Edison
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HOT CAKES
Edison needed every cent he could earn as Ogden cranked into full production. The artist William Dodge Stevens sketched him for McClure’s, while Waters went down the line, and caught a knot of intense worry between his eyes.
Edison sketched by William Dodge Stevens, Ogden, 30 September 1897.
He had just mortgaged the Phonograph Works at West Orange for $300,000. That same day, he humiliated himself by borrowing $11,175 from his eldest son’s inheritance.238 Tom did not take kindly to the transaction, even though Edison paid him 6 percent on the loan. Edison already owed him $4,500 on a “bond” agreement of doubtful validity. The two withdrawals pretty well swallowed up all that Mary had left Tom.239 But he was as usual helpless in his father’s hands. All he could do was continue to send self-obsessed letters to Mina from Asbury Park, New Jersey, where he had settled after leaving Ogden for the second time, to nobody’s regret.
Hitherto, Tom had written in a rounded script creepily imitative of Edison’s own. But now it was spiky, the hand of a different person, and an unstable one. It tilted ever more to the right, as if he were losing equilibrium. On 27 November he wrote Edison to say that he was ill, due to “the treatment I have received at the hands of my family,” and might not survive. “I sincerely hope—that if this does prove very serious to me—you all will feel better satisfied….I am for a little while longer your affectionate son.” The signature “Tom” reverted to upright characters, but was inked so small as to be almost illegible.240
In another letter, to Mina, he sounded cheerful and full of ambition. He had invented “one of the finest incandescent lamps in the world” and was hustling it with great success in New York. It was called “the Edison Junior Improved” and would “sell like ‘hot cakes’—in fact I never can fill my orders—for it is simply remarkable….I intend to have ten thousand agents on commission….I will control the market of the world or bust.” He went on excitedly for eight pages, ending with: “I wonder what father will think when he hears about this. He very probably won’t believe it.”241
Tom guessed right. Edison was aware that the lamp was derived from the fluorescent tube they had worked on together the previous year.242 He also heard that some unscrupulous “backers” were hoping to cash in on the fame of Tom’s surname. On 5 December The Sunday World featured a huge drawing of the young man inside a lightbulb. Across its base was bannered a new version of Tom’s signature, writ large now and so much an imitation of his father’s that Edison hastened to file for trademark protection. Even more infuriatingly, the article below declared that “a new personal power is risen in the world of invention” and quoted Tom as saying he would soon build a lamp factory “in Menlo Park, N.J.”243
It was clear that Tom’s paternal fixation was degenerating into a fantasy of reincarnation. Unless he was checked soon, he might well claim to have invented the phonograph. Mina wrote him a few kindly words of caution and was rewarded with an effusion that could have been penned by Little Nell: “That letter that has never left its sacred place—nearest my heart—binds me nearer and nearer to you darling Mother.”244
WHAT THEY MOST WANTED
At the annual board meeting of the New Jersey & Pennsylvania Concentrating Works on 12 January 1898, Edison boasted that Ogden was now so automated that he had been able to reduce the workforce from 400 to 78. This economical-sounding figure was deceptive, because the mill was again not running. He had closed it to deal with a drying problem and could not say when production might resume. But at least the problem—mud and ice clogging the ore—was caused by success: the steam shovels had proved more effective than dynamite in gobbling up chunks of mountain, “and now the rolls will take anything that can be put into the hopper.” That meant that the lower parts of the line had to be adjusted to deal with an embarras de richesses, not least the stockhouse, which was already crammed with unbricked fines.245
Edison talked on for a while in his usual optimistic way, before asserting (with Walter Cutting’s eyes upon him) that the plant was underfinanced: “I am in negotiations at the present time with a syndicate to furnish operating money until the Company has its own funds; but as to the money needed to liquidate the Company’s present indebtedness and that for test expenses, insurance, and leases, nothing has been done except by myself.”246
He said he was still prepared to bankroll the plant, “as far as I am able,” in confidence that it would soon become profitable. Mallory spoke next and cast doubt on the “soon” with a recital of cold numbers: Ogden, capitalized at $2.25 million, had so far cost $2,091,924 to build, equip, and test, and sold only $158,591 worth of iron and sand.247
Under the circumstances, it strained belief that Edison (who was privately trying to borrow $15,000 from his father-in-law) had just told reporters that he intended to build a $1.5 million gold mine southeast of Santa Fe, New Mexico.*51, 248 But such was the positive spell he cast that his fellow directors reelected him president and accepted his offer to lend the company $51,500 over the next six months. As Mallory remarked to Theodore Waters, “What has been said of his personal magnetism has not been overstated.”249
On 9 February Edison wrote Mina that he had cleared the stockhouse and was about to start milling again. He was working sixteen-hour days and “making good progress on 3 or 4 inventions to raise money.” The same could not be said for his eldest son, who had gone to Florida, reportedly on doctor’s orders. “Tom wrote a horrible letter to William saying he was deserted by his family, that he was lying at the point of death, that we would probably never see him again.”250
Mina had received a similar cri de coeur from Tom himself. She was the principal recipient of Tom’s letters, which came at the rate of two or three a week and formed an ongoing record of manic depression. “I enquired of my agent at Fort Myers,” Edison went on, “and got word that Tom & friend were having a fine time and had just come in from a Deer hunt.”251
Being a depressive herself, and by nature compassionate, Mina sympathized with Tom to a degree. He had indeed been dangerously ill, with what sounded like inflammatory rheumatism. She dreaded that he might come “home” to live, as he occasionally threatened to do.
