Edison

by Edmund Morris

  *52 The colored “chromolithographs” of Louis Prang, popular in late-nineteenth-century America.

  *53 These shoes cost Edison fourteen dollars, or $355.60 in modern money.

  *54 The Miller Cottage still stands at Chautauqua.

  *55 The houses were being constructed from kit parts shipped down from Maine.

  *56 On 1 March Tom wrote his father, “I am in long division and willie is in subtraction.”

  *57 The editors of The Papers of Thomas A. Edison have concluded that Edison was familiar with the nonmathematical aspects of James Clerk Maxwell’s classic Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism and with all of Oliver Heaviside’s papers on “Electromagnetic Induction and Its Propagation,” recently published in The Electrician (UK).

  *58 In two years Insull quadrupled Machine Works sales, and in six he increased its payroll from two hundred to six thousand employees.

  *59 Tate had succeeded Insull as Edison’s secretary-factotum in 1883.

  *60 Edison had tried and dismissed alternating current as early as 1882, saying it was good for nothing except the euthanasia of animals. However, he looked the other way when it was successfully installed on his isolated systems in Europe, for example at La Scala in Milan, May 1886.

  *61 Edison may also, or alternatively, have contracted pneumonia.

  *62 The “graphophone” that Tainter and Bell caveated at the Patent Office in a sealed and dated box on 20 October 1881 actually was an Edison phonograph, with a coating of wax applied to the metal cylinder. The deception was not uncovered until 1937.

  *63 Edison wildly overestimated. Dickens’s novel totals 263,520 words.

  *64 Madeleine Edison was born on 31 May 1888. H. de Coursey Hamilton was one of Edison’s paid globe-trotters.

  *65 Ezra Gilliland died childless, of heart disease, on 13 May 1903. In extreme old age his widow wrote Edison, “He loved you very dearly, Edison, and regretted all those misunderstandings.”

  *66 Le Prince’s Roundhay Gardens, filmed on 14 October 1888, is now generally regarded as the first motion picture. The First Film, a 2013 documentary by David Nicholas Wilkinson, is available at https://vimeo.com/​ondemand/​thefirstfilm/​181293064.

  *67 In some respects the contemporaneous Electrotachyscope of Ottomar Anschütz and the Chronophotographes of Étienne-Jules Marey were more sophisticated than Edison’s, the one employing projection and the other intermittent action.

  *68 Experiments conducted in the 1970s confirmed what Edison had believed, but been unable to prove, in the 1880s: that AC current is two and a half to three times more lethal than DC. There is no evidence, however, that death by either is painless.

  *69 With the advent of sophisticated new transformer stations in the early twenty-first century, high-voltage DC power has been rediscovered as a superior force for, e.g., underwater cable systems.

  *70 Kemmler’s execution on 6 August 1890, was a notoriously agonizing disaster, with two long applications of current being necessary to kill the prisoner. Edison agreed that an account of it was “not pleasant reading,” and suggested that Kemmler would have died much more quickly if the executioner had dunked his hands in cans of water added to the circuit.

  *71 Tolstoy did record some cylinders after Edison sent him a gift phonograph in 1908. They can be heard on YouTube, e.g. at https://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=6310hAtdl6k. The machine is on exhibit at Yasnaya Polyana.

  *72 Once in France, Marion was placed in the care of a governess, and she received the rest of her education in Europe.

  *73 Villard had previously and successfully combined all Edison’s European lighting companies.

  *74 The ceremony was performed at the Élysée Palace in September.

  *75 To this day, a wax Edison may be seen visiting with Eiffel in the latter’s office atop the tower.

  *76 Marey sent Edison an advance copy of his magnificent Le vol des oiseaux in the fall of 1889. It included the specifications for all his cameras. Edison’s subsequent Kinetograph and Kinetoscope were, as Marey dryly noted, “not without resemblance to my appareil.”

  *77 Life imitated art on 9 September, when Edison went to see Léo Delibes’s ballet Coppélia, about an old doctor’s creation of a life-size singing and dancing doll.

  Edison with his phonograph in Washington, April 1878.

