Edison

by Edmund Morris

  When Edison was presented to him on 13 February, he may not have known that a few years before, this affable slouch had been one of his army of gypsy operators, working in Western Union offices as far afield as Memphis and Boston. But Orton was already convinced that Edison was, as he put it, “probably the best electro-mechanician in the country,” and saw the value of acquiring his past and future telegraphic patents.25 Gold & Stock had a prior claim to them, and Lefferts made it a condition of purchase that they would remain within his firm, as a subsidiary of the larger company.

  Negotiations toward the merger proceeded. Harrington followed them apprehensively, not wanting to lose the services of the Automatic Telegraph Company’s house inventor. On 4 April he took the precaution of reserving unto himself two-thirds of the patent rights to any invention or improvement that Edison might make, “applicable to automatic telegraphy.”26

  A week after signing this conveyance, which included power of attorney, Edison was drawn back to Port Huron by the death of his mother. Nancy Edison was sixty-three. He had been her youngest child, and the one who most benefited from her store of bookish knowledge—if not her religious instruction. Back then she was, in his grateful memory, the only person who did not find him strange. “My mother was the making of me. She understood me; she let me follow my bent.”27

  COOPERATION AND GOOD WILL

  Further legal responsibilities piled up on Edison after his bereavement, ending what little remained in him of immaturity. On the first of May he and William Unger leased the third and fourth floors of a building on the corner of Ward Street and Pear Alley in Newark, “with the privilege of four horse steam power,” and transferred their thriving telegraph equipment works there. On the tenth, Harrington increased Edison’s obligation to the Automatic Telegraph Company by bringing in five more investors to share the burden of financing his other operation at 103 Railroad Avenue. It said much for Harrington’s reputation that he could recruit such distinguished partners and trustees as Gen. William Jackson Palmer, Erastus Corning, William P. Mellen, and Josiah C. Reiff, who all seemed eager to contribute more money to an operation that had already cost him $16,000.28

  Two weeks later Marshall Lefferts and William Orton concluded an agreement for the sale of Gold & Stock to Western Union, with Lefferts retaining the presidency of the former company. Both executives congratulated themselves on securing “the cooperation and good will of Mr. Edison for the future.”29

  On 26 May Edison signed a five-year contract with Lefferts that guaranteed him an annual salary of $3,000 a year if he continued to supply Gold & Stock with marketable inventions. It made particular mention of the universal private-line printer he had just finished working on. He was to receive the title of “Consulting Electrician and Mechanician,” and would be rewarded in addition with $35,000 worth of company shares. Assuming those went up rather than down, his total pay package might be much greater than its face value of $50,000.*5, 30

  Manifestly, Edison was being wooed by potent, grave, and reverend signors. But his new status also brought, in abundance, the jealousy that accompanies professional success. As part of the Gold & Stock/Western Union deal, the American Printing Telegraph Company he had formed with Franklin Pope and James Ashley ceased to exist. Although both partners were generously paid off, their severance did not compare to the size of Edison’s windfall, which they felt was partly due to work they had put into the patents concerned. Ashley especially would never forgive him.31

  VERY HANDSOME EYES

  One wet evening that spring three Newark schoolgirls took shelter from the rain in the hallway of Edison’s factory on Ward Street. They were invited inside by an employee who knew them, and came upon Edison working on a stock ticker. Mary Stilwell, aged fifteen and a half, was struck by him for two reasons. “First, I thought he had very handsome eyes, and next, because he was so dirty, all covered with machine oil, &c.”32

  The eyes won out, and she was emboldened to ask him about his work. Outside as they talked, the rain grew worse. She and her friends decided they would have to make a dash for home. The man who had brought them in offered to escort two of the girls with his umbrella. It was not big enough for all of them, so by chance or more likely design, Mary found herself left alone with Edison. He pulled an overcoat over his work clothes and escorted her home himself.

