Edison

by Edmund Morris

  He was justifiably proud of the telegraph taker’s script he developed this year—line by line perfectly straight across unruled paper, with no time-wasting flourishes, and only the occasional character misshapen as he kept trying to increase his speed.*8 When he stayed away from a union meeting and took the press report alone into the small hours (writing with an agate pen on five layers of oiled tissue and interleaved carbons), he was rewarded with a visit from the day manager, J. F. Stevens. “Young man, I want you to work the Louisville wire nights. Your salary will be $125.”47

  The appointment was worth more than extra money. Al was now officially a first-class operator, entitled to special respect wherever he wandered next on the “linked lightning” network.48

  NO COUNTRY LIKE THE US

  Three months in Nashville. Another three in Memphis. Four more in Louisville….49 Peacetime and the erasure of the Mason-Dixon Line brought a sense of exultant reopening of the American South, to a Northern youth just turned nineteen, full of wanderlust and curious to explore that beaten land. “I have growed Considerably,” he advised his parents on a message form stamped by the South-Western Telegraph Company. “I dont look much like a Boy Now.”50

  When he wrote again on a similar blank, not bothering to date it or say where he was, he seemed to have wider travel in mind, and was studying foreign languages in books: “Spanish very good now before I Come home I will be able to Speak Spanish & Read & write it as fast as any Spaniard. I can also Read French too but Cant Speak it.” In early August 1866 he was in New Orleans and conspiring with two fellow sparkers to take a steamer to Brazil, possibly unaware that the preferred language there was Portuguese. They had heard that the imperial government was spending many milreis on an extension of the national telegraph system and assumed that with their technical skills they could partake of this flow of gold. But a race riot broke out in the city, the steamer they planned to take to Rio de Janeiro was commandeered for the use of federal troops, and an Ancient Mariner who had lived in South America shook a skinny hand in Al’s face, advising him that “there was no country like the US” for a young man who sought to better himself.51

  Chastened, Al told his friends he was going back home and set off on the long trip to Port Huron.*9 The railroad north through the depressed landscape of Alabama was so rotten—“scrap iron laid on wooden stringers”—that the train had to chug along at little more than a walking pace. He was able to lean out his car window and pick peaches off passing trees.52

  Like many another returning prodigal, he found that “home” was not the happy place it had once been. During the late years of the war in Fort Gratiot, Henry Hartsuff’s animus against Sam Edison (“a villainous and malignant Copperhead rejoicing over rebel victories and abusing our government and public men”) had increased to the point of paranoia. As caretaker of the fort, Hartsuff had a reputation for hard drinking and official corruption, but he enjoyed the protection of a son who was a general in the army. Using that influence, he got the chief quartermaster in Detroit to requisition the big white house in the grove, by right of eminent domain in a military reservation. In consequence he at last succeeded in evicting Sam from a property bought in good faith twelve years before, paying him only $500 of its appraised $2,300 value.53

  The elderly Edisons were now living in a dark little cottage just outside the fort. Sam was as ornery and antigovernment as ever,*10 pursuing a furious lawsuit against the army that anyone could see was doomed. Nancy was ailing and losing her mind. Al stood their misery for no more than a month, then returned to the South-Western Telegraph Company office in Louisville.54

  EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCHES

  His second spell in Kentucky lasted until the following July. By then he was well into his twenty-first year, able to copy an average of eight to fifteen columns of Associated Press report every day in a highly individual scrip: “I found that the vertical style, with each letter separate and without any flourishes, was the most rapid, and that the smaller the letter the greater the rapidity.” He could write between fifteen hundred and two thousand words without tiring, in a minute hand as readable as diamond type.55

  This virtuosity was perfected, moreover, in conditions that strained his faculties to the limit. He worked on the second floor of a dilapidated downtown building, in a room that was never cleaned and only sporadically heated in the winter. The ceiling was half stripped of its plaster, and ornamented with dried splats of chewing tobacco. The copper wires that connected his telegraph set to the switchboard were eroded with blue crystals, and the board’s brass leads were black with the smoke of lightning strikes, “which seemed to be particularly partial to Louisville.” Every now and again in stormy weather there would be an explosive crack from the wall, not good for the health of operators with heart problems. Al’s principal feed came via the “blind” side of a repeater in Cincinnati, meaning that he was unable to interrupt a transmission and request the repetition of a dropped word or sentence. The wire also tended to leak when it crossed the Ohio River at Covington, so he got violent changes of current when receiving. He smoothed out some of the fluctuations by playing the signal through a quartet of relays and sounders. “The clatter was bad, but I could read it with fair ease. When, in addition to this infernal leak, the wires north to Cleveland worked badly, it required a large amount of imagination to get the sense of what was being sent…and as the stuff was coming in at the rate of thirty-five to forty words a minute, it was very difficult to write down what was coming and imagine what wasn’t coming.”56

  His champion feats as a taker were nighttime transcriptions of President Andrew Johnson’s 7,126-word Second Annual Message to Congress in December, and Johnson’s subsequent 6,111-word veto of the District of Columbia franchise bill early in the new year of 1867. In memory, he conflated both messages into one avalanche of verbiage, with section after section being scissored off as he wrote and rushed to the Courier-Journal’s office for typesetting. “I was fifteen hours in the chair on this occasion without a moment’s intermission for food.” Actually the articles appeared a month apart, but each involved Herculean effort, and justified his reputation as one of the fastest takers in the country.57

