Edison

by Edmund Morris

  However, it also did much to restore his wealth, because the Vitascope was a culture-changing success. Audiences gasped at the onrush of great waves in Rough Sea at Dover and at the prolonged intimacy of The May Irwin Kiss—shocking when blown up more than life size and the Edison studio’s biggest hit that year. “Can genius go farther?” the Los Angeles Times marveled. “We have been made to hear the voices of our distant friends, and now we are able to see them move and act.”206 It remained only for Edison to present himself to the camera, which he did, teasingly, by letting a young newspaper artist, J. Stuart Blackton, sketch him while he remained offscreen.

  The Edisonian forelock and black brows were given gestural attention, with slashing sweeps of charcoal.*48, *49, 207

  On 11 August Henry Ford, chief engineer of the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit, had a chance to worship the same features “live” during an industry convention at Manhattan Beach, Long Island. He surreptitiously photographed Edison snoozing straw-hatted on the porch of the Oriental Hotel but did not dare to approach him until around midnight, when Edison sat drinking beer with a number of Menlo Park veterans.208 Ford worked up the courage to tell him that he had designed and driven “a little gas car.” Although Edison was himself beginning to think of the storage battery as the ideal power source for horseless carriages, he reacted encouragingly: “Keep on with your engine. If you can get what you want, I can see a great future.”209

  Less than a month later, at the state fair in Providence, Rhode Island, two “electrics” averaging fifteen miles per hour beat five gas-powered Duryeas in the first track race for automobiles ever held in America.210

  By then Edison was back at Ogden, where at last the briquetting plant was registering big improvements. “Made 13,000 bricks without a miss,” he wrote his wife in triumph. “They came out perfectly baked and hard as granite. Now everything is known all will work and we are getting things to completion.”211

  Mina had heard such effusions so often, and had pined for his company so long, that it was hard for her to simulate excitement. She was more inclined to complain—or in his language, “growl”—about their many separations. She had recently turned thirty-one, and like Mary Edison before her, she was becoming stout. Edison tried to make her feel less neglected by sending extravagant endearments. “Darling Billy (Constitutional Growler)….I just simply love you to pieces….with kisses so thick that 40,000,000 X ray lamps couldn’t penetrate….”212

  Meanwhile on the Mesabi Range in Minnesota, steam shovels were pushing aside thin topsoil and lifting out pyramids of high-grade hematite, thirteen tons at a time. The price of that ore was steadily falling, just as shipments were rising—from 621,047 gross tons in 1893 to a frightening 2,884,372 tons this year. Edison’s only response was to scale up the size of his assault on Sparta Mountain. He let newspapers know that he, too, was ordering steam shovels and was ready to go into full production at five thousand tons of ore a day, if a sample order of his briquettes tested satisfactorily at the Crane Iron Works in Catasauqua, Pennsylvania.213 In that case, other eastern furnacemen were bound to switch to satiny Ogden agglomerate and rejoice that they need never again choke over trainloads of red rubble from Duluth.

  As if to remind the world he was still an inventor, he rounded off his laboratory work for 1896 with a flurry of new product announcements: a superior projector to replace that of Thomas Armat, a spring-driven home phonograph, an improved wax for cylinders, an “autographic telegraph” that sent dotted script and sketches, and a lightning-fast current breaker that, combined with Tesla’s coil oscillator, greatly increased the electromagnetic force of an X-ray machine.214

  A demonstration of this hookup at the Kentucky School of Medicine on 23 November showed how radiation could be used to aid surgeons in the extraction of bullet fragments from human flesh—a frequent chore in that part of the country. It also tantalizingly suggested what scientific miracles might be achieved if the two “geniuses” could be persuaded to form a team. But given their opposing personalities, that was as unlikely as an alliance between Oscar Wilde and the Marquess of Queensbury. Already Edison had joked about the nonappearance of Tesla’s fluorescent lamp—“If Tesla has a light why don’t he show it?”—while Tesla criticized him for X-raying the eyes of blind people to see if they registered any internal light patterns: “Is it not cruel to raise such hopes when there is little ground to them?”215

  On one thing they were agreed: that by toying with X-rays too much, they had done some mysterious damage to themselves. Until more was understood about the pathology of radiation, they preferred to return to safer research.216

  “The fact is, there is really a terra incognita bound up in crystals and salts,” Edison told a visitor to his laboratory. “Just come out here in the workshop and see how my assistants have suffered from the bombardment of these rays.” He led the way into another room and got Clarence Dally to hold out his arms and hands. They were swollen out of all proportion, as if they had been pounded with clubs.217

  Edison seemed more interested than sympathetic. He wondered aloud if focused rays might not be effective in killing tuberculosis bacilli or clarifying cataracts. “I can blindfold you, and yet cause you to see objects by means of the X-ray….I know there are those who say that such a thing is impossible, but you cannot laugh a fact out of court.”*50, 218

  THE LAST NOTCH

  On New Year’s Day 1897 Edison was in Catasauqua to observe the start of a long series of tests on Ogden briquettes. He was accompanied by his inseparable aide Frederick Ott, who a few years earlier had become history’s first film star by pretending to sneeze for the Kinetograph camera.

