Edison

by Edmund Morris

  By now the only person in the room not fascinated by the shoe was Charles, still gamely speaking. Edison sensed the stare of the crowd, looked up, and received an amused ovation. He felt obliged to explain, in a voice overriding his son’s, “I went over to New York to buy a pair of shoes, and found they were asking $17 and $18 a pair—”

  Charles had no choice but to let him proceed.

  Edison said he would not pay that kind of money for pointy-toe footwear. Instead, he had gone to a bargain basement and bought a pair of Cortlands for six dollars. He then launched into a harangue on extortion by haberdashers that segued somehow into a demand for greater productivity from his employees.

  By the time he allowed Charles to go on reading, it was evident to the audience that the Old Man was back in charge.

  HIRIN’ AND FIRIN’

  Edison’s complaint about inflated prices was not entirely the affectation of a rich man. The shoe he held in his hand may have represented inventory that the Cortland Company was desperate to unload.18 Overproduction during the postwar boom, stimulated by rapacious consumption, easy credit, and addictive speculation, had caused such a rise in the cost of living that men of his age, remembering the panics of ’73 and ’93, could see that the American economy was again a bubble close to bursting. In fact, it had burst already, manifesting itself in millions of canceled orders and a recent 25 percent increase in railroad rates that made cash-poor farmers slaughter their horses for hog feed. Salaried city dwellers felt the inrushing cold air of a major depression, and reacted with a halt to optional purchases. Luxuries like phonographs (until now the topmost item on the Edison profit sheet) stacked up unsold. Shabbiness became the new chic. Women recycled last year’s dresses, and men had their suits “turned,” shiny side in. William McAdoo, President Wilson’s former treasury secretary, publicly sported trouser patches. For once in his life, even Edison began to look fashionable.19

  On 16 September a wagon bomb packed with shrapnel exploded opposite the headquarters of J. P. Morgan & Co. on Wall Street, killing thirty-two pedestrians and injuring hundreds of others. Investigators blamed the disaster on anarchists. But to financiers, a coincidental sharp drop in the Dow Jones industrial was an even louder inducement to panic. Henry Ford slashed the price of his basic Model T, hitherto hard to keep in the showroom, from $575 to $440. General Motors followed suit. The Chicago billionaire Samuel Insull—Edison’s former private secretary—had to borrow $12 million in personal funds to keep his web of power companies together. Deflation set in, at a rate unparalleled in American history.20

  Edison waited no longer than October to initiate a purge of most of the employees his son had hired during the war. He believed that the slump left him no choice but to trim the payroll and increase automation—in both cases, if necessary, by half. He did not scruple to fire some of his own long-serving aides as well. “Poor Charles I fear is pretty much crushed,” Mina wrote Theodore.21

  As diplomatically as she could, she tried to persuade her husband to give up his lifelong habit of command. She had to do so in writing, rather than shout in his right ear:

  My darling—

  It is beautiful to see you a tower among the young men—Charles, John, Fagan, Mambert, Maxwell, etc —and I do love to see you quietly counselling with them, giving them the benefit of your wisdom and experience.

  I and all have so admired your giving the work over to Charles and backing him up in his efforts….

  You have made a success of your life—built up tremendous industries successfully so you have nothing more to prove to the world that you are capable—All know it—Can’t you be happy in just letting the boys struggle along, with you to guide them….Charles is all for you—He stands by you at all times and is with you, wanting to please you in every way. He always puts up your side and will never let any one say a thing contrary to your praise—Don’t misjudge him.