William was another claimant on her responsibilities as stepmother. He was in his freshman year at Yale and hated it there. Mina did what she could to give both what they most wanted—expressions of love and payment of bills—but she was expecting another child of her own in July and had little time to spare for two malcontents who should have long since grown up.252 Edison had even less. As far as he was concerned, they were out in the world he had entered at age twelve, and could drown if they chose not to swim.
YOUNG DAYS
William Edison, circa 1898.
Patriotic young Americans that spring smelled war coming between the United States and Spain over the cause of Cuba Libre, a movement to win freedom for the last major European colony in the New World. One of the first Yale men to vow to fight if President McKinley issued a call to arms was Mina’s brother Theodore Miller. A twenty-three-year-old postgraduate law student in New York, he was well acquainted with both William and Tom, and admired neither. At least William (who dropped out of college in early March) wanted to join up too. Tom manifestly was unfit to serve. He talked vaguely of “going away soon,” but at the same time he posed as the president of a new $100,000 lighting company, with two maternal uncles as his backers. “He is a queer boy,” Theodore wrote his father. “I am very sorry he is allowed to do these things and have talked to Mina but she says Mr. Edison says he can do nothing.”253
Congress declared war on 25 April, and within six weeks Theodore and William were enlisted as privates, the former in the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, or “Rough Riders,” and the latter in the First New York Regiment of Engineering Volunteers.254
For Edison, toiling obsessedly on Sparta Mountain, the Spanish-American W
ar proceeded as little more than a twelve-week geopolitical disturbance in the Antilles, its rumbles inaudible amid the satisfying roar of his mill.255 He took enough notice of it to offer the navy a night illuminant consisting of calcium carbide and calcium phosphite packed into shells that would explode on contact with water and flare long enough for enemy ships to be detected four or five miles away. But as he would discover later in life, the government was not much interested in civilian defense ideas.256
Incomprehensible as it might have been to Mina, awaiting her baby in the green peace of Llewellyn Park, Edison so loved being at Ogden that coming home on Sunday was something of a chore for him. He even lost interest in his laboratory. It languished for lack of assignments from the Old Man, although the rest of the West Orange campus thrived with burgeoning production of phonographs, moving pictures, cameras, and projectors.
By now Edison had resigned himself to the fact that because of the Mesabi phenomenon, iron prices were never going to rise more than a few cents above the historic low they had registered in May. (Bessemer was selling as low as $2.25, and non-Bessemer even lower at $1.75, almost sixty cents less than what he had hoped to get for his iron when he began mining at the beginning of the decade.)257 But such was his pride in the magnitude of his achievement so far that he began to think of bigness as an economic advantage in itself. He would prevail by building more Ogdens, each four times the size of this one.
Besides which, he was happy at the plant, happier even than he had been starting out at Menlo Park in ’76 with Charles Batchelor and “the boys.” Batchelor was mostly absent now, semiretired and wealthy on his share of their mutual inventions over the years, but Edison did not miss him. He had a different set of “boys” to josh around with now, and in their rough masculine way they enjoyed mountain life as much as he did. On rare days off they played baseball, boxed, or bet their wages on rattlesnake and cock fights in a pit dedicated to bloodshed. Edison allowed the sale of beer at the company store, rather than encourage the smuggling-in of banned hard liquor. Racial violence occasionally broke out in the Summerville settlement, where laborers lived in a squalid clutch of frame houses and outside privies.258 It derived from Old World hostilities of no interest to the “Americans” more comfortably quartered in Cuckoo Flats, or the hotel Edison had built for visitors and senior management. He could often be seen daydreaming on the porch, or wandering up to the quarry in his enormous straw hat and duster to watch the steam shovels at work, a sight that endlessly fascinated him.