  When we got to the house I saw that he was determined to go in and I had to invite him, and when my mother came down she asked who that was. I told her and said that he had brought me home and she went in. I was in mortal terror lest she should ask him to stay, but she did, and then he got up and took off his overcoat and stayed till nine o’clock, and then when he went away he asked permission of my mother and myself to call again. When he got it he availed himself of it almost every evening, and at last after five months…33

  GRAY MORNING SAUNTERS

  During that long period of courtship, Edison discovered that the money due to him from his various contracts, though substantial, was not enough to meet the expense of maintaining three shops and a workforce approaching seventy. He also had to bear the necessarily expensive business of experimenting, and such essentials as patent fees, food, and cigars.34 He developed a severe cash flow problem, and dealt with it by paying his creditors only when their demands turned into threats. At the same time his perfectionism retarded delivery of factory orders and promised prototypes. “When are you agoing to have something to show in the way of the new Perforator and Printer?” Daniel Craig wrote in early June.35

  When Harrington—always nervous about having to share him with Lefferts and Orton—also complained about an apparent lack of progress on the automatic telegraph, Edison was provoked into a rare outburst of anger. “I cannot stand this worrying much longer….You cannot expect a man to invent & work night and day, and then be worried to a point of exasperation about how to obtain money to pay bills—If I keep on in this way 6 months longer I shall be completely broken down in health and mind.”36

  Harrington responded with a check that met his current payroll problem. Two days later Edison felt flush enough to invest $300 in a Port Huron liquor store. As he joked years later, “I have too sanguine a temperament to keep money in solitary confinement.”37

  He was telling the truth, however, about working night and day. In June he delivered two prototypes of his most important invention to date, a universal stock printer, to Gold & Stock, and on 26 July he executed the first of two patents on improvements in automatic telegraphy to gladden Craig’s heart. He shuttled back and forth between his shops and office in Newark and the headquarters of his various clients in New York. Being peripatetic stimulated his creativity: “I have innumerable machines in my Mind.” Not wanting to lose any of them, he developed a lifelong habit of carrying pocket notebooks to record every inspiration.38

  His principal interest at this time (aside from Mary Stilwell) was the electrochemistry of automatic telegraphy. A printing method invented by George Little in 1869 allowed signals to flow from a metal stylus onto paper sensitized with potassium iodide or some other aqueous solution. The marks were “fugitive” if the recording point was platinum, and permanent if it was iron. But recorders based on Little’s patent “tailed” terribly, encouraging Edison to come up with a superior method of his own. Harrington let him open a small research laboratory for the purpose, on the top floor of the Automatic Telegraph Company building in downtown Manhattan.39

  Edward Johnson, the company’s superintendent, was deputized to work with him after being warned that Edison was “a genius…and a very fiend for work.”40 So began the most important friendship of Johnson’s life. “I came in one night and there sat Edison with a pile of chemical books that were five feet high when laid one upon another. He had ordered them from New York, London, and Paris….He ate at his desk and slept in his chair.” Within six weeks all the books had been read and reduced to a volume of handwritte
n abstracts. One result of Edison’s consequent erudition was that he was able to concoct a ferric solution for automatic reception that cost only five or six cents a gallon, as opposed to the seventeen dollars a gallon of Little’s.41

  Johnson was awed. Hyperactive himself, wing-mustached and torrentially talkative, he was destined to become an excellent salesman for Edison products, able to prove or pretend their superiority in every particular. But his chief value at this early stage of their association was to help “the Old Man”—as Edison was already quaintly called—deal with the challenges of long-distance automatic telegraphy, a subject in which he was an expert.

