The Wizard of Menlo Park

by Randall E. Stross

  Following his sensational April visit to Washington, D.C., he was deluged with invitations to make personal appearances for sundry groups and occasions. He told a visiting reporter that he had no interest at all in making such appearances. (“You shouldn’t have become famous, if you didn’t want to be talked about and bored by strangers,” the reporter replied.) Edison turned down the invitations across the board, but he made two exceptions when he was still glowing from the warm reception received in Washington. The unsatisfying results in both cases served to show him that the role of traveling celebrity was not to his liking.

  In May, he accepted an invitation to speak at the Academy of Mount Saint Vincent, a Catholic girls’ school on the Hudson River, as a favor to an old telegrapher friend. His hearing disability loomed as a larger issue when he was on the road. His hosts did not know how best to overcome its isolative effects (and Edison had yet to finish that “lap megaphone” he had been talking up with the press). When he was taken to the chapel during Mass, he strained to hear the celebrants’ words. (When the priest touched his arm to let him know it was time to go, Edison misinterpreted the gesture, thinking it was a rebuke for not showing proper reverence, and stooped down almost to his knees, remaining with bowed head. No one knew how to clear up the misunderstanding with the service still in progress.) Before Batchelor began the phonograph exhibition conducted before the students, Edison took a seat on the platform, “instantly becoming absorbed with some train of thought,” and apparently heard little or nothing of the school’s welcome. For him, the highlight of the day appears to have been at the end when he and Batchelor, after saying their good-byes, raced each other down the hill, oblivious to the rain and the propriety expected of the eminent inventor and his assistant.

  A few weeks later, Edison was lured out of the lab one more time, for an invitation-only appearance at a reception held after a public exhibition of the phonograph in New York City. He was introduced by Hilbourne Roosevelt—organ builder, investor in the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company, and first cousin of Theodore—who said he “had almost been obliged to use force to drag the inventor from his work.” The occasion was what a political campaigner today would call a meet and greet, and only the professional pol could be expected to have the stomach for it. At midnight, Edison excused himself, explaining he had to “get home and work.”

  As for family matters, hagiographers did not hesitate to see Mr. and Mrs. Edison as a perfect couple. One journalist described Mary as “a charming woman, and is evidently the counterpart of himself, and one would know, the moment he put his eyes on both, that they were exactly suited to one another.” This scene, painted by a stranger with a ripe imagination, was based on nothing at all. Edison’s almost total withdrawal from the family’s domestic sphere was the leitmotif that would be the one Edison and his assistants chose for Edison’s life narrative: the tireless inventor. Edward Johnson pretended to confide to a reporter that Edison’s “only bad habit” was work, so consuming that it constituted “a dissipation.” For the last ten years, Johnson said in 1878, Edison had averaged eighteen hours a day at his desk. So immersed in work’s demands, he “does not go home for days, either to eat or sleep,” even though his house was only a few steps away. On another occasion, a reporter observed that when his five-year-old daughter Marion came to the lab to fetch him for dinner, Edison had told her he would “be along in a minute”—and then had become engrossed in something else in the lab. “That’s nothing,” Batchelor had explained when the reporter commented on Edison’s susceptibility to distraction. “When we get interested in a thing here we stay all day and all night sometimes, and Edison hardly stops to eat even if they send his meals to him.” What Mary Edison thought of her husband’s absences was not recorded. She was only rarely included in the standard newspaper profile, and even then, merely as the ornament.

  Whether it was for a banquet in the city or supper at home, it was difficult to extract Edison from the lab. As the months passed following the phonograph’s first public exhibitions in early 1878 and he failed to produce a production model, Edison remained maddeningly blasé. He puttered and procrastinated, his attention flitting from one side project to the next.

