Edison

by Edmund Morris

  The night was cloudy, and snow was forecast for the morning.259 Menlo Park’s two hundred other residents were asleep. In about twelve hours their peace, and the isolation of the hamlet from the rest of the world, would be disturbed by pilgrims to the Festival of Light.

  *1 John Ott suffered a crippling stroke in 1895. Edison continued to employ and support him for life.

  *2 Over the next three years, Edison manufactured and sold 3,600 gold printers at home and abroad.

  *3 A characteristic of Edison’s orthography was his use of the sign = to signify something more than a dash and less than a period. His odd distribution of initial capitals (mostly cursive ones), seems to have come from simple enjoyment of the way they looked as he inscribed them.

  *4 Between October 1870 and May 1871, Edison spent about $11,000 of Harrington’s money on experiments alone, and probably twice as much of Lefferts’s. Equipping the Ward Street factory cost Harrington a further $16,000.

  *5 Equivalent to $1.06 million in 2018.

  *6 Nicholas Stilwell’s occupation was probably the reason Edison included, in his last notebook entry before the wedding, a double-tooth design to prevent bandsaws from running out of line.

  *7 At this point, notice might be taken of the remarkable early parallels between Edison’s marriages. In both cases he fell in love with a schoolgirl in the spring, courted her assiduously through the summer, made a formal request for her hand in the fall, wed her under the rites of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and overflowed with inventions in the months immediately following. Each wife presented him first with a daughter, then with two sons.

  *8 Threatening letters did not prevent Edison borrowing $3,100 to help his impecunious brother Pitt start up a street railway in Port Huron.

  *9 Reiff, unaware of Edison’s lifelong habit of getting Peter to pay for Paul, was under the impression he was financing developmental work on the automatic telegraph.

  *10 Edison’s specific mandate was to develop duplex or diplex designs that would amplify but not conflict with the Stearns patent, which Western Union owned.

  *11 He seemed unaware that his lodging, the famous “Hummums” of Covent Garden, was a favorite haunt of Dickens, Thackeray, and Lewis Carroll and had a lubricious reputation as a hotel/bathhouse for single gentlemen checking in pseudonymously.

  *12 Gouraud became Edison’s London agent on 1 June 1878.

  *13 Despite the Post Office’s decision to pass on Edison’s system for this and other reasons, it was considered so promising that two British investors bought the foreign rights to it. They were unsuccessful in their subsequent efforts to introduce it in England.

  *14 “At that time I was very short of funds and needed it more than glory,” Edison recalled in later life. “I was paying a sheriff $5 a day to withhold a judgment which had been entered against me in a case which I had paid no attention to.”

  *15 Edison’s book has been reconstituted from various archival sources. It is available in the digital edition of the Papers of Thomas A. Edison, under code NS7402.

  *16 Later in life Edison remarked that his incandescent light system was “simple” compared to the quadruplex.

  *17 Orton’s bill of complaint, filed 28 January 1875, cited the fact that Edison, the previous summer, had allowed Western Union’s chief electrician, George B. Prescott, to assume co-ownership of the quadruplex in return for vital access to the company’s wires. Prescott contributed almost nothing to the design of the system but insisted on a half share of its rights bounty. Competing claims and counterclaims disputed the interests of Harrington, Jay Gould, and Edison himself. The quadruplex case, which over time jarndyced into three state and three federal proceedings, as well as others administratively involving successive directors of the Patent Office and secretaries of the interior, is summarized in appendix 3 to volume 2 of the book edition of The Papers of Thomas A. Edison.

  *18 Edison’s electric pen was the first consumer product to use an electric motor. It was also the first mass-copy duplicator and the precursor to A. B. Dick’s mimeograph, which is often misattributed solely to Edison. See Bruce Watson, “A Wizard’s Scribe,” Smithsonian, August 1998.

  *19 One of the electric pen’s satisfied customers in 1877 was Lewis Carroll.

