I have not reached my conclusions through study of traditions; I have reached them through the study of hard fact. I cannot see that unproved theories or sentiment should be permitted to have influence in the building of conviction upon matters so important. Science proves its theories or it rejects them. I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. I earnestly believe I am right….Proof! Proof! That is what I have always been after; that is what my mind requires before it can accept a theory as a fact….
Moral teaching is the thing we need most in this world, and many of these men could be great moral teachers if they would but give their whole time to it, and to scientific search for the rock-bottom truth, instead of wasting it upon expounding theories of theology which are not in the first place firmly based. What we need to do is search for fundamentals, not reiteration of traditions born in days when men knew even less than we do now.
SOMETHING ELEMENTAL
The fire and brimstone Edison chose to bring down on his head could not have been better—or worse—timed to sabotage the publication, in early November, of a two-volume biography, Edison: His Life and Inventions. Its coauthors were Frank Lewis Dyer, general counsel for the Edison Laboratory, and Thomas Commerford Martin, former president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. Stoutly bound, gilded, and boxed, meticulously researched, respectful yet not sycophantic in tone, and featuring in facsimile the subject’s signature of approval, it practically begged to be called “definitive.” Volume 2 ended with an appendix of 156 pages, describing just nineteen of Edison’s “twenty-five hundred or more” inventions.
After a month of silence The New York Times, which had harshly criticized Edison’s religious views, conceded in an unsigned review that he otherwise deserved all the praise his biographers bestowed on him.37
There is something elemental about this man Edison, and the sense of it grows upon one in reading such a book….More than once he has been called the greatest living American, and it is at least curious that a popular vote of one of the big daily newspapers and a poll of one of the electrical engineering journals gave him priority over all others considered. Somehow one thinks of Edison already as being as big and as typically American as his contemporary, Mark Twain, and as grouping with Lincoln and Franklin in largeness of mental mold and actual achievement along lines that are essentially of this nation.
The reviewer noted that many pages, as revised by Edison, were essentially autobiography, “quoted in his own nervous and forceful language.” At the same time it was technical enough to amount to a history of the last fifty years of electrical innovation, most of which Edison had dominated.
Yet his work does not stop short with electricity. It is interesting, even surprising, to learn that he is one of the largest makers of cement in America; to read of his gigantic efforts in the reduction of magnetic iron ore; to be shown that to him was committed the task of licking the early typewriting machine into practicable shape; to find that he invented the paraffin paper in which candy is wrapped; brought out the mimeographed copying press, and for eighteen to twenty hours a day applied his ingenuity against pretty nearly every real problem in the mechanical arts and sciences. At times the tone of the authors, as they dwell on one tour de force after the other, seems too eulogistic; but in the end it must be said that it would have been strange if they could have lived so close to such a versatile, indefatigable, resultful spirit without becoming enthusiastic.
A PITCHFORK FOR CHRISTMAS
Edison’s pious wife worried that the attention he was getting would encourage him to apply his “nervous and forceful language” to more and more subjects outside the range of technology. “It makes me sad to see him lose his old time simplicity,” she wrote Charles. “He never used to assert himself but now upon all subjects he has something to advance. This miserable immortality idea is so upsetting.”38
His heresies, though, were nothing new to Mina. She had realized as early as their courtship in 1885 that Edison was a cheerful infidel who delighted in shocking her pieties. Had he not been such a celebrity, even then, and so old-fashioned in begging for her hand, her equally devout father, a pillar of the First Methodist Episcopal Church in Akron, Ohio, might well have reserved her for somebody more comfortable in a pew.
