Edison

by Edmund Morris

  For a few months Edison and his elder daughter recaptured something of the closeness they had shared in the aftermath of Mary Edison’s death. Marion rejoiced to have her adored “Papa” back at Glenmont and to find him no longer as cold to her as he had been when she first quit his hearth. But by the time Tom and William came home again for Christmas, Mina began to feel there were altogether too many of her predecessor’s children in the house. She could not conceal her regret that Marion had declined the marriage proposal of a socialite she had met in Madrid.114

  Embarrassingly for Edison, a gossip columnist publicized his domestic situation in Town Topics magazine:

  I am all the time running across charming newspaper accounts of the home life of one of the great inventors of the world, a genius that lives not very far from New York. The inventor is very happy in the possession of a young wife that [sic] is remarkable for her physical beauty and is devoted to him. They have two fine children of their own, and the inventor has several grown up [sic] children by his first wife….Now, everyone knows how difficult it is to be a good stepmother, and therefore it is not at all strange that the inventor’s wife is by no means the fond and generous type of the species that she attempts to have people believe. [She] is said to fancy that her treatment of her husband’s children is quite all that it should be, but among her friends, I believe, it is held that her tolerance and gentleness are not remarkable.115

  The Black Maria, circa 1893.

  In January 1893 Tom, a sickly boy who clung to Marion, turned seventeen and refused to go back to St. Paul’s. He said he wanted to work for his father. Edison saw a fault line developing in the family and decided to make Marion a present of their old home in Menlo Park. She was not yet of age, but he saw no reason to wait another year before handing it over to her. Marion was in some respects more mature than Mina, who had never known peripatetic insecurity, let alone faced death in a foreign country. He transferred the deed on the last day of the month, and Marion moved out of Glenmont a few weeks later. It remained to be seen how long she could stand living alone in a vandalized hamlet on the wrong side of Metuchen. As far as Edison was concerned, she was “now settled for life.”116

  After returning to Ogden, he tried with some irritation to soothe Mina’s feeling that his heart was not all hers. “You are mean to doubt me as you did in your last letter…you are not a lover, only on occasions do you impress me as loving me, in any event it is not a strong deep love like mine, what little there is would easily be disturbed, someday Billy darling you will love me….It is very cold here today, the wind is blowing very hard.”117

  NOT THE BEST TIME

  In February the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, a stressed spar of the nation’s overextended transport industry, snapped and toppled into bankruptcy. Investors already concerned about a decline in Treasury gold reserves rushed to buy as much bullion as they could. Panic set in, just as organizers of the World’s Fair in Chicago were preparing to celebrate American industrial might.

  W. K. L. Dickson collapsed at the same time as the railroad. He was worn out by his multiple responsibilities as photographer, producer, performer, studio builder, and sound coordinator—in one experiment, playing violin while two young men self-consciously waltzed for the camera.*31, 118 On top of all these responsibilities, he had embarked on writing an authorized life of his employer, and had already published several advance chapters in Cassier’s Magazine. Edison sympathetically treated him to a ten-week vacation at full pay in his house in Fort Myers. It did away with any lingering hope that they would be able, as promised, to exhibit a sonic version of the Kinetograph at the fair—or for that matter, even show the basic camera.119

  He had already given up on an earlier dream, to be the official supplier of electricity to the exposition, and fill its white palaces with the radiance of his greatest invention. Since he was no longer in the lighting business, it was a matter of practical indifference to him that George Westinghouse had won that honor by underbidding General Electric. More personally, it was satisfying to see Westinghouse scrabble not to infringe on his now-universal lamp patent, by supplying leaky, reconfigured bulbs that lasted about as long as candles.120

  No sooner had President Cleveland opened the fair at the beginning of May than a second speculative juggernaut, the National Cordage Company, went into receivership. The stock market crashed. There was no doubt now that the economy was headed for a major depression. Hundreds of banks called in their loans, then failed themselves. Edison was somewhat protected by the variety of his investments in his own companies, but with all his children still depending on him—as well as Mina, with her love of fine food and good clothes—he had personal expenses of almost $3,000 a month.*32 It was not the best time to discover that he had been wrong in assuming he could build a new plant at Ogden as quickly as he had adapted the old. Instead of taking four months and costing $100,000, the project looked likely to drag on for another year and a half, at incalculable cost. And there were no more orders for the limited amount of concentrate he still had on hand.121

  “The Ogden baby is sick,” he said to Tate.122

  He was unwell himself, suffering from an onset of diabetes that would trouble him for the rest of his life. Two insurance companies declined to cover him “on account of sugar,” and he was able to register with a third only after stringent dieting. In other indications of stress, he borrowed $115,000 from Drexel, Morgan at the high rate of 6 percent, fired many employees, and complained about “professional sharks” continuing to infringe on his inventions. “I’m through with patents,” he told a lawyer soliciting his business.123 Over the next four years, he would send only five applications to the Patent Office—for him, the equivalent of a total boycott.124

