Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Absorbed in his laboratory work, Edison did not notice, or did not sufficiently heed, a clause in the offer awarding Gilliland $50,000 in cash and $200,000 more in new-company shares, for his “general agency” contract. What was more, the shares could be redeemed for cash as soon as the purchase was consummated.391

  On 16 June Edison declared that he was through, for the time being, with improving the “improvements” and perfecting the “perfection” of his new recorder. He shipped a handmade model on the next steamer to London, along with what he called a “phonogram”—history’s first audio letter. It was recorded by himself on a detachable spool, and contained the news that he had just become a father again.392

  Ahem! In my laboratory in Orange, New Jersey, June 16, 1888, 3 o’clock, A.M.

  Friend Gouraud—Ahem! This is my first mailing phonogram….I send you by Mr. Hamilton a new phonograph, the first one of the new model that has just left my hands. It has been put together very hurriedly and is not finished, as you will see. I have sent you a quantity of experimental phonogram blanks, so that you can talk back to me….

  Mrs. Edison and the baby are doing well. The baby’s articulation is quite loud enough but a trifle indistinct. It can be improved but it is not bad for a first experiment.*64

  With kind regards,

  Yours,

  Edison.393

  The organization by Jesse Lippincott of the North American Phonograph Company on 14 July ended the strife between the Edison and Tainter-Bell interests and pooled all their patents. It enriched everybody concerned, especially Gilliland, who hastened to cash in the rest of his quarter-million-dollar bonus and depart posthaste for Europe. He claimed to be exhibiting the phonograph there, but when Edison found out about the agency sale clause and heard that it had been negotiated by his own personal attorney, John Tomlinson, it was as if Damon had slipped a knife between the ribs of Pythias. “I have this day abrogated your contract,” he cabled Gilliland in London, “and notified Mr Lippincott of the fact and that he pay any further sum at his own risk. Since you have been so underhanded I shall demand all the money paid you.”394

  Gilliland cabled back, “Sale made to Lippincott exactly as presented and had your approval….You certainly are acting without knowledge of facts and are doing me great injustice.” A court of law agreed when Edison, in one of his litigious furies, sued him for breach of contract. But their friendship, which had yielded them both such dividends—financial, professional, and in Edison’s case romantic—was over. For as long as the Gillilands continued to winter in Fort Myers, the Edisons stayed away, depriving themselves of vacations in the sun for the next fourteen years and making sure that no electric power from their generator or water from their windmill pump would ever cross the space between the twin houses.*65, 395

  THINGS IN MOTION

  On 8 October Edison, free now of another corporate responsibility, sketched a device that at first sight looked like a phonograph.

  But M was not a stylus or a speaking tube, and N was not a wax cylinder. Nor were the dots on its surface indentations or incisions: they were too widely spaced for that. Actually he was thinking of microphotographs—Muybridgean images reduced down to 1/32nd inch wide, spiraling past a tiny telescope at a rate of twenty-five exposures per second. He calculated he could embed forty-two thousand such images on a cylinder of plaster of paris that, rotating at phonograph speed, would present a moving-picture show twenty-eight minutes long. If the drive shaft P was geared to that of an acoustic cylinder in playback mode, sight and sound would blend.

  “I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear,” he wrote, in the beautiful script he reserved for important documents, “which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion, and in such a form as to be both cheap practical and convenient. This apparatus I call a Kinetoscope ‘Moving View.’ In the first production of the actual motions that is to say of a continuous Opera the Instrument may be called a Kinetograph but its subsequent reproduction for which it will be of most use to the public it is properly called a Kinetoscope.”396

  He went on to describe how the recording version of his device would be a camera big enough to contain a photosensitive cylinder, or even a reel of film, either of which would advance in a stop-start motion so rapid as to seem continuous. The essence of his invention was deception: each unbelievably short stop would be enough to photograph a slice of action, and each unbelievably fast jump forward enough to expose another frame to the light. That would necessitate a shutter just as kinetic, or mobile, as the advancing cylinder, able to snap at least eight pictures a second (but preferably twenty-five) in order to flow them past an enlarging lens later, and pull off the con known as persistence of vision.

  Edison’s first Kinetoscope caveat, 8 October 1888.

  Edison thus articulated for the first time in history the idea of motion pictures synchronized with words and music. He was never to achieve the combination practically, and he was wrong to imply in his caveat that a spiraling cylinder was preferable to unrolling film. Nor—even as he datelined the document “Orange N. J. Oct 8 1888,” with the initial O inked in a perfect circle—did he know that Louis Le Prince, an obscure French camera inventor working in Leeds, England, was six days away from doing precisely for the Eye what the phonograph did for the Ear.*66, 397

  “Rush this I am getting good results,” Edison wrote later that day, dispatching the Kinetoscope caveat to his patent attorneys for submission to the Patent Office. It was followed in due course by two others, all attesting in their force and specificity to the power of the idea that had seized him. But for the next nine months he was so busy with electric power and phonograph promotions, in anticipation of the epochal Paris Exposition Universelle in 1889, that he left the technical work of building his cylinder-camera to W. K. L. Dickson. The young man was not only a gifted engineer but an expert photographer. Fluent in French and German, he was able to browse foreign periodicals in the laboratory library and keep track of experiments in motion photography overseas.*67, 398

