Edison
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Orton met him halfway with $5,000 “in part payment” of a purchase price still to be negotiated, and Edison simultaneously got Harrington to roll over a due note for $3,351 that might otherwise have ruined him.87 With frigid weather and Christmas approaching, he had more than a hundred workers depending upon him in his various shops, not to mention Mary and Marion. He appealed to Orton for more money, saying that the quadruplex should pay him $25,000, plus annual royalties per circuit. “Edison is almost wild over the Quadruplex,” Orton told one of his officers. He was excited about it himself, in his phlegmatic way, but was in no hurry to conclude a deal, for the good reason that patents covering the system had not yet been applied for. Edison had withheld executing them until the last minute of development, in fear of anticipatory imitation.88 The most Orton would do, pending a formal application to the Patent Office, was to give Edison & Murray a manufacturing order, dated 17 December, for twenty sets of quadruplex instruments. It was worth $15,000 on delivery, but in the meantime Edison had to bear the cost of fabrication. When he appealed yet again, Orton treated him with Scrooge-like coldness (or so it felt to Edison) and departed for Chicago, saying he would be back after the holidays to resume discussions.89
At this juncture, like another Dickensian schemer looming out of the darkness, the financier Jay Gould paid a late-night visit to Edison’s shop on Ward Street. His ulster drooped shabbily to the ground, and he wore a hard black bowler.90 A mild, charming man despite his sharklike reputation, Gould owned several railroads plus the Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company. Unknown to Orton, he was about to acquire the Automatic Company from Harrington and Reiff, thus gaining control of Edison’s printers. He now sensed an opportunity to snatch the quadruplex too—along with its inventor.91
Edison was struck by his “far off look” as he listened to an explanation of how the system worked.92 Gould left without making a proposal. But a few nights later, before Orton’s return from Chicago, Edison found himself being escorted through the servants’ entrance to a house on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. There, in a basement office, Gould
…started in at once and asked me how much I wanted. I said—make me an offer—then he said—I will give you $30,000—I said I will sell any interest I may have for that money, which was somewhat more than I thought I could get. The next morning I went with Gould to Sherman and Sterling’s office and received a check for $30,000, with a remark by Gould that I had got the steamboat Plymouth Rock as he had sold her for $30,000 and had just received the check.93
The date was 4 January 1875, and at the flip of a millionaire’s deed to a yacht, Edison was on the way to becoming a rich man himself. If not one yet, he was relieved of his current despair and hurt pride. There would be other cash crises in his life, some of them acute, but not till after he was famous and able to rely on the credit that is fame’s reward.
Orton returned from his alleged “business” trip to Chicago, only to find that Edison had left town on an alleged “family” trip to Port Huron. They respectively took each other’s travels to mean that the one man declined to be hustled, and the other would not be toyed with. At all events Orton was the loser, and Western Union’s share value dropped four points when The New York Tribune (a Gould-controlled newspaper) announced on 15 January that the expanded Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company would shortly be putting one of Edison’s automatic systems into operation between New York and Washington, and that he would become the chief electrician of all its telegraph lines.94
The announcement was a major blow to William Orton. He tried in vain to “accept” Edison’s proposed sale of quadruplex rights for $25,000, then resorted to a Jarndycean lawsuit to claim them. If he had lived until 1913, he would have seen the quadruplex case’s final resolution and realized the importance of the great invention he had gambled away.*17, 95
TO PRICK AS WE WRITE
Edison celebrated by splurging on scientific books and equipment and helping his father, brother, and in-laws out with loans and settlements. Mary celebrated too, throwing a masquerade party for her husband’s twenty-eighth birthday on 11 February and treating herself to a fresh wardrobe.96 She would not be able to wear the latest formfitting fashions for long. By the time the Edisons settled into a new house on South Orange Avenue in the early spring, she was again pregnant.
