Edison

by Edmund Morris

  This idea was so audacious that Orton did not comprehend its import. He gave Edison permission to run night tests on a loop wire between New York and Boston, to occupy experimental space in the Western Union building for the duration, and to use the company’s own factory to fabricate necessary equipment. In return, Orton reserved first-refusal rights to any duplex/diplex patents that Edison might come up with.*10, 58

  A freehand sketch by Edison of his quadruplex system.

  NIGHTS ALONE

  The birth of a baby daughter, Marion, on 18 February 1873 enabled Mary Edison to begin a series of duplex transmissions of her own. She saw little of her husband that winter, as he was working at Edison & Murray by day and camping out in the basement of Orton’s headquarters most evenings. A Western Union employee recalled a week “during which time he never went to bed or had any regular hours for meals.”59 His model networks on the floor, which he webbed with copper wires unspooled from his pocket, threatened to trip unwary passersby:

  When he was hungry, he visited a coffee and cake establishment in the neighborhood and absorbed what he was pleased to call the Bohemian Diet, and, returning with an unlighted cigar between his lips, he would begin his experiments anew. After a while, he would throw himself into a chair and doze, sometimes for an hour, and again for shorter or longer periods. He used to say that when he was thus napping, he dreamed out many things that had puzzled him while awake.60

  Edison’s tests created as many problems as they solved, keeping him away from home for more than a hundred consecutive nights of experiment. At least one system that he sketched for possible patenting was labeled “Four-plex.” It laid out a circuit of intimidating complexity with the waggish addendum, “Why not.”61

  He had to postpone any further work on this ne plus ultra of telecommunication in the spring, when Craig and Harrington sent him to England on a delicate assignment. He was charged with demonstrating to skeptical engineers of the British Post Office Telegraph Department that his automatic transmitter-receivers were faster than the so-called rapid printing telegraph of Charles Wheatstone.62

  Edison packed a small satchel, stuffed three boxes with instruments, chemical paper, and preperforated message tapes, and sailed for Liverpool on 23 April, accompanied by an assistant, Jack Wright. The crossing on HMS Java was stormy. Having never navigated a body of water bigger than Lake Huron before, he only now discovered that he had an iron stomach. It was not until the green fields of Lancashire hove over the horizon that most of his fellow passengers came on deck for fresh air.63

  He left Wright with some equipment in Merseyside and reached London at the beginning of May. Most other young Americans visiting the world’s largest city for the first time would have wanted to sightsee, but Edison was austerely focused on work.*11, 64 On the morning after his arrival he set up automatic receiving apparatus in the Post Office headquarters on Telegraph Street. Examiners there wanted to see the quality of sample messages sent to him by Wright in Liverpool. One of them said, encouragingly, “You are not going to have much show. They are going to give you an old Bridgewater Canal wire that is so poor we don’t work it.” He was also informed that Wright would have to draw his signal charge from “sand batteries”—cells filled with a weak sedimentary electrolyte.65

  Sensing that the odds were stacked against him, Edison sought the help of Col. George Gouraud, the Automatic Telegraph Company’s London representative. Gouraud was a large, majestic, expatriate American who had won a Medal of Honor during the Civil War and made the most of it in building a business career. Glossy of mustache and spit-polished shoes, he was a handsome man, except that his eyes, as a diplomat who knew him observed, “were not quite in tune.”66 Both of them, however, looked out for George Gouraud, and they reflected Thomas Edison as a comer worth cultivating.*12

  When asked if the company would stand for the purchase of “a powerful battery to send to Liverpool,” Gouraud said yes. The only one available turned out to be a monster unit that John Tyndall had used for demonstrations at the Royal Institution. It consisted of a hundred cells and cost a hundred guineas, and Wright had to come to London to get it. But when grounded and connected, it gave messages such momentum that test printouts on Telegraph Street were, in Edison’s words, “as perfect as a copper plate.”67

  He had to wait three weeks for the Post Office trial. In the meantime, his stomach proved less able to tolerate English cooking than it had turbulence at sea. After forcing down repeated dinners of roast beef and fried flounder, he complained that his “imagination was getting into a coma” and rejoiced to find a French patisserie in High Holborn that soothed him with carbohydrates.68

  On 23 May Edison was finally able to demonstrate the superior speed of his automatic telegraphy to that of the Post Office’s Wheatstone system. Wright sent him Morse messages at an average rate of five hundred words a minute over the next five days. The chief examiner thought this excellent, but pointed out that such an increased flow of copy would require the hiring of extra transcription clerks. The fact that the flow would, in turn, generate more telegraph income did not seem to outweigh the traditional British preference for muddling through.*13, 69

  Before returning to America, Edison won permission to conduct self-educating experiments on reels of transoceanic cable stored underwater at Greenwich. He was mystified to find that the signals he had received so sharply along the land line from Liverpool were distorted when sent through two thousand miles of coiled cable. A single dot printed out at the other end as a dash twenty-seven feet long. When after endless adjustments he managed to send whole words, only two or three of them dragged through per minute. Eventually he realized that the coil was the culprit—or rather, that electrical induction caused his signals to bleed from one winding to another.70

