*25 Edison’s educational movies project was a natural sequel to a series of semidocumentary, reformist shorts put out by his studio between 1910 and 1913. They covered such subjects as slumlords, tuberculosis, and child labor.
*26 Edison claimed that his nonskip jewel holder was the result of 2,300 experiments.
*27 “Blue Amberols…when played with an Edison Diamond Reproducer…outperformed any other medium of reproduced music then available,” the audio historian Roland Gelatt writes in Fabulous Phonograph. “The ears in Edison’s recording studios were attuned with extraordinary sensitivity to the elements of good sound reproduction.”
*28 Edison, aiming for wealthy connoisseurs, soon added even more elaborate disk players. By 1919, at the height of the phonograph craze, he was offering a luxury cabinet model at $6,000, or more than $87,000 in today’s money.
*29 In 1917 Edison put out what is widely considered the first authentic jazz record, “That Funny ‘Jas’ [sic] Band from Dixieland.” Arthur Collins and Byron G. Harlan vocal duet, Edison 5186.
*30 William Meadowcroft added the suffix -ish to this word when typing up Edison’s statement for release.
*31 In 1911 the distinguished operetta composer Victor Herbert quit as Edison’s music adviser, unable to stand any more professional insults.
*32 In 2018 researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara undertook to restore and digitize nine thousand Edison Diamond Disc recordings and make them publicly accessible under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
*33 This series of talking-head interviews, now lost, was the first political documentary with sound.
*34 He sold the last of them in November 1917, having profited greatly and restored much of his personal fortune.
*35 In the summer of 1915 the U.S. Secret Service investigated a briefcase mistakenly left on a Manhattan-bound train and found evidence of a $100,000 contract to buy and resell Edison phenol to German-American firms by means of a fraudulent “Chemical Exchange Association.” The funds involved came from an espionage account at the German embassy. Edison was embarrassed when The World broke the story, although he had already committed the rest of his phenol surplus to the U.S. military.
*36 At one point, a flushed and excited Edison was heard declaiming the last lines of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If.”
*37 Historic wax cylinders destroyed in the fire including the only recordings of such great nineteenth-century musicians as Hans von Bülow, not to mention Mark Twain telling jokes, do not appear to have survived.
*38 Hutchison boasted a one-day tally of $415,000 in battery and phenol sales to Madeleine Edison Sloane on 20 March 1915. His commission was 20 percent, equal to $2.2 million in today’s money. M. R. Hutchison to Madeleine Edison Sloane, 20 March 1915, PTAE.
*39 Edison thereafter became president of the Naval Consulting Board, but for the rest of his tenure, through 1921, he was loosely referred to as its chairman.
*40 “The navies of the world,” Edison announced after the F-4 disaster, “…must expect catastrophes so long as they continue to use sulphuric acid in those vessels.”
*41 It took a month for Baekeland to come up with the idea of letting hydrogen bubble out of the submarine through a waterproof vent. Edison had to explain that what was needed was a way to vacate “without any gas leaving the boat to indicate its presence to the enemy.”
*42 On 18 May 1917 the American Institute of Electrical Engineers awarded Tesla its Edison Medal. He reminisced on that occasion about working for Edison (“this wonderful man”) as a newly arrived immigrant in 1884. (See Part Five.) For discussions of the internet myth that Edison and Tesla were bitter rivals, see Bernard Carlson, Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age (Princeton, NJ, 2013), 397ff., and the essay “Edison and Tesla” at http://edison.rutgers.edu/tesla.htm.
*43 See Part Six.
*44 An annotated diagram of the explosion in the Edison National Historic Park archive indicates that the main outboard battery exhaust was valved shut, and plates opened adjacent to the fans for increased inboard ventilation.
*45 Hutchison told Daniels that a detective in his employ observed “frequent consultations” during the course of the trial between a member of the court and representatives of Edison’s principal competitor, the Electric Storage Battery Company.
