Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Always, in letters of this kind, the begging note intruded. Having sounded it, Tom cast all dignity aside and verbally threw himself on his father’s mercy. “I will sign any reasonable agreement with you—in which you can dictate your own terms—which will satisfy forever—an agreement which will deprive me of all future rights to the name of Edison.”89

  It was an abject surrender in a life marked by many. Edison had his legal department draw up twin contracts guaranteeing Tom and Stilwell respectively $1,890 and $1,350 per annum, in exchange for vows not to leech him again. Just to make sure they understood, he went to court anyway to prevent the Thomas A. Edison Jr. Chemical Company from selling any more Edison Magneto-Electric Vitalizers.90

  SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION

  By mid-February, cement and car battery production had started at Edison’s two huge new plants in New Jersey. Progress in each case was experimental and slow, but he predicted it would soon accelerate to a point where marketing could begin. He was uncowed by a threat to his pending copper-cadmium cell patent, filed by Ackumulator Actiebolaget Jungner, and announced by that company in English, presumably to get American attention: “The patent office of the United States has not agreed to Edisons claims, but has already made him several disagreeable questions. Some particulars in the case between him and Jungner will an interference jury decide.”91

  It was true that the Patent Office had agreed to hear Jungner’s counterclaim to have preceded him in 1899 with a silver-cadmium cell patented in Britain, but Edison was sure that the examiner would find that early device inoperable. In any case, he was no longer interested in cadmium and had applied much more successfully for a patent on his nickel-iron combination.92

  “At last I’ve finished work on my storage battery,” he told a reporter who came upon him hunched over a yellow pad in his laboratory. “And now I’m going to take a rest.” He threw a stub pencil down and dropped into an armchair. “I’m tired—very tired. I’m all worn out.”

  There was a twinkle in his eye as he said this, but he insisted that what he needed was an extremely long vacation, starting at once in Florida. He had a four-hundred-page notebook of ideas that he had never had time to develop. “I’ve made up my mind to drop industrial science for two whole years and rest myself by taking up pure science.”93

  Exhausted Edison undoubtedly was, and he did not mention the notebook again after he got to Fort Myers and started fishing. He took only a desultory interest in the sport, but it suited his deafness and love of being left alone. Little boats named Madeleine and Charles and Theodore bobbed alongside the dock that now extended far out into the Caloosahatchee, and a ninety-two-foot, double-deck steamer named the Thomas A. Edison was in service for excursions upriver. Mina had her own eponymous fishing boat, a twenty-five-foot naphtha launch. But she identified more with the house, extensively refurbished during the last two off-seasons, “and all so fresh and pretty.” She decided that it should henceforth be known as Seminole Lodge.94

  Edison enjoyed just a week of “rest” before news of a catastrophe at New Village reached him. There had been an explosion in the mill’s coal blower that touched off a fire in the adjacent oil tanks. At least six men were dead, and scores injured, some burned so badly that their faces were crisped like bacon. Subsequent reports raised the death toll to ten, and ascribed the explosion to the spontaneous combustion of seventy tons of pulverized coal. Much of the plant was reported destroyed, with damage—excluding lawsuits—estimated at several hundred thousand dollars.*22, 95

  Edison at Seminole Lodge, early 1900s.

  It was the worst industrial disaster in Edison’s career. He set to work on plans to increase safety at the plant, with no apparent thought of returning north to comfort widows and sufferers. As one of his aides remarked with mock envy, “Mr. Edison is fortunate among other men in having been born without feeling.”96

  Tom had a sense of that in June, when he signed a formal agreement to stop using his father’s name commercially. He was welcome to do what he liked with “Jr.” In exchange he was granted a weekly allowance of thirty-five dollars, every payment requiring a receipt. With typical naïveté he assumed he had been forgiven his peccadillos and the following month asked for a job at the laboratory. Edison was quick to disillusion him. “You must know that with your record of passing bad checks and use of liquor…that it would be impossible to connect you with any of the business projects of mine,” he wrote. “It is strange that with your weekly income you can’t go into some small business….William seems to be doing well.”97

  He did not mention that he had just approved a request from William to “borrough two thousand dollars” to buy an automobile garage in Washington, D.C. Edison’s aloofness from his elder sons did not preclude him from treating them fairly when they attempted to succeed on their own. William was a good mechanic, and the time was propitious for him to get into the car business. He received his first installment of the loan on 17 July, the day after Henry Ford incorporated a new motor company in Detroit.98

  “Now my dear father this is my last call on you,” William wrote, with every appearance of sincerity. “I can promise that the William of several years ago is not the William of today.”99

  IT TAKES TIME TO DEVELOP AN INVENTION

  When a representative of Electrical Review visited the laboratory that month, Edison hinted that he might become an auto engineer himself. He had just returned from a test of a twenty-four-horsepower gasoline tonneau and found it fast but unstable. “Look here, this is automobile data,” he said, pulling out a red-leather-covered pocketbook stuffed with notes and graphs. “I am going to build a good machine.” His would be all electric, geared for sandy traction, and “able to beat, or at any rate, keep up with, any gasoline machine on a long run.”100

  This led the reporter to ask the main question that had brought him to West Orange: why, after many announcements, was the alkaline storage battery still not on the market?

