Edison

by Edmund Morris

  255. “It was only as one might stand in their [giant rolls] vicinity and hear the thunderous roar accompanying the smashing and rending of the massive rocks as they disappeared from view that the mind was overwhelmed with a sense of the magnificent proportions of this operation.” Dyer and Martin, Edison, 484.

  256. Ibid., 587–88.

  257. Israel, Edison, 360; Iron Trade Review, 62.1142; Carlson, “Edison in the Mountains,” 42.

  258. Michael Peterson, “Thomas Edison, Failure,” Invention and Technology 6, no. 3 (Winter 1991); Nerney, Edison, Modern Olympian, 149; Johnson, Edison’s “Ogden Baby,” 76; Wayne T. McCabe, Sussex County (Charleston, SC, 2003), 44.

  259. TE quoted in William A. Simonds, Edison: His Life, His Work, His Genius (London, 1935), 270; Dan Smith interviewed by Mary Nerney, Nov. 1928, TENHP, 8.

  260. Vincent, Theodore Miller, 135–42; Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders (1899; New York 2003).

  261. William Edison to TE, ca. late Sept. 1898, DSP; Thomas Edison, Jr., to Edward Redington, 27 Aug. 1898, PTAE, and to MME, 10 and 19 Oct. 1898, DSP. William remained in the army through 25 Jan. 1899.

  262. Mallory to Pilling and Crane, 7 Dec. 1898, PTAE; Iron Age, 5 Jan. 1899; Johnson, Edison’s “Ogden Baby,” 72, 154.

  263. TE to MME, 2, 5 and n.d. Dec. 1898, PTAE.

  264. Mallory to Pilling and Crane, 7 Dec. 1898, PTAE; Israel, Edison, 361.

  265. William Edison to Thomas Edison, Jr., ca. 15 Dec. 1898, PTAE.

  266. Thomas Edison, Jr., to TE, 17 Dec. 1898, PTAE.

  267. Thomas Edison, Jr., to William Edison, 16 Dec. 1898, PTAE.

  268. Mallory deposition in Edison v. Allis Chalmers, 648; Josephson, Edison, 377; DeGraaf, Edison and Innovation, 164–65.

  269. Israel, Edison, 403–4.

  270. Cleveland Press, 21 Feb. 1898; Boston Post, 18 Feb. 1898; Rochester (NY) Democrat and Chronicle, 18 Feb. 1898.

  271. William S. Bayley, Iron Mines and Mining in New Jersey (Trenton, NJ, 1910), 15.

  272. Mallory to Josiah Reiff, 10 Apr. 1899, and to Stuart Coats, 11 May 1899, TENHP.

  273. Israel, Edison, 399; Dyer and Martin, Edison, 508ff.

  274. Israel, Edison, 404; Iron Age, 15 June 1899; Israel, Edison, 410–11; Mallory interview, 1908, William Meadowcroft Collection, TENHP; Desmond, Innovators, loc. 1410; Israel, Edison, 400.

  275. Boston Globe, 3 July 1899; William Edison to TE, nd, ca. Oct. 1899, PTAE.

  276. Johnson, Edison’s “Ogden Baby,” 154, 291ff.; Dan Smith interviewed by Mary Nerney, Nov. 1928, TENHP; NJ&PCW Board Meeting Minutes, 10 Jan. 1900, TENHP; Mallory to Pilling & Crane, 18 Sept. 1897, PTAE.

  277. Josephson, Edison, 377–78.

  278. Robins, “Friends in a Lifetime,” 6–7.

  279. Mallory, “Edison Could Take It,” 2. This conversation may have occurred a year earlier, but the weight of evidence indicates December 1899. See Dyer and Martin, Edison, 502–3, for a similar council of war leading to the organization of the Edison Portland Cement Company in June 1899.

  280. Mallory, “Edison Could Take It,” 1.

  281. The plant did reopen for a few months in 1900, but failed to satisfy Bethlehem Iron’s low-phosphorus requirement and was forced to dispose of its remaining briquettes below cost. It closed finally for dismantlement on 10 December. Carlson, “Edison in the Mountains”; Mallory to H. S. Gay, 27 Sept. 1900; Mallory to Pilling and Crane, 8, 12, 15, 22 Oct. 1900, PTAE; Johnson, Edison’s “Ogden Baby,” 154–55.

  282. TE quoted in John Coakley Oral History, TENHP, 14. Edison may have exaggerated his estimated $3 million loss, although Bernard Carlson endorses it. An authoritative contemporary statement of what the Ogden project cost was made by Walter Mallory in 1910. He said that up till 10 December 1900, his boss contributed, in cash, $2,174,000 “out of a total expenditure of about two and a half million dollars.” The modern equivalent of what Edison lost would be $66.9 million. Carlson, “Edison in the Mountains”; Walter Mallory testimony in Edison V. Allis Chalmers, 648.

