WINTER SUNSHINE
“I see by the papers that the Edison factory has been largely destroyed by fire,” Rep. Ernest Roberts (R., Mass.) said to Secretary Daniels that afternoon.
Daniels was testifying before the House Naval Committee on the need for an accelerated program of submarine construction, which he promised to push for if current tests on the S-type power pack were successful.
He said he had heard the same news. “The battery plant was not damaged, I am informed.”
“The paper states that the factory was partially destroyed and 5,000 hands thrown out of employment.”
“I do not know how that will be.”224
Actually the damage was much less serious than the pyrotechnical display had portended. Edison’s first estimate of his loss had been as high as $5 million; the true figure turned out to be $1.5 million. One workman had been killed in the first chemical explosion, but other casualties were few, thanks to the company’s policy of regular fire drills. There had also been an efficient evacuation of vital documents, record masters, and portable precision instruments.*37 An astonishing 97 percent of the heavy machinery had withstood the heat and explosions, and the reinforced concrete walls and slab floors of the seven major buildings—all of them fireproof, except for their wooden elements—were largely intact.225
Far from laying off his employees, Edison hustled them into an emergency program of cleanup and retooling, while a construction company from New York worked triple shifts to make the standing buildings better than new. Within twenty days, six acres of floor space had been cleared. Square columns were rounded to hold more load, floor slabs were reinforced and slicked with his hardest portland cement. Partitions, which Edison disliked (“They make too much newspaper reading”), were reduced to a minimum, opening up vast spaces. When the vertical, flat, and cylindrical surfaces were painted white and winter sunshine streamed in through new, tilting, metal-frame windows, the result was as austerely elegant as anything later achieved by the Bauhaus school.226
Production of Blue Amberol cylinders resumed on the last day of December. Now more than ever, the Phonograph Division had to be the chief source of Edison’s wealth. He needed all the profits it and his outlying chemical factories could rack up, since the fire insurance he carried paid out a mere $287,000 on a claim of $919,788. Far from being downcast, he radiated energy and excitement as he rose to the challenge of full recovery in the new year. “I am sixty-seven….I’ve been through a lot of things like this. It protects a man from being afflicted with ennui.”227
A GREAT RESEARCH LABORATORY
By the spring of 1915 Edison had created what amounted to a new plant, while his young efficiency expert, Stephen Mambert, made it the nucleus of a thoroughly modern corporation—Frank Dyer’s dream of four years before. Mambert was a typical graduate of the progressive school of “management engineers,” clerky, clean-shaven, and closely barbered, his neck movements constricted by a high, detachable white collar. Organization charts and budgeting—the geometry and calculus of business science—were his dry delight. Working companionably with Charles, who was still more at home in Greenwich Village than in West Orange, Mambert instituted Ford-like production and methods, demanded strict accounting of every purchase order down to the last paper clip, and put Thomas A. Edison, Inc., on the soundest financial footing it had ever enjoyed.228
Edison had his doubts about the company’s burgeoning bureaucracy. “An ‘efficiency’ which submerges the individual,” he remarked, “is an inefficiency.” But it was a relief for him to hand over many executive chores and have more time to potter with new inventions—among them a portable, battery-powered searchlight that could throw a beam several miles. The idea for it had come to him during the fire. Willing as ever to jettison failed projects, he gladly took $50,000 from a Japanese entrepreneur for what was left of his talking picture business and looked around for some other large venture to engage him.229
There was no need to offer any help to his “personal representative in naval affairs.” Since the beginning of hostilities in Europe, Hutchison had been selling storage batteries to the government as fast as the works on Lakeside Avenue could turn them out—most recently, seven thousand B-4 cells to operate wireless systems on warships.*38 Josephus Daniels had chosen USS E-2, crucible of last fall’s chlorine-gas accident, as the first submarine to be equipped with Edison S-type cells, and he also approved their future installation in a larger vessel, the L-8, under construction in Maine. Edison priced the latter order at $90,000 and wrote the secretary: “Your telegram will cause the boys around here to lash me to the machinery to keep me from flying.”230
Hutchison saw an opportunity to nudge the two men into a closer relationship, with a view to consolidating his own profitable position between them. He saw chains of zeroes accumulating in his bank account, like a submarine bubble trail, if he could only persuade Edison to abandon his pacifist sentiments and put his inventive genius at the service of the government. On 7 May a German U-boat saved him the trouble. It sank the Cunard liner Lusitania off the coast of Ireland, drowning 128 Americans and more than a thousand other civilian passengers. The tragedy caused even the most neutral-minded patriots to call for a program of “preparedness” to go to war if Germany ever struck again.
Among the first was Edison, who chose the Memorial Day weekend to make his own recommendations in a major article in The New York Times.231 He advised against the creation of a large standing army and an overcommissioned navy but advocated enormous stockpiles of weaponry at strategic points along the nation’s two seaboards: “All our war would be there.” New battleships and submarines should be built with dispatch and held in drydock, thousands of military “aeroplanes” chocked for instant takeoff, and 2 million well-greased rifles kept in arsenals that could be got at by truck, instead of by trains, to speed distribution. Young American men, meanwhile, should be trained to spring to arms whenever their country called.