  Success makes success—and if you will only let Charles feel that you do appreciate him you will make him and all happier. Forget a little bit that you are Charles’s manager and be a father—a big father!22

  Mina might have shouted into Edison’s other deaf ear, for all the notice he took of her letter. Charles, he declared, needed to have the “conceit” knocked out of him. The tension between father and son grew to the point that Mina forbade them to talk business during a family lunch. As a result, she told Theodore, “Papa never opened his mouth during the whole meal.”23

  There was a temporary truce in November after Edison and Charles both voted, as Republicans, to send Warren Gamaliel Harding to the White House. Harding’s huge win over James L. Cox (announced that night by a tiny startup station calling itself “8ZZ” in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) repudiated the cloudy idealism of the war years. But for as long as the stroke-enfeebled Woodrow Wilson remained in office, the election did nothing to bolster consumer confidence. By late December bank presidents were committing suicide, homeowners losing their all to sheriffs (Edison knew what that felt like), and “Billy” Durant, the founder of General Motors, was out of a job.24

  Edison had no intention of sharing Durant’s fate. Working eighteen hours a day and often not returning home until dawn, he increased the savagery of his purge, dismissing the whole of Charles’s personnel department before Christmas (“Hell, I’m doin’ the hirin’ and firin’ round here”) and laying off 1,650 employees of the Phonograph Works. He jettisoned five-sixths of the engineering force and a like proportion of bookkeepers, clerks, artists, copywriters, salesmen, and talent scouts. Those who survived had their wages slashed and were told to forget about Christmas bonuses. In the process, Edison destroyed his old image as a benevolent autocrat, and Charles lapsed into despair.25

  A TRIO OF THORNS

  Among those caught short by the depression were Edison’s children by his first marriage. Disdained by Mina as genetically inferior to her own brood, they had been for more than thirty years a trio of thorns in their father’s side. Marion at least had done him the favor of settling in Europe and marrying a German army officer. But now, at forty-seven, she wrote to complain that Oberst Oscar Öser was an unfaithful, abusive husband. She was hiding from him in Switzerland, and if Edison did not send the money she needed for a divorce, she might throw herself into the Rhine.26

  Thomas Alva Edison, Jr., forty-four, was a sad ne’er-do-well, perpetually broke and ailing. Although he ran a mushroom farm, he had long tried to market inventions under his famous name. The latest was a fuel-saving automotive device that he wanted his father to sponsor. Earlier in the year Mina had been terrified that Tom’s wife might give birth to a Thomas Alva Edison III. “Poor papa and poor us!” The pregnancy, like others of Beatrice’s, had mysteriously evaporated. She claimed to be a nurse, but there was reason to believe that she had once practiced a much older profession.27

  William, forty-two, was a jock turned clubman, large, loud, defensively jovial. Like Tom, he was a would-be inventor who settled for a malodorous variety of farming—in his case, poultry. William admitted to his father’s secretary, Richard Kellow, that he owed Edison $8,347.36 for a tractor and other items of machinery. “Tell him to cheer up, all is not lost, that I’m not dead yet.” In the meantime he needed further funds: his wife Blanche was facing a $500 medical procedure.28

  Edison gave Marion a monthly allowance of $200, agreed to test but not endorse Tom’s Ecometer, and told Kellow to deny William’s appeal. “Find out why he don’t sell the tractor.”29

  HAIL THE MASTER

  In the new year of 1921 Edison, alarmed by a free fall in phonograph sales, went on a rampage of additional firings that had even well-wishers questioning his stability. “The Old Man is certainly out of his mind,” Miller Reese Hutchison, the company’s former chief engineer, wrote in his diary. “Breaking up his organization and seems pointing to a ‘bust up.’ ”30

  Edison showed no sympathy for di
smissed employees who had failed to save for hard times. “I do not believe in unemployment insurance.” Mina reported the new purge to Theodore in anguished letters, sometimes two a day. “What can we do to have father dear see that he is crushing all the spirit throughout the plant?…I wish he would calm down and let Charles manage things.” A few days later: “Papa is tired to death and Charles is just about at the end of his string.”31

  She did not know how near Charles was to resigning over the closure of another of his creations, the Power Service Division. He wrote a bitter poem on the theme of one of Edison’s favorite maxims, “Nothing is permanent but change.”32