  PART FIVE · LIGHT (1880–1889)

  1. TE quoted in Engineering World, Nov. 1922.

  2. Walter P. Phillips, Sketches Old and New (Boston, 1897), 189. Phillips misremembers this conversation as occurring in 1876, but his context makes clear it took place four years later.

  3. “Menlo Park Lighted,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, 27 Dec. 1879; New York Herald, 1 Jan. 1880.

  4. George W. Soren to Francis Upton, 29 Dec. 1879, PTAE; McPartland, “Almost Edison,” 190; Papers, 5.644. See also Gall, “Edison: Managing Menlo Park,” for a discussion of TE’s problem of reconciling his open laboratory policy with intellectual property theft.

  5. Harper’s Weekly, 3 Feb. 1880. Thornall Avenue was the old post road to Philadelphia, later the Lincoln Highway.

  6. Except where otherwise indicated, documentary details in the following account of TE’s “open house” at Menlo Park in the early days of 1880 come from newspaper clippings in the Charles Batchelor Scrapbooks, PTAE, and others quoted in Papers, 5.539–42.

  7. New York Sun and Philadelphia Times, 27 Dec. 1879; Times (London), 29 Dec. 1879.

  8. New York Herald, 30 Dec. 1879 and 1 Jan. 1880; Times, 29 Dec. 1879; Dyer and Martin, Edison, 362; Strouse, Morgan, 181; Philadelphia Ledger, 28 Dec. 1879.

  9. TE first used the word filament, hitherto applied to thread, to describe his incandescent lamp element in a draft lighting caveat, ca. 25 Feb. 1880, in Papers, 5.652. He made it public when executing his Patent 525,888 on 10 Mar. 1880 (“the filament of my electric lamp”). It appeared even earlier, when the Philadelphia Ledger, in an article about TE at Menlo Park datelined 27 Dec. 1879, referred to the “carbon filament” of his successful lightbulb. The Oxford English Dictionary and the Online Etymological Dictionary still cite 1881 as the year of first such usage, by the British physicist Sylvanus P. Thompson.

  10. Hammer, “Edison and His Inventions,” v; Martin, Forty Years of Edison Service, 21–22; Papers, 5.1025–26.

  11. New York Sun, 12 Feb. 1880.

  12. “Edison’s Light,” New York Herald, 28 Dec. 1879; New York Herald, 1 Jan. 1880; Chicago Tribune, 4 Jan. 1880. See also Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, passim. Friedel observes that the crowds attaching themselves to Edison at this time represented “a new relationship between advanced technology and the common man. Edison’s electric light was as mystifying and awe-inspiring as any invention of the age….The wizardry of scientific technology was now a source, not of distrust, but rather, of hope. This attitude toward the powers of science and technology was one of the nineteenth century’s most important legacies, and no single instance exemplifies it better than the enthusiasm with which the crowds ushered in the new decade at Menlo Park” (89–90).

  13. Quoted in Bristol Mercury, 15 Jan. 1880 [original dateline Philadelphia, 30 Dec. 1879].

  14. Menlo Park farmer, quoted in Philadelphia Times, 2 Jan. 1880; New York Herald, 1 Jan. 1880; Hammer Reminscences, TENHP; Philadelphia Public Ledger, 7 Jan. 1880. See the photograph in Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 670.

  15. New York Herald, 2 Jan. 1880; Taylor, Mr. Edison’s Lawyer, 46.

  16. Times, 30 December 1879.

  17. Nature, 1 Jan. 1880. See also Joseph Swan, “The Sub-Division of the Electric Light,” Journal of the Society of Telegraphic Engineering 9 (1880) and Allerhand, Illustrated History, 128–32.

  18. Quoted in ibid., 131.

  19. Bowers, Lengthening the Day, 84; Scientific American, 27 Nov. 1880; quoted in Allerhand, Illustrated History, 131; Journal of Gas Lighting, 20 Jan. 1880.

  20. Bowers, Lengthening the Day, 70.

  21. Reports of Patents, Design, and Trademark Cases Decided by Courts of Law in the United Kingdom (London, Apr. 1887), IV.4, 83.

  22. Saturday Review, 10 Jan. 1880; Nature,
12 Feb. 1880.

  23. Papers, 5.727.

  24. Le Temps, 8 Jan. 1880 (author’s translation).

  25. Henry Morton letter in Sanitary Engineer, 1 Jan. 1880; Morton interviewed in New York Times, 28 Dec. 1879. See also, e.g., the criticism of “a well-known electrician” of Cleveland, Ohio (probably Charles F. Brush), in “Lighting a Great City,” New York Times, 7 Feb. 1880.

