The Wizard of Menlo Park

by Randall E. Stross

  After Croffut’s puff piece appeared, Edison directed Samuel Insull to send Croffut fifty shares of the Railroad Telegraph company. Even judged by the looser journalistic ethics of that day, the gift was apparently deemed best delivered outside of the office (it was sent to Croffut’s home). In his note of thanks to Insull, Croffut wrote, “That’s what you wanted my private address for, is it, you rogue?” He asked Insull to pass on his appreciation to “Mr. Edison for his continual kindness.”

  Edison had sent the shares with the message that they “may be worth something some day.” The new technology did not work well, however, and the company’s prospects diminished accordingly before “some day” could arrive. Put simply, the company was headed toward oblivion. Insull soon concluded that its prospective customers, the railroad companies, were unlikely to “adopt it with much of a ‘rush’” and tried to unload his own allocation of shares at a decent price, urging Edison to do the same.

  The Railroad Telegraph did not occupy Edison the way that Pearl Street had in the years before service was launched in 1882. Now, nothing in his life did so. He wanted a wifely helpmate, and it is this that commanded his attention more than anything else the year following Mary’s death. Ezra Gilliland, and his wife, Lillian, would be a great help to Edison in this quest.

  In February 1885, Edison had traveled to New Orleans to visit the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition. A world’s fair was a splendid place to show one’s wares, and Edison Electric had obtained the coveted contract to illuminate the fair’s main building, which covered thirty-three acres and was said to be the largest wooden structure in the world. While in New Orleans, thirty-eight-year-old Edison met nineteen-year-old Mina Miller, daughter of Lewis Miller, an Ohio industrialist whose agricultural machinery was on exhibit. Miss Miller had graduated from a Boston seminary the year before and while a student had been a frequent guest at the Gillilands’ home. (The circumstantial evidence suggests that Edison met the Millers, father and daughter, in New Orleans by the matchmaking designs of the Gillilands.)

  The Gillilands had a summer house on the north shore of Boston Bay, which served as a place for Edison to try out a new sociable persona in the summer of 1885. Edison invited Insull, who was also single, to come up and join the group: “There is [sic] lots [of] pretty girls.” Edison himself had already fixed upon Miller as his choice for future wife, and Miller was spending the summer not on Boston Bay but with her parents at the Chautauqua Institution, on Chautauqua Lake, New York—the very place Edison had been scheduled in 1878 to present a talk before he canceled and fled on his trip west.

  Chautauqua had been founded by two people. One was John Vincent, the insufferably self-important person who had pressed his uninvited opinions too hard on Edison in the early days of the phonograph. The other cofounder was Lewis Miller, Mina’s father. In 1885, Edison understood that Mina Miller was bound closely to Chautauqua, and he would have to make an appearance there during the summer program.

  Edison spent the weeks preceding his first Chautauqua visit at the Gillilands’ to get comfortable with the new version of himself that he was trying on: a gregarious bon vivant, uninterested in work, filling summer days with frivolous entertainments such as boat rides, card games, and a variation of Truth or Dare for middle-aged participants. He seriously considered buying a yacht, before he came to the realization that his self-transformation was still incomplete—he recognized that he still lacked the ability to disregard the frightful expense.

  One of the pastimes organized by the Gillilands was having the guests maintain individual diaries, which were to be passed around among the guests for the entertainment of the group. Edison was willing to go along, making entries for ten consecutive days in July 1885. The calligraphy is impeccable and the grammar without fault, suggesting the final version of writing had passed through at least one preliminary draft. The entries provide a window into what Thomas Edison wanted others—in particular, Mina Miller—to see as his inner feelings. The first entry established that Miller was the very first object of his thoughts upon waking that day; a later entry claimed that “it would stagger the mind of Raphael in a dream to imagine a being comparable to the Maid of Chautauqua.”