In May, Edison, wanting to free himself from manufacturing responsibilities, dissolved his partnership with Joseph Murray. At the same time he took advantage of Gould’s embroilment in disputes over the acquisition of his quadruplex and automatic system patents to fold up his tent as electrician of the A&P Telegraph Company and quietly steal away to the life he had always coveted—that of an independent inventor in a laboratory of his own.97
For the time being, it consisted of a few rooms in the Ward Street shop. He hired five extra men to assist him and Batchelor in their experiments. They were the machinists John Kruesi and Charles Wurth, both from Murray’s shop floor; James Adams, an old friend from Boston days; his nephew Charley, an excitable boy of fifteen; and the indefatigable Sam Edison, willing to do any job necessary, from carpentry to cleaning up, in return for twenty dollars per week. With occasional extra help from Edward Johnson (still working for A&P) and another former telegraph buddy, Ezra Gilliland, Edison now had the makings of a research and development team.98
They began work on 1 June with a list of nineteen experimental projects, including “a copying press that will take 100 copies.” The first such press was a messy device that saturated tissue paper with an ink of violet aniline dye and apple pomade. It was fragrant but ran slow, needing frequent blotting. Then on the last day of the month Batchelor noted, “We struck the idea of making a stencil of the paper by pricking with a pen & then rubbing all over with ink.”99
The “pen” was nothing but a platina point that had to be jabbed manually at the paper while it lay, like a flattened fakir, on a bed of miniature nails. “It is not much good,” Batchelor conceded, with English understatement. “Resolved to make a machine to go by clockwork or engine to prick as we write.”100
The Edison Electric Pen with batteries and press, 1875.
Thus was born Edison’s electric pen, a battery-wired stylus with a needle point that flickered in and out faster than a snake’s tongue. Held as steeply as possible, to balance the tiny electromagnetic motor on its top, it pricked a sheet of stencil paper in a near-continuous line, allowing the penman to write—or draw—any cursive shapes he pleased.*18 The resulting perforate was framed, pressed against blank stationery, and ink-rolled to print as many sharp duplicates as required.
At first the electric pen was a cumbersome instrument, for all the mobility of its point, but Edison progressively miniaturized the drive components, making it lighter and less vibrant in the hand. Even so, it required considerable skill to use: an O, for example, would drop right out of the paper if inscribed too slowly. He assigned the manufacturing rights to Ezra Gilliland, and it became the showcase product of his Newark laboratory, ubiquitous in businesses and government offices as far away as Russia. Over the next ten years it would sell some sixty thousand units and be remembered as “the grandfather of automatic stencil duplication.”*19 Edison gratefully gave Batchelor and Adams a percentage of the profits.101
Helping him develop the pen gave Batchelor an education in electricity, which he had understood imperfectly hitherto. It also introduced him to the charms of nocturnal labor. “We work all night experimenting & sleep till noon in the day,” he wrote his brother in England. “We have got 54 things on the carpet….Edison is an indefatigable worker & there is no kind of a failure however disastrous affects him. He stands today the foremost inventor & electrician in this country by far.”102 He showed his respect for the Old Man (who was more than a year his junior) by never addressing him as “Al” or “Tom,” as a few old friends were allowed to do. It was always “Edison” or “Mr. Edison,” while he in retu
rn was “Batch.”
TRUE UNKNOWN FORCE
By now Edison had lost interest in the multiplex and automatic aspects of telegraphy. Instead, he became fascinated by the “acoustic” or “harmonic” telegraph, which Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell were separately developing. It involved the transmission of Morse sound signals along a single wire by several differently pitched “reeds,” similar to tuning forks. If an identical array of reeds was mounted at the receiving end, each pair would vibrate at their mutual frequency, while the others stayed quiet. Ideally, though, all the pairs ought to commune simultaneously, enabling a greater message traffic than even the quadruplex could handle.