  Edison became defensive. “We are making one set a day, and within a short time will be making two sets. We are not doing any advertising, because we have more orders than we can begin to fill….The public doesn’t seem to understand that it takes time to develop an invention.” He said he had spent six years commercializing the electric lightbulb, eight on the telephone transmitter, and sixteen for the phonograph.101

  The truth was that his battery, for all its theoretical simplicity, was more complex—and consequently harder to produce—than those previous devices. A tenacious problem was to prevent the iron electrode from being overwhelmed by the rising capacity of its nickel opposite, in order to ensure a smooth and constant voltage curve during the discharge cycle. As his chief chemist, Walter Aylsworth, put it, both elements had to be kept “in training.” Compression of the graphite flakes in each at four tons a square inch was essential but almost impossible to maintain at a constant level, due to flexion of the cell walls. This affected the conductivity of the flakes and the performance of the unit.102 Edison ordered the finest, strongest steel possible from Sweden, but he worried about its expense and fumed over shipping delays.

  Another threat to the battery’s economic prospects was the question of its originality. The Patent Office had dismissed Jungner’s interference suit as expected, but did so by citing an obscure French alkaline-cell patent (Darrieus 233,083) that antedated Edison’s by even more years. Now he heard that on 1 September Jungner had been granted a U.S. patent for some “new” storage battery refinements directly based on his own. Or so it seemed to Edison, who turned to the patent attorney Frank L. Dyer for help.103

  He had hired Dyer full time a few months before to handle his accumulation of letters patent, which now numbered well over eight hundred and cost the company $100,000 a year in protective litigation.104 Dyer also had a sophisticated understanding of movie rights. That qualified him to make the most of a surprise U.S. Court
of Appeals decision granting the Edison studio full ownership of every film it had ever filed as a paper print at the Library of Congress.105 Although technical, the ruling was of major consequence in the industry, and he was working to ensure that it restored the Edison studio’s fortunes.*23

  Before the year was out, Dyer would serve as his boss’s personal lawyer too. Tall, bespectacled, bookish, and precise, he was the perfect foil for an inventor impatient of restraint and bored by due process.106 He was cool-tempered and adept at dealing with the strong feelings that arise when human relationships are codified. He venerated Edison without particularly liking him and felt sorry for Tom and William, seeing them as chips never to be reintegrated with the old block.

  SHOT FOR SHOT

  While Dyer prepared an aggressive case for the canceling of Jungner’s new patent, Edwin S. Porter resumed production of Edison movies, among them a comic feature whose title sounded more innocent in the fall of 1903 than it would in a later age: The Gay Shoe Clerk.*24, 107 His major feature of the year was The Great Train Robbery. Effectively transporting theater viewers from their seats onto a train hijacked by murderous bandits, it was a pioneer “action film” and became the first blockbuster in American history. The scenes shot aboard an open-sided baggage car (hurtling along the same Lackawanna line Edison took on his trips to the cement mill) had the impact of authentic movement, as did an even more thrilling sequence photographed from above and behind the cinder-spraying locomotive. But nothing made audiences scream louder than the final brutal close-up, wherein the chief bandit cocked his revolver and expressionlessly fired straight out of the screen, turning shot into shot.

  In perhaps unconscious acknowledgment that the age of the fixed camera had come to an end, Edison ordered the demolition of “Black Maria,” the dark old box that had served as his movie studio ten years before.108

  “THIS LATEST DISGRACE”

  The year ended badly for Tom and William, the former checking into a sanitarium for vague medical reasons, and the latter incurring paternal fury after calling his garage in Washington the Edison Motor Company. “You are now doing me a vast injury,” Edison wrote him. “You are being used for your name like Tom and as you seem to be a hopeless case I now notify you that hereafter you can go your own way & take care of yourself….I am through.”109

  William, terrified that his loan was in jeopardy, apologized and hired a lawyer “to annul the company that I so foolishly allowed to come into existence.” The business reconstituted itself as the Columbia Auto Company. Blanche wrote to say that she was now running it, with four mechanics working around the clock under “Billy’s close attention.” She clearly thought her husband was a commercial moron. All that was needed to make it a success was an extra infusion of capital. “We would like two hundred dollars to carry us through.”110

  Edison turned her down.