  By midsummer Al was back at the Western Union office in Cincinnati, for a three-month stint that saw him use his mastery of telegraph technology as a key to open up wider fields of science, such as magnetism, metallurgy, and conductivity. He began to keep a notebook of experimental ideas (some his own, some copied for instruction): self-adjusting and polarized relays, long-distance electromechanical repeaters, duplex transmitters, a secret signaling method for the army, a private-line telegraph system for Procter & Gamble. He drew them in a free-flowing, two-dimensional style that showed a palpable pleasure in the way each design spilled out of his pen, without a single short-circuit of electricity or ink. He compiled lists of scholarly books to study. Among them was the first volume of Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity, borrowed from the Free Library around the same time the great man’s death was announced in London. It and its three companion volumes became his lifelong bible, and Faraday of all scientists the one he most revered. He also satisfied a growing appetite for current and cultural affairs by devouring twenty volumes of The North American Review, which he had bought for two dollars in Louisville and could not be parted from thereafter.58

  The more Al brooded over his books and clapped together strange-looking models and forgot to eat and declined booze and wore, according to one incredulous observer, the same suit season after season, the more eccentric he seemed to some of his less cerebral colleagues. They called him “Luny Edison” or “Victor Hugo” because of his fondness for French novels, and wondered why he never seemed to have any money, although he had been earning an excellent salary for two years. “He was always broke,” one of them complained. “The day after pay day he’d come to me to borrow a dollar.”59

  Ezra Gillila
nd, J. F. Stevens, and others in Cincinnati who understood him better knew that Al was spending all he had on technical equipment and supplies.60 It was a compulsion, the instinctive behavior of a man—boy no longer, a technician already mutating into a thinker—who could not help doing what he was born to do.

  THE JAY FROM THE WOOLLY WEST

  In January 1868 James Ashley, the editor of The Telegrapher, received an article submission from an aspiring inventor in Port Huron, Michigan. It illustrated a double transmitter of exquisite symmetry, and the accompanying text guaranteed that “by means of this ingenious arrangement, two communications may be transmitted in opposite directions at the same time on a single wire.”61

  Ashley thought the manuscript, which was long and technical, interesting enough to publish on the front page of his journal, but by the time he got around to doing so in the spring, the author had moved from Port Huron and was identified as “Mr. Thomas A. Edison, of the Western Union Telegraph Office, Boston, Mass.”62

  Edison’s arrival at that major branch of the nation’s biggest corporation marked the formal beginning of his inventive career, although it would be six months yet before he applied for his first patent, and four more before he felt confident enough to make the ultimate transition to New York.63

  He certainly did not look like a person of substance when he arrived at the office in Boston, being half-starved and more than usually shabby after a blizzard-slowed train journey. But he came recommended as an “A1 man” by Milt Adams, who had befriended him during his first spell in Cincinnati and was now working for the Franklin Telegraph Company in Boston. He was assigned to begin taking copy at five-thirty that evening. His fellow night operators lost no time in setting up what they thought was a trap for “the jay from the woolly West.” They gave him a cheap pen and put him onto the number-one wire from New York, saying that a fifteen-hundred-word dispatch from the Boston Herald was about to come through. By prearrangement, they had lined up one of the fastest tappers in Manhattan to send it, starting moderato assai and then accelerating to his best presto.64

  Edison effortlessly kept up with the transmission, writing very small, conscious that he had a surprised audience watching over his shoulder. Taker’s instinct reassured him he could do four or five words per minute more than the New York man could send. His correspondent began to tire, slurring rhythms and sticking the signals, but as Edison remarked afterward, “I had been used to this style of telegraphy in taking report, and was not in the least discomfited.” When he sensed his invisible tormentor had tired, he opened the line and tapped a message of his own: “Suppose you send a little while with your other foot.”*11, 65

  From then on, the number-one wire was his privileged conduit. He was by his own admission a poor sender, but now became nationally known for his “chirography.” Ashley used that imposing word as a headline in The Telegrapher, claiming below that Thomas Edison was “about the finest writer we know of.” He said he had seen one of the young man’s press report cards, measuring “five by eight inches, and there are 647 words upon it…the whole plain as print.”66

  Milt Adams fell on hard times as soon as he had helped Edison to good. Franklin Telegraph could not stand the competition of Western Union and fired him. Edison compassionately put him up in the “hall bedroom” of his apartment on Bullfinch Street. Neither of them had any money because Adams’s finances were reduced to “absolute zero centigrade,” and Edison’s, as usual, were invested in experimental equipment. Poverty drew them together, and they became inseparable, eating together in an “emaciator” boardinghouse where the portions were so small as to be almost affordable.67

  It followed that they had no spare cash for social life. One night the headmistress of a girls’ private school dropped by the Western Union office and asked Edison if he would stage a telegraph demonstration for her students. The invitation led to his first recorded experience of an electromagnetic shock not induced by a battery.

