Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Patenting, he learned, was an expensive procedure for a young inventor, with heavy fees for each application and approval, payable to agents, attorneys, draftsmen, and the Patent Office itself—not to mention the often enormous costs inherent in defending letters patent against charges of infringement, or prosecuting his own charges against plagiarists. Throughout Edison’s career from now on, a large part of his income, whether it totaled four or six figures, was absorbed into patent litigation like water through sand.

  Another disagreeable aspect of professional inventing was the necessity to cultivate financial backers and influential businessmen. Edison happened to be good at it. Once money men got used to his uncouth appearance, they were beguiled by his humor and swayed by his utter self-confidence. But that did not make it any less humiliating to have to ask, and ask, and ask, and subsequently tolerate the maddening desire of investors to involve themselves in the creative process or, worse still, venture ideas of their own.

  He started modestly, biting the ear of a fellow operator, DeWitt C. Roberts, who agreed to “furnish or cause to be furnished sufficient money to patent and manufacture one or more…Stockbroker Printing Instruments,” in return for a one-third interest in their potential sale. Roberts subsequently sold part of that interest to another investor—a warning to Edison that he could not always choose his pecuniary company. But Roberts also financed the vote recorder, and various Boston brokers, merchants, and telegraph company directors, most notably E. Baker Welch, lined up to support the young inventor as his reputation spread around the city.77

  LABORATORY OVER THE GOLD-ROOM

  On 30 January 1869 an announcement appeared in the “Personal” section of The Telegrapher: “Mr. T. A. Edison has resigned his situation in the Western Union office, Boston, Mass., and will devote his time to bringing out his inventions.”78

  Eighteen days later Edison executed his second patent application, for an elegantly ratcheted black-and-gold “Stockbroker Printing Instrument,” almost as complex as a clock.79 It was aimed at the booming new market for alphanumerical tickers that reported fluctuations in prices on the New York gold and stock exchanges to subscribing brokers. The technology had been pioneered the year before by Edward Calahan, whose Gold & Stock Telegraph Company now sought to expand to Boston. So did the almost synonymous Gold & Stock Reporting Telegraph Company of his rival Samuel Laws.

  Edison saucily chose to open a stock quotation service of his own at 9 Wilson Lane, in the same building Laws planned to put on line. He took two rooms on the floors above them, one for price monitoring and posting, the other for an experimental workshop he called his “Laboratory over the Gold-room.” Knowing little about the trading business, he relied on one of his backers, the broker Samuel W. Ropes, Jr., for market expertise. His first customer could not be bluer of chip or more Back Bay Brahmin: the banking and brokerage house of Kidder, Peabody. In time, Edison added twenty-five subscribers.80

  If he expected Laws to buy his printer, he was disappointed. It was superior to Calahan’s original, having a single typewheel instead of two, and operating with a single drive wire rather than three. For a couple of months Edison and a new operator buddy, Frank Hanaford,*12 eked out an impecunious living, installing cheap, private-line dial telegraphs in the Boston-Cambridge area. They had to shell out considerable sums for the purchase of such supplies as forty-seven glass and porcelain insulators for pole wiring, 1¾ pounds of blue vitriol electrolyte powder, and a variety of tars, oils, and sulfur to proof their wires against the city’s corrosive coal smog.81

  By spring it was evident that Boston was either too small or too conservative for Edison’s restless ambition. Welch declined to provide funds for his “magnetograph” printer, which would have relieved customers of the need to maintain messy, accident-prone batteries.*13 Nor would Western Union allow him to test an improved version of his double transmitter on any of its busy long-distance wires. He had high hopes for this instrument, and accordingly arranged to use a line belonging to the small Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Company, in Rochester, New York.82