  “This is Freddie,” he said to Leonard Peckitt, president of the Crane Iron Company. Peckitt was an Englishman and thought he said “Friday,” in reference to another famous factotum.

  Later, when they were alone, he asked, “What does Friday do?” and Edison, deaf, replied, “Nothing.”

  “If he doesn’t do anything, why do you want him?”

  “Because he never falls asleep. That’s what I pay him for, to keep awake. Whenever I want him, he is there. The other damned fools are always asleep when I want something.”219

  Peckitt put Edison up at home while Ott stayed at the local hotel. At mealtimes he was fascinated by his guest’s obliviousness to whatever was served.

  He never asked for anything, never would express a preference, never helped himself. He ate and drank what was before him. If you put nothing on his plate, he did not miss it. He then told endless stories.

  If you put a glass of wine before the Inventor, he drank it. It made no difference whether the brand was sherry or champagne, he said nothing, but the glass was always emptied without comments. He [just] went on talking and cleaned his plate without any trouble.220

  Edison was gratified by the initial yields of his briquettes in the blast furnace but kept pushing for more and more revolutions of the blower to produce more heat. When Peckitt demurred, for fear of an explosion, he scoffed and said he had deliberately wrecked a $25,000 crusher at Ogden in order to see how much load it could stand. “Now I can design and build one that will do as well as she did before the last notch was added.”221

  There was intense interest throughout the Pennsylvania iron industry in the ongoing tests, which usually began at two A.M. Trade reporters hung out in Peckitt’s office to hear Edison tell stories while the furnace was prepared for casting. One night he interrupted himself to roar out, “Hi, there, what are you doing? What the devil now? Someone kick him.”

  Ott had fallen asleep.222

  Edison stayed in Catasauqua for a week, long enough to see that the tests were going to be positive, pending a final report from the works. Shortly before returning to West Orange, he sent a telegram to one of Peckitt’s rival smelters, S. B. Anderson of Andover, New Jersey: “Come to breakfast. Have 11,
000 tons for you.” When Peckitt asked what it meant, he explained that Paterson had mocked his briquetting method by saying, “I will eat all you make.”223

  MILE OF MAGNETS

  The test results were more than positive, they were extraordinary. Peckitt reported that the briquettes had caused a 33 percent increase in furnace smelting, and he was confident of reaching 50 percent if they were supplied to him in large quantities. They reduced ore to a precipitate that “showed unusual strength, and was, in fact, the strongest and toughest foundry iron we have ever made.” Considered technically, it “could not be better, as the purity of the briquettes enabled us to make an iron very low in phosphorus and sulphur.”224

  Even more pleasing was an order from the Crane Company for as much ore as Edison was willing to deliver. Along with news that his film and phonograph business was booming, and that William McKinley’s election to the presidency had brought about an end to the long depression, it was the nicest possible present for his fiftieth birthday, at Ogden in February. Mina sent up a congratulatory cake with model miners and little electric lights.225

  Edison needed no further encouragement to authorize yet another expansion of the plant, intending a switch to full commercial production in the spring. He commissioned two Vulcan steam shovels (one of them, at ninety-three tons, the biggest ever built), and studded his giant rolls with steel “slugger” knobs and more than doubled their rotary speed. He also invented a device that made dust a lubricant rather than a coagulant and lengthened the line to what the Harrisburg Daily Independent breathlessly described as a “mile of magnets,” totaling 480 separation processes.226

  The trouble with his goal of refining five hundred tons of concentrate a day was that the bricking facility could handle only half that output. Unless he installed another fifteen fabricators and eight new furnaces at a cost of $50,000, both stockhouses would soon be swamped with fines. Walter Mallory had to send a begging letter to investors, telling them that Edison had already spent over $1 million of his own money at Ogden ($200,000 on the giant rolls alone) and could use some help from “friends” now that his product was in demand.227

  This appeal coincided with intelligence that the price of Mesabi Bessemer ore, which had dropped as low as $3.25 a ton in 1896, was now falling so fast that it might soon approach the two-dollar mark. Edison insisted that he could ship at seventy-eight cents a ton, but he was not famous for arithmetic.228 The president of the American Institute of Mining Engineers said at its annual convention that a more likely price for Ogden ore was $4.08 per ton. In that case, “it is not probable that the Edison Works can be run continuously at a profit.” The most that could be said for the remarkable venture on Sparta Mountain was that it was “a monument of perseverance in original research which certainly deserves our admiration.”229

  Under the circumstances, Edison’s backers again declined to give him any more money, so he again had to shoulder the cost of a vital improvement.230

  At least he could save on one minor expense while doing so—the wage he had been paying his eldest son as a general mechanic at Ogden. Tom had just turned twenty-one and come into a $17,309.91 legacy left him by Mary. In a letter half aggrieved, half supplicatory, he wrote to say he wanted to strike out on his own. “I feel that I have never pleased you in anything I have ever done….I don’t believe that I will ever be able to talk to you the way I would like to—because you are so far my superior in every way that when I am in your presence—I am perfectly helpless.”231

