Edison

by Edmund Morris

  As soon as he could, he resumed work on the telephone, seeing that it needed his carbon button to realize its prodigious business potential. The Bell Telephone Company evidently felt the same, and tried in vain to buy the device from him. But Edison turned instead to Western Union, demanding $100,000 for a virtually solid-state transmitter that combined an induction coil with a disk of pure lampblack, tamped right against the diaphragm, doing away even with a needle.173

  In offering this breakthrough device to William Orton, he was sure it would be judged fairly. Orton had always been a hard bargainer—too hard, in one instance—but had never held Edison’s defection to the A&P Telegraph Company against him, nor hesitated to give him more assignments, out of frank respect for his inventiveness. Edison privately admitted to loving the man, despite their past squabbles over money, and was cheered that Orton did not flinch at his demand, stipulating only that the transmitter be tested first. It functioned perfectly on Western Union’s wires, picking up whispers from three feet away and sending them without interference for seventy miles. A Bell transmitter, in contrast, failed to carry a shouted call from New York to Newark.174

  The last thing Edison anticipated at this moment of triumph was that Orton, who was only fifty-two, would die on him. But no sooner had they agreed on his own specified terms of sale—“six thousand dollars per annum for seventeen years payable in monthly installments”—than Western Union announced that its president had been felled by a stroke.175

  “His last words to me were of you,” Grosvenor Lowrey wrote Edison.176

  The company’s directors could well have renegotiated the pending deal. But they chose to honor it—not surprisingly, since Edison had as usual undersold himself. His carbon transmitter would remain a staple of American telephones for another century.177

  At the time, he thought he had behaved like a canny businessman. “I knew that I would soon spend this money experimenting if I got it all at once,” he reminisced when he was older and not much wiser. “I fixed it so I couldn’t.”178

  CLEAR STEALING

  Notwithstanding Edison’s attempt to dam one income stream, others flowed pleasantly into his personal account. They included a $10,000 development grant from the Speaking Phonograph Company, which also guaranteed him 20 percent of all exhibition receipts, carbon button purchase orders (he retained the manufacturing rights to that item), and royalties on the sale of his telephone sets, five hundred of which went to Chicago alone. Wanting to share his good fortune, he awarded Charles Batchelor a 10 percent share of phonograph royalties, offered his father a tour of Europe, and bought Mary an elegant team of horses for her spring outings.179

  He also hired a personal secretary, Stockton Griffin, to handle the sacks of mail and interview requests that came with his new fame. This relieved him of bureaucratic paperwork just as his output of laboratory notes swelled enormously. He perfected the astronomical device he had mentioned in his Washington interview, calling it at first a “carbon electro-thermometer,” then a “tasimeter.”180 It was based on his discovery that a rod of hard rubber was so supersensitive to heat as to register even that of a star when aimed correctly. Its expansion altered the resistance of an adjoining carbon button, which could then be calibrated electrically on a galvanometer. He also adapted the principle of variable resistance to a plethora of “phone” products—an aerophone that used compressed air to blast speech at large crowds or wandering children; a megaphone that served the same purpose; a telephonoscope that reportedly picked up conversation from two miles away; an auriphone that did the same, in miniature, for deaf persons; and a phonomotor that converted sound waves into rotary mechanical action, allowing compulsive talkers to bore in more ways than one.*33, 181

  In mid-May he was upset by the public claim of David Edward Hughes, a British experimental physicist, to have discovered variable resistance in packed semiconductors long before him. The Royal Society was reportedly in receipt of a “Hughes Telephone” that featured a solid-state carbon transmitter like his own. “Evidently Mr H don’t read the papers,” Edison wrote William Preece, the newly appointed electrician to the British Post Office. “That is nothing but my carbon telephone…I’ll bet £100 on it.”182

