Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Eventually he told Wallace that a machine that lit only one lamp per horsepower was not what the world was looking for. “I believe I can beat you in the search,” he said.210

  A BIG BONANZA

  Edison did not mean to be critical of the dynamo itself, which he arranged to buy on the spot. Here was a single machine generating more power than all the batteries he had ever handled, illuminating a whole foundry as it did so. But the steadily eroding carbons, as well as the red heat and quarter-inch thickness of the copper conductor linking them, made him optimistic that he could “beat” Wallace, and other experimenters too, in attaining the double chimera of incandescence and subdivision. “It was all before me,” he said afterward. “I saw that the thing had not gone so far but that I had a chance….The intense light had not been subdivided so that it could be brought into private houses.”211

  That same night in Menlo Park he doodled some electric arc and kerosene lamps, in the apparent hope of creating a fire in his mind. One drawing in his notebook showed a pair of spiral wires around metal poles sitting on switches. He wrote beneath, It may be possible that one regulator at the Central Station may be made to do it for all the main current being regulated by the heat of a large spiral. Then it occurred to him that an incandescent lamp could be made to regulate itself in such a way that its wire never melted. Over the next few days he and Batchelor sketched forty-five variations of this idea and filed a caveat to protect them. On 13 September Edison telegraphed Wallace, HURRY UP THE MACHINE. I HAVE STRUCK A BIG BONANZA.212

  As always when diverging into a new course of experiment, he saw himself at the glorious end of it, rather than the fraught beginning. He forgot that he was now so famous that he could no longer afford to boast an invention without being sure that it would work. “I have it now!” he said to one of the newspapermen who had found that Edison loved to give interviews. “When ten lights have been produced by a single electric machine, it has been thought to produce a great triumph of scientific skill.”213 With weird precision, he described what he was going to achieve in the immediate future:

  With the process I have just discovered, I can produce a thousand—aye, ten thousand from one machine. Indeed, the number may be said to be infinite. When the brilliancy and cheapness of the lights are made known to the public—which will be in a few weeks, or just as soon as I can thoroughly protect the process—illumination by carburetted hydrogen gas will be discarded. With fifteen or twenty of these dynamo-electric machines perfected by Mr. Wallace I can light the entire lower part of New York City, using a 500 horsepower engine. I propose to establish one of these light centers in Nassau Street, whence wires can be run uptown as far as the Cooper Institute, down to the Battery, and across to both rivers. These wires must be insulated, and laid in the ground in the same manner as gas pipes. I also propose to utilize the gas burners and chandeliers now in use. In each house I can place a light meter, whence these wires will pass through the house, tapping small metallic contrivances that may be placed over each burner. Then housekeepers may turn off their gas, and send the meters back to the companies whence they came. Whenever it is desired to light a jet, it will only be necessary to touch a little spring near it. No matches are required.

  Again, the same wire that brings the light to you will also bring power and heat. With the power you can run an elevator, a sewing machine, or any other mechanical contrivance that requires a motor, and by means of the heat you may cook your food. To utilize the heat, it will only be necessary to have the ovens or stoves properly arranged for its reception. This can be done at trifling cost.214

  Virtually every electrical device Edison described had yet to be invented, and he would soon start building his own dynamos too. The words volts, amperes, and ohms were not yet in parlance. When, on 5 October, he executed his first lighting patent, it only presupposed with the miraculous subdivision process he claimed to have devised. With deceptive modesty, he claimed an “Improvement in Electric Lights,” exemplified by a design plucked more or less at random from his regulatory caveat. Nevertheless it was the first incandescent lamp he ever invented, and as time passed, its originality became more apparent. A spiral of platinum, or any wire with a high fusing point, hung in a glass cylinder and wrapped itself loosely around a vertical zinc rod. The rod lengthened as the wire incandesced and depressed a lever, just as the spiral shone with maximum brilliance and was about to melt. The lever shut off current to the spiral, allowing it to cool while still glowing. Meanwhile the rod contracted and another surge of current flowed into the cylinder. The make-and-break cycle recurred with such rapidity that the human eye was not much aware of fluctuations in the light. But in practice the rod kept bending and the constant vibration of metal against metal caused the lamp to literally die of fatigue. Edison experimented with some other thermostatic devices, but they all failed.215

