Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Having taught himself how to crossbreed, he sat all day on his swivel seat in the laboratory, surrounded by dozens of goldenrods in flower. He delicately washed the anthers of some specimens, waited for them to dry, then brushed on the pollen of others, working with the patience of a miniaturist in watercolors.212

  In June he drafted a detailed sequence of goldenrod treatment for the instruction of his Florida staff. Seven extraction processes were to be performed with linked dispatch. First, low-temperature drying of the leaves to prevent oxidization of the rubber cells; then prompt powdering and purification with acetone; resaturation with benzol for rubber removal; partial distillation of the resultant solution; application of a coagulating agent to the concentrate; and finally, after the stiffened crude was run through a creping roller, hydration to wash out its chlorophyllous resins.213

  Edison was confident that the rubber of Solidago leavenworthii, being “not in the least sticky,” could be vulcanized, despite a troublesome “X compound” that affected all his percolations and weakened the springiness of the resultant elastomer.214 He said nothing publicly about his choice for the time being, knowing that if he did, the press would at once fantasize that he had discovered a miracle plant.*14

  I AM WRITING THIS

  His stomach continued to bother him into the summer, and he found the only relief he could get from abdominal contractions was to adopt an all-liquid diet. Henry Ford flew in a quantity of iced pasteurized milk from Detroit, but Edison preferred the fresh product of his estate brown cow—high in sugar, low in butterfat, still warm from the udder. She was not always cooperative, so he arranged with the Dobbins dairy in Fort Myers for backup supplies of Jersey milk, ordering twenty-four pints whenever he left town on a plant-collecting trip.215

  Mina noticed that his stomach was always worse when he was distracted from botanical work.216 She dreaded the day he would discover that Charles and Theodore were failing in their efforts to modernize entertainment technology at Edison Industries. Exactly as he had predicted, they had come to radio, electrical recording, and the long-playing disk too late and at too great a cost. They were now risking their father’s wrath by ending production of Blue Amberol cylinders, and the time was fast approaching when the Phonograph Division would have to shut down. Ironically, the one sonic instrument doing well—amid abundant profits elsewhere in the company—was the Ediphone dictating machine. His sons might have forgotten (though Edison had not) that he had visualized the phonograph as a business device from the moment it first spoke to him.217

  “Father is a little worried and upset over things just now,” Mina warned Theodore on the eve of her husband’s return to West Orange. “So just let him get settled and realize that it is not your work really that is annoying to him…but his experiments in rubber. It might make him irritable and critical so just understand and if anything does seem amiss be patient and know that it will pass.”218

  Evidently it did not. Edison, for whatever alimentary or executive reasons, behaved so tyrannically over Charles’s decision to manufacture a line of green “neutrodyne” radios—while also building a majestic stone mansion in Llewellyn Park—that Charles went to the extraordinary length of drafting a proxy suicide note.219 Ostensibly coming from a friend identified only as “Williams,” it read:

  Your son Charles is no longer a boy. Although not yet forty, he has literally worn himself gray in your service. His unswerving loyalty to you through the blackest days has been a rare and admirable thing….He has handled a difficult job with imagination and judgement.

  The radio situation is dangerous and no one knows it better than Charles….If you force him to obey you, he is through. He is a condition of such despair that I am actually afraid of suicide.

  You are too great a man to fail him now at this critical moment in his independent career. I urge you from my soul to let him fight out his battle if it means sweeping away all you have done.220

  Before signing off with his friend’s surname, Charles wrote, “Charles does not know I am writing this, and will never learn about it from me.” His despair was not so great as to prevent him sharing four versions of the draft with his mother. She in turn showed a copy to Theodore and Ann. They did not take it seriously. Ann said nothing, and Theodore’s only comment was that the author had written “like a man” and sounded “very earnest.” The final version, in Williams’s handwriting, had the suicide line deleted.*15, 221