  Pique turned to anger when Preece, in reply, not only denied this but supported a new claim by Hughes to have invented a “microphone” featuring the carbon button. Edison had regarded Preece as a friend since his visit to London in 1873, and relied on him to act as his advocate before the local scientific establishment. Less than a year before, he had welcomed the Englishman to Menlo Park, and shown him all his sonic devices featuring pressure relays. Now Preece wrote with apparent relish, “The recent discoveries of Professor Hughes have thrown your telephone completely in the shade.”183

  There was a degree of truth to these words, because Edison had recently sent some demonstration telephones to Britain, in hope of breaking into the local market, and they had proved so vulnerable to interference as to be unworkable. He had forgotten that most lines in England were laid underground, unlike the high wires that gave him clear transmission in America. “You were on the very threshold of a great discovery,” Preece lectured him, “…had it not been for the phonograph distracting your attention.”184

  The interference problem Edison was sure he could solve. But he was enraged by what he saw as Hughes’s “piracy” and Preece’s disloyalty, and decided to make a public issue of them. He brushed aside the argument of Sir William Thomson that while he was the real inventor of the microphone, Hughes had developed one independently. “It is not coinvention,” Edison wrote an English acquaintance, “because after a thing is known all over the world for two years its sudden reinvention is clear stealing.”185

  A prolonged battle of claim and counterclaim ensued on both sides of the Atlantic, waged mainly in newspapers and technical journals.*34, 186 It embittered Edison’s relations with Preece and slowed his development of an improved phonograph for exhibition purposes. Physically spent, he spent some days in bed toward the end of June. When Professors Barker and Draper invited him to join a scientific expedition to Rawlins, Wyoming, to observe the total eclipse of the sun on 29 July he accepted, seeing it as a chance to try out his tasimeter almost seven thousand feet above sea level.187

  Mary was five months pregnant with her third child and not happy to be left alone. He was barely a week from home when Griffin wired him to ask, “How long are you going to stay there Mrs E wants to know.”188

  SOMETHING LIKE NIGHT

  It was clear from Mary’s querulous inquiry that Edison had said nothing to her about his intent to continue west after the eclipse, until the Pacific Ocean stopped him. “This is the first vacation I’ve had in a long time, and I mean to enjoy it,” he told a reporter, saying he wanted to see Yosemite and San Francisco. But first he was determined to measure the heat of the sun’s corona at the moment when the moon blocked out all the photosphere.189

  The tiny town of Rawlins, which he reached on 18 July, was hard put to accommodate a trainload of scholarly strangers hauling almost a ton of astronomical and photographic equipment. It consisted of little more than a long street of bars and bawdy houses that sometimes echoed, at night, with the sound of gunfire settling local disputes. There was a hotel of sorts that found space for Edison only by doubling him up with Edwin Fox, a reporter for The New York Herald. Their sleep was disturbed that night when a drunk frontiersman barged into their room and said he wanted to see the famous inventor he had read about in the newspapers. He introduced himself as “Texas Jack” and demonstrated his skill with a gun by shooting through the window at a weather vane. When Edison, who did not sleep well for the rest of the night, inquired about him downstairs, he was assured that “Jack was a pretty good fellow” and not one of the “badmen” who frequented the town.190

  He looked around for a suitable site to set up his tasimeter and found that the scientis
ts had bagged all the most sheltered places for their telescopes and Draper’s big wet-plate camera. Rawlins was on the cusp of the Continental Divide, exposed to the atmospheric turbulence that a total eclipse can cause. Edison had no choice but to establish himself in a henhouse, temporarily displacing its current residents, and pray for calm weather.191

  The activities of the astronomical delegation caused much local rubbernecking. Edison and his fellow observers gave notice that they should be left undisturbed during the short “totality” of the eclipse, when their instruments would have to be kept perfectly focused. Law enforcement authorities in Rawlins were sympathetic and gave them permission to shoot any unqualified intruder “on the spot.”192