  “You do not seem to think that I appreciate what you have done for me,” William wrote him, “but on the contrary I do….I would call your attention to the fact that I never had the business training that most fathers make their sons go through and it was not my fault as I repeatedly begged for a position at your works but in every instance was refused.”111

  The next post brought a note from Charles Stilwell to Randolph confirming that Tom was seriously ill and would undergo treatment, presumably for alcoholism, at St. James Hospital, Newark. He hoped that Randolph would keep “this latest disgrace to the name of Edison” from Tom’s father.112

  A PICNIC LIKE THIS

  By January 1904 production of the Edison car battery had ramped up enough for it to be marketed at last. He designated it his E-type cell and made it available in three sizes and strengths. But his satisfaction in its initial brisk sales was clouded by Frank Dyer’s failure to persuade Patent Office examiners that they had unjustly awarded Waldemar Jungner priority over himself as the inventor of a working alkaline reversible cell.113

  Edison was so worried about the prospect of lawsuits, either from Jungner or Darrieus, that for the first time in his life he lobbied a major political figure. “Sir,” he wrote President Roosevelt, “I have been before the Patent Office for thirty years and although I have felt sometimes that criticism on my part was warranted, I have been silent. Now I find that a great injustice has recently been done me, due to what I shall call incompetence or fraud”—he crossed out the last two words—“on the part of two of the examiners.” He complained that the patent commissioner had taken “an arbitrary and practically antagonistic position” in declining his request for an official review of the case. “It seems to me that I am entitled to such an investigation, and if I can prove that an outrage”—he changed the word to injustice—“has been done, I shall be satisfied.”114

  Roosevelt lost no time in leaning on the commissioner, Frederick Allen. “Thomas A. Edison is a man who has done much for this country, and whatever can properly be shown him in the way of courtesy I should be glad to have you show.” He demanded that the great inventor be granted at least “a full hearing.”115

  Encouragingly, Jungner’s German patent was canceled in Berlin on 9 January, in a Supreme Court decision that found his battery to be “nonworking”—exactly the ground on which Edison was challenging it in the United States.116 Commissioner Allen had no choice but to order a review of the case against the examiners.

  As an advance birthday present for himself in February, Edison ordered two Lansden “electrics,” a touring car and an express wagon.*25 He chose not to be intimidated by the growing popularity of gasoline automobiles (William and Blanche boasted from Washington that they had acquired the agency for the new Ford motor car), nor was he discouraged by complaints from early purchasers of his battery that it did not live up to its extravagant publicity. Far from generating more power per pound than a lead-acid unit, it averaged only a moderate 11.8 watt-hours for each cell. Its soldered seams developed microscopic pores that leaked electrolyte, and most annoyingly, every charge/discharge cycle reduced its capacity. Edison found that the latter problem could be solved by a time-consuming application of heat during reversal, but he recognized that it was a fault that must be eliminated for his battery to succeed.117

  Having already spent $1.5 million developing it, he took a perverse pleasure in the need for further experiments. A long-suffering laboratory assistant remarked, “I could never get away from the impression that he really appeared happy when he ran up against a serious snag.” The finished cells were beautiful things—shining slipcases packed with up to eighteen pounds of nickel hydrate, iron oxide, steel, and caustic potash. There was something either masochistic or sadistic in Edison’s insistence that randomly selected models should be dropped from upper levels of the laboratory onto the blacktop courtyard. (“Now try the third floor.”) If they stopped working as a result, they were not solid enough, and the design had to be improved.118

  Perfection, to him, was a state forever imminent and attainable, so he spent no time celebrating past achievements. When the American Institute of Electrical Engineers held one of its overly frequent black-tie dinners, this time to congratulate him on his invention of practical electric light, he endured it as usual in smiling silence. Yet the anniversary seemed to register on him, and in mid-May, when the New Jersey countryside was at its greenest, he accepted an invitation from the General Electric Outing Club to visit what was left of Menlo Park.119

  At first he was depressed to see the house where Mary had died, tenanted now by Italian squatters, the decaying machine shop that had once thrummed with his first big dynamo, and the rusting hulk of his pioneer electric train, railless and sinking ever deeper into grass. Chickens roosted in the shed where Francis Jehl used to manufacture lampblack. At least the old laboratory building (so large-seeming when his father built it for him in ’76) was in decent repair, serving as half firehouse and half theater for the farming community all around. There was still a depot of s
orts, for visitors who could persuade the Pennsylvania Railroad to stop there, and a post office that continued to receive mail addressed to him. Otherwise the hamlet was headed for ghosthood.

  Edison toured all of it except his former office building, occupied by a crotchety recluse. Afterward he cheered up and ate a late lunch of cold chicken and bread, sitting on a log beneath the giant trees. “I get tired of big banquets,” he said. “But a picnic like this…I’m glad to be here.”

  It was a lovely afternoon, and he did not leave until sunset.

  THAT WAS THE WORST

  Presidential interest made Edison’s challenge to the Jungner patent a red-hot item in Washington. Commissioner Allen prudently went on vacation and assigned his office’s review to a deputy, assistant patent commissioner Edward B. Moore, who divided the challenge into three areas of review, ruled upon each, then asked five internal experts, each sworn to secrecy, to re-review them before presenting a final report to Alexander M. Campbell, assistant attorney general of the Department of the Interior, who approved it provisionally but requested the further endorsement of his boss, Secretary Ethan A. Hitchcock, who declined to be involved except to submit the swollen file to Roosevelt, who authorized Campbell to announce on 14 June that Edison had lost his case.120

  The Patent Office was found to have acted correctly, with “absolutely no evidence of malfeasance,” in awarding priority to Jungner’s storage battery over Edison’s. But in an obvious sop to his—and maybe the president’s—feelings, the examiners were transferred to other departments.121