The Wizard of Menlo Park

by Randall E. Stross

  Eventually, another company, Gray & Davis, would win the contract to supply Ford Motor with starters and generators for Ford cars. So that its equipment would work with Edison batteries, it invested in a refrigeration plant to simulate cold conditions and its staff tried to engineer an electrical system that could accommodate the battery’s shortcomings. The experiments ended without success; the task of making the Edison battery work was declared “impossible.” Ford dealers also registered their negative feelings about the Edison battery, telling Gray & Davis that if Ford equipped cars at the factory with Edison batteries, the dealers could not in good faith sell the cars to customers without first taking on the new expense of replacing the factory batteries.

  Throughout the process of evaluating options, Henry Ford stood apart, maintaining an agnostic attitude until the test results were definitive. He did not intervene when Liebold, the company engineers, and the dealers all agreed that the Edison battery was woefully underpowered and unsuitable. By having Liebold serve as liaison between his company and Edison’s, Henry Ford was able to protect his personal relationship with Edison. For his part, Edison also valued the personal relationship and did not ask Ford to reconsider when the company selected other suppliers and technology. By the time of the 1914 fire, Ford and his staff no longer regarded the Edison battery as a viable candidate for use in Fords. Edison did not share his disappointment with others and harbored no ill feelings toward Ford himself.

  After Ford extended the disaster-relief loan of $100,000 immediately after the fire, he made the tenth and last loan to Edison in May 1916. The total provided from 1912 to 1916 was $1.2 million. The first $900,000 had been issued as notes secured by Edison Storage Battery Company stock, but beginning with another slice in February 1914, the last $300,000 had been unsecured, suggesting that Henry Ford had no expectation of placing a future order with Edison’s company, as there were no anticipated royalty payments that could serve as collateral. Edison did not give up hope entirely and continued to pursue a battery powerful enough to start an engine. But later that year, he did concede tacitly that sales to Ford Motor Company were not imminent when he began to pay interest and repay the principal. Having a personal friend as his company’s banker was helpful when pinched finances forced him in 1917 to ask Ford not to cash a check he had sent for $50,000, and when he was ready to have that one cashed, to ask Ford at the same time to put $196,102.81 of new checks in his pocket for “a little while” until Edison had the funds to cover them. “The “little while” turned out to be sixteen months. There were other instances when Edison could not make regular payments, but he always returned to the schedule when he could. In 1925, Ford forgave whatever debt remained—the records are not clear about the amount—and the legal departments of the two companies were put to work on memos that clarified the tax implications.

  Even when the fire placed Edison in his most dire financial straits, Ford did not show the slightest concern about the repayment of the loans. To Ford, Edison was an American hero—for inventing. Ford knew from the beginning that Edison would likely have trouble managing the business end of their relationship. When Ford described his friend as “the world’s worst businessman,” he had gone on to say that Edison “knows almost nothing of business.” Business had brought the two men together originally, but when business partnerships failed, their personal ties were not weakened. The two actually got to spend more time together than before because they began to take a camping vacation together annually.

  In the first year plans were made, 1916, Ford was unable to join Edison and the two others: Harvey Firestone, the tire manufacturer and a principal supplier to Ford, and John Burroughs, the naturalist. The group traveled by car through the Adirondack and Green Mountains and were equipped for comfortable camping by what Burroughs named their “Waldorf-Astoria on Wheels that followed us everywhere.” Schedules could not be arranged for a joint vacation the next year, but in August 1918, Ford was finally able to join Edison, Firestone, and Burroughs for the first of three road trips traveling as a famous quartet, and three more trips as a trio following Burroughs’s death in 1921.

