Edison

by Edmund Morris

  DAMN FOOL

  The depression triggered by the previous year’s panic reached its nadir in July. Exhibitors, nevertheless, were eager to invest in Kinetoscopes. Edison belatedly realized that entertainment was a public necessity, especially in hard times. No longer could he pretend that his phonograph was a business instrument, best suited for stenographic purposes. He brooded over the success of Emile Berliner’s rival disk-playing Gramophone and decided he could do better. Coin-operated phonographs were highly successful and a natural complement to peephole machines in amusement arcades. But first he had to wrest the commercial rights to his invention back from the hands of the ailing, failing entrepreneur Jesse Lippincott.141

  He had sold those rights to Lippincott six years before, at the same time undertaking to manufacture phonographs for him exclusively, at the profitable rate of $250 apiece. The resultant North American Phonograph Company had struggled amid proliferating competition to keep paying him back. When Edison heard that it was $1 million in debt, he moved to push it into receivership.142

  The suddenness and brutality with which he did so shocked Tate, who represented him on North American’s board and who felt obligated to honor that company’s many agreements with regional retailers—all of which he would have to abrogate if the bankruptcy suit went through. Rather than do that, he announced his resignation.

  “What’s the matter with you, Tate?” Edison said, turning on him in annoyance. “Why are you going to make a damn fool of yourself?”143

  It was a split with yet another veteran of Menlo Park days, clearly less painful to him than to Tate, who for some time had noticed the growing willfulness of Edison’s behavior.

  From the period of the fusion of the Edison General Electric and Thomson Houston Companies I observed a marked change in him in this respect. He seemed to repel discussion and his decisions became mandates issued from the depths of his own mind. If they were questioned he became impatient and merely reiterated them….

  The iron bit into the flesh when I broke the link that bound me to a man I loved so sincerely.144

  On 21 August North American Phonograph declared bankruptcy. Edison’s bid of $125,000 for its assets was accepted, challenged by less agile rivals, and eventually confirmed by the receiver. He thus regained full rights to develop and market his favorite invention, creating for the purpose a new subsidiary, the National Phonograph Company: “I don’t care to have anyone else have a lien on my brains.” Tate drifted off to a life of wandering, indifferent achievement and was replaced in his managerial responsibilities by William E. Gilmore, a tougher executive better suited to the temper of the times.*39, 145

  ONE PARTICULARLY DISREPUTABLE ONE

  That summer, notwithstanding the success of his film venture, Edison had to increase the stock of the New Jersey & Pennsylvania Concentrating Works to $1.75 million. He needed funds to reinstall the mill’s crushers on a bed of cast iron, strengthen the traveling crane (which experts warned was too wide to be safe), and build something never seen near a metal mill before—a bricking house. This costly experiment was Edison’s answer to complaints from smelters that Ogden fines had shown a dangerous tendency to “blow” in blast furnaces. He wanted to find a way to agglomerate the concentrate into Bessemer-quality briquettes, hard enough to stand heavy shoveling yet porous enough to absorb reducing gases at high heat.146

  Every problem solved at Ogden seemed to generate a dozen more. The belts on the rolls began to slip at certain speeds, and buildings had to be reconfigured so many times that carpenters took little care over their work, cynically assuming that all of it would be changed sooner or later.147

  Edison’s way of dealing with every procedural obstacle was to throw himself at it, body as well as mind, until something gave way. He and Walter Mallory nearly suffocated when they crawled into an eighty-foot tower dryer to investigate a blockage above and were buried under an avalanche of ore.148 This may have occurred just before Edison returned home for a rare family visit, imprinting on the memory of little Madeleine an image that would never fade:

  One Saturday [Charles and I] were called in from play—scrubbed and combed & dressed to the nines to accompany Mother to meet him at the station…Mother—who was a very beautiful woman—looking exquisite in her flowered dress—ostrich feather hat, & lace parasol—the coachman—elegant in his livery—managing the high spirited team of bay horses…& the two of us—miserable but resigned in our starched ruffles because we realized that this was to be a great occasion: “Papa” was coming home!