  Edison reported that his daughter Marion invited him one day to toss a ball with her for the first game of catch he had played in his life. His receptiveness to new experiences extends to accepting the dress code of polite society—he wore a clean, starched white shirt, explaining that he submitted out of fear of the disapproval of Mrs. Gilliland. He picks up a book by Hawthorne but fails to be engaged, the reaction to be expected, he self-mockingly says, of a “literary barbarian.”

  In a newspaper Edison read of two suicides, which he describes in his diary with cold eyes: “Among the million of perfected mortals on Manhattan Island two of them took it into their heads to cut their navel cord from mother earth and be born into a new world.” The sarcasm works to better effect in his description of a clerk he encountered when he went into town on errands: “A drug store nowadays seems [to be…] in the charge of a young man with a hatchet-shaped head, hair laid out by a civil engineer, and a blank stare of mediocrity on his face.”

  Edison’s trip into town had come close to being fatal, he says in the diary, because he “got thinking about Mina and came near being run over by a street car.” He further embellishes the tale: “If Mina interferes much more will have to take out an accident policy.” Though he did not address Mina directly, he knew that she would soon read what he wrote, and clumsily joked about marriage. When Marion showed her father her notes for a novel she was planning to write that touched upon the subject of matrimony, Edison writes that he told her “in case of a marriage to put in bucketfuls of misery; this would make it realistic.”

  Marion Edison could see that her father, joking aside, would soon marry again, and her stepmother would be the person whom her father was incessantly talking about and who was only seven years older than herself. In his diary, Edison thinks Marion’s jealousy of Mina, whom he regards as “the yardstick of perfection,” was quite amusing. He writes that Marion “threatens to become an incipient Lucretia Borgia.”

  In August, the Edisons and the Gillilands traveled to Chautauqua and spent a week with the Millers. Edison did not possess the religiosity of Lewis Miller, but the two men did share experience as commercially minded inventors. Miller had experience, too, as a publicly known figure, more so for his work for the Chautauqua Institution than as a principal in an agricultural machinery firm. Edison had noticed earlier that summer that when he picked up a business bestseller titled How Success Is Won, both he and Miller were mentioned. (At the time, Miller would have been the wealthier of the two men. A contemporary newspaper placed his net worth at $2 million, or about $38 million in today’s dollars.)

  The first meeting went well enough for Mina Miller to receive her parents’ permission to accompany Edison, Marion, and the Gillilands as they traveled farther upstate in New York and then over to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Looking back on the trip years later, Edison recalled it as a time in which he and Mina enjoyed an intimate privacy while in the same carriage as the three others. He had taught Mina how to use Morse code as a private language tapped out on the hand of the other person. Private endearments were exchanged in the carriage without risk of being overheard. A story from family lore is that Edison was sitting in the Gilliland family parlor with a number of other people present when Mina suddenly stood up and rushed upstairs without saying a word. Concerned about her sudden exit, Lillian Gilliland went up after her. “What in the name of goodness is the matter?” she had asked. Mina said, “Why, Mr. Edison has just proposed to me across the living room floor.” This version of the story does not make clear how Miller had responded at the time, but Edison said that Miller tapped back, “Yes.” He would retell the story many times to illustrate why he regarded his deafness as a help in winning Mina as his wife. “If she had been obliged to speak it,” Edison s
peculated, “she might have found it harder.”

  Upon returning home, Edison formally wrote Mina’s father seeking his approval of the marriage. Seeking to show that he was a suitable, sober husband-to-be, he referred to his professional accomplishments—and fame—as his qualifications. “I trust you will not accuse me of egotism when I say that my life and history and standing are so well known as to call for no statement concerning myself.” Edison probably sounded more presumptuous than he intended when he closed, “I trust my suit will meet with your approval.” Miller received the letter happily, invited Edison to visit the family home in Ohio, and bestowed his blessings on the couple.