After a quarter-century of going to church without him, she despaired of his salvation and concentrated on a new and more painful problem: what to do about her daughter Madeleine’s infatuation with a Roman Catholic. They were about as opposite as any lovers could be—Madeleine a twenty-two-year-old flower of Bryn Mawr, bright, witty, and impulsive; and John Eyre Sloane, small, dour, bespectacled, hard up, unsure of what to do with himself at twenty-five except get up in the dark every morning to go to six o’clock mass.39 His formidable mother, Alice, shared the same conviction. She would be more than a match for the diffident Mina, if it ever came to an argument over doctrine. But since both women were determined Madeleine and John would never marry, that prospect looked unlikely.
Madeleine Edison, circa 1911.
Madeleine shared something of her father’s irreverence (she teasingly bought him a pitchfork for Christmas). Although not an unbeliever, she failed to see why belief was so essential to John. His idea of a refreshing weekend was to go on retreat and ponder the remission of sins. This bothered Edison less than the young man’s inertia. The “rising intelligence” he seemed to lack surged contrastingly in Madeleine, except that hers was bottled up by the social conventions her mother imposed on her. “I want to be a free agent,” she complained, desperate to excel at something other than household management and polite entertaining—which, along with regular confinements, represented Mina’s idea of fulfilled femininity. Madeleine felt a victim of male prejudice too. She loved to act in amateur theatricals, but John disapproved. When, to her passionate excitement, a researcher in New York offered to pay her for help in processing the papers of E. H. Harriman, Edison curtly informed him that he was affluent enough to support his own daughter.40
The unhappy lovers, held apart by prejudice and penury, occasionally breaking up yet always drawn back together, took refuge in a private engagement that threatened to drag on for years. John kept assuring Madeleine that all would be well, with divine assistance. “After all it is between God and you and me and you may be sure He will direct us when the time comes.”41
THEY ARE PEACHES
Another Christmas present to please Edison was brought to Glenmont by Miller Hutchison on the evening of 21 December. It was an order from the Navy Department for the development and construction of a trial submarine battery, with no expenses spared. Hutchison reported that Admiral Cone had offered the use of USS Cuttlefish for tests once the device was ready. Clearly the high command was interested. Edison rewarded “Hutch” by introducing him to his family—a rare honor, since Mina seldom approved of mixing with the help.42
Early in the new year draft specifications were ready for the new S-type battery. It would consist of 102 alkaline cells, each standing five feet tall and containing nineteen positive and twenty negative tubes. When topped up with electrolyte, they would weigh 508 pounds apiece. This projected a power pack 25 percent lighter yet three times as capacious as the leaden mass that so inhibited the Cuttlefish underwater. The cells, moreover, were fully dischargeable, whereas acid ones could not stand a drop to one hundred volts without injury. They would last three times longer—ten years or more—and radiate enough electricity to drive a submarine 150 miles underwater at an easy five knots. Altogether the S-type battery would have an operating superiority of 92 percent, in Hutchison’s excited calculation.43
Taking advantage of Charles’s absence at college, he worked at becoming a substitute son to Edison, and succeeded sooner than he expected. He had special qualifications that endeared him to the Old Man and made
it difficult for other sycophants at the plant to compete. One was his scientific understanding of deafness. Hutchison knew enough to feel the sense of exclusion behind Edison’s lifelong pretense of being content not to hear most of the world’s noises—a loneliness that had driven him, from puberty onward, to surround himself with the jostling camaraderie of men at work on machines. Hutchison also shared Edison’s nocturnal energy, joking that he took vacations only “from 2 A.M. to 7 A.M.”44 Most congenially, both men had the positive imagination characteristic of inventors. They could see solid, finished engineering behind a pencil sketch and, with less rational clarity, the orders that were sure to result from any expression of buyer interest.