The science of sound was a new one for Edison, although it occurred to him that a relay he had invented in 1873, with an oscillating electrode varying the resistance of water or glycerine, could have been adapted to produce audible signals.103 He began a series of acoustic telegraph experiments for Western Union in November, assisted again by Batchelor and Adams. In less than a week he improved on Gray’s acoustic transmitter by employing a delicate balance of electromagnets, resonators, and spring pendulums, each connected to its own battery, responding to its own frequency, and moving in and out of circuit without breaking the flow of current through the whole. “I do not wish to confine myself to any particular form of vibrating pendulum,” he wrote in his caveat, “as a tuning fork or string secured at both ends, or wind instrument may be used.” He also claimed as unique his idea of keeping current waves distinct as they undulated over long distances (the old telegraphic problem of “tailing”) by placing the receiver in a derived circuit and shunting it with a condenser.104
At this time the same day the experimental trio were intrigued by a bizarre side effect of magnetizing a vibrator of Stubb’s steel. A spark leaped from the core of the magnet, larger and stronger than any that could have been caused by induction. Curiouser and curiouser, when a wire attached to the vibrator was connected to a gas pipe in the laboratory, all the other fixtures in the building sparked in sympathy. Whatever energy they shared followed none of the laws of voltaic or static electricity. It jiggled no galvanometer, lacked polarity, and did not even taste of electrical discharge. Yet a knife stroked across the stove twenty feet away drew a splendid chain of scintilla from the hot metal. “This is simply wonderful,” Batchelor jotted in a notebook entry, “and a good proof that the cause of the spark is a true unknown force.”105
For Edison, it was almost as if he had willed the phenomenon to happen. Five months before, in his list of projects for experiment, he had vowed to find a “New force for Telegraphic communication.” Already that imponderable looked to be something more marvelous than acoustic transmission. He, Batchelor, and Adams had much subsequent fun by applying the force to vibrators made of twenty-eight different other metals. Only two—boron and selenium—failed to react. Carbon and thallium produced “actinic” sparks; tellurium gave off with “a strong and disgusting smell of garlic”; cadmium outperformed bismuth; and silver produced the best flash of all, a spurt of “magnificent green.”106
Edison wondered if he could utilize these sparks to send messages on underground and underwater wires without insulation. It did not occur to him at first that he might not need wires at all. Then he discovered that a spark could be made to hover between two lead pencils if they were tilted so that their points almost touched, providing that one was grounded and the other hooked to about a foot of free wire. To view the phenomenon better, he enclosed them in a “dark box” that was penetrated by a pair of brass eyepieces.107
The next step toward magic was when he made a “trembling bell” generator of a spark coil inside an evacuated glass tube, and carried the dark box into another building with the free wire still projecting. Incredibly, the sparking persisted, though much enfeebled. He could only assume that his new force was reaching the pencils through the “ether,” to use the nineteenth century’s favorite word for whatever it was that separated matter from matter. And he would have to wait thirty or more years before his box set’s protruding wire could be called a radio antenna.*20, 108
INVENTION FACTORY
The birth of Thomas Alva Edison, Jr., on 10 January 1876 saw his father immersed in a serious study of acoustics, and his grandfather constructing a long two-story shed on a hillside in Menlo Park, New Jersey.
Sam was an experienced builder, tough enough at seventy to hoist roof beams with men a third his age. Edison had given him carte blanche to find a rural location where he and “the boys” could live and work, far from the worldly distractions of New York City—but not so far as to inhibit business trips and deliveries of supplies. Sam loved a deal as much as he loved whiskey (four slugs of which he tossed back daily, to no apparent effect), and he saved his son many dimes by choosing Menlo Park, a failing, half-finished development planned along a convergence of the Philadelphia turnpike and the Pennsylvania Railroad. Its forty-odd houses and many empty lots overlooked a landscape of corn and fruit farms, with a small lake lying like a mirror in the middle distance and Manhattan, twenty-four miles away, clearly visible in bright weather.109
Edison bought two tracts for $5,200. The one smaller and closer to the railroad had a show house on it, big enough to accommodate his family, visiting relatives, and three black servants. The larger field up Christie Street (a steep, muddy boardwalk uninviting to Mary) became by spring a campus for the laboratory of his dreams—an isolated research and development facility, staffed by a team of talented young experimenters and serviced by a parallel team of machinists who would manufacture and sell whatever he invented. Soon to be known as Edison’s “Invention Factory,” it was a concept new to technology, and for that matter new to science too: communal, democratic, daring in the scope of its ambitions. With William Orton’s encouragement, he dedicated the facility first to the new science of telephony.110
If anyone that month had a prior claim on the word telephone (so far understood to mean the transmission only of pitched sounds, rather than speech), it was neither Elisha Gray nor Alexander Graham Bell but the German telegrapher Philipp Reis, who had invented a diaphragmatic Telefon in 1861. Edison had been familiar with its make-and-break circuitry as long ago as 1869. And in the summer just past, he had written the word speak above the resonant box of a sketched telephonic instrument, built around a tuning fork whose resistance was varied by mercury.
