Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Separately, Gilliland agreed to pay a quarter of the price of the estate. Although that gave Edison most of it, they planned to build twin winter homes there, in a grove facing the water. When they journeyed back north a few days later with their female companions, they had something other than “jumping” train telegraphs to discuss. Punta Rassa was becoming fashionable and an investment upriver seemed worthwhile, although as Edison admitted, “it will make a savage onslaught on our bank account.” United now in business and at least partially in domicile, they began to call themselves Damon and Pythias—Gilliland assuming the former identity, with its Greek connotation of readiness to die for his best friend.309

  Pythias had no sooner returned to his laboratory than he applied in Damon’s name for two patents on a wireless train communications system using induction telegraphy. Possessive as Edison always was of his own patents, he was scrupulous in recognizing the antecedence of other inventors—even though the claimant in this case had merely bought his way in. But on legal advice, and recognizing that he was to be the major developer of the system from now on, he added his own name at filing time.310 Week by week, signature by signature, the Pythagorean duo was being yoked closer together.

  A SORT OF RAPHAELIZED BEAUTY

  Among the young women who prettified the Gilliland apartment in Boston was a Miss Mina Miller, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a wealthy businessman in Akron, Ohio. She was a student at a finishing school on Newbury Street, where she had become fluent in French and well trained in fine and domestic arts. Her piano teacher, however, had been unable to match Mina’s love of music with anything resembling musicality. Edison’s first reaction when she sat down at Mrs. Gilliland’s piano was a mixture of surprise and curiosity. “I could not help being interested immediately in anyone who would play and sing without hesitation, when they did it as badly as that.”311

  Mina performed not because she was vain, but because she had been asked to. It was her nature to oblige. She doubted that she would see Edison again. He was, of course, famous and “a genial, lovely man” to boot.312 But he was twice her age, with gray streaking his hair and a habit of cupping his right ear in conversation. For all her study of English literature, it did not occur to her that such a man, single and in possession of a good fortune—not to mention three motherless children—must be in want of a wife.*49

  All he was aware of, at first, was a pair of “great dazzling eyes.” On subsequent visits to Boston to do business with Gilliland and American Bell, he could not fail to notice that Miss Miller had other double attributes, agreeably arranged elsewhere on her sturdy person. Had she been fair instead of darkly brunette, she might have reminded him of an even younger schoolgirl, ducking out of the rain and into his life fifteen years before.*50 Except that this one had an easy sophistication poor Mary never attained. Her four elder brothers were all college men, and her two younger ones were destined for Yale. Her older sister was as polished and well traveled as she, and the other two were at or put down for Wellesley. Her millionaire father, Lewis Miller, was a pillar of Akron society, an elder of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and co-founding president of the Chautauqua Institution. From her equally pious mother Mina had inherited a certain dourness that was less attractive to Edison than those big eyes and—was fate again speaking to him?—the delightful fact that she was at home in a workshop.313

  It turned out that Mr. Miller was also an inventor, with a hundred farm implement patents to his credit, so she had an understanding of technology and was not likely to be bored when Edison talked to her about electromotographic mirrors. Luxuriating in company with her and other “fresh invoice[s] of innocence and beauty” at Woodside Villa, Gilliland’s beach house in Winthrop, Massachusetts, Edison became so infatuated that he sounded like a teenager himself, writing Insull at the end of June, “Could you come over here to spend 4th at Gills—there is lots [sic] pretty girls.”314

  A page of Edison’s diary, summer 1885.*51

  Around this time someone in the Gilliland circle suggested that they all start keeping diaries, full of as many personal details as possible, to be shared for common amusement. Edison began his on 12 July in Menlo Park, where his children were being looked after by Mrs. Stilwell.315

  When he returned to Woodside Villa with Marion in tow, Mina had left to join her family at Chautauqua. Lillian Gilliland, who was openly seeking a mate for him, offered Louise Igoe from Indiana for his consideration. “Miss Igoe,” he wrote, “is a pronounced blonde, blue eyes, with a complexion as clear as the conscience of a baby angel.” But he could not shake Mina’s darker charms from his mind. During a Boston book-buying excursion, he “got thinking about Mina and came near being run over by a street car—If Mina interferes much more I will have to take out an insurance policy.”316

