Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Piling promotion on promotion, Hutchison also planned to stage a media coup later in the month that would link West Orange with San Francisco and advertise Thomas A. Edison, Inc., as the most innovative company in history.

  I HAD A GIRL ONCE

  Edison had never been as sanguine about the S-type as Hutchison. Granted that its sealed, noncorrosive chemicals obviated chlorine-poisoning accidents, such as had caused the recent loss, off Honolulu, of submarine F-4 with twenty-one aboard,*40 he knew that all storage batteries liberated hydrogen when electricity passed through them in reverse.249 His own alkaline cells did so copiously at the earliest stage of recharge. This was no problem when they were installed in well-ventilated conveyances like automobiles and trains. But submarines, with their huge battery packs, had to be on the surface, with all fans going, to purge themselves of the odorless gas.

  What worried Edison was that S-type cells continued to seep small amounts of hydrogen and oxygen after being recharged. In a letter to “friend Baekeland” written as his train crossed Iowa, he asked for advice on the problem. It was hardly necessary for one chemist to remind another that the formula H + O, at a certain level of concentration in a confined space, “reaches to an explosive mixture.” He said that he had tried to absorb hydrogen in permanganate and also pumped it through unglazed porcelain—the latter an effective procedure, but impracticable underwater. “Won’t you please think of other absorbers or methods & see what can be done.”*41, 250

  Henry Ford was in San Francisco when Edison and Mina arrived there three days later. He disapprovingly accompanied them on a cruise around the bay aboard USS Oregon, which had fired the first shot in the Battle of Santiago in ’98. When Edison gave its big gun an affectionate pat, Ford said that as far as he was concerned, all warships were dodos, fit only for stuffing.251

  The two men were making their first public appearance together as honorees at the Panama-Pacific Exhibition. Whatever glory Ford hoped to bask in paled in comparison to that accorded his friend, whom Californians had never seen before and who was to be honored on “Edison Day,” 21 October, rather awkwardly flagged as the thirty-sixth anniversary of the electric lightbulb. But he clung close to his hero on the eve of the celebration, touring the exhibition grounds with him and cramming close whenever press cameras flashed.

  At one point they stopped by the Western Union booth, where Edison sat down in front of an ancient telegraph sender.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked the young woman in attendance, taking up the perforated tape and letting it spill through his fingers.

  “It was made by you, Mr. Edison.”

  “Well, well! I had a girl once in New York that could send 119 words a minute with it.”252

  The exchange was more spontaneous than the one staged by Hutchison at the height of the festivities next day. It occurred during a lunch banquet in the California Building, and the audio connection he arranged between Edison’s table and his own station in the library at West Orange went to ludicrous literal lengths, employing a multiple splice that linked sections of Samuel Morse’s first signal wire, the first transatlantic cable, Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone circuit of 1875, a fuse from Edison’s Holborn Viaduct power system of 1882, and other historic hookups.253

  When Hutchison’s cross-country “call” was piped into the lunchroom, it sounded loud and clear even to Edison, who was listening with the aid of a special amplifier. The chief engineer said he was reading his script under a “flood of mellow light” cast by an Edison incandescent lamp, powered by an Edison storage battery. Around him, he went on, were “several hundred of your friends,” including Menlo Park veterans and all four of Edison’s sons. Then he sprang a coy surprise: “This address is being made to you by your greatest favorite—the Edison Diamond Disc Phonograph. An Edison Granular Carbon Telephone Transmitter is transforming the sound waves into electric impulses which, after following the tortuous paths of copper between rivers and bays, over valleys, deserts plains, and mountains…”254

  By the time Hutchison ran out of purple prose, his audiences east and west were more than ready to hear from Edison himself. Everyone knew that the Old Man never spoke over the telephone. But here he was, leaning into a mouthpiece and reading out yet more of Hutchison’s advertising copy:

  This is the first time I have ever carried on a conversation over the telephone….A pretty big undertaking, but the engineers of the Bell system have made it easier to talk thirty-four hundred miles than it used to be to talk thirty-four miles. I heard the record of Hutch’s talk very plainly. I should now like to hear a musical record. If you have one handy, I wish you would play that Anna Case record from Louise.255

  Later, when he adjourned to Festival Hall to receive a commemorative medal, he had to fight his way through a crowd so dense he lost both his wife and his hat.256

  WHITE BLACKBERRIES

  With a busy winter of naval-related work ahead of him, Edison took advantage of being on the West Coast to spend two weeks sightseeing by train and automobile. One excursion Henry Ford insisted on was a visit to Luther Burbank’s gardens in Santa Rosa. The little horticulturalist had a popular image as saintly as that of John Burroughs, despite his desire to propagate a white super-race, in the same way he bred white blackberries.257

  Ford noticed, as Burbank led them around, that Edison was not much interested in plants. But having recently met Harvey Firestone in San Francisco, he raised the subject of rubber, predicting that it would be the first vital import to be cut off if America entered the war.258

  “Could you devise a domestic equivalent?” Ford asked.

  “I will,” Edison said. “Some day.”259

  SHARE IT WITH NIKOLA

  At sunset on 27 October Edison stopped by Universal City in the San Fernando Valley to lay a plaque on the wall of Carl Laemmle’s massive new film studio. The text lauded him as “the world’s greatest electrician” but said nothing about his two decades of dominance over an industry he had himself founded. This was perhaps just as well, because a federal court had just ordered the breakup of the “Edison Trust,” as his Motion Picture Patents Company was generally known. The judge found that a move by the trust to deny Laemmle the right to thread independent films through a patented projector had made it a conspiracy in restraint of trade in all aspects of the motion picture business.260

  The decision was so much a reproof for Edison, and so much a victory for Laemmle, representing hundreds of maverick filmmakers, that it was a wonder either man had consented to the ceremony. But neither seemed to hold a grudge against the other. Edison could only hope that the MPPC’s right to license its products might be reasserted by the Supreme Court. Otherwise his own studio, which depended on trust royalties to stay profitable, would soon go dark. The future of movies belonged to Hollywood, not to the Bronx or Fort Lee—and to feature-length, star-studded, narrative scenarios, rather than the uncredited two-reelers he had specialized in.261

  He returned home on 8 November to hear that he was once again in line for the Nobel Prize. This time it was to be for physics, and The New York Times reported that it would be awarded jointly to Nikola Tesla. Edison declined comment, but Tesla was gracious, saying that “he thought Mr. Edison was worth a dozen Nobel Prizes.”*42, 262

  In the event, they lost out to a father-and-son team of British crystallographers and were destined to die without receiving the honor.

  A SHEAF OF PLANS

  After three weeks of Western sun, Mina was mahogany brown but Edison remained pale, as if he had never left his laboratory. Mentally that was more or less true: his head was now full of defense technology requirements, from an invisible periscope (almost tauntingly wished upon him by the navy) to smokeless navigation lamps powered by the ebb and flow of waves. He wondered how the Brazilian firefly managed to contradict the second law of thermodynamics. “Its luminous
organs are but specks, and the illumination generates no heat. I have studied that little bug for years, and tried it with the most delicate thermometers….I’d give anything to know how he does it.”263

  He was afraid that a closed-cylinder apparatus he had devised to burn off unventilated hydrogen in submarines might get hot enough to trigger an explosion. The navy had noticed seepage of the gas from the cells Hutchison had installed in USS E-2 and was requesting a hydrogen detector that would warn its commander to surface and open all hatches if the diffusion level rose too high.264

  Edison let his chief engineer deal with that problem while he drew up a sheaf of plans, including blueprints, for a naval research laboratory. He presented them to the Naval Consulting Board at its last meeting of the year, held at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and attended by three advisory admirals.