  From the beginning in 1918, the group drew attention. Setting out from Pittsburgh, the men spent ten days driving mountainous roads through West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina. A contemporary feature article would describe them as four grown men of varying ages—Burroughs was eighty-one; Edison, seventy-one; Ford, fifty-five; and Firestone, forty-nine—who briefly became boys again. These “boys,” however, did not shed their collective wealth and celebrity and regain unself-conscious innocence. The four were part of a contingent of fourteen, including Firestone’s son, Harvey Jr., three friends, a chef, and various assistants. The group rode in three cars and the camping equipment and commissary followed in three trucks. A photographer was always on hand to take still photos for distribution to the press and movies for newsreels.

  A trip diary kept by the Firestones, senior and junior, shows how Ford and Edison had different traveling preferences, Ford being the restless, perpetually active one, and Edison, sedentary. When one of the vehicles broke down, which was almost a daily occurrence, Ford would set to work on repairs, which he often completed on the spot without need of new parts (on one occasion he secured a replacement bolt from a farm implement and its cooperative owner). Edison would take a midday nap, curled up under a tree, “dropping off to sleep like a baby,” wrote Burroughs. Edison was the only member of the group who had brought newspapers and books along. He also packed batteries, wires, and lamps, providing light for reading at camp in the evening. If his attention was not required for something else, he would take up a newspaper.

  The diary also shows that the ten-day trip was anything but a private one. Each little mountain town that they approached knew in advance of the group’s approach and sent out a contingent of local notables in many cars to greet the approaching celebrities and their factotums. Each town presented new challenges to group members in how to manage crowds of fans seeking autographs, or the opportunity to say hello or ask that the esteemed visitors provide them with a speech. (In lieu of speaking, Edison would offer deep bows to a gathering.) When the campers reached the spot where the assistants had set up camp for the night, they were often followed by curious locals. Their arrival anywhere caused such predictable excitement that the only events worthy of noting became those rare instances when someone failed to recognize them or was inordinately shy.

  The members reassembled for a similar expedition the next summer in 1919. Now the caravan had swollen to fifty cars and trucks transformed into moving billboards carrying placards “Buy Firestone Tires.” The group’s arrival in every town was made into an occasion of considerable commercial benefit to the local Ford dealer, who used the free publicity to push sales of new Fords. Newsreels about the campers, such as Genius to Sleep Under the Stars, pretended to capture candid views of the celebrities relaxing and were shown in movie theaters across the country. A diary entry in a trip scrapbook suggests how the images were obtained: “Members of the party accepted their fate and allowed the camera-man to direct their motions and activities for the next quarter of an hour.”

  In the late evening, after the cameramen and interlopers had left, the men sat around the campfire and listened while Ford and Edison lectured the group about the nefarious deeds of Jews. Burroughs wrote in his diary of how Ford “attributes all evil to the Jews or the Jewish capitalists—the Jews caused the war, the Jews caused the outbreak of thieving and robbery all over the country, the Jews caused the inefficiency of the navy of which Edison talked last night.” Burroughs was the only voice present to counter the anti-Semitism. When Ford used Jay Gould as an example of how Jews controlled Wall Street, Burroughs, who had been a childhood playmate of Gould’s, took pleasure in telling Ford that Gould’s family was Presbyterian.

  The camping vacation dispensed with the camping portion altogether in 1920, when the wives of the principals were invited for the first time and the gro
up slept in hotels rather than tents. The next year, the collection of star power was boosted, for one night, by the participation of President Warren Harding, a friend of Firestone’s. The president arrived with an entourage of six Secret Service officers and ten reporters.

  Edison did not greet the president with warmth. Instead, he used the opportunity to make a show of his disdain of this “dude,” as he called any man who failed to meet his standards of manliness. When the president offered cigars to the men in the camp, Edison declared, “I don’t smoke, I chew.” This was pure contrariness—everyone knew that Edison was a heavy smoker of cigars. Firestone, who observed the scene, tried to put the best face on it later when describing the encounter, interpreting what Edison said as a declaration that he “does not set up as a hail fellow.” Harding, the smooth politician, did not miss a beat. He replied, “I think I can accommodate you” and pulled out a plug of chewing tobacco from his hip pocket, which Edison accepted. Edison later announced, “Harding is all right. Any man who chews tobacco is all right.”

