Edison became obsessed with chemistry. Spurning the play that other boys his age engaged in, Edison spent all of his free time in a laboratory he had set up in the cellar of his parents’ home. He would spend what little pocket money he had on chemicals (he had at least two hundred small bottles lined up on the shelves of his laboratory) and conducted experiments that replicated findings he had read about in books. It was to finance his purchases of chemicals (and obtain access to fresh reading) that Edison, at the age of twelve, became a newsboy. He persuaded his mother to let him take a job selling newspapers and candy on the Grand Trunk Railway train between Port Huron and Detroit.
Edison found his entrepreneurial spirit very early in life. He quickly realized that he could buy produce at a low price in Detroit and resell it for a profit in Port Huron. So at the age of twelve, he opened two stores—a newsstand and a produce stand—and even hired two boys to work for him. By fifteen he was publishing his own newspaper, the Weekly Herald, which he printed in the baggage car of the train during its sixty-three-mile journey from Port Huron to Detroit, using a small printing press that had formerly been used to print hotel bills. He also began conducting his own chemistry experiments in the baggage car. One day a stick of phosphorous fell and started a fire on the train, and Edison, his newspaper, and his chemistry lab were all forcibly thrown from the train by the enraged conductor.10
One day in the summer of 1862, while the train was stopped at the Mount Clemens platform, Edison noticed that the station agent’s three-year-old son was playing on the tracks in the path of an oncoming freight train. Edison made a running dive for the child and scooped him up just in time. It was such a close call, in fact, that Edison’s heel was struck by the train, and both Edison and the toddler suffered cuts on their faces and hands from the gravel ballast on which they fell. The station agent, in his gratitude, offered to teach Edison Morse code, which soon enabled Edison to become a telegraph operator at the Western Union Office—all before he turned sixteen.
In the years that followed, Edison worked at several telegraph posts, and in his free time he tinkered with telegraph equipment and similar electrical projects. In 1869, at the age of twenty-two, he was awarded his first patent, for an electronic vote recorder that would speed up the voting process in state legislatures.11 Edison’s device would enable legislators to vote by flipping a switch that would transmit information by electric current to a main recorder. After the voting was complete, a clerk could feed a piece of chemically treated paper through the machine that would “print” the votes for all to see.12 Being awarded a patent must have been a thrill for the young Edison, who would apply for (and be granted) patents at a frenetic pace throughout his life, garnering 1,093 in the United States and more than 1,200 internationally. His record would stand until 2003, when it was surpassed by Shunpei Yamazaki of Japan, who in turn, was passed in 2008 by Kia Silverbrook of Australia.
The vote recorder would not turn out to be a commercial success—as it turns out, faster vote counting was not the kind of breakthrough in efficiency that politicians were looking for because it eliminated the time for the politicking needed to change votes. However, the invention and its patent marked an important turning point for Edison. He loved to tinker and experiment, and he knew that if done well, inventing might afford him the luxury of being independent—an extremely attractive option for the individualistic young man. Within the year he had quit his job as a telegraph operator and became a full-time inventor. His primary goal at that time was to have his own shop and make enough money to work on his projects autonomously. Over the next few years he hopped from one venture to the next, moving from Boston to New York City to Newark, each time finding a partner who would fund him to develop and manufacture small lots of completed telegraph instruments. In 1870 he founded American Telegraph Works, and he proudly wrote his parents to joke that he had become a “Bloated Eastern Manufacturer.”13
The success of his early ventures waxed and waned, and when the twenty-four-year-old Edison went prematurely gray, he claimed it was from the long working hours and the stress of having to pay the bills. His lifelong habit of losing himself in his work and staying at the laboratory late into the night was already apparent. For example, in 1871 he married sixteen-year-old Mary Stilwell (a worker at his company), and on the day of his wedding a friend visited his laboratory to find him dozing at his desk. When his friend woke him and told him it was past midnight, Edison replied, “By George. I must go home, then. I was married today.”14 Although Edison often left Mary alone days at a time while he worked in the laboratory, she did not openly complain about it. In fact, she recounted about herself (in the third person), “[S]he never feels neglected when her husband shuts himself up at Menlo Park for the purpose of making experiments or for invention, and she just waits until he has emerged from his seclusion, only taking pains to see that he has his meals properly.”15
Edison’s business during the 1870s primarily developed telegraph systems that provided information to businessmen in the financial sector. While the firm was sometimes profitable, cash flow was vulnerable to the volatility of an economy that experienced frequent panics. For example, the panic of 1873 nearly wiped Edison out and also forced him to sell his house at a loss. Edison thus began considering ways to diversify and in particular to tap the much larger consumer markets. In 1874 he and his partner Joseph Murray invented a device for inducing electric shocks that they called the Inductorium. Advertisements exhorted that the device should be in every home “as a specific cure for rheumatism, and as an inexhaustible fount of amusement.”16 The device was surprisingly successful and whetted Edison’s appetite for developing more products that could be marketed to mass-market consumers.