  There followed the laziest, most ruminative period of his life, a sun-soaked, ozone-flavored, female-graced, and oddly frenchified interlude so unlike what he was used to that the days seemed to blend into a prolonged raptus that was more dream than reality. Missing from it only, yet permeating his diary through and through, was “the Maid of Chautauqua,” whose remoteness in western New York State he was determined to make temporary. In the meantime Mina could be pleasurably associated with Madame Récamier, Lucien Bonaparte’s scantily dressed muse and the embodiment of unattainable, sophisticated sexuality. Although Edison spoke little French, he had always been drawn to French literature, and one of his book purchases in Boston was the autobiography of la divine Juliette—“I should like to see such a woman.”317 Absorbed in it, he drowsily envisioned the jealous tyrant who had sent her into exile.

  After breakfast laid down on a sofa, fell into light draught sleep dreamed that in the depth of space, on a bleak and gigantic planet the solitary soul of the great Napoleon was the sole inhabitant. I saw him as in the pictures, in contemplative aspect with his blue eagle eye, amid the howl of the tempest and the lashing of gigantic waves high up on a jutting promontory gazing out among the worlds & stars that stud the depths of infinity Miles above him circled and swept the sky with ponderous wing the imperial condor bearing in his talons a message….

  Mina Miller dressed as a gypsy, at about the time Edison first met her.

  Then my dream changed—Thought I was looking out upon the sea, suddenly the air was filled with millions of little cherubs as one sees in Raphaels pictures each I thought was about the size of a fly. They were perfectly formed & seemed semi-transparent, each swept down to the surface of the sea, reached out both their tiny hands and grabbed a very small drop of water, and flew upwards where they assembled and appeared to form a cloud.318

  Clearly Edison was in the grip of an emotional turmoil that had him struggling to keep his balance amid the vast stability of a universe governed by immutable natural laws or (if Mina insisted) by God:

  Went out on Veranda to exercise my appreciation of Nature. Saw bugs, butterflies as varied as Prang’s Chromos,*52 Birds innumerable, flowers with as great a variety of color as Calico for the African market….What a wonderfully small idea mankind has of the Almighty. My impression is that he has made unchangeable laws to govern this and billions of other worlds and that he has forgotten even the existence of this little mote of ours ages ago. Why cant man follow up and practice the teachings of his own conscience, mind his business, and not obtrude his purposely created finite mind in affairs that will be attended to without any voluntee[re]d advice.319

  Marion, not to be outdone by her father in imaginative expression, wrote an outline for a novel about “a marriage under duress.” When she read it to him, he said, in words that might have told her something about his own past experience, “Put in bucketfulls of misery.”320

  It was the only sour note sounded in what was otherwise, for him, a period of ecstatic expectation that Mina (who had turned twenty on the sixth) would be receptive to his advances. If by headin
g west she was playing hard to get, then he would pursue her, even into the bosom of her family. That meant he would have to charm as many as ten other Millers, not to mention Mina’s countless cousins, and especially win the favor of her father, the largest frog in the small pool of Chautauqua Lake.

  Edison’s best chance there was to ingratiate himself with Lewis Miller as a fellow inventor, while staying off the subject of churchgoing. “My conscience seems to be oblivious of Sunday,” he wrote in his diary. He learned what he could about the great man by reading a collection of business profiles encouragingly entitled How Success Is Won. There was little he could do about his other possible liability—middle age—except to strive for an elegant appearance by buying a pair of uncomfortably tight, French-made chaussures de monsieur.*53 “These shoes are small and look nice,” he noted in his diary. “My No. 2 mind (acquired mind) has succeeded in convincing my No. 1 mind, (primal mind or heart) that it is pure vanity, conceit and folly to suffer bodily pains that ones person may have graces [which are] the outcome of secret agony.”321