  Le Prince’s supreme achievement with a single-lens camera was unpublished news and in fact would not be recognized for almost half a century. If Dickson was ignorant of it in 1888, he certainly knew about other pioneers in France and Germany, and lived to see the day when Edison’s own pretension of primacy in the history of cinema (a word not yet coined) was under justified attack by their proponents. As an old man, Dickson would again and again notch his memory calendar back one year, to prove beyond doubt that the Kinetoscope was the mother of all motion picture cameras, and that he and Edison had started working on it in the fall of 1887. He wasted much ink in refusing to acknowledge that there was such a thing as a Zeitgeist, as his revered boss did in 1912, in words as modest as they were true: “My so-called inventions already existed in the environment—I took them out.”399

  COMPARATIVE DANGER TO LIFE

  In November Edison was drawn into the most disagreeable controversy of his career, when a body calling itself the Medico-Legal Society advised the New York State legislature that the quickest, most painless way to execute criminals sentenced to capital punishment was to subject them to three thousand volts of direct or alternating electric current.400

  Earlier in the year Gov. David B. Hill, impressed by this argument, had signed a bill to abolish hanging as the state’s standard execution method, in favor of death by electricity—or electrocution, as it became known, to the distress of word purists. Few understood the implication of the decision better than Charles Batchelor, who nearly killed himself fixing a light on the Edison laboratory’s direct current system. Had the current been alternating, instead of flowing directly through him, he would unquestionably be dead at forty-two, mourned by all.*68 The savage sawing motion of AC, at hundreds of reversals a second, would have shredded every cell in his body. Or so Edison persuad
ed himself, on the basis of animal tests conducted on his own premises by Batchelor, Arthur Kennelly, and Harold P. Brown, an independent, passionate proponent of DC power.401

  Brown was responsible for perverting what had been a reasoned debate between the Edison and Westinghouse interests as to which system was preferable for most lighting purposes. In all respects except safety, the so-called “war of the currents” was now resolved in favor of AC. During the last month, George Westinghouse had received more orders for central station lights than the Edison Company had in the previous year.402 Local utilities simply found his thin-wire, high-tension system cheaper to install and operate, as well as extensible to suburban areas where affluent customers lived.

  Brown’s only recourse was to stigmatize AC as the “executioner’s current,” better used on death row than in the home. Although his professional credentials were slight, he was possessed, to a near-pathological degree, with desire to prove his point by electrocuting dogs, calves, and horses both at West Orange (where Arthur Kennelly meticulously noted their convulsions) and at venues as public as Columbia University. His evangelism on the subject was based on industrial deaths he had observed during five years as an electrician working for Brush Arc Light Company.403

  Edison witnessed several of the electrocutions, and gave no sign of being disturbed by them. “I have taken life—not human life, in the belief and full consciousness that the end justifies the means.” He had opposed capital punishment in the past, but found his moral attitude toward it wavering now that it had become a concern of electricians. If criminals were to die for their sins, then he would prefer them to be dispatched by a Westinghouse dynamo. “Electricity of a high tension must be used,” he told a reporter who questioned him on the subject, “and an alternating one rather than a straight one.”404

  He was, nevertheless, sincere in his belief that DC power of around three hundred volts was safer for common distribution than the lightning bolts Westinghouse was sending around cities like Pittsburgh—via overhead wires that were liable to tangle disastrously with those of telegraph and telephone companies. Had he given the word, the Edison Electric Light Company could have used its own AC patents to compete on both the high- and the low-tension levels. But he would not consent, to the company’s great cost.*69, 405

  In December the Medico-Legal Society formally recommended the installation of an AC system at Sing Sing Prison, to excite the electric chair being built there by Edwin F. Davis, the New York state executioner. The New York Times published an approving article headlined “SURER THAN ROPE.” At this, George Westinghouse, who had maintained a dignified silence in the controversy so far, publicly accused Harold Brown of being a paid Edison Electric Light Company stooge and a cynical scaremonger. Brown responded by challenging Westinghouse to an electrical boxing match, wherein they would each submit themselves to punches of their preferred current. The punches would increase by fifty volts, round by round, until one of them was forced to admit defeat. He was pretty sure it would not be him.406

  To general disappointment, Westinghouse did not take up the challenge. Brown expanded his campaign in the new year, calling for a nationwide ban on AC distributions of more than three hundred volts. He published a booklet, The Comparative Danger to Life of the Alternating and Continuous Currents, which thanked Edison for giving him the space and the power to conduct his experiments. The authorities at Sing Sing rewarded him with an order for three Westinghouse dynamos, which were secretly provided by Charles A. Coffin of the Thomson-Houston Electric Company. A murderer on death row, William Kemmler, was given the honor of being the first man to test the effectiveness of the prison’s electric chair.*70, 407

