by Alec Foege
One might conclude that the reason the young Thomas Edison failed to bring these early inventions to market had to do with the typical difficulties faced by budding entrepreneurs, mainly poor planning, poor luck, and simple business naïveté. But in the case of Edison, that would be the wrong conclusion.
In reality, it was the nature of Edison’s tinkering process that was standing in the way of success, not his lack of business acumen. Beholden to his investors, who each had his own strong ideas about the marketability of his inventions, Edison was trying to improve existing technologies rather than letting his mind wander wherever it wanted. Every time he tried to bring out a new version of an already familiar device, done in the name of good business sense, it fizzled due to the extremely competitive environment.
The one exception was his improvement on the printing telegraph, which was first invented by Edward Calahan. In early 1868, Edison was fortunate that one of the top gold and stock reporting companies was looking to expand into Boston and decided to use his printer for this new outpost. The vote of confidence enabled Edison to open his own gold and stock quotation service and resign from his job at Western Union.
From early in his career, Edison had exhibited a “primal and unvarying” need for absolute autonomy in his business endeavors, according to biographer Randall Stross. In July 1869, he left Boston to take a job in New York City, as superintendent of the Gold & Stock Reporting Telegraph Company, located in lower Manhattan. This was the big-league version of the company he had created in Boston. But shortly after that, Edison partnered with Franklin Pope, the man he replaced at Gold & Stock Reporting, to found Pope, Edison & Company. New commissions and an influx of cash from their financial backers soon enabled Edison to move to a larger workshop in Newark, New Jersey. By the early 1870s, he had achieved his dreams of running his own workshop, work on projects of his own choosing, and earn a decent living wage doing it.
But even running his own shop, Edison persisted in his practice of working on several projects at the same time. If he got stuck on one project he would “just put it aside and go at something else; and the first thing I know the very idea I wanted will come to me. Then I drop the other and go back to it and work it out.” An attorney he knew spoke admiringly of Edison’s “remarkable kaleidoscopic brain,” which produced countless variations of designs for each of his inventions, “most of which are patentable.” As for Edison, he frequently wrote in his notebooks at that time, “I do not wish to confine myself to any particular device.”
The telegraph that Edison had worked with at Western Union used a series of dots and dashes communicated electronically over wires. By the early 1870s, telegraph companies were on the hunt for any new technology that would allow the transfer of more messages over a telegraph line. One appealing solution was harmonic telegraphy, or acoustic telegraphy, which involved a network of vibrating reeds that allowed the simultaneous transmission of multiple messages. Edison spent much of 1875 trying to perfect his own acoustic transfer system.
Edison was aware of Alexander Graham Bell, just a few hundred miles away in Boston, toiling away on his experimental alternative to acoustic telegraphy. But Edison, like many others, felt the commercial potential of the telephone was limited. Bell’s background as a teacher of the deaf kept him focused on certain mechanical elements that aided in the reproduction of speech—Bell’s father, also an educator of the deaf, had devised the Visible Speech method of teaching the deaf to talk—even as he also pursued improvements in acoustic telegraphy along the lines of Edison’s.
After Bell demonstrated his newly invented telephone at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, Edison could no longer ignore it. Accounts of Bell speaking over a short distance via his device to British physicist William Thomson and the emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro, on June 25, 1876, were widely reported. By early July, Edison had started his own telephone-related experiments. A year earlier, he had sought to improve upon an early telephone prototype created by Philipp Reis. His idea was to improve the circuit by transmitting fluctuations in volume and tone by adjusting the current and resistance.
Another event relevant to Edison’s evolution as a tinkerer was the moving of his operations and his home in the spring of 1876 to Menlo Park, New Jersey, a farming community twelve miles south of Newark. Menlo Park was relatively rural and isolated in that era, but was conveniently located near the Pennsylvania Railroad line, halfway between Manhattan and Philadelphia.
The Menlo Park compound, some thirty-four acres in total, included the Edison home as well as a two-story laboratory building, one hundred feet long by thirty feet wide, built under the supervision of Edison’s brother Samuel. The second floor, which included a balcony overlooking cow pastures, was where Edison and his assistants would conduct most of their experiments; it included a wall of shelves filled with more than twenty-five hundred bottles of chemicals as well as a small work table tucked into a corner that served as Edison’s office. The first floor contained a machine shop, complete with a steam engine, as well as a collection of earlier inventions and prototypes, which Edison and his men plundered for spare parts.
It was at Menlo Park that Edison could finally be himself and work in a way that helped him to explore his own natural thought patterns more organically. His tinkering approach already had evolved quite substantially from his early days in the telegraph business, where the business interests of his financial backers had been the primary decider in how he spent his time.
At Menlo Park, Edison laid out his projects in true tinkerer fashion. He typically liked to work on and develop a wide variety of inventions at the same time. Surrounded by a relatively small group of friends and disciples, he would flit from project to project on a daily basis, inspecting work he had assigned to his employees and offering his own ideas for technical improvements. In 1877 alone, those projects included various iterations of his telephone technology, as well as telegraph devices, electric pens, mimeograph machines, sound-measuring instruments, chemical experiments, and even an early incandescent light prototype, which Edison pushed aside after it failed to illuminate for more than a few seconds.
