The Wizard of Menlo Park

by Randall E. Stross

  Not so long before his visit to Keely, Edison had himself been at the center of a heated scientific controversy when he had made claims about the ether, too. The first time he had drawn attention to himself outside of the world of telegraphy had not been in 1877, with the phonograph’s invention, but two years earlier, when he had publicly announced, overly hastily, that he had made a fundamental discovery in physics of the “etheric force.” Having noticed sparks flying between parts of his telegraphic apparatus that were not conducting currents, Edison carried out investigations that appeared to rule out scientific explanations based on conventional knowledge of electricity. He did not think he was on the threshold of a perpetual-motion machine, but he did think the etheric force could revolutionize telegraphy, making possible transmissions through uninsulated wire, whether on land or through sea. For a brief moment, Edison’s claims were treated in some scientific quarters respectfully, even in the Scientific American. Refutation and ridicule followed. Edison was defensive, but was also embarrassed and chastened; he would never again make as large a claim of discovery in science again. (Years later, however, scientists came to realize that Edison had stumbled across high-frequency electromagnetic waves—the basis for radio, and ultimately an ironical coda for the inventor who would live long enough to personally witness the radio boom of the 1920s yet stubbornly dismiss its commercial future.)

  Edison’s unhappy experience in 1875 when he had announced the discovery of the etheric force prematurely drained his interest in taking an active role of self-promoter. But in early 1878 he was amenable to playing the passive role of principal subject in newspaper profiles, and Menlo Park was perfectly placed for this purpose. It was sparsely populated, as if it were a world removed from New York City, yet it was also conveniently located a short train ride away. It sat close enough to the city to be regarded proprietarily by New York–based reporters as their own. Had it been located, say, between Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., Edison’s lab would not have received visits by representatives of the New York press, and without them, the story of Edison’s lab would have remained one of merely local interest.

  Amos Cummings jumped ahead of his rival reporters and put himself into the Menlo Park story he reported. He described in detail his arrival at the laboratory and initial impressions, including the setting itself as a member of the dramatis personae. The laboratory was depicted with imagery anticipating Henry Adams’s later twin images of the Virgin and the Dynamo: the long wooden structure was likened to “an old-fashioned Baptist tabernacle,” but on its roof were nine lightning rods, and on its side were the twelve telegraph lines.

  Cummings walked in the front door and found himself stepping into an office, in which an unidentified man was studying a drawing. Having asked for Edison, he was told, “Go right upstairs, and you’ll find him singing into some instrument.” The rarity of a visitor such as Cummings is underlined by Edison’s availability, uninsulated by a personal secretary or other gatekeeper. Up the stairs, and there “Prof. Edison” was, seated at a table. Grimy hands, uncombed hair, dirty shirt, muddy shoes, “he looked like anything but a professor,” Cummings would write, forgetting that his subject was not, in fact, a professor. Edison was also described as utterly lacking pretentiousness. “A man of common sense would feel at home with him in a minute,” Cummings reported, “but a nob or prig would be sadly out of place.” This motif—the genius who spoke plainly—proved so irresistible that it became the one used in almost every profile of Edison for the rest of his life.

  Edison had virtually no prior experience with a reporter who was about to make him the subject of a long profile, but he was naturally adept at steering the conversation in the direction he wished, which was to describe the future commercial possibilities of the phonograph. Even though he was privately focused on its use as a dictation machine in the office, he sensed that the general readership of a newspaper would be interested in other applications. The arias of opera soprano Adelina Patti could be recorded, Edison suggested, and enjoyed in the parlors anywhere, selling “millions.” He lamented the lost opportunity to record the last benediction of just-deceased Pope Pius IX; the recording could have been easily duplicated for every Roman Catholic in the world. A great public service, and a great business opportunity, too. He did the arithmetic: at $5 each, “there was a fortune in it.”

  The more he talked, the more he looked out to the future. He was prescient in some cases: audiobooks (“Say I hire a good elocutionist to read David Copperfield”); Nixon’s Oval Office recordings (“I could fix a machine in a wall…. Political secrets…might be brought tolight”); movies with sound (“The pictures and gestures of the orator, as well his voice, could be exactly reproduced, and the eyes and ears of the audience charmed by the voice and manner of the speaker”). Edison also thought parents would hide recorders so that they could in the comfort of their own bed listen to “all the spooney courtship of their daughters and lovers.”

  Edison’s talking foghorn, the aerophone, which conveniently remained unfinished, provided still more incredible possibilities. He suggested installing one inside the mouth of “the Goddess of Liberty that the Frenchmen are going to put upon Bedloe’s Island that would make her talk so loud that she could be heard by every soul on Manhattan Island.”

  Cummings meekly took it all in, unquestioningly, and was so eager to depict Edison as a genius that he reported as fact details that were empirical impossibilities. In front of Cummings, Edison recorded his favorite ditty for a phonograph demonstration, “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” played it normally, and then reversed the cylinder, which Cummings claimed then yielded the words in reverse order and distinctly: “Lamb little a had Mary.”