  On Sunday 28 July there was a dawn-to-midnight rehearsal of all the telescopic, spectroscopic, and other procedures that would have to be coordinated when the cosmic moment arrived. Edison sacrificed sleep altogether that weekend, trying to ensure that nothing but solar rays would strike the infrared sensor of his invention. The tasimeter was a camera-like, slit-visored box built around a lampblack button that was pressed between two battery-connected disks of platinum and backed up behind an expansive disk of vulcanite. An adjacent mirror galvanometer, playing a spot of light along a graduated scale, registered degrees of heat as minuscule as one-millionth of a degree Fahrenheit. Any stray source of warmth—even his little finger moving past the visor five feet away—edged the light spot sideways. For that reason the box had to be aligned with a roof telescope precisely aimed at the target pulsator. He practiced by focusing on two bright stars, Arcturus and Vega. Rawlins was scheduled to rotate through the lunar shadow at three-fifteen on Monday afternoon, and he would have less than two and a half minutes to register the corona at full flare.193

  Encouragingly, the day began with pristine weather. “Not a cloud obscured the heavens,” the Laramie Daily Sentinel reported, “and the air had that clear, deep blue which is found nowhere else but in the mountain region.”194 Later on a mass of cumulus drifted toward the sun and thickened, casting gloom over the landscape as well as on the astronomers. They were cheered when it passed away around noon, but then a wind began to blow, as if agitated by the darkness fast approaching from the northwest. It grew to gale force, buffeting through Edison’s henhouse. Feathers and thistledown filled the air. He tried in vain to balance his telescope as the moon notched across the sun and the light faded. At five minutes past three only one-eighth of the sun still shone. The citizens of Rawlins watched through pieces of smoked glass as the crescent pared down. Something like night descended. Cattle along the ranges stopped grazing. The eclipse was total at three-fifteen, but Edison’s rig was still unsteady. Then with only one minute of totality left, the wind dropped, he got a fix on the corona, and was rewarded with a rightward sweep of his graduating light.195

  But he discovered that the tasimeter was ten times too sensitive for the rays it was receiving. It was thrown off scale, and he had no time to adjust it for further measurements before daylight returned, and puzzled cocks began to crow.196

  STREAMERS OF THE SUN

  Many years later, after the tasimeter had been shelved and forgotten, a western legend grew up that Thomas Edison “invented the electric light” while stargazing, or sunscoping, in Rawlins. Another story had him accidentally dropping a bamboo rod into a campfire and seeing it glow in the flames.197

  The yarns were of course fanciful, since various forms of incandescent light had been invented (or at least attempted) before, from Jacques Thénard’s briefly luminous platinum wire of 1801 to Stanislas Konn’s self-destructing carbon rod lamp of 1873.198 Edison had already experimented with some makeshift lamps at Menlo Park, firing them up from batteries and concluding, like so many electricians before him, that there was no way an incandescent element could shine for long without suffering a total, and permanent, eclipse of its own.199

  If he did not experience an epiphany during his stay in Rawlins, he definitely mused about ways of harnessing electric power for work and light after visiting San Francisco and Yosemite in the first week of August. Recrossing the Sierras and Rockies, with their tumbling rivers, he wondered why hydroelectricity was not being used to drill mines and detect ores. The harvest-ready flatness of Iowa’s cornfields, with overloaded wagons crawling toward distant elevators, cried out for electric trains—even automatic trains—speeding along lines that matched the geometry of the landscape.200

  Throughout his career so far, he had thought of electricity solely in terms of telegraphy and telephony, the tasimeter being little more than a by-product of his experiments in variable resistance. It had, however, interested him in astronomy. (On reaching home, he meant to use it to sweep the sky for undiscovered stars.) And working with Henry Draper had also made him curious about the new science of spectroscopy. Even more “illuminating,” perhaps, was the fact that he had just experienced, at close hand, a cosmic event withheld from the sight of most human beings. Edison would have been less than flesh if he did not experience some Kantian emotions when he connected with the light of Arcturus and the streamers of the sun, through the open roof of a henhouse in Wyoming.201

