The Wizard of Menlo Park

by Randall E. Stross

  A month before, in November 1879, one of Edison’s reporter-friends, Edwin Fox of the New York Herald, was given exclusive access to the laboratory and to Edison for two weeks, while forty bulbs and fixtures were being installed throughout the laboratory buildings. As a condition of giving access, Edison had asked Fox to embargo his story until the date that Edison would provide him, when tests and preparations were complete. Fox accepted the arrangement and worked on the story; Upton helped with revisions.

  On Sunday, 21 December 1879, the Herald published “Edison’s Light,” catching Edison by surprise and infuriating him. The article was flattering in the extreme, however, describing the completed light as a “little globe of sunshine,” without giving off gases, smoke, or odors. It gave all credit to one person, Edison. But as Edison knew full well, the publication of an article reporting the “perfection” of the light would bring yet another onslaught of curious visitors, for which preparations were not complete. He also knew that his reputation, already damaged during the previous year, would be irreparably harmed if the public once again expected to see a durable light and was again disappointed. A New York Herald editorial, “Edison’s Eureka—the Electric Light at Last,” spoke of how the public’s faith in the Wizard of Menlo Park had grown “feeble” when silence had followed the announcement the previous year of Edison’s invention. Now, the newspaper said, Edison finally had the goods to make the gas companies quail. For Edison, receiving such highly visible support was helpful to the cause, but the timing was hardly ideal.

  The Herald article also made public all of the technical details that Edison’s many competitors in the incandescent light field could have hoped for. William Sawyer, for example, immediately fired off letters to the major newspapers, claiming that Edison was infringing on a number of his own patents. And when Edison was not infringing, Sawyer said, he was hawking technology that simply would not work. He dared Edison to run one of his bulbs three hours, explaining that even if Edison achieved a perfect vacuum inside the bulb, it would not last ten minutes. Edison returned the challenge, daring Sawyer to reach three hours with his own bulb. Sawyer responded by saying that the publicity that Edison was so skilled at generating for himself was a transparent ploy to raise money in the capital markets.

  A conservative response to this provocation would have been for Edison to put off the demonstration until ready, placating newspapers with descriptions of the longevity of the latest bulbs built in the laboratory. At that time, Edison bragged that he had a bulb that had burned 108 hours; with assumptions that favored his case, he stretched this into a claim that this would provide a family with light for evening hours for twenty-four days. But stung by the skeptics and challengers who spoke up after the Herald article, Edison felt strongly that he now had to show, not tell. He responded with a public promise: In short order, no later than the end of that week, he would light up ten houses in Menlo Park with his electric light, and set up ten electric streetlamps.

  When Egisto Fabbri, one of the directors of the Edison Electric Light Company, learned of Edison’s plan, he was aghast. On 26 December, Fabbri tried to find just the right tone to head off a premature demonstration. “I am much older than you are and a friend,” he wrote Edison, covering all angles, going on to suggest that it would be best if Edison were to first try out the electric lights, indoors and out, for one continuous week before inviting the public in. Fabbri made a good argument: “As long as you are trying private experiments, even before 50 people, partial failure, a mishap, would amount to nothing, but if you were to express yourself ready to give a public demonstration of what you considered a complete success, any disappointment would be extremely damaging, and probably more so than may appear to you as a scientific man.”

  Edison was not accustomed to receiving suggestions from anyone, even key investors. He did not openly defy Fabbri, but instead of taking a week to carry out a nonpublic test, he devoted only one evening to the trial run. For a group of invited friends, he set up bulbs in the laboratory for a showing, from 6:00 to 10:00 P.M. Each bulb gave about the same illumination as a gas jet, and there were no mishaps. The next night, on the twenty-eighth, uninvited strangers “of all classes” came to Menlo Park to see the light, said one newspaper account, and more arrived the next night. Those who “hold that Rome was built in a day” were disappointed that the lampposts that had been set up in a field as if they lined a real street still lacked electric lights, which awaited the arrival of another generator.

  Two and then four more streetlamps were electrified. The boardinghouse of Edison’s neighbor Sarah Jordan was outfitted with lights and opened up to visitors. Just as quickly, the stream of tourists descending upon Menlo Park grew, with hundreds arriving in the daytime, even before nightfall. The laboratory itself was opened to the public, too. The number of people crowding into the limited space made work impossible; the laboratory assistants found themselves fully occupied answering questions, and trying to protect the equipment from damage. “Requests and notices not to touch or handle were unavailing,” said one report, and one of the best vacuum pumps was broken by some strangers who had given themselves permission to conduct their own experiments.

  Edison was not, as his rival Sawyer charged, attempting just then to raise capital on Wall Street—the Edison Electric Light Company had been recapitalized just the previous month. But an incidental effect of placing his electric light in public view in Menlo Park was to excite the interest of traders. Company stock now was changing hands for $3,500 a share. Francis Upton received, and gladly accepted, an offer for five of his shares, at $5,000 a share, a tidy windfall for someone who had been paid $12 a week earlier in the year. The spike in prices did draw the censorious attention of the New York Times, which wrote in an editorial that “a suspicion arises that much of the appearance of success may be factitious and intended for stock-jobbing uses.”