  INSIDE THE BOX

  Dickson came back from Florida in time to help Edison mount the first public demonstration of the Kinetograph at the Brooklyn Institute on 9 May. The occasion was almost perversely uncommercial, being a lecture delivered by George M. Hopkins, chairman of the department of physics, to an audience of four hundred scientists. For once, Edison did not arrange newspaper coverage: nor did he attend the event himself. “These Zoetropic devices,” he scoffed to Eadweard Muybridge, “are of too sentimental a character to get the public to invest in.” He may have been embarrassed by his failure, two years after promising to show moving pictures with sound and color at the World’s Fair, to come up with anything more impressive than the evening’s tall, varnished box with a peephole at the top. As for pictures, all he had to offer Dr. Hopkins were some silent black-and-white experimental shorts.125

  The professor chose a twenty-seven-second loop of three blacksmiths clustering around an anvil, sharing a beer, and forging a piece of white-hot iron. He was unable to project the action for communal viewing, but used a magic lantern to flash a few stills on the auditorium screen. The gradated differences between each frame were at least discernible. “Persistence of vision,” he explained, “is depended upon to blend the successive images into one continuous ever-changing photographic picture.” Using the lantern’s radially slit disk shutter, he showed a spasmodic suggestion of movement. “In Mr. Edison’s machine far more perfect results are secured,” he said, explaining that its fundamental feature was an advancement system operating at hardly comprehensible speed. “This camera starts, moves, and stops the sensitive strip which receives the photographic image forty-six times a second.”126 He then invited his colleagues to file past the Kinetograph and bend over the peephole to watch Blacksmith Scene endlessly playing inside the box.*33

  Three hours went by before all were able to do so. Unless any of them had been overseas, and—by remote chance—seen private demonstrations of paper-roll motion pictures by Louis Le Prince, Étienne-Jules Marey, and William Friese-Greene, this vision of a new medium was so strange as to defeat initial comprehension. Each scientist in turn applied his eye to the glass and was pulled fro
m the bright auditorium into a flickering world where Lilliputian figures moved in chiaroscuro, their tiny hammer blows falling soundlessly.127

  THE FIRST FEW CONCUSSIONS

  Ogden, in contrast, was a crescendo of noise from August on, as Edison began to assemble and test the components of his new concentrating facility. First in order of process were the world’s largest traveling crane, a 215-foot bridge rumbling on rails over the quarry and lifting overloaded skips pneumatically, with earsplitting hisses and snorts, and a six-ton electric elevator that thunderously spilled ore into the crusher building. Their combined cacophony, amplified by shrieking locomotive whistles, throbbing engines and dynamos, and the clatter of miles of conveyor belts, rose to hurtful levels when he invented and installed a pair of self-styled “Giant” crushing rolls in March 1894.128

  These counterspinning, corrugated cylinders were six feet in diameter and weighed about thirty tons each. Along with four supplementary pairs of rolls, they were designed to reduce the most adamantine gneiss to powder. Only Edison, with his muffled hearing, could stand near them without wincing. “They have a surface velocity of nearly 40 miles per hour,” he boasted, “and can strike a blow of 1,800,000 lbs.”*34 The violence with which they did so came from his addition of a cabled friction clutch to their drive. It resolved the ancient conundrum of irresistible force meeting an immovable object by releasing the rolls to whirl free just before they bit into a boulder, so that momentum alone—seventy tons of chilled steel hitting a few tons of rock—did the fracturing.129

  The first few concussions were enough to show that he had been unwise to mount his roll assembly on a wooden foundation. Drops from the hopper caused misalignments that either jammed the machinery, or threw boulders high into the air before they descended, spinning, and rode the rolls with the deceptive lightness of ping-pong balls. On such occasions the crew had to scatter to avoid flying fragments. Edison saw that nothing short of a bed of cast iron, and babbitted bearings, could fortify the roll banks, both “giant” and intermediate, well enough to stand a constant torrent of ore.130

  The tests were a disaster, necessitating many more months of crusher redesign that cost him another $200,000 and postponed—yet again—any thought of getting the New Jersey & Pennsylvania Concentrating Works into regular production.131

  THAT CROWD OUT THERE

  Edison had no more luck in making a practicable combination of the phonograph and Kinetograph when he returned to the laboratory. He settled for the spring release of a coin-operated version of the peephole player Hopkins had unveiled in Brooklyn, along with a small library of “films”—his own word—to demonstrate the miracle of photographed movement. Quashing hopes that the box might be wired for sound, he renamed it the Kinetoscope*35 and announced that the first reel made for it would feature the dancing biceps of Eugene Sandow, “Strongest Man on Earth.”132

