Morgan

by Jean Strouse

  Morgan’s new house was the first private residence in New York entirely illuminated by Edison’s lights. Bare bulbs, singly and in clusters, are visible in the photographs of 219 in Artistic Houses—they didn’t need shades since the light they gave off was so dim. Engineers had installed a steam engine under the stables behind the house, and wired the building so that Morgan could light up the first floor, front hall, and cellar by turning a knob near the head of his bed. He remained resolutely committed to electric lighting, despite his father’s initial opposition, and even though Edison had not been able to keep the promise he made in 1878 to have a working system ready in a few weeks; there was still no system at the end of 1882.

  The wizard of Menlo Park had wanted “funds to push the light rapidly,” but wanted to spend them in his own way. His attorney, Grosvenor Lowrey, had from the outset been caught between the Edison Electric Light Company directors and an autocratic prodigy who had an “easily ruffled ego,” and “bristled whenever doubts of his eventual success were voiced.” At the end of December 1878, just weeks after the Light Company was organized, executive-board members complained that Edison had spent nearly $20,000 on new buildings—far more than they “had been led to suppose was necessary.” In the future, they wanted detailed vouchers for expenses.

  One morning a month later, Lowrey stopped by the Drexel, Morgan office and learned of a setback—Edison had discovered that the platinum wire filament used in his first lightbulb wouldn’t work. Morgan partners Fabbri, Drexel, and Wright, who owned EELC stock, jokingly asked Lowrey if he knew of anyone who wanted to buy their shares, but (Lowrey told Edison) “Mr. Fabbri looked serious.” As Lowrey made the case for scientific trial and error, urging patience, “Mr. Morgan stood by listening without saying anything.” The head of the bank had agreed to handle lighting patents in Europe, replacing Edison’s foreign agent, but details had not been worked out. One of the partners noted that Edison was about to draw on his European representative for $1,800 in patent fees, and that Morgan might not want to take over advancing such sums if he was losing confidence in the project.

  “Mr. Morgan spoke for the first time,” reported Lowrey, and said on the contrary, he had been waiting for just this kind of opportunity to settle with the agent on fair terms—he was quite prepared to go ahead as planned. An exultant Lowrey concluded that “these gentlemen” were not “to be very easily frightened away from a thing they once made up their mind to,” and urged his client to be completely frank with “our friends” at 23 Wall Street about whatever difficulties might arise: they would all learn from his experience.d

  Transforming a brilliant idea into a marketable system took far longer and cost far more than anyone initially expected, and as Edison worked to solve a range of technical problems, build large central power stations, and set up factories to manufacture the necessary equipment, some of his backers lost patience. The EELC had been set up to hold patents; its directors never intended to get involved in manufacturing. In the fall of 1879, the board refused to raise more capital on the earlier terms, considering (Lowrey told Edison) “that you agreed to give them an electric light and that they agreed to give you Fifty thousand Dollars.”

  The company increased its capital stock several times—to $480,000 in November 1880. Some of the new shares were issued to Edison in return for extensions of the initial patent agreements; most were sold for cash. To raise money for manufacturing companies, Edison sold much of his stock, borrowed against the rest, and tapped the savings of friends. The Morgan bank tendered informal advice. Fabbri warned his “Friend Edison” late in 1879 not to conduct public exhibitions of “your great invention” before testing them completely in the lab: though errors might be instructive for men of science, public failures were “extremely damaging” in business, and Fabbri wanted to make sure that “for your own sake as well as that of those interested with you every precaution is taken to insure the success you so well deserve.”