  *20 Edison announced his discovery of what he called “etheric force” to newspaper reporters on 28 November 1875. The headlines created considerable popular interest. But he failed to publish his findings in proper academic form, and they were largely mocked by the scientific community. His future industrial rivals Elihu Thomson and Edwin Houston conducted a series of related experiments that proved to their satisfaction that the force was nothing but electrical induction. Edison had, however, discovered high-frequency electromagnetic waves, as confirmed in theory by James Clerk Maxwell and in later practice by Hertz, Lodge, and Marconi.

  *21 In 1880, when Gray’s and Bell’s rival claims to have invented the telephone were being hotly contested in court, Edison claimed that in July 1875 he had sketched three acoustic telegraph devices with liquid transmitters that permitted the phenomenon of “undulating” or variable resistance current, the fundamental principle of telephony. These remarkable sketches do exist but are undated. There is no surviving evidence that Edison built a model based on one of them around November of that year. He frankly confessed, however, that the model did not work and always gave Bell full credit for his invention.

  *22 Not to mention another auditor, the Emperor of Brazil.

  *23 TDMA is an essential operating system for mobile phone networks, which have the same synchronization challenges that Edison posed for acoustic transfer telegraphy in 1876.

  *24 Edison typically segued at this point in his notebook jottings to the notion of an artificial rose buttonhole drawing its perfume from a tiny phial of attar.

  *25 Edison meant it to improve on the already impressive performance of his automatic telegraph, which on 5 December 1876 transmitted President Grant’s 12,600-word annual message from Washington to New York in just over an hour.

  *26 That of anthracite coal, for example, varied from 300 to 1,700 ohms, yet Edison complained that it was good only for the o in coach and failed to register “the lisps & hissing parts of speech.”

  *27 Electromotograph receiver.

  *28 Today’s text-to-speech computer applications are the realization of Edison’s dream of 1877.

  *29 When talking on the telephone, Edison started using the greeting “Hello” rather than the old-fashioned “Halloo” and Bell’s preferred “Ahoy!” In 1987 the audio historian Allen Koenigsberg established, with the agreement of editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, that the word hello was indeed coined by Edison. He wrote it for the first time on 15 August 1877, in a note boasting that his latest telephone receiver did not need to ring, “as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away.” By 7 September 1880, delegates to the National Convention of Telephone Companies were wearing HELLO buttons on their lapels. See Allen Koenigsberg, “The First ‘Hello!’: Thomas Edison, the Phonograph and the Telephone,” Antique Phonograph Monthly 8, no. 6 (1987).

  *30 [Sic]. This reference to “dots and dashes,” rather than the hill-and-dale continuity of Edison’s grooves, shows how hard it was even for a scientific journalist to adjust to the newness of the phonograph in 1877.

  *31 On 18 April 1877, Cros, too poor to apply for a patent, filed a letter with the Académie describing his idea of a paléophone that would reproduce sound by combining the “phonautograph” voice-sketching method of Scott de Martinville with duplicative photoengraving, an almost prohibitively difficult process. Cros never built a working model. Despite conspiratorial theories to the contrary, he and Edison do not appear to have been aware of each other before December 1877.

  *32 Modern computer programmers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories have dramatically translated some of Scott’s visual patterns into
actual audio.

  *33 Edison’s need for instrumental names was so great in the spring of 1878 that he ordered his bookseller to get him a copy of Jacob Boyce’s Etymological Glossary of Greek-derived words. Papers, 4.247. Charles Batchelor teasingly signed off a letter to him with “Yours phonographicarbontelephonically, Batch!!!”

  *34 Although at least one British journal, Engineering, deliberately suppressed data that supported Edison’s case, his reputation in Britain suffered as a result of bringing it. Late in the year Thomson criticized him for failing to acknowledge that he had overreacted: “There is no doubt he is an exceedingly ingenious inventor, and I should have thought he had it in him to rise above…the kind of puffing of which there has been so much.”

  *35 Equivalent to $10.3 million in modern money.

  *36 Trigeminal neuralgia, or tic doloureux, is one of the most painful afflictions known to medicine. It is a spasmodic condition often brought on by stress.

  *37 Multiple-arc circuitry is now generally known as parallel wiring.

