand for information about the shops, pointing out that they were, after all, “connected with our business.”270
Edison replied that he would prefer not to comply “until I have had an opportunity of discussing the matters in question with Mr. Villard,” referring to the one Light Company director he had always been able to count on for moral and monetary support. But Villard was a broken man now, having pushed his Oregon & Transcontinental Railroad too far and too fast toward the Pacific, and caused both it and himself to collapse. He could not suggest anything to save Edison from similar hubris, trivial as the latter’s entrepreneurial difficulties were compared to his own.271
On 24 April Edison wrote Eaton to say that he had been unable to win any new contracts for the Construction Department, and could not coax any more cash out of the ones he had acquired. “I find myself in the position of being obliged to immediately disband my organization, as the expenses in connection with it are too large to allow of my continuing it.” He would therefore allow the Electric Light Company, “as it has been suggested,” to take over the Edison Company for Isolated Lighting, along with all his current construction projects. The sooner this was done the better, because he had recruited some of the best men in the electrical industry over the past year, and it would be shortsighted to let them go for lack of pay.272
Actually Charles Clarke and Frank Sprague, a brilliant (if obstreperous) young engineer brought in by Edward Johnson, had already walked, early refugees from a business empire widely perceived to be in trouble. The perception was inaccurate. Pearl Street was pouring out more power by the month and looked sure to become profitable sometime soon. Planning had begun for Manhattan’s second central station, and John Kruesi had taken extra space for the Tube Company in Brooklyn. But negativism was the prevailing mood on Wall Street these days, due largely to Villard’s fall. It was a gloomy time for Edison to have to admit his own failure to push a grand project, even in another man’s handwriting.273
The Electric Light Company board accepted his proposal and reaffirmed its interest in buying his shops, while Insull, emulating Brer Fox, lay low. Then in mid-May a liquidity crisis hit the nation’s banks. Commerce froze, and Edison in a panic fired his engineering staff (retaining only Dickson and an assistant). He also closed down the Machine Works for “maintenance.” Several jumbo generators sat unsold on the factory floor, and he unsuccessfully tried to get his British company to buy them.274
For Mary, too, the spring was bleak. Her adored father died, and she felt less well than she should after a long vacation. Besides being caught up in funeral preparations, she found that for budgetary reasons she must transfer her husband and children out of the Clarendon Hotel and back into the house in Gramercy Park. Edison’s sublessees had come up short, and the lease there would not be up until the first of October.275
Lucy Seyfert’s legal team chose this moment to inform Edison that the New Jersey Supreme Court had again validated his debt to her, now amounting to $5,349 exclusive of fees. In view of his obstinate refusal to pay, the Middlesex County sheriff had authority to seize his holdings in Menlo Park.276
Edison was convinced against all reason that Mrs. Seyfert would settle for $300, the original value of the note she held, if he continued to stall. He ordered his lawyers to assert that the Electric Light Company was the owner of his former laboratory and auxiliary buildings. Everything in the house on Thornall Avenue should be put in Mary’s name and out of the sheriff’s reach. The house itself belonged to him but was heavily mortgaged in New York, which meant that the plaintiff would have to cross state lines, and celebrate several more birthdays, before she got satisfaction on that score. He presented Mary (“Duck—please sign your name below”) with an affidavit claiming title to all the goods and chattels they still possessed at Menlo Park, from a six-piece marble top suite in the master bedroom to a gray horse, three cattle, two pigs, and a “lot of manure” upwind in the yard.*43, 277
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