  On New Year’s Eve, extra trains were run to bring the curious to Menlo Park, and the laboratory added new stunts to the show. One bulb was submerged under water in a large glass jar, amazing onlookers with its ability to function. Across the room a lab assistant manually flicked one light on and off rapidly, as many times, it was claimed, as a household would switch a light on and off over the course of thirty years, and on it burned. Edison made himself available, putting on a performance on his own terms, wearing a rough suit of work clothes, and impressing the New York Herald as “a simple young man attired in the homeliest manner, using for his explanations not high sounding, technical terms, but the plainest and simplest language.”

  The next day, however, on New Year’s, the numbers of visitors increased to the point that the crowd became unmanageable. The willingness of Edison to turn his laboratory into a public theater had succeeded, only too well. When he appeared, a shout, “There is Edison!” rang out, causing a surge of bodies in his direction. One report claimed that the crowds “more than once threatened to break down the timbers of the building,” a statement that may not have been hyperbole; the lab assistants were convinced that collapse was possible and hurried outside, bolstering the floor supports below with telegraph poles and lumber. Where the realm of science ended and that of entertainment began could no longer be distinguished, judging by the printed condemnation of the behavior of a minority of the visitors who “cared nothing for science, who regarded the laboratory as they would a circus.”

  In the laboratory itself, the lights were arranged on a table to resemble a miniature layout of Menlo Park, and Edison had assigned assistants on all four sides to look out for sabotage. Their vigilance was needed that day, as one man was caught applying a jumper wire that ran under his clothes and down both sleeves, deliberately short-circuiting four of the lights. He turned out to be an electrician employed by the Baltimore Gas Company and was marched out, with language ringing in his ears “that made the recording angels jump for their typewriters,” Edison later recalled.

  Early in the evening of New Year’s Day, as order in th
e laboratory gave way to chaos, Edison sought refuge in his private office. But distinguished visitors would show up, insisting that they see the great man himself, and he would have to appear, answer the same questions that he had already addressed countless times before. Seeing this reluctant showman forced to work the crowd, the correspondent for the New York Tribune described Edison with tenderness: “Edison is one of the most retiring of men, detesting all pomp and show, resembling the ladies in his desire to get away into the forests of solitude.” The next day, on 2 January, Edison ordered that the lab be closed to the general public so work could resume.

  The public-relations benefits from the Menlo Park demonstration proved short lived. Without the rollout of commercial service in New York or another city, the show ended without disarming the skeptics who said that Edison’s lighting system had yet to be tested outside of his cozy laboratory and own home. An English critic described Edison’s many announcements with acidic sarcasm:

  What a happy man Mr. Edison must be! Three times within the short space of 18 months he has had the glory of finally and triumphantly solving a problem of world-wide interest…. If he continues to observe the same strict economy of practical results which has hitherto characterized his efforts in electric lighting, there is no reason why he should not for the next 20 years completely solve the problem of the electric light twice a year without in any way interfering with its interest or novelty.

  The price of Edison Electric Light Company stock quickly fell from $4,000 a share to $500.

  Edison was reminded daily that as the world-famous inventor, he had to defend himself daily against attacks that his counterparts who labored in obscurity could never imagine. This was especially the case when the commercial potential of the invention was clearly visible to all. The phonograph had not caused him similar tribulation. Two years after its public debut, it was not regarded as a potentially lucrative invention, even by its progenitor. At this moment Edison had been observed to treat the phonograph “with the same degree of interest as a boarding school miss would allude to a discarded doll,” in the view of the Philadelphia Record. The latest attempt by a licensee to make a business out of it was in the form of a toy, but those machines were so flawed that no distributor would accept them. Edward Johnson sighed: “The trouble with them is, not one person out of 50 has mechanical skill enough to adjust them as per instructions.” Edison took what solace he could in the observation that at least no one was bothering him with claims of inventing the phonograph twenty-five years previously. But the moment an inventor “has perfected something of commercial value, something that will conflict with the interests of long-established monopolies,” he told an interviewer, “then there is a general rush to endeavor to pull him down.”

  Closing the laboratory to the general public was one way to protect himself and the electric light from industrial spies. For those who had an academic or business interest in the experimental work and made arrangements in advance, he remained welcoming—too much so. A professional snoop who purported to be interested in licensing Edison’s technology for manufacturing purposes quickly won Edison’s confidence and was provided a tour of all of the facilities with Charles Batchelor as his guide. The visitor published a pamphlet based on the tour, intending to discredit Edison, but he had seen nothing that was serviceable for this purpose. Instead, he saw that the incandescent lights worked well. The worst he could say about them was that each light could be turned only on or off; an intermediate level of brightness could not be set. He was told that some of the bulbs burned continuously for eight hundred hours, but that they would be tested for eight more months before the system would be introduced for public use.

