Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Edison was now faced with two choices. He could proceed with mass production of his battery and gamble on Jungner not having the money or the will to sue him for infringement. But if the gamble failed, he could easily be ruined. The other decision was whether, in view of proliferating complaints about the battery’s unreliability, he should recall the units already sold and spend whatever time and money was necessary to fix his invention beyond challenge. Both alternatives were so painful that he postponed action on them through the fall.

  In the meantime he had to deal with the news that Tom, alias “E. A. Thomas,” had checked into a resort hotel on Greenwood Lake, New York, to escape vengeful business partners, while Clarence Dally, who had assisted him in countless X-ray experiments in the 1890s, had become a double amputee and was dying of radiation poisoning.122

  Edison was lucky to have escaped a similar fate, having more recently succumbed to the temptation to experiment with the first known quantity of radium imported into the United States. William Hammer, one of his former lighting engineers, had worked with Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris and gotten their permission to bring nine tubes of radium bromide home, to see if it could be used to create new luminous substances.*26, 123 Edison bought one tube from him, under the impression there was little in common between radium and the glowing salts that had contaminated Dally. (“Don’t talk to me about X-rays, I am afraid of them.”) He found that over a hundred chemicals fluoresced when exposed to the mysterious element, and that it also inducted phosphorescence in a diamond ring. But when he sensed damage to his stomach and left eye, he gave up radiation research altogether. Dally died on 2 October.124

  By the end of the month it was clear that the Edison storage battery was performing so erratically in the market that its total withdrawal was necessary. With thirty-seven thousand cells sold, this represented a huge loss to the company and another setback for Edison, after the failure of his mining ventures and his humiliation at the Patent Office. He ordered the recall under guarantee and threw himself and a team of eighteen assistants into a flurry of remedial experimentation. Working twenty-four-hour days in staggered shifts at two laboratories, they concentrated on the battery’s inexplicably different rates of power attrition, cell by cell and auto by auto. Edison thought he had the problem solved after three months, but this hope proved illusory, and the team settled into an increasingly desperate quest for a chimera only he believed in—that of “complete reversibility” of electrodes. Fred Ott, one of his longest-suffering experimenters, had to perform so many gloveless adjustments to various counterbalances that hot potash seeped under his nails and made them bleed. When the pain grew unbearable, he would dip his fingertips in acetic acid to neutralize the alkali absorption. He could not sleep at night unless he lay with his burning hands propped above his head. “Of all the elusive, disappointing things we ever hunted for,” a colleague remarked when it was all over five years later, “that was the worst.”125

  In January 1905, at the height of the initial phase of redevelopment, Edison was felled by an attack of chronic mastoiditis in his left ear. It necessitated a dangerous operation that reduced what little hearing he had left on that side to zero.*27 Examinations attendant to the procedure showed that the optic nerve leading to his left eye had thickened to a cordlike diameter. Whether this was the result of radiation was a question beyond current medical ken, but he had to live with partially blurred vision henceforth, along with greater deafness. This made him more and more difficult to converse with as he tried to keep interlocutors at bay with monologues or his particular brand of cornball humor—such as the one about the man with liver trouble who got rich after purchasing a spring in the San Joaquin Valley that cured fellow sufferers from all over the world. “Well about twenty years afterwards the man died, and at the coroner’s inquest they had to take his liver out and kill it with a club.”*28, 126

  Edison recovered quickly from his ear surgery, but because the knife had carved into the back of his temporal bone, his doctors ordered him to “do no brain work” before the spring. He ignored them and returned to storage battery experiments at once, declining even to recuperate in Florida. By February he had discovered that flake graphite, contrary to his earlier belief, was not stable when subjected to prolonged electrolysis. In the positive element, it frequently short-circuited, increasing resistance and so diminishing the capacity of the cell. This necessitated a search for some other insoluble material that would flake as well as graphite while maintaining a consistent contact with neighboring active particles. On 31 March he sought to patent a means of stuffing his electrode salt with minuscule, highly conductive “scales” of cobalt, alloyed with nickel to reduce oxidization to almost zero. Exquisite care was required to manufacture them. First he electrodeposited what he called “a mere blush” of zinc on a copper plate. The plate was then washed and transferred to an electrolytic bath, in which a film of cobalt and nickel (proportionately mixed by separate anodes) was laid upon it to a depth of only .0002 of an inch—hardly more substantial than the “blush” beneath. A third immersion, this time in a dilute acid, dissolved the zinc and caused tiny bubbles of hydrogen to rise off the copper and lift the alloy film. As it floated free, Edison wrote, it broke up into “small flakes or scales, which naturally assume a curved or curled shape—a phenomenon especially characteristic of cobalt.” They were sized through microscreens before being annealed to a red heat in a hydrogen atmosphere, “which treatment effects a very perfect cleaning of the surfaces.”127

