Edison

by Edmund Morris

  153. New York Tribune and Washington Post, 28 Nov. 1911. TE also planned to make a talking picture of the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson on 4 Mar. 1913. A week later he was reported as confirming that he had shot parts of Wilson’s speech (whether live or in a Kinetophone studio was not clear) and would be exhibiting the film in due course. There is no record of him doing so. Boston Globe, 24 Feb. 1913; Pittsburgh Post-Dispatch, 10 Mar. 1913.

  154. TE quoted in The New York Times, 12 May 1912; Hutchison to W. H. Ives, 18 Feb. 1913, TENHP. See also “Discovery Communications Realizes Edison’s Vision,” http://edison.rutgers.edu/​connect.htm#5. TE’s educational movies project was a natural sequel to a series of semidocumentary, reformist shorts put out by his studio between 1910 and 1913. They covered such subjects as slumlords, tuberculosis, and child labor. Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 45. Hutchison told Ives that TE wanted to “personally direct” scientific and industrial tutorials that would be detailed enough to amount to “self contained textbooks.” For the brief rise and consumer-assisted fall of educational/moral movies before World War I, see Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 37ff.

  155. Winthrop D. Lane in “Edison Versus Euclid,” Survey, 6 Sept. 1913; TE to L. H. Putney, 24 Dec. 12, 1912, 1913 Motion Picture File, TENHP.

  156. L. H. Putney to TE, 29 Jan. 1913, TENHP (quoting $80 per projector plus $1.50 a day for film rentals); W. H. Ives to TE, 22 Jan. 1913, TENHP. The films in the sample program were not listed, but probably included some of an entomological series TE had prepared as a test run. Scenario subjects included “The House Fly,” “The Various Ways in Which Insects Build,” “The Apple Tree Tent Caterpillar,” and “Microscopic Plant Life.” Hutchison to TE, 11 Mar. 1913, TENHP.

  157. L. H. Putney to TE, 29 Jan. 1913, TENHP.

  158. Frederick J. Smith, “Looking into the Future with Thomas A. Edison” New York Dramatic Mirror, 9 July 1913.

  159. “Edison Versus Euclid,” Survey, 6 Sept. 1913.

  160. Ibid.

  161. Ibid.; TE memo to Harry F. Miller, ca. 5 May 1913, TENHP. The loan (modern equivalent, $1.3 million) was repayable in four months and secured by $63,000 in Edison Phonograph Works stock. Hutchison Extracts, entry for 6 May 1913, TENHP. Hutchison seems to have expected 6 percent, but a docket in TENHP indicates that the interest was reduced by one point.

  162. Minutes of Kinetoscope and Kinetophone Committee eighth meeting, 8 May 1913, TENHP; Smith, “Looking into the Future with Edison”; TE Patent 1,138,360, “Method of Presenting the Illusion of Scenes in Colors,” 16 June 1913; Hutchison Extracts, entry for 24 Aug. 1913, TENHP.

  163. TE to Geo. F. Morrison, 18 Aug. 1913, TENHP; Elbert Hubbard, Selected Writings of Elbert Hubbard (New York, 1922), 106; MME to Charles Edison, 14 Jan. 1913, PTAE.

  164. Hubbard, Selected Writings, 107; Madeleine Edison to John Sloane, 2 Sept. 1913, DSP; MME to Charles Edison, 10 Sept. 1913, PTAE.

  165. MME to Charles Edison, 10 Sept. 1913, PTAE.

  166. John H. Greusel, Thomas Edison: The Man, His Work, and His Mind (Los Angeles, 1913), 69–70, 12.

  167. Diamond Disc retail advertisement, 1913. New York Sun, 23 Dec. 1913. Although demonstration models of the disk phonograph had been playing sample records in selected showrooms for more than a year, the Edison Diamond Disc Phonograph and the Diamond Discs themselves were not officially marketed until Dec. 1913. Edison Phonograph Monthly, Oct. 1913; New York Times, 17 Dec. 1913.

