Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Wherever he went in the city (which he had mapped in his head before arrival), crowds pressed close to stare at him, inventors waylaid him with devices under their arms, and sycophants hailed him as “Maître,” “Sa Majesté Edison,” “le roi de Paris,” and less formally, “le papa du phonographe.” Two hundred letters a day poured into his hotel suite on the Place Vendôme. The conservative feuilletoniste “Caliban” went to extremes of Gallic metaphor in predicting that Prometheus must soon wreak vengeance on Edison, out of “divine jealousy” for his success in “shackling lightning” and “externalizing sound.” He was serenaded by Charles Gounod au piano and by Emma Eames, the Opéra’s latest ingenue, who sang him Liszt’s setting of “Comment, disaient-ils,” a poem by his favorite Victor Hugo. Louis Pasteur showed him around his institute. Alexandre Dumas fils begged him to come to Puys so that they could hold hands.

  He was twice received at the Élysée Palace by President Sadi Carnot, and was twice treated to champagne luncheons in Gustave Eiffel’s vertiginous new tower.*75 The hurtling elevators, the poulet braisé aux truffes and langoustines et écrevisses au buisson, the clamor of French conversation in his muffled ears, agreed with him no better than an “American breakfast,” hosted by Buffalo Bill Cody, at an outdoor table loaded with clam chowder, cornbread, pork ’n’ beans, “grub stake,” hominy, and two kinds of pie. Long before the biggest celebration of all, a seventeen-course banquet staged in his honor at the Hôtel de Ville by the municipality of Paris, opening with sherry-infused soup and sluiced down with Château d’Yquem ’75, Edison’s shrunken stomach rebelled, and he was pale with dyspepsia.418

  At all public functions, he remained obstinately mute in his refusal to acknowledge the countless toasts tilting his way. Yet he was accessible as usual to reporters, telling them with a straight face that he was designing a telephone that would allow parties to a call to see each other. He said nothing about the moving picture machine that he and Dickson would be working on when he returned home. But Étienne-Jules Marey, whom he met at a dinner commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the daguerreotype, divined enough of that secret to give him a private demonstration of his own zoetrope électro-photographique, a rolling film device that could shoot twenty images a second of birds in flight. The difference between them, as Marey afterward acknowledged, was that he sought the illusion of moments of stillness in motion, to elucidate avian or animal mechanics, whereas Edison sought the illusion of movement, by streaming stills so rapidly that the eye could not “seize” on their separation.*76, 419

  His exhibit was by far the largest at the exposition, attracting thirty thousand visitors a day. It covered almost an acre of the Palais des machines and centered on a lamp of lamps—twenty thousand bulbs clustered into the shape of a single bulb forty feet high. At periodic intervals they were unlit, irradiated only by a giant concealed carbon. Then crowds thronging the gallery gasped as a wave of light ascended from the base, transforming opalescence into incandescence, until the whole thing shone like an effulgent balloon about to take off. Its glow fell on 493 of Edison’s inventions, dating back as far as his 1869 vote recorder. Polished and carefully positioned, they gleamed and throbbed while phonographs cranked out “cheerful American songs.” The music played only tinnily through speaker diaphragms (the problem of amplification had not yet been solved), but when Parisians listened through attached white rubber tubes, they were amazed that so much sound could emanate from wax. Not everyone liked what they heard. The bone earbuds scrubbed words and music clean of the “varnish” of ambient noise. It was the sound of a harsh new age of talking machines and artificial sunshine and le Dieu moderne, technology as God.420

  Unknown to Edison as he went his rounds of the city, a French writer who had long obsessed about him lay dying in the care of nuns. Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam was the author of L’Ève future, a visionary novel that imagined Edison’s creation of an android woman. Its opening pages, written in 1877, depicted le Sorcier du Menlo-Park as a reclusive, Faustian figure, frustrated in his attempts to record the voice of the Almighty. Instead, this fictional Edison had applied his mechanical magic to the creation of a “new Eve,” who could be the progenitor of a whole new race of synthetic beings, untroubled by morals, dedicated only to the advancement of science. At first he shaped her out of sound, as a singer heard but not seen, but then he made her a moving image, a singer-dancer whose seductive vivacity derived from the synchronization of audible and visible effects—just what the real Edison dreamed of achieving now with his Kinetoscope-Kinetograph. “I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear.”*77, 421