  The company directors were willing, however, to put the electric light to an immediate test in the real world for Henry Villard, one of the company’s investors, as long it was done out of public view, in case the test went awry. Among Villard’s other financial interests was the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company, which had given John Roach, a leading shipbuilder, a commission to build a new 334-foot steamship, the Columbia. Impressed by the exhibition of the electric light in Menlo Park, Villard decided that to fulfill his wish that the Columbia be outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment, it should have electric lights, too. Over Roach’s objections that the light should be proven on land before tried on the sea, Villard gave Edison a contract for the work. Power for the lights would be supplied by the ship’s steam plant. Francis Upton was assigned the task of hand-carrying to the shipyard a basket with a delicate cargo—the lightbulbs, wrapped in cotton batting—while dodging traffic on the city streets, as no one wanted to test whether the bulbs would survive a crosstown trip on a wagon.

  The Columbia sailed on its maiden voyage in May 1880, carrying locomotives and railcars around Cape Horn and then up to Portland. The electric lights did well on their first practical test outside of Menlo Park, but the designers thought it best to have a professional control the lights in the individual cabins. The ship’s steward had to be called to unlock a box outside each stateroom and throw the switch whenever a passenger wanted a light turned on and off.

  In reality, Edison’s electric light had yet to be tested in a setting that resembled its intended destination, in a commercial urban district. But in the imagination of his associates, it shone brightly, at least when described to lovers. Grosvenor Lowrey, the Edison Electric Light Company’s attorney, can be forgiven for concocting mumbo jumbo for impressing his fiancée: “Be thou to me, my love, a low resistance lamp! Be a voltaic arc! & not a nasty high resistance continuous conductor.” Lowrey also told his beloved that spending time with Edison had improved Lowrey’s spirits. “Perhaps I’d better marry him, since he cures me,” he teased her.

  When Lowrey showed Edison a miniature photograph of her, Edison offered a compliment about her looks, but then asked him, “Why is it, Lowrey, that so few women have brains? Men of brains it is easy to find, but women—” Edison’s own wife was almost completely invisible in contemporaneous accounts of his life written by his closest associates. When she appears, it is as a foil for a tale of how Edison could not abide her concern for middle-class appearances and propriety. A man who did odd jobs around the Menlo Park lab, for example, tells a story of how Mrs. Edison managed to get Mr. Edison home, where she “dolled him up in a fifty-dollar suit.” Edison stayed put for a short while “looking pretty,” then fled for the lab. In the tale, Edison was found at the lab two weeks later, still wearing the same suit, having not been home the whole while. The suit, covered in grease and dirt, was ruined, a fact that went unnoticed by its wearer.

  Edison knew how to mimic the sounds of a pragmatic businessperson, but the decisions he made then, as well as throughout the remainder of his life, favored new projects over near-term payoff of old ones. After countless performances of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” the novelty of the phonograph had worn off, and he had failed to sustain his interest long enough to see the machine’s development through to commercial introduction of a model for the mass market. Still, as he and his laboratory staff brought the electric light into viable form, it is striking how Edison’s interest waned here, too. Despite his avowed near-term pragmatism, Edison got excited about another idea of his: electric trains.

  The idea originated in his interest in mining, and when in the spring of 1880 he first sketched out the electric train that he had in mind, it was capable of astounding feats. He thought electrical power could give a train’s wheels the ability to grip the rails as if clamped upon them, enabling the train to run up and down steep mountains. There would be no need to drill tunnels again, he said in an interview published in the Denver Tribune. No need for human engineers or brakemen, either. Freight trains could be controlled by telegraph.

  This project hardly offered prospects of meeting the criterion he had vowed to use, that is, likely to “pay in the near future.” But there was another aspect that made it attractive: It would make a terrific show for the public. In April 1880
, Edison ordered workers to lay down a half mile of track in Menlo Park for his electric railroad prototype, equipped with a modified dynamo as its motor, with current supplied by the rails. It was the picture of a freckle-faced boy, working under a hot summer sun, that left an indelible picture in the mind of David Trumball Marshall, a laboratory associate, who, many years later, wrote a memoir about his experiences. The unidentified boy had to dip each railroad tie into hot, liquefied asphalt, to render it nonconducting were it to get wet. Day after day, the work went on with melancholy repetition. “It takes brains and brawns to perfect inventions,” Marshall observed, and it was that boy who “furnished some of the brawn.”

  Upon completion, the track was extended across the hilly countryside, and a ride on the little railroad became the new novelty for visitors. Edison took strange enjoyment in his own ability to remain unaffected by conditions that made others around him physically queasy. In previous summers, when he had taken his laboratory assistants fishing on the banks of the Atlantic, and rough seas had driven the others to the bottom of the boat, immobilized with seasickness, Edison thought it amusing to swing a piece of rancid pork across the noses of his suffering men. “The smell was terrific,” said one account, “and the effect added to the hilarity of the excursion.”