  THEY’RE ALL HERE

  In late August Edison was felled by an attack of pneumonia that had doctors worrying for his life. But he rallied by Labor Day, only to succumb once more to gastroparesis. This time his recovery was slower. When he emerged, snow-haired and alarmingly thin, from Henry Ford’s private railroad car at a depot near Dearborn early on Saturday 19 October, it was as if he were stepping down onto the last platform of old age.222

  The Golden Jubilee was two days away, and Ford wanted to familiarize—or refamiliarize—him with certain structures that had arisen, like brick or clapboard phoenixes, among the lawns and new trees of Greenfield Village.223 The latter complex was still under construction, and would be for years to come. But the Edison Institute’s centerpiece, “Independence Hall,” stood complete to the last detail, pristine in the Indian summer sunshine, ready to receive President Hoover and half a thousand other VIPs on Monday.

  Edison was already somewhat befuddled by the experience of arriving at a depot that called itself “Smith’s Creek” and exactly resembled—in fact was—the station where he had been dumped at age twelve by a conductor infuriated by his onboard chemical experiments. Memory, however, insisted that in those days the depot had been a stop on the Grand Trunk Railroad, sixty miles to the northeast. But this paradox was nothing to the experience of being led by Ford through a barbed-wire fence, with Mina at his side, and seeing at some distance ahead the six buildings that had once comprised Menlo Park—the dominant one white, double-storied, and many-windowed. Was he in Michigan or New Jersey? The very earth he now trod—seven carloads worth, trucked in by train—was the same eastern clay he had walked on fifty years before.224

  Menlo Park reconstructed at Greenfield Village, Dearborn, Michigan, 1929.

  Edison’s cognition flickered back and forth between place and time. When Mina tried to button his overcoat, he pulled away. “I’m all right, I can take care of myself. I’m just as young as I was when I worked there in the old laboratory.” He nodded at the white building, which everyone else could see was new. “There’s the old boarding house, just like it stood.” In this case, he was correct—the hostelry where his research team used to live had survived and been transported intact. “And by golly if Henry hasn’t moved in the stump of that old elm tree. I tell you, it’s exactly as it was, every bit of it.”225

  At first Edison was animated by what he saw. But when he entered the laboratory and climbed a stair that took him back half a century into the past, he stopped talking. Ford had assumed, with all the naïveté of a surprise party planner, that the restorations he had paid for, whether authentic or duplicated with fanatical fidelity, would evoke nothing but delight in his hero. He was unaware that the effects of sudden déjà vu on an octogenarian might be more complex, not to say depressing.

  Again, as in 1879, a long light-filled room opened out, its tables strewn with hundreds of tools and machines collected by the Edison Pioneers. Chemical cabinets glittered against the walls, and gas fixtures—not yet wired for electricity!—spiked down from the ceiling. At the far end stood the pipe organ that Hilborne Roosevelt had built for the entertainment of “the boys” during midnight “lunch.” Edison gazed about him with an abstracted half-smile. He pointed at the three volumes of his youthful bible, Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity, and said in satisfaction, “In their old place.”226 A few straight-backed chairs, designed to discourage sleepiness, stood about. He crossed over to o
ne and sat down.

  A silence descended, as by some instinctive scruple, the rest of the party refrained from joining him. For several minutes Edison gazed around, his arms folded and his eyes dimming.227 At last he became aware of a short man, almost as white-haired as he, waiting deferentially farther down the room. It was Francis Jehl, whom he had hired as a muscular twenty-year-old to help with the hard labor of operating mercury pumps. Jehl was now Ford’s resident archivist and the last living witness of the night Edison’s first viable electric lamp held its incandescence.

