THE LIGHT OF THE FUTURE
Allowing for artistic license, an illustration in the New Year issue of Harper’s Weekly represented what visitors saw before they walked up the plank road that led to the research complex at the top of the slope. The immediate prospect was dominated by Edison’s house set against the sunset, its front yard already darkening. Marion and Tom could be seen playing on a swing, while three adults, a man and two women, strolled close to the picket fence on Thornall Avenue.5 They were drawn very small, but the man—bandy-legged and waving his hat at some passing horsemen—did not look like the owner of the house. It was most likely Charles Stilwell, an assistant glassblower at the laboratory, who roomed there. In that case, the two female figures were Charles’s sisters Alice Stilwell, twenty-seven, and Mary Stilwell Edison, twenty-four, distinguishable by her plumpness.
The hat, the wave, the fence, and the riders, along with a flagpole in front and windmill out back, were part of the iconography of a million Currier & Ives prints, except that some windows of the house glowed with a new kind of light—as did a white post on the opposite sidewalk that seemed to be crowned with a halo tilted out of perspective. The artist clearly did not know what to make of it. It was the first streetlamp in the world to shed incandescent light, and the first of fifty-eight fishbowled bulbs arrayed elsewhere up the slope.
At the moment, they shone down on nothing more than a few hundred square yards of buildings and scrawny fields rising to a wooded crest.6 There were hardly enough houses for Menlo Park to call itself a hamlet. Only three of them, strung together by droops of bare copper wire, gave off a light similar to Edison’s. It was soft, with a pale orange tinge, and steady, different from the lambency of oil lamps or the whiter glare of gas.7 Nor did the various pools of radiance conjoin. Each pole cast little more than a dissolving nimbus. The nearest thing to brightness came from everyone’s destination—the upper floor of the laboratory, a long, two-story shed in a field of its own, flanked by a brick office/library, glassblowing house, and machine shop.
Edison’s house in Menlo Park, January 1880.
To early visitors from New York, the “Village of Light” described in newspapers was at first a disappointment, its display hardly to be compared with the dazzle of arc lamps along Broadway. But when darkness came and the countryside around Menlo Park receded into blackness—except for a few distant, lantern-lit farm windows—the miracle that Edison had wrought became more apparent. Here, illuminated in the midst of nowhere by an invisible generation plant, were globes of glass that gave off no fumes and sooted no ceilings, that did not ignite anything, that could be held in the hand as they burned, discharging nothing but a pleasant warmth, that could be dunked into a bank of snow, or even drowned in water, without going out. They were silent, flicker-free, each as bright as sixteen candles,*1 and reportedly flattering to ladies of a certain age. Incredibly, they did not break when dropped from a height of six feet onto the wooden laboratory floor. They could be clustered like flowers or scattered like stars, yet a single switch turned them all on or off. Nor did they mind having their series interrupted. One bulb could be unscrewed from a chain of twenty, and the other nineteen would continue to shine.8
Hard for nontechnical visitors to understand was that the tiny, unlookably bright horseshoe inside each unit had originally been paper. Edison’s craftsmanlike assistant inventor, Charles Batchelor, had perfected a way of cutting U-shapes out of bristol board and carbonizing them at white heat until they shrank into stiff, shiny-black “filaments”—a word new to electricity, coined by Edison himself.9 Clamped to platinum wires and incandesced in a vacuum of 1 million atmospheres, they burned without consuming themselves, some for hundreds of hours. How long that was on average, nobody at the laboratory was ready to say.
Souvenir hunters able to reach nine feet high stole every streetlamp they could unscrew, not knowing or caring that Edison needed to keep statistical tabs on each one. Shorter vandals took advantage of the crush in the laboratory to pocket tools and test tubes and carve squares of wood out of the workbenches. “Gumshoe” security men had to be hired to intercept thefts or breakages of precious equipment. A representative of the gas industry was caught trying to short out the room’s entire electrical circuit with a jump cable threaded through the sleeves of his coat.10
Edison often passed unnoticed in the crowd. Few had yet seen a photograph of him, since newspapers were able to print only engraved portraits that failed to register his animated gaze. Nor did his rough workman’s clothes distinguish him from anyone else in the laboratory crew, unless the white silk scarf, knotted under one ear in lieu of a collar, caught attention. He lounged around with a cigar in his mouth, a hank of hair falling over his huge pale forehead, looking like one of the hoboes who periodically wandered up from the depot.
The impression of vagrancy was not altogether deceptive. Over the last several months Edison had become so obsessed with illumination technology as to become almost a resident of the laboratory. Mary, despairing of seeing her husband at home, would send dinners up the boardwalk that grew cold in his office. “His assistants say that he would forget to eat his meals or go to bed if he were not reminded of those things,” The Sun reported.
