Edison

by Edmund Morris

  This last comment outraged the scientists, writers, and industrialists who had welcomed him to Berlin, one with such respect “I felt inclined to kiss his hand.” Sigmund Bergmann, who had known Edison for more than forty years, sent him an article entitled “Eine Bier-Phantasie Edisons” and asked him to deny his reported words, “so that I can pacify the people here, who are looking at this matter very tragically.”91 Edison cabled a quasi-corrective letter and tried to atone for his gaffe by praising Germany’s phenomenal industrial growth, especially in the field of chemical manufacturing.92

  He sounded more serious when he spoke about the belligerent nationalism that he had sensed in every country he visited. “They’re all thinking too much about war—forts and guns everywhere and everyone on the lookout for spies.” Even in Switzerland, where a man had been shot dead for picking strawberries on the wrong side of the Swiss-German border, there was fear of a collapse of international order. “I’m not a Malthusian,” he told a reporter from the Pittsburgh Telegraph. “I don’t believe in the agency of war in keeping down the population, though I think that if France had another tussle with another country, its wonderful intelligence would go far to meet superior brute force.” It was clear which “brute” power he had in mind. He worried about the extent to which war, and the glorification of it, permeated European history, saying that was why he had never been impressed by the Arc de Triomphe. “I always see beside it another and greater arch, thousands of feet high, made of the phosphate of the bones of victims sacrificed for Napoleon’s personal glory.”93

  If every battle monument in Europe were inscribed with its true cost in blood and money, Edison said, there would be no new ones. However, there was now a deterrent that he believed would have the same moral effect: “fear of indiscriminate annihilation” brought about by the development of the flying machine. “A nitroglycerine bomb dropped from one of our modern airships will do more damage than whole days of fighting did in Napoleon’s time.” No sane political leader would ever contemplate such carnage. “In other words, invention has got beyond the thirst for blood; the power of science that has been let loose must overwhelm aggressive diplomacy.”94

  A COUPLE OF QUARTS

  On 18 October, nine days after the employees of Thomas A. Edison, Inc., welcomed their chairman back to work (Hutchison again snapping away), unofficial word came from Stockholm that he was to be awarded the $40,000 Nobel Prize for physics.95 The news was, to say the least, consolation for his rejection, earlier that year, for membership in the National Academy of Sciences.*16, 96 But when the Nobel Foundation made its formal announcement, the prize went to Professor Wilhelm Wien of Würzburg, a city rich in beer architecture. Edison maintained a dignified silence. If he had done so after his trip, instead of inflaming European sensibilities, he might have been bemedaled along with Marie Curie, who won the prize for chemistry.

  Instead, he accepted from the president of the American Institute of Mining Engineers a gift made to his own Shylockian specification. It was a cubic foot (“Nor cut thou less nor more”) of solid copper inscribed to him in appreciation of the boost his electrical inventions had given to the nation’s copper industry since 1868. He mounted it on a pedestal in the laboratory library, preferring its tactile, 468-pound mass to the frippery of his other awards, of which he claimed to have “a couple of quarts” stashed somewhere.97

  Boosted by his vacation, Edison confronted multiple business challenges that fall. “He certainly has come home with new energy,” Mina wrote on 27 October. “It is so overpowering that it paralyzes me.” He found that the 250 experimenters who depended on him for daily direction had been lax, during his absence, on several fronts—the most critical being their failure to adapt his prototype disk phonograph to the requirements of commercial production.98 Although the model exhibited to jobbers both looked and sounded splendid, he had to be sure its complex technology did not price it out of the market. It would take him another year to achieve that confidence.

  They had also stalled on the manufacture of one of his loonier inventions, concrete furniture—whose main virtue was that it tended to stay in place. Only the submarine alkaline battery project showed progress. The lead-acid lobby was already campaigning against it, a sure sign that Wall Street was seriously interested.

  In appreciation, Edison appointed Hutchison as his personal representative at the plant and confided that as soon as Donald Bliss, his chief engineer, could be gotten rid of, he would have that powerful position too.99

  A CIVILIAN OF CONSEQUENCE

  Hutchison soon coined a variant to his title and had stationery printed that proclaimed him “Personal Representative of Thomas Edison in Naval Affairs.” He arranged for his boss to be made honorary vice-president of the Navy League and on 2 November drove him, Mina, Madeleine, and Theodore to Staten Island to watch the Atlantic Fleet parade in New York Bay. It was the greatest display of American sea power yet seen, confirming news that the U.S. Navy now ranked second only to that of Great Britain.100 In a frigid gale that failed to blow away the thudding of nearly four thousand cannon shots, twenty-four battleships foamed past the Statue of Liberty, followed by a five-mile chain of smaller ironclads. No longer white as they had been in Theodore Roosevelt’s day, they presented a progression of gray, war-ready steel. Of particular interest to Edison and his party were eight submarines riding so low in the water that their saluting crews were at risk of slipping off each narrow whaleback.101