  At the end of 1880, Drexel, Morgan helped Lowrey incorporate an Edison Electric Illuminating Company, with $1 million in capital stock, to build a central power station on Pearl Street in downtown Manhattan. Pierpont took Jacob Rogers and Jack out to see Edison’s Menlo Park “invention factory” in January 1881, and two months later told his friend William W. Hoppin: “I think there is a good thing in this for all parties who undertake to introduce it properly into cities—and feeling this way I was very anxious you should derive the benefit of it for Providence.” Just how good a thing it was did not become widely known for a few more years. In the meantime, Drexel, Morgan held the company’s deposits, arranged its loans, managed Edison’s personal investments, and—just as Lowrey had predicted—effectively promoted incandescent light at home and abroad.e

  Thirty years after George Peabody advanced funds to display McCormick’s reaper, Colt’s revolvers, and Hoe’s printing press at London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition, his successors helped exhibit Edison’s light at world’s fairs. At the Paris Electrical Exposition in 1881, the Edison display attracted the attention of a French architect who put Edison lights in the foyer of the Paris Opéra, an American naval ensign who went on to develop electric street-rail systems in the United States, and the German engineer/industrialists Emil Rathenau and Werner von Siemens. In 1882 the Edison exhibit at another Crystal Palace fair led to the building of a central power station in London’s Holborn Viaduct. Pierpont had finally changed Junius’s mind: J. S. Morgan & Co. organized an Edison Electric Light Company in London in 1882, and in October of 1883 merged it with its chief rival to form the Edison & Swan United Electric Light Company, Ltd.

  “The greatest advantage Edison had over all rivals,” conclude the historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel, was the trust of “the wary and watchful men of Wall Street,” which gave him a “capability possessed by no inventor in history before him.” Edison chafed at times under the obligations to meet timetables and demands that came with using other people’s money, but after one round of struggle his secretary reported him “begin[n]ing again to think that DM&Co. are thorough good people to be associated with as although they may be a little hard in some things they do not make a lot of empty promises. If they undertake to do a thing they fulfill their contract not only to the letter but also in the spirit in which it was made.”

  Pierpont personally put Edison’s invention on prominent first-class display in New York. On September 4, 1882, the inventor walked from his just-completed central power station on Pearl Street down to Drexel, Morgan & Co., which had been wired with 106 electric lamps. Edison checked the installations. Minutes before 3:00 P.M., an electrician at Pearl Street turned on the current in a generator called Jumbo, after P. T. Barnum’s famous elephant. Precisely at 3:00, Edison flipped a switch at 23 Wall Street. A New York Times reporter noted that it was still daylight when the bulbs came on, but by 7:00 P.M., as the city grew dark, the electric light “showed how bright and steady it is … soft, mellow, and grateful to the eye.” The Herald added: “From the outer darkness these points of light looked like drops of flame suspended from jets.” Edison told the Sun: “I have accomplished all I promised.”

  Not quite. The cost of the Pearl Street station was nearly triple the original estimate, which made capitalists in other cities reluctant to invest in central power stations.

  The electrical system at Morgan’s new house got off to a less auspicious start than the one downtown. When the engineers finished the private installation at 219, Morgan asked Edison’s chief lieutenant, Edward H. Johnson, to inspect it. What did he think? Touring the building slowly, checking wires, sconces, and bulbs, Johnson said, “If it was my own I would throw the whole damned thing into the street.”

  “That,” Morgan replied, “is precisely what Mrs. Morgan says.”

  Not about to give up, Morgan asked Johnson to rewire the whole house before his family moved in. When the system was finally turned on, the steam-powered generator under the stables made so much noise and smoke that the
next-door neighbor complained. Morgan apologized. He had taken “great pains and precautions” to avoid these problems, he wrote, and would “spare neither exertion nor expense to correct” them: “Nothing but the fact that it would leave my house in entire darkness prevents me from stopping the Engine at once.”

  He called for repairmen, but the Edison company had a surfeit of projects on its hands in December of 1882, and its famous banker had to wait. After three weeks, Morgan wrote to the president of Edison Electric, Sherbourne B. Eaton: “I must frankly say that I consider the whole thing an outrage to me, as well as the neighbors—& I am unwilling to stand it any longer. Please let the matter have immediate attention.” In January, engineers set India Rubber supports under the engine, lined the housing with felt, and dug a trench across Morgan’s yard to funnel the smoke and steam through his own chimney, farther from the neighbors.