  When Cummings, the polite guest, asked Edison how he had discovered the phonograph, Edison concocted a great drama in the wrong place, not when he and his assistants had first tried to record on a strip of paper, but later, when he directed his chief machinist to build the first cylinder model, the successful testing of which was noted in the lab books with scarcely a yawn. Edison told the reporter that his lab mates “laughed at me” when he proposed making the cylinder, and bets involving cigars and cash showed that his belief in success was matched by his associates’ skepticism that it would work in the first trial, which it did.

  With Cummings faithfully recording his every utterance, Edison showed an impish side, recording serious verse, and then overlaying upon it jeers and gibes (“Oh, cork yourself!”). He saved the best part of the demonstration for the end, when he recorded “Mad dog!” a half dozen times “and then amused himself by turning the crank backward.” Cummings does not spell out the profane result, but it was not, as he claimed to have heard before, the original words merely reversed.

  Cummings headed for the train, leaving his readers with a final charming image of Edison, returning to work on his phonograph “like a delighted boy.” The reporter had obtained materials for a flattering portrait; the inventor had lost only a few hours of work time. But when Cummings’s story appeared in the New York Sun, the seemingly intimate portrait of the “genius” in his laboratory created a sensation, setting off a mad rush of reporters to Menlo Park to write their own profiles of the inventor in his lab. And with the reporters came others who wanted to see “the Professor” for themselves. “I find I cannot get away,” Edison wrote one of his attorneys, complaining only semiseriously. “Every day a dozen of the heavy lights of literature and science come here.”

  The Edison stories served to whet readers’ appetites for still more. The result was that Menlo Park became a place known far and wide around the world, and so closely was the place name associated with Edison’s laboratory that it entered the nation’s consciousness and stayed, even though Edison himself would live and work there only three more years, and would spend more than four decades at another location in New Jersey.

  The more that Edison spoke with reporters about his ideas and plans, the more giddy he became. He was untroubled by doubt that
he might lack the time and resources to accomplish all of the side projects that he mentioned, seriously or casually. Readers learned that he not only had invented a new painkiller cocktail, but also had invented a hearing aid for his own use. His “telephonoscope” was supposedly inconspicuous, yet enabled Edison to hear “a cow chew a quarter of a mile off.” When letters came pouring in, imploring him to commercialize the invention, he announced that he had assigned two of his assistants to work on tests, and was confident he would have a hearing aid on the market within months.

  His aerophone remained incomplete. But when Vanity Fair Tobacco and Cigarettes wrote “Prof. Edison, Menlo Park,” asking if he could adapt his “airaphone” to proclaim “Smoke Vanity Fair,” Edison wrote back that he could, though it would take him a while to “perfect” it. The aerophone made for wonderful copy, but reporters found it impossible to see it for themselves. “I am very sorry,” Edison apologized to a New York World reporter in March 1878, “that I cannot show you the aerophone today. I have just sent the application for a patent to Washington, and have taken the machine I had here to pieces.” The reporter said this was a “great disappointment,” but Edison, “one of the most courteous gentlemen in the world,” covered for the machine’s absence with a detailed explanation of its supposed capabilities.

  The aerophone and the telephonoscope could not materialize because Edison was woefully understaffed. Even though he conveyed to reporters the impression that his laboratory was home to a staff too large to name, in fact it was small. In early March, he hired a few more hands, but that gave him a total of ten or twelve assistants, eight of whom were working on the phonograph, and the others on the telephone. At the same time that Edison was working on a new version of the phonograph that employed a disc rather than foil wrapped around a cylinder, he was also serving as host to increasing numbers of reporters and visitors, performing the same parlor games, answering the same repetitive questions. In the transition from unknown to iconic figure, Edison still felt free to say whatever he wished, so one entertainment he concocted was a variation of the one in which he had heckled himself in an overlay after first recording a serious reading. In the new version, he mimicked a sermon, in a mock-solemn drawl: “Ladies and gentlemen, I have come—before you this evening—to deliver for your—benefit—a discourse on travels—in Bible lands. Allow—me before commencing—to sta-a-ate—” Then he stopped, returned the stylus to the beginning, and recorded a running commentary: “Oh, give us a rest! Oh dry up! Sit down! Put him out! Hire a hall! Oh, that’ll do! Bah!”

  When the Sun’s Amos Cummings had visited the Menlo Park laboratory in February, he was the only outsider on the premises. When his competitors followed him, however, they bumped into one another. Edison complained that “the reporters that come down here have already [so] unstrung my nerves that I think of taking to the woods,” but this seems more a handy pretext rather than genuine complaint. He stayed where he was and left the door to his lab wide open. No one had to tell him that the feature stories were the best kind of advertising possible: disseminated for free.