  The “telescopophon” was one of the distractions that held his attention, but not long enough, it would turn out, for it to ever reach commercial release. This was a giant megaphone that performed marvelously when used as a pair, one for speaking, the other for listening, placed a mile apart on hilltops. Reporters were invited to try it themselves—one claimed he could hear a voice that was two miles away and out of sight—an entertainment so diverting that no one bothered to ask Edison details of how he was going to miniaturize it to make good on his claim that this nonelectrical mechanical device would enable the partially deaf to “hear every whisper on the stage of the largest theater,” yet be so small that it could be used “without your next neighbor knowing that you have one.”

  Any sense of urgency was blunted by pleasing news arriving from Paris, where the phonograph’s exhibition was drawing large crowds. Theodore Puskas, Edison’s business agent in Europe, had had to overcome the skepticism of the French Academy of Sciences, to whom he had first presented the machine. The scientists thought the machine’s playback was a ventriloquist trick and insisted that Puskas leave the room while they listened again and were finally convinced.

  Puskas secured a coveted place for a machine at the Paris Universal Exhibition. He cunningly chose to leave the machine inert and silent, without giving visitors the opportunity to hear it. At the same time, he leased a private hall on the Boulevard des Capucines, where he charged an admission price for phonograph demonstrations that ran three times a day, bringing in $200 daily. Edison called this “the sharpest kind of an advertising dodge,” which was high praise. Edison attributed Puskas’s inspired arrangements to ideas Puskas had picked up while in the United States.

  One of Edison’s associates on the ground in Paris wrote Charles Batchelor that the phonograph drew crowds that were overly enthusiastic and difficult to dislodge. A dispatch from Paris reported, “So we can only show it once and cover [the machine] up until the crowd gets away so as to give some one else a chance.”

  In the newspapers, Edison’s own name had become so familiar to readers that humorists could invoke it without having to provide any background. Typical was this brief item that appeared in several newspapers in June: “Edison has not invented anything since breakfast. The doctor has been called.” In Menlo Park, Edison could read these items and smile; they were harmless. But by July, he had passed through the exhilarating novelty of being well known; now he was weighed down by an accumulation of irritations. The stream of letters from strangers was holding steady at about seventy-five or eighty a day, coming from people whom Edison described as “the deaf, dumb, halt, blind, lame and all sorts of people.” This one, with failing eyesight, wanted Edison to invent a “blindoscope.” That one, a phonograph for advertising purposes, even though the machines were not being mass produced. Many wanted only one thing: cash.

  His correspondents included new acquaintances who held positions of power, and they too made requests of him. An example: John Vincent, the cofounder of the Chautauqua program based by Chautauqua Lake, New York, which offered summer programs for families that combined religious and secular education, invited Edison and his family to participate. Edison agreed, making plans to stay three weeks in August and offer a demonstration of what Vincent poetically described as “all the marvels of electricity which you can evoke and exhibit.”

  Vincent undoubtedly had no idea what a coup he had scored, obtaining atheistic Edison’s assent to being cooped up for weeks in a family-oriented church camp far from his lab. Vincent pressed on. He had a brother, who had a friend, who would like to rent a phonograph—that is, the machine that had yet to enter production. Could Edison oblige? And another thing. Vincent suggested—no, he instructed—Edison to change the name from “phonograph” to “tautophone.”
When Edison politely replied that he thought that “phonograph” was known so widely that it was probably too late to change, Vincent was unmoved. He informed Edison he was going to write an article about the machine, calling it by what he regarded to be its proper name, and expressed the hope that Edison would correct his patent records accordingly.

  Edison’s family plans for Chautauqua in August had been arranged early in the year, when August was distant; then, the correspondence with the insufferable Vincent followed. By July, Chautauqua in August was looming. William Croffut was also proving rather pushy, inviting himself and his wife for an overnight visit at Edison’s house. At the lab, Edison continued to flit from one workbench to another. The work, such as it was, continued to be interrupted by uninvited visitors and their expectations that he follow his self-assigned role in the trained-seal-with-phonograph act. Painter urged Edison to close the lab’s doors to visitors entirely and “only show your hand when you are ready for the market & then its [sic] too late for thieves to get your things.” Edison had not yet been convinced that he had to abandon the open-door policy, and letters from Painter were a reminder that the principals in the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company were waiting impatiently for the machine that they could sell in volume. At home, Mary Edison was pregnant with their third child, due in October.