  In 1924, the final year of the camping trips, the caravan stopped in Plymouth, Vermont, to visit Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge, at his father’s home. The participants enjoyed a joke that later circulated about the group’s ride to the local factory for a tour.

  Something went wrong with the car and they stopped near a farmhouse. The farmer came over to the party and offered his help and at the same time started to lift the hood when Mr. Ford stopped him and said: “There’s nothing the matter with that engine: I’m Henry Ford and I know all about engines.” The farmer then suggested the trouble might be in the battery and Mr. Edison spoke up and said: “No, I’m Thomas A. Edison and I know all about batteries. That one is all right.” The farmer began to look incredulous but tried again by suggesting the tires needed air and offered to pump them up, but Mr. Firestone put in with, “No, I’m Harvey Firestone and I made those tires; they’re just right.” The farmer exploded at this with, “Well, Ford, Edison, and Firestone, eh? I reckon that little runt in the back seat’s Calvin Coolidge?”

  Henry Ford took a keen interest in how fully the press paid attention to the trips. In 1918, his first year with the group, he had his staff prepare a report that contained the full text of every newspaper story that had reported on the expedition. Later, he claimed in his memoirs that “the trips were good fun—except that they began to attract too much attention.” This does not jibe with the contemporaneous evidence that Ford loved nothing as much as the attention the trips attracted. Charles Sorensen, Ford’s longtime lieutenant, presented in his own memoirs a skeptical view of Ford’s claim: “With squads of news writers and platoons of cameramen to report and film the posed nature studies of the four eminent campers, these well-equipped excursions…were as private and secluded as a Hollywood opening, and Ford appreciated the publicity.”

  Edison never commented on the trips, but his daughter Madeleine did, when reflecting back upon them from the vantage point of 1972, when she was in her eighties. She retrospectively dismissed them as a “publicity stunt” that had been staged by Firestone. Her father did not really care for them, but “he would let himself be taken in to these things.” It is not likely that this was the case, however. In all other domains, her father did exactly as he pleased. We can assume that Edison went on the trips because he enjoyed them.

  The most detailed vignette we have of Edison and Ford conversing together is from a later time, in 1929, when Edison was eighty-two. The scene is preserved in the autobiography of Edward Bernays, the master practitioner of modern public relations, who was working as a consultant to Ford and happened to be on hand one afternoon when Ford and Edison had lunch together. The difference between what Bernays expected to witness and what he actually saw was great.

  After our little walk we sat on the porch for lunch. I was delighted to be lunching with two of the great men of the time and looked forward to learning something from their words of wisdom. Mr. Ford cupped his hands (Edison was extremely hard of hearing) and said in a loud voice, “What makes you look so well, Tom?”

  Edison didn’t hear the first time and Ford repeated the question. A look of understanding and warmth came into the old man’s face and in a low voice he said, “My wife makes me take liver pills every day.”

  “How many pills does she give you, Tom?”

  That, too, demanded a repeat. “Three a day, Henry.”

  Throughout the luncheon the conversation revolved around this subject. So all I really learned at that luncheon was that Mrs. Edison’s liver pills seemed to help the inventor.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  LETTING GO

  LIKE TOM SAWYER, Thomas Edison heard eulogies delivered well in advance of his actual funeral—in Edison’s case, up to thirty years early. The Man Who Defeated Darkness. The Dean of Inventors. The Man Who Struck the Magic Spark. The Greatest Single Benefactor of the Race. The Archdeacon of the World. The Greatest Citizen of the World. Flattering, yes, but such honors were those bestowed upon a has-been, a statue for a museum. In his fifties, Edison was not ready—he would never be ready, even in his eighties—to step off the stage, to leave the lab, to rest on the laurels that went back to 1877 and those magical five years that followed. He resented being treated like a statue; admirers no longer seemed to listen to what he had to say. When an eighth-grader wrote him in 1915 with a few questions, asking for advice that would be useful to a student “wishing to take up your work,” Edison replied that he did not like “to give advice as no one ever takes it.”

