The Wizard of Menlo Park

by Randall E. Stross

  Edison’s rubber research was not successful, and he apparently covered up the failure in order to keep his external funding intact. An employee of the Fort Myers laboratory claimed that the goldenrod mixture, which Edison showed Ford to be able to demonstrate that the research had achieved success, had surreptitiously been enriched with real rubber—from condoms purchased in bulk for this purpose. The same employee also observed Harvey Firestone tearfully explaining to Edison that the collapse of business due to the Depression meant that he could no longer continue his support of Edison’s laboratory. After Firestone left, Edison was heard sneering, “He’s a God damned lightweight.” (Ford doubled his own contribution so that the funding continued undiminished.)

  While their father was absorbed in the rubber project and spending more time in Fort Myers, Charles and Theodore took steps out of his view to try to ensure that the Edison name would have a place in the evolving music business. Late though the hour was, they set up a research group in Orange to make a phonograph with an electric pickup and moved ahead on plans to introduce a radio. With prototypes ready, they succeeded in extracting their father’s grudging assent, but he predicted the experiment would result in a financial bath.

  Edison’s fears were realized, though it had been his intransigence that put the company at such a great disadvantage as a late entrant. Even when Charles and Theodore were free to act without stealth, they were dogged by problems obtaining a necessary license from General Electric, setting up an expensive production facility, and selecting a design that would be affordable to consumers. On 9 October 1929, Charles prepared a report for his father that showed a loss for the company of $1.3 million due to start-up costs for the radio, which, to put the best face on it, was no more than the average annual loss for the company in the previous five years. Still, the company had assets in the form of Liberty Bonds, and Charles remained hopeful that losses from the radio would not, as he put it, “sink the ship.” He could not know that two weeks later the stock sell-off would begin with Black Thursday, on 24 October—followed by Black Monday and Black Tuesday—and business conditions would deteriorate apace.

  A few days later, Thomas A. Edison, Inc., announced that it would cease producing records and refit the factory for the production of radios. The announcement was accompanied by mention of regret as the phonograph “was one of Mr. Edison’s favorite inventions.” If the company was going to succeed in home entertainment, everything would ride on the success of its new radios and radio-phonographs. These were sold not as tabletop sets but as stunningly beautiful pieces of furniture designed for the high end of the market, not the best positioning in depression conditions. Each model was encased in a wide console standing about four feet high, finished in walnut and hidden behind sliding doors. The sales literature seemed to be addressed less to the general public than to Edison himself, the sons boasting of the “engineering refinement” that provided volume levels ranging “from a whisper to a mighty crescendo and both without distortion!”

  A year later, Charles and Theodore informed their father that there was no point in continuing a hopeless endeavor, and the radio production was shut down immediately. Charles wrote his father with bittersweet feelings about the end of the experiment: “Radio is the last of our products to carry the name Edison in the house. Altho [sic] we have lost a pile of money there is at least the solace of knowing that it was a good product worthy of the name, and that we have nothing to be ashamed of in the way it was sold.” He thanked his father for being willing to pay the bills despite his personal misgivings. “We have had our battles and differences of opinion,” Charles wrote, “but when all is said and done you will stand out for me as the ‘world’s best sport.’”

  The sons could not undo decades of poor decisions that their father had made regarding the phonograph and the entertainment business. Edison had insisted on keeping control of the phonograph for too long, to the detriment of the business. But his reputation as the nation’s super-inventor nonpareil, the man who had single-handedly brought into being multiple industries, was so unquestioned that he did not have to do anything more in order to collect compound interest denominated in fame. In 1923, Edison was credited with the creation of industries then worth $15.6 billion and employing 1.5 million people. Henry Ford’s personal net worth was estimated at that point to be $2 billion, but the New York Times said that “the business community has found Edison eight times as valuable as Ford.”

