“Can I expect a prompt reply?” Armat asked, obviously aware that Edison was leery of any moves on his intellectual property.65
Edison referred the proposal to his studio head, William Gilmore. “Say that I cannot very well go into the matter by letter…also that I do not agree with many of his suggestions in regard to litigation.” He was, however, interested enough in the trust idea to invite Armat to send an intermediary to discuss it with him. Eventually he said no, proposing instead a cross-licensing agreement to be negotiated after the appeals court ruled. Armat saw that Edison was gambling on a further victory that would make him so powerful as to be a monopoly unto himself.66
There was nothing for a weaker player to do but gamble on that gamble and await the court’s decision. At least the idea of a national motion picture trust had been discussed for the first time, and it might be discussed again if Edison’s dice throw turned up less than a six.
MONUMENTAL AUDACITY
Instead of flowers, centerpieces of tiny green lightbulbs ornamented the tables at a special dinner of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in New York on 13 January 1902.67 Larger, whiter bulbs at either end of the Astor Gallery spelled out the mysterious words POLDHU and ST. JOHNS, and yet more lamps, arranged in clumps of three, sporadically flashed the Morse signal “– – –.” It signified the letter S, which the guest of honor, Guglielmo Marconi, had beamed across the Atlantic, from Cornwall to Canada, one month before.
The general glow bathed the faces of many other electrical titans: Alexander Graham Bell, Elihu Thomson, Frank J. Sprague, Carl Hering, William Stanley, and the institute’s president, Charles Steinmetz. It also illumined Mina Edison, sitting alone at the high table.
“I believe I voice the sentiments of all,” Steinmetz said in his opening remarks, “when I say that we are extremely sorry not to have with us the grand master of our industry, Mr. Edison.” Instead, he welcomed Marconi as “another genius…who, taking up where Mr. Edison left off at the beginning of his career, has advanced beyond what others have done.”
If that sounded like a reference to the wireless work of another notable absentee, Nikola Tesla, Steinmetz did not elaborate.*18 He turned the proceedings over to the toastmaster, Thomas Commerford Martin, who lost no time in reading a handwritten note from Edison: “I am sorry that I am prevented from attending your annual dinner tonight, especially as I should like to pay my respects to Marconi, the young man who had the monumental audacity to attempt, and succeed in, jumping an electrical wave clear across the Atlantic Ocean.”
A COLD HEART LIKE MY FATHERS
That night Edison was lying ill in a New York hospital, suffering from an unusually harsh attack of the stomach pain that often troubled him. For the last four days he had subsisted on nothing but water. Mina’s willingness to quit his bedside for the dinner indicated that he had begun to recover, but it would be three days more before he was allowed to drink some milk and eat a chop.68
William Edison could have chosen a better time to write to his stepmother complaining about his life as the “forlorn son of a great man.” But tact had never been Will’s principal virtue. Nor was he subtle in appealing for sympathy from the one person who could rehabilitate him in the family circle:
It is now over two years since I have gotten a line from you or home and it rather sticks in a fellows craw to be treated in this manner. Of course I believe in my heart that you would not treat me so coldly if it were not for my fathers wishes in the matter as I believe you have a good and not a cold heart like my fathers….I don’t blame you in the least as you have your own children and they occupy all your time and devotion. We have sort of drifted away like a dead log down a slow flowing stream and its no easy matter to push that log back from its starting place and duced hard it is for a fellow to stand out in the starlight to find in what direction his home is when he has not a home that he can call his own. Often, I have half started for Orange but somehow the thought that came over me prevented such a step not knowing if any one would welcome my outstretched hand or not.69
Mina’s experience was that whenever William stretched his hand out, it was for money. But this time all he requested was a photograph of the children: “To think I would pass them in the street and not know them.”70
She took Edison to recuperate in Fort Myers where, still frail in mid-March, he heard that Tom and William had been arrested in a fracas with police in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Tom was charged with being intoxicated on a public street, and his brother for having struck the police officer detaining him. They had spent the night in jail, Tom being released on payment of a fine of $7.50, and William on finding—somewhere—$100 for a bond that committed him to appear in court later, on a charge of assault and battery.71
The same issue of The Evening World reporting this incident carried a news item equally if not more distressing to the young men’s “cold-hearted” father:
EDISON NOT INVENTOR OF MOVING PICTURES
The United States Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a decision this afternoon declaring that Thomas A. Edison was not the inventor of “moving pictures” and that the various other machines besides his are no infringements on his patents. By this decision the Edison Company will have lost thousands of dollars in royalties.72
Edison’s angry reaction was to reissue his basic camera patents, in narrowed form and once again sue every major studio in sight, including Mélies and Pathé in France. It was not a happy month for him, even though National Phonograph reported soaring sales of his new line of “gold molded” wax records, now being duplicated at the rate of ten thousand cylinders a day. He still needed to rest daily at noon after returning to West Orange in April.73