To the outside observer, it would often appear that Edison lacked direction in his experiments. But by this point, the increasingly more confident inventor relied on serendipity as much as experimentation in arriving at workable, and perhaps more important, marketable solutions. Edison believed strongly in the role chance or accident played in discovery, something he considered separate from invention but just as crucial. “Discovery is not invention, and I dislike to see the two words confounded,” he once said. “A discovery is more or less in the nature of an accident. A man walks along the road intending to catch a train. On the way his foot kicks against something and . . . he sees a gold bracelet imbedded in the dust. He has discovered that—certainly not invented it. He did not set out to find a bracelet, yet the value is just as great.”
While Edison was not a scientist in the traditional sense—he was motivated by commerce as much as scientific discovery—his methods of invention incorporated some of the same approaches as those of scientists who typically worked on their theories for many years before achieving a breakthrough moment.
Still, Edison felt the influence of external factors, which had the habit of sidetracking his preferred approach to tinkering.
Pressured by the public attention on Bell’s telephone, Edison was forced to reconsider his opinion of what he previously termed “merely scientific toys.” Not the ideal person to be working on a telephone, since over time he had become nearly deaf, he nonetheless soldiered on in his quest. By 1877, Edison was actively working on what he perceived as the weakest element of Bell’s telephone, its transmitter. In Bell’s transmitter, a magnet was vibrated by sound waves and generated a variable current that, after traveling through the line, was then turned back into sound waves at the receiver.
While hardly passionate about his telephone, Edison was driven by his competitive nature to bes
t Bell’s invention. In addition to criticizing Bell’s transmitter, he ran down its receiver in speaking with colleagues, pointing out that it could not be used on longer lines because of poorly modulated current resistance.
Edison cycled through a series of telephone-related experiments over the next couple of years. Many touched on previous experiments he had done with carbon, an element with conductive properties uniquely suited to solving the current resistance problems Edison hoped to redress. In October 1876, he used a stick of Arkansas oilstone coated with graphite, carbon in its softest form, as a resistance medium in place of Bell’s magnet. The design he finally settled on, and for which he ultimately received a patent, was a carbon transmitter made of a parchment diaphragm with a tinfoil face that pressed up against a disk of hard rubber coated with plumbago graphite to complete the circuit. This device provided the pliability and sensitivity needed to respond differently to high and low notes, and therefore more accurately reproduce the varying modulations of the human voice.
In late 1877, Western Union officially identified the telephone as a real threat to its telegraph business, after Bell’s company began offering and selling private telephone lines to businesses. It quickly started up a subsidiary called the American Speaking Telephone Company, with $300,000 in assets, and snatched up all the related patents it could manage, including Edison’s loud and articulated carbon transmitter. Edison’s transmitter was so much better than Bell’s that the Bell Company would have been put out of business if it had not stumbled upon an unknown inventor named Emile Berliner, who had devised his own telephone transmitter employing scientific principles similar to those developed by Edison.
As a result of a yearlong lawsuit filed by the Bell Telephone Company against Western Union in September 1878 over what it claimed was Western Union’s pirating of Bell’s telephone receiver technology, the leading telegraph company agreed to withdraw from the fledgling telephone industry entirely. In exchange for the rental of telephones on its existing lines, Western Union received a 20 percent royalty, amounting to $3.5 million, from Bell Telephone. While the deal seemed like a smart one at the time, it gave Bell full control of America’s telephone industry.
Edison himself made his own dubious deal for his telephone technology. A few months prior to the Bell settlement, he brokered his own agreement with Western Union for his carbon transmitter, for $100,000, a handsome sum for the young inventor but a remarkably small sliver of the ultimate profits. Oddly, Edison made a special request that his fee be paid in seventeen annual increments of $6,000—he feared he would spend a lump payment too quickly—since the interest on $100,000 in savings likely would have paid that much.
Meanwhile, Edison set out on the task to develop a better receiver for his telephone. Starting in March 1877, he performed a series of experiments in search of an alternate receiver design, many of which used what Edison called the electro-motograph, a cylinder of chalk moistened with caustic soda and turned by a crank. An electromagnetic arm was held with tension to the cylinder by a spring, and when electricity was applied to the arm, it would vibrate and create a pattern on the chalk cylinder. By July, he had settled on one with a speaker composed of a diaphragm with an embossing point held against a sheet of paraffin paper, which he later exchanged for ridged tape not unlike that used for a stock ticker. On the night of July 18, 1877, after a midnight dinner with his workers, who were accustomed to working long hours, he stumbled upon a variation to his original idea while playing with some of the diaphragms they had constructed: Edison realized he could easily record sound and play it back later.