  For Sandow, alias Friedrich Wilhelm Müller, a German chain-breaker who had wowed audiences at the World’s Fair, the chance to be associated with the most famous inventor of the age was more than a splicing of superlatives. It meant that hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of Americans would now be able to admire his physique in Aktion and buy his various bodybuilding products. Nor could the publicity hurt Edison, who needed the Kinetoscope to distract attention from the shutdown of his iron mill. He welcomed the massive young man to West Orange and posed for a snapshot beside him, taking care to stand a little higher, before escorting him to the Black Maria. Once inside, Sandow stripped down to boxing boots and a white undergarment that gave new dimensions of meaning to the word briefs.133

  The resultant forty-one-second “actuality,” taken by Dickson and Heise in a brilliant downfall of sunshine, beautifully caught the ripple of his muscles as he clenched and writhed and twirled for the camera. But by chance, or more likely by design, the lighting emphasized some of his less mobile protuberances, with an attention to detail not to be matched in cinematography for seventy years.134

  Nevertheless it was the likeness of Thomas Alva Edison, cast in bronzed plaster, that appeared on a pedestal in the forecourt of the first Kinetoscope parlor in New York on Saturday 14 April, two days before Sandow and two dozen other “moving pictures”*36 were due for exhibit. The ambitious lessor of the premises at 1155 Broadway was Alfred Tate, who like Insull before him had parlayed his job as Edison’s private secretary into a variety of outside responsibilities. With his brother Bertram and a friend, Thomas R. Lombard, helping out, he spent the morning arranging ten Kinetoscopes for on-demand viewing. The oak cabinets were electrically linked in two rows and enclosed in a curving rail for patrons to lean against while moving from peephole to peephole. Framed pictures hung high on the walls, as if to emphasize the contrast between their stillness and the animated “shows” available below, at twenty-five cents for five. The floor was glossed to reflect the varnished oak of the machines, and sprays of potted palm added a touch of salon-like elegance.135

  Eugene Sandow models for W. K. Dickson’s camera, March 1894.

  By early afternoon all was ready for the opening on Monday. Tate and his companions retired to the back office to smoke and chat.

  We had planned to have an especially elaborate dinner that evening at Delmonico’s, then flourishing on the southeast corner of Broadway and Twenty-sixth Street, to celebrate the initiation of the Kinetoscope enterprise. From where I sat I could see the display window and the groups who stopped to gaze at the bust of Edison. And then a brilliant idea occurred to me.

  “Look here,” I said, pointing towards the window, “why shouldn’t we make that crowd out there pay for our dinner tonight?”

  They both looked and observed the group before the window as it dissolved and renewed itself.

  “What’s your scheme?” asked Lombard with a grin.

  “Bert,” I said to my brother, “you take charge of the machines. I’ll sell tickets and,” turning to Lombard, “you stand at the door and act as a reception committee. We can run till six o’clock and by that time we ought to have dinner money.”136

  The trio never got to Delmonico’s. There was such an inrush of patrons that Tate was unable to close the parlor until one o’clock on Sunday morning.137 During the weeks that followed it became a magnet for oglers of both sexes. They admired Sandow’s masculinity and the gyrations of female dancers and contortionists until Edison, embarrassed, ordered his bust to be removed.

  Given the nonnarrative shortness of Kinetoscope films, the public’s fascination with them derived, beyond prurience, from incredulity that movement, which by definition was a state of continuous change, could be both recorded and replayed. The fifty-foot loops magically kept boxers punching, barbers shaving, gymnasts somersaulting, Fred Ott sneezing, and Annie Oakley sharpshooting until celluloid fatigue set in—whereupon there was always a duplicate copy to wind onto the reels. Dickson and Heise were more interested in novelty than aesthetics, except when they filmed the Butterfly, Sun, and Serpentine dances of Annabelle Whitford. Her yellow hair and radiant, floaty costumes encouraged them to have a few strips hand-tinted, frame by frame. Privileged viewers were then able to watch Miss Whitford twirling amid undulations of colored gossamer that at one moment resembled wings, at another the petals of an enormous windblown flower.*37, 138

  Soon the Kinetoscope department of the Edison Manufacturing Company was selling $2,000 worth of players a week, plus Kinetograph cameras and films, through three competing agencies. Purchase orders grew at a compound rate as new parlors opened up across the country. Over the next year Edison’s income from his invention would exceed $250,000.*38 Yet he again refrained from patenting it overseas and again emphasized, in a handwritten statement published in the June issue of The Century Magazine, that he was not the only begetter of moving pictures. If the technology ever reached the point of presenting spectacles as grand as those of the Metropolitan Opera, he wrote
, it would be due to “my own work and that of Dickson, Muybridge, Marié and others who will doubtless enter the field.”139

  Whatever authenticity Edison’s graceful calligraphy (and misspelling of Marey’s name) gave to this modest sharing of credit was compromised by his declaration, a few lines earlier, “In the year 1887, the idea occurred to me that it was possible to devise an instrument that would do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.”

  If this alteration by one digit of the true chronology of his invention was deliberate, rather than a simple slip of the pen, it gave birth to a lie that would make him and Dickson—who perpetuated it with fanatical insistence for the next forty years—morally suspect in the eyes of history.140