  The wedding was held at the Miller home in Akron in February 1886. Reporters were present not only at the wedding but also on the train trip south to the honeymoon in Florida. Edison showed off his irrepressible nature as the inventor who never goes on holiday, telling the New York World midjourney that he had just been inspired to sketch out the design of a machine that “will pick cotton without trouble.” When Edison had first become famous almost ten years previously, he had been complimented with mock editorials calling for action to stop the flow of his inventions; now, Edison was playing to his audience, showing off his legendary mind that could not be switched off, even when traveling with his new bride.

  Mina Edison, who still was only twenty years old, did not register a complaint about having to compete with the mechanical cotton picker for Edison’s attention. From the beginning of her marriage, she was Mrs. Edison, wholeheartedly devoted to helping her husband, the inventor. While they stayed in Fort Myers, Florida, where Edison and Gilliland had recently purchased adjacent lots and put up vacation houses, Edison shared his unceasing brainstorms with her. His new ideas were recorded in notebooks, each entry dated and signed first “TAE,” then “Mina.” When they returned home, she commuted daily with Edison for a brief time to his laboratory at the lightbulb factory and assisted in experiments there.

  Mina Edison’s work at the lab workbench did not last much longer than had Mary Edison’s, but the domestic arrangement that succeeded it would turn out to be durable for decades. Edison was the inventor, Mrs. Edison the household manager whose responsibility was to keep her husband insulated from distractions. Later, after almost forty years of marriage to the man whom a clever magazine editor referred to as “the most difficult husband in America,” Mina described her auxiliary role without a hint of complaint: “We have always put his work first, all of us. And we have tried to organize our home and our home life to give results just as much as the laboratory.”

  When Edison and Mina were engaged, Edison offered her a choice of two houses: one in Manhattan on Riverside Drive, the other in a suburb in New Jersey. She weighed the advantages and disadvantages of each by considering which location would be most ideal for Edison’s creative work, quiet and free from interruption by visitors. She chose the suburban house, and there she would preside as the chief executive of the household for the duration of his and her lives.

  The house Edison purchased was a twenty-three-room Queen Anne–style mansion. It was set amid thirteen and a half sylvan acres in Llewellyn Park, in West Orange, New Jersey, a stunningly beautiful planned suburban community, the country’s first. The house had been built and occupied by Henry Pedder, a department store clerk with a modest salary who had discovered that he could afford the good life by embezzling funds from his employer. His bookkeeping exploits had been exposed two years before. When arrested, he promptly turned over title to the property to his employer as partial restitution. The house remained unoccupied but just as it had been, stuffed with Pedder’s furniture. The real estate agent who spoke with Edison estimated the combined value of the house and furnishings at $400,000, and initially offered it to Edison for half that if he wished to purchase it furnished. Here was a large estate with collections of exquisite art and furniture and a five-thousand-volume library, the product of ten years of what Edison admired as “enthusiastic study and effort,” available at half price—or less. So eager was the department store to unload the property that it eventually lowered its asking price to $125,000. After Mina had made it her choice, Edison took pains to say publicly that he himself was not interested in its luxury. “It is a great deal too nice for me,” he said, “but it isn’t half nice enough for my little wife here.” The Edisons would call their estate Glenmont.

  Edison could have viewed the house as an exhibition space to be used for semipublic demonstrations of the fruits of his latest experiments, just as his own associate William Hammer had done with his all-electric house. Edison, however, took little interest in using his own home in this way. Chandeliers had gas burners as well as electrical bulbs. Speaking tubes—interconnected pipes like those used in ships—served as the house’s unelectrified intercom system. (“They don’t break down,” a member of Edison’s family would later say in the electronic era.)

  Edison found himself with a new home, a new wife, and he would have another daughter, Madeleine, and two sons, Charles and Theodore, who followed. (This matched the pattern of his three children from his first marriage: daughter, Marion, followed by two sons, Thomas and Will.) What he still lacked, however, was the dream laboratory, one that would exceed the humble dimensions of the one he had abandoned in Menlo Park when he moved to New York City to install his first electric light system. His plan was to provide himself with the means to recapture the magic of Menlo Park, which he was already viewing through the gauze of nostalgia. He wrote in his diary, “Everything succeeded in that old laboratory.” The limitations of its equipment had not prevented him from enjoying his two biggest triumphs in invention, the phonograph and the electric light. But he thought he could accomplish even greater feats in better appointed surroundings. By building a new lab from scratch that was state of the art, he could tackle any and every kind of problem that struck his fancy and surpass his previous entries in the annals of invention.