  Those dark hours in Greenwich were as bleak as any he ever spent, the only hostelry open to him being a roach-infested snug for longshoremen. It purveyed molasses cake and coffee that tasted like burnt bread. Gouraud made the mistake of coming down once to breakfast with him there, and felt so ill afterward that he had to be revived with gin. Edison sailed home in mid-June with no particular desire to revisit the Old World.71

  A PECULIAR EFFORT OF THE MIND

  He was greeted in Newark with the disagreeable news that a sheriff had been bothering Mary about debts. Joseph Murray reported that he had lent her $200 to help, but she “did not pay one bill out of it.” Murray was a soft-hearted soul and quickly added, “I don’t Blame her or find fault with her”—as well he might, since she had a baby to feed and the household accounts were, after all, her husband’s responsibility. The larger problem was that the Edison & Murray shop was being bled white by the credit cost of buying out William Unger. And the largest problem of all was that the national economy, like Edison himself, was suffering the consequence of growing too fast and spreading too thin. The railroad-cum-telegraph expansion following the Civil War had petered out for lack of more places to go and a withdrawal of speculative capital. “Business is very dull money worse than ever,” Murray wrote his partner. “Believe I have had a hard time of it since you left. I lost 11 lbs in one month but I shall die in the Harness if I ever do die.”72

  For the next year and a half Edison flirted with insolvency while his brain spouted inventions, and payments for them flew in and out of his pocket. A full-scale panic occurred in mid-September 1873, driving scores of banks under and triggering a depression that would last most of the decade. William Orton, conserving Western Union’s resources, declined to finance the diplex just as it evolved into a promising prototype model. He considered Edison “a very ingenious man, but erratic,” always with his hand out for laboratory funds. Gold & Stock cut back on its orders, compelling Edison & Murray to hustle for manufacturing contracts. The Automatic Telegraph Company, struggling to survive, looked around for a purchaser, even as a group of British investors paid $50,000 in
gold for the foreign rights to its patents. Edison had to beg for his one-third share of that money, learning how his creditors felt when he imposed the same indignity on them. He had to beg again, this time to Orton, when a note for $10,000 payable to Unger became due, along with a threatened lien on his Ward Street shop. Orton gave him only $3,000 on account of unspecified future work. A sympathetic Automatic investor, William Seyfert, came up with $6,600 more to cancel Unger’s lien, generating another note that would one day trouble Edison severely.73

  His rescuer then became his workbench colleague now. Charles Batchelor, who had shone as a precision machinist and mechanic on the factory floor at Ward Street, joined him upstairs in a series of quasi-scientific experiments provoked by Edison’s belated discovery of induction in the wet cables of Greenwich.74 Edison was not alone in being ignorant of the phenomenon, since American electricians had never had much to do with long-distance, undersea signals; they thought instead in terms of relay transmission overland.

  He affected contempt for English innovators—“They do not eat enough pie”—but he had met and interviewed enough of them during his off-hours in London to realize that they were far more sophisticated than he in electrical matters.75 During the winter and spring of 1874 he somehow kept his financial troubles in one compartment of his mind while occupying the rest of it with intense self-education in the arcana of electromagnetic and electrochemical science.*14 He unembarrassedly began with a primer, John Pepper’s Cylcopaedia of Science Simplified, then studied and annotated the telegraphic handbooks of Robert Savine and Latimer Clark before absorbing such formidable tomes as William Crookes’s Select Methods of Chemical Analysis and Charles Bloxam’s Laboratory Teaching. All these authors were British. Their erudition inspired him to such a degree that he began to write a book of his own, a telegraphic treatise based on his ongoing experiments with Batchelor. Although he never completed it, several chapters appeared in various trade journals, in probable imitation of the first-serial publication method of the great Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell.*15

  Out of this six-month swirl of personal and intellectual turbulence, like two great birds tossed up by a storm, came Edison’s most important contributions yet to the science of communications. The first was the quadruplex telegraph, which he had meditated on for years but made practical now through his new understanding of induction. On 8 July 1874 he let Orton observe it in action between New York and Philadelphia, conscious for the first time that he had an invention worth millions. “I had my heart trying to climb up around my oesophagus.” The demonstration was a success, and two days later The New York Times announced it to the world. Although Edison was mentioned only in passing, he got his first addictive taste of renown.76

  In its planned form, which he would continue to elaborate and refine for years, the quadruplex was a superbly symmetrical grid that opposed two terminal stations, each sending and receiving two transmissions. The system allowed them to do so simultaneously—four signals bypassing one another along the same wire—a feat akin to playing Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge on a one-string violin. Edison added the further counterpoint of “phantom wires” at either end of the main line, duplicating the variations in its resistance and creating, in theory, another four transmissions. He allowed with some smugness that the overall concept “required a peculiar effort of the mind, such as the imagining of eight different things moving simultaneously on a mental plane.”*16, 77