  Polls that inquired about the Most Useful American or the Greatest American were a perennial source of entertainment during Edison’s lifetime, and his name always ranked high. Perhaps the most unintentionally entertaining poll was that conducted in 1922 among the 750,000 youth group members of the Methodist Episcopal Church who were asked to vote for the “greatest man in history.” Edison was given top place, edging out Theodore Roosevelt and Shakespeare. Henry Ford gave Edison top place, too, and his vote would count more than anyone else’s because of the funds he cheerfully deployed to honor his designee and friend. About a decade before Ford famously declared in 1922 that “history is bunk,” he had begun purchasing old agricultural implements, wagons, pre-Ford horseless carriages, and other artifacts of an earlier age. He had no interest in history that was ancient and foreign and intellectual—he had followed his “history is bunk” declaration with the rhetorical question “What difference does it make how many times the ancient Greeks flew their kites?”—but he was passionately interested in history that was near-recent, American, centered on technology, and tactile. He began plans to build a “historic village” in Dearborn that would provide visitors with an appreciation of the nation’s technical ingenuity. It emerged as Greenfield Village, and contained a full-scale re-creation of Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory complex built as much as possible with materials salvaged from the original site. Ford had seven railcars deliver soil from the New Jersey site, so authenticity could be claimed even for the dirt.

  For Edison’s eighty-second birthday in February 1929, Ford made a gift of $5 million to establish an endowment for his museums’ collection of Edisonia and to establish a technical school in Edison’s name. Later that year, he arranged to dedicate the opening of Greenfield Village with an enormous celebration, Light’s Golden Jubilee, honoring Edison on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the invention of incandescent light. President Herbert Hoover, John D. Rockefeller Jr., J. P. Morgan, Marie Curie, Orville Wright, and Will Rogers were among the five hundred invited guests who joined Ford and Edison for the festivities. After the evening banquet, Edison, Ford, and Hoover walked to the unlit Menlo Park laboratory to play a scripted melodrama fancifully re-creating the first lighting of the electric light. The radio announcer solemnly intoned: “Mr. Edison has two wires in his hand; now he is reaching up to the old lamp, now he is making the connection. It lights! Light’s Golden Jubilee has come to a triumphant climax!” Americans around the country who were listening to the live broadcast had dutifully followed the instruction to turn off their household lights until Edison had again provided the world with light, and then, upon cue, they turned on their lights again as car horns blared.

  When the party returned to the banquet hall, Edison plopped on a davenport just inside the door. He appeared overwhelmed by emotion and told Mina, “I can’t go in.” She said, “You are the whole show, you know,” and offered to get him a glass of milk. The milk provided what he needed. He got up, reentered the hall, and carried on. On this exceptional evening he did that rarest of things: He made a public speech. It offered thanks to President Hoover, the guests, and Henry Ford, about whom he said, “I can only say to you that in the fullest and richest meaning of the term, ‘He is my friend.’ Good night.”

  EPILOGUE

  AFTER THE LIGHT’S Golden Jubilee, Edison lived two more years, working less, napping more. He summoned the energy in January 1931 to sign off on one more patent application, for a “Holder for Article to Be Electroplated.” Its issuance brought his personal
total to 1,093, the leader in the patent office by a wide margin. Most of the patents were for minor variations on previous ones—more than 400 concerned electric light and power and almost 200 were for phonographs and recording—and Edison had no compunction about claiming credit for work done by assistants. But under his name, he compiled a record that seemed to be unassailable.

  Health matters, naturally enough, became Edison’s principal preoccupation at the end. He remained unshakably certain that he was an expert on medical matters and had long before developed all-encompassing claims for a milk-only diet. When Mina Edison’s sister Jane had died suddenly in 1898, Edison wrote Mina expressing shock—and admonished that if Jane had only been put on a milk diet, nature would have had the opportunity to “throw off the poisonous defective digestion and she would be strong and hearty today.” Over time, Edison had become more attached to milk as an ever-reliable tonic, as he had shown on the evening of the Golden Jubilee. In 1930, he explained he did just fine with nothing but one glass of milk every two hours. He maintained that “80 percent of our deaths are due to over-eating.” This conviction arose from his insight that “auto-intoxication,” that is, the accumulation of diseases in the bowels, was the cause of most deaths. The solution was “a matter of diet and lubrication.” He was the same medical authority who years before had said that clothing that pinched was literally a killer: “Pressure ANYWHERE means that a certain part of your body is deprived of its natural flood. And starvation and death begin where the body is pressed and choked.”