Better than bottles of medicine for his body and spirit as summer came on were some highly successful road tests of the storage battery. The first—sixty-two miles straight in a small Woods runabout—earned him a box of cigars from ESBC stockholders. He participated in some of them and became as addicted as Mr. Toad to the thrill of jouncing along country highways at dangerous speeds. “The sport of kings I call it—this automobiling at 70 miles an hour. Nothing on earth compares with it.” Edison could not have attained that speed in an “electric”—more likely during a comparative run in a gasoline car—but mobility was the thing, and he would remain a road hog for the rest of his life. Oddly, for a man who needed to be in control, the act of driving itself did not suit him. After one or two tries that ended up in ditches, he settled for a seat up front next to the chauffeur, where he could see everything and let passengers behind enjoy his secondary cigar smoke.74
Mina was a nervous convert to his new hobby. “This afternoon we had a spin over to South Orange and back in one of the gasoline flying automobiles,” she wrote her mother. “It was great sport but it made me feel like clinging to the sides every moment and felt myself drawn up to the highest tension for fear something might happen.” When Edison bought two big White “steamers” for excursions upcountry, the family named them Discord and Disaster.75
THERE WILL BE A FIRE
Bulk orders were already coming in for the battery by midsummer. They were premature, because Edison was a fanatical tester. Until five of his prototype units had each withstood five thousand miles of rough riding in electric vehicles as large as a three-ton truck, he declined to go into production. Besides, he was still experimenting with combinations other than nickel-iron and showing a serious interest in cobalt.76
This did not stop him announcing in the July issue of The North American Review that he had achieved the “final perfection” of the alkaline storage battery. He wrote that the lead-acid cell could not be compared with it, being self-destructive as well as heavy. “A storage battery, to deserve the name, should be a perfectly reversible instrument, receiving and giving out power like a dynamo motor, without any deterioration of the mechanism of conversion.” The alkaline cel
ls he was currently testing weighed less than sixteen pounds apiece and showed “no signs of chemical deterioration, even in a battery which has been charged and discharged over 700 times.”77
He allowed that an electromobile driven by his battery would be costly to buy, at $700 and up, but argued that its horsepower, unlike real horsepower, was cheap. A fifty-cent charge was all an Edison cell needed to propel a Baker two-seater eighty-five miles along a level road, and it did not have to be topped up with oats every day when it was not being used. Again in contrast to the horse, it could be relied on to work without regrettable sound effects. “The electric carriage will be practically silent and easily stopped in an emergency.”78
Edwin S. Porter might have been expected at this juncture to come up with an automobile-featuring scenario, since he was under pressure to do something to rescue his boss’s floundering movie business. But when he did come up with the idea of a film that told a dramatic story, instead of presenting a staged “turn”—like a boxing bout or a dance solo—he directed it around the more cinematic spectacle of a team of horses at full gallop. His Life of an American Fireman, which began shooting that fall, was so elaborate a production that the Newark Evening News felt obliged to warn its readers on 15 November, “There will be a fire on Rhode Island Avenue, East Orange, this afternoon.”79
Porter liked to boast afterward that Fireman was “the first story film.” That was not true, but it was nonetheless unprecedented in its use of temporal overlaps.80 It anticipated Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase in breaking action up into a series of visual shards, each one angled differently yet integrated with those that came before or after. The paradoxical effect was of narrative speed and busyness of content, although the movie was (like the Edison kiln) more than twice as long as normal.
A drowsy fireman on watch duty sat half-dreaming of home (his wife, in a floating vignette, putting his daughter to bed) when an unheard alarm sounded. The fireman’s sleeping colleagues awoke, jumped into their oilskins, and slid out of frame down a pole. In the stable below, the pole remained bare while horses, raring to go, were harnessed to their engines. The sliding firemen came on scene just in time to jump onto the departing equipages. Outside, it was—surprisingly—daytime, and the façade of the firehouse was quiet. Then team after team burst through the stable doors and galloped away. A crowd on a residential street corner watched as no fewer than ten engines sped toward and past the camera. On the outskirts of town, sparser onlookers saw the same procession approaching and slowing. A leftward pan tracked the hose wagon as it stopped in front of a burning house. Inside the bedroom upstairs, a little girl and her mother (also keeping irregular hours) were sleeping together while ominous puffs came through door and floor. Waking and choking, the woman rushed to the sash window and waved for help before falling in a faint. A fireman entered and axed the window open. The prongs of a ladder bumped against the sill as he hoisted the woman onto his shoulder, climbed out, and dropped from view. Moments later he climbed back in again and found Snookums still asleep in the smoke. As she too was carried to safety, two hose bearers came through the door and sprayed the bedroom with such force that its principal decoration, a framed plaque reading “THOMAS A. EDISON—TRADE MARK,” nearly fell off its hook.
Down in the garden, the rescuing fireman was about to chop his way into the house. The woman appeared above him, waving through a sash window in a reverse of the image seen one and a half minutes earlier. The prongs of the ladder that saved her—and would save her once more—tilted upward as she fell back fainting. By now the ax-wielding fireman had gotten upstairs. No sooner had he broken open the window and brought her down, laying her tenderly on the wet grass, than she came to and with further frantic arm-waving told him that he had not completed his work. Hurrying back up the ladder, he returned to ground level with Snookums, and the feature came to an end with two nightgowned female figures embracing.