  AT TWENTY-THREE, EDISON landed his first major contract as an inventor. The Gold & Stock Telegraph Company of New York City paid him $7,000 to lease a shop in Newark and develop a small, fast, one-wire printing telegraph. He was given an extra $400 to buy tools and equipment and hire a machinist for six months. When (the contract was respectful enough not to say if) his instrument was “clearly patentable,” he would receive a salaried appointment as the firm’s consulting electrician. And in further recognition of the ingenuity he had displayed last summer in Manhattan, Gold & Stock promised him a bonus of $3,000 if he could invent a facsimile telegraph that transmitted shapes, not just dots and dashes. Wealth—at least in terms of his absolute penury not so long ago—stared Edison in the face.1

  It was an unusual face for a young telegrapher at the beginning of the Gilded Age, when beards were as obligatory as bowler hats: smooth-shaven, large, and pale, blank during moments of thought, yet animated and focused when speaking. Edison looked like—and was—an open, engaging personality, unusual only in his lack of interest in food and apparent habit of sleeping in his suits. He compensated for being unable to hear much of general conversation by dominating it himself. His near-cataleptic concentration on any technical problem could have been that of a recluse, yet upon emergence from it, he was as gregarious as an actor, eager for approval of his sometimes labored jokes. The fact that he thought himself funnier than he really was betrayed a certain detachment from society. His frequent acts of generosity and kindness contrasted with an apparent inability to care about, or even notice, the emotions of other people. Victims of this indifference put it down to his haste to outrace everybody, whereas in fact it often hampered Edison’s own progress.

  He constantly sought to widen his web of business and social relationships, while detaching himself with difficulty from those of no use or interest. Even now, as he put up the shingle of “Newark Telegraph Works” at 15 Railroad Avenue, he was still a partner in Pope, Edison & Co., electrical engineers of New York, and a co-founder of the Financial & Commercial Telegraph Company, directly competing with Gold & Stock. He had a telegraph patent pending for the former firm, and was about to execute two more for the latter, one in his own name and another co-signed by Franklin Pope—in whose mother’s house he was boarding, under increasingly strained circumstances. Pope and he were further allied with James Ashley, editor of The Telegrapher, a New York journal always willing to promote new devices in which Ashley was personally interested. Back in Boston there were even older associates with varying claims on him, one owning the rights to Edison’s first patented invention, the electric vote recorder of 1868.2

  Had he been less of a confidently self-centered spider, adept at tweaking all these strands, he might have quailed at acquiring yet another partner. But in late February he took on William Unger as his machinist and gave him a large share of the Newark shop. It was an impulse he would soon regret—unlike the friendship he at once struck up with John Ott, a twenty-year-old mechanic whose ability to construct any device on order amazed him. “Here, I tell you what I want: you come and take charge of this place for me.” Ott would remain on Edison’s payroll for more than half a century, until they died within hours of each other.*1, 3

  YOU CAN DRAW ON ME

  The Newark Telegraph Works, soon to be known as Edison & Unger, was that city’s first communications laboratory. Edison intended forthwith to manufacture his own inventions, but as Ott noted, he was not a man to waste time in manual labor.4 He liked to use his hands creatively—spilling just the right number of drops from one test tube in
to another, sketching rapid diagrams of telegraph circuitry (clear to the last relay, for all their speed), or calligraphing important letters with graceful curlicues. For the next several years, while bending his brain to complex theories of information exchange, he would devote himself with increasing fascination to the mechanics of recording—printing, perforating, engraving, motographing, mimeographing, and other still-undreamed-of ways of capturing words on the fly.