  168. Vanderbilt, Edison, Chemist, 132; TE superscript on Thomas Wardell to TE, 26 Mar. 1913, TENHP.

  169. Edison Phonograph Monthly, Oct. 1913; Phonograph folders, passim, TE General Files, TENHP.

  170. Gelatt, Fabulous Phonograph, 166–67. “Blue Amberols…when played with an Edison Diamond Reproducer…outperformed any other medium of reproduced music then available. The ears in Edison’s recording studios were attuned with extraordinary sensitivity to the elements of good sound reproduction.” See also Millard, Edison and Business, 212.

  171. Frank J. Essig to TE, ca. Dec. 1912, TENHP; S. Willard Cutting to TE, 25 Feb. 1913, TENHP.

  172. Allan L. Benson, “Edison’s Dream of New Music,” Cosmopolitan 54, no. 5 (May 1913): 797–800.

  173. Jones, Edison: Sixty Years, 282; TE interview in Etude magazine, Apr. 1917. TE cited his favorite operatic composers as “Bellini, Rossini, Donizetti, and Verdi.”

  174. TE interview in Etude; Benson, “Edison’s Dream of New Music”; TE quoted in Current Literature 54, no. 4 (Apr. 1913).

  175. See, e.g., Thomas Wardell to TE, 26 Mar. 1913, TENHP.

  176. TE draft of a stock letter to the phonograph trade, 17 June 1913, TENHP.

  177. Samuel Gardner Oral History, 3–4, TENHP.

  178. Theodore Edison Oral History, 58–59, TENHP. “His ear curve was such—we had measurements on that—that he lost his upper register almost entirely, so he lost the diction that depends on the hissing consonants very much for being able to understand things.”

  179. Samuel Gardner Oral History, 6, TENHP.

  180. Ibid.

  181. Ibid.; Gardner interviewed in Harvith and Harvith, Edison, Musicians, 49.

  182. Benson, “Edison’s Dream of New Music.”

  183. Ibid.; Madeleine Edison Sloane Oral History, 12, COL. In 1920 TE wrote to the mother of a deaf daughter, “If she rests the upper teeth on the edge of the piano frame she can probably hear the piano.” TE superscript on Victor Robb to TE, 29 Mar. 1920, TENHP. Ludwig van Beethoven used a similar technique to hear high frequencies, biting into sticks that he pressed against the keyboard in order to send sound vibrations directly into his brain. Krystian Zimerman, BBC-3 interview, 21 Apr. 2013.

  184. Benson, “Edison’s Dream of New Music.”

  185. When TE studied Hermann Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone, he made exhaustive marginalia on the pages devoted to piano sound. Most listeners, he wrote, “don’t hear the Thump being intent on the music. I hear all these thumps ½ an octave lower than middle C & hear only the thump sound of last 14 keys it is as loud as a xylophone & yet normal Ears only hear the Musical vibrations and not the Thump. I cannot hear a musical sound above a certain pitch hence the Thump sounds are noise of vibrations of low pitch.” TE’s copy, 503, TENHP.

  186. Benson, “Edison’s Dream of New Music”; Meadowcroft, Boys’ Life of Edison, 247; Meadowcroft to M. Kline, 29 Dec. 1920, TENHP; Ernest L. Stevens Oral History, 21, COL.

  187. TE interview in Etude, 1 Apr. 1917; TE in Musician, May 1916; Vanderbilt, Edison, Chemist, 130.

  188. Stevens Oral History, 17, COL. See also Ernest L. Stevens folder, Biographical Collection, TENHP. TE eventually sanctioned the release of eight Diamond Disc recordings by Rachmaninoff, and paid him a “special fee” of $147. Although the pianist went on to become a star of RCA/Victor’s classical list, he had a special fondness for his early Edison acoustic recordings, and kept a framed copy of the Liszt disk. Edison Records studio logbook, 1919, TENHP. See also Max Harrison, Rachmaninoff: Life, Works, Recordings (New York, 2002), 224–25.