*46 Hutchison had, however, been explicit about all kinds of battery gas evolution in his briefing booklet on the S-type, distributed throughout the U.S. naval command in the fall of 1915.
*47 Madeleine’s news coincided less agreeably with another of Beatrice Edison’s avowed pregnancies. Her confinement was “expected” around the end of June, but thereafter she and Tom remained childless. Beatrice Edison to MME, 19 June 1916, CEF; Madeleine Edison to MME, ca. late August 1916, DSP.
*48 The parade inspired Childe Hassam to paint his famous series of New York flag paintings.
*49 From this date on, Daniels addressed Edison as “Commodore,” unbothered by the latter’s conviction that his own name was “Dannels.”
*50 Fire control is the aiming, balancing, and concentration of naval gunfire on moving targets.
*51 Edison had earlier prospected Fort Wadsworth and Governors Island in New York Bay, and even the Hudson Valley, but “on account of the ice, I did not go beyond Tarrytown.”
*52 According to Hutchison, Edison’s fury was such that he ordered the breakup of all the precision tools and dies that had gone into the manufacture of the S-type battery.
*53 Edison was nevertheless confirmed as “president for life” by a vote of the Naval Consulting Board on 10 March 1917.
*54 The Casino, looking much the same as in Edison’s day, is now a luxury restaurant in Eagle Rock Reservation.
*55 Edison had experimented with vestigial vision as early as December 1903, when he told a newspaper editor that the eye was “marvelously selective” in storing up low-intensity light.
*56 “I have always been more interested in chemistry than physics,” Edison told a reporter in February 1917.
*57 Potassium hydroxide, or caustic potash.
*58 When an officer of the Bureau of Ordnance objected to having to test some Edison projectiles, Daniels told him, “Commander, you may be right in this matter, but the public will think that Edison is right, so go ahead and test them.” William L. Saunders to TE, mid-September 1917, PTAE.
*59 Edison’s inventive flow was such that he begged Daniels in April, “Please do not send on other people’s ideas….I have more now than I could ever work out.”
*60 When one series of experiments became costly, Daniels had to encourage Edison to “go ahead and spend as much money as will be necessary” to complete them.
*61 Edison, in contrast, remembered Wilson as a “conceited bookworm.”
*62 Theodore’s long illustrated letter of 15 November 1917 explaining this device to his father shows that he was a born inventor.
*63 Between 1918 and 1934 Thomas A. Edison, Jr., was awarded ten U.S. mechanical patents.
*64 Charles added the executive title of general manager to his chairmanship in January 1919.
*65 Hutchison prospered briefly, then became a victim of the postwar depression. By the end of 1925 he was down to his last $275. He lived on until 1944, clinging to his title of “Doctor,” and never ceasing to bask in the memory of having once moved among the great. “I spent the happiest days of my life with Edison. I knew him as did no other man.”
*66 John Sloane did not improve the family atmosphere that summer by suggesting, to Edison’s rage, that Charles and Theodore were evading war duty.
*67 The report was never released. Through his legal department, Edison aggressively fought the lawsuits arising out of the E-2 disaster, with claims totaling more than half a million dollars. He settled them in 1919 for $66,000.
Edison in his chem
istry laboratory, 1902.
THE APPROACH OF Edison’s fifty-third birthday, otherwise agreeably given over to freezing liquid carbonic acid at different soda strengths, was spoiled by a letter from his son William, a shifty Yale dropout who had promised, only a few months before, never to “darken the doors of your house again.”1
Recently married to a young woman of “fast” reputation, whom Edison refused to receive, William wrote that they were living in New York and had “gained quite an axcess to society.” All that was lacking to complete their happiness was an invitation to visit Glenmont. “Just for an evening that is all I ask….I may have been a disobedient son but hardly a bad or worthless one.”
