The Wizard of Menlo Park

by Randall E. Stross

  Edison Electric did not charge for its service the first four months. Its initial customers were treated to a beta test, offered without charge while bugs were identified and eliminated. Short circuits were difficult to track down, especially in the underground feeders. Often employees at the station had no way of identifying the location of the problem, other than to walk the streets, looking for smoke coming up from the paving stones.

  Edison Electric had done everything it could to make it easy for prospective customers in its Pearl Street district to switch from gas to electric lighting. It had wired the homes and businesses of its customers for free, and provided bulbs without charge. It also guaranteed that its electric lights would be cheaper than gas. Still, it proved difficult to enlist the cautious prospects who had not signed up before service started. Some customers seemed to Edison determined to “prevaricate” when demanding discounted rates, claiming that their electricity bill was greater than their gas bill had been.

  Some of the early customers expressed appreciation of Edison Electric’s inaugural service. One such customer in the liquor business put in an order for 250 lights, placing one light in each of 250 barrels of cheap whiskey, believing that the light took “the shudder out of it.” He was always prompt in paying his bill.

  J. P. Morgan was not so cheerful about his own bill, however. He complained to Edison that the meter was inaccurate, favoring Edison Electric. Edison was unwilling to concede any problem with his meter and outlined a method of checking its accuracy, to which Morgan agreed. Cards were printed and hung on every fixture in Drexel, Morgan and Company’s offices, which noted the number of bulbs in each fixture and the time they were to be turned on and off each day. At the end of the month, a clerk collected the cards and calculated the total number of lamp hours consumed. When the number was compared with the bill, the results confirmed the overcharge. Morgan was happy, Edison was not. Edison suggested that they continue the test for a second month. When it yielded similar results, he was nonplussed. Determined to uncover a problem at Drexel, Edison visited the offices, inspected the wires and fixtures, and reviewed the cards recording usage. He then asked that the janitor be summoned. Upon questioning him, Edison discovered that he used the electric lights while he worked but did not record the hours—no one had asked him to. The test was run another month, with the janitor’s participation. With his hours added to the total, the calculated sum came within a few cents of the amount based upon the meter. Morgan was said to have been pleased to find that the meter stood up better to interrogation than others whom he suspected of bilking him.

  The story—a parable—was retold with pride many times by Edison and his associates. The lesson it was intended to impart was that Edison Electric had begun its service in an exemplary way. The system worked, and worked well. Judged on its technical merits, the accomplishment was no less than what the company claimed. But as a business that intended to operate in the black, it was less impressive. For once, this could not be blamed on Edison’s inattention to business considerations. He had not pursued the light for the sake of intellectual curiosity; his interest in electric light was nakedly commercial. He had entered the field because of his belief that he could produce a profitable service superior to gas and to the other electric light entrepreneurs. Prior to the start of Pearl Street’s service, he could only estimate and guess and hope, filling notebooks with speculative figures. The definitive answers could be obtained only when real customers paid real money for what he offered. The initial data produced by actual service were disappointing. At the time the company began assessing charges, it had a modest number of 231 customers. It operated at a loss.

  Before the switch had been thrown at the Pearl Street station in 1882, Edison had been consumed with the work, technical and nontechnical, necessary to launch the service. But with consummation of the goal, and with it, the conquering of the major technical challenges, his psychological state changed just enough to break his concentration. He had said the previous year that he planned to begin work “immediately” on a second district in Manhattan, bounded by Twenty-fourth and Thirty-fourth Streets, excited at the thought of supplying electricity that would replace not only forty-two thousand gas jets but would also power forty-four hundred sewing machines. But he had not started work on it then, nor could he do so when Pearl Street service began, not when the business had yet to be proven as sound as the technology upon which it was based.

  Edison had launched the service believing he could move easily between laboratory and front office, going wherever outstanding problems needed his attention. Two months after Edison Electric began collecting from its first customers, Edison told a reporter that he was going “to be simply a business man for a year,” taking a “long vacation” from inventing. And when he did return to the lab, he said, he would give his attention wholly to electricity; “no more phonographs or things of that kind.”

  Acting as “simply a business man” did not satisfy him, however, nor could he take pride in seeing the company prosper. After a year, Pearl Street had merely doubled its customer base to 455 and was still running at a loss. To Edison’s credit, he acknowledged the necessity of bringing in a professional manager, offering Charles Chinnock $10,000 if he succeeded in making the Pearl Street operation profitable. Chinnock was able to do so within the second year of operation. According to company legend, Edison paid Chinnock the promised bonus out of his own pocket.

  Expansion in New York proceeded slowly. The uptown station that Edison the year before had claimed that he was about to begin work on was not constructed that year, or the year after. The second district, based at a station on Twenty-sixth Street, did not commence service until 1888, six years later. Coverage in the original downtown district was not expanded until 1891.