The other day, while returning from New York, he alighted from the train at Menlo Park, forgetting that he had his little daughter aboard. As the train was about to start on its way to Philadelphia, the conductor recognized the child. “Are you not Mr. Edison’s little girl?” said he. “Yes, sir!” she answered. The conductor led her to the platform. Some distance ahead her father was seen hastening to his laboratory, entirely forgetful of his negligence.11
Absent-minded as Edison was (even during night receptions he kept on his enormous floppy hat), he focused on every question from the crowd, cupping his right ear and responding with old-fashioned courtesy. He was repeatedly asked how there could be no air inside each bulb—or as one visitor put it, “How do you extract the vacuum?” In the plainest possible words, leavened with jokes, he explained how Ludwig Böhm, his Bavarian glassblower, puffed each one into shape before plugging it with a separate semimolten base that intruded the filament assembly and two platinum “lead-in” wires. Again and again he demonstrated the operation of mercury pumps, blowpipes, and necking shears. Only when he dropped the Latin term in vacuo, or cited the identical coefficients of contraction and expansion obtaining between platinum and glass, did he betray the fact that he was, after all, a professional inventor.*2, 12
“He is partially deaf and very modest,” the correspondent of The Times cabled back to Britain. “Yet when he finds that his visitor really sympathizes with him, and is not a ‘professional expert’ whose object is only to criticize, he warms up into one of the most entertaining men I have ever met….He has not the slightest trace of that self-assertion which is often the accompaniment of success.”13
What Edison did have was a lively awareness of the value of public relations. He seemed to enjoy chatting to the proletariat as much as to scientists and financiers. “When T. A. hain’t got his thinking cap on,” a local farmer remarked, “he’s just as jolly as a schoolboy.” Visitation reached three thousand a day after the Pennsylvania Railroad laid on extra trains east and west. Even Edison saw that the laboratory should revert to privacy, lest it literally split its sides. His father had carpentered it well, but by the second week of January the walls needed buttressing with telegraph poles.14
Thereafter only bona fide scientists or officials connected with the Edison Electric Light Company were allowed to disturb him as he assembled the resources—human, mechanical, intellectual, and financial—required to consummate his urban power plan. His old friend and counsel Grosvenor P. Lowrey was one of the few who understood the immensity of the task ahead, and in moments of dread, worsened by rheumatism, he doubted that he could do it. But the flawless performance of the lamps during their recent exhibition comforted him
. “I am writing this by the light of the future at Edison’s table,” Lowrey scribbled to a friend one evening when the laboratory was quiet. “The same light which was burning when I began, is sound still…having burned three hundred hours before. Should it sustain another test, the economy and durability of the lamp is demonstrated.”15
THE GREAT DISCOVERER
Lowrey’s optimism was echoed overseas by no less a voice of authority than The Times of London. It praised Edison’s achievement in a column and a half of dense print that could have been written by a publicist for the Electric Light Company.
Mr. Edison is determined to maintain his place as the great discoverer of the age. After a silence of some months he has again come before the world as the inventor of a system of electric lighting which he claims to have made complete at every point….The new light, as Mr. Edison’s machines will furnish it, admits of being employed for every purpose of public and of private use. It is as manageable as gas has been. It can be raised to an intense brilliancy beyond any that gas can reach, or it can be turned down to a thread. There is no difficulty in laying it on. A thin wire in connexion with the generating machine is all that is necessary for this. It is light without heat. However carelessly it may be used, there can be no danger of fire from it….It gives almost exactly the tone of ordinary daylight. With all these advantages it is, moreover, the very cheapest light that has ever been produced.16
Members of the British electric engineering establishment rose as one to protest the idea that such things could have been achieved by an unschooled American huckster who did not have the decency to wear a beard. The electrochemist Joseph Swan was first to declare his own preeminence in the field. “Fifteen years ago,” he announced in Nature magazine, “I used charred paper and card in the construction of an electric lamp on the incandescent principle.” Swan was honest enough to admit, “I did not then succeed in obtaining the durability which I was in search of.”*3 He did not explain why he had never filed a precautionary caveat, or provisional specification,*4 to protect his light, while continuing to experiment with it on and off, beyond the ken of the English trade press.17
That lack of notice was put to right by periodicals such as The Electrician and Chemical News, not to mention Saturday Review, which on 10 January published an unsigned polemic entitled “The Great Edison Scare.” Some of its blows were shrewd:
What a happy man Mr. Edison must be! Three times within the short space of eighteen months he has had the glory of finally and triumphantly solving a problem of worldwide interest. It is true that each time the problem has been the same, and that it comes up again after each solution, fresh, smiling, and unsolved, ready to receive its next death-blow….His friends may look forward to a long and equally happy future, crowned at periodical intervals by similar dazzling and final triumphs; for, if he continues to observe the same strict economy of practical results which has hitherto characterized his efforts in electric lighting, there is no reason why he should not for the next twenty years completely solve the problem of the electric light twice a year without in any way interfering with its interest or novelty.18
It would be ten months before Swan produced a filamentary lamp of his own, and it proved to be virtually identical to those on display at Menlo Park. This did not stop John Tyndall, the revered professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution, from endorsing Swan’s retroactive claim to have developed such a lamp in the 1860s. Hence Edison’s was “cursed by a total absence of originality.” But both inventors were pursuing a chimera, in Tyndall’s opinion. Eighty years of research had proved that “the most economical form of electric light is, and in all probability always will be, the arc lamp.”19
It was true that Edison and Swan were just the latest in a historic line of electric-illumination pioneers going back to Sir Humphrey Davy, who in the early years of the century had coaxed both arc and incandescent light out of a mass linkage of voltaic cells. Since then scores of inventors had tried to turn either of these incompatible radiances—the one harsh, flaring, and consumptive, the other weak and maddeningly variable—into a light that could be relied on and be competitive with gas. As early as 1840 William Grove had made a spiral of platinum wire incandesce for a moment or two inside a glass tumbler.20 The international arc lamp fraternity, notably Pavel Yablochkov of Russia, had been successful enough in illuminating some great public places with their sputtering “candles,” but that kind of light would never be accepted by ordinary people at home and at work around the world.