  Changes bring but other changes;

  Progress runs in Error’s ring;

  Plans are made, but Change deranges;

  Hail the master; Change is king.33

  Charles later admitted to wanting to leave the company rather than tolerate the humiliations his father heaped on him. One of these was Edison’s public remark that Thomas A. Edison, Inc., had lost efficiency during the war “due to the negligence of those who were supposed to be watching it.”34

  Charles could not deny that the company’s profit sheet, substantial in 1919 and 1920, was reddening toward a loss of more than $1 million this year. But the depression, not his own management, was at fault: nationwide, corporate profits plummeted by 92 percent. One of the Phonograph Division’s biggest competitors, the Columbia Company, had to float a $7.5 million bond issue, at ruinous interest, just to pay for a forest’s worth of cabinets it could not sell. U.S. Steel, the nation’s first billion-dollar trust, was in the process of firing one hundred thousand workers.35

  Edison saw, with eyes older and colder than his son’s, the necessity of similar action at a time when industrial wages were draining eighty-five cents out of every budgeted dollar. He kept pointing out that he had started out in business at age eleven. “I’ve been through half a dozen of these depressions. I know how they work, and it’s got to be this way or we’ll go broke.” By February Charles’s protests had weakened into second guesses that Edison, who often made a convenience of being deaf, ignored.36

  One night, brooding in bed, Charles heard himself say, “There’s a possible chance that he may be right and I may be wrong.”37

  A SHAKER LIKE RAPPOLD

  Edison’s preoccupation with staff and wage cuts did nothing to assuage his inventive drought.38 The only patent applications he had filed since 1919 were for improvements to his elegant alkaline storage battery of a decade before. Now, revisiting another old technology, he spent every available hour in the experimental recording studio Charles had built on Columbia Street across from the plant, trying for the fifth time in his career to perfect the sonics of Edison music products.

  To most ears, the Phonograph Division’s new take of Marie Rappold and Carolina Lazzari singing Puccini’s “Tutti i fior” had remarkable fidelity, with flutes and tinkling percussion complementing the tessitura. When the two women went into duet, their voices seemed to shimmer. Edison could not stand it. Deaf as he was, he persisted in thinking he heard perfectly if he jammed the right side of his head close to the amplifier. “How could anyone who pretends to understand Music record such a Record,” he scribbled in his notebook. “All out of balance too loud wrong instruments, 2 singers can’t sing together & putting a shaker like Rappold in.”39

  It was too late for him to prevent the disk’s release, but he could at least wage war on what he saw as lapsed standards throughout the division, from studio to point of sale. He ordered fresh rosin to be applied to the horsehair of string instruments for every four hours of playing time. This would prevent the ribbons from wearing “square,” a phenomenon he had detected under the microscope. Plastic dust adhering to the grooves of any pressing should be whisked out with a sweep of the finest white Chinese bristles (an idea that came to him when he was brushing his teeth), and the phenolic varnish glossed with stearin for extra slickness under the reproducer.40

  Edison listening to phonograph records at home, 1920s.

  The therapy of working with sound again revived Edison’s spirits, if not those of the technicians he bullied. “Of all the children of his brain, the phonograph seems to be the one he loves most,” his personal assistant, William Meadowcroft, remarked. Mina rejoiced to see her husband becoming his old jocular self. At such times he affectionately called her “Billy,” the boyish name he had given her in the early days of their marriage. “It puts a bright hue on everything when he is happy and makes love to me as he is doing now,” she wrote Theodore.41

  FREE FALL

  Warren Harding was sworn in as president on 4 March 1921. A placid, middlebrow, middle-of-the-road midwesterner, he famously personified everything that was “normal” in America. Harding objected to extreme behavior, whether it was too emotional a reaction to the current state of economic affairs, or too precipitous an action to combat it.

