Edison

by Edmund Morris

  HIS PASSING ALONG

  Olive Harper, a roving reporter on women’s issues, was impressed with the splendor of Mary’s home in Gramercy Park, when she interviewed her for a profile published in The World at the beginning of June. The pale blue satin furniture and Chickering piano had come with the lease, but Mary had rearranged the first-floor parlors, laid down some extra Persian rugs, and crammed in many bits of painting and porcelain that were evidently her own artistry.278

  Miss Harper seemed to want to write a mainly descriptive article, noting that “Mrs. Edison has been called the most extravagant woman in New York as to personal adornment,” and estimating her weight at 160 pounds. But Mary was wearing nothing but black in mourning for her father. She wanted, in her first and last chance to speak to the press, to correct a story about her marriage that had irritated her for more than five years.279

  “In the first place,” she said, “I never worked in any factory, not for Mr. Edison, nor anybody else in any capacity, and therefore all the stories about his passing along where I was at work Monday evening and proposing to me and setting the wedding for Tuesday morning hasn’t a word of truth in it.”

  She confirmed that she had been fifteen and a half when he first set eyes on her, ducking out of the rain into his works on Ward Street in Newark. And “very handsome” eyes they were, although the rest of him had been so grimy and oily. “I’m a little in love with my husband’s eyes—yes, in fact, a good deal.” He had been the most gentlemanly of courtiers, gradually winning her father’s trust.

  Mary became so sentimental as she rambled on about Edison and her children that she forgot the main rumor she had wanted to deny—that he had gone to the laboratory on their honeymoon night and forgotten to come home. “I have been very happy with him, and I expect to be as long as I live.”280

  QUIETNESS AND COUNTRY AIR

  Menlo Park was a stripped and saddened place for Mary to return to that June, with none of the “boys” and their wives remaining, the laboratory emptied out, the electric railway grassed over, and the famous streetlamps dead. She would be seeing little of her husband, now that his work was concentrated in New York, and Mr. Batchelor back at last from France. She had her mother, her sister Jennie, and her children to talk with during the day. But with no man in the house at night, and hoboes squatting in the old lamp factory nearby, she slept with a gun under her pillow.281

  The quietness and country air at least were good for her in her uncertain state of health—and for eight-year-old “Tommie” as well. He was like his father with his bright eyes and large head, but he was like her too, being prone to fainting spells and mysterious headaches. Little “Willie” was sturdier and stronger, and Marion, now in her twelfth year, even more so, with long blond hair that reminded Mary of herself as a girl.282

  A DAMN GOOD MAN

  It was a comfort for Edison to have Batchelor at close quarters again, as they worked together on dynamo improvements in the shut-down Machine Works. Edward Johnson (whom Insull was plotting to put on the board of the reorganized Light Company) was the only aide who had served him as long and with as much devotion. But whereas Johnson was an excitable, affectionate dog, constantly pulling to the next pole ahead, Batchelor was a cat who kept his own counsel. He had wisely invested the bonuses, stock certificates, and other pourboires Edison had given him over the years, in moments of shared elation over some triumph at the workbench. As a result, he was by now a wealthy man, and would have been shocked if he knew that his employer currently had little more than twenty dollars in the bank.*44, 283

  Edison appointed him general manager of the Works and accepted his recommendation to hire Nikola Tesla, a phenomenally gifted young Serbian engineer, just off the boat from France. Batchelor had discovered Tesla in Paris the year before, and been awed by his understanding of electricity, as well as the voracity of his appetite for steak.*45 On both counts, America was clearly where Tesla should be. It had not been difficult for Batchelor to persuade him to cross the Atlantic and become the newest of Edison’s “boys.”284

  He at once solved a dynamo problem that was preventing an Edison-lighted steamer, the Oregon, from leaving New York Harbor. Having stayed up all night, he then reported to the Works for another assignment. Edison murmured to Batchelor, “This is a damn good man.”285

  Tesla was reciprocally impressed: “The effect that Edison produced on me was rather extraordinary. When I saw this wonderful man, who had had no training at all, no advantages, and did it all himself, and [saw] the great results by virtue of his industry and application, I felt mortified that I had squandered my life…ruminating through libraries and reading all sorts of stuff.”286

  ALL TWENTY-ONE LOTS

  Mary’s affidavit claiming possession of everything in the house at Menlo Park had not persuaded her husband’s lawyers that the sheriff of Middlesex County would be put off by it. Nor was he likely to be intimidated by the note she had added for good measure: “You will interfere with same at your peril.” Frail as she might be at the moment, with gastritis complicating her chronic neuralgia, Mary was a fighter.287

  So, but in a less emotional, more vengeful way, was Edison. Neither of his ploys to frustrate Mrs. Seyfert’s suit passed legal muster. The mortgage argument admitted of no postponement under New Jersey law, while Mary was unable to show a transfer deed that proved she was the rightful owner of the house’s chattels. Edison, who had excellent credit, could have borrowed money to honor the obligation imposed on him by the state’s highest court. But he declined to do so, and the sheriff thereupon announced that his entire property at Menlo Park would be auctioned to satisfy the judgment, at two P.M. on 22 July.