  By all the evidence, Edison felt he was being crushed by demands on him, from strangers, reporters, associates, and family. He responded by acting on a threat he had made in jest a few months earlier of curing his “unstrung nerves” by “taking for the woods.” He abruptly accepted the invitation of his biggest admirer in academe, Professor George Barker, to embark upon a one-month trip to the West. The official purpose of the trip was to observe a total solar eclipse on 29 July from the best vantage point, near Rawlins, Wyoming. The eclipse provided unimpeachable justification for why Edison had to embark right then, absenting himself from lab associates, business partners, and pregnant wife and forcing cancellation of the Chautauqua trip. At the Wyoming site he could test his new “tasimeter,” a scientific instrument for measuring the temperature of the sun’s corona that he had thought up while he was working hard on not working on the phonograph. It was Barker’s inspired idea that on their way back they could stop in St. Louis and attend the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where Edison would read a paper that Barker was ghostwriting for him. It was apparently Edison’s idea, however, to extend the trip to California before turning around for St. Louis and the return.

  Edison and Barker left on 13 July, and the timing of his escape was fortuitous, Edison being absent when, a week later, a new problem popped up back at the lab. Scientific American, which had taken the lead in introducing the world to the wonders of the phonograph, continued to do so. The journal told readers, “The Phonograph, truly wonderful as it is, is exceedingly simple and may be made at a slight expense.” It published detailed instructions so that anyone could build a machine without waiting for Edison and the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company to finally make good on their promises to the public.

  Flouting the phonograph’s patents presented the Menlo Park lab with a crisis. In Edison’s absence, it was left to Batchelor and Johnson to decide how to respond. Reflecting their different personalities, Batchelor’s first reaction was to write Edison for instructions, and Johnson’s, to prepare a take-no-prisoners counteroffensive. He prepared a circular warning of the patents that protected the invention and spelled out what would happen to anyone foolish enough to infringe.

  The manufacture, sale or use, of a patented article without the consent of the owner of the patent is an infringement, and subjects the infringer TO AN ARREST or prohibition from the employment of his machinery, shop, works, or men, in the production of the article. The infringer is also LIABLE TO BE MULCTED IN TREBLE THE AMOUNT OF DAMAGES AWARDED BY THE JURY, TOGETHER WITH THE SUM TOTAL OF THE COSTS…. Ignorance of the law or of what the patent covers cannot be pleaded in Court…the Company are [sic] satisfied that upon an examination of the law, anyone desirous of having a Phonograph will find it the cheapest to procure it in a legitimate way.

  Johnson also protested to Scientific American’s editors, but the journal did not back down. “Investigators have rights as well as patentees,” a long editorial explained, and among those rights was the one that permits making a patented article for one’s own tests. Anticipating contemporary debates about an individual’s right to make copies of copyrighted music or television programs for noncommercial purposes, the editorial argued that only if a self-assembled phonograph were offered for sale, depriving the patent holder of his “lawful reward,” would the action be rightfully treated as illegal. With phrasing that could have been lifted from a blog, Scientific American in 1878 declared, “Unfortunately, the purchasers of patents are too apt to construe their rights so as to make them cover pretty much the entire universe.”

  Meanwhile, Edison had left the phonograph with the rest of his cares back in Menlo Park. He was determined to see all that could possibly be seen on his trip, and he secured the very best position to do so, obtaining permission to ride at the very front, on top of the locomotive’s cowcatcher, with the help of a letter from Jay Gould, with whom he had developed a relationship years earlier when Gould had used his railroad interests to gain control of Western Union and Edison was the telegraphic equipment expert of the day. The train traveled at a top speed of twenty miles per hour. The only time he felt he was in danger was when the locomotive hit an animal—Edison thought it may have been a badger. Upon impact, the animal was thrown up against the locomotive, just below the headlight, but Edison at that moment was leaning on the side, hanging on to an angle brace, and suffered no harm.