  Edison had not seen him in eighteen years, but showed no more awareness of the man’s half-reverent, half-hostile attitude now than he had then. He merely rose and led Jehl to a cabinet full of pharmaceuticals, asking, “Where d’you suppose they got ’em all? They’re all here, every one of the chemicals I had at Menlo Park.”228

  So they were. Obedient to Ford’s fanatical quest for faithfulness, Jehl had ordered them from the laboratory’s former supplier, Eimer & Amend, still doing business in New York. For a while Edison opened random jars, sniffing powders and licking crystals off the palm of his hand. Then he dawdled along the tables, picking up many implements that he recognized. “I could sit right down here and go to work with my old tools.” At the request of a photographer, he did just that, scooping up some carbon paste with a spatula to impregnate several raw cotton threads, then kneading and rolling them between his palms until they were stiff and shiny, ready for baking into light filaments.229

  “Francis, give me the kerosene,” he said, assuming that a jar of the hand cleaner would be where it had stood fifty years before. It was, and so was the towel that Jehl brought him to dry his fingers.230

  He was as cooperative as ever with the playacting of publicity, but at several unguarded moments, his eyes filled with tears.231

  LIGHT ’ER UP, FRANCIS

  In Chicago that weekend, electrical engineers employed by Samuel Insull readied a “sky writing gun,” intended to flash Edison’s name in capitals fifty feet high on the night of the Jubilee. For the letters to register, there had to be a screen of cloud; but if there was not, a smoke bomb projector was ready to provide one. Countless other technicians in seven continents prepared to celebrate the birth of electric light, amid general agreement that Edison’s system had been the most seminal technological advance since the invention of printing. Amsterdam declared a full “Edison-light-week,” and incandescent arches were cantilevered over the streets of Tokyo’s Ginza district. An especially elaborate land-and-air link was strung between a studio in Berlin and loudspeakers in Ford’s banquet room in Independence Hall, because Albert Einstein wanted to congratulate Edison viva voce, at the climax of the festivities.232

  Dearborn’s weather on Monday could hardly have been worse. Sheets of freezing rain beat down on the Edison and Ford families as they attended the president’s nine o’clock arrival at the River Rouge transfer station. Hoover himself was soaked before he finished shaking hands, while his wife tenderly tried to shelter Edison under her umbrella.

  Across the platform, an old-fashioned locomotive waited puffing, with coach, smoker, and baggage car attached. It was Ford’s replication of the train Edison had ridden as a newsboy. He hustled his VIPs into the rear car, while press and White House personnel piled into the forward ones. Soon the train was jerking and coughing its way toward Greenfield Village. At a cruising speed of four miles an hour, that gave Edison—who had bucked up considerably after a day of rest—plenty of time to parody his old job. The car was furnished with a basket of fruit and candy for that purpose.233

  “Candy, bananas, peaches, apples,” he sang in a voice much hoarser than a boy’s.

  “I’ll take a peach,” Hoover said, producing a quarter.234

  Edison’s energy began to flag during the afternoon, when he accompanied the presidential party on a long, muddy tour of the village. At four P.M. in the laboratory, with Hoover, Ford, and a phalanx of photographers looking on, he assembled a replica of his original lightbulb of 1879. He worked with bushy-browed concentration, his hands still deft, aware that he would have to do it again in six hours’ time, for an even more intimidating audience.

  “Everything should be ready now,” he said after finishing. “If only the vacuum is good.”235

  Jehl teetered up a stepladder, poured mercury into the Sprengel pump, and partially evacuated the bulb.236

  “We used to seal ’em off too quick,” Edison told Hoover. He gave the filament some battery current to burn off the occluded gases that remained. “Bring ’em up very high. We pumped out an enormous amount of air.”

  The president, an engineer himself, watched fascinated until the mercury driblets ceased to fall.

  “Well, for all practical purposes that’s enough,” Edison said, peering closely at the outlet tube. “Seal it off.”

  Jehl heated, softened, and snipped the bulb’s umbilical. When it had cooled, Edison reconnected the lead-in wires to the battery. A curl of light ignited in the glass. He sat back in his chair and beamed.

  “Well, sir,” Hoover said, “with that little invention, you’ve multiplied the light of the world a thousandfold.”

