Mina had her own problems, being by now visibly pregnant and worried after a year of marriage that she did not have Edison’s “full affection.”366 She preceded him north in mid-April, taking Marion with her, leaving the field clear for her father to visit with Edison alone and subject him to Methodist scrutiny. Lewis Miller came, stayed, and was beguiled. He listened in vain for improprieties in his host’s storytelling and for any remarks that might indicate disappointment in her as a wife.
“The more I see him,” he wrote Mina, “the more I am impressed with his greatness and genuine good heart. I am thoroughly convinced that he is true to you and true to what he appears to be. And socially he is superior to any man I know.”367
However cheering this was to her, she had to deal sometime that spring with a trauma more real than any imagined marital strain. All references to cribs and specially measured dresses vanished from her correspondence.368
HILLS AND DALES
Edison had Mina work with him in his East Newark laboratory for a while in May, but soon got caught up in a project so technical that only Batchelor and Gilliland could help. It was the development of a dictating machine to counter the cylinder recorder that Charles Sumner Tainter and Chichester Bell had patented last year, when he was too lovesick to pay it much attention. Now he had to. As if calling their device the “graphophone” were not cynically evocative enough of his favorite invention, it looked so like the phonograph, with its voice funnel and helical grooves and hand crank, as to trick casual shoppers into thinking he must have licensed it.*62 The crucial difference between the two instruments was that the graphophone stylus incised a wax sleeve, instead of indenting a tinfoil wrap. This was a definite selling plus—on top of the fact that Tainter and Bell were ready to market their device, while Edison had little more than a rough sketch of an “Improved Phonograph” to offer in competition.
He was further lumbered by a mistake made in 1878, when he patented an extraordinary number of potential phonograph developments in Britain, rather than in America. Among those innovations (itemized in sixty-seven descriptive drawings) had been all the features that Tainter and Bell now claimed to have come up with independently. But the Patent Office refused to award him priority over them at home, on the grounds that protection overseas was all that he was entitled to. Whatever new instrument Edison designed for the American market must, by maddening irony, not infringe on the graphophone, whose technology he had anticipated nine years before.369
His sketch, dated 7 May, accordingly showed a phonograph with an electric motor drive and rubberized acoustic tubes for recording and playback. The round of the cylinder was left enigmatically blank, and as he and Batchelor built what became known as model M, it was clear that they acknowledged the advantage of a recording surface of wax coating cardboard over one of foil laid on iron.370 When incising, the stylus cut the wax cleanly and lightly, with minimal drag. When indenting, it needed weight to press the foil into hills and dales that were less well defined. The contrary problem with wax was that it was softer than foil, so sound quality deteriorated with each replay.
Hence, Edison’s challenge was to formulate a wax that was hard enough to wear well yet receptive to the highest, least incisive frequencies, contained in such sibilant words as sphynx. (Clarity of speech was essential to this machine, since both he and Tainter were aiming at the dictating market, in a boom time for American business.) The wax should not clog the stylus by curling up behind it as the cylinder rotated; ideally what was etched out should float into the air, dust from the sonar landscape. That meant, of course, that the stylus itself should be as durable as it was sharp—yet not so sharp as to erode the very slopes it was shaping, when it traveled over them again.371
The search for an ideal counterbalance between all these requirements, involving chemistry as well as physics and electrical engineering, was to preoccupy Edison for the next thirteen months. At the same time, and for almost as long, he had the equally challenging task of planning, building, equipping, moving into, and staffing his huge laboratory on Valley Road in West Orange—the ground for which was broken on 5 July.
Both projects afforded him deep pleasure, the first being the kind of experimental marathon that had produced his best inventions. He had at least one seminal idea, a playback needle that “never touches the surface of the record but is itself electrified,” in essence a magnetic pickup. For some reason he abandoned it, postponing the advent of electrical recording for thirty-three years.372
There were three other distractions to deal with during this period: a corporate squabble about the future of the long-defunct Edison Speaking Phonograph Company, a second pregnancy for Mina commencing in the fall of 1887, and a visit from the photographer Eadweard Muybridge later on that would profoundly affect his future.
Edison had hardly started work on model M when Edward Johnson and Uriah Painter, co-founders of the old phonograph company, lobbied him to accept a move by Tainter and Bell to combine all his patents with theirs, and form a new company that would practically monopolize the dictating machine market. To Edison, any such merger, ludicrously scrambling together phonograph and graphophone and Painter and Tainter, was unthinkable. It would compromise his primacy in the recording field, and he could see that what the Bell interests really wanted was his all-embracing British patents. “Under no circumstances will I have anything to do with Graham Bell with his phonograph pronounced backward graphphone [sic],” he wrote his London agent, Col. George Gouraud. “I have a much better apparatus and am already building the factory to manufacture [them].”373
Alexander Graham Bell was involved with his brother Chichester and Sumner Tainter in the sense that all three of them comprised the newly formed American Graphophone Company of Washington, D.C. With increasing obstinacy, Edison rejected their repeated efforts to do business with him and, rather than revive the Speaking Phonograph Company, decided to form a new one, the Edison Phonograph Company. He incorporated it on 10 October 1887, establishing its capital at $1.2 million and waving aside the anguished protests of Johnson and Painter that he was trampling on their rights as shareholders of the old firm. They declined to accept his offer of a 30 percent stake in Edison Phonograph as dishonorable and inadequate, since they would have profited to the extent of a half interest if he had accepted the Bell offer.374 That merger, in retrospect, looked all the more sensible a month later, when Emile Berliner, a German immigrant, patented a recorder that played disks instead of a cylinder.