  They discovered they had a shared gift for penury. Often, Johnson recalled, they worked without dinner through dawn:

  Along about daylight, when weariness and hunger combined to paralyze our mentality…we would find ourselves without so much as a nickel wherewith to purchase a bun, not to speak of a bed; and upon such occasion we would combat the weariness and the hunger by taking a brisk walk to Central Park and back, by which time the office boy at least would be on hand to assist us with a meager but grateful breakfast at Coffee Pat’s, a well-known penny-lunch establishment on Park Row, whose sole other patrons were the “printer’s devils” of the various newspapers in that vicinity.42

  On one of these “gray morning saunters,” when they could not afford even to eat at Pat’s, Edison pointed at the decorations in the window and said, “Say, Johnson, we had better quit inventing and hire ourselves out as a pair of Chinese gods. We would be a more brilliant success. At least, we needn’t go hungry.”43

  HOW TO TREAT A WOMAN

  Edison’s wooing of Mary Stilwell became serious around the time of Thanksgiving, when he was taking her home from a walk. By now she was sixteen, and he, at twenty-four, was “Thomas” to her “Mame.” In the only interview she ever gave, she recalled how the unspoken issue between them came up.

  “Have you ever thought you would like to be married, Mame?”

  “Why no—not yet anyhow.”

  “Well, I have and I would like to, and I would like you for my wife.”

  “Oh I couldn’t.”

  “Well, and why not? Don’t you like me well enough? Think, now, and try not to make a mistake.”44

  Mary stammered something about being too young.

  He waved her protest aside. “If you meant no you would say no, so now I’ll see your father tomorrow night, and if he says yes we’ll be married Tuesday.”

  What Edison lacked in romance he made up in directness. “I love your daughter and I’ll make her a good husband,” he told Mr. Stilwell, holding Mary’s hand. “I am honest, and I am good, and I know how to treat a woman.”

  He agreed to wait a week for Mr. Stilwell’s answer, which turned out to be positive.

  “And so,” Mary told Olive Harper in the last year of her life, “we were married.”45

  POPSY WOPSY

  The wedding took place on Christmas Day 1871. By then Edison had bought a house at 53 Wright Street in Newark and delivered a lucrative shipment of six hundred universal stock printers to Gold & Stock. Thanks to this and other shop orders and the regularity of his salary as the firm’s consulting electrician, he was back in the black, able to lavish $2,000 on his bride for the acquisition of furniture, domestic help, and—important to her—a new wardrobe.46

  Mary was a pretty picture in fine clothes, especially when she tied a sexy ribbon around her neck and let white ruffles spill out of her loose sleeves and collar. She was a slender, pensive-looking girl with lovely eyes, unused to money (Mr. Stilwell was a sawyer)*6 but quite willing to spend it, now her husband had it.47

  They were married by a Methodist Episcopal minister and spent their first night at home—Edison typically asking if he could stop by the factory for an hour or two to solve a consignment problem—before traveling to Niagara Falls and Boston for an abbreviated honeymoon. They were back home on New Year’s Day. After that their life together remained private except for two jocular complaints that Edison entered into his notebooks: “My Wife Popsy Wopsy Can’t Invent” and “Mrs Mary Edison My wife Dearly Beloved Cannot invent worth a Damn!”48

  Mary Stilwell Edison, circa 1871.

  He certainly could not say that of himself. During the first year of his marriage, and particularly in the months before Mary conceived her first child, he executed thirty-nine successful patents: printing telegraphs, typewheels, perforators, chemical papers, rheotomes, autotel instruments, electromagnetic adjusters, transmitters, unison stops, galvanic batteries, circuits, and signal boxes.*7, 49 These were amplified by hundreds of notebook notions, some to do with a word-printing idea that had come to him on the eve of his wedding: that of interposing a band of silk, or some other resilient fabric, between a metal point and a roll of paper. The silk would be saturated in ink, and electrical impulses coming through the point would impress the paper with dots that formed letters. In an entry dated 18 January (“This is a novel affair”), he drew a batch of such points tapping down on the silk band as it flowed over the paper roll.50 More elaborately in the same note, he imagined an electrochemical recorder in which the roll became a “platina faced drum” and the points “platina pens” and the interposing band sensitized paper that, as the pens tapped down in response to charges agitating them, spelled out the word BOSTON.

  Edison was doubtless unconscious that somewhere in the near future, like a shadow of these drawings thrown on an unseen wall, wavered the stylus, the foil, the cylinder, and the stippling vibrations of his most historic invention.51

  Edison chemical printer spelling out the word “BOSTON,” January 1872.

