The Wizard of Menlo Park

by Randall E. Stross

  So determined was Edison to strip artists of their vanity and unreasonable demands that he refused to print the name of the recording artist on the record label. When one of his dealers, the Santa Fe Watch Company, of Topeka, Kansas, asked him to reconsider, Edison let loose a torrent of pent-up opinion:

  I am sure you will give me the credit of having put a tremendous amount of thought into the Phonograph Business after the many years that I have been engaged on it. Not alone to the technical side of the business have I given an immense amount of thought but also to the commercial side, and I want to say to you that I have most excellent reasons for not printing the name of the Artist on the Record. Your business has probably not brought you into intimate contact with musicians, but mine has. There is a great deal of “faking” and Press Agent work in the musical profession, and I feel that for the present at least I would rather quit the business than be a party to the boasting up of undeserved reputations.

  Edison wrote this in 1913, when he was sixty-six years old. His confidence in his business acumen had, if anything, grown over time. And in taking this stand, he reveals a nature that could not see the inconsistency: Here his own companies used his fame as the Wizard to market his inventions, prominently displaying his name and driving off anyone who threatened to infringe the trademark. But he could not abide others—in this case, his own recording artists—using fame, even though much more modest, for their own commercial interests.

  Victor was especially receptive to the fads of popular music. The company immediately responded to a dance craze around 1910, in which taxi dance halls opened, school proms multiplied, and lodge cotillions drew avid attendees. Victor signed the ballroom dance stars Vernon and Irene Castle to oversee all of the company’s dance recordings. Columbia Records issued and promoted dance records, too.

  Edison, however, stood aloof. He continued to follow the marketing plan with which he had begun, which was to make his phonograph the centerpiece of a home entertainment center, eliminating the need to go out in search of fun. Without mention of “cocooning,” the Edison marketers in the early twentieth century tapped a preference for private consumption of entertainment, a preference that is only now, a century later, finding full expression in the installation of high-definition television sets and multichannel sound systems. One aspect of Edison’s advertising campaign that does not have a contemporary ring is its depiction of married life: “When a man leaves home in the evening it is because he seeks amusement. The best way to keep him home is to give him the amusement there. Make home a competitor of downtown, the club, the cafe, the theatre and the concert hall. No such thing will furnish so much amusement for so many people, so many times, and in so many ways as the Edison phonograph.”

  The voice that is speaking is smooth and omniscient, wise in all domestic matters. It is not Thomas Edison’s real-life voice, however, that had the burr of irritation when swatting away the complaints of his dealers. If one complained about the poor quality of the finish on the phonograph cabinets, Edison twisted the complaint into something else, a wish to have a $150 cabinet provided for a $100 machine. If he complied, “I would have to go out of business,” he condescendingly explained to one dealer. As for his reasons why he did not affix the price on the face of the record, he wrote that he did not have time for “lengthy explanations,” but there was a good technical reason that should have been taken on faith. The Wizard could not understand why his dealers refused to acknowledge his competence to make such simple decisions: “I should be credited in cases like this with as much intelligence as the general average of the genus homo.”

  His voice was more often than not tinged with irritation about the exasperating tastes of the public, too. A typical letter that he dictated in 1914 went on at some length about the regional variations in musical taste and the difficulties this created for his company. He did not display any interest in the New Englanders’ objections to “ragtime and Coon Songs”; it was just one of many mysteries about likes and dislikes, conveyed to him in sarcastic letters. He claimed to be so discouraged by the hostility that these correspondents expressed that had he known about the differences of opinion, he never would have entered the music business.

  Edison invested so much time personally managing every aspect of his music business that it is easy to forget that in this same time period he was principally concerned with work on automobile batteries. Music was merely a sideline. He launched other projects, too, such as promoting the sale to the working class of all-concrete houses, designed by Edison (but not adopted as a replacement for his own house at Glenmont). The project that was most ahead of its time was the home movie projector, named the Home Projecting Kinetoscope, that he introduced in late 1911. It was both an engineering marvel and a commercial flop. The film’s frames were tiny: three-sixteenths of an inch high and a quarter of an inch wide. When the image was projected upon a six-foot-tall screen, each was enlarged about 120,000 times. In order to keep the dimensions of the unit small and its weight to twenty pounds, Edison and his assistants designed the projector to accommodate filmstrips that were only eighty feet long, but it was effectively triple this length because the film was composed of three narrow ministrips, mounted side by side. The film would be run through once, showing the images on one edge, then the film-transport mechanism would be shifted so that the images in the middle, which ran in the opposite direction, would be visible, and then the home projectionist would adjust the projector one more time to project the third row. This arrangement yielded a show that ran sixteen minutes.

  Along with the home projector, the company introduced a central clearinghouse for used films, which offered customers a way of replenishing the family’s entertainment supply by using the postal service to swap titles with others for a nominal processing fee. Edison, however, wanted to use his projector not for entertainment but for education. For preschoolers, his idea was nothing less than brilliant. For teaching the alphabet, Edison explained in an interview, “suppose, instead of the dull, solemn letters on a board or a card you have a little play going on that the littlest youngster can understand,” with actors carrying in letters, hopping, skipping, turning somersaults. “Nothing like action—drama—a play that fascinates the eye to keep the attention keyed up.” (A prospectus for Sesame Street could not have made a better case.)