  He had to accept that it would be a while yet before he strung ten, let alone ten thousand lights across “the entire lower part of New York City.” So great was his reputation, however, that the mere fact he was confident of doing so prompted the avid interest of Wall Street. While gas stocks slumped on both sides of the Atlantic, Grosvenor Lowrey drew him into negotiations with a group of financiers associated with Drexel, Morgan, & Co. The bank graciously offered to relieve Edison of all financial distractions in exchange for title to his lighting patents, present and future. J. P. Morgan sought to market those rights in Britain and Europe, seeing vast imperial revenues once Edison managed (as surely he would) to subdivide the light. “Impossible overestimate result if such success attained,” Morgan cabled his London partners.216

  Edison hesitated. He had already promised to let George Gouraud and Tivador Puskás handle his foreign patent sales, but their influence did not compare with Morgan’s. He absolved himself of guilt in the matter by handing over power of attorney to Lowrey, telling him, “All I want is to be provided with funds to push the electric light rapidly.” The result was the hasty formation on 16 October of the Edison Electric Light Company by a board of blue-chip incorporators representing the interests of Western Union as well as Drexel, Morgan. They awarded Edison $250,000 in stock, an experimental budget of $130,000, a guaranteed minimum share of annual royalties, and other allowances for a total of $395,000.*35, 217

  “With the English patents,” Lowrey told him, “I think we can get money enough to set you up forever.”218

  TWO YEARS, OR MORE

  Edison’s sudden semi-deification as the modern Prometheus, without yet having brought light to anybody, made him realize, with more private apprehension than Lowrey could imagine, the consequences of too much braggadocio. If he failed to deliver what he had so airily promised, he would be humiliated and likely ruined. That prospect loomed almost at once, when trustees of the Light Company pressed for a demonstration of the system they were investing in. He dared not risk showing them the few fallible models he had so far managed to construct. Burner after platinum burner was fizzling out or fracturing in his hands. Nor could he prove his claim to have “just discovered” the secret of subdivision. He began to show signs of stress and closed the doors of his laboratory to visitors.219

  One of the few who still managed to get in was, inevitably, another reporter. He bribed his way upstairs with a cigar and found “the Professor” much more subdued than normal. With rain falling outside and blue smoke curling over his head, Edison admitted that he might need two years, or more, to make all the improvements necessary to his electric lamp. He connected one workbench model to the Wallace dynamo, just delivered, and its platinum strip glowed an intense, cold white before he prudently turned the current off. “Now, old man, get out and let me go to work.”220

  The interview was published on 20 October, and Edison felt renewed pressure to “show and tell” his new invention. Sleepless and half-starved, with bloodshot eyes and a week’s worth of beard, he strove to construct a light that
would last as long, or even half as long, as a candle. After three days of further failure he was felled by a slashing attack of facial neuralgia that kept him bedridden for the rest of the month.*36 Mary, suffering hardly less pain, gave birth to a twelve-pound son, William Leslie, on the twenty-sixth.221

  Edison had not fully recovered when he heard that the Light Company believed a rival lamp designer, William E. Sawyer, might have anticipated his recent patent. “I was astonished at the way Mr. E received the information,” Stockton Griffin wrote Lowrey. “He was visibly agitated and said it was the old story—i.e., lack of confidence—The same experience which he had had with the telephone, and in fact with all his successful inventions….He said it was to be expected that everyone who had been working in this direction…would immediately set up their claims upon ascertaining that his system was likely to be perfect.”222