  He also brushed up intellectually by delving into his pile of beach books—Rousseau’s La nouvelle Héloïse, Disraeli’s Curiosities of Literature, Hjalmar Boyesen’s Goethe and Schiller (“a little wit & anecdote in this style of literature would have the same effect as baking soda on bread”), Johann Kaspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy, Hawthorne’s Passages from the English Note-Books, Rose Cleveland’s George Eliot’s Poetry and Other Studies, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and The Sorrows of Young Werther, Thomas B. Aldrich’s Story of a Bad Boy (“very witty and charming”), and Longfellow’s Hyperion. As if this were not enough erudition, he reveled in the epigrams of Sydney Smith and reminded himself, “I must read Jane Eyre.”322

  On 10 August Edison presented himself at Chautauqua. Marion accompanied her father, not altogether congenially. He had sensed, while extolling Mina’s “perfection” to the Gillilands, that his daughter was becoming jealous. “She threatens to become an incipient Lucretia Borgia.”323

  Lewis Miller turned out to be a pleasant surprise. Reciprocally, he took to Edison at once as a man who, like himself, made large amounts of money for the benefit of humanity. Although the light he sought to bestow was more spiritual than electrical, he was at the same time an earthy, good-natured, receptive personality, more willing than his austere wife to laugh at cornball jokes—which Edison was careful to scrub clean of words likely to shock them. Even Mary Valinda Miller admitted that her daughter’s new suitor had a winning way with him. She had previously hoped for a match between Mina and young George Vincent, the son of Chautauqua’s other co-founder, but neither she nor Lewis could help being flattered that one of the most famous men in the world was calling at their cottage, hat and heart in hand.*54, 324

  They jibbed, however, when Edison asked permission to take Mina off on a tour of northern New York State and New Hampshire. Decent girls did not go on such jaunts, even with respectable widowers. Ezra and Lillian Gilliland offered themselves as chaperones, and Louise Igoe (who was sweet on Mina’s brother Robert) volunteered further company. They all, in Mina’s words, “made it so attractive [that] father at last consented.”325

  The six travelers set off on 18 August. Their rail and pleasure boat itinerary took them via Niagara Falls and the Thousand Islands of upstate New York to Montreal, whence they swung south into the White Mountains of New Hampshire and stopped at the grand Maplewood Hotel. Here, Mina primly recalled, “things got a little warmer” between herself and the inventor of the quadruplex telegraph.326

  One evening after spending the day on top of Mount Washington, we were sitting around the hotel in the foothills. Mr. Edison wrote down for me the Morse code characters and by next morning I had memorized them. A short time later he slowly tapped a message to me which I was able to understand. Just what the message said I consider too sacred to repeat.327

  Marion claimed to have witnessed the tapping, which took place on Mina’s hand, as well as the dash-dot-dash-dash, dot, dot-dot-dot response. Having often hung about her father’s laboratory in Menlo Park, she may have learned Morse code too. More likely her memory of Mina’s story transmuted over time into an imagined recollection. At any rate it was an end to the happiest year she ever spent,328 and for Edison and Mina, the beginning of a union till death.

  CUPID’S DEMANDS

  On 30 September Edison wrote Lewis Miller, formally asking if he could marry Mina.

  My Dear Sir

  Some months since, as you are aware, I was introduced to your daughter, Miss Mina. The friendship which ensued became admiration as I began to appreciate her gentleness and grace of manner, and her beauty and strength of mind.

  That admiration has on my part ripend into love, and I have asked her to become my wife. She has referred me to you, and our engagement needs but for its confirmation your consent.

  I trust you will not accuse me of egotism when I say that my life and history and standing are so well known as to call for no statement concerning myself. My reputation is so far made that I recognize that I must be judged by it for good or ill.

  I need only add in conclusion that the step I have taken in asking your daughter to intrust her happiness into my keeping has been the result of mature deliberation, and with the full appreciation of the responsibility I have assumed, and the duty I have undertaken to fulfil.