  The dry language of his patent application explained that each pair of terminals transmitted mismatched signals. Sender A drew constant power from its source battery, the polarity of which reversed between every dot-or-dash pulsation of current, with no break in the circuit. Receiver A was polarized—a feature of most of Edison’s telegraph designs—and unsprung, so that it responded only to what it felt of the reversals coming its way. Sender B, controlled by a neutral relay with a retracting spring, was indifferent as to polarity, depending instead on varying strengths of induced current to keep in touch with receiver B.78

  Orton was not sure if the beauty of the quadruplex as an electrical concept would make it a practical addition to his system. He needed to be persuaded of that by seeing it thoroughly tested on a Western Union line. But he did let company shareholders know that the quadruplex was “an invention more wonderful than the duplex,” which, coming from an executive famous for circumspection, amounted to a torrent of praise.79

  NEW FORCE

  In August Edison executed a flurry of patents in multiplex and automatic telegraphy, including one for his second great invention of the year, modestly entitled “Improvement in Telegraph Apparatus.” It arose out of his earlier discovery that if a positively charged piece of lead was pushed across a slice of damp chalk resting on a negatively charged plate, the current running through made the chalk surface slippery, and caused the lead to skate with such agility it could be impelled in any direction, with no apparent friction or inertia—“as upon ice.” Although at first the phenomenon had seemed to be simply a hydrostatic translation of electrical signals into motion, he now saw the lead as a potential pen point, and the chalk as a tabula rasa wanting to be written on. “Hence I term my invention the electric motograph.”80

  Writing—or in telegraphy, printing—consisted of marks imposing themselves on blankness. White paper soaked in an electrosensitive chemical solution and drawn over a drum could substitute for white chalk, Edison reasoned. When a bolt of current vibrated the pen, the point would slide, and the paper beneath darken in reaction, as if inked. (Ferrocyanide of potassium turned Prussian blue.) Conversely, whenever the pen lost its charge, the paper would become less slippery, and there would be a microsecond of drag—the skater digging in—before the next charge, and the next mark. That meant economical printing, with not too much white space separating the characters.81

  He congratulated himself, with reason, on having discovered a “new force”—so new that he could not for the moment figure how best to utilize it. Nor, since he was used to the ticking of telegraph recorders, did he pay due attention to that of the motograph. Every dash or dot that it registered on the ear as well as the eye; every advance of the paper recorded a downward vibration felt. Perceptively, the editor of Scientific American noted on 5 September, “The salient feature of Mr. Edison’s present discovery is the production of motion and of sound by the pen, or stylus, without the intervention of a magnet or armature.”82

  THE PROFESSOR OF DUPLICITY

  Edison sought to augment the professional respect he earned from inventing the quadruplex and the motograph by assuming the science editorship of a new telegraphic journal, The Operator. He contributed a series of articles, including one on the duplex for the 1 October issue that was so densely technical as to dissuade many a young electrician from taking up multiple telegraphy. It ended with a warning: “To be continued.” He wrote for other journals too, sometimes posing abstruse problems for readers to solve, and paid Robert Spice, a Brooklyn professor of natural philosophy, to give him a one-month crash course in chemistry.83

  Although the extra notice accorded him as a result was modest (some of his articles were published anonymously), Edison began to attract those twin concomitants of celebrity, the sycophant and the scourge. George F. Barker of the University of Pennsylvania wrote on 3 November to congratulate him on his “remarkable little instrument,” the motograph, and asked if he would be “willing to come on and show it to the highest scientific body in the country, the National Academy of Science.” And James Ashley, still fuming over his deal with Gold & Stock three years before, began to mock him in The Telegrapher as “the professor of duplicity and quadruplicity.”84

  Edison ignored Ashley and was unable to gratify Barker, perhaps because he could not afford the fare to Philadelphia. He was so desperate for money as the winter came on that he had to sell his house at a loss, and move his wife and daughter into an apartment over a drugstore in downtown Newark. T
he sale netted him nothing, relieving him only of attendant credit. His private anguish around this time was implicit in one of his periodic doodlings of dream imagery: “A yellow oasis in hell….the wrestling of shadow, a square chunk of carrion with two green eyes held by threads of gossamer which floats at midnight in bleak old rural graveyards.”85

  By the beginning of December he could stand poverty no longer. The quadruplex was now testing superbly on Western Union lines from New York to Boston, Buffalo, and Chicago. Orton saw the system as a crucial asset to the company, worth at least $10 million in the near future and incalculably more beyond. But he had yet to make an offer for the patent rights. Edison, with the ingenuousness that was part of his charm and a large part of his deficiencies as a businessman, wrote him on the sixth: “I need 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, or 2,000 dollars—any one you would like to advance.”86