  *38 Late in 1879 Francis Hopkinson of Great Britain showed that the efficiency of the bipolar dynamo could be further improved by simple dimensional changes. In doing so, he legitimized Edison’s radical invention.

  *39 Seven of the five hundred volumes Edison ordered for his library in 1879 were studies of mineralogy and mining.

  *40 Edison overcame his stage fright enough to read another paper, describing his invention of the chalk cylinder telephone receiver while Alexander Graham Bell sat in the audience. As far is is known, this was the last time he delivered a speech in public, until his shaky appearance at Light’s Golden Jubilee fifty years later.

  *41 Charley Edison died in October in the midst of what appears to have been a homosexual entanglement with an English friend. His uncle had to pay for the expatriation of his remains and subsequent funeral in Port Huron.

  *42 Cornelius Van Cleve, a carbonizer married to Mary Edison’s half-sister.

  Edison as a young telegrapher, circa 1863.

  AT THIRTEEN, EDISON drove a freight train for the first time, down forty-seven and a half miles of track—“all alone,” he boasted afterward, although the engineer’s eye must surely have been on him.1 Solo or not, it was an ecstatic moment for a boy on the edge of adolescence, with the engine roaring loud enough to make him forget that he could no longer hear birds sing.2

  The Chicago, Detroit & Grand Trunk Junction Railroad ran a daily round trip between his hometown of Port Huron and Detroit, Michigan. Every morning at eight, young “Al”*1 boarded the baggage car of the southbound local, well supplied with candy, hickory nuts, and popcorn balls to sell during his three-hour journey to the big city.3 Lake Huron receded behind him, and the St. Clair River slid by on his left, with Canada—his family’s ancestral country—spreading out beyond. Then for a while both river and frontier disappeared, as the train edged inland to pass through Smith’s Creek, Ridgeway, New Haven, New Baltimore, Mount Clemens, and Utica—small towns that half a year earlier had seemed unattainably remote but were now familiar, almost neighborly parts of his expanding environs. When the river reappeared, it had swelled into Lake St. Clair, and Detroit, opening up ahead, offered him almost four hours of urban freedom.

  Al was not yet old enough to qualify for membership of the Young Men’s Society Reading Room, but the city’s stores were open for browsing and for the purchase of chemical and electrical supplies to aid his experiments at night. Useful bits of brass and iron and, with luck, the occasional old battery cell could be filched from dumps around the Grand Trunk’s machine shop and engine houses on Michigan Avenue. Every afternoon on his way back to Michigan Central Depot, he picked up a hundred copies of the Detroit Free Press, to supplement his candy sales on the return journey home. If any papers were left unsold by the time the train, slowing, approached Port Huron, he would jump off with them onto a sandbank and walk the last quarter-mile into town, hawking his last stock en route.4

  Otherwise he would stay on the train until its run ended at Fort Gratiot, a sleepy old military reserve guarding the confluence of the river and Lake Huron.*2 Sam Edison’s big white house and observation tower stood within the stockade. So Al did not have far to walk, past the hospital and graveyard (not his favorite locality, on dark winter nights) before reaching the comforts of home, and dinner, and his reeking basement laboratory.5

  NOW WE HAVE RODE

  Free time, free throwaways, the Free Press, and even free railroad freight privileges, as his business expanded to include fruit and grocery sales—Al was his own man now, no longer subject to Nancy Edison’s disciplined schooling. Earning an excellent income of forty to fifty dollars a week, he conscientiously paid her a dollar a day for his keep and invested the rest of his fortune in chemical and electrical equipment. At the same time he voluntarily continued his liberal education, reading the works of Thomas Paine at the behest of his father, a lifelong libertarian who espoused the rights of the southern states to secede from the Union.6