  Outside of New York, Edison Electric sold a smattering of central power systems to small towns, but these did not serve as showcases. The second plant opened was the one hastily built in Appleton, Wisconsin, by the licensee who made his riskiest investment decisions while fishing. It was the nation’s first hydropower plant, but lacked voltmeters, ammeters, lightning protection, and fuses. Its poorly insulated wires shorted out frequently; its managers were unacquainted with cost accounting and set rates below cost. Operating expenses were paid for by ongoing issuance of company stock.

  Six months after the start of business at Pearl Street, Edison Electric had failed to convert its establishment of central service in New York into a base for a growing business that sold similar systems to other large cities. The only line of products that sold well were the ones that Edison disdained, the on-site power plants. The company had sold more than 330 plants, some of which were larger than those installed in central stations. Edison Electric’s backers, who had waited patiently for four years and were now eager to see a return on their investment, urged Edison to promote the product line that customers were most interested in, the on-site plants. Edison sought vindication of his belief that centralized power generation was superior to distributed generation, but he acknowledged that here, too, he needed help to make a success of the central-station business. He appointed his own personal secretary, twenty-three-year-old Samuel Insull, to take charge of the campaign. Insull had immigrated from England two years before to work for Edison, and his employer had come to view him as indispensable. In his new position, Insull quickly closed sales in small towns in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York.

  For Edison’s grandly conceived central stations, this was as good as it would get, it appeared: success gained one sale at a time, each on an exceedingly modest scale. He had the patience for a long campaign, if it were technical in nature. But for the slow process of winning customers, he was not well suited temperamentally. He needed technical mysteries and skeptical onlookers and drama. He was an impatient spectator, as when he was invited to Boston to attend a special performance at the Bijou Theatre, marking the debut of its newly installed electric light system. In the course of installi
ng the new lights the theater had taken the daring step of removing the backup system, its gas fixtures. Power was supplied by a neighboring printer, which had installed the largest on-site power plant in the country. The governor was in attendance, and Edison brought along his closest associates, including Johnson, Bergmann, and Insull, all of whom arrived in formal evening dress. The performance began and all seemed well at first. Then Edison noticed that the stage lights were growing progressively dimmer. He and Johnson left their seats to investigate. At the printer’s, they discovered that the boilerman had been absorbed in repairing a steam leak, neglecting the boiler fire. When other members of the Edison Electric delegation arrived to see what was the matter, they found Edison and Johnson shoveling coal into the firebox. When the fire was stoked, they picked up their swallow-tailed coats and high hats and returned for the remainder of the performance.

  The grander the scale of Edison’s ambitions, and the greater the skepticism that he had had to overcome, the happier he had been. Once the electric light had been introduced, however, he found himself in a difficult position. How could he possibly sustain the pace of accomplishments of the previous five years? He could not shrug off the expectation that the Wizard of Menlo Park could accomplish anything. He was thirty-five years old, and the rest of his long life was devoted to attempts to make the inspiration that brought the phonograph and the electric light return.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  STARTING ANEW

  THE MAN WHOSE public image was of a wizard who could conjure whatever he wished faced daily at home his actual powerlessness: He could not make his wife well. She was plagued by headaches, panic attacks, and severe fatigue. In the summer of 1884, she insisted that the family move from their New York apartment at Gramercy Park back to the family house at Menlo Park. She died there on 9 August 1884, at the age of twenty-nine, succumbing to what her doctor termed “congestion of the brain.”

  Edison was not prepared. His daughter Marion would later recall the image of her father “shaking with grief, weeping and sobbing so he could hardly tell me that Mother had died in the night.” Mary’s mother, Margaret, had already become the principal care-providing adult for the three Edison children. After Mary’s death, the two younger boys, Tom and Will, did not spend time with their father, but their daughter Marion, who was now twelve, became Edison’s constant companion. He removed her from Madam Mears’s Madison Avenue French Academy and continued her education at home. The curriculum was simple: He had her read ten pages daily from an encyclopedia. This freed her to accompany her father on horse rides, or visits to the theater. She also attended board meetings of the Edison Electric Light Company and stayed with her father until the wee hours of the morning at Delmonico’s.

  Professionally, Edison was drifting, without an all-consuming project to blot out everything but the work itself. The electric light no longer needed him, and he did not know what to do with himself. Mercifully, his floundering took place out of public view, as newspapers and magazines had swiftly lost interest in him. His boast that electric lighting would replace gas lighting in homes had been more credible before Pearl Street had begun its service on a modest scale. A book about prominent New Yorkers that appeared that year noted how swiftly his public image had flipped, from that of a prodigy to a failure, an illustration of “the fitfulness of the fever of fame.”

  Electric light had become more of a curiosity than an epoch-defining change. It was used to add novelty one evening to a parade sponsored by the Blaine-Logan presidential campaign of 1884. With Edison’s blessing, Edward Johnson and Charles Batchelor designed helmets equipped with lights that were worn by Edison Electric Light employees who marched down Madison Avenue on behalf of Blaine. Each marcher was connected by wires to a portable generating plant that accompanied the group, along with supporting coal and water carts for the steam engine.