  Once these problems were solved, Morgan held a reception at 219 that introduced four hundred of his friends to Edison’s electric light. Then one night while the family was at the opera, the wiring in the library set the banker’s desk on fire. Johnson came to inspect the damage early the next morning. “The house was pervaded by a strong smell of wet, burned wood and burned carpet,” he later recalled. The library floor had been torn up, and the desk, heavy rug, and assorted charred objects were piled in the center of the room.

  Suddenly Johnson heard footsteps: “Mr. Morgan appeared in the doorway with a newspaper in his hand, and looked at me over the tops of his glasses.

  “ ‘Well?’ he said.

  “I had formulated an explanation, and was prepared to make an elaborate excuse. Just as I opened my mouth to speak, Mrs. Morgan appeared behind Mr. Morgan, and as I caught her eye she put her finger on her lips and then vanished down the hall. I said nothing, but looked at the heap of débris.”

  Morgan finally asked Johnson what he was going to do.

  Make the system safe, the engineer replied. He himself was to blame for the wiring—there was nothing wrong with the lights.

  How long would it take?

  Johnson: “I will do it right away.”

  “All right,” said the banker. “See that you do.”

  Morgan stayed with this experiment at considerable personal inconvenience and cost. He knew from financing railroads, the Atlantic Cable, and the St. Louis Bridge how much difficulty could lie between a good idea and a working result. Not all of Edison’s early supporters had similar stamina. The William H. Vanderbilts installed electricity in their new houses in 1882, but when crossed wires set fire to the picture gallery, Mrs. Vanderbilt gave up. Edison took the whole installation out.

  Morgan’s children responded in character to this venture. “Certainly this is the age of electricity,” Jack told Louisa from St. Paul’s in 1883. “In our reading room they take a paper called ‘Scientific American’ and in looking through that I saw only about three new inventions that were not connected in some way with electricity. It makes one very much ashamed of not knowing more about it than one does.”

  Louisa attended a costume party in the early eighties as “the spirit, it could hardly be called the ghost, of electricity,” reported the Herald. “She was gowned in electric green satin, covered with a net work of embroidery done in electric wire.” There were electric ornaments in her hair, and at the touch of a button concealed in the folds of her dress, all the tiny bulbs lit up. What kind of battery animated her electrifying appearance the Herald did not say.

  The American rage for “reinventing everything, especially the house” extended to country as well as city properties in the 1880s, and with his family ensconced at 219, Morgan decided to expand and modernize Cragston. He had acquired additional land at Highland Falls, which brought the total to 675 acres, and in 1886 engaged the Boston architects Peabody & Stearns to remodel his Hudson Valley farmhouse. Like his Manhattan brownstone, this rural retreat was relatively unpretentious by the standards of the Gilded Age: George W. Vanderbilt constructed a French château called Biltmore on 130,000 acres in North Carolina at a cost of $3 million—with “league-long marble halls” and “alternate Gothic and Palladian cathedrals,” reported Henry James.

  Peabody & Stearns were known for respecting the contexts of their buildings and for balancing “picturesque” style with organic coherence. The firm had designed New York’s Union League Club, Harvard’s Hemenway Gym, and houses throughout New England, including a boxy rustic cottage in Northeast Harbor, Maine, for Harvard’s president Charles W. Eliot. To the wood-frame house at Cragston, Robert Swain Peabody added asymmetrical new wings with wide bays, a Palladian window above the entrance, a conservatory, a full third story with gables and eaves, a widow’s walk, and a piazza facing south and east for panoramic views of the Hudson. Inside, he rearranged walls to provide fewer, larger rooms, more bathrooms, a library, and a wine cellar—all under Morgan’s close surveillance. Someone penciled on one of the architect’s drawings: “These steps are not right. Mr. M. asked to have them changed,” and on another, “Mr. M. does not want a bath here but thinks a slop sink is all that is required.” The cost of the alterations, plus a new dairy and several cottages, came to $76,000—$16,000 more than the price of the entire farm in 1871, but probably less than an outbuilding for the “Granderbilt” palazzi.

