The Wizard of Menlo Park

by Randall E. Stross

  When he bought the Ogden property in 1889 and assigned staff to begin building the new concentrating works, he had not anticipated that he would move to the mine site himself. He had a new wife, a new estate, and a new laboratory in Orange that placed at his disposal everything he had ever desired. He had a newborn child, Madeleine, and another, Charles, would be born the next year, in 1890. Yet in 1891, when he had to accept the loss of control of his power-and-light businesses, Edison could not enjoy his blessings at home and at the laboratory. He had resolved to make his mark in mining and prepared himself to invest whatever it would take, and spend as much time away from his family as required. This was the venture that he was determined to make “so much bigger than anything I’ve ever done before.”

  It is hard to imagine a more stark contrast between the otherworldly luxury of the Glenmont estate and the frontier-town conditions at the Ogden site. At the mine, there was no town, so Edison and his lieutenants crowded into an old farmhouse, sardonically referred to as “the White House.” There were no amenities, no amusements, just work. In the winter, the room temperature fell below freezing; washing up in the morning required first melting the ice that had formed in the pitcher on the nightstand. In the summer, temperatures were hotter “than the seventh section of hades,” reported Edison, who added that the humidity was “so thick that some of the fish from the Hopewell pond swam out into the air.” Ambient dust made life miserable, to the point that Edison had difficulty retaining workers until he put a crew of seventeen to work to control the problem. Convincing Mina to move up to the mine, along with the children and the servants, was out of the question. So Edison took up a routine of taking the train up early Monday morning, then returning home on the last train Saturday night. One year turned into two, and still the work was unfinished. It lasted five years.

  The bare facts suggest that Edison was doing his best to avoid his second wife and young children, that this was a repeat of his earlier flight to the western states in the summer of 1878, only in extreme form. The reality was something different. For most of his life, Edison did not record his feelings about personal matters, but the circumstances he found himself in during the Ogden years were an exception. He was at the mine, Mina was at home in Glenmont, and they lived at a time when the personal letter had yet to be displaced by the phone call. So the normally taciturn Edison, who usually gave nothing away about his innermost thoughts, wrote daily letters to Mina, whom he addressed by the pet name “Billy.” They are attentive, funny, and loving—unabashedly so (“Darling Sweetest Loveliest Cutest…”). Upon occasion, they are quite explicit. “Last night I felt blue without you,” he wrote Mina in 1895. “With a kiss like the swish of a 13 inch cannon projectile I remain as always your lover.”

  Edison’s letters to Mina reveal an aspect of his personality that would not otherwise have been visible: his personal philosophy concerning mental well-being. To Edison, unhappiness could be vanquished by sheer force of will. In August 1895, when Mina and the children were at Chautauqua, and he was at Ogden, he responded to Mina’s expression of the “blues” with empathy, and tried as many therapeutic approaches as his philosophy permitted. He humored her with stories about the dust (“some smart weed seeds have commenced to sprout out of the seams of my coat”). He teased her that she was blue because of her disappointment in him. He praised her intelligence (“There can’t [be] 1 woman in 20,000 that is really as smart as yourself”). He lectured her on the medical basis of depression (“blues are from disordered liver”). He teased her in a way that would make a mental-health professional today cringe (referring to her in a babyish third-person voice: “I wonder if Billy Edison truly loves me or does she just say so at times to keep me deceived. If she really loved, why should she get the blues”). He advised her to stay away from novels, take up newspaper reading, and “have all the fun you can.”

  He himself looked for fun in only one place—at work. He enjoyed himself immensely at the mine, even when his colleagues’ spirits dragged as the years passed, the money disappeared, and customers for what turned out to be expensively priced briquettes of processed iron ore failed to materialize. His chief assistant, Walter Mallory, was “the most dejected man you ever saw,” Edison wrote Mina, but “your lover [is] as bright and cheerful as a bumble bee in flower time.”