  Edison ignored Tom’s request for a special assignment that would give him a chance to show that he, too, was an inventor. In a series of letters to Mina, the young man demonstrated only that he was a world-class whiner. “Why is it I am unhappy? why is it I feel alone?…why am I so backward?…I love but I am not loved.”232

  He went west and south for a few months but inevitably, like a small moon in irregular orbit, yielded to the pull of its star. By May he was back at the plant, doing laborer’s work. His father gave no indication of noticing that he had been away. “I can say,” Tom wrote to Mina, “he has not even looked at me.”233

  Edison hardly had time to look at a clock. He was busy doubling the size of the bricker plant and building a larger powerhouse, patenting Ogden’s screening system, designing new machinery (in one case, forty-eight versions of a single device), taking delivery of the Vulcan steam shovels, and running out of money fast. In August, after yet another start-stop, he had to sell his stock in the Edison Electric Illuminating Company, just to maintain the mill during closure. “I am full of vinegar yet, although I have had to suffer from the neglect of absent minded Providence in this scheme.”234

  It was plain even to him at summer’s end that when Ogden next opened, it must stay open and prove itself to be the inexhaustible cornucopia of iron that he had so long promised. Otherwise it would be forever known as “Edison’s folly,” a multimillion-dollar mockery of his past achievements, good for little more than the production of sand.

  By late September the new bricker machines were ready to receive. He put the entire line into operation and gave reporters unrestricted access to it for the first time.235 The result was three major articles in The Iron Age, Scientific American, and McClure’s Magazine, exquisitely illustrated and sharing a common tone of reverence. “Mr. Edison appears in the new light of a brilliant construction engineer grappling with technical and commercial problems of the highest order,” the trade journalist wrote. “He pursues methods in ore dressing at which those who are trained may well stand aghast. But considering the special features of the problems to be solved, his methods will be accepted as economically wise and expedient.”236

  What awed the visitors, apart from the fact that they were looking at the biggest iron-concentrating works in the world, was the way Edison had synchronized all its operations, integrating mechanical power with the natural forces of gravity, momentum, and magnetism. High on Iron Hill, the steam shovels loaded slabs of black-grained gneiss weighing as much as six tons into skips that ran down a tilted track toward the mill, one every forty-five seconds, simultaneously returning “empties” to the quarry.

  The Traveling Crane lifted them to the top of the Crusher House, whence they thudded ten feet down into the whirring cleft between the giant rolls—an abyss no man could look into without fear. Shattered in less than three seconds, they dropped through to a set of intermediate rolls and got chewed into stones. Elevator no. 1 took them for further decimation by the first and second thirty-six-inch rolls, whereupon they lost their plural identity and became a speeding mass of rubble. Except in the hottest weather, this reduction usually showed sign of dampness. It passed through the twenty-four-inch rolls to elevator no. 2, slid onto Thomas Robins’s rubberized first conveyor belt, and was roasted in dryer no. 1. Elevator no. 3 and the second and third conveyors, then carried it, smoking, to the three-high rolls, which beat it into gravel before it fell through fourteen mesh screens, in a zigzag trajectory that allowed only the finest pulver to reach the separator building. There, from a great height, it fell again, a thin gray curtain of dust that paled as three progressively stronger twelve-inch magnets deprived it of its iron specks. Even now the black draw-off was not rich enough for Edison’s purpose. He subjected it to more heat in dryer no. 2, reconcentration by the fifty mesh screens and eight-inch magnets, cleaning and dephosphorization in the dusting chamber, and a final refinement by the four-inch magnets before it was conveyed to an immense stockhouse, ready for caking and baking.

  The process whereby Edison transformed his fines into hard briquettes that were, paradoxically, both porous and waterproof could have been devised only by an inventor equally versed in chemistry and physics. He mixed the iron powder with a warm binding material whose formula was a trade secret. Then he transferred it as dough to a row of die-block machines that took it, cut it, and compressed it three times (under squirts of oil to prevent adhesion)
, the last plunger slamming down with a force of sixty thousand pounds. This all happened at a disgorge rate, per machine, of sixty briquettes a minute—each a squat black cylinder three inches in diameter and nineteen ounces in weight. They were superheated for well over an hour before shipping.

  Theodore Waters, the writer from McClure’s, marveled at Ogden’s total automation. “The never-ending and never-resting stream of material constantly circulates through the various buildings…and not once in its course is it arrested or jogged onward by human agency.” He was also impressed by the economical way the mill recycled its waste products. On the last day of September he watched a conveyor unrolling from “the magnet-house” and pouring what looked like a cascade of gold onto a hill-size dune that shimmered strangely in the sun. It was a mix of quartz, feldspar, and lime phosphate tailings, and the shimmer came from its sharpness—unlike the dull obtundity of beach sand. Builders and the manufacturers of abrasives prized it, so to that extent it was gold, of a sort, in Edison’s pocket. He even sold the dust from his dephosphorizing chamber to paint companies, who thickened their pigments with what had once been the rock of Sparta Mountain.237