  And it wasn’t just the youngest students who would benefit by adoption of the new medium; Edison was convinced all students would. He compiled a list of subjects suitable for his new pedagogical tool—the total came to four thousand, and he vowed in 1912 to “make films of them all.” His marketing pitch to school systems was simple: He would rent a set of educational films to a school for $8 a week. “You couldn’t hire much of a teacher for $8 a week, could you?” he chortled. “And then think of the saving—you won’t need any truant officer. No, siree! Every little toddler in the district will just want to scoot to school!”

  A year after the release of his home projector, Edison offered only twenty-five feature titles, including the scintillating Manufacture of Paper, Apple Pies, and Modern Weapons for Fighting Fire. It was not a catalog large enough to draw significant numbers of customers, nor was it sufficient to keep the clearinghouse well supplied. In 1913, two years after the debut of the projector, all owners received a letter from the company imploring them to send in any “idle films” for exchanges. The venture languished.

  No critic at the time apparently commented on the outlandishness of Edison’s carelessly announced ambition to radically remake American education—and in his spare time. The side projects multiplied, each initial announcement bringing reporters running and forcing Edison to dilute his attention.

  When he plunged into a campaign, no subordinate would have any grounds to tease him for working less hard than anyone else. When a business colleague in 1912 wrote him and casually asked how he was feeling, Edison replied, “Well, I worked 122 hours in six days last week, hence I must feel fine—and do.” The next month, he h
ad a time clock installed in the laboratory, which permitted him to document his hours and call in reporters to let the world know that he outworked everyone. The first week the clock was in operation, Edison logged ninety-five hours and forty-nine minutes, or, as one story put it, “nearly twice as long as any of his 5,000 employees who enjoyed an eight hour day.” His recorded hours would have been longer had he been able to log in properly on the first day, as he had been working all night and left the building at 8:15 A.M.

  Five years earlier, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, Edison had told reporters that he was retiring from business and would spend all of his time in the laboratory, pursuing pure research. His self-exile from business matters ended, however, almost as soon as it had been announced. He felt compelled to personally oversee—and personally decide—everything, as he was wont to do. He drove himself hard, as hard in his sixties, seventies, and even eighties, as he had ever worked as a younger man, because he felt a burden that was uniquely his to shoulder: protecting the public image of “Thomas Edison,” omnipresent and omniscient, the Wizard with a magical touch (“It is irresistible because Edison made it”). Protecting the brand required the deployment of lawyers to warn off anyone who attempted to trade on the Edison name. Brand protection also required that Edison remain personally involved in everything, trying to live up to the legend. He did not regard this as a burden. On the contrary, it was the very thing that gave his life meaning. As long as he was the one who made the decisions, he was happy, no matter what consequences followed for his businesses.

  Edison had the ability to remain imperturbably content even when disaster struck. In the early evening of 7 December 1914, an explosion rocked his film-finishing building, part of the complex of buildings surrounding his laboratory. The building was swiftly evacuated, just ahead of the fire that swept the two-story structure. As the film stock fed the flames, the fire jumped to the surrounding buildings, where it was fed by the rubber and chemicals used in record manufacturing. These buildings were made of reinforced concrete, the material that Edison had boasted was completely fireproof. Their combustible contents, however, fed conflagrations whose temperatures melted the floors, and soon the walls collapsed. Even the newest building, less than two years old, and said to be state of the art in fireproof construction, succumbed when its contents—phonograph records—caught fire. Liquid chemicals poured down the sides of the building as streams of flame. The high temperatures rendered the efforts of the firefighters, who had been summoned from six neighboring communities, largely ineffectual. Ten to fifteen thousand people gathered to watch.

  The fire had broken out at the dinner hour, when Edison happened to be at home. He was one of the first to get to the scene. Neither he nor his assistants thought that the fire would spread to the neighboring concrete buildings, and no one initially took action to save what they could. When Mina arrived, she rushed in and out of the company’s general offices, carrying papers out of harm’s way while Edison stood by and watched the firefighters. Her rescue efforts ended only when the flames reached that building, too. For seven hours, the firefighters did their best in the bitterly cold night, but the fires claimed ten of the eighteen buildings of the complex. Miraculously, the disaster claimed only one victim, William Troeber, an employee who had rushed back into a building with a fire extinguisher under his arm, believing, erroneously it turned out, that some of his coworkers were still inside.

  The facilities for phonograph and record manufacturing were lost. The estimated damage was $3 million to $5 million, of which, the company told reporters, insurance covered about $3 million. This latter number appears to have been dispensed in order to give employees, jobbers, dealers, and customers reassurance that the Edison works would have no difficulty recovering. A private letter, however, suggests that the insurance coverage was minimal, as Edison had been supremely confident when he began to build concrete buildings that coverage for fire damage was superfluous.