  189. Harvith and Harvith, Edison, Musicians, 44.

  190. Welch and Burt, Tinfoil to Stereo, 146–49; Venable, Out of the Shadow, 25–44.

  191. CE to MME, 1 Oct. 1913, PTAE; Venable, Out of the Shadow, 25–44; Hutchison Extracts, entry for 1 Feb. 1914, TENHP.

  192. TE quoted in Detroit News, 26 Oct. 1921; Venable, Out of the Shadow, 76.

  193. Madeleine Edison to John Sloane, 23 Feb. 1914, DSP; Fort Myers Press, 23 Feb. 1914; New York Times, 12 Feb. 1914.

  194. Madeleine Edison to John Sloane, 27 Feb. and 1 Mar. 1914, DSP.

  195. Josephson, Edison, 457; Sward, Legend of Henry Ford, 50–58.

  196. Josephson, Edison, 457; TE to Edward N. Hurley, 1 Jan. 1918, HFM.

  197. TE to H. E. Heitman, quoted in Fort Myers Press, 25 Mar. 1914; Madeleine Ediso
n to John Sloane, 22 Mar. 1914, DSP.

  198. Charles Edison to Hutchison, 23 Mar. 1914, TENHP; John Burroughs quoted in Fort Myers Press, 9 Apr. 1914; Madeleine Edison to John Sloane, 25 Mar. 1914, DSP.

  199. Fort Myers Press, 28 Mar. 1914; Madeleine Edison to John Sloane, 30 Mar. 1914, DSP; TE to Hutchison, 14 Jan. 1914, TENHP.

  200. Slogan emblazoned an Edison lobby display triptych, photograph image 23.500/14, TENHP; TE quoted in “Talking Singing Whistling Movies,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 23 Feb. 1913.

  201. Madeleine Edison to John Sloane, 29 Mar. and 8 Apr. 1914, DSP; MME to Madeleine Edison, ca. 17 June 1914, DSP.

  202. Erskine, “Women Will Not Be Men’s Equals”; INS Special, 8 Oct. 1911, Clippings File, TENHP.

  203. New York World, 1 Oct. 1911.

  204. TE marginalia in his copy of Allan H. Powles’s translation of Bernhardi (New York, 1914), 18 and 34, TENHP. For a fuller statement of his views on the outbreak of the war, which he blamed on a nervous “overreadiness” of Germany’s part, see Edward Marshall, “Edison’s Plan for Preparedness,” New York Times, 30 May 1915.

  205. “Edison in Wartime,” American Magazine, Nov. 1914; Diarmuid Jeffreys, Aspirin: The Remarkable Story of a Wonder Drug (New York, 2005), loc. 1612.

  206. “Edison in Wartime,” American Magazine, Nov. 1914.

  207. Nerney, Edison, Modern Olympian, 229.

  208. Except where otherwise indicated, the following paragraphs are based on the chapter, “Organic Chemicals and Naval Research,” in Vanderbilt, Edison, Chemist, 234–58.

  209. TE quoted in Edison Diamond Points, Feb. 1917; Vanderbilt, Edison, Chemist, 250–55; Thomas H. Norton, “A Census of the Artificial Dyestuffs Used in the United States,” Chemical Engineer and Manufacturer 24, no. 5 (Nov. 1916); Edison Diamond Points, Feb. 1917. See also De Graaf, Edison and Innovation, 194–96.

  210. New York Times, 25 Oct. 1914. In the summer of 1915, the U.S. Secret Service investigated a briefcase mistakenly left on a Manhattan-bound train and found evidence of a $100,000 contract to buy and resell Edison phenol to German-American firms by means of a fraudulent “Chemical Exchange Association.” The funds involved came from an espionage account at the German embassy. Edison was embarrassed when the New York World broke the story, although he had already committed the rest of his phenol surplus to the U.S. military. Jeffreys, Aspirin, loc. 1843–54; U.S. Navy Bureau of Supplies order 23233, 15 Apr. 1915, TENHP.

  211. Goldstone, Going Deep, loc. 92; House Naval Affairs Committee, Hearings on Estimates Submitted by Secretary of the Navy, 1914 (Washington, DC, 1914), 634; Jeffrey, “ ‘Commodore’ Edison,” 13–14.

  212. Jeffrey, “ ‘Commodore’ Edison,” 15–16.

  213. Patrick Coffey, American Arsenal: A Century of Waging War (New York, 2014), 17; Craig, Josephus Daniels, passim.

  214. Josephus Daniels, 10 Oct. 1914, Internet Archive audio dub, https://archive.org/​details/​EDIS-SRP-0191-06.

  215. Washington Times, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and New York Sun, 11 Oct. 1914.

  216. Hutchison, Submarine Boat Type, 5; Washington Times, 11 Oct. 1914.

  217. Ibid.

  218. Except where otherwise indicated, the following paragraphs are based on “Report of the Committee on Edison Fire,” Journal of the American Concrete Institute 11 (Apr. 1915).