  26. New York Times, 28 Dec. 1879; New York Sun, 27 Dec. 1879.

  27. See Ron D. Katznelson and John Howells, “Inventing Around Edison’s Lamp Patent: The Role of Patents in Stimulating Downstream Development and Competition,” www.law.northwestern.edu.

  28. TE Patent 369,280.

  29. Ibid., figs. 3 and 4.

  30. Ibid.

  31. Francis R. Upton, “Edison’s Electric Light,” Scribner’s Monthly, Feb. 1880.

  32. TE Patent 369,280.

  33. Ibid.

  34. Ibid.; Dyer and Martin, Edison, 389; McPartland, “Almost Edison,” 206ff.

  35. TE Patent 369,280.

  36. TE Patents 227,226 and 369,280.

  37. Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 94. See Papers, 5.692, for the “fundamental change” in Menlo Park operations from research to manufacturing during the course of 1880.

  38. Papers, 5.542; New York Sun, 12 Jan. 1880. For an eloquent description of Menlo Park at night in the summer of 1882, see York (PA) Daily, 15 July 1882.

  39. The best guide to TE’s inventive progress is the list of his patents by execution date compiled by the Edison Papers project. It is available online at http://edison.rutgers.edu/​patente1.htm et seq.

  40. Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 118. “There is no record of such a large corps of trained men and so complete an establishment devoted to scientific research. Menlo Park is one of the wonders of this wonderful age.” Boston Globe, 2 May 1880.

  41. Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 359, 262–63, 858–59, 866; Hammer Reminiscences, TENHP; Marshall, Recollections of Edison, 31–32. See also Bernard S. Finn, “Working at Menlo Park,” in Pretzer, Working at Inventing, 32–47.

  42. Dyer and Martin, Edison, 637; Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 693, 241.

  43. Papers, 5.545; Charles T. Hughes reminiscence, 19 June 1907, TENHP. See also “The Menlo Park Mystique” in Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 118–20. On 2 May 1880 the Boston Globe commented, “There is no record of such a large corps of trained men and so complete an establishment devoted to scientific research.”

  44. See Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 131–34, on this “most critical lamp production problem.”

  45. Papers, 5.624–26, 752, 636; TE Patent 248,418.

  46. W. C. White, “Electrons and the Edison Effect,” General Electric Review, Oct. 1943. Edison used the phrase “molecular bombardment.” Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 618.

  47. Papers, 5.753, 627–30; TE Patent 307,031; William H. Preece, “On a Peculiar Behaviour of Glow-Lamps when raised to High Incandescence,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 38 (London, 1885); Harold G. Bowen, The Edison Effect (West Orange, NJ, 1951); Sungook Hong, Wireless: From Marconi’s Black Box to the Audion (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 121–22.

  48. Papers, 5.546, 677; Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 111–20; McPartland, “Almost Edison,” 201–2.

  49. Papers, 5.671–73 and 713–14; “On the Efficiency of Edison’s Light,” American Journal of Science, Apr. 1880; McPartland, “Almost Edison,” 203.

  50. Grosvenor Lowrey to Kate Armor, 20 Feb. 1880, quoted in Taylor, Mr. Edison’s Lawyer, 50.

  51. Scientific American, 22 May 1880; Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, “Edisonia,” 133. See also Allerhand, Illustrated History, 177–81. TE was not required to provide lights for navigation, that function being performed by the much more powerful arc lamps of Hiram Maxim.

  52. A fourth dynamo excited the functional three. Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, “Edisonia,” 129, 131; Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 116–17; TE Patent 227,226; Papers, 5.598–99.

  53. Dyer and Martin, Edison, 372.

  54. Papers, 5.600, 694; New York Herald clipping, “April 29, 1880,” Charles Batchelor Scrapbook 1878–1881, PTAE; Ray E. Kidd, “Lighting the Steamship Columbia with Edison’s First Commercial Light Plant,” General Electric release, June 1936; De Borchgrave and Cullen, Villard, 310.

  55. Marshall, Recollections of Edison, 17; Israel, Edison, 198.

  56. Marshall, Recollections of Edison, 18; Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, “Edisonia,” 124.

  57. New York Times, 9 Aug. 1880; Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, “Edisonia,” 121–22; drawings in TE Patent 475,591. For an extended discussion of TE’s 1880 electric railway, see Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 576–86; Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, “Edisonia,” 122; Scientific American, 5 June 1880; Dyer and Martin, Edison, 452; Papers, 5.231–34, 1020–21. Edison’s application for a U.S. patent for his electric railway was found to be in interference with that of Werner von Siemens, and disallowed. He wrote a detailed description of the system when applying successfully for a British patent in September 1880. See Papers, 5.846–53.

