The Wizard of Menlo Park

by Randall E. Stross

  The shares in the new company gave Edison an opportunity to cash out, and he did so, liquidating 90 percent of his stake. Why did he divest almost all of his holdings, rather than simply sell slowly, diversifying at a steady rate that would, at the same time, reassure investors that he had not lost faith in the company? He wrote Villard afterward that he had cashed out because he had been “under a desperate strain for money for 22 years.” Even as he continued to bark in public as loudly as ever at alternating current, he was poised to enter “fresh and more congenial fields of work,” he told Villard. Iron-ore mining was going to be his new passion. Insull wrote a colleague that Edison was “practically intoxicated by the business.”

  Villard had tried to persuade Edison to agree to merge his electrical companies with alternating-current rival Thomson-Houston. The two companies’ patent holdings were complementary and consolidation in the industry seemed inevitable. But Edison could not accept it, for reasons that were not obvious. It was not the thought of joining hands with the very interests he was campaigning against that was too much to bear. Nor was he passionately committed to his own company, even though this served as a convenient pretext to object to a merger with a better-managed, better-capitalized company. Were Villard to proceed, Edison told him “my usefulness as an inventor [would be] gone,” arguing that it was the spur of competition that provided the fuel he needed to persevere.

  In fact, Edison was not interested in sticking around, merger or no. His direct current was going to lose the battle of the currents, and he could not accept graciously a prize for first runner-up. He had cashed out his own personal position and was ready to move on to new projects, but he wanted to leave on his own terms, not someone else’s. He also wanted to make certain that his Orange laboratory would continue to receive financial support. Consolidating his various companies into one, while spurning the Thomson-Houston offer, allowed him to do what he wished.

  The new Edison General Electric Company appointed Villard as president, and Insull as vice president and, effectively, the chief operations officer. Edison had assumed that his laboratory would be supported as it had been previously, receiving $250,000 annually from his various companies. But after Edison General Electric was organized, the multiple sources of funds were reduced to a single company, and that one was willing to pay only $85,000. Edison told Villard that the shortfall “has produced absolute discouragement.”

  By withdrawing his own financial stake in the industry, Edison discovered too late that he had lost considerable power in directing his own affairs at the lab, too. As a contract researcher, he had to do the bidding of others. When the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, which were the Edison system’s licensees, convened in the summer of 1889, the members spoke in the hoarse voice of the desperate: They begged Edison General Electric to supply association members with an alternating current system as soon as possible, within six months at the latest. Insull was fully supportive and assigned the task of developing the system to the person who was under contract to perform research and new product development: Thomas Edison, the world’s most vociferous opponent of alternating current.

  One year after agreeing to deliver the new system within six months, Edison had failed to do so. Insull, not bothering to hide his anger, wrote Edison with the tone used when addressing a subordinate whose recent performance was wanting: “I would like to know definitely from you what I can promise to our District Managers throughout the country.” He was not going to accept hollow assurances that would not be fulfilled. “I think that it is particularly important that in our new organization any promises I make to our people should be absolutely adhered to, and I shall be glad if you will bear this in mind when you reply to this letter.” Edison did not like being spoken to in this manner. He had his secretary write a short note saying that he had perused it but was “unable to reply fully to it at the moment.”

  Edison was working on the project, albeit slowly. He may have dragged his feet hoping that the first state-sponsored experiment in electrocution would publicize the menacing aspect of alternating current, making it possible to imagine that its triumph was not certain after all. The convicted murderer William Kemmler exhausted his appeals, and the date of his execution was set for 6 August 1890. Here, at last, was the moment Edison had anticipated: the lethal nature of alternating current would be demonstrated in dramatic fashion. Only the warden of the state prison in Auburn and the individuals he had invited as official witnesses would actually see the execution, but reporters and crowds showed up anyhow. To accommodate the press, Western Union set up a temporary dispatch office at the freight station. Curiosity seekers gathered around the prison walls, and atop trees, rooftops, and telegraph poles, hoping to catch a glimpse of the condemned man.

  “They say I am afraid to die,” Kemmler said to one of his jailers after breakfast that morning, “but they will find that I ain’t.” Indeed, when he was led to the room with the chair constructed to bring his life to an abbreviated end, he remained calm. As the warden adjusted the headpiece and the eleven straps that crossed his body and limbs, Kemmler tested each one and advised the jailer when a strap needed adjustment. “Warden, just make that a little tighter,” he asked at one point. “We want everything all right, you know.”

  PHOTO INSERT

  Edison in 1880, at the age of 33.

  Mary Stilwell Edison, Edison’s first wife, in 1871, the year of their wedding.

  Edison in Mathew Brady’s Washington, D.C., studio in April 1878, posed with a second-generation tinfoil phonograph.

  The first-generation tinfoil phonograph in 1877.

  Edison in 1888, at the age of 41, posed after spending 72 straight hours working in his West Orange laboratory on his “perfected” phonograph.