Edison preferred to be deeply involved in developing rather than manufacturing products and to work without a partner. Thus, in 1876 he moved to a site in rural New Jersey about thirty miles from New York called Menlo Park, where he could build a much larger laboratory at a more reasonable cost. Over the next couple of years Edison and his assistants would develop a variety of electronic products—an electric drill, an electric sheep-shearing device, some electronic toys—that were sold through American Novelty Company, a separate firm that Edison had established. In that same year, Alexander Graham Bell, a professor of vocal physiology at Boston University, obtained a patent for an “apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically.”17 This was only a short-range telephone, but it spurred Edison and another electrical engineer of the day, Elisha Gray, to race to introduce better telephones that were capable of long-distance voice communication.
The earliest sound transmission devices did not convey speech clearly and were better suited to transmitting music. Bell, Edison, and Gray thus all held concerts to demonstrate to the public that their devices could transmit recognizable music from a location miles away. As the competition heated up, it became the subject of quite a bit of attention in the newspapers. For example, an 1877 article in the Newark Daily Advertiser reported that “Mr. Edison has so often been scoffed at, that it has no other effect upon him than to stimulate him to increased study and labor,” and, adding a dose of humor, it noted that if Edison succeeded in creating a device that would transmit voice, “what an instrument of torture it would be in the hands and at the mouth of a distant and irate mother in law.”18 The New York Times was more critical, noting that “This evening Prof. Edison gave a public rehearsal of his telephone, which consists of a musical instrument not nearly as loud in tone as that of Prof. Gray of Chicago.…”19 Alexander Graham Bell won the race and was ultimately awarded the most important patents. However, Edison created a carbon transmitter that greatly enhanced a telephone’s functionality. Furthermore, Edison’s work on capturing and relaying sound waves using a diaphragm led to an invention where his primacy could not be disputed: the phonograph.
Edison expected his assistants to work the same long hours that he worked, and this often meant staying through the night at
the laboratory. He had established a tradition of ordering a midnight dinner for the workers at the laboratory on such occasions, and it was one of the only times when he permitted himself to relax. The men would enjoy the feast, banter, and tell jokes until Edison rose and signaled it was time to go back to work. During one of these late nights, on July 18, 1877, Edison and his assistants had been trying out a range of materials to use as diaphragms that would vibrate when receiving sound waves. After the midnight dinner had been consumed but not yet cleared, Edison was toying with one of the diaphragms, speaking in one side and feeling the vibrations on the other. He casually noted to Charles Batchelor, one of his most valued assistants, “Batch, if we had a point on this we could make a record on some material which we could afterwards pull under the point, and it would give us the speech back.”20 It was sheer genius. Instantly the men jumped up to test it. Within the hour, they had demonstrated that Edison was correct. As Edison would later describe it,
From my experiments on the telephone I knew of the power of a diaphragm to take up sound vibrations.… I reached the conclusion that if I could record the movements of the diaphragm properly, I could cause such record to reproduce the original movements imparted to the diaphragm by the voice, and thus succeed in recording and reproducing the human voice. Instead of using a disk, I designed a little machine using a cylinder provided with grooves around the surface. Over this was to be placed tinfoil, which easily received and recorded the movements of the diaphragm. A sketch was made, and the piece-work price, $18, was marked on the sketch.… The workman who got the sketch was John Kruesi. I didn’t have much faith that it would work, expecting that I might possibly hear a word or so that would give hope of a future for the idea. Kruesi, when he had nearly finished it, asked what it was for. I told him I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it was absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I shouted “Mary had a little lamb,” etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time. Long experience proved that there were great drawbacks found generally before they could be got commercial; but here was something there was no doubt of.21
When the creation of the phonograph was described in the October–December 1877 edition of Scientific American, Edison suddenly became famous. The article, titled simply “The Talking Phonograph,” gives a detailed technical explanation of how the phonograph worked and then provides the following commentary:
No matter how familiar a person may be with modern machinery and its wonderful performances, or how clear in his mind the principle underlying this strange device may be, it is impossible to listen to the mechanical speech without his experiencing the idea that his senses are deceiving him. We have heard other talking machines. The Faber apparatus for example is a large affair as big as a parlor organ. It has a key board, rubber larynx and lips, and an immense amount of ingenious mechanism which combines to produce something like articulation in a single monotonous organ note. But here is a little affair of a few pieces of metal, set up roughly on an iron stand about a foot square, that talks in such a way, that, even if in its present imperfect form many words are not clearly distinguishable, there can be no doubt but that the inflections are those of nothing else than the human voice.22
At the time it was incomprehensible that a device could record the human voice and play it back in different places and times. People noted with awe that the device would enable one to hear the voices of the dead (presuming their voices were captured before death!). Reporters and visitors began to stream to the Menlo Park laboratory, eager to see the “wizard” and his inventions. The New York Sun dubbed him the “Napoleon of Invention.” Commercial applications of the phonograph seemed endless, and Edison helped to whip excitement over the product into a frenzy by speculating on its many potential uses: it could be used to record songs by famous singers, executives could dictate letters, books could be read into it and played back, or it could be mounted into the wall of politicians’ office to record political secrets. He also often alluded to other inventions that were near completion—a talking foghorn and a hearing aid—stoking the public’s curiosity and enthusiasm.