  58. Papers, 5.739. The phrase odor of armature was used by T. Commerford Martin in “Edison’s Pioneer Electric Railway Work,” Scientific American, 18 Nov. 1911.

  59. Lowrey to Kate Armour, 5 June 1880, quoted in Taylor, Mr. Edison’s Lawyer, 53. See also Dyer and Martin, Edison, 463.

  60. Papers, 5.738, 735; New York Herald, 10 Aug. 1880. For an extended account of TE’s railway work in the 1880s, see Dyer and Martin, Edison, 454–72.

  61. Papers, 5.738; Taylor, Mr. Edison’s Lawyer, 27 and passim.

  62. Jocelyn P. Kennedy and Robert C. Koolikian, “Grosvenor Porter Lowrey,” ts., Biographical Collection, TENHP.

  63. Boston Globe, 2 May 1880.

  64. Boston Globe, 2 May 1880. William S. Pretzer remarks on the “mystical” quasi-religious nature of the Menlo Park fraternity in Pretzer, Working at Inventing, 18.

  65. Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 95–97; Papers, 5.790, 764; New York Herald, 10 Aug. 1880; McPartland, “Almost Edison,” 204; Allerhand, Illustrated History, 136, 135; Israel, Edison, 196.

  66. Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 107–8; Papers, 5.563; Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, “Edisonia,” 97; Israel, Edison, 196.

  67. Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 128–30; Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 620; Papers, 5.1050; Hammer Reminiscences, TENHP; Hammer, “Edison and His Inventions,” vi. In Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, “Edisonia,” there is a photograph of this historic bulb, which TE gave to Hammer as a souvenir (106).

  68. Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 674; Papers, 7.725.

  69. Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 164–65; Vanderbilt, Edison, Chemist, 348–49 McPartland, “Almost Edison,” 218. Upton went so far as to deduce a general law of distribution: “The cost [of conductors] increases as the square of the distance from the central station.” Papers, 5.573.

  70. TE Patent 264,642; Hughes, Networks of Power, 21; TE Patent 239,147; Dyer and Martin, Edison, 386.

  71. Josephson, Edison, 23.

  72. TE Patent 264,642; Dyer and Martin, Edison, 343; Manchester Guardian, 6 Sept. 1882.

  73. Papers, 5.764, 783–84, 840–41, 843; Charles L. Clarke, “Menlo Park in 1880,” TENHP; Marshall, Recollections of Edison, 30; W. S. Andrews, “A Short History of the First Underground System Used for Edison Lamps,” ts., 1907, 1–3, TENHP; Papers, 5.764; Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 723ff.

  74. Andrews, “Short History,” 3.

  75. Charles Mott laboratory diary, entry for 3 Nov. 1880, PTAE; Andrews, “Short Hist
ory,” 3. TE’s grand gesture nearly became an embarrassment. There was a surge back to the Democracy after midnight, and Garfield won by only 1,898 votes.

  76. Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 151; Papers, 5.908–9, 898–90. For a detailed account of lamp production in this period, see Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 786–816.

  77. Papers, 5.889–90.

  78. Papers, 5.739; Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 134–46. William Hammer notes that power was delivered to the factory via a three-quarter-mile overhead cable, “[giving] to the world the first demonstration of how current could be distributed successfully.” Hammer, “Edison and His Inventions,” vi.

  79. Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 134; Pretzer, Working at Inventing, 44; Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 406–7.

  80. Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, “Edisonia,” 149; Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 805. The last eight words of this sentence are taken from Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 134.

  81. Papers, 5.882, 825–26; Charles Mott laboratory diary, 4 and 6 Aug. 1880, PTAE.

  82. See Dyer and Martin, Edison, chap. 13, “A World-hunt for Filament Material.”

  83. Papers, 5.891.

  84. Allerhand, Illustrated History, 226; Cincinnati Enquirer, 13 Nov. 1880; Papers, 5.922. According to Francis Jehl, Maxim’s visit took place a few weeks before Ludwig Boehm left Menlo Park to work for him. Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 612.

  85. Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 707; Friedel and Israel, Edison’s Electric Light, 160; “Has Edison Been Outdone?” New York Sun, 17 Nov. 1880.

  86. Papers, 5.915, 923; New York Evening Post, 22 Nov. 1880.

  87. Allerhand, Illustrated History, 172. But see TE to Morton in Papers, 5.906: “I certainly have believed that you have not treated me exactly right for reasons which I cannot fathom.”

  88. Pretzer, Working at Inventing, 119. For the early relations of TE and Barker, see Hounshell, “Edison and the Pure Science Ideal.”

  89. Papers, 5.922.