“I believe that in addition to this,” Edison said, “the government should maintain a great research laboratory, jointly under military and naval and civilian control. In this could be developed the continually increasing possibilities of great guns, the minutiae of new explosives, all the techniques of military and naval progression.” When the time came—and sooner or later it would come—“we could take advantage of the knowledge gained through this research work and quickly manufacture in large quantities the very latest and most efficient instruments of warfare.”232
Hutchison at once drafted a letter for Daniels to send Edison, begging him to help establish just such a “department of invention and development” for the navy, along with a board of eminent civilian scientists to supervise its operations. Daniels rewrote the document to include some of his own views and those of Franklin D. Roosevelt, his hawkish assistant secretary, and sent it off to West Orange on 7 July.233
I feel that our chances of getting the public interested and back of this project will be enormously increased if we can have, at the start, some man whose inventive genius is recognized by the whole world….You are recognized by all of us as the one man above all others who can turn dreams into realities and who has at his command, in addition to his own wonderful mind, the finest facilities for such work.
What I want to ask you is if you would be willing as a service to your country, to act as an adviser to this board, to take such things as seem to you to be of value, but which we are not, at present, equipped to investigate, and to use your own magnificent facilities in such investigation if you feel it worth while.
Edison read the letter, then put in his out-basket with a scrawled superscript, Hutch—note and return with comments.234
YOU NOW RANK AS A COMMODORE
Many years later, when Edison was dead and Daniels was President Franklin Roosevelt’s ambassador to Mexico, an aging and much diminished Hutchison recalled his excitement
at seeing language he had drafted typed out on the Navy Department’s heaviest stationery.235 “There was my whole conception of the Board,” he vaingloriously wrote Daniels.
I drummed it into Mr. Edison’s head, until he took cognizance of the need and allowed me to use him as its sponsor….I hopped on the Congressional to Washington, called on you, at your home, and said Mr. Edison would be glad to head such a Board if composed of men elected by the outstanding Scientific and Engineering Societies….President Wilson appointed Mr. Edison and myself.
I will never forget the day we all signed the Oath and, jocularly, I asked Mr. Edison if he wanted to be measured for his uniform. “Uniform, h—!” he said. “But you now rank as a Commodore and really must wear a uniform,” I replied. Turning to you, he said, “If I have got to wear a uniform, count me out. I want to be able to tell an Admiral to go to —— if he is in the wrong.”
Hutchison was conflating, in retrospect, a pair of dates fifteen months apart. Nor did he mention the submarine disaster in between that could have sent him to jail. Daniels was either too tactful or too hazy himself to challenge the former chief engineer’s memories, which were otherwise fairly accurate. Hutchison had even leaned on Edward Marshall, the New York Times writer, to publicize Edison’s original call for what would eventually become the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
At the time—midsummer 1915—Edison’s first priority was the composition of the proposed supervisory board. Daniels paid another visit to Glenmont on 15 July and approved his suggestion that it should be recruited from the Inventors Guild and ten major professional associations. These would be the American Aeronautical, Chemical, Electrochemical, and Mathematical Societies; the American Institutes of Electrical and Mining Engineers; the American Societies of Automotive, Civil, and Aeronautical Engineers; and the War Committee of Technical Societies. Each body would be asked to nominate two representatives, serving without remuneration as a patriotic duty.236
Edison notably excluded the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, on the grounds that neither was likely to nominate anybody “practical.” He accepted the presidency of the board, and Daniels agreed to appoint Hutchison as his “personal assistant,” on the tacit understanding that Edison’s deafness would keep him away from most meetings. That made a round membership of twenty-four.237
Predictably, the scientific community reacted with outrage at being snubbed when the nominations were announced. Edison would soon enough learn to his cost that academic wrath was on a par with the furor teutonicus now ravaging Europe. But for the moment he could bask in the compliments he earned, from President Wilson on down, for putting his “genius” at the service of his country and publicizing the cause of preparedness. “The willingness of Edison to head the Board is a spectacular advertisement,” wrote Waldemar Kaempffert, managing editor of Scientific American.238
The Naval Consulting Board, as it was officially named, posed for its first group photograph on the steps of the White House on Wednesday 6 October. Edison recognized only a few of the faces around him. Two were by no means friendly. Leo Baekeland, the Belgian-born inventor of Bakelite plastic, resented the success of Condensite and wrongly believed that Walter Aylsworth had infringed his patent. Frank J. Sprague’s wolfish, frowning features had been forbidding enough thirty-seven years before, when Edison gave him his first break as a young inventor. If Sprague had ever cracked a smile since then, it was unrecorded in articles celebrating his brilliant achievements in the field of electric power. The gold medal of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers hung around his neck like a millstone, since it was engraved recto with the profile of Thomas Alva Edison. Sprague nurtured a grudge against his old boss for allowing the General Electric Company to erase his name from its history—forgetting that Edison had suffered the same corporate fate.239
A more affectionate face was that of Thomas Robins, Jr., inventor of the rubberized conveyor belt. He had developed it at the Edison mine in Ogdensburg, New Jersey. Forty-six years old, center-parted, Princetonian, and precise, Robins was a natural for the post of secretary to the board. Edison was also acquainted with William L. Saunders, a mining engineer, Elmer Sperry, inventor of the gyroscope, and the polymath Hudson Maxim, a bewhiskered eccentric equally devoted to poetry, penmanship, and explosives (as his prosthetic left hand attested). The rest of the board, consisting of sundry scientists, industrial executives, and engineers, were strangers.