  Pierpont was not as wealthy as the industrial tycoons, and shared some of his father’s concern not to give the impression that the Morgan bankers cared more for their own pleasure than for the interests of their clients. Still, he had always treated himself and his friends to whatever he considered “the best” in the way of luxury and comfort, and his indulgence increased with his means. He sent bushels of oysters, terrapins, and Cragston apples to his London partners every Christmas, and in New York took large parties to the new Metropolitan Opera House and to private Patriarchs’ Balls (the fifty members of the exclusive Partriarchs’ Association gave two to three balls a season). He had a saddle of Newport lamb delivered to 219 twice a week by a Rhode Island butcher, cases of whiskey sent up from Kentucky, and bottles of brandied fruit and tins of cream biscuits awaiting him at the White Star dock every time he sailed. His suits were custom-tailored in London. For his annual Fourth of July picnics at Cragston, crews of men fired torpedoes and rockets from the Hudson River shore. One afternoon in the eighties, he spent 275,000 francs ($55,000) on jewelry at Tiffany’s in Paris. And one spring he sent his wife a French chef. Fanny had just fired her American cook, complaining that the woman “asks $50 per month and is worth about $25.” Shipping a Frenchman across the Atlantic and setting him up in New York would cost far more, but Pierpont thought it worth the expense. Fanny did not. “A ‘male foreigner’ will know little about American cooking,” she protested, “and less about American ways.”

  Morgan paid little attention to cost for things he really wanted—house, yacht, painting, necklace, dress, horse, dog—but did not like to pay more than he had to for other people’s work. He knew that strangers would try to overcharge him, and when the contractors turned in a bid for the new Cragston dairy, he told Peabody & Stearns he had no intention of “going ahead on such a basis. I understand it is nearly double what Mr. Vanderbilt’s dairy cost, which from all accounts is too high.” A more chilling example: when a maid he brought to Europe for Louisa one year spent the entire Atlantic crossing seasick in her bunk, Louisa wanted to send the girl to Germany to recover, “but Papa says no,” she told Fanny. “He says that to give her so much money for being with us eight weeks, and then after finding her perfectly useless for almost two of those weeks, to send her away for two or three more of them would be perfectly absurd.”

  With the rise in Morgan’s means and public prominence came a dramatic increase in requests for financial help. In 1884 he put up the last $4,000 for the Groton School in Massachusetts, founded by the Reverend Endicott Peabody (called the Rector), the son of Junius’s former partner, S. Endicott Peabody. He gave free investment advice to friends, including William Wetmore Story, the
American sculptor in Rome, whom he advised late in 1884 not to keep all his “eggs in one basket”: if Story sold some of the eggs and sent the proceeds to New York, Morgan would “invest in safe securities productive of income.”

  He gave hundreds of gifts each year to hospitals, museums, the Episcopal Church (over $200,000 to St. George’s in 1887 alone), and individual members of the clergy; and he made personal loans, usually without expectation of repayment, to artists such as Story’s son Waldo and the painter Luther Terry, to other people whose work he admired, and to some who simply needed help. One of the latter was Lizzie Darling, the “E.D.” whom he had courted in Hartford and Boston years before. She had never married, and was living in Dedham, Massachusetts. In 1886 Pierpont paid some of her taxes and the interest on a loan. A year later he advised her to sell bonds to pay off the loan, and regretted not having seen her recently: “If you get in difficulty for current expenses,” he offered, “let me know and I’ll send you a cheque.”

  She did—and he did—but he was not willing to subsidize her indefinitely. Six years later he wrote kindly but firmly, “My dear Lizzie, It is true that I have received your various notes and ought really to have answered them but I did not like to say no, and in the face of your assurance that the last remittance I made would be all that you would need, and in the face of the many demands upon me from all quarters, I felt that I had gone as far as I ought; however I do not wish to leave you in the lurch and therefore enclose my cheque as you request for $300, but you will not misunderstand me when I say that this is as far as I should be willing to go. With kindest regards I am always sincerely yours.…”