  Before returning east via Chicago, Edison was invited to present a report entitled “On the Use of the Tasimeter for Measuring the Heat of the Stars and of the Sun’s Corona” to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St. Louis on 23 August. He had a terror of public speaking, and had an excuse not to break his journey after receiving a disturbing letter from his secretary. “Mrs. E’s health is not of the best,” Stockton Griffin wrote. “She is extremely nervous and frets a great deal about you, and about everything. I take it to be nervous prostration—She was so frightened yesterday for fear the children would get on the [railroad] track that she fainted.” Griffin had summoned the family physician, Dr. Leslie Ward, and Mary was better again, but “needs a change and right away.”202

  The total eclipse seen from Creston, Wyoming, 29 July 1878. Astronomical drawing by E. L Trouvelot.

  There was a slight tone of reproach in the last words, since newspapers were saying how tanned and healthy Edison looked after his sojourn in the mountains. He felt obliged, however, to accept the AAAS’s invitation, if only because Barker and Draper wanted to induct him as a member. No sooner had he done so than Griffin wired him to “return at once,” as Mary had had a relapse. Edison left St. Louis immediately after delivering his address.203 He reached Menlo Park on the twenty-sixth to find that the cure she needed was to have him back.

  Later that day he was seen in a rockaway buggy cresting the hill above the hamlet, with Mary driving and his children nestled behind him.204

  TO BE ABLE TO SUBDIVIDE

  Within twenty-four hours of returning home Edison had sketched something he labeled “Electric Light,” although it looked more like a battery-operated thumbscrew. On close examination, the pressure points of the rack were shown to be platinum, and the small element between them was either boron or silicon. Current passing through was supposed to produce an arc of light for as long as the element separating the points remained in place.205

  It was not the first time he had doodled a scintillant or luminous device. During his early experiments with variable resistance, he had noticed that a piece of metallic silicium held between two live carbons took on a steady glow that might well empower “a Common Electric Light,” if only the problem of burnout—oxidation and fusing of the incandescent element—could be solved. He had experimented with wicks of carbonized paper, electrifying them in weakly evacuated glass chambers, but gotten little more than a brief radiance, then smoke. In the spring he had talked of “subdividing” electric light into a multiplicity of lamps after hearing that the veteran inventor Moses Farmer had helped William Wallace, a wire manufacturer in Ansonia, Connecticut, build an eight-horsepower dynamo. But telephone work had prevented him going north to see it, despite the plea of one of Wallace’s engineers
that “it will be a blessing to the world, to be able to subdivide.”206

  While out west he had discussed the dynamo with George Barker, who knew Wallace and suggested they visit Ansonia together sometime soon. This suggestion rekindled Edison’s dormant interest in illumination technology. “He came home full of projects for producing light in large quantities and distributing it in small units as is done by gas,” Batchelor wrote, in a reminiscence of his boss’s high state of excitement after the eclipse. The two men sat up several nights “figuring out stations that could deliver current to houses which could be used equally for light, or for small powers such as pumps, sewing machines, printing presses & all sorts of manufacturing—All these could be turned on or off at will without affecting any other.”207

  Barker and Batchelor accompanied Edison to Ansonia on the afternoon of 7 September. A fellow passenger on the train was amused to see Edison, wearing a frayed straw hat and long linen duster, squeezed into the amen corner of the parlor car, with the professor’s considerable bulk crowding him.208

  The same duster ballooned back from his legs next day as he stood facing the rotary whir of Wallace’s little machine, ruminatively chewing tobacco and figuring out how it worked. He did not hear the other three men talking and joking around him. When Batchelor interpreted, he laughed but was soon absorbed again. The dynamo ignited eight dazzling carbon arc lamps via a single thick copper wire. Edison visibly gloated in its promise of long-range distribution. In the words of a reporter present, “He sprawled over a table with the simplicity of a child, and made all kinds of calculations. He calculated the power of the instrument and of the lights, the probable loss of power in transmission, the amount of coal the instrument would save in a day, a week, a month, a year, and the result of such saving on manufacturing.”209