  Edison took great pleasure in the novelty of the technical challenges and in the opportunity to redeem his reputation as a savvy businessperson, even though redemption never came. The low-grade iron ore in New Jersey did not have a competitive chance once huge reserves of high-grade ore were discovered in the Mesabi Range of northeastern Minnesota; the Mesabi ore was easily mined near the surface and close to economical shipping on Lake Superior. Well after the first Mesabi mine opened in 1890, Edison remained pitiably hopeful about his Ogden mine, even when objective facts made the future of its business appear bleak to anyone else. In 1897, when failure was inevitable, he refused to acknowledge the facts. Edison wrote a colleague, “My Wall Street friends think I cannot make another success, and that I am a back number, hence I cannot raise even $10,000 from them, but I am going to show them that they are very much mistaken. I am full of vinegar yet.”

  Edison was not so emotionally invested, however, that he sold all of his other assets in order to keep the business alive. Glenmont and his laboratory remained untouched, and he was proud that the mine enjoyed a top credit rating because he would not permit it to take on a penny of debt, even when it had exhausted his ready cash and the last of the General Electric shares that he had held. He had to close the mine repeatedly, then reopen when money from an unrelated line of business came in, only to exhaust the new funds. The enterprise did not turn out to be a complete waste: The rollers that were developed at the mine were moved and adapted for use in a new line of business—producing cement. For a while it would become a viable business, which Mallory headed, but not an innovation in the same class as electric light.

  In 1902, at a time when General Electric shares were trading at a historic high and well after Edison had sold his, Mallory happened to be traveling with him and saw in the newspaper the eye-popping closing price. Edison asked what his stake would have been worth had he held on to it. Mallory quickly worked out the number: over $4 million. Hearing this, Edison remained silent, keeping a serious expression for about fifteen seconds. Then his face lit up and he said, “Well, it’s all gone, but we had a good time spending it.”

  The story would be retold by Edison’s hagiographers many times. The evidence suggests that Edison did have a jolly time, which, to him, was well worth the $4 million. He did not include in the calculations, however, the opportunity that he lost to profit from his own inventions, beginning with the phonograph that would bring into being the modern entertainment industry. It would be others who began to make money offering to the public recorded entertainment. Edison, distracted in the pursuit of his own fancies, was slow to observe the limitless business opportunities made possible by the commercialization of fun.

  Edison could not take the pulse of a public from which he was isolated. First, cloistered within Glenmont and his new lab in Orange, and then even more isolated in unpopulated mining country, Edison was not well situated to listen to a mass consumer market clamoring for the opportunity to spend money on popular music. Work was the only form of fun he was personally familiar with; it took him a long time to even consider marketing the phonograph as a device for entertainment. As late as 1892, he told Alfred Tate, “I don’t want the phonograph sold for amusement purposes.” Tate explained in his memoirs that Edison was “unable to visualize the potentialities of the amusement field.” By the next year, Edison had begun to relent, but only a tiny bit. He was able to picture the phonograph being marketed to the individual household for the “best in Oratory and Music.”

  The masses did not want to turn their parlors into a music appreciation class—they had neither the parlors nor phonographs, which were still expensive, nor hunger for classica
l music. But entrepreneurs materialized to give the people what they wished to hear. They added a gizmo to the Edison phonograph and came up with the “nickel-in-the-slot” machine, the earliest coin-operated jukebox. It only played a single selection, but many machines could be placed in a saloon, hotel lobby, or amusement hall. Each was equipped with rubber listening tubes that were placed in the ears of the paying patron, which permitted an individual to enjoy music in public space without disturbing others. Public health authorities worried, however, that the listening tubes were “disease breeders”; the park commissioners in Philadelphia ordered the machines removed from park grounds for this reason.