  COPPER AND TIME

  When he needed a witness to countersign and date ideas that looked patentable, Edison turned more often than not to Joseph Murray, a senior machinist at American Telegraph Works. When in February Edison & Unger began to have trouble handling the volume of orders it attracted from telegraph companies (some of them as far away as England), he decided to make Murray his partner in a supplementary factory, manufacturing equipment primarily for Gold & Stock. On 5 February the new shop opened its doors on Railroad Avenue. This, with the addition of an annex Edison rented for himself on Mechanic Street, brought the number of his facilities in Newark to five, a total he soon found to be unsupportable administratively and financially. Again, in the rags-or-riches toggle that would always characterize his way of doing business, he found himself unable to pay bills on demand.*8, 52

  In July he worsened his difficulties by buying William Unger out for $17,100 worth of mortgage and notes, and concentrating all his manufacturing activities at Ward Street. The new firm was organized as Edison & Murray, and its payroll grew to an impressive seventy-four.

  After the transaction a representative of the R. G. Dun credit rating agency noted that Edison was “talented in the way of inventive genius [but] Is at present Considbly spread out.” Although his ultimate success “might in a measure be Consid assured with Careful Management is Yet Consid problematical & cr[edit] shd be extended with a good deal of Caution.”53

  Edison’s creative flow subsided only slightly in the second half of the year, while he fought off creditors and tried to apportion equal amounts of time to his competing clients, Gold & Stock and the Automatic Telegraph Company. That meant alternating, or concurrent, development of information-sharing devices for Lefferts and Orton, and automatic transmitters for Harrington.

  In one experiment aimed at pleasing the latter, he achieved the almost incredible printout speed of eighteen hundred words a minute by changing his universal private-line printer into an electric typewriter.54 The device was of little immediate use to the Automatic Telegraph Company—it lacked a sending mechanism—but was a significant advance nonetheless. After working for years with dots and dashes, then with dots alone inscribing the shapes of letters, he
was now producing neat roman capitals, and punctuation marks besides. “TO MR HARRINGTON,” the instrument rattled out, by way of demonstration, “THIS IS A SPECIMEN DONE ON THE PRINTING MACHINE—DO YOU THINK IT ANY IMPROVEMENT OVER THE LAST SPECIMEN, IT IS NOT SO VERY MARKED AS TO KNOCK A MAN DOWN BUT STILL A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION.”55

  Edison & Murray workforce, Ward Street, Newark, 1873.

  During the fall and early winter Edison (buoyed by a $4,000 development deal from Josiah Reiff) attained a high degree of sophistication in duplex telegraphy.*9 It was a process, pioneered by Joseph Stearns and much pondered by himself, of sending simultaneous messages along a single wire. While one stream of signals dot-dashed its way from A to B, another stream did the reverse. The idea was to stagger the streams, so that going pulses would not collide with coming ones, just as pedestrians on a New York sidewalk avoided one another as they headed downtown or uptown.56

  Edison’s initial duplex designs were sketched rapidly, yet with elegance and precision. Most of them violated normal telegraphic procedure by counterposing a neutral relay at one end of the line and a polarized relay at the other. He boasted that given enough funding, he could invent any number of such machines. “Very well,” William Orton told him, “I’ll take all you can make—a dozen or a bushel.” Huge as Western Union was, its size meant that it handled the bulk of the nation’s message traffic, and it was constantly on the lookout for devices that would speed up transmission. More than that, it was willing to buy patents of any sort that would cramp innovation among its competitors. Edison responded with twenty-one further designs, some penciled while he was waiting in Orton’s anteroom, all probing past duplex toward what he called “diplex” messaging. It was a method that dispatched signals the same way in pairs. He intimated that if he were allowed to use Western Union lines to test both kinds of transmission, he might even succeed one day in coordinating duplex and diplex signals to create quadruplex telegraphy, with enormous savings of copper and time.57