Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Mina and all the children were at Edison’s bedside when he died at 3:24 A.M. on Sunday 18 October.

  * * *

  —

  TWO MINUTES LATER, the high wall clock in his laboratory library stopped ticking.22 Its pointers maintained their acute angle for the next three days while Edison, clad in an old-fashioned frock coat, lay beneath in an open coffin. Ten thousand mourners filed past to stare at his waxen profile. “A marvelous, powerful face,” the sculptor James Earle Fraser remarked. “The beautiful, full forehead, the nose, the mouth, the chin…The hands, too, are wonderful. Delicate, sensitive nails and fingertips, yet withal they show great power.”23

  To gawkers less fixated on flesh, the surrounding gallery could be seen as a sort of wooden cranium, packed with evidence of Edison’s searching intellect. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Staired book stacks, rising to triplex height above the floor, held thousands of scientific and technological tomes, along with runs of periodicals alphabetically devoted to aeronautics, automobiles, chemistry, construction trades, drugs, electrical engineering, hydraulic power, mechanics, metallurgy, mining, music, philosophy, railroads, telegraphy, and theater. (He left unthumbed those on mathematics, one of the few disciplines that bored him.) A corner pedestal mysteriously supported a 486-pound cube of solid polished copper. Panels and vitrines glittered with mechanical models, crystals, chunks of ore, medallions, and gold-stamped awards, along with a framed misquotation: “There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.”24

  All the library’s lamps were dimmed except for the soft radiance cast by a globe-bearing marble figurine, Aurelio Bordiga’s Genius of Electricity. The shabby old rolltop desk that Edison had insisted on using, in defiance of the splendor of the room, stood against one wall, temporarily shunted aside to make way for his bier. One of its pigeonholes was stuffed with memoranda for inventions he had meant to get around to. A shadowy alcove half-concealed the blue-covered cot that Mina had installed for his catnaps—even though he had always been happy to stretch out on a workbench, with one arm for a pillow, deaf to the conversations around him.

  Now his head rested on silk. An honor guard of veteran employees kept watch at each corner of the catafalque. The library’s normal bookish mustiness was made fragrant by strewn red oak leaves and floral wreaths. Adding to the aura of sanctity were prayers intoned every few hours by the minister of the West Orange Methodist Episcopal Church. They were read at Mina’s request, in defiance of her husband’s oft-stated, vehement agnosticism. Dr. Howe tried to make reporters believe that Edison had expressed religious sentiments toward the end. But the only mystical remark he could recall was “If there is life hereafter, or if there is none, it does not matter.”25

  A private funeral was scheduled for Wednesday at an unstated hour. Meanwhile an international avalanche of tributes poured in, attesting to the fact that Edison had done more to irradiate the planet than any agent save the sun. “An inventive spirit,” Albert Einstein cabled from Berlin, “has filled his own life and all our existence with bright light.” Henry Ford declared that the dead man’s achievement was “etched in light and sound on the daily and hourly life of the world.” Even President Hoover was moved to eloquence: “He multiplied light and dissolved darkness.”26

  Unquoted among all the panegyrics was the frankest of Edison’s self-appraisals, recorded some twenty years before: “Everything on earth depends on will. I never had an idea in my life. I’ve got no imagination. I never dream. My so-called inventions already existed in the environment—I took them out. I’ve created nothing. Nobody does. There’s no such thing as an idea being brain-born; everything comes from the outside. The industrious one coaxes it from the environment; the drone lets it lie there while he goes off to the baseball game. The ‘genius’ hangs around his laboratory day and night. If anything happens he’s there to catch it; if he wasn’t, it might happen just the same, only it would never be his.”27

  * Edison averaged one patent for every ten to twelve days of his adult life. The complete list, arranged by number and execution date, is available online at edison.rutgers.edu/​patents. It does not include inventions, such as the X-ray fluoroscope, that he chose to leave patent-free.

  Edison collecting botanical specimens, circa 1927.

  AT SEVENTY-THREE, WITH his wartime career as president of the Naval Consulting Board behind him, Edison tried to make sense of a new intellectual order that challenged everything he had learned of Newtonian theory. Abstract thought did not come easily to him. “My line of sorrow,” he wrote, “lies in the realm of technical science.” He needed to feel things come together under his hands, see the filament glow, smell the carbolic acid, and—as far as possible for a near-deaf man—hear the “molecular concussions” of music.1

  Laws such as those of Faraday’s electromagnetic induction and Ohm’s relation of current, voltage, and resistance he understood, having applied them himself in the laboratory. But now, if only to slow as much as possible the entropy of his own particles (the fate of all systems, according to Lord Kelvin), Edison studied Einstein’s general theory of relativity.2 The recent solar eclipse had persuaded him, along with the academic scientists he mocked as “the bulge-headed fraternity,” that the theory was valid—even if it failed to suggest any correlation between his attempt to measure the total eclipse of 1878 and his subsequent perfection of incandescent electric light.3

  The urtext of the theory, as translated by Robert Lawson, defeated him after only eleven pages. “Einstein like every other mathematical mind,” he scrawled in the margin of his copy, “has not the slightest capacity to impart to the lay mind even an inkling of the subject he tries to explain.” He turned for help to an interpretive essay—Georges de Bothezat’s “The Einstein Theory of Relativity: A Glance into the Nature of the Question”—and filled thirty-one notebook pages with scrawled paraphrases of its main points.4

  Gravitation is due to the retardation in velocity of the ultimate particle in passing through the fixed aggregates of matter. Ultimate particles fill the whole of space and proceed in every direction….

