The Wizard of Menlo Park

by Randall E. Stross

  In a matter of just a few weeks, Edison had spent $19,000 of the $25,000 advance on a new laboratory building. When directors showed up at Menlo Park when the move was in progress, and Edison himself was not present to offer reassurance that all was well, the visitors saw “general dilapidation, ruin and havoc.” Lowrey met with the executive committee and shared with them what he later described to Edison as a “very good natured laugh over their disappointment at their visit.” Edison was fortunate that the committee members were so willing to tamp down their rising concern.

  While Lowrey undertook the education of the company’s trustees, Edison continued to release little puff balls of news and anecdotes for the general public that were meaningless at best and outright misleading at worst. In his telling, work at the laboratory was going so well that he could not do anything, even clumsily dropping a tool, without improving his electric lightbulb. He claimed he had doubled the intensity of light in one of his platinum filaments after a screwdriver was accidentally dropped and bent it. From now on, he declared, he would make all of his filaments in the same misshapen form. Edison packaged this and other entertaining partial disclosures as if he were being candid to the point of being imprudent. “I have begun by taking the public into my confidence,” he told the public in December 1878, “and I don’t propose to keep from them anything I know, or propose to do, if I can help it.”

  One blemish-free story was fed to the press for the public; another, more candid version went to the investors; and an uncensored version was provided only to his most senior, trusted employees. There were no financial conflicts-of-interest regulations in Edison’s era. In January 1879, when the Edison Electric Light Company issued 500 shares, there were only ten shareholders. One was Edison, who received 219 shares; but, significantly, one was Edwin Fox, of the New York Herald, and another was William Croffut, of the New York Daily Graphic, who received 8 and 5 shares respectively as gifts from Edison. Not having heard acknowledgment that Croffut had received his shares, Edison sent a follow-up note and received the following effusive reply:

  My Dear Edison,

  Yes! Bless you, yes, of course I got the five shares of stock and have been commercially ecstatic ever since. You are a brick. If I can do anything in the world for you at any time, order me up & I’ll go it alone.

  The thank-you note that Fox sent to Edison treated the gift as recognition of past services rendered (it made Fox “truly sensible of the pleasing fact that my friendship is not unappreciated”), but he, too, served up fulsome flattery, closing with the wish that Edison continue in his “triumphal march to undying fame.”

  Edison misled the general public, and, in more sophisticated fashion, the outside investors of the Edison Electric Light Company, not to effect a stock swindle but to buy precious time so that he could work his way out of the corner his premature boasts had backed him into. He did not confide to a diary or in letters how the discouraging results in the laboratory little resembled the daily miracles he publicly claimed or hinted at. But the mood in the lab is chronicled in the letters written home by one of Edison’s new hires, Francis Upton, a twenty-six-year-old physicist from Peabody, Massachusetts. Upton came from a background of privilege and formal academic training, different from Edison’s in every imaginable way. He had studied at Bowdoin College, in Maine, then at Princeton, and had done postgraduate work under Hermann von Helmholtz at Berlin University in Germany. Before being invited to Menlo Park, he had been a temporary subcontractor doing a patent search for Edison in the Astor Library in New York City. In November 1878, Edison offered him a permanent position, which Upton accepted without even knowing what he would be paid. Excited about the prospect of having his first real job, he wrote his father, “I cannot really believe that I am earning money.”

  Upon arrival in Menlo Park, Upton was brought into Edison’s inner circle, even as he was referred to by some colleagues as “the mathematician” rather than by name. Edison, Batchelor, Upton, and three other assistants worked from 7:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M.—a schedule necessitated by the well-intentioned visitors who made work during the day impossible. Edison complained that they would appear as a line of heads coming up the hill in the morning, “devour” his time, and then “pay for it with expressions of admiration.” When a tornado and fierce rain hit the area in early December, Edison and his staff were glad for the storm, as it kept the curious away for a day.