  A STROKE OF LUCK

  With an advance from Welch of only forty dollars in his pocket, Edison arrived in Rochester on 10 April. He had to wait four money-draining days before the A&P gave him access to its New York line, late at night in an office off the Reynolds Arcade. The four-hundred-mile wire turned out to be so badly insulated, and his apparatus so complex in operation, that the taker he had hired in Manhattan became confused and the test failed. He nevertheless posted an announcement in The Telegrapher that his transmission had been a “complete success,” returned briefly to Boston to settle up with various creditors there, then spent all the cash he had left on a one-way steamship ticket to New York.83

  His excuse to Welch for this sortie was that he needed to get the double transmitter locally altered to handle the problem of long-distance induction—electromagnetic interference slowing and blurring the passage of signals. That work would take time, and the A&P would also have to fix its line before he could resume testing. But the real reason he gravitated to New York was that, like countless aspiring youths before him, he sniffed the city’s air and caught—or thought that he caught—the intoxicating perfume of success: “People here come and buy without your soliciting.”84

  If so, they were not much in evidence on his first seventy-two hours there. He had to walk the streets all night with only enough money to buy a cup of coffee and a plateful of apple dumplings at Smith & McNell’s restaurant on Washington Street. For the rest of his life he would talk about the deliciousness of those dumplings. They kept him going until, on his third day in town, he stopped by Samuel Laws’s Gold & Stock Reporting Telegraph Company on Broadway—just in time to find the office going into a panic over its jammed general transmitter. He studied the machine’s workings and told Dr. Laws that a contact spring had snapped off and fallen between two gear wheels.85

  “Fix it! Fix it!” Laws cried, losing revenue by the minute. “Be quick!”86

  Edison removed the spring and set the contact wheel at zero, while employees scattered through the financial district to reset branch indicators. In two hours the system was working again. Dr. Laws gratefully hired him on the spot as an operator-mechanic at one hundred dollars a month.87 Although this was less than he had earned during his best years as a tramp operator, it meant that he would no longer have to sleep on shavings and could subsist on more than stodge and sugar. He proceeded to work with frenzied energy, sometimes up to twenty hours a day: “I’ll never give up for I may have a stroke of Luck before I die.” At the beginning of August, Laws appointed him superintendent of the company’s entire operating plant and tripled his salary.88

  He justified his promotion by reconfiguring and improving a stock printer that Laws had designed but could not patent, because it replicated several features of an instrument designed by Edward Calahan. Edison produced what was in effect a new stock printer of his own, radically simpler, smaller, and smoother in operation. In the process, he lost the lucrative position he had only just won. Laws sold out to the competition on 27 August, creating a virtually monopolistic Gold & Stock Telegraph Company. The expanded firm came with its own superintendent, so by the end of the month Edison was back on the street.89

  This time, however, he was already known in New York as the patentee of four useful inventions—the vote recorder, the private dial telegraph, the double transmitter, and the stock printer—as well as the author of several informative technical articles. A new book by Franklin Pope, Modern Practice of the Electric Telegraph, had a section that illustrated and praised “Edison’s Button Repeater” (one of the long-distance relays he had invented in Cincinnati) as “a very simple and ingenious arrangement of connections…which has been found to work well in practice.”90

  Pope had preceded Edison as superintendent of the Laws company. Now that they both found themselves at large, with an ab
undance of skills to share, they decided to announce their own merger, and formed “a Bureau of Electrical and Telegraphic Engineering in this city.”91 Before it could be formally constituted, Edison had an experience downtown that ensured he would never regard money men as pillars of probity and responsibility.

  On Friday 24 September he was on transmitter duty in the balcony of the “Gold Room” on New Street, a suffocatingly nicotinous parlor where speculators in gold stocks traded bullion under the stare of a water-spitting, gold-leaf dolphin. During the course of the day, soon to be known as “Black Friday,” Jay Gould launched a stealth assault on the gold market, attempting to “corner” a majority of it for himself. The room’s price indicator, which had drooped to as low as 144¼ the previous evening, surged to 155 in just six minutes. Tumult broke out on the floor. Edison, fascinated, climbed on top of the Western Union telegraph booth to watch sober-suited men behaving like a pack of howling coyotes. The financier Albert Speyers, who had bought $6 million worth of gold the day before, gave every appearance of going insane as he bid the price up to 160. At the climax of the hysteria, just before noon, the indicator reached 162½. Then news came that President Ulysses S. Grant had authorized the Treasury Department to sell $4 million in government gold. This turned Gould’s attack into a rout and caused a concurrent panic on the Stock Exchange. After closing, so many fortunes had been lost that the prospect of homicides, or suicides, on Wall Street was serious. A company of militia was posted to keep order.