  That issue became fraught on 18 May, when the Free Press gloomily reported the nomination in Chicago of the “black Republican,” Abraham Lincoln, for president of the United States. The newspapers Al sold that summer covered the election campaign with apocalyptic “by Magnetic Telegraph” bulletins prophesying rebellion in the South and “irrepressible conflict” if Lincoln was elected. When, around midnight on 6 November, the first dispatches confirming his victory came down an accessible wire into Port Huron, Al was able to “read” some of the results to fellow urchins by putting his tongue to it and tasting the tiny shocks of each dot and dash. From that moment on, war between the states was inevitable. Fort Gratiot awoke from its slumbers, and recruits began to drill on the parade ground.7

  He was fourteen by the time Fort Sumter fell, and for most of 1861 no more aware than any Michigan youth his age of the catastrophe unfolding in the South and East. The state sent regiment after regiment to the distant battlefields, but was otherwise peaceful as ever.8 Al saw more immigrant Norwegians—daily trainloads of them heading for Iowa and Minnesota—than he did men in uniform. Meanwhile his grocery and news businesses prospered to such an extent that he began to employ other boys. One sold bread, tobacco, and stick candy aboard the immigrant “special.” Another loaded baskets of market vegetables onto the morning express to Port Huron, where a German lad collected them and sold them on commission downtown. Al himself continued his lucrative commute, buying butter and, in season, immense quantities of blackberries from farmers en route, and purveying them at either end of the line.

  Al Edison, newsboy, circa 1860.

  Early in 1862 he bought three hundred pounds of old type slugs from a junk dealer, and a small secondhand press to accommodate them. It occurred to him that since the front part of the baggage car, a small, unventilated compartment, was never used, he could turn it into a mobile print shop, teach himself how to set type, and produce his own onboard newspaper. The first issue of The Weekly Herald (“Published by A. Edison”) appeared on 3 February as a double-sided, copy-rich broadsheet, elegantly laid out and even decorated verso with a woodcut of a puffing locomotive. Only the orthography left something to be desired.9 Under the headline LOCAL INTELEGENCE, the paper’s chief correspondent reminded the Grand Trunk Railway that it had a policy of rewarding meritorious service.

  Now we have rode with Mr. E. L. Northrop, one of their Engineers, and we do not believe you could fall in with another Engineer, more careful, or attentive to his Engine, being the most steady Engineer that we have ever rode behind (and we consider ourselves some judge having been Railway riding for over two years constantly,) always kind, and obligeing, and ever at his post.*3, 10

  Elsewhere Al reported that “Gen. Cassius M. Clay, will enter the army on his return home,” announced the forthcoming thousandth birthday of the Empire of Russia, listed the latest per-pound price of dressed hogs and turkey
s, allowed himself a pause for philosophical reflection (“Reason Justice and Equity, never had weight enough on the face of the earth, to govern the councils of men”), and even found space at the foot of column four for a joke: “ ‘Let me collect myself,’ as the man said when he was blown up by a powder mill.”11

  Eager readers were offered a subscription to the Herald of eight cents monthly, and were promised that their names would be gratefully published in future issues. These inducements, coupled perhaps with curiosity as to whether anywhere else in the world a newspaper was being printed and sold aboard a moving train, led to a rapid rise in circulation to more than four hundred copies a week.12

  Gradually appropriating unto himself more and more of the baggage car, Al set up a traveling laboratory where he could consult Fresenius’s Qualitative Analysis and mix chemicals at only moderate risk of blowing out the windows. Since the time it took to put the Herald to bed each Saturday interfered with both his experiments and his candy sales, he soon subcontracted the latter chore to a Port Huron schoolboy. Forty-five years later Barney Maisonville recalled their partnership:

  Al was very quiet and preoccupied in disposition….Most boys like to have money, but he never seemed to care for it himself. The receipts of his sales, when I sold for him, were from eight to ten dollars the day, of which about one-half was profit. But when I handed the money to him, he would simply take it and put it in his pocket. One day I asked him to count it, but he said: “Oh, never mind, I guess it’s all right.”…

  He was always studying out something, and usually had a book dealing with some scientific subject in his pocket. If you spoke to him he would answer intelligently enough, but you could always see that he was thinking of something else when he was talking. Even when playing checkers he would move the pieces about carelessly as if he did it only to keep company, and not for any love of the game. His conversation was deliberate, and he was slow in his actions and carriage.