  Upton arrived just at the moment when Edison was coming to the realization that he and his staff would never be able to make a durable electric light based on platinum. This conclusion, accepted most reluctantly, meant starting over. Alternative filament materials, which could reach incandescence without soon melting, all shared a similar vexing attribute: In the presence of oxygen, they oxidized, ruining the light. To prevent this, they had to be placed in a high vacuum that was difficult to achieve even with the best technology available at the time. It was the troublesome vacuum that Edison had thought he could avoid when he had rashly seized upon platinum as the “simple” solution.

  Contrary to his published avowal that he would be perfectly candid with the public about the progress on the electric light, Edison did not tell reporters that he had hit a dead end. Even when he decided to tell the Edison Electric Light investors in late January, he had Stockton Griffin, his secretary, go into New York to deliver the news. Edison had no patience for attending personally to the care and feeding of his backers; that was for minions like Griffin or his attorney, Grosvenor Lowrey, to take care of. The most striking thing about how the investors received the news was their meekness—no one demanded that Edison appear to explain his failure to secure the first principles for a working incandescent bulb. On 25 January 1879, when Lowrey visited the offices of Fabbri & Chauncey on the same day that Griffin had come and gone delivering the news that Edison had been forced to abandon the platinum filament, the Edison Electric shareholders gathered around Lowrey and jokingly asked him if he knew anybody who would want to buy their shares. Lowrey did what he was supposed to do, dispensing homilies as Edison himself did, saying that doubt and tribulation accompanied any great accomplishment, and “this was just the time when we must all stand by the inventor.”

  The investors did stand by the inventor, which was important to young Francis Upton, who, like any new hire at a start-up that was in trouble, spent much time wondering if he had made a mistake. In late February, Upton, reasoned, “I am learning a great deal and nothing will be likely to take that from me,” even if the venture ran aground. At times like early March 1879, when Upton wrote his family marveling that he was actually paid $12 a week for labor that “does not seem like work but like study and I enjoy it,” he seemed younger than his twenty-six years. A few weeks later, however, he had worked up the courage to ask Edison for a raise. Edison ruled that out, but offered to provide him with the fees Edison would receive for publishing magazine articles if Upton would serve as the ghostwriter who would “dress his thoughts for the press.” Flattered, Upton accepted the offer.

  In May, when Upton was visiting his home in Peabody, he heard about a mill owner in Lawrence who was unhappy about paying $30,000 a month for gas lighting and interested in trying Edison’s light in his mill. He wrote Edison excitedly, offering to investigate the opportunity, and doing the arithmetic for his employer: “Three or four hundred thousand dollars a year are not to be sneezed at.” Inexperience with the world of business must have contributed to Upton’s failure to see that he was working with the wrong numbers. The mill owner paid the gas company $30,000 yearly, not monthly, Upton sheepishly had to inform Edison.

  Upton’s value was revealed not in business development but in the experimental work in the laboratory. In early June 1879, Edison offered to provide his young assistant a 5 percent share of equity in the Edison Electric Light Company. Edison made his offer to his protégé on an either/or basis: salary or equity, not both. At the time, Upton had not yet married and was childless, but he knew his financial obligati
ons would soon become considerable. He was engaged and would be married later that summer when his fiancée returned from travels in Europe. He could see that the electric light was “far from perfection,” and there was no way of predicting when it would ever be ready for commercial introduction. Edison had difficulty letting go of his original design based on platinum, which served only to delay the inevitable day when all of his focus could be trained on alternatives.

  In writing about his quandary to his father, Upton preserves the jumble of conflicting feelings he had at that moment. On the one hand, he wondered if he should ask Edison for 7.5 percent of the company instead of 5 percent, as Edison was anything but stingy when making such allocations. On the other hand, it was generous of Edison to have offered 5 percent, without requiring any contribution from Upton other than forgoing wages of $600 a year. Upton wrote, “I think it is not becoming in me to try and jew him.”