“If, within the next five years—the life maximum of lead cells in use in new boats—we get the battery business of the present submarine boats of the U.S. Navy,” Hutchison wrote Edison, “we will sell 6,912 of the S-19 cells, equivalent [to] the gross business of $3,710,000.00.” That was but a fraction of the billions of rubles, marks, lire, yen, and pounds that would flood West Orange if other navies of the world followed suit. At present, the United States had eighteen submarines, with ten more under construction. Germany deployed eight and Japan nine (both powers were rumored to be secretly and urgently building up the size of their flotillas), Russia thirty, France fifty-six, and Great Britain sixty-three. All relied on lead-acid batteries. Hutchison’s next move was therefore to write, and have Edison sign, letters to the naval attachés at relevant embassies in Washington, inviting them to visit the laboratory and be briefed on S-type technology.45
He prided himself on his ability to write seductive copy, but the letters (“They are peaches”) attracted just one representative of a major sea power, Cdr. Dmitri Vassilieff of the Imperial Russian Navy.46 This was an unusual rebuff to Edison, whose celebrity was such that any chance to meet him was prized. It was his first experience of the extreme caution with which naval bureaucracies reacted to innovation.
Nor did he distinguish himself as a diplomat when Vassilieff showed up in full uniform. The commander was welcomed with an Edisonian harangue on Russia’s ill treatment of Japan in the early years of the century. Afterward it was all Hutchison could do to persuade him to accept four smaller batteries for testing in Kronstadt. Rival attachés chose to wait and see how Edison’s prototype performed.47
They were in no hurry, knowing his reputation for fanatical perfectionism. Undiscouraged, Hutchison applied for, and received from Edison, exclusive agency rights to market the S-type at home and abroad, for a 10 percent commission on each sale in lieu of salary. In the meantime he tried to stimulate interest in the battery by the old sales technique of making it sound hard to get. When a contractor to the Royal Navy, more interested in intelligence than business, inquired about its availability, he cannily replied that so many continental powers had approached him, “I cannot make any definite arrangements with you at present.” And to Frank L. Dyer, he boasted that even Washington was going to have to restrain its impatience. “I told the submarine people we did not care to consider tying up with them at the present time, as Mr. Edison is averse to doing business on anything which he has not finished and thoroughly tested to his satisfaction. I therefore left the matter open, and their representatives departed disappointed, but hopeful.”48
“INC.”
Dyer was the most ambitious of Edison’s senior aides. Having added the title of biographer to his other roles as company counsel and sales manager, he aspired to greater distinction. His hope had long been that Edison: His Life and Inventions would serve as a sort of pedestal onto which Edison the Colossus would step and turn to marble. Dyer could then reorganize the multicompany mess at West Orange (nobody knew quite what to call it) into Thomas A. Edison, Inc., and be rewarded with the new firm’s presidency.49
Personal ambition aside, it was urgent that someone trained in corporate law prepare for a time when the laboratory would no longer be a fountainhead of Edisonian invention but merely the research arm of a great manufacturing concern. The National Phonograph Company, Edison’s biggest dollar earner, was bled white from transfusions to unprofitable subsidiaries.50 Two of these—Edison Storage Battery and Edison Portland Cement—seemed sure to pay off their enormous start-up costs eventually, because they each manufactured a superb product. So, for that matter, did National Phonograph: its cylinder-playing Amberolas were sonically superior to Victor’s disk-playing Victrolas. But the evidence was unmistakable that consumers preferred the convenience of flat records. Victor’s sales for the last year totaled $8.25 million to National Phonograph’s $2.67 million. Even Edison agreed that he must adapt to disk technology or see the company go under. Over the last twenty years he had personally spent well over $4 million to hold his business empire together. Dyer made him understand that any further profligacy would bankrupt him. Only outside investment could help now, and the best way of ensuring that was to capitalize on his single greatest asset—his name.51
Reluctantly, he gave permission for National Phonograph to be reincorporated as Thomas A. Edison, Inc., and serve as the nucleus of a centrally structured organization run by one executive committee instead of dozens. He was made chairman of the board of directors, which then elected Dyer president, and Carl Wilson, chief of the Phonograph Works, general manager. Edison’s compensation for the loss of his autocracy (and bets were off on how long he would stand for that) was the creation of an “Engineering and Experimental Department” allowing him continued control over all intellectual property issuing from the laboratory.52