It would be thirteen years before a bit player on Edison’s payroll, D. W. Griffith, rose to obliterate the memory of Edwin S. Porter as a film director.*19 In the meantime the older man pioneered a style that in future movie parlance might be described as “déjà vu all over again.”
TOPSY
Considerably less entertaining, if horridly more watchable, was Porter’s next feature, Electrocuting an Elephant. Filmed at Coney Island on 4 January 1903, it documented the last minutes of Topsy, a circus pachyderm of uncertain temper who had to be put away for killing three men in three months. The last had been a drunken trainer who thought it would be amusing to feed her a lighted cigarette butt. Nodding and swaying, she followed her handlers onto a pad electrified with six thousand volts of direct current and allowed them to strap her into place. For a few seconds she stood still, then white fumes billowed around her feet, and she toppled like a punctured airship. The camera held her in close-up as she lay on her side, until her left hind leg, stiffly extended, relaxed and sank.*20, 81
THE NAME OF THOMAS A. EDISON
The desire of William Edison to protect his father’s “good name,” even while besmirching it himself, became a matter of commercial urgency that winter. Whether framed on the wall of a movie set or stamped on countless thousands of phonographs, dynamos, and other devices, the trademark was an asset beyond price. Edison had cause to regret, just when he was preparing to sign off on the mass production of storage batteries and portland cement, that he had given the same name to his eldest son.
Edison’s trademark signature, 1902.
Joseph F. McCoy, who served him as an industrial and personal spy, reported that Tom had sold it to Charles F. Stilwell, throwing in the “Jr.” for free. “Mr. Stilwell wants to put a Thomas A. Edison, Jr. Phonograph Company on the Market, he says there would be big money in it.”82
Stilwell was Tom’s maternal uncle, a former glassblower with plenty of hot air still left to spare. Edison regarded him with wary benevolence. He had made use of his family connection before, helping Tom organize the Thomas A. Edison, Jr. Improved Incandescent Lamp Company. McCoy wrote in his memorandum that their new venture trespassed even more rudely on Edison’s personal territory. “He said that he refused last week $5,000 Five Thousand dollars he thinks he can get more.”83
Apparently Stilwell had already tried to resell the Edison name to the Columbia Phonograph Company, a major competitor of National Phonograph, but failed because his intermediary (Tom?) “was drunk for more than (3) three weeks, and the Columbia people would not deal with them.” If anything more was needed to seal Tom’s paterfamilial fate, it was Stilwell’s remark to McCoy “that Mr. Edison would only live a few years longer, at his death, he would bring suit against the National Phonograph Co. for using the name of Thomas A. Edison on their Phonograph and Record and supplies. He would make big money from that, as the Company would have to pay him, if they continued to use the name Thomas A. Edison.”84
Edison père had to struggle between anger at Tom and compassion for Stilwell, who had recently gone blind and had a large family to support. Notwithstanding the pair’s earlier collaboration in the lighting industry, they were neither of them bulbs of especial brightness—as evinced by Stilwell’s naïve assumption that McCoy would not at once alert Edison to their intent.
It was clear to Edison that Tom deserved a legal slap in the face that would stop him from ever again participating in identity theft. At the same time, having consistently refused to give him and William jobs at the plant, he had to accept some responsibility for Tom’s abject condition. The young man was impoverished, depressed over the failure of his marriage, rooming in Newark with the Stilwells, and drinking heavily. He had taken to bed in one of his prolonged sieges of paroxysmal head pain.85
But even now Edison felt unable to lay a symbolic hand on his son’s forehead: “Tom is either crazy or a very bad character.” He allowed Randolph to send him a terse note saying that they must come to an immediate
legal arrangement, with some guarantee of security on both sides.86
In return he received a three-page, meticulously scripted outpouring of bile, shocking to read from somebody as timid as Tom. It began “Dear Sir,” and continued:
Since I left you some six years ago—my career has undoubtedly been a wild one—as everyone knows—but I am not at all sorry that I have had the experience—although I am sorry I have injured you in the manner I have—however this is done now and I will talk to you as man to man realizing that our hatred towards each other is very intense.
I can honestly say that I never have had the slightest intention of doing you any injury—but your persistent refusal to take me back with you—I will admit has often caused me to give you little consideration in matters where I was personally benefitted. I know of no business deal that I have ever made—that I was not taken advantage of—having often been forced to enter into agreements to save myself from absolute poverty….
I never dared to ask your advice nor to consult you upon any matter whatsoever—for from the very first you gave me sufficient cause to consider you as my worst enemy and I still consider you today as such.87
The shapely undulations of Tom’s pen seemed to calm him down a little. He acknowledged that Edison had never done him any serious injury, “and you couldn’t if you wanted to—for I have injured myself too much to have anyone else do it.” He had rushed into his deal with Stilwell out of desperation, never having made one with his own father. There were, he confessed, some other name-selling contracts that Edison might find objectionable.*21 “My object in writing to you is to ascertain whether you are interested at all in their recovery—they are of course the only means by which I derive a living at present.”88
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