  “This is the first speech Mr. Edison has ever made,” Chairman Saunders joked, unaware that thirty-six years before, two thousand scientists had gathered in Saratoga Springs to hear a talk by the young inventor of the chalk-cylinder telephone.*43

  As speeches went, it consisted of the tersest possible comments as Edison laid sheet after sheet on the table, letting the drawings speak for themselves. They represented thirteen buildings and eight shops, and he was precise about the expensive equipment each would contain: “surgical apparatus…all universal tools…three five hundred KW turbo generator sets.”

  When he was through, the naval officers said he had convinced them such a facility would greatly speed up the development of new prototypes. Rear Adm. David W. Taylor, chief of the Bureau of Construction and Repair, thought Congress could be persuaded to invest $5 million in it. Rear Adm. Robert S. Griffin, chief of the Bureau of Steam Engineering, was not so sure. “If Mr. Edison will appear before the [House] Naval Committee with the plans and all the data that he has…it will make a very profound impression.”265

  No public exposure could have been less to Edison’s liking, but he recognized his responsibility as board president. “I will go down to the Committee and explain that and fight for it if you want.”266

  A SPARK OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN

  When 1915 came to an end, Hutchison wrote in his diary, “The year has been the happiest one of my life and I look forward to a most happy one for 1916.”267 In particular he anticipated passage by Congress of a bill, drafted by himself, providing for the installation of Edison S-type batteries on all American submarines.268

  But just over a fortnight later, he fell from happiness to mortification. At 1:12 P.M. on 15 January a massive explosion rocked USS E-2 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, killing five men and injuring ten more. The submarine was in drydock at the time, undergoing modifications to its battery installation, and the whitish-gray smoke that shot out at the sound of the boom, along with a sailor still clinging to a section of the steel ladder, suggested a hydrogen blast.269 Rescuers had to don oxygen helmets before entering the fume-filled interior. Along with the dead and wounded—some were burned beyond recognition, others were pinned under mangled machinery—they found evidence that the boat’s two hundred Edison cells had blown with such force that the engine-room bulkheads were curved back like cockleshells.270

  The news reached West Orange late that afternoon. Hutchison rushed to inspect the wreck, while Edison, feeling far from festive, dressed in white tie for the annual dinner of the Ohio Society of New York. There was no question of him dropping out, since he was the guest of honor, and Secretary Daniels had come north to deliver a tribute to him. Both men looked stiff and grave as they endured what was supposed to be a jovial celebration. As usual Edison remained silent and, when accosted by a reporter afterward, said only, “I have no statement to make, except that the accident could have been due to any one of a hundred causes.”271

  Hutchison sent him a formal memo, blaming the disaster on lack of proper ventilation. It had been the coldest morning of the winter, with eleven degrees of frost at noon. “There were nine plumbers working in the boat, in addition to the crew present, and they doubtless wanted to keep warm.” A preliminary survey by naval officials of the damage, which included a dismembered torso, indicated that the explosion had been caused by “a spark of unknown origin” igniting an unacceptably high concentration of battery gas. Daniels had no choice but to appoint a court of inquiry.272

  It convened at the yard on Tuesday 18 January under the presidency of Capt. William H. Bullard. His youthful judge advocate was a lanky, tight-lipped lieutenant named Joseph O. Fisher. Another young officer, Lt. Chester Nimitz, served as counsel for the captain of the E-2. A retired naval engineer, Cdr. William H. McGrann, represented Hutchison and the Edison Storage Battery Company.