  Black Friday 1869. Gold price postings annotated by future president James A. Garfield.

  About the only observers who stayed calm through the afternoon were Edison, the dolphin, and the Western Union operator, who said to him, “Shake, Edison, we are O. K. We haven’t got a cent.”92

  MRS. POPE’S HOUSE

  At the beginning of October the firm of Pope, Edison & Co. came into being, and opened an office downtown at 78–80 Broadway. James Ashley signed on as third partner, touting Edison in print as a young man who, in addition to being a master of electrical science, was also “of the highest order of mechanical talent.” The trio decided that their inaugural specialty was to be Edison’s latest invention, a single-wire “Financial and Commercial Instrument” that both received and printed Morse signals without a local battery. They placed an advertisement in The Telegrapher to announce, “We possess unequalled facilities for preparing Claims, Drawings, and Specifications for Patents.” All custom instruments would be made to order across the river in New Jersey, where Pope lived with his mother—and where Edison, too, would thenceforth be a paying guest.93

  Mrs. Pope’s house was in Elizabeth, two Pennsylvania Railroad stops away from Jersey City, where Edison found some laboratory space. As the days shortened toward December, he fell into a commuter’s routine of rising every morning at six to catch the eastbound train there, working his customary eighteen-hour day, then waiting in frigid dark for the one A.M. local to take him back to Elizabeth.94

  The cold he could stand with multiple layers of underwear, and the darkness he would one day do something about.

  *1 At this stage of his life Edison was called “Alva” by his parents and “Al” by friends. His earliest surviving letter, dated 10 August 1862, is signed “Alva.”

  *2 Now the Thomas Edison Depot Museum in Port Huron.

  *3 The suspicion arises that Mr. E. L. Northrup was the “kind, and obligeing” engineer who allowed Edison to drive his freight train for 60½ miles.

  *4 According to the account given in Edison’s authorized biography, Al was loitering on the platform when an unbraked boxcar, pushed out of a siding, bore down on Mackenzie’s son, who was playing on the main track: “Edison dropped his papers and his glazed cap, and made a dash for the child, whom he picked up and lifted to safety without a second to spare, as the wheel of the car struck his heel, and both were cut about the face and hands by the gravel ballast on which they fell.”

  *5 Later the Detroit Public Library.

  *6 An estimated fifteen hundred skilled telegraph operators had been siphoned off for war duty, thus creating an urgent need for help in the civilian sector.

  *7 How Edison evaded, or avoided, being drafted in 1865 is not known. He may have paid a $300 commutation fee or simply kept one step ahead of summons by moving from Indianapolis to Cincinnati.

  *8 Edison delighted in all kinds of pen play. He became an expert forger, effortlessly imitating the handwriting of Washington, Jefferson, Napoleon, and amusing himself—if not his dupes—by presenting notes for large sums of money owed: “It’s your signature, isn’t it?” The publisher Edward Bok recalled his drawing a circle round a dime, then filling it with a minutely inscribed copy of the Lord’s Prayer that included all commas and periods. Marshall, Recollections of Edison, 94; N. N. Craig, “Thrills,” autobiographical ms. ca. 1930, Biographical Collection, 41, TENHP; Providence (RI) Journal, 13 Aug. 1927.

  *9 Afterward Edison heard that both had died of yellow fever in Vera Cruz.

  *10 At sixty-four years of age, Sam outjumped 250 men in Fort Gratiot.