The question opening up now, of whether Swan had indeed preceded Edison in finally achieving a viable incandescent lamp, was not going to be settled by Tyndall’s say-so, or for that matter by the only lamp Swan could so far hold up in evidence—a carbon rod enclosed in a flask that looked like a urological appliance. He had demonstrated it in early 1879, several months after Edison’s premature achievement of a platinum-spiral lamp, but long before the first little carbonized “horseshoes” began to shine in globes around Menlo Park.
By all reports, Swan’s rod gave off plenty of light for a minute or two, and also plenty of soot, which indicated either imperfect vacuum or too much exposed carbon. Yet there was an ominous indication in this month’s United Kingdom caveat listings that Swan understood filamentary technology as well as Edison. He gave notice that he intended to seek patent protection for a process of improving bulb evacuation by the use of heat to expel occluded gases out of the incandescent element, whether “rod, filament, or lamina.”21
Before the end of January, British official opinion had solidified against concession of any priority to Edison.*5 The editors of Nature dismissed his lamp as “a hopeless failure, wrong in design, wrong in principle, useful only in showing how singularly devoid of sound scientific knowledge a clever practical man might be.”22
“In short my Boy you are not loved over here by these fellows,” Edward Johnson wrote him from London. “You have committed the grave error of having succeeded.”23
The same went for Paris, except that the precedents cited there by Théodose du Moncel, the ranking French authority on illumination technology, were mostly the work of his compatriots. He informed readers of Le Temps that Edison was nothing more than “a very ingenious and fecund inventor” who could not claim to be “au courant with the subtleties of electrical science.” It was impossible to believe that his new lamp, “this horseshoe of carbon, so fine spun, so delicate,” did not degrade when incandescing. Du Moncel advised European commentators to withhold their praise until Edison confirmed that he had lit fifty or sixty bulbs from a single generator. For himself, he would continue to be wary of “the pompous announcements that come our way from the New World.”24
Edison was philosophical enough about foreign anti-Americanism to shrug such comments off. His patience was more strained by the abuse of compatriots who claimed to know more about his invention than he did. In a widely published letter, Henry Morton, president of the Stevens Institute of Technology, called his light “a conspicuous failure” and sure to remain so, because as “everyone acquainted with the subject” realized, stringing together a large number of bulbs “involves an immense loss of efficiency.” Tests of the “identical” carbons of such electrical pioneers as Siemens, Weston, Brush, and Maxim had proved over and over that incandescence was a short-lived phenomenon.25
Edison read Morton’s letter beneath the glow of eighty-four lamps suspended from the ceiling of his laboratory. “He should investigate first and animadvert afterward,” he said to a reporter watching him.26
ALL THE OPERATIONS CONNECTED THEREWITH
On 27 and 28 January Edison alternately received and executed the two most historic patents of his career: U.S. 223,898, “Electric-Lamp,” and 369,280, “System of Electrical Distribution.” The former guaranteed seventeen years of protection to his basic bulb—or should have, if eleven of those years were not to be spent fighting jealous
lawsuits.*6, 27 The preamble to the latter application showed that the main components of his plan to illuminate lower Manhattan were already integrated in his head, if nowhere else:
To all whom it may concern:
Be it known that I, THOMAS A. EDISON, of Menlo Park, in the State of New Jersey, United States of America, have made certain new and useful Improvements in Furnishing Light and Power from Electricity….
The object of this invention is to so arrange a system for the generation, supply and consumption of either light, or power, or both of electricity, that all the operations connected therewith requiring special care, attention, or knowledge of the art, shall be performed for many consumers at central stations, leaving the consumer only the work of turning off or on the supply as may be desired.28
The four thousand–plus words and set of complex diagrams that followed lent weight to Lowrey’s concern that no human being would be able to design and build such a system before the Edison Electric Light Company’s capital (currently standing at $300,000) ran out. Edison on the contrary regarded his scheme as so much a fait accompli that he labeled the streets in one drawing “Cortlandt,” “Broadway,” and “Maiden Lane.” Another drawing, of four identical power “districts” arranged in a grid, each with its own “central station” and interconnecting “conductors,” not only anticipated the look of electronic circuitry of a century thence but made clear that he dreamed of lighting whole cities.29
“I will here state,” Edison wrote, “that all the devices for translation of electricity into work are arranged on the mutiple arc system, each device being in its own derived circuit, the effect being in substance to give each a circuit from the generating source independent of the circuit of all the other devices.”30
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