  Even as he said these words, he was being asked for advice from a source that had never asked before: the federal government. Invited to head up the new Naval Consulting Board, which would offer the military the perspective and guidance of the civilian scientific community, Edison agreed to serve. When the United States entered World War I, he increased his advice-giving activity, volunteering to devote all of his time to applied research on behalf of the U.S. Navy. At the end of the experience, he learned that nothing had changed: His advice was not acted upon. “I produced forty-five different inventions for the Government during the war,” Edison said afterward. “Every one of them was pigeon-holed.”

  Edison wanted to live in the present, not in the past. At the same time that his current research interests were slighted, he was showered with praise for having created in the past entire industries out of nothingness. One moving tribute he received was in the form of a letter of appreciation sent in 1921 by one Mrs. W. C. Lathrop, of Norton, Kansas. Lathrop was a college graduate, the wife of a surgeon, the mother of four children, and the sole housekeeper of a large home. While her electric washing machine chugged away happily, she realized that “it does seem as though I am entirely dependent on the fertile brain of one thousand miles away for every pleasure and labor saving device I have.” The house was lighted with electricity, cooled with electric fans, and cleaned with an electric vacuum cleaner; her kitchen was equipped with a Westinghouse electric range and an electric dishwasher and an electric pressure cooker (handy on one occasion for an impromptu dinner with the visiting governor); the family’s clothes were sewed and washed and ironed with electric appliances. For relaxation, she enjoyed the use of an electric massager and a Victrola, “forgetting I’m living in a tiny town of two thousand where nothing much ever happens.” When her husband returned home exhausted at the end of his workday, she was “now rested and ready to serve the tired man.” If he did not want to listen to music on the Victrola, she would take him to see “a masterpiece at the ‘Movies.’” For all this, she said, “please accept the thanks, Mr. Edison, of one of the most truly appreciative woman [sic].”

  As a testimonial to the conveniences provided by electrical appliances, this was a most gratifying letter. Lathrop’s reliance on electricity was far ahead of many parts of the country—even ahead of Edison’s household at Glenmont, which was still using a small army of human housekeepers and relying on a gas stove (an electric range was never installed)
. But the very fact that the only two brand names that Lathrop mentioned—Victrola and Westinghouse—were his competitors’ says much about the Wizard’s mismanagement of business opportunity. Edison’s legacy was enhanced more by mistaken associations between his name and competitors’ products than by the sales of his own.

  Over time, however, Edison had become an accidental captain of industry in several lines. Aside from musical records and phonographs, these were in fields that the general public would not likely associate with the famous inventor. Each represented a story of Edison’s ambition that had been thwarted elsewhere—the failed venture in ore processing that had led to cement production; the failed venture in automotive batteries that had developed into an industrial-battery business specializing in sales to ships and railroads. Or, in the case of the “Ediphone,” the version of the phonograph sold for office dictation, it was a story of the inventor’s stubborn refusal to relinquish his very first idea of what the phonograph was best suited for. In 1911, he set up a new umbrella company, Thomas A. Edison, Inc., which would soon encompass most of his existing businesses, including the phonograph, records, movie equipment (retained after he had left the movie-production business), batteries, and chemicals. This company’s fate would determine the longevity of the Edison brand name in the marketplace.

  Like any technology-based business, Thomas A. Edison, Inc., needed technical and managerial talent to direct its many separate business divisions. Edison had never been comfortable sharing control, however, and his tight grip on the rudder did not weaken as he grew older. Even at the entry level, new employees were selected for docility. Edison wrote to a correspondent in 1916 about a candidate who was recommended for his great promise as an inventor, “We have found it very undesirable to take into our employ young men whose talents run to invention.” He stated flatly that he had no place for the candidate.