  Upton’s father urged him to choose the salary, but Upton elected in July 1879 to take the offer of a 5 percent share of the company. He reasoned that a salary was ultimately dependent on the success of the electric light anyway, so he might as well select the option that provided the largest potential gains. He immediately felt a freedom as “master of my own time,” free to come and go as he pleased, confident that Edison trusted him that “I should know what is best.” As time passed, however, uncertainty about Edison Electric’s prospects grew. On 19 October, he wrote home, “The electric light goes on very slowly.” It was impossible not to think about the fact that if it were to succeed, “the money will come in enormous amounts.” But if the efforts were to end in failure, Upton said he would be “contented with the experience I shall have, though of course very much disappointed at not having the money.”

  He did not foresee that the very day he was drawing up this somber assessment, Sunday, 21 October 1879, his laboratory colleague Charles Batchelor spent ten hours evacuating the air in a bulb with an untested filament, a carbonized sewing thread. That night, the bulb was placed on a test stand and the power was switched on. The bulb burned on and on, passing the twenty-four-hour mark. Bets were laid down, and the round-the-clock vigil continued for a second night. It stayed on into the afternoon of Tuesday, having performed admirably for more than forty hours, when Edison decided to end the endurance test under normal conditions and increased the voltage until the bulb turned into a ball of dazzling white, and then—pop—burned out.

  In retrospect, those forty hours would be looked upon with fondness as the first successful test of a durable incandescent filament, a breakthrough, but the laboratory records at the time show a laconic reaction. Batchelor wrote without affect that “we made some very interesting experiments with cotton thread,” but he was also testing at the same time fishing line, paper, cardboard, and other materials. We might guess that Edison’s premature declaration of success with platinum the year before made everyone at the laboratory wary of committing the same mistake again.

  Edison could not trumpet the promising results in public because he had maintained all along that the necessary technical innovation had been accomplished in short order at the beginning of the initiative. He did tell the New York Times in a story published on 21 October 1879 that “the electric light is perfected,” allowing that unspecified problems “which have been puzzling me” had now been solved. Francis Upton had already learned, however, that Edison used “perfect” as verb or adjective without regard for conventional definitions, and it was best not to be carried along by his optimism. Upton discounted Edison’s claim that the Edison Electric Light Company stock was now worth a thousand dollars a share. “He is always sanguine,” Upton wrote his father about Edison, “and his valuations are on his hopes more than on his realities.” A couple of weeks after seeing the cotton-thread bulb burn steadily, Upton’s spirits had fallen again. “Continual trouble” continued to dim the electric light’s prospects, as “we cannot make what we want.” He acknowledged, and mocked, his own disappointment when it appeared that he and his fellow experimenters would never “see the untold millions roll in upon Menlo Park that my hopes want to see.”

  And then, in mid-November, the work in the laboratory produced new excitement, when carbonized paper, bent into the shape of a horseshoe, was tested as a filament and proved more durable than the cotton thread had. Finally, Upton said, “we now know we have something.” He could not yet say whether the economics of electric light would make it competitive against gaslight, but at least the laboratory had a working prototype. By the end of November, private trading of shares of the Edison Electric Light Company had sent the price upward to vertiginous heights. No one associated with Edison’s laboratory then foresaw that commercial introduction of the electric light would still be three long years away. Upton, however, did not have to wait to enjoy pointing out that Father had not known best, that in giving up less than $300 in wages at that point, Upton’s shares were already worth more than $10,000. He told his father, “I cannot help laughing when I think how timid you were at home.” Already forgotten were his own doubts about the venture that had left him depressed only a few days before.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  STAGECRAFT

  DECEMBER 1879–JANUARY 1881

  NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES had made Edison famous with portraits created with words, not cameras. Were Edison to leave his laboratory for a rare trip to New York City, he could do so without attracting attention to himself. Occasionally, on a Saturday night, Edison would go into the city with Francis Jehl, a young assistant, taking in lowbrow theater, or a boxing match, or a streetside phrenological exam. As the two strolled at leisure, taking in the sights of card hustlers, street vendors, and quack doctors, Edison “enjoyed being incognito,” Jehl recalled in his memoirs. It is indeed remarkable that Edison could move in public with such ease, at the very time that one New York paper asserted that the general public discussed at greater length the probable life span of Edison than most anyone else in the world, “outside the crowned heads.” Edison was in possession of “more inventions than any man living,” and was all of thirty-two years old.