  No sooner had he perfected this exquisite process than the gross problem of sheet metal warpage reasserted itself. There was no point in tamping masses of scale-speckled nickel hydrate into pockets that would not keep them compressed. A month later Edison and Aylsworth filed a joint patent application for pockets that were tubular rather than cubical, still made of perforated steel, but closed top and bottom and prevented from bulging by virtue of their pipelike construction. When these “non-deformable” tubes were packed with active nickel hydrate and had absorbed their fill of the surrounding electrolyte, they should, according to the application, attain a “desired” internal pressure and hold it indefinitely.128

  This supposition was accepted by examiners and moved toward eventual patent, but the idea of a constant balance between inner elasticity and outer rigidity proved to be illusory. Maddeningly, the cobalt scales kept shifting and short-circuiting inside the active mass, coating themselves with an oily insulant that none of Edison’s chemists could analyze. Increasing the packing force from 6,000 to 20,000 pounds per square inch made the scales more conductive, but compressed the content of the pockets into something as hard as soapstone, with a consequent loss of porosity.129

  And so the labor of “perfecting” a reversible alkaline galvanic battery dragged on toward summer and fall and who knew how many subsequent seasons. Even Edison wondered in moments of gloom if the thing would ever work. Whenever Yin bulged in the convex, it seemed to attenuate the concave tail of Yang.

  MR. AND MRS. BURTON WILLARD

  Tom’s removal to the Valley House Hotel in Greenwood Lake, New York, had not succeeded in averting the wrath of his creditors. He remained there under a pseudonym, drinking heavily and battling ill health and depression, until he was rescued by Beatrice Willard, a young woman of inscrutable origin. At various times in her life she had been Matilda Heyzer, Beatrice La Montagne Heyzer, Miss Beatrice Matilda Heyzer, Mrs. Thomas Montgomery (widow of a ticket clerk at Madison Square Garden), and most recently Mrs. (or Miss) Beatrice Willard. She had almost as many birth dates as names, making her at last count either thirty-one, twenty-three, or ten years old.130

  When Tom first wrote home about her, she was “Mrs. Willard,” a fellow guest at the hotel who was nursing him back to health after his latest “nervous breakdown.” After that it was difficult to deny the existence of a former Mr. Willard. Tom keen to return to New York in 1905 with Beatrice at
his side, so he solved many problems by adopting the surname Willard himself. The couple intended to marry but could not until Tom’s truant wife agreed to a divorce—an unlikely prospect for as long as Marie kept receiving weekly checks from Edison. Besides, she was a Catholic. It was accordingly as Mr. and Mrs. Burton Willard that Tom and Beatrice were now living in a leased house on Staten Island.131

  Their sanctuary there was breached in September, when a doctor in New Brighton wrote to John Randolph to say that a certain “young man” needed institutionalization. “I would advise his removal next week to Dr. Laning’s, Cornwall on Hudson.” He was referring to a home known as the Cornwall Sanitarium for the Scientific Treatment and Permanent Cure of the Liquor, All Narcotic Drug Addictions and Nervous Diseases. It sounded comprehensively suited to Tom. “Not that I have a very great belief in that ‘young man,’ ” the consultant wrote, “but I have seen some bad cases treated there.”132

  Randolph could not keep the news from Edison, who was going to be stiffed with the sanitarium bill. Dr. Laning advised that therapy for alcoholism alone would cost $100 a week, plus bed and board for the patient and his “wife.”*29 He estimated that a month’s stay would be enough to dry Tom out. Edison told Randolph to make whatever arrangements were necessary.133