  Later that month Hutchison escorted Edison to Washington for introductions to President Taft, Admiral Dewey, and officials at the navy yard. Edison was taciturn about their discussions of defense matters, except to predict that one day most of the engineering on U.S. warships would be electrical. A week later he welcomed two hundred officers and men from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to the laboratory for a lecture-demonstration on alkaline battery technology. Describing the S-type as the climax of his life’s work in electrochemistry, he assured them it would enable a submarine crew to stay underwater for three months without breathing any fatal “acid gas.” What was more, it was invulnerable to concussion. This was of particular interest to the sailors in his audience, some of whom might have suffered ear damage during the fleet exercise. They told him that violent sound waves, as from cannon fire, had neutralized many lead cells in the past.102

  Slowly and subtly (and without awareness on his part, while he remained preoccupied with disk and talking picture development), Edison was being transformed into a civilian of consequence to the national defense. Hutchison wrote at the end of December: “I am ensconsed here, right next to the greatest living inventor & apt to step into his shoes when he passes away. Brilliant future ahead of me & what others consider phenomenal advancement behind me. If every year of my life is as satisfactory to look back on, I’ll be glad.”103

  A LITTLE GAMBLING

  The first important visitor Hutchison escorted around the Edison plant in the new year of 1912 was a nouveau multimillionare from Dearborn, Michigan. Henry Ford, at forty-eight, had long been a genuflector at the shrine of Thomas Edison. He preserved as holy tokens some snapshots he had taken of him at a beach hotel in Brooklyn fifteen years before. In those days, Ford had been an aspiring gas-buggy designer in the employ of the Edison Illuminating Company of Detroit. Now, thanks to wildfire success of his Model T automobile, he was one of the richest men in America, keen as ever to become close to his idol.104

  William J. Bee, Edison’s resident expert on electric vehicles, was equally keen to have Ford divert some of his money into the Edison Storage Battery Company. He had sent him a portrait of his boss, flatteringly inscribed, along with an invitation to come to West Orange, as Edison “would be very much pleased to meet Mr. Ford.”105

  The pleasure was augmented when Ford allowed Bee to persuade him that the lightweight alkaline battery would make an ideal triggering device for automobile self-starters. He agreed to invest $1.
2 million in whatever buildings and equipment Thomas A. Edison, Inc., would need to supply the Ford Motor Company with 450,000 type A cells a year, starting in 1913.106 Overjoyed at the windfall, Edison sent Ford a letter in the curlicued calligraphy he reserved for momentous documents:

  Friend Ford.

  Billy Bee seems to be obsessed with the idea of having you do a little gambling with me on the future of the storage battery. Nothing would please me more than to have you join in….

  Up to the present time I have only increased the plant with profits made in my other things, and this has a limit. Of course I could go to Wall St and get more, but my experience over there is as sad as Chopin’s Funeral March. I keep away.

  Yours

  Edison107

  A MAN TO BE WATCHED

  Edison turned sixty-five in February 1912, and decided that the alkaline storage battery, his most sophisticated invention since the movie camera, was “complete” enough to sell itself without further improvements. No matter how long Hutchison took to finish testing the submarine version (and the Navy Department’s arthritic approval process was bound to take even longer) smaller A-cells were now pouring out of his factory at a rate that Ford’s order promised to transform into an avalanche. Hutchison saw nothing but gold in its monetary moraine. Dazzled, he pitched for, and received, permission to act as advertising and sales agent for all Edison batteries. He was a fluent long-copy writer, and the media managers of the magazines who sold him space would probably find ways to express their gratitude.108

  “I feel afraid of him,” Mina wrote Charles. “He is so aggressive and has Papa so thoroughly under his thumb without Papa’s realizing it that there is no telling to what lengths he may go— He seems to me a man to be watched.” Her unspoken fear was that by the time her son graduated from MIT, “Hutch” would have amassed enough power to threaten Charles’s future as heir to the leadership of Thomas A. Edison, Inc.109

  Hutchison, whose appointment as chief engineer became formal that summer, was aware of Mina’s fears, as well as that of Frank Dyer (ailing, overextended, and bullied by Edison at board meetings). He combated it by working longer days and nights at the plant than anyone else, the Old Man included, and by sending Charles lengthy reports of company activities, written with a disingenuous frankness that charmed the young man and reassured him that his future was secure.

  I am very anxious to get something in shape for you to jump into when you get through College….There isn’t a job here in the Works that I would have on a salary basis….I am so exceedingly fond of your father that I would work for ten years for nothing to help in any way if he happened to be in any such condition that he could not pay. As it is, I fully expect my commission end of the Government business*17 to amount to a good deal in the next few years, and meanwhile, I am doing all I can to promote the interest of the Battery Company and T.A.E. Inc.110

  I am so exceedingly fond of your father. Mina worried that the fondness might be reciprocated. For most of his career Edison had been immune to flattery. He had always depended on acolytes to do his will and treated them all, affectionately if distantly, as intimates. But his attachment to them had never been as quasi-filial as this one. There was something yielding about the way he accepted Hutchison’s compliments, guffawed at his “coon” jokes, and allowed the younger man to publicize him as if he were a white-haired, benignly smiling cigar-store Indian. He posed for a couple of strange two-shots that Hutchison did not hesitate to circulate on company literature. One showed him apparently conversing with a submarine battery almost as big as himself. In the other, a withdrawn-looking Edison sat staring into space while Hutchison, a skilled Morse code sender, tapped out a message on his knee.