  Then the train arrived, puffing & blowing—black soft coal smoke—and from it emerged the most disreputable group of men I had ever seen—laughing & talking—they were dusty & dishevelled, their faces streaked with soot…and none of them looked as if they’d shaved for a week. I gazed at them in horror & then suddenly one particularly disreputable one detached himself and leaped into our carriage, kissed my mother most enthusiastically & we were off—my Father had arrived.149

  If Marion had been there, she might have recalled a much younger but equally filthy Edison besmirching her own mother’s fine linen. But as expected, she had been unable to stand her rustication in Menlo Park and was back in Germany—whence she applied, now, for his permission to wed Oberstleutnant Karl Hermann Oscar Öser of the Royal Saxon Army.

  “I at last love some one better than myself,” she wrote with her usual engaging frankness. “I hope dear Father you will make a flying trip to Europe to see me married. I have a good reason for wishing you very much to do this for me. Because I don’t throw my money away people think I am an imposter and not your daughter.”150

  Like her rapidly maturing brothers, Marion was afraid that when the time came for her father to divide his kingdom, he would not do so equitably. Mina was a more powerful influence on him than all of them combined, and she was bound to fight like Goneril to acquire the largest slice possible, in favor of her own privileged brats. That at least had been Marion’s obvious belief when she left—angering Edison so much he had refused to see her off, and had kept Mina from doing so too.151

  He was soothed by the simple sincerity of Oscar’s request for his daughter’s hand, but not enough to cross the Atlantic to give her away. Assured by intermediaries that the lieutenant was a decent man who loved her, he gave his approval. It would take many months of gemütlich residence in Neusalza-Spremberg before Marion apologized for “the way I acted before I left America.” She blamed her old traveling companion, Mrs. Earl, for making her doubt his goodwill to her, Tom, and William. “She it was who told me that you had settled all your money on Mina so that we would get none of it.”152

  THE GREATEST GENIUS OF THIS OR ANY OTHER AGE

  In September the Thomas Y. Crowell Company announced the forthcoming publication of The Life and Inventions of Thomas Alva Edison, an imperial quarto volume of nearly four hundred pages with 250 illustrations, co-written by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and his sister Antonia. It was an expanded compilation of the biographical articles they had been publishing about Edison in Cassier’s Magazine and was billed as “the first complete and authentic story of his life,” reflecting years of collaboration between the authors and their subject.

  Edison received an advance copy and gave it a qualified testimonial: “Although I have not had time to read it through carefully, after a casual glance I must say that it is extremely well gotten up.”153

  His glance may not have extended to the final line, which described him as “the greatest genius of this or any other age.” He was used to superlative salutations and quite aware of his public stature, but the Dicksons elsewhere gave him enough praise to embarrass an egomaniac. This was unfortunate, since the book contained much biographical information derived from Edison himself. The New York Times reviewed it favorably. “No one can help admiring the man who is revealed in these pages. Starting with nothing, he has acquired alm
ost everything that men prize. The boy who sold papers on the Grand Trunk Railway forty years ago is today known and honored in every country in the world….The popular notion is that Edison will discover everything if he shall live long enough.”154

  CATASTROPHIC FOLLY

  Edison spent lavishly building the new Ogden, liquidating all his General Electric stock in the process.155 At first the reopened plant seemed set to become its designer’s dream: a fully automated fons et origo of purified magnetite, cheaply delivered in unlimited quantities to revived foundries on either flank of the Adirondacks.