  Edison with his second wife, Mina Miller Edison.

  Edison’s Black Maria movie studio, mounted on turntable and equipped with hinged roof to utilize direct sunlight.

  A man posed with a kinetoscope in 1895: Ear tubes provided sound that was synchronized with the images viewed from the peephole mounted on the top of the cabinet.

  Advertisement for the Edison Concert Phonograph in 1899.

  Thomas Alva Edison Jr., at the age of 21, in 1897.

  Edison asleep on a laboratory bench in 1911.

  In Vermont in August 1918, Edison poses with other members of camping trip (left to right): Edison, young Harvey Firestone Jr., R.J.H. Deloach (seated), John Burroughs, Henry Ford, and Harvey Firestone.

  Edison ceremonially punches the laboratory’s time clock on his 74th birthday in 1921.

  Mourners lined up outside the West Orange laboratory to view Edison’s bier.

  When the electrodes had been attached and preparations were complete, the warden said, “Good-bye, William.” This was the signal for the assistant to throw the lever. When the circuit closed, Kemmler’s body convulsed and then froze as rigidly as if bronzed. After seventeen seconds, the presiding doctor declared Kemmler dead, the warden signaled for the power to be cut, and the seated witnesses stood up, exhaling with relief that the ordeal was apparently over.

  “Great God! He is alive!” someone cried. “Turn on the current,” implored another. The warden, who had been detaching the electrode on Kemmler’s head, stopped momentarily, then hastily reattached it. Everyone could see that Kemmler’s chest was rising and falling. The doctor told the warden to switch the current back on. The signal was given and the lever was thrown again. The witnesses were so aghast, the sight of blood drops that appeared on Kemmler’s forehead so horrifying, the stench of singed hair so strong, that no one present could later say with certainty how long the second attempt at execution lasted. After this indeterminable period, the doctor again signaled for the current to be shut off, and the witnesses stumbled out, all but a few retching.

  One of the first individuals to leave the prison was the electrician who had set up the apparatus. He went immediately to the telegraph office and sent a message to Westinghouse
: “Execution was an awful botch. Kemmler was literally roasted to death.”

  “Far Worse Than Hanging” read the headline in the New York Times, which characterized Kemmler’s execution as nothing less than “a disgrace to civilization.” When asked for his reaction, George Westinghouse drily remarked, “They could have done better with an axe.” The public could place the blame where it belonged, he said, and “it will not be on us.”

  Westinghouse’s prediction proved accurate: Blame did not attach to his company. Nor did blame attach to the concept of an electric chair, only on those who had handled the arrangements and done the testing. After the U. S. Supreme Court refused an appeal of another person, Shibuya Jugiro, convicted of murder and headed for death by electrocution, the electric chair got another chance. Shibuya was one of four who died one morning in 1891 at Sing Sing. By the end of the century, more than fifty had died in the chair. More than four thousand followed in the twentieth century, before lethal injection became an alternative to the chair, if not its replacement, in all states but one (Nebraska). The shift away from electricity shows that a century of experimentation was insufficient to realize Edison’s claim, made before the first execution, that electric current was sufficient to kill the condemned person painlessly “in the ten-thousandth part of a second.”

  Unaffected by this experimental work that state prisons undertook in the early 1890s involving human subjects and lethal (or not-quite-lethal) electricity, the adoption of alternating current in the wider society accelerated and the future for direct current dimmed. Edison General Electric was the sales leader among the three largest power-and-light concerns, but its costs were much higher, and its strategic positioning and growth prospects the weakest. It was up against competitors that played by their own rules (historian Forrest McDonald describes Thomson-Houston’s tactics pertaining to intellectual property as “scarcely distinguishable from theft”). Samuel Insull appreciated the necessity of merging with Thomson-Houston, even if Edison still did not. While Insull carried out negotiations with the prospective merger partner, and at the same time tried to coax Edison to acquiesce, he found himself politically isolated at Edison General Electric. He was only thirty-two and had not yet mastered the more subtle techniques of persuasion; by his own admission in his memoirs, he had made “a good many enemies.” For a few weeks, Edison himself was “prejudiced” against him and the merger, but Edison came around and the two men repaired their relationship.

  In early 1892, the deal was done: Edison General Electric and Thomson-Houston merged as nominal equals. The organization chart, however, reflected a different understanding among the principals. Thomson-Houston’s chief executive, Charles Coffin, became the new head and other Thomson-Houston executives filled out the other positions. Insull was the only manager from the Edison side invited to stay, which he did only briefly. From the outside, it appeared that Thomas Edison and his coterie had arranged the combination from a position of abject surrender. Edison did not want this to be the impression left in the public mind, however. When the press asked him about the announcement, he said he had been one of the first to urge the merger. This was not close to the truth, and is especially amusing when placed in juxtaposition to Alfred Tate’s account of the moment when Tate, hearing news of the merger first, had been the one to convey the news to Edison.

