The Wizard of Menlo Park

by Randall E. Stross

  Gouraud sent Edison a continuous flow of reports from Europe that would have stimulated the imagination of any inventor, even one without a weakness for the grandiose. Gouraud wished he “had had my wits about me” when he had first received word of Edison’s invention of a new approach to the electric light: “I might have made you a clean million as it played the very devil with stocks all over the country.” The British equivalent of $1.36 billion was “trembling in the balance,” Gouraud wrote in another letter, while British scientists tried to determine whether Edison’s “alleged” discovery was genuine. Gouraud urged Edison to form an electric light company in England, without delay, to take advantage of “universal free advertising such as cannot be bought for money under any circumstances.”

  In the excitement of the moment, Edison was unable to remain quiet. He once again invited members of the press to his laboratory, one by one, not to bring them up to date on the technical difficulties that he and his staff had encountered, but to quell any doubts that his announced success was complete. When the New York Herald arrived, Edison had a demonstration set up, showing a bulb that was lit for three minutes, not long enough to expose the short life of Edison’s platinum filaments. The reporter was impressed. When arc lights were the principal competition, Edison’s incandescent bulb drew praise simply because “it did not pain the eye.”

  Running the sham demonstration for the representative of a second newspaper, Edison flipped a switch, and he and the reporter waited while the filament began to glow and finally reached incandescence. Sitting in front of the bulb that would burn out in a couple of minutes were he to leave it on beyond the brief demonstration, Edison was asked, “How long will it last?” He answered, “Forever, almost.”

  When the reporter from a third newspaper paid a visit for the same demonstration, Edison was asked point-blank if he had yet encountered any difficulties. “Well, no,” he replied with a straight face, and then claimed that the very absence of setbacks was “what worries me.” For another newspaper, he asked the public to be patient—not for the perfection of the “subdivided” electric light, which was complete, but for his phonograph, which he granted was viewed by many as a toy of little practical use. He was making daily improvements, he claimed, and it would eventually take its place “in the niche of public utility in good time.”

  Little attention was spared for readying the phonograph for the mass market, however. The time sheets from his laboratory for this period show that five staff members devoted about sixty hours to the dictating phonograph in October 1878, an insufficient investment to produce an affordable model that would supplement the expensive model sold to commercial exhibitors. The exhibition model’s best month had been in May, when it sold forty-six units; in July, the number had dropped to three; in September, it had recovered slightly, to reach the lofty level of sixteen units, netting Edison a commission of $461. The treasurer of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company told him that these paltry sales would soon disappear altogether and that he looked forward to the introduction of a “‘Standard machine’ which I understand you are perfecting.” But even the minimal ongoing work on the phonograph would be pushed aside by the launch of frenzied efforts to find a way to fulfill Edison’s premature public claim that his electric light was working. A couple of months later, when asked in an interview about the state of his phonograph, Edison replied tartly, “Comatose for the time being.” He changed metaphors and continued, catching hold of an image that would be quoted many times by later biographers: “It is a child and will grow to be a man yet; but I have a bigger thing in hand and must finish it to the temporary neglect of all phones and graphs.”

  Financial considerations played a part in allocation of time and resources, too. Commissions from the phonograph that brought in hundreds of dollars were hardly worth accounting for, not when William Vanderbilt and his friends were about to advance Edison $50,000 for the electric light. Edison wrote a correspondent that he regarded the financier’s interest especially satisfying as Vanderbilt was “the largest gas stock owner in America.”

  In mid-October, the American Gas-light Association, the industry’s principal trade group, met in New York and took stock of the threat posed by the claims issuing from Edison’s laboratory in Menlo Park. Gaslight monopolies had few friends outside of the ranks of shareholders. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, gaslight had been viewed as pure and clean; seventy years later, its shortcomings had become all too familiar: it was dirty, soiled interior furnishings, and emitted unhygienic fumes. It was also expensive, affordable for indoor lighting only in the homes of the wealthy, department stores, or government buildings. The New York Times almost spat out the following description of how gas companies conducted business: “They practically made the bills what they pleased, for although they read off the quantity by the meter, that instrument was their own, and they could be made to tell a lie of any magnitude…. Everybody has always hated them with a righteous hatred.”

  Edison credited the gas monopoly for providing his original motivation to experiment with electric light years before in his Newark laboratory. Recalling in October 1878 his unpleasant dealings years earlier with the local gas utility, which had threatened to tear out their meter and cut off the gas, Edison said, “When I remember how the gas companies used to treat me, I must say that it gives me great pleasure to get square with them.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle printed an editorial titled “Revenge Is Sweet” in which it observed that the general public greatly enjoyed the discomfort of the gas companies, too: “To see them squirm and writhe is a public satisfaction that lifts Edison to a higher plane than that of the wonderful inventor and causes him to be regarded as a benefactor of the human race, the leading deity of popular idolatry.”