In Edison’s opinion, William merited all three adjectives. And his wife, Blanche, a Delaware doctor’s daughter, was a spendthrift. No doubt the couple had worked through what little money William had inherited from the estate of Mary Edison, and now wanted “axcess” to some funds on his father’s side. They assumed, as everyone did, that Edison was rich. In fact, his finances were seriously strained. Having squandered well over $2 million on an iron mine in the New Jersey highlands and sunk half a million more into a gold mine at Ortiz, New Mexico, he was in no mood to reinstate William on the list of his many dependents—along with Tom, another wastrel, with a wife even “faster” than Blanche.2
They were boys no longer, at twenty-two and twenty-four, respectively,*1 and cared little that their father had a second, much younger family to support. Their demands on him—William’s alternately abusive and conniving, Tom’s querulous and self-pitying—were so continual that he relied on Mina to keep them off his back. Had she brought them up lovingly, rather than with a sort of dutiful affection, their vague memories of Mary might have been subsumed under a much more vivid experience of another “Mother.” But try as she might, Mina could not conceal a natural preference for the flesh of her own flesh. Looking past her for a true sense of identity, they distantly perceived their father. He loomed as the only constant on their horizon, a mountain of familiar mass. Except that whenever they approached, it receded or faded. Was there, in fact, any father there?
Charles and Madeleine had no such confusion, and neither would Theodore when he grew older. Taking for granted the love of their parents for each other and for them, they accepted Edison’s long absences from Glenmont as part of its domestic rhythm, just as they forgave him at home for being too deaf, or too abstracted, to pay them much heed. In a stream-of-consciousness letter written from MIT years later, Charles waxed nostalgic for the family circle that had never fully embraced his step-siblings:
The sitting room, is it still as it was I wonder, the big window that looks out over the frosty lawn the litter of toys under it, the big table the fine old lounge. The moonlight just visible thru the high north windows as it filters thru the moving branches of the big maple tree. The canal coal burning brightly in the fireplace and near it the chair with the big glass lamp above it and in it the most widely respected loved and honored man in the world, reading, the pile of magazines on the floor, the leather covered books on the small table near the door, the chair beside it and the little foot stool and you, mother, in it….And in the old south room the sister writing, writing, writing and the great dignified drawing room with its piano and the tall vase of american beauties or poppy flowers—nothing else—and the soft alabaster lamp in the drawing room….The quiet dining room with its chilly exedra and the big uncomfortable den, the phonograph in Theodore’s room and the white linen & bunch of red roses in my room and everywhere the touch & thought of one person and all the things I have dreamed of seeing again after all these years.3
Madeleine shared Charles’s adoration of Mina. They realized that her need to be assured of their love, regularly and often, was insatiable. And yet no amount of hyperbole could stave off her black depressions, which became more frequent as she grew older. She was the daughter of an inventor married to an inventor and could not shake off the neurosis that Edison cared more for his laboratory than her.
Edison’s chair and lamp in the sitting room at Glenmont, circa 1900s.
At thirty-four, she had long lost the teenage sexiness that had captivated him in the summer of ’85 (“Got thinking about Mina and came near being run over by a street car”). Her firm contours had softened to plumpness, and her almost Indian “Maid of Chautauqua” glow was dulled by too much domesticity and too few winter vacations. She was by no means an overworked housewife, having a staff of eleven to keep the mansion clean, plush, and polished, her table loaded with food (but no wine—she disapproved of alcohol), and the estate and greenhouse immaculate.4 Private schools and French governesses educated her children,*2 and a coachman and carriage were always on hand to drive her to ladies’ luncheons and meetings of the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Edison gave her a generous personal allowance, so she wore expensively dowdy clothes and could afford the best boxes at any opera or ball in New York.