His first thought was that he had on his hands a business machine that far exceeded the usefulness of Bell’s infernal telephone. At least initially, telephones were employed in the same way as telegraph transmitters: a company employee would transmit the message verbally, instead of in Morse code, and it would be written down on the receiving end. Edison realized that a more useful device would be able to record the spoken message automatically. In his own account, Edison recalled how he subsequently devised a toy that used the sound vibrations of a telephone diaphragm to power a pulley that made a paper man saw wood. “Hence, if one shouted: ‘Mary had a little lamb,’ etc., the paper man would start sawing,” he explained.
But while Edison’s receiver did in fact reproduce sound beautifully, it was impractical as a telephone. Although it was able to receive speech well enough in laboratory conditions, it did little to further articulate the human voice over long stretches of phone line.
So he returned to his idea of an embossing telegraph repeater. In June 1877, he had made notes proposing the use of “thin copper or other metallic foil” rather than the ridged tape he had tried previously in an effort to sharpen and raise the volume of the human-sounding mutterings that emerged from the device upon playback. It wasn’t until November, however, that Edison had a detailed sketch of what he thought to be one of his most commercial projects to date: he would produce a telephone repeater, along the lines of the telegraph repeater, that would be useful for recording and reproducing sounds coming through Bell’s telephone.
Edison had no idea he was actually inventing something completely different.
The sketch of what he had in mind was a contraption that used “a cylinder provided with grooves around the surface” and wrapped with tinfoil, “which easily received and recorded the movements of the diaphragm.” A hand crank would be attached to the cylinder to rotate it. Then he assigned the job what he called a “piece-work price” of $18. This meant one of his company’s workmen would get the job as a challenge. If the workman failed to produce the machine properly, he would get his regular pay; but if he succeeded in building a working model, he would get the $18 also. It was an easy bet for Edison, who was not optimistic that what he had designed would work.
John Kruesi, the workman assigned to the project, apparently had no idea what the machine he was building would be used for when he started the job. When it was nearly done, he asked Edison what it was. When Edison told his employee that he was “going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back,” Kruesi thought it “absurd.”
But when the device was completed—with two diaphragms, each attached to a stylus and mounted on tubes on opposite ends of the cylinder—the effect was nothing short of astonishing. On December 6, 1877, Edison shouted the first few lines of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” into one of the diaphragms while he turned the hand crank. Then he turned the crank backward to where it had begun, removed the first diaphragm tube from the tinfoil, and replaced it with the other. Once again, Edison turned the hand crank forward. His voice played back almost perfectly. “I was never so taken aback in my life,” he said. “Everybody was astonished.”
On the morning of December 7, Edison and his business partner and associate Charles Batchelor hauled the new phonograph from his Menlo Park workshop to New York City and the offices of Scientific American, where he proceeded to demonstrate it for editor Alfred Beach and the other employees of the esteemed publication; according to Edison, so many people gathered around Beach’s desk that the floorboards were at risk of collapsing. He set up his phonograph and, as he had done in his workshop, he spoke into it while turning the crank, then reversed the cylinder back to its starting point, switched diaphragm arms, and played the result. The gathered crowd could hardly believe its ears. Many believed Edison’s demonstration was a parlor trick, the act of a skilled ventriloquist. The morning papers reported the event in tones of near disbelief. Two days later Edison filed a patent application for his “phonograph or speaking machine.”
The resulting Scientific American article, entitled “The Talking Phonograph,” published in the issue of December 22, 1877, brought Edison something he had neither sought after nor anticipated: fame. Reporters from major newspapers in the region descended on the Menlo Park studio, and were politely admitted by the inventor.
The fact that Edison, who had a plainspoken, down-to-earth manner about him,
good-naturedly answered questions posed by visitors no matter how silly or ill-informed, made him even more of a folk hero. He was admired by Americans who believed in the power of hard work, though those who were skeptical of his achievements hinted he had ties to the occult. Branded by some as a “wizard,” he became known as the “Wizard of Menlo Park.” Cognizant of the many potential uses for his phonograph, Edison liked to say that the phonograph would grow up to support him in his old age. In an article published in the North American Review in June 1878, called “The Phonograph and Its Future,” he detailed some of them, many of which would become reality: dictation without a stenographer; phonographic books for the blind; listening to music; recording the voices of family members as a keepsake; clocks that announced the time; the preservation of the words of great men; the recording of teachers’ instructions for students to refer to at a later date; and the making of permanent records of telephone transmissions. But for all of his sudden fame, Edison again met failure when it came to turning his invention into a business.
Unfortunately, Edison’s original tinfoil phonograph was far from user-friendly. It required superior manual coordination to operate. The tinfoil had to be wrapped around the cylinder at just the right level of tension, so that the stylus would leave a deep enough impression but not rip through the foil. Then the operator or a companion had to yell a message for, at the most, ten seconds, while cranking the feed screw at a consistent pace. To hear the recording, a playback stylus was placed at the beginning of the groove that had been made with the first stylus and the operator had to crank the machine at the same speed as it was originally recorded to get an accurate rendition of the original performance.
Furthermore, each tinfoil recording could only be played a few times before it wore out.