  It took him three months to perfect the device specified on his first contract, a stock printer that would be smaller and at least as fast as the telegraph industry’s standard Calahan ticker.5 Gen. Marshall Lefferts, president of Gold & Stock, was impressed with it. He began to keep an admiring eye on Edison, even though the “Autographic or Fac Simile Telegraph instrument” he also wanted would not materialize for another eleven years.6

  Edison’s delightful feeling of being affluent for a change was buttressed in the spring when Gold & Stock paid $15,000 for rights to a ticker he and Pope had co-patented. They called it their “gold printer,” although it was neither the first nor the last instrument Edison designed to work on circuits reporting gold price fluctuations on the New York Stock Exchange. The high value Gold & Stock assigned to it derived from his innovative use of electricity to operate a “unison stop” that synchronized all the printers subscribing to the circuit. James Ashley had contributed nothing to the patent, but as a partner in Pope, Edison & Co., was happy to accept one-third of the purchase price.*2, 7

  Edison was less happy to have either man profit from a machine he regarded as largely his own. He looked for a way to dissociate from them, and began by using some of his $5,000 share to pay off rent arrears he owed Pope’s mother. Then he moved to bachelor digs on Market Street. With obvious pleasure he wrote to tell his parents in Port Huron, Michigan, that they could “take it easy after this.”8 Nancy Edison, to whom he owed almost all his inquiring spirit, was bedridden with dementia.

  Dont do any hard work and get mother anything She desires = You can draw on me for money—write me and Say how much money you will need in June and I will Send the amount on the first of that month = give Love to all the Folks—and write me the town news—What is Pitt doing….

  Thos A*3, 9

  Pitt was his much older brother William Pitt Edison, superintendent of the Port Huron street railway and a perennial loser in speculative local schemes. For the rest of his life Edison was going to have to deal with “Dear Al” letters from relatives whose number, and financial difficulties, increased in ratio to his own prosperity.10

  He continued to work on a variety of printing devices through the summer, at a pace that struck more sedate observers as freakish. An assistant at F. Brunner, Engraver & Die Sinker, in Manhattan recalled him slamming bound rolls of typewheel blanks on the counter and asking “When can I have them—when can I have them?” as if the future of telegraphy depended on their immediate embossing. Sometimes he was in such a hurry, he was out the door before the assistant had time to reply.11

  In the fall, Edison and Pope created an elegant glass-domed, private-line printer that won first prize in its class at the American Institute fair in New York. It was “comparatively slow” and simple, but so were most of the operators it was designed for. Gold & Stock saw its potential and bought not only the machine but the company the partners had formed to market it.12

  At this point Edison’s patent attorney, Lemuel Serrell, expressed concern that his client was not doing enough to protect all the technological ideas that he kept innocently talking about. Edison at once filled a notebook with sketches, explanatory notes, and dates of inspiration. The fact that most of the entries were made on the spot in Serrell’s office, with no reference to the instruments themselves, testified to the photographic accuracy of his memory.13

  Out of this skein of shapes two major projects emerged: a refined system of automatic transmission, and an evolving series of “universal” printers that promised to be his most important achievement yet.

  Automatic telegraphy—codified electric pulses shot down the line mechanically, rather than by a slow human hand tapping a key—was a technology that inventors had been struggling to perfect ever since the first Morse operator developed repetitive motion disorder. It involved the perforation of a paper ribbon with holes that corresponded to dots and dashes, each one permitting an electrical contact to be made as the ribbon whirled through a transmitter. In theory, the speed at which pulses were released was limited only by the pace of the ribbon. In practice, however, electrical induction—current arising in a wire because of charges in the magnetic field around it—caused a problem known as “tailing,” with each hole, like a miniature comet, allowing part of its charge to drift behind it and blur the oncoming roundness of the next. At a speed of more than ten words a minute, the blurring erased the distinction between hurtling dots and dashes. Distance compounded the problem, so that often only an unbroken streak printed out at the end of the line.14

  Earlier in the year, Edison had designed a shunted automatic transmitter that to a certain extent reduced tailing. He returned to that work with a will in October, when an independent backer, George Harrington, helped him open a second factory on Railroad Avenue, the American Telegraph Works, and followed up with the incorporation of the Automatic Telegraph Company a month later, capitalized in the extraordinary amount of $13 million. Harrington was a former assistant secretary of the treasury under Abraham Lincoln, and Edison looked forward to tapping him as a treasury in himself. Another promising source of funds was Harrington’s friend Daniel H. Craig, a founding director of the Associated Press and the most ardent promoter of automatic telegraphy in the country. He had heard enough of Edison’s skills to write him, “If you should tell me you could make babies by machinery, I shouldn’t doubt it.”15