  Phonograph dealers who invested in the machines discovered that the nickels added up to considerable profits, even after they turned over 50 percent of revenues to the patent holder, the Automatic Phonograph Exhibition Company. A San Francisco distributor said in 1890 that he collected more than $4,000 in about six months. That money was not earned from the “best in Oratory and Music.” The impresarios of the nickel-in-the-slot machine provided whatever was not classical: popular music supplemented with programs of prurient storytelling that brought occasional censorship.

  Even before others had found a way to earn profits from recorded music, Edison had begun thinking about a machine that did more. The “Kinetoscope Moving View” would do “for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear.” The first version was modeled on Edison’s phonograph, and was rather too ambitious, attempting to provide not only images but synchronized sound. This very early progenitor of modern cinema—only one of many that tinkerers around the world were working on—did not come close to resembling the machine that would cast mesmerizing images that filled large screens, for it was conceived on a microscopic scale. One cylinder was used to play back sound and a second one to provide visuals with thousands of tiny images, each taken as an individual photograph by a conventional camera and painstakingly mounted on the cylinder, one by one. They were arranged in a spiral so that they could be viewed continuously through a microscope. In theory, it was a clever arrangement; in practice, however, it was impossible to make the images lie flat and appear clearly.

  Edison did not have time to work out solutions to the problems as he had done when the incandescent light was his top priority. He conceived of the kinetoscope just as he decided that ore milling was going to be his main project. Edison reassigned one of his principal assistants at the mine, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, whom Edison knew was also a talented photographer, to head up work on the kinetoscope. It was Dickson who would advance the project with myriad contributions—and continue to do so after he parted with Edison on less-than-amicable terms in 1895 and put his talents and experience to work for competitors.

  No one had yet figured out how to rapidly open and close the camera’s shutter—dozens of times a second—while capturing crisp images on film that was in constant motion. A much improved camera was invented, but not by Edison or his assistants. Etienne-Jules Marey, the same distinguished French scientist who earlier had worked on recording human vocalization, had designed an ingenious camera: It recorded sixty images a second on a long continuous strip of film, which was pulled by a cam in a deliberatively jerky fashion to stop the film momentarily, so that light could saturate the film and capture motion. Not only had Marey made these crucial advances, he was happy to share what he had learned with the scientific community. When Edison visited Paris in 1889 for the Paris Exposition, he was cordially received by Marey and was presented with a copy of Marey’s book, which detailed in French his recent photographic work. Dickson, who had remained back at the laboratory in New Jersey but was fluent in French, likely had learned of Marey’s most recent work by reading French periodicals that he bought for the laboratory.

  In Dickson’s account of the events of that year, Edison does not play much more than an honorific role. While Edison was in Paris, Dickson readied a prototype system that was far ahead of its time—projecting images upon a screen with synchronized sound. Upon the inventor’s return to the lab, Dickson appeared on the screen, raised his hat, and said, “Good morning, Mr. Edison, glad to see you back. I hope you are satisfied with the kineto-phonograph.”

  This feat was accomplished by using a tachistoscope, which used a stroboscopic light and a revolving disc that could only hold a few images. It would not serve as the next step in the technical evolution of moving images, but it did show Dickson’s talents. Edison took no immediate notice, however, and temporarily shifted Dickson back to the mining project. Another month went by before Edison returned his attention to moving images and drew up a preliminary patent application for a motion-picture system that replaced the cylinder with a filmstrip, like Marey’s. But mining remained his pet project. Two more years passed before a working prototype was ready for a public demonstration.

  The kinetoscope that was unveiled in 1891 was a console made of wood, about twenty inches square and standing four feet high, that resembled its older sibling, the nickel-in-the-slot phonograph. On top was mounted an eyepiece for the peephole, through which the viewer saw a moving image, backlit and magnified, as the film moved past the opening. The film was spliced together as one continuous fifty-foot loop, arranged on rollers. The film feed was powered by a battery-powered electric motor. In all, it was a mechanical marvel. Still, what the eye saw fell well short of a sensual feast. The images were small, and the first commercial film, Blacksmith Scene, ran only twenty seconds.