“I never felt better in my life,” he reminisced years later: “Hard work, nothing to divert my thought, clear air, simple food…very pleasant.” In old age Dan Smith, his big mine rigger, looked back with similar nostalgia on these “young days…the happiest time of my life.”259
Neither man, however, was on active duty in Cuba. On 1 July, in a coming together of names, Theodore Miller fought beside his commander, Col. Theodore Roosevelt, at the battle of San Juan and was fatally wounded. Ten days later an anguished Mina gave birth to a son. He was baptized Theodore Miller Edison.260
William survived through the cease-fire on 12 August and thereafter lay sick and bored in Puerto Rico, begging his father to help him get an early discharge. As if this were not enough family distraction, at a time when Edison urgently needed to give all his attention to problems at the mill, Tom also complained of ill health, along with his usual financial straits. He was then reported to be summering in a camp in the Adirondacks with a showgirl, scandalously unchaperoned, by the name of Marie Toohey. Tom denied press rumors that they were engaged, and when she reappeared in his apartment in October, he insisted that she was only “nursing” him.261
THAT HOLE IN THE GROUND
Personal, professional, and meteorological crises converged on Edison in the last days of 1898 with a suddenness that drove him closer to panic than ever before in his career. A blizzard whitened Sparta Mountain and was followed by a long period of intense cold. Many laborers walked off their jobs, never to return. Hitherto, during the depression years, they had been insecure enough to tolerate the low wages and primitive accommodations Edison begrudged them. But now there were better prospects elsewhere. Mallory warned that unless decent housing was built at the plant, Ogden for all its automation would never be a paying proposition. In fact, it was already at the point of financial collapse.262
On 2 December Edison wrote in desperation to Mina, who was visiting with her family in Akron, “I must have the $12,000 of the General Electric bonds in exchange for Phonograph Works bonds without these the works would have to be shut down.” He needed the cash from this transaction on the fifteenth and a further $5,000 in Northern Pacific bonds before Christmas: “You had best make a flying trip home.” Three days later he cabled her, “I think you better return by the tenth…very important i am feeling quite ill.” In an attendant letter he admitted, “I am very worried about things.”263
She hurried to help him, but before she could get back to Glenmont, weather and worker attrition obliged him to close the plant for what looked ominously like the last time.264 Meanwhile the proliferation of yellow press articles about the erratic behavior of “Thomas Edison, Jr.” annoyed Edison so much that he sent his son a message, via William, threatening legal action unless he stopped abusing the family name. “The old man says he is through with you,” William wrote, enjoying his mission. “Also he says that you are in debt and furthermore that you have married this actress.”265
Whether in fact Tom had spliced himself to Marie was not clear, but he responded with outrage on 17 December, addressing his father as “Dear Sir.” He asked why it had been necessary to reprimand him by proxy. “However I understand this is one of your characteristics.” In a shrewd blow, he pointed out that he was not the only Edison in debt. “If you knew how to handle your own achievements—what have you today—ask the financial world—they know….People are through putting money into your inventions—and—as a consequence they are through with the name of Edison for good—otherwise I would be a rich man.”266
This was uncomfortably near the truth of Edison’s current situation, and Tom’s separate reply to William showed that he knew its full dimensions. “He couldn’t raise a dollar on anything—he put two millions out of his own pocket in the Mill—simply because he couldn’t get it from any one else.”267
Edison gambled what was left of his faith in magnetic mining on anticipated borrowings from the National Phonograph Company, although William Gilmore resented having to play Peter to his Paul. For the rest of the month—“What, is it Christmas already?”—he sought relief from worry in reading. But the books and periodicals he studied had less to do with iron concentrate than with the golden pyramid of sand piled up outside the separation house. Before the year was over, he was ready to apply his tailings separation technique to the production of portland cement.268
He would continue to insist, until the end of the century, that his great experiment at Ogden would succeed. But events tinged with a sense of finality, or of significant change, kept cautioning him, throughout 1899, that it would not—that alternative avenues of research and development were open for him to explore. For the better part of a decade he had embraced the problems that Ogden taxed him with, delighting in his ability to solve them one by one. But when, early that year, he compiled a list indicating there were 183 more to be tackled, he could no longer ignore the odds against him.269
On 17 February Mina’s revered father Lewis Miller died—the second great grief to hit her in seven months, hastening her passage toward middle age. Edison himself, having just turned fifty-two, was white-haired now. Three days later he heard that Tom and Marie had married, in a Roman Catholic ceremony that at least confirmed the seriousness of their relationship—as did news that the girl had given up her stage career in order to be a full-time wife. “She will not go back without my consent,” Tom was quoted as saying, trying to sound lik
e a man in charge for once.270
When spring came, Ogden remained shut amid a nationwide surge in iron ore demand that Lake Superior mines were only too pleased to satisfy.271 Mallory told backers that $100,000 was needed to get the works started again. If necessary Mr. Edison would contribute yet more cash in exchange for stock, but first, decent housing had to be built for the labor force.272
By then Edison was back to working full-time at the laboratory, educating himself in all aspects of portland cement production. In one sleepless twenty-four-hour stretch he designed what would become the largest cement mill in the country, right down to minute details of plumbing, lubrication, and ventilation.273
On 15 April he organized the Edison Portland Cement Company, capitalized it at $11 million, and began looking for a suitable site in western New Jersey. The following month he attended the annual electrical exhibition in New York, where all the talk was of electric automobiles. He denied that he was building such a car for himself, but told Mallory that he had an idea in mind for a light, efficient, durable storage battery that was “absolutely not to work with lead and sulphuric acid.” He began experiments on it at once, and soon had more than a hundred technicians detailed to the project.274
Tom told reporters in July that he had “severed all connection” with his father and would pursue an independent career as an inventor: “I think he is too wise a man to bother over the inevitable.” William, no longer in uniform and furious not to be offered a job at West Orange, made a similar bid for independence just before he turned twenty-one on 26 October. “What little money I receive in a few days I will invest in picture machines and a small factory,” he wrote Edison. “If I fail it will be my loss.” Within three weeks he, too, would marry and embark on a lifetime of proving that to be true.275