  In mid-October he put its machinery into experimental motion, aware that a malfunction at any point along the line—twenty-two sequences of pulverization, separation, and refinement—could jar the whole into immobility. The first disaster occurred in December, when one of the ore elevators split and fell. It necessitated a total rebuild of all three, plus complex adjustments to the crushing machines they served. The new bricking facility produced, after a number of false starts, some cakes that had encouragingly high levels of magnetite, but they were too few and too crumbly, bound to shatter en route to the foundry. In damp weather they absorbed water like sponges. Edison was obliged to shut Ogden down for yet another winter. He ordered the construction of a larger, more sophisticated bakery and set about developing a resinous binder, not anticipating that the “briquetting problem” would torment him for the next several years.156

  Twice in the early months of 1895 he called on his fellow shareholders for cash infusions. Alarmed that the mill was costing $1,200 a day just to maintain, they declined to increase their stakes. Gloom gathered among Edison’s engineers, all of whom regarded the giant rolls as a catastrophic folly.157 He alone remained convinced that when their kinetic action was accelerated to the point that they outperformed the explosiveness of dynamite, the plant would usher in a new age of automated magnetic mining.

  MORE THAN ENOUGH GLORY

  Emboldened—and personally enriched—by the rush of peepshow exhibitors around the world to buy Edison machines and show Edison films, W. K. L. Dickson chose this time to publish History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope, and Kineto-Phonograph, a monograph that reflected much glory upon himself as the great man’s closest aide. Or so it seemed to Edison, hypersensitive as ever to any presumption of intimacy. He thought that his tribute in The Century Magazine to the photographic innovations “of Dickson, Muybridge, Marié [Marey] and others” conferred more than enough glory to go around.158

  Now he saw that same tribute reproduced, along with a full-page portrait of himself, as the opening spread of a volume that otherwise paid him only passing attention. The text that followed was evidently written by Dickson’s sister Antonia, who cultivated a high literary style. (“With its great flapping sail-like roof and ebon complexion, [the Black Maria] has a weird and semi-nautical appearance, like the unwieldy hulk of a medieval pirate-craft or the air-ship of some swart Afrite.”) Dickson, identified as the book’s designer, managed to attach his extremely legible signature to most of the illustrations, including two bizarre self-portraits. One showed him posing à la Napoleon with hand tucked inside coat, while the other was a trick photograph of his severed head on a platter.159

  His principal provocation, however, was to append “by request” an article from the American Annual of Photography that described him as “a clever young electrical engineer” who was “co-inventor with Edison of magnetic ore separators.” This resulted in a rare outburst of Edisonian rage, dictated for the record to a stenographer:

  I object to the little book gotten out by Dickson. The part about Dickson being a co-inventor in the magnetic separator etc., is incorrect, as there is no co-invention in the Ogden business with Dickson or anybody else….Mr Dickson will get full credit for what he has done without trying to ram it down peoples throats….I am not especially stuck on having my own photograph in the book, it looks too much like conceitedness and self glorification on my part and the public never takes kindly to a man who is always working his personality forwards. It’s the thing they want to know about and not the man for whom they do not care a D—.160

  Having thus convinced himself, if nobody else, of his personal humility, Edison cooled down. But Dickson would never get the “full credit” he deserved as a pioneer of American cinematography.

  AN EXPERIMENTER OF THE HIGHEST TYPE

  Edison was about to reopen Ogden in mid-March when news came that Nikola Tesla’s laboratory in Manhattan had been destroyed by fire. Although the Serbian inventor was a wealthy man, on the strength of his brilliant innovations in alternating current electricity and wireless power transmission, he had neglected to insure the property. He was seen walking through the ruins, a storklike figure, picking up a piece of brass, blowing the soot off it, then tossing it aside in tears.161

  “I am in too much grief to talk,” he told reporters. “What can I say? The work of half my lifetime, very nearly; all my mechanical instruments and scientific apparatus….Everything is gone. I must begin over again.”162

  Edison reached out in sympathy to his stricken colleague. He knew what it was to begin over—and over and over. “I have received a letter from Mr. Edison offering me the use of his workshop in which to continue my experiments,” Tesla announced to reporters. “He has shown me the greatest kindness and consideration. I do not think, however, that I will accept the offer.”163