  His inaugural speech echoed what Edison had been saying to Charles for the last five months. Citing the “delirium of expenditures” that had brought the depression on, Harding declared, “We must face a condition of grim reality, charge off our losses, and start afresh.”42

  If this sounded like a warning of governmental intervention, Harding soon made clear that by we he meant the 62 million adult Americans whose buying and selling influenced the economy. He waited for the invisible hand of the market to reassert itself, doing little more than appoint a distinguished group of aides to monitor it. They included Andrew Mellon as Secretary of the Treasury, and Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce. Prices continued their free fall.

  WHAT IS COPRA?

  Edison congratulated himself that spring on having gotten rid of thousands of “untrained and careless workers”—by one estimate, nearly a third of his eleven-thousand-man payroll—with further pink slips yet to be issued before Edison Industries was, in his opinion, slim and trim again. “You’re going to learn a big lesson out of this depression,” he said to Charles.43

  Apparently not caring that he had become the most hated man in West Orange, he worked on a new plan to replace highly paid executives with young men willing to work for less money. This meant a risky investment in recent college graduates. To ensure he got the best out of hundreds of desperate job seekers with degrees, he devised a questionnaire to bring out their general knowledge. Only 4 percent of his initial batch of applicants struck him as worth hiring. “The results of the test are surprisingly disappointing,” he announced in May. “Men who have gone through college I find to be amazingly ignorant.”44

  The contempt for higher education implicit in that remark was nothing new for Edison. It betrayed a prejudice much more complex than the anti-intellectualism of a small-town boy who had clawed his way to success with minimal schooling. Although his mother was his primary teacher, at home in Port Huron, Michigan, she had been a woman of enough culture to introduce him to Gibbon and Hume, even as he mastered R. G. Parker’s A School Compendium of Natural and Experimental Philosophy by himself. And his father—radical, randy, secessionist Sam—had “larned” him the complete works of Thomas Paine when he was still a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railroad.

  Edison’s reading in the sixty years since embraced few of the humanities but most of the sciences, as well as a wide range of magazines and newspapers. He now claimed to study twenty-seven periodicals, ranging from the Police Gazette and “the liberal weeklies” to the Journal of Experimental Medicine, plus five papers a day and “about forty pounds of books a month.” He was able to maintain this consumption because of his ability to flip pages fast and memorize whatever data appealed to him. “Nearly all my books are transcripts of scientific societies, which will never be republished.”45

  He was an energetic margin-scribbler, forever endorsing—or more often disagreeing with—passages that struck him. “This is young metaphysics over a pound of platinum,�
� he wrote above a chapter of Oliver Lodge’s Ether and Reality, and “Why lug bible sayings in” next to a passage on maternal love in Sherwood Eddy’s New Challenges to Faith. Quotations came easily to him, and he had a transatlantic sense of irony: “As La Rochefoucauld said, our virtues increase as our capacity for sin diminishes.” His erudition was beyond that of many university professors, let alone their graduate students. “From my experience,” the electrical theoretician George Steinmetz remarked, “I consider Edison today as the man best informed in all fields of human knowledge.”46

  Hence the frustration of a Cornell man who publicized seventy-seven Edisonian questions that he thought had unfairly disqualified him from a job at West Orange, such as “How is leather tanned?” “Who was Danton?” and “What is copra?” Another rejectee complained that he failed to see any useful connection “between the thyroid gland and selling incandescent bulbs, or between gypsies and talking machines, or attar of roses and sales production.”47

  Edison had not meant his questions to be leaked. He was obliged to draft another 113, but they too ended up in newspapers across the country, under such headlines as “IF YOU CANNOT ANSWER THESE YOU’RE IGNORANT, EDISON SAYS.”48

  Harper’s Magazine accused him of indulging in “philallatopism,” or pedantic pleasure in exposing the ignorance of other people. But the questions, though difficult, were not condescending:

  Which country drank the most tea before the war?

  What is the first line of The Aeneid?

  Where is the live center of a lathe?