  The gas interests had been dealt a number of recent setbacks even before Edison’s announcement of a newly successful variant of electric light. An “enormous abandonment of gas” by retail stores in cities, who now could use less expensive kerosene, was noticed. The shift was attributed not to stores’ preference for kerosene but as a means of escaping “the arrogance of the gas companies.” Arc lights had now become a newly competitive threat, too. The previous month, Charles Brush had set up his lights in an exhibition hall in New York and then added a display in Boston. Sales to stores followed in several cities; then, as word spread, other establishments sought to obtain the cachet bestowed by the latest technology. William Sharon, a U.S. senator for and energetic booster of California, retrofitted the public spaces of his Palace Hotel in San Francisco with arc lights that replaced 1,085 gas jets. The gas-industry conventioneers preferred to talk about the failed installations of arc lights, such as in textile factories, in which the dark shadows cast by the light made it difficult for loom operators to distinguish threads.

  Speakers at the gas-industry convention explained that Edison’s light did not pose the potent competitive threat to gas that had been described in the press. (Edison had sent Charles Batchelor to attend and enjoyed hearing Batchelor’s account that showed “they talked in the dark.”) While the popular image of Edison was of a wonderful man who “could accomplish almost anything he undertook,” sober scientific authorities were shaking their heads doubtfully about Edison’s claims of success.

  One independent observer, Albert Salomon von Rothschild, in Vienna, had had his interest piqued, and he wrote an American colleague for an impartial assessment of whether Edison’s invention would “allow electric light to be henceforth employed everywhere just as gas-light, and not only in very large rooms or places, as is now the case [with arc lights].” Rothschild made clear that he had never joined the cult that idolized Edison, whose most recent inventions, including the phonograph, “however interesting, have finally proved to be only trifles.” Still, he did see that if Edison’s technical claims were to prove valid, the business implications could not be overstated.

  Edison did not publicly divulge the details of his electric light experiments, of course
, so no external authorities could know for certain that his attempts to devise a lasting filament—which he was trying to do with platinum and thermal regulators—were as ill-fated as those of his many predecessors. He blamed his reticence about the electric light on his past experience with the phonograph. The premature publication of technical details in Scientific American had been translated, via French, into German, causing endless difficulties with foreign patents. He had a letter from Lemuel Serrell, one of his attorneys, to show to a skeptical reporter, in which Serrell lectured Edison, “The confounded newspaper men are doing you more harm and producing more trouble than they are worth.”

  Not so easily put off was his friend and supporter, Professor George Barker. As the person who had encouraged Edison during their shared trek out west to revisit the project of developing incandescent light, Barker had been thanked with a promise of six working sets of bulbs when Edison thought he had easily found a simple, but complete, solution in platinum. Relying on Edison’s word, Barker had announced he would present a public lecture on the state of the art of electric light, complete with a demonstration. The newspapers carried the announcement, and Edison had promised to leave his laboratory for the occasion and make an appearance himself. Only after Barker had set about making arrangements did Edison realize how woefully unready he was to unveil his short-lived platinum bulbs. First, he begged off from making the trip himself, and then he told Barker that though he personally wanted very much to provide lights for the demonstration, he could not because the directors of the new Edison Electric Light Company would not allow him to do so.

  Barker was astonished and angry in equal measure. He did not know that the company that Edison invoked as the villainous party in the matter had not yet signed an agreement with Edison. The prospective investors apparently had been told little about Edison’s setbacks in his electric light research, and Edison understandably was not eager to make a public display of his yet-to-be-reversed failure in the laboratory. “Positively No Admittance” was now posted at the front door of the laboratory. “What is that inhospitable sign for?” a reporter asked Charles Batchelor, who gallantly took responsibility for the change of policy. Edison “doesn’t want to bar anybody out, so he lets all sorts of inquisitive people come here and occupy his time.” Batchelor said he and the other assistants had prevailed upon him to keep the curious out. Closing the front door also served to restrict the outflow of information, too, in this delicate time of arranging financing.

  Professor Barker would not be denied without a protest, however. If Edison would honor his promises for the lecture, Barker would go to New York and personally ask individual company directors to give permission. The thought of giving a lecture on the electric light without having one of the Edison lights that had been advertised would put him in a position in which “I would rather lose my right hand than occupy.” In the event, he did not have an Edison bulb for a demonstration in his survey of the state of the art, but Charles Brush’s company also failed to show. It had asked for, and secured, a place in Barker’s program, then the company had suddenly begged off only twenty-four hours in advance. Barker forgave Edison for his breach of promise, and publicly covered for him at the demonstration by saying that Edison’s London attorney had advised against a public showing quite yet. Afterward, he privately indulged with Edison in the pleasure of knocking Edison’s arc light rival (“not always fair in their statements or scrupulous in their dealings”).

  At the same time that Edison was careful not to let outsiders see the true state of his electric light research, he continued to accept cheerfully individual requests for interviews from the major newspapers. He conveyed complete confidence in his still-secret solution, and charmed reporters with his disdain for conventional formality. The press was fascinated with Edison’s fondness for chewing tobacco—the Professor tore into a “yellow cake as large as a dinner plate” while being interviewed by the New York Sun, as he talked on without end about the advantages of indoor electric light and the imminent test of lights in every home in Menlo Park in order to “keep the bugs out of the invention.”