  Villiers’s death was reported on the front page of Le Figaro on 20 August. A few days later “Caliban” wrote in the same paper:

  It is clear that Edison has never read L’Ève future, and without doubt the name of [its author] is totally strange to him. Maybe he’ll learn from this article that, during his stay in Paris, he passed a hundred paces from the hospice where his prophet lay in agony.

  I don’t subscribe, like poor Villiers, to the philosophy that holds up the dressed crucifix against the invasion of the scientific barbarian….But, being a man of the sort menaced by the American, who resembles Napoleon and is deaf like Beethoven, I find he plunges me into unspeakable melancholy, because I know well that he holds the future in his fob pocket.422

  Before returning to America, Edison spent two scientifically oriented weeks in Germany, Belgium, and London, being further lionized by the likes of Hermann von Helmholtz, Werner von Siemens, Heinrich Hertz, and Sebastian de Ferranti. He revisited Paris just once to receive his final awards, pack a major souvenir—Aurelio Bordiga’s white marble statue of the “Genius of Electricity”—and say goodbye to Marion, who was remaining behind in a pensionnat on the Champs-Élysées to complete her European studies.423

  By the time he sailed from Le Havre on 28 September, he had picked at so many banquets and pretended to hear so many toasts that he did not care if he never donned a dress suit again. Across the Atlantic the prototype Kinetoscope awaited his inspection, and great tracts of Appalachian ironland lay ready for prospecting by a new company he had formed, the New Jersey & Pennsylvania Concentrating Works. Pearl Street—by any account his supreme achievement—was aglow with 16,377 lamps, just one of thousands of imitative constellations around the world.424

  Edison had had enough of light, and enough of fame.425 A new decade beckoned, in which he meant to recover his old identity as an empirical inventor, feeling his way by hand and intuition toward fresh fields of discovery—perhaps that of submolecular science, which suggested the communality, and maybe interchangeability, of all matter at the most basic level. What a great thing it would be to have every microscopic unit of his own body under control, detachable and adjustable at will!

  “I would say to one particular atom in me—call it atom No. 4320—‘Go and be part of a rose for a while.’ All the atoms could be sent off to become parts of different minerals, plants, and other substances. Then, if by just pressing a little push button they could be called together again, they would bring back their experiences while they were parts of those different substances, and I would have the benefit of the knowledge.”426

  *1 The modern equivalent of sixteen candlepower would be around ninety-five watts.

  *2 Robert Friedel observes that the crowds attaching themselves to Edison at this time represented “a new relationship between advanced technology and the common man. Edison’s electric light was as mystifying and awe-inspiring as any invention of the age….The wizardry of scientific technology was now a source, not of distrust, but rather, of hope. This attitude toward the powers of science and technology was one of the nineteenth century’s most important legacies, and no single instance exemplifies it better than the enthusiasm with which the crowds ushered in the new decade at Menlo Park.” Friedel and Israel,
Edison’s Electric Light, 89–90.

  *3 Later Swan backdated his invention another five years, to 1860, and after his death, his children added a further five, to 1855.

  *4 A caveat in nineteenth-century American parlance, or provisional specification in British, protected the main elements of an invention in advance of a more formal, detailed finding.

  *5 The consensus endures in modern Britain. See, e.g., the timeline under “Joseph Swan” in Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History, https://www.gracesguide.co.uk. It states that Swan “obtained a UK patent covering a partial vacuum, carbon filament incandescent lamp” in 1860, whereas he did not even apply for such protection until 27 November 1880 (UK 4933 of 1880), more than nine months after Edison’s anticipatory British patent (UK 4576 of 1880) was approved.