  When next he heard from his son, in late November, it was a cry of such pathetic gratitude as to distract him momentarily from battery development. “Words are certainly inadequate to express my appreciation for all your kindness tendered me during my recent illness,” Tom wrote. “My entire system has forever and eternally rid itself of the poison that was hastily eating my life away—and a new form of manhood has enveloped me and transformed me to a character worthy of the name I bear.”134

  Now that the “stupor craze pain and worry” that had brought him close to suicide was over, he felt free to confess that “many times I hungered for commiseration but feared to appeal to you—as my bravery to bear censuring had long left me.” Even now he felt that “the bridge that separates us” precluded him from hoping for a personal interview with the man he worshipped most in the world. However,

  With my new name my new life and new acquaintances—I am ready to start out in the world fully equipped to meet the demands of my business ability—This Father means that I must have an occupation….

  I have long been an enthusiast in the interest of agriculture and I find that my greatest ambition and heart’s desire is to possess a farm and start a mushroom business….I am positively proficient in everything concerning the mushroom.135

  That was news to Edison, though not the fact, broached by Tom on page four, that possession of any farm entailed the outlay of capital. “My idea is first to have you purchase me a farm—taking a six percent mortgage on same….”136

  Edison read the rest of the letter carefully and wrote across the top, “Randolph—Tell him to better rent a farm…if in time it was satisfactory it could be bought—Tell him to pick out a place & ascertain the rent & also the money required to operate one year & let me know & if satisfactory I will help him out financially.”137

  William Edison also felt the call of the wild that winter. After two years of working as manager, salesman, or grease monkey in a series of failed automobile businesses, he wrote his father from Waterview, Virginia, on stationery emblazoned “The Punch Bowl Island Game & Poultry Farm.” He and Blanche were listed as proprietors. Just in time for Christmas, they offered “Mammoth Bronze Turkeys, English and Golden Pheasants, Homing pigeons, Belgian Hares, Imperial Pekin Ducks, Buff Cochins, Mexican Crested Quail, etc.”138

  It was plain to anyone familiar with Will’s ever-changing letterheads that his new venture existed only on paper. He hinted that he would be looking at two other rural properties in the spring and hoped he would be able to afford a down payment on one of them.139

  BREAKING STORY

  Edison, who seemed to have a habit of poisoning himself around the turn of every year, inhaled so much hydrogen cyanide on 1 January 1906 that he had to hurry outside and clear his lungs with cold air. A lab assistant told Frank Dyer over lunch that “the old man persisted in handling such things as if they were milk…I suppose they will be the death of him yet.”140

  Dyer, aware that his boss’s sixtieth year was approaching, had started keeping a diary, in anticipation of the day when he might contribute to—or even write—the official biography of Thomas Alva Edison. “That is just the sort of thing I would like to work up.” He was also aware that William Gilmore, general manager of the prospering phonograph and film companies, had a thirst comparable to Tom’s and was prone to unexplained prolonged absences from work. The day might come when Gilmore would not be welcomed back, in which case an ambitious, lawyerly executive more congenial to Edison would have a good chance to succeed him.141

  Although Dyer had failed to prosecute his full case against Jungner’s battery patent, that defeat looked Pyrrhic now that flake impregnation had so radically altered the technology. He encouraged Edison to talk to him on subjects other than law, and he was quick to record any biographical snippets that came out in their conversation:

  Spoke to Edison today of my scheme to abolish speculation in stocks by requiring all purchases to be recorded in Washington, like deeds to real estate, under a Federal incorporation act. He talked continuously against it in a most lucid and interesting way, just as if he had opened his mind to a particular page bearing on the point and was reading it….