  By dusk Edison was again a frail old man. Stormy day became stormy night, compelling the Chicago skywriters to abandon their plans to glorify him aloft. Oddly, Greenfield Village and the facade of the Edison Institute were illumined with nothing but weak oil lamps. The dimness was intentional. After six months of mounting publicity, Edward Bernays was about to stage a coup de theatre that would eclipse anything the electric age had yet seen.237

  At seven-thirty, live radio coverage of a white-tie-and-jewels reception for five hundred of Ford’s most powerful friends—improbably including Marie Curie—began in Independence Hall. The lighting was almost as low as it was outside. It emanated from hand-dipped candles that threw shadows over the white walls and ceiling, while chandeliers and gold sconces stayed dark.

  As they drank their cocktails under the Liberty Bell tower, they had the novel experience of hearing—along with millions of radio listeners around the world—the voice of an NBC commentator relayed from a hidden loudspeaker: “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of the radio audience. This is Graham McNamee speaking from Dearborn, Michigan, where Henry Ford and Edsel Ford are entertaining one of the most notable gatherings assembled in the annals of American history to honor Thomas Alva Edison.”238

  McNamee was located not in the hall but six hundred yards away in the laboratory, along with the Fords, Edison, Mina, Hoover, and Jehl, who had set out another clutch of archaic lamp parts on a tiny table. Edison repeated his afternoon performance, minus the evacuation. He was deaf to McNamee’s suspense-building hyperbole (“Tonight is the climax of Light’s Golden Jubilee, and what a climax….the greatest tribute ever paid to any living man!”) and could not understand why the ignition of his bulb had to wait until eight o’clock sharp, the official anniversary hour. It was not that anyone had been keeping careful time in 1879.

  “Will it shine, or will it flicker and die as so many previous lamps have died?” McNamee mouthed into his microphone. “Oh, you could hear a pin drop in this long room.”

  “Light ’er up, Francis,” Edison said.

  Jehl respectfully declined the honor.239

  Edison had to be helped to stand up. Again he connected the bulb to the battery, and again the filament incandesced. By prearrangement, Hoover pressed a button.

  Back in the banquet room, chandeliers and sconces burst into radiance, “with the effect,” one observer remarked, “of an eclipse running backward.” The Liberty Bell pealed out the wonder of fifty years of electric light. Deerfield Village and Detroit lit up, along with many downtowns across the nation. A thousand rockets exploded in the rainy sky, while two Ford Tri-Motors took off from the company field. One released a coruscation of silverstar fireworks, and the other
displayed, in glowing red signage under its wings, the name EDISON—written in the skies after all.240

  AND NOW, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

  Ford had an automobile standing by at the laboratory to hurry his guests to Independence Hall. It was past two A.M. in Berlin, where Einstein was waiting to broadcast his congratulatory message. But Edison collapsed on the way. He was laid on a couch in an alcove off the vestibule, and Mina and the White House physician, Cdr. Joel T. Boone, rushed to attend him. After drinking a glass of hot milk, he revived enough to enter the banquet room, to a standing ovation.241

  This reached a crescendo when Hoover, ignoring protocol, insisted that he take the seat of honor. Mina, seeing that her husband still looked pale, urged that the evening’s speeches begin immediately.242 The toastmaster, Owen D. Young of General Electric, agreed and spoke of “the vitality of spirit…aided by a little phosphorus” that had gotten young Al Edison tossed off a train at Smith’s Creek depot nearly seventy years before. He compared it to the glow of radium, which touched off another ovation for Madame Curie. Walter Barstow, president of the Pioneers, informed the guests that just when Edison had illuminated the building they sat in, a memorial tower in New Jersey burst into light at the spot where he had defeated darkness in 1879. Barstow quoted the inscription on the tower’s base: “The light once lit shall never dim, / But through all time shall honor him.” Then to laughter, he added Edison’s favorite saying, “All things come to him who hustles while he waits.”