  Once the embers were cool and company managers could take stock, they discovered that in some ways the fire had been considerate, skipping over two thousand gallons of high-proof alcohol that came through undamaged. They also discovered that all of the master molds of the company’s recordings were undamaged—and they would receive a kind offer of the loan of record presses from Victor. But on the night of the fire, when none of this was known, when the fire had yet to be contained and was still hopping from one building to the next and when the prospects were the bleakest, Edison’s equanimity was put to a test. His immediate reaction? He cracked jokes, laughed, and declared, “Although I am over 67 years old, I’ll start all over again tomorrow.” Nothing could rattle him.

  The striking absence of visible discouragement on Edison’s part inspired a New York Times editorial titled “Abnormality Like His a Blessing.” The Times ascribed Edison’s “abnormality” to his temperament, a new concept that was explained as being beyond the control of an individual’s will. (At that time, temperament was said to be controlled by the thyroid and pituitary glands.) Some “abnormality” should have been expected, however, from the abnormal experience of playing for thirty years the role of the celebrated Wizard. His fame had been built on his work, then reinforced by his eagerness to be the hardest-working man in the invention business. Edison reacted to the disaster as if it were a tonic: “It’s like the old days to have something real to buck up against.”

  “I never intend to retire,” Edison said in an interview in 1911. “Work made the earth a paradise for me.” Not merely made, past tense, but continued to make for him a paradise. He voiced heresy when he said that he did not believe that a paradise awaited in the afterlife. He was speaking, however, as a man who experienced paradisiacal pleasure every moment he was at work. No wonder he could not imagine doing anything else.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  FRIEND FORD

  IN 1896, WHEN Thomas Edison first met Henry Ford, Edison was famous, and Ford was not. If Edison failed to remember the encounter afterward, the likely reason is not self-absorption but lopsided arithmetic: one luminary, many strangers clamoring to meet him. The occasion was a convention of the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies held at a beach hotel near Coney Island. Edison was attending in an honorific role, having sold off his electric light interests and thrown himself into his mining venture. It was not his customary practice to spend time outside of his own workplace, but for three days he settled into the role of passive conventioneer.

  At dinner on the first day, Edison found himself seated at a large oval table with senior representatives of various large electric utilities. The conversation centered on the bright prospects for the industry, poised to supply the power for electric cars that would replace horses. In the midst of these happy speculations, the superintendent of the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit, Alexander Dow, spoke up to mention a curiosity. Dow’s chief engineer, thirty-three-year-old Henry Ford, whom he had brought along with him, was an amateur inventor who had just built a cart that was powered not by electricity but by a gasoline-powered engine. It was equipped with four bicycle wheels; Ford called it a Quadricycle.

  Asked to explain how his carriage was powered, Ford addressed everyone at the table and Edison cupped his ear, trying to catch Ford’s words. A man seated by Edison offered to change places with Ford so that Edison could hear better. Once the switch was effected, Edison peppered Ford with questions; Ford sketched out his answers. Then came the moment that Ford would say changed his life: “Young man, that’s the thing!” Edison told him, pounding the table for emphasis. “Electric cars must keep near to power stations. The storage battery is too heavy. Steam cars won’t do either, for they have a boiler and fire. Your car is self-contained—carries its own power plant—no fire, no boiler, no smoke, and no steam. You have the thing. Keep at it.” With encouragement from the man whom Ford regarded as “the greatest inventive genius in the world” ringing in his ears, Ford returned home with the conviction that he should persevere.
He told his wife, “You are not going to see much of me until I am through with this car.”

  We have only Ford’s account of the meeting, and the purported details were set down on paper for the first time no fewer than thirty years later. The stagy dialogue rings false; nor did Ford immediately quit his day job at Edison Illuminating. It would take three more years before he felt ready to try to commercialize his automobile designs as a full-time entrepreneur. But he did meet Edison at the convention and did have a conversation that must have roughly resembled what he later recollected. The two had a second conversation, too: Ford recalled that Edison invited him to ride with him on the train back to New York City at the conclusion of the convention. Edison did not resume their conversation about the internal combustion engine but instead spoke of other topics, including his boyhood memories of Michigan.

  There is no question that Henry Ford felt much encouraged. He would later regard Edison with worshipful regard and spend stupendous sums to honor the inventor. Whether Edison dispensed as large a dollop of encouragement as Ford perceived is open to doubt, however. Edison was reliably polite in such situations, but he virtually never praised the technical feats of others. Edison’s subsequent actions suggest that he forgot the encounter; if he remembered it at all, he chose to pretend he did not. The second encounter came eleven years later, in 1907, when Ford, now the head of his own eponymous company, wrote Edison with a mixture of familiarity and worshipfulness: “My Dear Mr. Edison,” it began. “I am fitting up a den for my own private use at the factory and I thought I would like to have photographs of about three of the greatest inventors of this age to feast my eyes on in idle moments. Needless to say Mr. Edison is the first of the three and I would esteem it a great personal favor if you would send me a photograph of yourself.”