  I asked him where he had picked up so much information about Wall Street and he said that for five years he ran the stock tickers. Facts once absorbed by him are never forgotten.142

  To John Randolph’s relief, Dyer also became the main negotiant between Edison and his pesky sons, not to mention their even peskier wives. He was a lover of Victorian fiction and enjoyed dealing with the melodramatic crises they heaped upon him. On 8 February he met with Beatrice Willard and found her overeffusive yet otherwise touching in her desperate desire to marry Tom. Nine days later, in a denouement straight out of a dime novel, Marie Toohey died, aged twenty-six.143

  Dyer had to handle three immediate consequences of the breaking story (“MRS. T. A. EDISON DEAD—CHORUS GIRL MARRIED INVENTOR’S SON AND LEFT HIM SOON AFTERWARD”). The first was the Toohey family’s assumption that Edison would be glad to pay for the funeral. (He was not, but did.) Tom followed up by asking if his marriage to Beatrice could now take place. While awaiting Edison’s decision on that score, Dyer visited the “Willards” in their Staten Island home and revised his opinion of Tom as a loser. The young man looked well and happy, excited at the prospect of a future in mushrooms. He played the piano with skill while Beatrice cooked a nice lunch. “It really was first class,” Dyer wrote that night. “I hope his father will help him.”144

  Edison honored his promise to rent and equip a farm that Tom found in Burlington, New Jersey, but declined to receive him and Beatrice at Glenmont and would not hear of them marrying. They went ahead anyway on 9 July, after Tom informed Dyer that the ceremony was urgently necessary. Edison reacted to this news with surprising mildness. He said he guessed family life was the best thing for his son “and would probably keep him straight.”145

  Nothing further was heard of Beatrice’s supposed pregnancy except a vague message from Tom in October, saying she was “getting along first rate.” By then he had begun to quail at the task of upgrading his primitive homestead to the sophisticated requirements of a gentleman mushroom farmer. Winter was approaching—the time of most hard labor in mycological cultivation—and he was ailing again. He was not sure he had the strength to tote, embed, flatten, and spray hundreds of wagonloads of horse manure compost, merely to begin the long, gassy process of fomenting a salable crop for next spring. In one of his many moments of despair, he suggested to Dyer that he might be better suited to a job at his father’s cement plant. If not, he was thinking of becoming
a professional photographer.146

  On hearing this, Edison exploded with an anger such as Dyer had never seen before. He said he did not want his son near him or any of his factories. If necessary he would set him up in another business, but he was sure to fail at that, as he had at everything he ever tried. Tom was “no good, and a degenerate.”

  Dyer tried in vain to persuade him that Tom deserved a large degree of compassion. “It seems remarkable,” he wrote in his diary, “that Edison should be so cold and vindictive.”147

  SMALL PALACES

  As it happened, Edison was under considerable stress at the time. After more than ten thousand experiments on his car battery, he complained that he had not learned “one-millionth of one percent” of what there was to be known about alkaline electrochemistry. As fast as he and Aylsworth added improvements to the E-cells being manufactured at Glen Ridge, older units came back under guarantee for expensive repair or replacement. Ironically, the aspects of his business he had reassigned to others—moviemaking under Edwin S. Porter and record production under Walter Miller—were bringing in huge sums, thanks to the spread of nickelodeons nationwide and the phonograph’s new status as an essential item of domestic furniture. It would be some years yet before the great mill at New Village, managed by Walter Mallory, recouped its start-up cost, but it was already disgorging six thousand barrels a week of the best portland cement and promised to be profitable sooner than the Storage Battery Company.148

  Edison could at least take credit for the excellence of its product, having devised a self-measuring hopper system that fed parallel streams of limestone and cement-rock roughage into separately beamed scales, each set to tip according to weight limits specified by a chemist. The moment either scale tipped, a needle dipped into a cup of electrified mercury and shut off the hopper, precisely regulating the proportions of the resultant mix. This precision only partly explained the quality of his cement. Much more was due to his insistence on grinding slurry destined for the kiln to a degree 10 percent finer than the industrial average, so that at least 85 percent of it would sift through a two-hundred-mesh screen before calcination. After coming out the other end as granular “clinker,” it was at first reground to a powder smooth enough to cream between wet fingers. But he discovered that such a consistency made for too-quick setting, so he adjusted his crushers to make a slightly grainier hydrate.*30 Concrete whitened with this paste developed formidable strength. “It is the coming construction for all great buildings,” Edison boasted. “It won’t bend, it won’t break, and you couldn’t burn it if you tried.”149