  Talking at such length in the New York Sun was hurtful to Edison’s public image, advised another reporter-friend, Edwin Fox, who wrote Edison with unsolicited advice about proper management of Edison’s celebrity. “Keep yourself aloof and reserved,” Fox said, like the extremely reserved, and much-loved, General Ulysses S. Grant (Fox had no way of knowing in 1878 that Grant, pressed by financial need, would drop his reserve at the end of his life and write two volumes of bestselling memoirs, published in 1885–1886). In Fox’s not unbiased view, the image of Edison that came through in the competitor’s interview was abhorrent. “Holding you out to the world as a chewer of tobacco and all such trash…is really too bad.” For his own reporting, Fox said he had always “sought to keep you on a high pedestal.”

  Days after he wrote this, however, Fox sought intimate access to Edison and the laboratory, so that he could write about everything: “how you act, talk, live, work, and look—the struggles and obstacles attending the completion of your chief inventions.” Showing a sure, and strikingly modern, understanding of the popular appeal of fly-on-the-wall journalism, Fox said he planned to spend at least a week living in Menlo Park, dropping into the laboratory “when the spirit moves” to fill his notebook with “fresh crisp data.” This was the only way to do justice to his subject, did not Edison agree, “my esteemed manipulator of the fiery lightning”? Fox’s flattery is not especially noteworthy; not just Edison, but his wife and children, too, received uncommon compliments on a daily basis. A speed record in sycophancy was established when a story in late October reporting the birth of the Edisons’ third child, William, credited the newborn with “indications of precocity” and “intellectual independence” because he had kicked mightily as he was dressed for the first time.

  Members of the press, academics, investors—everyone made their own individual appeal for access to Edison. At the same time, he had nothing to show them that would withstand scrutiny. Edison’s position must have been uncomfortable, and all the more so because he had no close friend in whom he could confide. Stress may have played at least some role in a severe attack of neuralgia that kept him in bed on 23 October. Without being privy to a complete view of Edison’s predicament, Barker ascribed the attack to overindulgence in work. “Be regular about your meals and sleeping hours,” the amateur doctor advised, “or some day you will break down entirely.” Edison had a different theory about the cause of his malady: on seven successive nights he had looked too long into arc lights that he had set up. “I think electricity burned me,” he said. “I shall not repeat that trick.” When he recovered, he wore a floppy black sombrero in the lab for protection.

  In the eyes of an entirely neutral party, the credit-reporting agency of R. G. Dun & Company, Edison was seen as “an untiring genius apt to run from one effort at invention to another without fully completing the work he is on.” His world renown was acknowledged; so, too, was a history of commercial disappointments: “the financial fruits seem to be mainly plucked by other hands.” The report summed up rather nicely Edison’s reputation and prospects:

  Now claims to have solved the problem of furnishing cheap Electric light to dwellings & places where multitudes of single lights are required at less cost than gas. His claim is not yet demonstrated to be good, but if he is successful this time his ability to pay need not be questioned. He is reported to be a thoroughly honorable steady & industrious man. He must have some means but probably all his ready money is continually being planted in the expenses of his experimenting. It is impossible to Estimate his worth, or in fact to say that he has a class of assets valuable as a basis for credit.

  Edison was not much interested in what a credit-reporting agency had to say about him, as he was not interested in obtaining commercial loans. When R. G. Dun wrote him a few years later for information about one of his companies, he scrawled some basic information in the
margin as his reply, closing with “hope nobody will ever give us any credit.” What he sought were passive investors who would provide his laboratory with the funds necessary to make good on the breakthrough he had thought he had obtained in early September. He left negotiations to Grosvenor Lowrey, saying he did not care about the details, he simply needed money to “push the light rapidly.” In fact, he was in no position to do anything rapidly with the electric light; he first needed the money to make his incandescent filament durable.

  Lowrey, in turn, told the senior executives at Western Union; Drexel, Morgan & Company; and his fellow law partners, all of whom wished to invest in Edison’s electric light venture, that “all serious difficulties have been overcome.” Lowrey knew just what to say to bring investors on board, letting them know that some refinement was still needed, but not letting them know so much that they were scared off. On 15 November, the newly formed Edison Electric Light Company gave Edison an advance royalty payment of $30,000, of which $25,000 was to go for work at the laboratory for “further necessary investigations and experiments” related to the light.

  A few days later, some members of the company’s executive committee paid a visit to Menlo Park, and Lowrey did his best to convince Edison that such visits were helpful in making their expectations of progress more realistic. “It is all the better that they should see the rubbish and rejected devices of one sort and another,” Lowrey wrote Edison. When other company directors made another visit, Lowrey again labored to convince Edison that it was good that the backers had had “their imaginations somewhat tempered.” He wrote Edison: “They realize now that you are doing a man’s work upon a great problem and they think you have got the jug by the handle with a reasonable probability of carrying it safely to the well and bringing it back full.”