  Actually, Sawyer, an impoverished and unstable alcoholic living in New York, thought the opposite of Edison’s chances. He knew from experience that the self-regulating platinum lamp would never work, being an impossible balance of cost and inefficiency. With his partner, Albon P. Man, he now claimed to have invented “a means of making carbon incandescent without consuming it.” Edison tried to downplay this disturbing news, telling Griffin that the line he was developing was “entirely original and out of the rut.”223

  SUCH A DREARY PLACE

  When in December the directors and bankers of the Light Company were finally allowed to visit Menlo Park, their image of Edison as a solitary, inspirational genius was, in Lowrey’s tactful phrase, “somewhat tempered.” The much-publicized white laboratory on a green hillside overlooking New York was now the center of a muddy construction site. Bricklayers and carpenters were racing the onset of winter, getting ready a new office-library building in the front yard and a massive machine shop at the back. The laboratory itself was in a state of apparently chaotic expansion, as Griffin’s clerks and file cabinets and Kreusi’s artisans and heavy equipment moved out of the ground floor to their new accommodations. The space vacated was already filling up with new experimenters and researchers, many of them with university or polytechnic degrees. With wads of Morgan money in his pocket, Edison was recruiting at a rate that would more than triple the size of his workforce over the course of the next year.224

  “Such a dreary place,” a young Princetonian, Francis Upton, wrote his father. “The work of course keeps my mind full.”225

  The directors were concerned at his profligacy and dismayed to find little going on in the lighting department. Edison seemed to be concentrating all his intellectual effort on the design of a generator that looked like nothing more than a monstrous tuning fork. He explained that it was a “magneto-electric machine” which, if successful, would give him as much electricity as twenty or thirty Wallace generators. Before there could be a successful lamp, there had to be a steady flow of power, and since power could derive only from mechanics—something Edison understood better than any electrician in the world—he had invested heavily in two big new engines and boilers, fixed to deep foundations at the end of the machine shop.226

  Lowrey, shuttling between the separate planets that Edison and his backers lived on, begged him not to resist corporate scrutiny, while persuading the board of the Light Company that its funds were being wisely invested. Both sides were in any case pretty sure, as the year came to an end, that no other inventors had the capital and creativity vital to subdivision of the light—not Sawyer and Man with their brittle carbons and cracking glass tubes, nor Hiram Maxim with his graphite rod glimmering in a globe of hydrocarbon vapor, nor the Englishman St. George Lane Fox-Pitt with his iridium loops trying to keep aglow in nitrogen.227 None of these money-strapped men had the benefit of the unique research, developmental, and manufacturing facilities of Menlo Park. Lowrey assured Edison that his backers trusted him and wanted only to feel they were partners in his endeavor:

  All they, or I, shall ask from you is to give confidence for confidence. Express yourself, when you come to a difficulty, freely. You naturally, having an experience of difficulties and of the overcoming of them, in your line (which none of the rest of us can have), may feel that it would be prejudicial, sometimes, to let us see how great your difficulties are, lest we, being without your experience in succeeding, might lose courage at the wrong time.228

  THE BUSIEST MAN IN AMERICA

  “He is an untiring genius,” the R. G. Dun & Co. credit assessor wrote in his latest report on Edison, “apt to run from one effort at invention to another without fully completing the work he is on.”

  That was less true in 1879 than in previous years, for his pursuit of universal electric light—what William Preece in Britain publicly called “an absolute ignis fatuus”—preoccupied him to a degree that soon became obsessive. “I think there is no doubt I am the busiest man in America,” he informed a more sympathetic English friend, the otologist Clarence Blake. “The phonograph gets very little consideration from me nowadays.”229