  YOUR INSTRUMENTS TAUNT ME

  Edison paid only sporadic attention to the protracted and worsening “war.” It was primarily the concern of Edward Johnson,408 president of the Electric Light Company and Brown’s main backer. Nowadays he was more interested in the applied sciences of sight and sound. He wrote two further moving picture caveats as stimuli to W. K. L. Dickson, whom he had charged with the construction of a cylinder-spinning, microphotographic camera.409

  Production, meanwhile, of the improved phonograph began at West Orange. It reproduced so clearly that Edison changed his mind about marketing it only as a business instrument. He opened a soundproof studio in the laboratory and began to engroove a long series of musical and spoken-word performances on spools coated with a hard-wax formula that he kept as secret as Babbage’s solution to the Vigenère cipher. It consisted of 80 percent burgundy wine, 25 percent frankincense, 9 percent colophony (a rosin derived from spruce), 8 percent beeswax, 4 percent olive oil, and 4 percent water, heated at 110 degrees until it steamed solid and was left to cool in molds.410 Record production was a simple matter of remelting the wax, so that blank spools of plaster of paris could be dipped in it and rotated for an even coating.

  Edison with his microphotographic camera. (Photograph by W. K. Dickson, 1888.)

  Before the decade was out, Edison would imbue this dark red medium with the sonic presence of some of the great names in classical music, including Johannes Brahms, Hans von Bülow, Josef Hofmann, and Johanna Dietz, as well as such celebrities as Mark Twain, William E. Gladstone, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Florence Nightingale, Sir Arthur Sullivan, Prince Napoleon, Otto von Bismarck, and the aged Count Helmuth von Moltke—whose voice had first been heard in the eighteenth century. Von Moltke recited some lines of Goethe that spoke forward through time: Ihr Instrumente freilich spottet mein / Mit Rad und Kämmen, Walz’ und Bügel (“Your instruments taunt me / With cylinders and levers, wheels and cogs”).411

  Most of these records were cut by Theo Wangemann, whom Edison appointed manager of his new Phonograph Experimental Department and sent abroad as his musical emissary. But he also dispatched another sound technician, Julius Block, to Russia, whence a high-pitched Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky could be heard giggling with excitement over what he called “the most surpassing, most beautiful, most interesting invention of the nineteenth century.”412 Block was unable to record Tsar Alexander III and Leo Tolstoy, but they joined Tchaikovsky in sending good wishes and “gloire au grand inventeur Edison!”*71

  These and other plaudits from Europe, where his isolated lighting systems were proliferating, set the tone for Edison’s looming reception at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. He had decided to attend in August, partly because his advance man on the site, William J. Hammer, was putting together a complete retrospective of his career so far, and partly because Mina deserved a treat after two years of adjustments to marriage and stepmotherhood. (Marion had become such a resentful problem that they had allowed her to leave school and sent her to France ahead of them, accompanied by an aunt.)*72, 413

  Besides, as the pianist Hans von Bülow noticed in April, Edison was an exhausted man. He had patented thirty-eight phonograph refinements in the last year, as well as doubling the luminosity of his lamps, inventing the Kinetoscope, embarking on a new career as a record producer, fighting a hopeless breach of trust case against Ezra Gilliland, and nearly blinding himself in a chemical explosion that had his face swathed in bandages for almost a month. Throughout this draining period he had to stand by, half regretful and half relieved, while Henry Villard reorganized all his lighting companies and shops (excluding only the Phonograph Works in New Jersey) into the Edison General Electric Company, capitalized at $12 million.*73, 414

  For good measure, Villard included Frank Sprague’s highly successful Electric Railway and Motor Company, which furnished the Machine Works in Schenectady with two-thirds of its business. Sprague had created the world’s first electric streetcar service in Richmond, Virginia, in 1887, obliterating the memory of the little track and train Edison had built six years earlier. Edward Johnson and the other Menlo Park veterans running Edison shops were sullen about Villard negotiating away their autonomy. Edison pretended to sympathize, but he saw that t
he combination made business sense. Better even than its enormous profit to himself—at about $1.25 million in cash and stock—was the feeling, when he signed the incorporation papers on 24 April, that the “leaden collar” of company ownership had finally fallen from his shoulders.415

  For twenty years he had had to find capital to keep his various enterprises going and over that span had been compelled to shelve many inventions, for lack of time or money to develop them. The hundreds that had come to him on honeymoon were only the latest examples of these suppressions. If he had nevertheless managed to invent a pyromagnetic motor and glassmaking machine since then, along with the Kinetoscope, how free would he now be to develop new ventures! For one thing, he had developed a compulsive interest in mining. When the exposition was over, he might switch to that entirely.416

  GO AND BE PART OF A ROSE

  Edison’s five-week visit to Paris in the summer of 1889 was a succession of dazzling social and professional triumphs, culminating in near apotheosis when the French minster of foreign affairs inducted him into the highest rank of the Légion d’honneur.*74, 417 Instead of his usual loose black bow tie, he had to wear the red ribbon of a commandeur under his collar, plus a dangling, enameled grand cross. Save for two superior “dignities” usually awarded to statesmen, it was the greatest civil honor France could bestow, recognizing his “eminent merits” as a benefactor of civilization.