  The machine was a novelty item, and Edison did not accord it much commercial potential. When he filed for a patent in the United States, his attorney urged him to file for foreign patents, too. Edison decided not to do so, however, when told it would cost $150. Legend has him saying at the time, “It isn’t worth it.” Without the protection of patents in other countries, however, he was vulnerable to legal attack. Patent disputes quickly flared and would last for more than twenty years.

  When Edison visited Chicago in May 1891, reporters asked him if he was preparing to exhibit an “electrical novelty” for the World’s Columbian Exposition that the city would host in 1893. This was going to be the largest—and the most influential, it turned out—of the nineteenth-century world fairs. (Its White City would provide one visitor, children’s writer Frank Baum, the inspiration for the Emerald City of Oz.) This inquiry handed Edison an invitation to talk up his kinetoscope, which, even if not yet ready for commercial release, seemed certain to be complete within two years, well in time for the fair. He chose instead to play the role of the Wizard, promising the never-before-conceived. “My intention,” he declared, “is to have such a happy combination of photography and electricity that a man can sit in his own parlor and see depicted upon a curtain the forms of the players in opera upon a distant stage and hear the voices of the singers.” What he is describing—color visuals and audio, capturing a performance in a distant locale, in real time, projected upon a large flat surface—seems rather close to what we would come to know as color television. Edison declared he was confident that it would be “perfected” in time for the opening of the fair.

  Such a claim might appear to be the product of the feverish, and incorrigibly self-deceiving, mind of the Wizard of Oz. But Edison’s expectation of the perfection of color television was more a case of absentmindedness—he was not immersed in the work on the kinetoscope as Dickson was. Standing at a distance, and preoccupied with mining, Edison gave his own motion pictures and sound only a half glance. If he did not face the practical issues on a daily basis himself, he was inclined to assume that the difficult was easy, and that the impossible took just a little bit longer.

  The responsibility of readying the kinetoscope for the Chicago fair fell squarely upon Dickson’s shoulders, and the burden proved too much to bear: Soon exhausted, he was unable to work at all for almost three months. At the same time, the Panic of 1893 imperiled Edison’s ore mill; he had no time to return to the kinetoscope. In the meantime, Tate had proceeded on the assumption that all wou
ld be ready in time and had organized a syndicate, including a brother-in-law of one of the exposition’s commissioners, that secured a coveted concession to operate twenty-five machines on the grounds. The fair opened in May 1893 and introduced to the world wonders such as the Ferris wheel, Cracker Jacks, and Juicy Fruit gum. Before closing in October, it drew 27.5 million visitors. Those 27.5 million visitors did not get a look at Edison’s kinetoscope, however, as the machines were not completed until the next year, too late for the fair.

  The development of the machines could have been accelerated, but only if Edison relinquished his notion that they were only a novelty. In February 1894, he wrote the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, “I have constructed a little instrument which I call a Kinetograph, with a nickel and slot attachment and some 25 have been made but I am very doubtful if there is any Commercial in it and fear they will not earn their costs.”

  Astute observers noticed at the time that Edison had made the wrong call about the future of the phonograph, too. “The wizard Edison’s idea” that the phonograph would be adopted as a machine for office transcription “has not proved to be the success which its famous creator thought it would be,” the New York Morning Advertiser noticed. But as a source of amusement, it was doing well. One entrepreneur, Charles L. Marshall, had installed five thousand nickel-gobbling machines in phonograph parlors. He had developed a simple rule of thumb: Give the public what it wanted, and that meant avoiding what he called “classical songs” like “Thou Art Like Unto a Flower.” Music that appealed to a less-refined sensibility—he singled out “Throw Him Down, McCloskey” and “One of His Legs Is Longer Than It Really Ought to Be” as exemplars—brought in fifteen times as much revenue per day.