  *6 Edison’s parallel British patent, UK 4576 of 1880, was approved ten days later. See Part Six for the final approval of U.S. 223,898, arguably the most important of Edison’s 424 lighting and power patents.

  *7 “No bird could fly through their network,” Edmund C. Stedman wrote of downtown New York’s tangle of wires in the 1880s. “A man could almost walk upon them…they darkened the street and the windows below their level.”

  *8 Edison had it in mind to make as much use as he could of the existing gas fixtures in every building he electrified, even down to adapting the mantles of chandeliers. It would save him money and at the same time enrage his competition—both agreeable prospects.

  *9 From 1880 through 1883 Edison would file for 321 patents—more than at any other time in his career and more rapidly than any inventor before or since. This total does not include seventy-eight other applications that he alleged were stolen from him and sold by a corrupt patent attorney, Zenas Wilber.

  *10 Upton was the victim of a typical Edisonian tease. Asked to calculate the volume of a pear-shaped bulb, he spent several brain-cracking hours numerically integrating its curves in three dimensions. Before he finished his quod erat demonstrandum, Edison reappeared and asked if it would not be simpler to fill the bulb with mercury and weigh the contents. Dyer and Martin, Edison, 277.

  *11 Edison also used the phrase molecular bombardment.

  *12 In 1972 the molecular biologist Gunther Stent famously raised the question of “prematurity” in science—discoveries or theories too much in advance of contemporary knowledge to be explored seriously until years later.

  *13 As now exemplified in the vacuum tube diode.

  *14 Edison’s U.S. Patent 307,031 was the first ever granted in America for an electronic device. It features a drawing and description of a two-element vacuum lamp that in essential details anticipates the diode “invented” by John Ambrose Fleming in 1904. Fleming had previously used the Edison Effect to rectify radio waves. Two decades later Edison was annoyed to read Fleming’s claim in his autobiography Fifty Years of Electricity to have been the first to realize “that a carbon filament incandescent lamp with a plate sealed into the bulb could be used to rectify high-frequency alternating currents.” Edison scribbled in an angry marginal note, “Absolutely untrue & he knows it is untrue.”

  *15 Edison was not asked to provide lights for navigation, that function being performed by the much more powerful arc lamps of Hiram Maxim.

  *16 Edison’s 1880 locomotive and cars can be seen at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

  *17 He even tried such eccentric materials as myrrh gum, macaroni, asphalt, fishing line, cork, and banknote paper.

  *18 Edison’s choice of this potential, over the much lower voltages favored by his competitors, eventually became standard in the United States.

  *19 Edison also invented a “three-wire” connecting system that reduced the copper content of his conductors by a further two-thirds.

  *20 James A. Garfield (R., Ohio) was running against Winfield S. Hancock (D., Pa.).

  *21 The Maxim bulb also substituted a flame-suppressant hydrocarbon vapor, loosely sealed in, for Edison’s high vacuum.

  *22 Swan’s contempt for Edison at this time was plain in a letter he drafted on 24 September but apparently never sent: “I had the mortification one fine morning of finding you on my track and in several particulars ahead of me—but now I think I have shot ahead of you.”

  *23 Edison continued to finance Science through the fall of 1881, at a personal cost of $10,000, before declining to do so any longer. The magazine briefly failed and was restored to life by Alexander Graham Bell. It is still in publication.

  *24 The lighting historian Adam Allerhand points out that Edison could hardly have known about Swan’s early lamp before Swan himself began to remember it publicly on 27 December 1879—the same day the “Village of Light” was illuminated for a press preview. From that date on, the British electrical establishment vigorously supported Swan’s claim of priority, having not noticed it before. Swan admitted that his unpatented “invention” (one of twenty pre-Edison attempts to develop a workable electric light) had not shone for much more than a minute. As will be seen, in 1888 the London Court of Appeals ruled the first Swan lamp “a failure.”

  *25 An elegant monument “To the Memory of Thomas Alva Edison” stands at the Iwashimizu Hachimangu shrine between Osaka and Kyoto in Japan. The site was chosen for its proximity to the madake groves that supplied the Edison Electric Light Company with filament fibers for almost fifteen years.