  When Edison announced the perfection of his electric light, one fan expressed a wish to meet the great man and got her wish. But then, Sarah Bernhardt always got her wish. Bernhardt, a French actress and singer, enjoyed a movie star’s celebrity decades before movies were invented (and when they did arrive, Bernhardt became the medium’s first star). In December 1879, as she completed a run of stage performances in New York, Bernhardt was only thirty-five and, like Edison, a prodigy in her profession. But having made her acting debut at the age of eighteen, she had much more experience than he in the management of celebrity and was quite expert in the art of drawing attention to herself. She moved with an entourage as large as a contemporary hip-hop star’s posse. The juxtaposition of Bernhardt and Edison exposed their differences: he, uncomfortable with celebrity; she, fully in her element.

  Bernhardt’s original plan was to pay a visit to Menlo Park in the early evening of 4 December, after giving a matinee performance in New York City, her last before traveling to Boston the next day. The plan failed to account for the delays caused by her overly appreciative fans. When her carriage arrived at the theater before the performance, a crowd of autograph seekers was waiting; it took twenty-five minutes to get from carriage to stage door. After the third act of La Dame aux Camilias, her American audience insisted on seventeen curtain calls, and then after the final act, another twenty-nine. She dispatched her sister out the rear door of the theater where Bernhardt herself was expected, then snuck out the front unnoticed. On her own, it took an extra hour to return to her hotel. By the time she and her party were ready to depart, it was ten o’clock. The train was a local doing a milk run; it took hours to deliver them to Menlo Park.

  Upon arrival at the depot near Edison’s lab, Bernhardt, her furs, and her retinue were loaded into carriages and headed up the hill to Edison’s house. It was 2:00 A.M., and waiting for the visitors in t
he bitterly cold night were four men, two women, and a girl. Never having seen a photograph of Edison, Bernhardt felt a moment of panic: Which one was he? When she leaped out of the coach, she received a bouquet of flowers from Mrs. Edison, she presumed. But she still could not figure out which of the four men, all of whom moved closer to her, was Mr. Edison. Then she picked him out: he was the one blushing slightly, and in his eyes she saw traces of irritation. With a start, she realized that her visit was bothering him: “He saw in my visit only the banal curiosity of a foreigner drunk on publicity. He already foresaw the interviews the day after, and the stupid remarks that would be put in his mouth. He suffered in advance for the ignorant questions that I was going to put to him, and the explanations that politeness would force him to give me; and for a minute Thomas Edison disliked me.”

  Bernhardt then called upon “the full force of my seductive power to conquer this wonderful shy scientist,” and in her memoirs claims that they were soon “the best friends in the world.” Her credibility on what she observed during the tour of the laboratory and dinner served afterward is shaky—she described Edison’s electric light as so dazzling as to create “an impression of full daylight.” What Edison recalled about the visit in the interviews late in his life that serve as his memoirs was Bernhardt’s interest in everything she saw; her long dress that one of Edison’s assistants was assigned to watch carefully so that it was not caught in a machine; and the cumbersome process of translating everything from English into French. Ultimately, Bernhardt chose to treat him the same way as a member of the general American public did, idealizing the person whom Bernhardt called “this King of Light.”

  Two years before Bernhardt’s visit, Edison had begun his own career in stage business, when he had brought a single prop—his new phonograph—to the offices of Scientific American. He subsequently had favored the use of his Menlo Park laboratory as his preferred stage, and, with the professionalism of an actor in a Broadway hit, had performed the same play, with the phonograph as costar, hundreds of times. During the whole of 1879, Edison had built his presentation around the electric light, but short-lived bulbs could not be displayed for long, so the performances were brief and infrequent. With the cardboard filament proving to be longer lived, however, Edison had begun taking steps in preparation for a full demonstration to the general public when Sarah Bernhardt had paid her visit. By that time, he had illuminated the front rooms of his and Upton’s houses with electric light, utilizing the gaslight fixtures. Bernhardt’s visit, which went well, served to bolster everyone’s confidence and speed preparations for lighting up the laboratory and opening its doors again to the public.