The new company was registered on 28 February 1911. As a consolidation it was hardly complete. The battery and cement companies were kept off the books, for fear of frightening off investors. Still, a jumble of antiquated fiefdoms had been pushed part of the way toward the modern ideal of a professionally managed public corporation. “Inc.,” as Dyer’s creation soon became known, was capitalized at $12 million and employed about 3,600 people.53
YOU’D THINK HE’D HAVE AN APRON ON
Edison’s metamorphosis into a corporation coincided with the silver anniversary of his marriage to Mina. They celebrated with a family party at Glenmont. The house was laden with gifts and flowers. Charles, now in his sophomore year at MIT, could not attend, so Madeleine put a photograph of him on the dinner table. “As a surprise,” Mina squeezed as much of herself as possible into her wedding dress. Eleven-year-old Theodore at least was dazzled, and reportedly “fell in love” with her. After dinner Edison engaged everybody in a game of Parcheesi, which he had learned during his wandering days as a telegrapher.54
It was a treat for Mina to have her husband close for a whole evening, because he was in one of his periods of near-manic activity at the laboratory. Assigning Hutchison most of the responsibility for submarine battery development had by no means reduced his workload. He simply took on the weight of a project that he deemed much more urgent: restoration of the Edison Phonograph Division (as it was now known) to profitability. That meant coming up with a disk player and a compatible line of records that would not impinge on patents held by his competitors. “Such a drag on him,” Mina complained to Charles. “Don’t you think that Victor is gaining all the time?”55
She paid close attention to retail trends, and fretted about her husband’s paradoxical refusal to accept that the cylinder was a doomed device. Soon Edison Records would be the only company, except for Pathé Frères in France, to keep producing it. His reasons for doing so were in no way sentimental. Having experimented with a telegraph-recording disk even before he invented the phonograph, he knew that the geometry of the cylinder made for more constant pitch. Its volute grooves spiraled from left to right without tightening or tapering, whereas disk grooves contracted toward the turntable spindle, slowing the speed at which the needle rode in its cut.56
When fresh copies of the Edison Amberol cylinder and the Victor Red Seal twelve-inch disk were played through the same
horn, there was no question as to which sounded more natural, and which thinner and scratchier. But the very plasticity of the cylinder’s hard-wax grooves allowed a sapphire stylus to carve away their definition, so its fidelity deteriorated, whereas the disk’s gritty shellac, like most coarse things, endured.
Had it not been for an ill-reasoned injunction against him in 1905, Edison would have long before coated his cylinder blanks with one of the cellulose compounds he had pioneered in the early days of the phonograph era. Only now, having bought a competing patent, was he free to switch. But his star chemist, Walter Aylsworth—“one of the best experimenters I ever have known”—offered him something even tougher than celluloid. It was an infusible phenolic resin impregnated with a heterocyclic compound of ammonia and formaldehyde. The only trouble with this plastic was that its glasslike hardness, while admirably preserving the vertical incisions of the recording needle, caused the reproducer, or playback head, to ski-jump. Furthermore, each jump and subsequent touchdown shocked the sapphire point and fragmented the sound. Edison experimented successfully with a heavier reproducer, but the cost of continuous sound was more stylus wear.57
Searching for a varnish that would be kinder to sapphire, and good for both disks and cylinders, he patented his own “Composition for Sound-Records,” a hard resin into which he melted crystals of halogenized naphthalene. The crystals felted together during cooling and solidification, giving him an end product of extraordinary tensility and strength. He laminated some tubes of German lignite wax stiffened with cotton flock, and found that both base and coating had the same coefficient of expansion—which meant none of the cracking that so often bedeviled plaster of paris cylinders during changes of heat or humidity. Delighted, he patented that process too. “My improved record,” he boasted in his application, “is so durable that it may be dropped or even thrown on the floor with considerable force without encountering any objectionable injury.”58
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