  He could imagine that at least in terms of his own observation, forty years before, of the thermionic emission of carbon electrons in a lightbulb after evacuation—a mysterious darkening since known as the “Edison Effect.” It was about as far as he ever got in his search for a “new force” in electrochemistry. Disparaged at the time by his peers, he now knew that he had discovered, if not recognized, the phenomenon of radio waves eight years before Heinrich Hertz.

  Wireless waves cannot proceed thru space but thru Matter in combination with the ultimate particle….From this, if true, all matter is formed of the same material.

  Edison had once teased a science fiction writer with the notion of interchanging atoms of himself with those of a rose. He noted that Einstein envisaged particles in space with common axes converging into solidly constituted “rings,” while others remained ethereal.*1 Hence the “primal ring” of the solar system, with its interplanetary nothingness.

  We now have matter in a form which is polar & capable of producing what we call Magnetism & Electricity.

  The religion boys, of course, would protest that what drew particles together was the will of God. Edison was as ready as Einstein to believe in a “Supreme Intelligence” made manifest by the order and beauty of the stars, and equally reluctant to personalize it: “I cannot conceive such a thing as a spirit.” The furthest he would go in the direction of metaphysics was to imagine the subcellular particles of a human being as “infinitesimally small individuals, each itself a unit of life.”5

  These units work in squads—or swarms, as I prefer to call them—and…live for ever. When we “die” these swarms of units, like a swarm of bees, so to speak, betake themselves elsewhere and go on functioning in some other form or environment. If the units of life which compose a
n individual’s memory hold together after that individual’s death, is it not within the range of possibility…that these memory swarms could retain what we call the individual’s personality after the dissolution of the body?

  Having thus anticipated by more than a century both swarm intelligence and DNA inheritance theory, Edison gave up trying to understand relativity and returned to the more tangible universe he preferred.

  A BIG BUMP FOR COOKIES

  As he saw it, his first order of business in the new decade was to reimpose his own—highly individual—personality upon Thomas A. Edison, Inc., the sprawling industrial conglomerate that he had been forced to neglect during the war. He chose not to notice that it had thereby done much better than it had in earlier years, when he had run its manifold activities—phonograph and record production, movie making, cement milling, storage battery development, and laboratory research—with such autocratic willfulness as to make his executives despair of ever influencing him.

  Edison was not an easy man to advise, being a combination of twinkling charm and bruising imperiousness. In his youth the charm had prevailed, but now that he was a septuagenarian and almost unreachably deaf, the urge to overbear had become a compulsion, and he had lost much of the bonhomie that had kept thousands of men working for him, and worshiping him, over the past half-century. Long gone was the perpetual hint of a smile flickering around the corners of his mouth, as if he were about to break into thigh-slapping laughter. The artist Richard Outcault remembered its radiance back in ’89, when “the boys” presented “the Old Man” with a gold and silver phonograph for his birthday. “Edison’s smile! [It] sweetened up the atmosphere of the whole building….As long as I live the sweet spirit that pervaded the atmosphere of the laboratory will always remain with me.”6

  Edison still moved with the jerky energy that kept him awake, and acting more decisively, than young men unable to match his eighteen-hour-a-day schedule. He regarded exercise as a waste of time, and sleep even more so. Since he was twenty, he had maintained his 175-pound, five-foot-nine-and-a-half-inch frame with only a few lapses, quickly corrected. (“I do believe I have a big bump for cookies.”) The most remarkable thing about his appearance, apart from the brilliance of the blue-gray eyes, was the largeness of his head, amplified by its thick mop of snowy hair. He wore custom-made size eight-and-a-half straw hats, and slashed the bands of his caps for comfort. His handshake was perfunctory and surprisingly cold. Monomaniacally focused on whatever current project interested him, he strode at a forward angle, hands in vest pockets, aware only of his destination and completely unconscious of time. He never wore a watch, and made no distinction between day and night, nodding off when he felt like it and expecting his assistants to follow suit. The same went for waking up. If two hours of rest was enough for him, he did not see why anyone else should want more.7

  Lovable as he was—or had been in the past—Edison did not return affection, beyond the occasional beaming familiarity, in which there was often a note of tease. He thought hurtful practical jokes—electrified washbasins, a wad of chewing tobacco spat onto a white summer suit, firecrackers tossed at the bare feet of children—were funny. Having made money easily all his life, thanks to phenomenal energy and the mysterious gift of imagination (his personal wealth, at latest calculation, was almost $10 million),*2 he was unmoved by the lesser luck or ill fortune of others, and casual about the loneliness of his wives. Now, returning to his laboratory desk in 1920, he was determined to teach Charles Edison a thing or two about running a large corporation.