When they went inside to meet the president, Wilson took the opportunity to announce his conversion to the cause of preparedness—adding carefully that it should be “not for war, but for defense.” He said that the army and navy would welcome “the cooperation of the best brains and knowledge of the country” to enhance national security.240
Anxious to dispel rumors to the contrary, Secretary Daniels organized a cruise down the Potomac that afternoon on the presidential yacht Mayflower, so that members of the board could get to know some admirals en route to the gun proving grounds at Indian Head. Edison could no more resist playing with the ship’s communications equipment than a schoolboy.241 The following morning, before the board met to organize itself, he was found at the aquarium in the lobby of the Post Office Department, so engrossed in the circulation of goldfish that a messenger hesitated to disturb him.242
At eleven o’clock he called his colleagues to order in the library of the Navy Department.243 The board’s first action was to elect Thomas Robins secretary. Edison then ceded the active role of chairman, for which his deafness obviously disqualified him, to Saunders.*39 Peter Cooper Hewitt, developer of the mercury-vapor lamp, became vice-chairman. It was agreed that the board should meet at least bimonthly at venues of its own choosing. Fifteen subcommittees were then appointed to advise on various aspects of naval and aerial defense. Edison did not sit on any of them. Instead he assumed the major responsibility of heading a committee of five that, on Frank Sprague’s motion, would report as soon as possible on “the organization of a fully equipped and amply sustained laboratory for research and development…essential to the needs of the navy.”
After lunch, he laid out his rough ideas for the facility. It should be built of indestructible concrete somewhere along the Atlantic seaboard, on “tidewater of sufficient depth to permit a dreadnought to come to the dock.” There should be a large city nearby, “so supplies may be easily obtained,” but—Edison’s old desideratum for Menlo Park—not so near as to distract young researchers from their experimental work. The governing factors in its design were to be secrecy and security, with no visitation permitted. For maximum speed in developing inventions, it should also be a manufactory, equipped with a full range of shops, from a cast steel foundry and optical grinder to an explosives department, necessarily “separate from the main laboratory.”
During a long afternoon’s debate with the library door closed, Edison had to modify his original recommendation of complete civilian control as inimical to the navy. He agreed to let technologically qualified officers run the facility, as long as they did not impose “too much red tape.” All its innovation, however, must come from outside the service, including freelance ideas that the board considered worthy of development.
Daniels interrupted the proceedings only once, with a reminder to the board that it had no legal status or funding yet. It should not call for a large increase in naval spending for fear of alienating pacifists on the House Appropriations Committee. This did not prevent a final resolution in favor of Edison’s estimate that the laboratory would cost $5 million to acquire and at least half as much again to operate year by year.244
HIMSELF A MULTIMILLIONAIRE
“The soldier of the future will not be a sabre-bearing, bloodthirsty savage,” the president of the Naval Consulting Board announced a week later. “He will be a machinist.”245
Edison was holding a press conference in Chicago while his private Pullman car
was hitched to the back of a train that would take him to the Panama-Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco and a reunion with Henry Ford. Clearly enjoying his new role as a prophet of preparedness, he said that the United States was “the greatest machine country in the world” and should be able, in time of war, to deploy mechanical agents of death twenty times more efficient than men on the battlefield.
“What do you think of the use of liquid fire and asphyxiating gases?” asked a representative of The New York Times.
“They are perfectly proper for use in defense, but not in offense. A man has a right to claw, scratch, bite, or kick in defending himself.”246
Alarming as such sentiments were to Ford, a passionate pacifist, Edison’s further declaration that he would keep the business of defense innovation out of the hands of government—“I am down on military establishments”—were even more so to his chief engineer.247
At the moment, “Doctor” Hutchison (as he now liked to be addressed, having gotten an honorary degree from his alma mater) urgently coveted the goodwill of the navy. His seat next to his boss at the recent board meeting—close enough to knee-tap Morse transcriptions of remarks Edison couldn’t hear—represented another advance toward his dream of becoming equally famous. He would almost be Edison when deputizing for him at future meetings. This latest example of the Old Man’s habit of feeding one-liners to reporters threatened to compromise the publication of a glossy booklet by Hutchison, entitled The Submarine Boat Type of Edison Storage Battery. He had sent copies to every vessel in the navy and was counting on the successful installation of S-type cells in the E-2 submarine to make the battery universal and himself a multimillionaire.248
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