  I do not deny that your answer will seriously affect my happiness, and I trust my suit may meet with your approval. Very sincerely yours

  Thomas A. Edison329

  He gave his New York laboratory as his return address, and was good for nothing connected with business until he heard his fate. Edward Johnson tried to get his attention on a matter of some urgency—what to do about a new rival to the phonograph, the “graphophone”—but had to postpone further discussion, “for the simple reason that he is in love and don’t want to make any appointments in advance that might possibly conflict with Cupid’s demands.”330

  Miller replied promptly and with equal formality, inviting Edison to visit him en famille at Oak Place, Akron, early in October. Mina’s towering home was defended by a profusion of deer, horse, and dog statuary, and Edison was not made entirely welcome by her mother. Mrs. Miller doubted his assurance that he would be a churchgoer, were it not for the unfortunate problem of his deafness. Mina had some concerns on that score herself, but Lewis had none at all. He liked Edison enormously and gave the lovers permission to marry under his roof on 24 February 1886.331

  In the interim, Edison had some major real estate decisions to make. On a bright night by the sea the previous summer, indulging fantasies of Mina far away, he had taken an imaginary triangulation of the moon, “the two sides of said triangle meeting the base line of the earth at Woodside and Akron, Ohio.” His calculations had got him to the latter point precisely as planned. Now he had to plot a series of other extensions, which would become the geometry of his future life. First, from Oak Place to Fort Myers, where he wanted to take his bride on honeymoon, and where he and Gilliland were building twin houses and a winter laboratory to share; then back to wherever in the New York area Mina wanted to settle (he would give her the choice of city or county);332 then the shortest possible connection from that base to the location of a new superlaboratory that would erase all memories of Menlo Park.

  Mina chose Llewellyn Park, an exclusive, gated, hillside enclave in West Orange, New Jersey. It was far enough from the railroad station in downtown Orange to be considered rural, yet close enough to merit municipal horsecar service. Glenmont, the estate’s premier residence, was listed for sale fully furnished, thanks to the downfall of the owner, Henry Pedder, in a million-dollar embezzlement case. It was bigger than the house she had grown up in, a many-gabled, twenty-three-room Queen Anne mansion, red of brick and exterior framing, almost new and built as solidly as a bank, with a mahogany central staircase, a
billiard den, a music room, and an immense curving conservatory that caught the morning sun. It had hot running water in all bathrooms and fireplaces in all bedrooms, central heat, hand-stenciled ceilings, oil paintings, statuary, a huge service of Tiffany silver tableware, and a library of leather-tooled books Mr. Pedder had been unable to take with him when he skipped the country for St. Kitts.333

  Glenmont in Llewellyn Park, soon after Edison’s purchase of it for Mina.

  Glenmont was so named because it had a valley view, facing east across the Oranges toward New York, only twenty miles away. It was surrounded by eleven acres of shaven lawns and plantings designed by Nathan Franklin Barrett, the nation’s foremost landscape architect. Behind and to the north, fragrant woodlands soared toward the Eagle Rock reservation, which offered skating in winter and a refuge from the state’s mosquitoes in summer. All Mina needed to acquire this paradise from its receiver was a fiancé able to unbelt $125,000—well under a third of the estate’s estimated value.334

  Edison did not disappoint. He was beginning to be flush again, with profits surging in from his manufacturing shops and other enterprises. Pearl Street was in the black, having paid off its start-up costs in a year, and already issued its first dividend. The Edison Illuminating Company of New York was poised to begin construction of a much larger Second District, extending as far north as Central Park. Nationwide, fifty-eight Edison central stations and 520 isolated plants had more than three hundred thousand lamps in circuit.335 The Machine Works had so outgrown its cramped Lower East Side neighborhood that it would soon have to move out of Manhattan or even upstate. Not for some years yet might Edison count himself as rich as some of the other mansion dwellers in Llewellyn Park, but for the first time in his life he felt wealthy enough to match his spending to the scope of his ambitions.