The idea had not worked, but now, on 14 January, he executed an acoustic telegraph caveat that contained what he afterward called, rather wistfully, the “First Telephone on Record”—a resonating receiver with a membrane vibrating to the incoming oscillations of the line wire, transferred via a tiny electromagnetized coil. Edison thought of it, however, only as a device for measuring wave sounds.111 Its adaptability to speech reception dawned on him only after Bell’s variable resistance telephone design was patented on 7 March.*21
All three inventors, plus many others across the country, were preparing to show at the great Centennial Exhibition scheduled to open in Philadelphia in May. Edison secured a space of four hundred square feet, not as much as he wanted but enough to mount imposing displays of his quadruplex and automatic telegraph systems, the motograph and electric pen, and a range of printers, including those that operated chemically and spelled messages out in roman type. He elected not to provoke scientific wrath with a demonstration of “etheric force.”112
With many items still to perfect, he waited impatiently for Sam to finish the new laboratory. Mary Edison was less excited than he was about their impending move. She was still only twenty years old, and had spent her whole life in Newark. Knowing her husband’s eccentric work schedule, she was not looking forward to long nights alone in bed in an unlighted hamlet twelve miles from the nearest police station. Rosanna Batchelor—also a mother of two—had the same fear. The “surprise party” that some of Mary’s relatives gave her at home on 16 March was a probable attempt t
o cheer her up.113
Nine days later Edison opened the new laboratory, and life changed drastically for everybody in his immediate orbit.
THE SILENCE OF COUNTRY NIGHTS
For the next year or so, his band of familiars remained small, amounting to a dozen or so veterans of the Ward Street factory.114 Bergmann quit their ranks and set up an independent shop in New York, where he quickly prospered. Batchelor, Adams, Kruesi, Wurth, John Ott, and Gilliland all moved to Menlo Park—the last on the understanding that he would establish a factory for the electric pen in a shack alongside the railroad.115 Sam and Charley Edison came too, although the old gentleman was periodically obliged to return to Port Huron, where he had impregnated his housekeeper.116
One day he returned with torn clothes and many bruises, having leaped from the New York–Philadelphia express as it steamed past the depot at full speed. He said he had merely imitated what his son used to do with a bundle of newspapers when the evening train came home from Detroit. “I tell you, Tom, I wouldn’t do it again for ten dollars!”117
Edison was grateful to Sam for finding what he insisted was “the prettiest spot in New Jersey,” although Menlo Park’s beauty had to be taken on trust in the raw light of early spring. The laboratory was especially stark with its fresh white paint glaring in contrast to the dull yellows and browns of houses elsewhere in the hamlet. The only features that (invisibly) distinguished it from an elongated, double-story schoolhouse were two deep subterranean brick columns, to give it stability. A vibration-free floor was essential to Edison when testing acoustic equipment.118
He kept saying that he had come to Menlo Park in search of “peace and quiet,” not seeming to realize it was a strange remark for a near-deaf man to make. No less strange was the obsession with sonics that grew upon him now, unless the explanation simply was that the silence of country nights enabled him to measure frequencies that were disturbed by urban noise. He had never had any difficulty with the hard tapping and ticking of telegraph sounders, and he could “read” Morse by ear as easily as he swept his eye across pages of prose. But the much more complex harmonics and changing volumes of Bell’s speech telephony—early rumors of which reached him in April—came as a challenging shock. To catch up and then compete with Bell and Gray (even as they competed with each other), he would have to stop thinking of telegraphy as the rapid transfer of signals meant to be decoded as handwriting or print, and adapt to the notion of messages sent and received purely as sound—not even needing, in most cases, to be written down.119