  The theories did not protect him from kidney failure. In August 1931, he collapsed in his living room and spent ten days near death, while a battalion of newspaper reporters turned Glenmont’s ten-car garage into a pressroom. He moved out of immediate danger, but his energy had disappeared and familiar routines were abandoned. By October, he was too weak to leave bed and remained “mentally drowsy,” according to his doctor; he passed in and out of a coma and hovered on the edge of death for two weeks. Newspapers issued multiple bulletins each day reporting the slightest sign of improvement or decline. In the early morning of 18 October 1931, Thomas Alva Edison died at the age of eighty-four at home with his family at his bedside.

  That day, the New York Times carried twenty-two stories about Edison’s life and death. The blanket coverage was mirrored across all media outlets. For more than fifty years, Edison had promoted his own image and the notion that it was his hands alone that had performed miracles. That preparatory work made the eulogies he received upon death easy to write. His “genius” was credited in the Times with bestowing upon humanity the gifts of the electric light, the phonograph, the motion-picture camera, and “a thousand of other inventions,” hyperbole that confused the patent count with separate wonders. The asterisk that should have been attached to each major invention was long gone and history became the simplest form of story: In the beginning, before Edison, there was only darkness. The governor of New Jersey suggested that everyone in the state turn off their lights at 7:00 P.M. on the day of the funeral “as a reminder of what life would have been like if the inventor of the incandescent light had never lived.”

  Edison was given credit not only for bestowing light upon benighted humanity, but also for making life worth living. When John Ott, seventy-five, a retired employee who had spent his entire working career with Edison, was told of Edison’s death, he took the news hard, even though it could not have been a surprise. Ott died within hours, and his death was attributed to “shock” because he was “so stunned by the news of the master’s passing,” according to fellow former employee Francis Jehl. Ott’s wheelchair and crutches were placed reverently at the foot of “his master’s” bier.

  Whether Ott felt quite as bereft as press accounts described is an open question, however. When Mary Childs Nerney had interviewed him earlier for her biography Thomas A. Edison: A Modern Olympian, Ott had observed with evident sadness that his children had grown up without knowing their father because he worked late every night at Edison’s side and never saw them. “Why did you do it?” Nerney had asked, and Ott replied, “We all hoped to get rich with him,” but he ruefully observed that the only ones who succeeded in that ambition were those who had left Edison’s employ.

  Employees, former or current, who harbored any bitterness toward Edison made no appearance in the send-off, which resembled a state funeral. For two days, his bier was placed in the library of his laboratory and made available for employees and the general public to file past and pay a silent farewell. Declining the offer of the governor for a military presence, his oldest employees formed themselves into an ad hoc honor guard, standing with folded hands and bent heads at the foot and head of the coffin, relieving one another at fifteen-minute intervals. Ten thousand people filed past on the first day, and forty thousand the second.

  Making New Jersey’s plan to turn off all lights a national one, President Hoover asked the country’s citizens to mark their sorrow at Edison’s death by turning off all electric lights simultaneously across the country on the evening of Edison’s funeral, at ten o’clock eastern time. He had considered shutting down generators to effect a perfectly synchronized tribute but realized that it might lead to deaths; even this thought was put in service of a tribute to Edison, for the country’s life-and-death dependence upon electricity, he said, “is in itself a monument to Mr. Edison’s genius.”