  A few days before I carried the apparatus and with Adams’s assistance, set it up in the school, which was in a double private house near the public library. The apparatus was set up when school was out. I was then very busy building private telegraph lines and equipping them with instruments which I had invented, and forgot all about the appointment and was only reminded of it by Adams who had been trying to find me and had at last located me on top of Jordan, Marsh & Company’s store, putting up a wire. He said, we must be there in 15 minutes and I must hurry. I had on working clothes and I didn’t realize that my face needed washing. However, I thought they were only children and wouldn’t notice it. On arriving at the place, we were met by the lady of the house and I told her I had forgotten about the appointment and hadn’t time to change my clothes. She said that didn’t make the slightest difference. Adams’s clothes were not of the best because of his long estrangement from money. On opening the main parlor door, I never was so paralyzed in my life. I was speechless, there were over 40 young ladies from 17 to 22 years, from the best families. I managed to say that I would work the apparatus and Mr. Adams would make the explanations. Adams was so embarrassed that he fell over an ottoman, the girls tittered and this increased his embarrassment, until he couldn’t say a word. The situation was so desperate that for a reason I could never explain, I started in myself and talked and explained better than I ever did before or since.68

  It was a matter of smug satisfaction to him afterward, when strolling around town with colleagues from the office, that any chance encounter with the girls would attract smiles and nods in his direction.69

  HOW TO USE A JACKKNIFE

  Another epiphany occurred when Edison, who loved to browse the secondhand bookstores on Cornhill in Boston, bought all three volumes of Faraday’s Experimental Researches. Owning and studying the complete work affected him much more than his exposure to a borrowed volume in Cincinnati. He tried in various makeshift laboratories to perform all the procedures of the “Master Experimenter” himself, rejoicing in the simplicity of his prose and the spare use of mathematics. Adams recalled him coming home from Western Union at four A.M. and studying Faraday instead of going to bed. “I am now twenty-one,” Edison burst out over breakfast. “I may live to be fifty. Can I get as much done as he did? I have got so much to do and life is so short, I am going to hustle.”70

  By now Ashley had published his article on the double transmitter and praised it in The Telegrapher as an “interesting and ingenious” device, if not particularly original. The editor pointed out that double transmission had been used for many years in Germany. “But Mr. Edison has simplified the process by which it is effective.” This set Edison on the road to improving, and ultimately amplifying, duplex technology. His hopes of an early patent were frustrated when Joseph B. Stearns, a fire alarm specialist in Boston, was awarded protection for a similar system in June. Refusing to be discouraged, Edison listed fourteen ways in which he thought his transmitter was superior, and arranged with a local machinist to build three complete sets on spec, advertising them at the lofty prices of $400, $450, and $500. He got no orders.71

  Ashley’s editorial goodwill also encouraged him to contribute more articles to The Telegrapher. On 9 May “Edison’s Combination Repeater” described another derivative invention—the original in this case being George Phelps’s seminal combination printing telegraph of 1859. Edison argued that the Phelps machine, which was operated by a keyboard much like a piano’s, rat-tatted roman characters onto paper so rapidly that “repeaters in general use on the Morse lines” were unable to duplicate them accurately. His repeater (which he illustrated with one of his mirror-like binary designs) was built on a new principle, and employed magnets “of a peculiar construction,” in such a way that it could keep up with vibrations of any speed and, what was more, operate on “a current so feeble that its action would not be perceptible upon a Morse relay.”72

  As the summer and early fall progressed
, he continued with unflagging energy to experiment and publish—his most ambitious effort being an eighteen-hundred-word survey of Boston’s major manufacturers of electrical and telegraphic equipment in the 15 August issue of The Telegrapher. The article showed how thoroughly he had familiarized himself with the technological resources of the city in the four and a half months of his residence there. Among them was the prestigious shop of Charles Williams, Jr., where Moses Farmer had a little laboratory crammed with apparatus. Edison mentioned this fact without saying that he had taken space in the same building. But for some reason—possibly Farmer’s own austere, devoutly religious self-effacement—he made no attempt to ingratiate himself with the American Faraday.73

  Working nights at Western Union, and by day literally under Williams’s roof in a third-floor attic, Edison invented and made half a dozen devices, including a stock ticker, a fire alarm, and a facsimile telegraph printer (“which I intend to use for Transmitting Chinese Characters”).74 He executed his first successful patent application on 13 October for an electrochemical vote recorder, whittling the submission model himself from pieces of hardwood. “To become a good inventor, you must first know how to use a jackknife.”75

  It was a clever device—too clever to be commercial, as he soon found out. Designed to speed up the laborious process of vote counting in legislative bodies, it took signals of “aye” or “nay” from electric switches on every desk and imprinted them on a roll of chemically prepared paper, in each case identifying the signal with the legislator’s name. At the same time it separately tabulated the votes on an indicator dial. Edison’s dream of seeing his “recordograph” clicking and spinning in the chambers of Congress dissolved when he heard that speedy voting was the last thing politicos wanted in the passage of bills. They needed time to lobby one another in medias res. Edison resolved that hereafter he would invent only things that people wanted to use.76