For all these trappings and comforts of privilege, there was a grimness about Mina, buttressed by her staunch Methodism. She could not understand jokes, frowned on dancing and décolleté gowns, and deplored Edison’s cheerful agnosticism. Every August she attended the Chautauqua Assembly, the dour adult-improvement festival her father had co-founded in upstate New York, to soothe her melancholy at spiritual concerts and lectures on such subjects as “The Problem of Suffering” and “The Teaching of Jesus Concerning the Industrial Order.”5
It followed that she was horrified that boozy Tom had gone the way of so many millionaires’ sons and married a blond showgirl, Marie Louise Toohey. Nor could she forgive William for telling Edison, “I could never love, [or] even like my stepmother….I look upon her as the one who ruined our happiness.”6
“NO ANS”
Edison’s way of dealing with importuning mail—a substantial portion of the three thousand letters he received every year—was to scribble “No Ans” across the top of the first sheet. (Usually it was on the second that money was first mentioned.) He would leave it to his secretary, John Randolph, to decide if the supplicant at least merited a polite expression of regret. Randolph was good at trashing mail from religious maniacs, or desolate “widows” with masculine handwriting. But he felt less comfortable ignoring letters from Tom or William, even when Edison—a soft touch before they came of age—periodically threatened to cut their allowances for misbehaving. The secretary had emotional problems of his own, and could not help feeling sorry for them. Since his was, as it were, the only voice they heard in response to their appeals, and since he was the one who made out Edison’s checks, they began to treat “Johnny” as an ally who might prevail on their father when they could not.
The question for Edison in the spring of 1900 was how to get both sons settled as far as possible from the fleshpots of New York. That became an urgent priority after William sent Mina a letter that came close to a threat of physical violence, and the yellow press described Tom and Marie (“late a splendid figure in pure pink meshings on the stage of the Casino”) guzzling champagne frappé de glace at the Arion Ball in Madison Square Garden.7
Edison was less disturbed by that than by the way Tom, talking to newsmen, posed as his inventive heir apparent. “Reared in my father’s own laboratory and educated by my father himself, I think I am capable of continuing the work which he will perhaps not live to finish.” Randolph reported with annoying frequency that the young man was bouncing checks and selling his surname to all comers.8
Thomas Alva Edison, Jr., circa 1900.
On 9 May a flyer arrived at the laboratory announcing the appointment of Thomas A. Edison, Jr., as “consulting expert” to a new “International Bureau of Science and Invention,” with offices in New York, London, and Paris. “The company’s skilled technicians stood ready to “examine and look into any idea or ideas submitted to us (as per blank enclosed), giving their opinion of
same, and if necessary making suggestions toward improvement.” The bureau would help patent “any good invention” that resulted, in return for a two-thirds share of all subsequent profits. Its general manager, A. A. Friedenstein, addressed a postscript to Edison saying Tom had assured him that “the above scheme had been endorsed by you. If so, would you kindly advise me to that effect, as I would not care to invest any money in any matter that was not strictly O.K.”9
Having for years read similar missives touting the Edison Junior Improved Incandescent Lamp, the Thomas A. Edison Jr. & Wm. Holzer Steel & Iron Process Company, the Edison-Rogers Photoscope Company, and the Thomas A. Edison Jr. Chemical Company (not to mention Dr. Edison’s Obesity Pills and the Edison Electric Belt, which cured “all the ailments peculiar to women” by restoring strength to their “delicate organs”), Edison referred Friedenstein’s pitch to a lawyer and turned to the construction of an invention more typical of himself, the longest rotary cement-burning kiln in the world.10
AN ENTIRELY NEW VOLTAIC COMBINATION
One day that May Edison stood on the west side of Manhattan, waiting for the Cortlandt Street ferry to Jersey City. Just two blocks away was Smith & McNell’s restaurant, where once, famished, he had spent his last few coins on a plate of apple dumplings, a cup of coffee, and a cigar. It was the most delicious banquet in his memory, better than any he had subsequently been able to afford at Delmonico’s. The dumplings were still available (at $2.95), and every now and again he would recommend them to a friend as “the finest you have ever had.”11
All these years later, the streets he had lit jostled with horse-drawn traffic—overcrammed carts, cursing teamsters, and dogged drays whose manure and urine filled the air with such a miasma that a man needed the strongest cigar possible to counteract it. If New York was this jammed so early in the century, how long before it groaned to a standstill?12 For two hours Edison jotted remedial ideas in his notebook.
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