In several ways, Berliner’s was a revolutionary device, but he was years away from making it commercially feasible. Edison had an advantage over him and the Bell interests too, being able to boast the imminent completion of “the best equipped & largest Laboratory extant.” It would loom three stories high, total 37,500 feet of floor space, and employ a large staff of scientists, specialist engineers, and craftsmen—in all, a multidepartmental facility “incomparably superior to any other for rapid & cheap development of an invention.” He intended to occupy it by Thanksgiving and have it fully operational by the end of the year. Numerous outbuildings would surround it, each with its coordinated research or development function, including a gigantic Phonograph Works that would ship (by means of the Erie Railroad, curving right past his back door) so many perfected talking machines that Graham Bell would wish he had stuck to telephone design. In its integration of innovation and manufacture, the West Orange facility would amount to an apotheosis of Menlo Park. “In fact,” Edison wrote, as if the plant were already in operation, “there is no similar institution in existence….Can build anything from a ladys watch to a Locomotive.”375
During much of the time that he was jockeying with corporate lawyers and working out the mechanics of the M phonograph, Ezra Gilliland found it convenient to be ill and away from work. He thus avoided having to take sides in what became a painful showdown for Johnson particularly, as Edison’s oldest friend and pas
sionate promoter of the first phonograph. Johnson was for the first time in his life rich, having risen to the presidency of both the Edison Electric Light Company and the Edison Company for Isolated Lighting. He also enjoyed royalties from a personal invention—twinkling, colored Christmas tree lights—was living in a baronial Connecticut mansion, and had looked to the resurrection of the old phonograph company as the clincher of his fortune. But now, instead of sympathetically choosing him as “general agent” of the new one, Edison appointed Gilliland. The terms of the latter’s contract were more than generous, assuring him an income of around $160,000 during the first full year of production.376
There was little Johnson could do but wonder at Damon’s preferment at the hand of Pythias. He was a sensitive soul, and cringed when Uriah Painter tried to bully him into a shareholder revolt that would punish Edison for trading away their former rights. “Can we not get together & straighten this out?” he wrote Edison. “It is not a matter of money, but of wounded pride—Upon receipt of your ans[wer,] I shall take such action as will forever remove me from my present unpleasant position….The burial of all my long cherished ambitions in this Phono. matter will cost me no slight regret.”377
Edison replied with the written equivalent of a shrug. “Its not your fault in any way that the present condition of affairs have [sic] come about. I’ll take care of Mr U. H. P. after he gets through his outburst of temper & damfoolery.”378
Gilliland quailed at the unattractiveness of the “improved” phonograph Edison expected him to sell. It was still only a dictating machine, for one person to speak into and another to listen to at close range. The best that could be said of it was that the sound quality was remarkable. It was small but grotesquely complicated, with two diaphragms, exposed electric coils, and an array of studs, slides, knobs, and screws likely to cause mass resignations in the stenographic industry.379
He worried that Edison, who had recently won court victories that gave him almost total patent protection for his lamp design worldwide, was beginning to think that anything he invented obviated the work of other inventors, including men as gifted as Tainter and Berliner. The graphophone, operated by a treadle, like a sewing machine, struck Gilliland as a simpler and better device than his friend’s prototype M. Early that fall Edison bragged to a New York Post reporter that although his Phonograph Works was still under construction, he would have five hundred of the new machines on sale by the end of January 1888.380 He also showed his mastery of mathematics by figuring that four of its detachable cylinders, each with a capacity of six hundred words, would be enough to record all of Nicholas Nickleby.*63
BUILDING 5
Fortunately for all concerned, he forgot about these promises in the excitement of opening his new plant on Valley Road in the new year. An imposing gatehouse admitted nobody to the campus without a pass. The redbrick complex beyond, designed by Joseph Taft, was a considerable expansion of Edison’s original 37,500-square-foot concept, with four experimental longhouses servicing the main laboratory. They were respectively devoted to physics, chemistry, chemical storage, and metallurgy. The first building was completely nonferrous, so its galvanometers and other delicate instruments would relate only to the earth’s magnetic field. The second, sure to be Edison’s favorite retreat, had a concrete floor inclined and drained for toxic spillage. Among his personal stash of supplies, there were a few platinum cathodes remaining from some old Grove batteries he had broken open as a boy telegrapher.381
Building 5 opposite presented three great arched windows to passing traffic—as yet mainly buggies, in an otherwise rural landscape. Behind the glass was Edison’s library, double-storied, galleried, and paneled in yellow pine that would take years to darken to a more studious shade. The first aide he intended to install there, beside Alfred Tate, was a linguist able to translate his subscription list of German, French, and Italian technical periodicals, not to mention the jargon of scientists purportedly writing in English. His executive bathroom adjoined, gleaming with porcelain and Italian marble. (Elsewhere in the laboratory complex, galvanized iron was the noisy surface of choice.) Farther back was a house-size stockroom under orders to acquire, catalog, and index every nonperishable substance in the world, from hardwoods, graphite, waxes, drugs, and gems to sheet glass, silk, meerschaum, seeds, bone, aromatic oils, and the hair of the red deer, which Edison had found more delicate than camel skin to clean the grooves of his cylinders. The rest of the immense structure was given over to light and heavy machinery shops, plus a third-floor warren of research rooms whose walls were movable and whose functions would change as his interests changed. A tall-chimneyed powerhouse was annexed to the rear, its output of DC current set to handle the demands of all the laboratory buildings as well as the Phonograph Works—as yet little more than a frozen field alongside Alden Street, awaiting the spring thaw. Edison planned to run a branch feeder to his house in Llewellyn Park, a mile away.382
Edison’s new laboratory in West Orange. Phonograph Works in background.