  In Philadelphia, the light-equipped helmets were put to another use when Edison’s company presented to the public the “Edison Darkey.” This was the name given in a caption in Scientific American to the African American men who were hired to hand out flyers at the 1884 Philadelphia Electrical Exhibition. They wore helmets that were wired to copper spikes on the heels of their shoes and drew power from electrified copper strips placed on the floor of the hall. One report said that they drew crowds of such size that their movement in the hall became impossible.

  For a technology story to be interesting to the lay public, novelty was a prerequisite, and that became ever harder to supply. Longtime Edison associate William Hammer succeeded in garnering attention for a New Year’s Eve “electrical dinner” that he threw for guests at his home. Electricity was used throughout, beginning with invitations that had been written with an Edison electric pen. At Hammer’s house, the approach of a guest on the steps sent electrical signals that lit the veranda, rang the doorbell, and swung open the front door. Electricity supplied the power for self-operating bells, alarms, telephones, cigar lighters, phonographs, fans, musical instruments, and a lemonade pitcher equipped to deliver a nonlethal shock to the unwary person who picked it up, and other curiosities that served to give the house a haunted feel. “It seemed unsafe to sit down anywhere,” said one visitor. The party was intended to provide guests with a peek into the future, as if “they had been living half a century ahead of the new year.”

  Even a good technology story, however, can never match the appeal of a good financial scandal. In 1885, John Roach, the shipbuilder who had worked with Edison to outfit the Columbia, tumbled into financial ruin and public humiliation. Roach had once been the preeminent shipbuilder in the country but had become overextended. It was he who later had leased to Edison the building in Lower Manhattan that Edison used to establish the Edison Machine Works. Edison was appalled by the callous mistreatment of Roach by his creditors. Roach was a fellow self-made man, who had been responsible for “feeding innumerable families,” and was deserving of respect, not persecution. Edison wrote privately, “For people who hound such men as these I would invent a special Hades. I would stricken [sic] them with the chronic sciatic neuralgia and cause them to wander forever stark naked with the arctic circle.”

  Reading a headline such as “John Roach Embarrassed” in the New York Times must have given Edison a scare about his own situation. Just a year before, his own pinched finances had forced him to ask for Roach’s indulgence when Edison failed to pay rent on the Machine Works property. Edison blamed tardy payments from his foreign customers and his own costly experimental work. “I am desirous you should do me this favor,” he wrote Roach.

  At the time of Roach’s financial collapse in 1885, one newspaper published rumors that Edison was himself financially hard-pressed. Neither Edison nor his associates deigned to publicly respond, but they did not need to. William Croffut, the reporter who had written many fawning articles about Edison over the years, wrote a piece claiming “personally to know that Mr. Edison is to-day what most people would call a rich man.”

  The investors in Edison’s Electric Light Company, however, did not feel rich. They were grumbling that the price of the company’s shares had tumbled to levels that were a fifth or a sixth their peak value, attained when Edison’s electric light existed only as an announcement and long before it was introduced as reality. In 1885, three years after the start of service at Pearl Street, a director of the company who chose to remain anonymous complained to the Philadelphia Press that Edison insisted on taking an active part in the management of the company “although he is not a bit of a business man.” He gave an example of Edison’s poor judgment: Edison had proposed installing a new cable in Manhattan that would cost nearly $30,000 a mile, oblivious to the fact that Western Union had one with similar capacity in operation that had only cost $500 a mile. “If he would leave it to practical business men to make money out of it and stick to his inventions,” the director said, “the company would in time become very rich.”

  For Edison, “sticking to his inventions” full-time
would mean relinquishing control of Edison Electric, which was anathema. Managing his company did not engage him half as much as creating it, but he could not bring himself to let go of the captain’s chair. Edison’s intellectual interests, however, wandered from one minor project to the next. He had always done best when attempting something both entirely new and gargantuan in scale, but in the mid-1880s he could not find a suitable project. Around this time he asked his old friend Ezra Gilliland, who was a senior executive at the American Bell Telephone Company, what he should work on now that the electric light was “practically” out of his hands. Gilliland suggested that he return to the phonograph and make it “a practical instrument,” but Edison was unable to muster interest. An alternative area that Gilliland mentioned, train-based telegraphy, did not address a potential mass market of comparable size, but Gilliland had done work in this area himself and Edison leaped at the idea.

  In short order the two men founded the Railway Telegraph and Telephone Company, and Edison tinkered in a small lab he set up on Avenue B. William Croffut obligingly offered “the Wizard Edison” the opportunity to publicly tout his latest enthusiasm without waiting to put laboratory work to a test in the real world. The article was based solely on one visit to Edison’s lab—and on what Edison said about his work, uncomplicated by independent verification. Pointing to a long board covered in tinfoil and suspended from the ceiling with ropes, Edison said that the device permitted him to “make electricity jump 35 feet through the air, carrying the message without spilling it.” The plan would be to install foil-covered boards lengthwise atop railcars so that telegrams could be sent and received by trains while passing by stations without stopping.