  Yet his fascination with sound persisted, especially after Blake gave a lecture on the telephone in London and closed with a tribute to Alexander Graham Bell without mentioning Edison’s carbon button transmitter. George Gouraud, who was desperate to open a telephone company in England before Bell attained a full monopoly there, kept beseeching Edison to finish and send over a receiver he had invented some months before, in the hope that it would circumvent Bell’s British patents. It was a startlingly loud device based on the motograph principle of a reproducing point traveling over an electrosensitive surface—in this case, a thimble-size cylinder of hard chalk, slicked with water and rotated by hand. If it was spun fast enough, a person calling in normal tones from New York could have his voice amplified in Menlo Park to a field outside the laboratory.230

  Edison had handed the receiver over to his nephew Charley to develop. Now, with his competitive instincts aroused by Gouraud’s pleas, he ordered Sigmund Bergmann to make him two wall-mounted telephones with the new instrument boxed inside. The handle protruded on the right, a central lever pressed a wet roller up against the chalk, and a mouthlike orifice, complete with what looked like lips, emitted the vibrations of a hidden diaphragm. An erectile transmitter tube curved up from below the box for outgoing calls. It was the ugliest instrument Edison produced in a life generally unchastened by aesthetics. But its speaking volume and almost stereoscopic fidelity put the phonograph to shame. No less a British authority than John Tyndall postponed a lecture he was due to give on Edison acoustic devices at the Royal Institution, in order to add it to his program.231 The two sets were ready by the end of February and sent to London under Charley Edison’s care.

  Tyndall was delighted with them. He demonstrated the chalk receiver during his lecture, getting Charley to call from Piccadilly Circus so he could beam the young man’s voice distinctly to scientists in the audience. “I congratulate you with all my heart on this beautiful achievement and realization of all your promises,” Gouraud wrote Edison. “After this people will doubt you less concerning the Electric Light.”232

  THE DARKNESS OF IGNORANCE

  If by people Gouraud meant the discerning sort who lived in England and read the London Times, he was too sanguine. On 22 March their newspaper of choice reported that “Mr. Edison has failed in his experiments.” Fourteen of his sixteen claims to have advanced the technology of light had been rejected by the U.S. Patent Office. “The most he has ever yet accomplished has been to maintain 400 coiled iron wires in a state of partial incandescence with a 16-horsepower steam-engine.” So much for his promise to ignite twenty thousand lights from one central station. The attempts of “this impulsive man” to make a self-regulating lamp with a platinum burner had all been unsuccessful, leading to “great discouragement at Menlo Park.” Platinum had to be heated to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit before it shed any appreciable light. It melted so quickly thereafter that his vaunted switch-off
rod could not expand in time to stop the runoff. That was why Edison had not mounted a single public exhibition of his work so far.

  A favored few who have been admitted to his laboratory at Menlo Park have beheld it—a single lamp, enclosed in a glass globe, beautiful as the light of the morning star. But he has refused to let anyone inspect it closely, and has never allowed the exhibition of it privately to last long. He has never been able to depend on its durability. His apparatus is as far from perfection as it ever was, and, in fact, well-informed electricians in New York do not now believe that Mr. Edison is even on the right line of experiment.233

  Edison reacted both defensively and humorously, telling the The Daily Graphic that he had “never before read a statement containing so many lies.” However, the Times had done him a favor: its false report had thinned out the crowd of visitors who constantly encroached on his time at Menlo Park: “I have prayed for an earthquake or something of the sort to keep some of them away.” Far from being bothered by abuse from overseas, he said, “I rather like it, and it wouldn’t bother me a particle if they kept up the cry—at least until I am ready to show what I have accomplished.”234

  He also insisted that his employees were “as happy as clams,” but that was not altogether true. Francis Upton, for one, was losing heart. “The light does not yet shine as bright as I wish it might.” After working long nights all through the winter at Edison’s side, he foresaw no imminent success, if indeed subdivision of the light could be achieved at all. What the Times had to say about the nondurability of platinum lamps was true, and his boss seemed to be the only man in the lab (apart from the inscrutable Batchelor) who refused to accept that.235