  Encouraging as these commitments were to a young inventor still largely unknown, they were eclipsed by the scarcely credible sight of a draft contract, in Marshall Lefferts’s handwriting, offering him “forty thousand dollars” for a universal printer that would deliver text copy as well as numerical information. The sum was so large that it hardly bothered Edison to see that Lefferts, thinking twice, had crossed out the word forty and substituted “$30,000”—nor that the dread phrase “payable in stock” followed.16

  Yet he still sounded not quite grown up when he wrote again to boast to his parents.

  I am in a position now to Let you have some Cash, so you can write and say how much = I may be home some time this winter = Can’t say when exactly for I have a Large amount of business to attend to. I have one shop which Employs 18 men, and am Fitting up another which will Employ over 150 men = I am now—what “you” Democrats call a “Bloated Eastern Manufacturer.”17

  Edison’s latest engineering recruits included Charles Batchelor, John Kruesi, and Sigmund Bergmann. All were recent immigrants, and destined to be among his longest-serving aides. Batchelor, a product of the Lancashire cotton mill industry, was slow, calm, and meticulous, with a deft pair of hands. He could draw like a draftsman and make his own precision tools.18 Kruesi had many of the same qualities, combined with what passed in Switzerland for charm. Bergmann, newly arrived from Germany, had few words of English, but was a dogged perfectionist at whatever mechanical task he was assigned. “It doesn’t matter if his tongue falters,” Edison said. “His work speaks.”19

  THE SWING LAMP OF PISA

  By January 1871 Edison had so much work on hand that his clients competed for his full attention. George Harrington wanted to know when some marketable devices might be expected from the inventor’s new shop, in return for the thousands of dollars he had so far been charged for equipment and supplies. Lefferts was irked to find that he was designing perforators for both Gold & Stock and Automatic Telegraph, and wondered which company was getting the best for its investment in him. “I do see most clearly, that I shall through you be a very he
avy looser [sic],” he wrote.20 The plaint sounded more cajoling than bitter, because Lefferts had not yet signed their universal printer agreement and could afford to wait until Edison had something to show that justified its execution.*4

  Edison counseled patience, reminding all that technological breakthroughs could not be hurried. “Galileo discovered the principle of accurate Holology in the swing lamp of Pisa,” he wrote Daniel Craig. “It wouldn’t be a very sage remark to say—why damn it that lamp aint a clock.” He told Harrington that he was working nineteen hours a day on his behalf. “The Machines that I am making now will be made well & Complete, and if they don’t perforate more than 80 words a minute then there will be a funeral over here pretty quick.”21

  Harrington, reassured, continued to sign checks on demand, as did Craig, who was grateful for Edison’s cheerful serenity. “Your notes, like your confident face, always inspire us with new vim.”22

  So, presumably, did the originality and specificity of his patent applications, such as one that month for a printer designed for the New York Cotton Exchange. It featured two typewheels mounted on a single shaft, one for characters and one for digits, as well as a polarized relay, characteristic of many of Edison’s telegraph designs. This “cotton instrument” so impressed Lefferts that he ordered a production run of 150 models. When Edison also turned out a dozen experimental universal private-line printers, Lefferts was emboldened enough to list him as an asset in negotiating a merger between Gold & Stock and the Western Union Telegraph Company, the most powerful conglomerate in America.23

  Western Union was ruled by William Orton, an executive of commensurate stature. Widely respected, he was forty-five years old, an active Republican and Episcopalian, forceful, incorrupt, choleric, austere, and frail. Unlike many tycoons of the early Gilded Age, Orton was not just a financier. He had trained as a printer, written his graduate thesis on magnetic telegraphy, and risen through teaching, religious publishing, and politicking to become commissioner of internal revenue under President Andrew Johnson. His intellect was, like his prose style, clear and cold as glass, and his dignity such that the only nickname employees dared accord him was the single initial O.24