  *11 In 1898 Fred Catlin, a veteran operator, wrote Edison, “While you were not in your day among the stars as a sender, yet, as a receiver I do not think you had a peer. Thirty years ago I was considered as fast as the fastest, and I recall the pleasant hours spent in tapping off press matter and messages to you….It was a pleasure because I could sail along indefinitely without interruption.”

  *12 Milt Adams by now had succumbed to wanderlust and gone west.

  *13 Edison gave himself an unwanted winter tan when he splashed himself with nitric battery acid in his laboratory. “My face and back were streaked with yellow; the skin was thoroughly oxidized.”

  Alva Edison as a child, circa 1850.

  IN HIS THIRD year, Alva Edison’s memory began to retain and correlate the fragmentary impressions of the world that comprise the blur of infancy.1 The most primary of these vignettes was of a broad-faced, dark-haired woman holding him and instructing him, and—more distant yet lustily present—a big man with a chinful of graying beard.2

  Although primary, they were not his very first memories, which dated back to the summer of 1849. He was crawling across the floor toward a Mexican silver dollar, thrown down by the young man who came to court his big sister. He was watching a fleet of prairie schooners load up to join the westward gold rush, one of them with his uncle Snow Edison aboard. He was again in Nancy Edison’s arms, but this time she held him up to see Marion, a vision in white at twenty, being given away to the same young man.3

  Somewhere near at hand, that December day, would have been his brother Pitt, eighteen, and sister Tannie, sixteen. And somewhere infinitely farther off, in the Baptist heaven his mother kept talking about, were three children dead before he was born.4

  That made Alva the youngest of seven and the only child in his father’s house—a vacant-eyed little boy with a huge head. The security that surrounded him was physical (Sam Edison, prospering, had laid every brick and nailed every shingle of the seven-room house overlooking the canal basin) as well as emotional: he had the bulk of his mother’s attention, composed equally of love and discipline. Both parents were, by the standard of the day, well into middle age. Sam, or Samuel Ogden Edison, Jr., in the family Bible, was forty-five at the time of Marion’s wedding, and Nancy forty-one. Since she was unlikely to have any more children, whatever she had left of her genteel, minister’s-daughter culture would be shared exclusively with Alva.5

  Edison’s birthplace in Milan, Ohio.

  He was unique among his siblings in another respect, being the only one who was not Canadian born. The Edison family was remotely American in origin, but because of their pro-British sympathies, they had fled north after the Revolution. Sam grew up in Vienna, Ontario, a farming village that had also attracted Nancy’s family, the Elliotts, from upstate New York. He and she h
ad married in 1828 and would probably have continued to live and work in Vienna—Sam as an innkeeper, Nancy as a schoolteacher—had it not been for the “contrairy” streak in Sam that had him rebelling against any prevailing sentiment, even that of his own parents. Just as they had rejected the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and rooted for Great Britain in the War of 1812, he reacted in 1837 against the conservative, clerical regime that had begun to repress free thought in Ontario. Sam participated in an antigovernmental revolt that year, and after it failed, he made the best use of his long legs in skipping across the border to Detroit, with provincial troops in hot pursuit. He was indicted for high treason in Canada and deemed it prudent to start a new life as a carpenter in Milan, Ohio. By 1839 his family had settled with him there. Sam did well enough from various lumbering and auctioneering enterprises to provide a solid bourgeois environment for Thomas Alva Edison to be born in, on the snowy early morning6 of 11 February 1847.

  “Milan from near the Sandusky City Road,” by J. Brainerd, 1847.

  NOT PLAYING MUCH

  Seen from the street, Sam’s house presented its redbrick, white-trimmed facade to the rising sun. Inside and to the west, it commanded a panorama of Milan’s canal basin. He had built it at the highest point of a bluff overlooking the Huron River Valley. Any small boy standing at one of its parlor windows had to be thrilled by the sight, far below, of dozens of lake schooners, laden with wheat, leaving the harbor via the canal and gliding north down the river.7