  THE INSOMNIA SQUAD

  Edison receiving Morse signals from Hutchison, circa 1912.

  The photograph was deceptive, in that Edison, who had been attracted to the stage as a teenager, always enjoyed hamming for the camera. Helpless he was not, as staff in the Phonograph Works discovered when he embarked on a bout of disk development so protracted that his seven assisting engineers dubbed themselves “the Insomnia Squad.”111 It began behind locked doors around 9 September 1912 and continued with minimal sleep, soap, or shampoo for the next month and a half. Mina was not around to corral Edison home, due to consecutive absences in Maine on vacation with her children, and in Akron, where her mother lay dying. He took full advantage of his liberation, enjoying himself more, probably, than his bleary-eyed colleagues. When he boasted that they put in “more than twenty-one hours a day,” he did not include a preparatory solo spell by himself, lasting 95 hours and 49 minutes by the laboratory time clock.112

  Edison bore much responsibility for the desperate pace of the Squad’s work, because in vowing to market the ne plus ultra of phonographs, he had with typical optimism assumed that it could be announced to the general public in October. Fourteen months after his call for the production of 3,500 disk machines, only 329 were packed—a frustrating situation, since the sales department had advance orders for nearly five thousand. The problem was not lack of supply—he had $800,000 worth of instruments stacked in the warehouse—but lack of records to issue with them. For that, his own obsession with sound quality was responsible.113

  To the frustration of his executive committee, Edison rejected almost every test pressing he heard. Dust and other impurities endemic to the disk duplication process caused a slight surface noise that bothered nobody else. Cranking up the playback mechanism to its maximum amplification and cupping his right ear to the grille, he complained of loud “scratch.” He would not approve any commercial pressing for release until it matched the clean sound of the masters he had cut in experiment.114 That was the Insomnia Squad’s challenge as Edison cajoled its members into action.*18

  After two or three days of progress, he posed with them for an ostentatiously “historic” photograph, as he had done once at Menlo Park when he was young himself, and some of his experimenters mere boys. It showed a group of not-yet-exhausted men stoking up on hamburgers, apple pie, and coffee at two in the morning.115 They needed all the food they could get—“fuel for our physical energies,” Edison called it—through mid-October, when he wrote Mina to say, “I have overcome with certainty the principal troubles.”116

  Edison and the Insomnia Squad at midnight “lunch,” fall 1912.

  On the twenty-sixth he patented three significant disk-molding improvements. One involved a controlled system of Condensite flow onto a rotating transfer plate of polished German silver, which tilted as it slowly spun, causing the varnish to bleed evenly across the plate surface before the rotation became horizontal. Thus Edison, who had not yet read Einstein, showed an instinctive sense of gyroscopic motion in relation to gravity. With equal ingenuity, he used centrifugal force to throw bubbles and dust granules in the varnish outward while the stock remained fluid. After it cooled and hardened, the rough periphery could be sliced away. The result, Edison claimed, was “a homogenous veneer free from imperfections,” and the Patent Office agreed, granting all three of his applications, along with fifty-eight others he had filed since the beginning of the decade.117

  PRETTY CRUEL

  That period happened to coincide with the political rise of progressivism, a largely white, middle-class, moralistic, and proregulatory insurgency drawing strength from the liberal wings of both major parties. In the election year of 1912 the movement rated a capital P with the founding of an official Progressive Party by bolters from the GOP. Its leader and formidable candidate for a third term in the White House was Theodore Roosevelt, running on the one hand (to use his favorite phrase) against the Republican president, William Howard Taft, and on the other against Woodrow Wilson, Democratic governor of New Jersey.

  Edison had always been a loyal Republican, and with his ear so consistently jammed against phonograph grilles that fall, he might have be
en expected to pay little attention to the distant barking of ideological debate around the country. But he surprised the writer Will Irwin, while watching a trial of his A-6 battery on the Orange electric railway system,*19 by declaring for Roosevelt.

  “I’m a Progressive, because I’m young at sixty-five,” he said.118 “And this is a young man’s movement. There are a lot of people who die in the head before they are fifty. They’re the ones who get shocked if you propose anything that wasn’t going when they were boys.”

  Irwin was struck by the dreamy look in Edison’s gentian-blue eyes as he watched his battery absorbing a recharge that would have melted any conventional lead-acid unit. He stood with hands stuffed in his pockets, talking half to himself, in the manner of a man not used to being interrupted.

  It’s the way the world goes—the young push ahead and do things, and the old stand back. I hope I’ll always be with the young.

  You see, getting down to the bottom of things, this is a pretty raw, crude civilization of ours—pretty wasteful, pretty cruel, which often comes to the same thing, doesn’t it?…Our production, our factory laws, our charities, our relations between capital and labor, our distributions—all wrong, all out of gear. We’ve stumbled along for a while, trying to run a new civilization in old ways, and we’ve got to start to make the world over.