Strangely, however, whereas Edison had been comfortable releasing telegraph inventions that were not quite finished and letting the “sharps” (the vernacular for men in suits at the time) finish the fine tuning, he was reluctant to release the phonograph until he thought it was perfected. The public would just have to wait. They would wait for a long time, in the end, because Edison was prone to getting distracted by other projects and by all the attention of well-meaning visitors to the laboratory. Although he was repeatedly extolled to bring the phonograph to market, Edison’s fierce independence, evident even as a child when he would “involuntarily challenge” everything he read and insist on testing its veracity himself, meant that it was nearly impossible for others to rush him or to influence the direction of his efforts. As Randall Stross notes in a compelling biography of Edison, “Edison was not receptive to guidance from others, whether its nature was technical, strategic, or business.”23 Like most of the innovators studied here, Edison was stubborn, individualistic, and would not often take direction from others. Pressing him would only make him more defiant.
Partially deaf since his youth (usually attributed to a bout of scarlet fever), Edison refrained from speaking publicly. Social situations could make him feel awkward, although he claimed that deafness was an advantage that gave him uninterrupted time to “think out my problems.”24 Edison fueled the enthusiasm of the public by dangling out ever-more-exciting promises of invention but also found the public’s demands to be a burden. There is a great paradox in the fact that Edison masterfully created his own celebrity by playing the part of the “wizard” yet by all appearances did not enjoy the attention. At a reception to show off the phonograph to the National Academy of Sciences he was described as “shy and shrinking,” and he admitted to a reporter that he did not like crowds and had not enjoyed the academy president’s welcome because he had not heard a word that was said.25
Edison also retreated almost completely from domestic life with his wife and children, spending most of his time in the laboratory. According to his assistant Edward Johnson, from 1868 to 1878 Edison averaged eighteen hours a day at his desk and often did not go home for days at a time. His chief assistant, Charles Batchelor, added that when working on something that interested him, “Edison hardly stops to eat even if they send his meals to him.”26 As described by another of his assistants, Mr. Jehl, at the Menlo Park laboratory, “It often happened that when Edison had been working up to three or four o’clock in the morning, he would lie down on one of the laboratory tables, and with nothing but a couple of books for a pillow, would fall into a sound sleep. He said it did him more good than being in a soft bed, which spoils a man.”27 Another worker at the lab, Mr. Upton, pointed out that “He could work continuously as long as he wished, and had sleep at his command. His sleep was always instant, profound, and restful. He has told me that he never dreamed.”28 Working long hours and sleeping on a laboratory table were lifelong habits for Edison.
In late 1878 the project that interested Edison was not completing a phonograph machine that could be sold to the mass market but instead perfecting an incandescent light bulb that could burn for more than the few minutes that platinum filaments would burn. Finding a filament that would enable a bulb to burn for many hours proved challenging, but Edison was like a bloodhound on a trail. Many details of this search are provided in a comprehensive document that is Edison’s only authorized biography, aided substantially by Edison’s own dictation. The authors of this work, Frank Lewis Dyer, a patent lawyer and Edison’s personal attorney, and Thomas Commerford Martin, an electrical engineer who served as editor of Electrical World, wrote that “Continuing these experiments with most fervent zeal, taking no account of
the passage of time, with an utter disregard for meals, and but scanty hours of sleep reluctantly at odd periods of the day or night, Edison kept his laboratory going without cessation.”29 By late 1879, he had concluded that the answer would lie in a carbon filament, and he began carbonizing anything he could lay his hands on: tissue paper, cardboard, paper saturated with tar, cotton thread, fishing line, lamp wick, twine, celluloid, boxwood, coconut hair, spruce, hickory, baywood, cedar, maple, rosewood, punk, cork, flax, grasses, canes, and more.
By 1880, he had finally demonstrated a long-lasting incandescent bulb using a carbon filament that produced the soft light needed for indoor use (arc lights, which had already been established, shone too brightly for use indoors), for which he was granted US patent 223,898.30 The patent describes any number of substances that may be used for the carbon filament, but shortly after the patent was granted, Edison and his team discovered that a particular type of bamboo filament enabled the bulb to burn for 1,200 hours. Edison described this period to Dyer and Martin for the 1910 biography:
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