  Ever the loner, he said he would look for temporary quarters in the city and try to resume work there. Many observers thought it was more probable he would lose his mind. Just weeks before, he had confessed that his current experiments were “so beautiful, so fascinating, so important,” that he had virtually given up on food and sleep. This was hard to believe, since Tesla was a regular, solitary diner at Delmonico’s and ate pathological quantities of meat.*40, 164 Nor, with his frail constitution, could he keep the same kind of hours as Edison did without damage to himself. He admitted as much: “I expect I shall go on until I break down altogether.”165

  In all respects except that of creativity, the two inventors were opposites. Tesla at thirty-nine was a melancholy celibate. Edison at forty-nine still had a healthy libido and had carried off two teenage brides, impregnating both of them repeatedly.*41 If he was egotistical, his vanity concerned only work, while Tesla’s megalomania had no bounds. The New York Times went too far in reporting that “personally they are warm friends,” but they admired each other despite their professional differences. Edison restrained his contempt for alternating current enough to praise Tesla’s “amazing” success in transporting hydroelectric from Niagara Falls, while Tesla let it be known that he had “the utmost faith in the genius of Mr. Edison.”166

  THE VANISHED PRECURSOR

  Just when Ogden was thundering back to life, news came that Kinetoscope business in the United States had gone into a sudden slump. All three of Edison’s principal exhibitors—the Latham Company, Maguire & Baucus, and Raff & Gammon—reported peak sales in January, followed by precipitous falloffs of 72, 92, and 95 percent, respectively. Evidently the novelty of a device that showed moving pictures through a peephole had worn off. The clenching of Eugene Sandow’s buttocks did not encourage repeat viewings, except by a furtive minority of patrons.167

  Frank Gammon begged Edison to transform the Kinetoscope into a projector that would entertain large seated audiences, not just one standing viewer at a time. He got nowhere. Edison had lost interest in screened images after failing, four years before, to throw any that were larger than ten inches wide.*42, 168 The difficulty with projection was that it called for intermittent movement—forty-six film-tearing stops and starts per second—as each frame passed between a light and a lens. Otherwise, it would not reproduce in detail twenty feet away—much less at a hundred. Kinetoscope loops ran smoothly just below the eyepiece, with tolerable clarity.

  Edison the manufacturer in any case preferred
to sell multiple machines to parlors rather than single machines to theaters. He paid little attention when Dickson, choosing his words carefully, said that the Latham Company was building a projector for the specific purpose of screening Edison pictures. He chose not to mention that he had designed it himself and was spending many evenings in New York with the Latham brothers, secretly discussing the prospect of joining them in the organization of a full-scale production company once the machine was perfected.169 Such a studio would of course compete with Edison’s, making Dickson a pending, if not yet actual traitor to his boss.

  After twelve years of service, he was in terror of being found out and fired before he could be sure of security with the Lathams. They were little known and underfunded, entrepreneurial dwarfs in comparison to the giant he had done so much to mythify. Tempting as it was to accept a $125,000 start-up stock offer from them, he earned a good salary and substantial royalties as chief of the photographic department at West Orange. Until recently he had also run a profitable sideline selling portraits of Edison, shots of the laboratory, and paper print film strips, all copyrighted under his own name. That extra income, however, had been cut into by William Gilmore, who as general manager had forced him to transfer most of the copyrights to the Edison Manufacturing Company. Because of this Dickson hated Gilmore, and felt supplanted by him as the Old Man’s favorite aide.170

  In fact, that fluid title currently belonged to Walter Mallory. Edison had always winked at Dickson’s photo trafficking, since it served his public image. But he agreed with Gilmore that it must stop. His sudden attack on Dickson for aggrandizing him (after years of pretending not to notice) implied that Gilmore had advised him to distance himself from an associate whose days were numbered.171