  NOTHING’S RIGHT AND ALL IS CHANGE

  For four years Charles had been under the impression that he, not his father, was the chief executive of Thomas A. Edison, Inc. His formal titles were chairman of the board and general manager, but now that the Old Man had come home from the navy, reasserting command and firing off orders like grapeshot, he felt demoted. There was little he could do about it, since Edison had never relinquished the title of president.8

  Charles Edison, circa 1920.

  Charles was nearing thirty, married but childless, an oddly divided personality. At work he was the quintessential businessman, cautious, courteous, efficient, and fair. The patrician manners of Hotchkiss and MIT sat easily on his sober-suited shoulders. Small and wiry (Edison called him “Toughie”), he was a handsome man, with heavy-browed eyes of the palest blue. In later life he would develop a startling resemblance to his father.

  At home or in the Greenwich Village cafés he loved to frequent, Charles was a bohemian. For two years he had helped run an avant-garde theater off Washington Square, commuting back nightly to West Orange on the “owl” train. He spoke fluent French, composed songs with titles like “Wicky Wacky Woo,” attracted squads of young women, and wrote quantities of light poetry under the nom de plume “Tom Sleeper.”9

  He had displayed all the forceful spirit of extreme youth when he became chairman in June 1916. Until that moment, Edison’s skinflint, union-busting management style had made the West Orange complex “the last place at which men desired to work.” Charles had taken advantage of his father’s naval appointment to bring in some younger, more progressive executives, while decentralizing Edison Industries into a web of largely independent divisions, serviced by an administration in charge of communal interests. He prided himself on having “put the business on a little more humane basis,” and expanding it so judiciously that by 1920 Thomas A. Edison, Inc., with eleven thousand employees, was admired for its generous pay, medical, and social policies.10

  Charles’s dread was that the returned Commodore, already harrumphing that the company was too large and too loose, would move to dismantle his “beautiful organization” and reestablish totalitarian control. If so, there was bound to be blood on the boardroom floor. The prospect was enough to make Charles, whose health tended to be psychosomatic, sick with apprehension. He revered Edison as “Father, Boss & Hero,” and half-welcomed his reassumption of power at the plant.11

  “When he is here,” he wrote Mina, “I always feel that there is a safe harbor to go into if the weather gets too rough for me on the open sea.”12

  WE ARE ALONE

  March found Edison, as usual, at Seminole Lodge, his winter estate in Fort Myers, Florida. What was less usual was the absence of any children to stay. “Papa and I are sitting under the trees, just where Charles was married,” Mina wrote her second son, Theodore, a freshman at MIT. “It is blissfully quiet and we are alone….It has never happened in 34 years.”13

  To her pleased surprise, Edison showed no inclination to start another of his countless experimental notebooks. The failure of Washington paper-pushers to adopt a single one of his forty-five inventions and plans as the navy’s top defense adviser seemed to have crushed his creativity—for how long, she could not tell. He was particularly hurt by their transformation of his pet project, a naval research laboratory to be located far from Washington and staffed by civilian scientists, into a service facility just downriver from the capital, where “mentally inbred” career officers were sure to suppress any innovative ideas.14

  Aerial photograph of Thomas A. Edison, Inc., 1920s.

  Edison had come to despise government bureaucrats, seeing them as a blight on democracy. In his disgust he had just turned down a medal for his defense work, arguing that he deserved it no more than any other member of the Naval Consulting Board. He said he had lost interest in weapons of war—not to mention respect for the patent and copyright clause of the U.S. Constitution, “and the other 27,946 books filled with laws.”15

  Mina luxuriated in her husband’s company. Normally, unless guests were around, she had to settle for birdsong. A passionate amateur ornithologist (“My dream is a natural aviary”), she rarely went out of doors without binoculars. Her curiosity about all feathered things extended to their habitat, and she was as schooled in the Latin names of trees and shrubs as she was with
those of birds. Early on, it had been a frustration to her that biology was the one natural science Edison ignored—beyond scouring the world for bamboo fibers to carbonize in his lamps, or rare resins to bake into his phonograph records. But in later life he had begun to study botany, collecting and identifying specimens on rural jaunts and taking pleasure in the variety of plantings around Seminole Lodge. He talked now of setting out some groves of red and black mango and Louisiana cup oak, for a possible sideline in veneer cutting. To prepare, Edison read academic papers on the vegetation of Florida, and made sure that his estate manager understood the fine art of squashing the “slippery lumps” in wet humus.16

  A LOOSE PIECE OF LEATHER

  With the insensitivity that characterized his dealings with all his children, he upstaged Charles at a conference of “Ediphone” dictating-machine distributors in West Orange that summer.17 Nobody expected Edison to address the audience personally, since it was well known that he never spoke in public. Instead, he gave Charles a speech he had written and asked him to read it from the podium.

  During the discourse, Edison sat unhearing and apparently unaware that he was the focus of all eyes. His own attention became fixed on his right shoe. He bent down to unlace it, then, in the words of a reporter present, “took it off and pruned a loose piece of leather from the sole with a jackknife.” Discovering that the sole itself was detached, he peered and poked at it as if he were back at his workbench in the laboratory.