  I always have regretted the abruptness with which I broke the news to Edison but I am not sure that a milder manner and less precipitate delivery would have cushioned the shock. I never before had seen him change color. His complexion naturally was pale, a clear healthy paleness, but following my announcement it turned as white as his collar.

  “Send for Insull,” was all he said as he left me standing in his library.

  Having collected himself before meeting with the reporters, Edison could say with sincerity that he was too busy to “waste my time” on the electric light. For the past three years, since he first realized that his direct-current system would ultimately be driven to the margins by alternating current, he had been carting his affections elsewhere. The occasion of the merger did shake him into a rare disclosure of personal shortcoming: He allowed that “I am not business man enough to spend time” in the power-and-light business.

  Edison found himself staring from the outside looking in, as others who had the business acumen to extend electric light with newer technology, unconstrained by the orthodoxies written by a direct-current zealot, capitalized on the opportunity. In addition, Edison lost the services of Insull, who realized he had to leave Edison in order to work unfettered as a chief executive.

  At the time of the 1892 merger, Edison’s name disappeared when the new organization, the General Electric Company, was christened. Whether this was by his own choice is not clear. Years later, Insull said that Edison refused to permit the Edison name to be associated with the new entity. It is not difficult to picture Edison acting spitefully, angry that his namesake company could no longer remain independent. When Edison’s own children grew to be adults, however, they told a very different story, of his lifelong disappointment that “Edison” had been stripped from the new company’s name against his wishes. Both versions can be accommodated: Perhaps Edison refused to allow the use of his name in 1892, then, after the company narrowly escaped bankruptcy in the Panic of 1893 and grew into a far larger business, and the passage of years tempered his earlier ire, he came to feel regret about his decision—and came to think of it not as his decision but that of an ungrateful Wall Street. By that time, he had forgotten that he had become so discouraged about the commercial prospects for his electric light, outshone by the new entrants to the business, that he had given up on it.

  CHAPTER NINE

  FUN

  HOPPING INTO A new field and betting almost everything he owned, Thomas Edison set off in a quest to make a name for himself—in mining. The effort cost him five years of living apart from his family and ended without success. But he enjoyed the experience immensely and walked away without regrets. It was the one time in the fifty years he lived as a public figure when he ignored what was expected of him. It was also the one time when the man who seemed cold at his core recorded in letters his affectionate feelings for his wife.

  Edison’s adventure in mining began when he anticipated losing the battle of the currents. He was weighed down with self-doubt, telling an assistant that he had come to the realization that others on his staff knew more about electricity than he did. He went even further, morosely saying that he had never really known anything. But that did not matter because “I’m going to do something now so different and so much bigger than anything I’ve ever done before people will forget that my name ever was connected with anything electrical.”

  He had long been excited by the idea that electrically charged magnets could be used to process iron ore, separating the iron from other material. In Menlo Park, more than ten years earlier, a laboratory notebook recorded experiments he had personally conducted to test the concept. Other inventors had also worked on “magnetic concentration,” as this process was called. Edison had never had the chance to devote sustained attention to it, however, and the idea had been stuck into a cubbyhole. Now he was ready to pull it out and put it into practice. New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania had considerable quantities of low-grade iron ore, but it was so costly to refine by conventional means that it drew few or no buyers. Edison was convinced that he would be able to build a system of magnetic concentration that would make easily mined, low-grade ore economically competitive with hard-to-extract, high-grade ore found elsewhere. In 1889, when he cashed out his interest in the newly formed Edison General Electric, he had the financial means to put his ideas to a real-world test. This money did not stay in his pockets for long. He bought the Ogden iron mine in rural northern New Jersey, about two miles south of Ogdensburg, and began to erect a concentrating works of his own design to process ore.

  The Edison system was designed to handle the iron-laden rock in as large a chunk
as the largest steam shovel of the day could bite off. Rather than blowing it up using explosives, it would be sent to the works to be crushed by rollers, breaking the rock into particles small enough to be separated by magnets. In making his plans, Edison concatenated three seemingly obvious insights that no one else had thought to put together. First, it was cheaper to break up ore using the energy provided by coal, which cost $3 a ton, rather than dynamite, at $100 a ton. Second, a five-ton chunk of rock could be pulverized into powder if the crushing rollers were built sufficiently large. Third, the rollers could do their work at low operational cost, relying on centrifugal force after steam power got them spinning at high speed. The scale of everything was outsized.

  Edison happily embraced a thousand and one problems encountered in implementation. The rollers, for example, did not actually crush the rock as much as knock it into smithereens with knobs that were attached to chilled iron plates bolted to the curved surfaces. The rock turned out to be stubborn; its submission to the process required trial and error. The technical issues were primarily mechanical in nature; Edison had no claim to special expertise or advantages in this area, but he relished this opportunity to play in a field entirely new to him.