  Hutchison did not endear himself either to Edison or to the court by talking to the press even before proceedings began. The New York Times headlined his self-defense in a front-page story that took care of what was left of Edison’s reputation as a pacifist:

  A FOREIGN NAVY USES EDISON BATTERY, TOO

  M. R. HUTCHISON SAYS THREE SUBMARINES

  EQUIPPED WITH THEM HAVE SUNK MANY SHIPS

  HYDROGEN GAS NO DEFECT

  AMOUNT THROWN OFF BY DEVICE

  INFINITESIMAL, HE INSISTS—

  E-2 EXPLOSION PURELY ACCIDENTAL273

  He also blustered to The Sun that “the battery in the E-2 does not appear to have been injured in the least.” As a result, “I see no reason to recommend to Mr. Edison any changes or alterations in the theory, construction, or method of installation of the Edison submarine type storage battery.”274

  Fisher at once brought out evidence that the “plumbers” Hutchison mentioned had been duct workers installing new, larger vents over the batteries. Lt. Charles M. Cooke, Jr., commander of the E-2, had expressed concerns about the behavior of his boat’s power pack as early as September 1915. Some of the cells seemed to heat more than others, indicating an irregular rate of discharge. It was Cooke who had asked the Edison company, through Navy Department channels, for a hydrogen detector and an individual cell voltmeter. Nimitz showed that both requests were “held up by objections” from Hutchison, pending improvement in the submarine’s ventilating system. The chief engineer had also advised that the ductwork be accompanied by a discharge of all cells to zero voltage, to even them up for sea service.275

  Hutchison responded with yet another press statement, alleging that one of the E-2’s two ventilator fans had been idle on the morning of the accident.*44 Hence the commander of the vessel, not the manufacturer of the batteries, was responsible for allowing an explosive mix of hydrogen and oxygen to build up in the boat. When he appeared in the witness stand, Captain Bullard reproved him for public conduct prejudicial to justice: “Interested parties to this investigation will refrain in the future from quoting or giving articles to the public press.” Red-faced, Hutchison said that reporters were entitled to know the full facts, since the battery seemed to be “on trial.” This earned him another reprimand.276

  He was lucky not to be on trial himself, for not warning Lieutenant Cooke, either verbally or in battery maintenance instructions, about the hydrogen threat. Fisher kept harping on this dereliction, while failing to acknowledge that Cooke’s worries about gas seepage had coincided with a study published by the navy itself on the vital importance of ventilating all storage batteries, Edison or Exide. There had been at least six lead-acid battery explosions in the Atlantic fleet during 1915—another fact ignored by the court. Hutchison suspected industrial lobbying behind the scenes.*45, 277

  He had to admit in further testimony that he “didn’t know exactly” what was wrong with four quirky cells that the E-2’s electrician, L. L. Miles, had complained of before the disaster. They lost their charge more rapidly than the others, which meant they began to recharge at zero, and liberated clouds of hydrogen while the rest of the plant was still powering down.278 This caused a dispute between Hutch
ison and Fisher as to who was responsible for the gas buildup in the submarine—Hutchison as installer, or Cooke as caretaker of the cells.

  Q Did you ever tell Lieutenant Cooke that the reverse cell of the Edison submarine battery, in closed circuit with other cells not reversed, generated gas to a greater extent than on normal discharge?

  A Not that I know of. I did not consider it necessary any more than I would tell an engineer to keep water in his boiler.279

  The judge advocate asked for Hutchison’s haughty second sentence to be stricken. Bullard overruled him. “I think that does no harm.”280

  Later on, Fisher, still harping on premature reversal, saw an opportunity for some loftiness of his own. But Hutchison was better educated than he on the declension of Greek nouns.

  Q This seems to be a phenomena that wasn’t known to the officers of the Edison Storage Battery Company?

  A I don’t think that the phenomena—if you call it a phenomena—of gas given off by a reversed cell has been appreciated to a full extent by anyone.281

  It was a mistake for him to patronize an officer of the court. From then on, Fisher was determined to absolve the navy of all blame. He repeatedly referred to the E-2’s battery as “defective” and shouted at one point that Hutchison was a liar. This caused McGrann to object and demand an apology.

  “I apologize for my bearing,” Fisher said, “but my language stands.”282

  ALL THE MUCKERS WE NEED