  *26 Some of Edison’s bachelor employees were allowed to occupy bedrooms upstairs at “65.”

  *27 Neither man could guess at the time that they just co-founded General Electric.

  *28 Edison, who had a gift for real estate, got an extraordinary bargain. The property’s asking price was $136,000, but he bought it in receivership for $52,250. A number of years later he sold it for $1.08 million.

  *29 There is little doubt that Mary Edison’s sufferings from neuralgia were genuine (see Part Six), no matter how they may have been related to emotional problems. They appear to have passed on genetically to her eldest son, who was afflicted with paroxysmal headaches all his life.

  *30 Between 17 May and 25 June 1881 Edison applied for twenty-six U.S. lighting or power patents, only four of which were not granted. Papers, 6.4.

  *31 Edison’s fanatically detailed, 8,700-word letter of 8 September 1881, consigning this dynamo to Batchelor in Paris (“I will write you further if I have omitted anything”), is a good example of how closely he dominated his subordinates.

  *32 Swan also conceded privately to Lowrey that “Edison is entitled to more than I….He has seen further into this subject, [more] vastly than I, and foreseen and provided for details that I did not comprehend until I saw his system.”

  *33 In 1898 Edison served as a pallbearer at Reményi’s funeral in New York.

  *34 Today the conduit access door at Farrington Bridge is still labeled “North Thames Gas.”

  *35 When the black-and-white image of this panel printed in Scientific American, 27 August, is viewed on a modern computer screen, the rows of lights suffuse with patterns of refractive color. See https://babel.hathitrust.org/​cgi/​pt?id=pst.,000062999472;view=1up;seq=137.

  *36 Edison delayed executing his patent on this invention until 27 November 1882, allowing John Hopkinson to file a similar application in Britain well before that date. The Edison system was awarded priority in the United States on 20 March 1883 (U.S. Patent 274,290), but by then Hopkinson already had his British patent.

  *37 In 1878 Edison had been appointed a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor for his work on the phonograph.

  *38 Thomas Edison, Jr., attended the same school.

  *39 Sam Edison, just as typically, delighted in climbing all the stairs whenever he visited the factory. At eighty-two he had the legs of an elk and a chest expansion that his son was proud of: “I think it was five and one-half inches.”

  *40 As indeed it was, when it became General Electric.
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  *41 The number of cardinals on this dress, designed by Madame Anna Duval, was seven. It cost $391.90, or $9,500 in 2019 dollars.

  *42 See Part Four.

  *43 Mary was by no means passive in signing this affidavit. She attached a covering letter warning the sheriff, “You will interfere with same at your peril.”

  *44 The editors of The Papers of Thomas A. Edison found that on 1 June 1884 Edison had only $18.64 on deposit at Drexel, Morgan, and $3.80 at the Bank of the Metropolis. They point out, however, that he always regarded banks as clearinghouses: “Large sums flowed into his two checking accounts, [and] flowed out just as quickly.” Papers, 7.575.

  *45 According to T. C. Martin, writing in the February 1894 issue of The Century Magazine, Edison wondered aloud if Tesla was a cannibal.

  *46 Mary Edison’s death certificate was unsigned by any doctor, and the space for registering the cause of death was left blank. The original, in the New Jersey State Archives, shows signs of being mutilated. As a family friend remarked at her funeral, attended by four hundred mourners, “She is dead now, poor thing, but no one will ever know what she died of.”

  *47 See Part Six.

  *48 Lowrey was deeply hurt by Edison’s apparent acquiescence in the purge, but persuaded himself that Insull alone was responsible.

  *49 Edison had confessed this need to Lillian Gilliland during their railroad trip to Florida, and asked her to introduce him “to some suitable girls.”

  *50 See Part Six.

  *51 Edison’s references are to Grace “Daisy” Gaston, one of the other girls visiting with the Gillilands that summer; Lillian “Mamma” Gilliland; and the English geneticist Francis Galton (1822–1911).