  219. New York Sun, 10 Dec. 1914; Josephson, Edison, 430.

  220. New York Sun and Plainfield (NJ) Courier-News,10 Dec. 1914.

  221. “Report of the Committee on Edison Fire,” 587.

  222. Exchange quoted in James Carson, “Anecdotes of my Association with Thomas A. Edison,” ts., 1936, TENHP.

  223. Jeffrey, Phonographs to U-Boats, 63; Charles Edison in Venable, Out of the Shadow, 76.

  224. Hearings of the Secretary of the Navy Before the House Naval Committee (Washington, DC, 1914), 632.

  225. DeGraaf, Edison and Innovation, 195; “Report of the Committee on Edison Fire,” 647.

  226. Hutchison to Alfred DuPont, 1 Feb. 1915, TENHP; illustrations in “Report of the Committee on Edison Fire,” 609, 616, 618.

  227. Israel, Edison, 432–33; Venable, Out of the Shadow, 75; Josephson, Edison, 431; New York Times, 10 Dec. 1914; Josephson, Edison, 431.

  228. For a detailed account of the reorganization of Thomas A. Edison, Inc., after the fire of 1914, see Millard, Edison and Business, chap. 11. See also “The Empire of Stephen Babcock Mambert” in Jeffrey, Phonographs to U-Boats, 62–67.

  229. Edward Marshall, “Edison’s Plan for Preparedness,” New York Times, 30 May 1915; “New Edison-LaFrance Searchlight,” Safety Engineering 33, no. 5 (May 1917); Popular Science Monthly 92, no. 2 (Feb. 1918); TE interviewed in Film Daily, 4 Mar. 1927.

  230. Jeffrey, Phonographs to U-Boats, 80, 88; TE to Josephus Daniels, 11 Feb. 1915, quoted in Jeffrey, “ ‘Commodore’ Edison,” 18. See ibid., 18ff. for Hutchison’s massive publicity blitz in behalf of the S-type battery.

  231. Marshall, “Edison’s Plan for Preparedness.”

  232. Ibid.

  233. Daniels to TE, 7 July 1915 (combined draft), http://edison.rutgers.edu/​7JulyLetter.pdf. For a full account of the composition of this letter, begun on 31 May, see Jeffrey, “ ‘Commodore’ Edison,” 4–9.

  234. Daniels to TE, 7 July 1915, original copy, TENHP.

  235. Hutchison to Daniels, 12 Sept. 1935, TENHP. See Jeffrey, “ ‘Commodore’ Edison,” 5–6, for the complicated story of the letter’s authorship.

  236. Scott, Naval Consulting Board, 12–13.

  237. Israel, Edison, 447–48; Jeffrey, “ ‘Commodore’ Edison,” 10.

  238. Israel, Edison, 448; Jeffrey, “ ‘Commodore’ Edison,” 10; American Review of Reviews, Sept. 1915.

  239. Photograph copy in TENHP; Hutchison to Daniels, 28 Aug. 1915, TENHP (“Dr. B. and Mr. E. are not very congenial”); Vanderbilt, Edison, Chemist, 238–89; TE to Frank J. Sprague, 26 May 1878, New York Public Library; T. C. Martin, “Frank Julian Sprague,” Scientific American, 21 Oct. 1911; William D. Middleton and William D. Middleton III, Frank Julian Sprague: Electrical Inventor and Engineer (Bloomington, IN, 2009), loc. 434, 2614, and passim; Frank J. Sprague to Leo Baekeland, 16 Dec. 1915, FSP.

  240. Washington Post, 7 Oct. 1915.

  241. Ibid.

  242. Washington Evening Star, 7 Oct. 1915.

  243. The following account is taken from Naval Consulting Board Minutes, 7 Oct. 1915, TENHP.

  244. “Remarks of the Secretary of the Navy,” Naval Consulting Board Minutes, 7 Oct. 1915, 6–8.