  If anything, the advertising was too effective, creating demand for the phonograph that caught the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company by surprise. Phonograph Company investor Charles Cheever wrote another board member in mid-March that “the tide has started itself so fast that I have been unable in spite of all that I can do to hold it back until we had the small Phonograph ready to sell.” Cheever had helped whip up the public’s interest by holding public exhibitions in New York City, packing in three hundred people each afternoon, and drawing in the influential figures who were concentrated in Manhattan. William Cullen Bryant was so tickled he asked to come again with friends. An Astor, whose interest was piqued by Bryant, would not deign to rub shoulders with hoi polloi in the public exhibition, but she did ask for a private exhibition for herself and forty friends.

  Having received so much attention, gratis, the phonograph seemed poised for a sensational commercial launch. Gardiner Hubbard, the father-in-law of Alexander Graham Bell and another backer of the Phonograph Company, was so confident that demand would outstrip supply that he developed a plan for maximal exploitation of the imagined shortage. Why not announce that sales agents must place their orders—and pay in full—in advance? Figuring that each unit would only cost $15 to manufacture and would sell for $100, Hubbard gleefully rubbed his hands together, calculating paper profits. “We incur no risk,” he wrote a fellow investor.

  This proposal ran into opposition. Cheever was more concerned that early customers remain happy customers, and wondered aloud whether it would be better to lease the first small phonographs, once they were ready for release, rather than selling them. He knew that the shortcomings of the first-generation models would be a public embarrassment to the company as soon as the next-generation machine was released. Customers would naturally want “the most perfect one going and not a crude model.” If the company put all the machines out on lease, then it could “call them in and smash them up.” This praiseworthy idea disappeared.

  The principals of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company debated various business models, and counted in advance the coming profits, without asking Edison’s opinion. They encouraged Edison to hasten his work on finishing the two phonograph models, and excluded him from their discussions about the business. Edison had opinions about everything, however, including marketing. When asked by reporters, he doggedly insisted that the phonograph be purchased by executives for dictating letters, which would be transcribed and dispatched by lesser-paid office boys. “They can thus save hundreds of dollars a year,” Edison asserted, without explaining how exactly the savings would be captured by executives who were paid a flat salary, not by the number of letters sent out per day.

  Editorialists and feature writers were not much interested in technical details; they credulously reported Edison’s claim that he could record forty thousand words on a single disc when, in fact, he was nowhere close to being able to do so. They were more interested in projecting a heroic image of the inventor, “the Napolean of invention,” as the New York Sun dubbed him. Convention demanded that he be given a tender, domestic side, too. A visiting reporter read much in Edison’s pat on the head of “a bright little three-year-old boy who called him ‘papa’ with a genuine affection that showed, though the most remarkable inventor of the age, he is by no means dead to the less exciting episodes and battles of a domestic world.”

  Much was said about the phonograph as a source of humor, running along the lines that had been established from the beginning: It would be the bane of philandering husbands (surreptitiously recording, for example, “Hurry up, Betty, and give me a kiss before the old hen comes down”) and a boon to sharp-tongued mothers-in-law. The Washington Herald described the phonograph (on 1 April 1878) as the “outside agent of the divorce courts” and urged the passing of a law “making it a capital offense to manufacture or sell this species of deadly weapon.” Edison, too, was the subject of humorous editorials, vilifying him for inventing too many things. The New York Times said with a rather macabre sense of humor that “something ought to be done to Mr. Edison, and there is a growing conviction that it had better be done with a hemp rope.”

  The jokes and spoofs were entertaining, but the reader was susceptible to being confused, too. The phonograph, described in close detail in the Sun’s long profile “A Marvelous Discovery,” which had started the stampede to Menlo Park, was regarded by many as fantastic. Edison received three hundred letters that denounced the reporter’s mendacity. One professor urged Edison to protect his reputation and publicly disavow the claims that had been made in the article. “The idea of a talking machine is ridiculous, but the article is so ingeniously constructed, and some persons are so ignorant of the first principles of science, that they will be apt to believe it true, unless you deny it.”

  Truth appeared to be spoof; and spoof, truth. The New York Daily Graphic’s William Croffut wrote of a lunch that Ed
ison had served him on a recent visit to Menlo Park, at the conclusion of which Edison explained that he made all of the food “out of the dirt taken from the cellar.” In an almost plausible fashion, Edison provides a description of how he had found a way to speed up organic processes by inorganic means. Croffut was amazed: “This food machine is going to dispense almost entirely with farmers and stock-raisers, with millers and bakers—why it seems to me you are going to abolish all occupations except the manufacture of your machines.” Oh, no, Edison replies, laughing. But he did modestly allow that it would “certainly revolutionize the world.”

  The publication date of 1 April for “A Food Creator” should have served to put readers on alert. And the final paragraph, in which the narrator is awakened by a train conductor, groggily realizing that he had been napping and was only then arriving at Menlo Park, clearly showed that the preceding story had been a parody of the boilerplate Edison profile. But just as some listeners failed to hear disclaimers that were interspersed in Orson Welles’s 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds, so, too, some readers, and some newspapers, failed in 1878 to appreciate Croffut’s nicely crafted spoof. Though the hoax was clearly revealed at the end, the New York Daily Graphic pointed out afterward, “a good many, with the careless American habit of hasty reading, seemed to have stopped short of that revelation.”