  The five-building complex for which he drew up plans would be the largest and best-equipped industrial laboratory in the world. He picked out a site in Orange, New Jersey, a short distance from Glenmont in Llewellyn Park. The three-story main building would extend 250 feet in length and include a machine shop staffed with fifty machinists at the ready waiting for his instructions, a stockroom that would have “every conceivable material of every size,” and an enormous library with shelves extending from the floor to the 40-feet-high ceiling. The remaining buildings would house specialized labs. In Edison’s mind, the complex would enable him to “build anything, from a lady’s watch to a locomotive.”

  So excited was he by his vision that he began construction without waiting to arrange for financing. When the project neared completion in August 1887, Edison was still scrambling to sign outside investors. He hoped to raise $1 million, offering to form an industrial research company in which he would hold half of the equity. No less grandiose were his plans for factories that would be built in the valley to produce his inventions. These, he predicted, would eventually employ fifteen thousand people and return 500 percent to the pioneer shareholders.

  Edison acknowledged that his relationship with Edison Electric’s board of directors had become less than amicable and he conceded in a letter to a prospective backer that “my place is in the Laboratory.” He was confident that by outfitting the lab in advance with everything he could possibly need, it would produce “10 times as much” as a lab with empty shelves, dependent upon ordering materials, castings, or machinery when a particular need came up. He wanted to be ready whenever inspiration paid a visit. He expected to have thirty or forty projects going simultaneously, all profitable yet none as “cumbersome” as the electric light.

  Edison had a knack for coming up with memorable images. Newspaper reporters who came by especially liked the one about ladies-watches-to-locomotives. It was used for years even though neither watch, nor locomotive, nor anything close to either would emerge. The only people who were not immediately charmed by
Edison’s vision were the prospective investors. When his fund-raising efforts petered out, Edison quietly dropped his plan to organize a separate company to oversee the intellectual property that he expected to produce. He ended up being the sole owner and merged his own personal bank accounts with those of the lab. Contract work for other companies provided much needed cash, but also kept Edison entangled in the agendas imposed by others. Freedom to do exactly as he pleased in his laboratory turned out to be elusive.

  The shortage of cash affected Mina, who was given responsibility to manage Glenmont while Edison gave his undivided attention to launching his new laboratory. About this time she directed a salaried household staff that included a waitress, cook, maid, and laundress, as well as various gardeners and stable hands. Earlier, in 1887, when construction on the laboratory was beginning, Mina’s father, Lewis Miller, wrote to his daughter and reviewed the financial difficulties Edison had found himself in, having begun erecting the lab so soon after stretching his finances to purchase the Pedder mansion. The shortage of capital had made Edison “cautious” when it came to budgeting for household expenses, making newlywed Mina’s life as chief household executive rather “hard.” Miller praised her for handling the challenges well, but he also told her she should expect to be on her own in doing so, as he thought that Edison “did not care much to hear about home affairs.”

  After spending about $180,000 on the new lab, Edison had everything he could imagine ever needing. He was not going to squander splendid facilities merely to refine what was already in existence, however. Only projects that had yet to be realized would do. By January 1888 he was still pursuing Henry Villard as a possible investor, offering him the opportunity to own a half share in his new inventions for covering the $60,000 he estimated the lab’s operating expenses would run annually. On the list of projects he planned to pursue was the mechanical cotton picker, the inspiration he had brought home from his honeymoon, and the hearing aid, the invention he had delayed working on ever since the news of the phonograph’s appearance had brought mail bags full of entreaties from strangers. Other interests included using electricity to cut ice; sheet glass; “artificial ivory”; and railroad signals.