  245. New York Times, 16 Oct. 1915.

  246. Ibid.

  247. Ibid.

  248. Copy in TENHP; Jeffrey, “ ‘Commodore’ Edison,” 13.

  249. New York Times, 7 Apr. 1915; Hutchison to TE, ca. 18 Jan. 1916, and to H. B. Brougham, 20 Jan. 1916, TENHP. “The navies of the world,” TE announced after the F-4 disaster, “…must expect catastrophes so long as they continue to use sulphuric acid in those vessels.” New York Times, 27 Mar. 1915.

  250. TE to Leo Baekeland, 16 Oct. 2015, TENHP.

  251. San Francisco Chronicle, 21 Oct. 1915.

  252. Ibid.

  253. William J. Hammer to Hutchison, 18 Oct. 1915, TENHP.

  254. San Francisco Chronicle, 21 Oct. 1915; Hutchison, Edison Day script, ts., 16 Oct. 1915, TENHP. The speech can be heard at https://www.nps.gov/​edis/​learn/​photosmultimedia/​upload/​EDIS-SRP-0206-01.mp3.

  255. Hutchison, Edison Day script; San Francisco Chronicle, 21 Oct. 1915.

  256. Los Angeles Times, 22 Oct. 1915.

  257. See Luther Burbank, The Training of the Human Plant (New York, 1907).

  258. Firestone, Men and Rubber, 190–91. A letter from Firestone to TE, 27 Apr. 1915, TENHP, indicates that the two men were hither
to strangers, although they had business relations, and MME’s family had known the Firestones in Akron and Chautauqua for many years. Firestone came to the Pacific-Panama Exhibition specifically to “honor” Edison, and join him in a trip to a trade show in San Diego later that month. San Francisco Chronicle, 21 Oct. 1915; Los Angeles Times, 30 Oct. 1915.

  259. TE to E. G. Liebold, 16 Dec. 1927, HFM.

  260. Los Angeles Times, 28 Oct. 1915; District Court E.D. (PA), United States v. Motion Pictures Patents Co., 1. Oct. 1915, Federal Reporter 225, 811.

  261. Israel, Edison, 454; Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 224.

  262. New York Times, 7 Nov. 1915.

  263. Los Angeles Times, 30 Oct. 1915; undated Denver newsclip describing TE on 4 Nov. 1915, Edison 1931 scrapbook, PTAE; TE interviewed in Los Angeles Times, 29 Oct. 1915.

  264. TE to Leo Baekland, 17 Nov. 1915, FSP; “Hydrogen Given off by Edison Storage Battery,” USN Bureau of Steam Engineering memo, 15 Oct. 1915; Hutchison to Daniels, 16 Dec. 1915; both in legal department records, TENHP.

  265. Naval Consulting Board Minutes, 27 Dec. 1915, 18, TENHP.

  266. Ibid., 9 Feb. 1916, 98, TENHP.

  267. Hutchison Extracts, entry for 31 Dec. 1915, TENHP.

  268. Robert M. Lloyd to Admiral Nathaniel Usher, 26 Jan. 1916, TENHP.

  269. New York Sun, 16 Jan. 1916.

  270. “Record of Proceedings of a Court of Inquiry…into an accident which occurred on board the U. S. submarine at the navy yard, New York, on January 15, 1916,” ts., Edison Storage Battery Company Litigation File, 11–17, TENHP, hereafter “Record of Proceedings.” There is an annotated plan of the explosion in box 10 of this file.

  271. New York Times, 16 Jan. 1916; Wall Street Journal, 21 Jan. 1916; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 16 Jan. 1916.

  272. New York Times, 16 Jan. 1916; Hutchison to TE, Jan. 1916, TENHP; New York Evening World, 19 Jan. 1916.

  273. New York Times, 17 Jan. 1916.

  274. New York Sun, 17 Jan. 1916.

  275. New York Times, 19 Jan. 1916; “Record of Proceedings,” 75–76, 469, 471–72; Hutchison to Adm. R. Griffin, 14 Jan. 1916, TENHP. This long letter, written the day before the disaster, makes plain Hutchison’s nervousness about the inadequacy of E-2’s current battery ventilation.