  Edison’s party arrived well in advance of the eclipse, but after the solar event Edison took a dilatory four weeks to return home. What he enjoyed most talking about when the journey was complete was not the eclipse but his adventures as a white tourist in a West whose native inhabitants were in the process of being violently removed. A visitor to Wyoming in 1878 saw terrain similar to that Custer had seen only two years before at the Little Bighorn in Montana. After the eclipse, Edison, Barker, some railroad officials, a U.S. Army major, and some soldiers embarked on a hunting trip that took them one hundred miles south of the railroad into Ute country. A few months later, the same major and thirty soldiers were attacked and killed by Utes near the place Edison had camped, or such is the story Edison later told.

  Edison had left behind Daily Graphic reporter William Croffut, but he had not shunned the company of reporters entirely. The New York Herald’s Edwin Fox was on hand for the eclipse, and became Edison’s roommate and hunting companion. When the two men went off on short hunting trips as a twosome, locals spared Edison the worst pranks directed at tenderfeet from the East, though he was the butt of a mild ruse when he was fooled into taking some shots at a jackrabbit that happened to be near a remote rail depot. The rabbit didn’t move; he advanced closer, and shot again, with the same result. When he got close enough to see that the rabbit was dead and had been stuffed, a crowd of onlookers did not hide their amusement. Fox, however, suffered more when a stationmaster loaned him his “fine Springfield musket” when Fox had run out of cartridges for his own rifle. Inexperienced, Fox failed to notice that the musket had been run over by a rail handcar and was ever-so-slightly bent. Upon firing, the recoil drove the gun against his shoulder with such force that he had to be treated at a hospital.

  Edison did not fully appreciate the reach of the media and the diffusion of his own name until late one night, after he and Fox had gone to sleep in their hotel room in Rawlins. The two were awakened by a loud knock. In walked a man who introduced himself as “Texas Jack” and said he had read about Edison in the newspaper and wanted to meet him. The hotel proprietor appeared and attempted to intercede on behalf of his guests; Texas Jack tossed him into the hallway and resumed his self-introduction. He had just arrived in town from a hunti
ng trip and boasted of his marksmanship. To illustrate, he pulled out his Colt, pointed it through the hotel window, and fired at a weather vane that sat on top of the town’s freight depot. The shot hit its target and awakened the townspeople, adding to the commotion. Edison, pleading fatigue, tried to coax his new friend to leave, but he did not succeed until he promised he would see him in the morning.

  These and other picturesque encounters provided abundant potential material for colorful letters if Edison had written home, but he and his wife did not correspond. Edison kept in touch with his assistants at the laboratory, but the only time he heard news about his pregnant wife was when his secretary, Stockton Griffin, wrote him on August 5 with a report that she was not well.

  Mrs. E’s health is not of the best—She is extremely nervous and frets a great deal about you, and about everything—I take it to be nervous prostration—She was so frightened yesterday for fear the children would get on the track that she fainted—This morning I telegraphed Dr. Ward who came at noon…. She needs a change and right away, as the [train] cars keep her awake at night and this causes her to lose strength.

  Neither Griffin nor the doctor urged Edison to cut his trip short; Griffin ended his letter with the reassurance that “there’s nothing serious in this,” and that is how Edison received it. It would be three more weeks before he arrived back in Menlo Park.

  He and Barker had just finished a three-day visit to San Francisco; ahead was a tour of Yosemite; a visit to mines in Virginia City, Nevada; hunting and fishing in Wyoming; and then the appearance at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in St. Louis. Barker formally presented Edison as a new AAAS member, with a soaring introduction that asserted theirs was a time when “the practical man has found science too slow, and has stepped in and discovered for himself.” On that day, Edison was not only feted by the august body of scientists, he also received word that the Paris Exposition had awarded the grand prize to the phonograph.