  Edison really had been privileged to hear his own eulogy in advance: The one read at the Light’s Golden Jubilee two years before was used again at his service. That night, the two radio networks, the National Broadcasting Company and the Columbia Broadcasting Company, jointly broadcast an eight-minute tribute that ended on the hour, when listeners were asked to turn out the lights. The White House did so and much of the nation followed, more or less together, some a minute before the hour, others on the hour. On Broadway, about 75 percent of the electrified signs were turned off briefly. Movie theaters went dark for a moment. Traffic lights blinked out. Everything seemed connected to Edison: the indoor lights, the traffic lights, the electric advertising, everyone connected via radio, which Edison now received credit for helping “to perfect.” In the simple narrative that provided inspiration for posterity, one man had done it all.

  His would be a hard act to follow, yet it was irresistible. All four of his sons chose to pursue careers in the invention business. The two eldest sons died not long after their father died. Thomas Edison Jr., after failing to make a living from his Ecometer, had ended up working for Thomas A. Edison, Inc., at the time of Edison’s death. He died in 1935 at the age of fifty-nine. William, the only one of the four who did not work for the company, maintained a laboratory in his home basement, tinkering with radio equipment and hoping to find the money to market a one-tube radio set that he designed. He died in 1937 at the age of fifty-eight.

  Charles and Theodore lived much longer but were not able to move away from the shadow of their father. Charles continued to direct the company, then was appointed secretary of the Navy and elected governor of New Jersey. He died in 1969 at the age of seventy-eight. Theodore left his brother’s side and set up a small technical consulting company. He died in 1992 at the age of ninety-four. Even then, sixty years after his famous father had died, Theodore’s life was defined by reference to the “Illustrious Father” mentioned prominently in the headline of his obituary.

  Neither Charles nor Theodore accepted their father’s belief that working in a technology-based business was itself a form of world betterment; both sons gave away substantial portions of their wealth. The enduring nature of an endowed foundation, such as the one that Charles established, shows the shortcomings of Thomas Edison’s neglect of the fundamentals of philanthropy. His scholarship program had run only two years, ending when he became too sick to attend to it.

  At the time of his death in 1931, Edison’s estate was estimated in the press to be valued at $12 million. As the culmination of a long lifetime in the business of invention, it is a sum t
hat says much or little about Edison’s career and acumen, depending upon one’s vantage point. Measured against Edison’s impecunious beginnings, it is a sizable figure, and larger than might have been guessed when he had appeared desperate for the research subsidies from Ford and Firestone for his rubber research. Still, the $12 million was not so large when Edison’s loyal employees measured his wealth against the total capitalization of the industries that they credited the great man for conjuring into existence, modestly claiming little of the resulting wealth for himself. The size of the estate seems modest, too, when placed next to the Ford Foundation’s endowment of $109 million and the $70 million estate for his family that Henry Ford left at the time of his death in 1947.

  The $12 million figure for the Edison estate turned out to be inflated and subject to the crushing effects of the Depression. Time passed while the will was processed slowly by the courts. Four years later, when the executors gave the court the first accounting, the value of the estate was put at $2.9 million, and reduced by 50 percent to $1.5 million by the time the second accounting of the estate was filed two years later in 1937. Mina Edison was not affected by the disappearing inheritance. Edison had placed Glenmont, other real estate, and stocks and bonds in her name, providing for her financial security without placing her in the will. This arrangement spared her from being caught in cross fire between her stepchildren and children over the disposition of the estate. Four years after Edison’s death, at the age of seventy, she remarried a seventy-three-year-old retired businessman whom she had known since childhood. She was widowed again five years later and died in 1947 at the age of eighty-two.

  The Edison family name was not carried by succeeding generations. Unlike Henry Ford, however, whose male heirs have handed down the Ford name through the present, when great-grandson William Clay Ford Jr. is the company’s executive chairman, Thomas Edison’s sons did not have children themselves. Only his daughter Madeleine Edison Sloane did so. The Edison family name, the symbolic repository of his fame, would not be passed on to a third generation.