By the end of January he had recruited or transferred from New York seventy-five laboratory assistants, a payroll that steadily increased. So did the number of extra hours he seemed to expect everybody to put in. One employee defined the Old Man’s idea of a basic schedule: “Saturdays the laboratory closed at five o’clock instead of six…and holidays were celebrated with work.” When he complained of having no life of his own, Edison said to his mystification, “There’s just as much time coming as going, young man.”383
PICTURE AFTER PICTURE
On 27 February the photographer Eadweard Muybridge visited Edison after giving a demonstration of “zoopraxiscope” images in Orange. Having spent years encouraging racehorses and naked men and women to run, jump, and stroll past a long row of cameras—each one synchronized to capture a moment of apparent stillness that was actually a moment of motion—he had a suggestion that he thought would appeal to a man who had been working just as long to record sound and project light. Would Edison consider applying himself to the invention of a machine that would show moving, talking pictures?384
What Muybridge had in mind was, ironically, a system that reversed his own concept of photography. Whereas his multiple cameras—as many as twenty-four in a row—exposed only one frame each in a broken sequence, Edison’s imagined single camera must expose hundreds, even thousands, in smooth succession, and reproduce them in much the same way as his phonograph played back linked sound waves. The impression of continuity would of course be an illusion—picture after picture, each slightly different, succeeding one another so rapidly that the eye could not register the blanks between them.
Edison was interested, saying he would look into the idea when he had time. At his request, Muybridge sent a selection of his Animals in Motion plates to West Orange for exhibit in the laboratory library,385 and left their haunting sequences to float in Edison’s subconscious.
NOT BAD FOR A FIRST EXPERIMENT
In March, just as Gilliland was denying yet another rumor of the amalgamation of the Edison Phonograph and American Graphophone companies, a Pittsburgh multimillionaire, Jesse Lippincott, made a move to take over the latter firm. Lippincott’s fortune derived from glass. He knew nothing about the dictating machine business except that it looked like a good investment at a time when the American economy was booming. He also coveted the marketing rights to the “improved” phonograph, despite its nonappearance since being announced. With a capitalist’s wolflike alertness to any whiff of financial vulnerability, he sensed that Edison had overextended himself in West Orange and might be amenable to a sale that would give him titular preeminence over Tainter and the Bell brothers.386
Lippincott guessed correctly. Edison was indeed short of cash, having sunk $140,000 into his new laboratory and budgeted another $250,000 for the Phonograph Works, on top of his expenditures on personal real estate. He had covertly tried and failed to get Henry Vi
llard to finance the West Orange plant, not pausing to think that he might be encouraging another wolf to start prowling around him.387
Insull, who still managed Edison’s financial affairs, wrote Tate in late May to say that he had heard the Phonograph Company was not paying its bills. He worried that this would reflect on the credit of the Machine Works in Schenectady. “If you people at Orange are going to abuse your credit you will cripple us.”388
This plaint coincided with a disastrous demonstration Edison put on at the laboratory, hoping to impress another group of financiers with the latest refinements to his prototype M phonograph. Unknown to him, Fred Ott had put a stylus into the machine’s reproducer that was broader than the recording point. The result in playback was a prolonged hiss, bewildering Edison, and the money men retreated to New York with checkbooks intact.389
A similar humiliation had befallen Edison once before, when he was experimenting with his first lightbulbs at Menlo Park. Now as then and at other crisis times in his life, he marshaled a team of his best men—Arthur Kennelly the mathematician, Walter Aylsworth the chemist, Franz Schulze-Berge, and Theo Wangemann, German-trained acousticians—and plunged into a prolonged blitz for mechanical perfection. The phonograph was a much more sophisticated instrument now than it had been in January, attuned to music as well as speech, but it was still not ready to manufacture or market. Edison’s urgency was prompted by demands from Colonel Gouraud in London for a machine to recruit British investors, as well as by a need to make the stock of the Phonograph Company as attractive as possible to Lippincott—for by now that entrepreneur had made a direct purchase offer of $500,000, and Gilliland thought it was too good to pass up.390
Edison Page 53