  Nobody involved in the action chose to inform posterity where Mary was that day or what she felt about strangers bidding low for things she held dear. However, a bidder comfortingly familiar to her won out. All twenty-one lots were gaveled down to a Mr. Charles Batchelor, of New York.

  The total price paid was only $2,750, reflecting Menlo Park’s desuetude as much as the constriction of the economy. Batchelor acted only as a front for Edison, who had arranged to reimburse him later. But $2,852 was still owing on the judgment, and as far as Edison was concerned, the sheriff could sing for it.288

  Mary moved back into the house pending further court action. Simultaneously, Edison vacated his office at “65,” on the ground that he was now an inventor again and could safely leave the reorganization of his corporate affairs to Insull. He returned full time to his laboratory in New York—and at once blew out all its windows in an attempt at the direct conversion of coal to electricity.289

  He had only just settled in when, without explanation on Thursday 7 August, he left for Menlo Park. His train arrived there before sunset. Two nights later, in the small hours of the morning, Mary died.290

  SORROW AT MENLO PARK

  Edison had suffered no major bereavement before, except the loss of his mother in 1871. She had ailed for several years with dementia, so he had had time to brace for her death. Mary—still only twenty-eight, and usually able to bounce back to fun-loving health from her spells of illness and depression—departed with such suddenness that for the only recorded time in his life, he cried uncontrollably. When he broke the news to Marion, he was shaking and sobbing and hardly able to speak.291

  The immediate question to be asked was what had killed Mary Stilwell Edison. Half a century later her sister Alice told an Edison biographer, “The cause of death was typhoid fever.”292 If so, Mary’s prostration was remarkably rapid, bringing the gigs of country doctors to the house at a gallop even as Edison took his train from New York. Her death certificate, and a terse report issued by the Electric Light Company, cited “congestion of the brain,” which in contemporary parlance could mean anything from meningitis to apoplexy. Or it could mean the alternate dilation and contraction of cranial arteries stimulated by morphine.293 An unsigned artic
le, “Sorrow at Menlo Park,” in The World on 7 August (reading as if written by Olive Harper) went beyond circumspection in suggesting that Mary died of opioid abuse.294

  She suffered from obstinate neuralgia that refused all manner of treatment. The best physicians were called in, but their remedies were useless. At last for temporary relief she tried morphine, and soon learned the great palliative powers of the seductive drug—a ready dose of which was always at her side—and when the premonitory symptoms of an attack came on she knew the value of her white powder.

  At the request of Mr. Edison she took a trip to Florida last winter. Instead of obtaining relief she fell victim to gastritis, due to the peculiar atmosphere or perhaps the long acquaintance with morphine. She returned to Menlo Park in a more troubled condition. Her pain intensified, and at times she was almost frantic. Morphia was the only remedy, and naturally she tried to increase the quantity prescribed by the doctors. From the careless word dropped by [a] friend of the family it was more than intimated that an overdose of morphine swallowed in a moment of frenzy caused by pain greater than she could bear brought on her untimely death. The doctor in attendance said she died of congestion of the brain. When a reporter put the question to him he positively asserted that it was the immediate cause, but about the more remote causes he preferred to remain silent.*46, 295

  So did Edison. Like Henry Adams and Theodore Roosevelt and other dumbstruck widowers of the time, he honored the dead by keeping his grief to himself. Except for a brief reference to “my poor wife” in an interview at the end of the month, he rarely mentioned Mary again. Because she was soon to be replaced, she was edited out of the Edison family’s later history—except among her children, and only the eldest of them had much of her to remember. In the mythology of the Stilwells, Mary became a limp, naked figure being lifted from her bath by Grace-like vestals, or a ghost walking in the front yard of Edison’s house, rising as he ran forward to clutch at her white summer dress, which dissolved in his fingers like a cloud.296

  DAMON AND PYTHIAS

  The barrage of emotional blows that made 1884 Edison’s annus horribilis—his business folly, his near bankruptcy, the humiliating sale of his house, the abruption of the mother of his children—drew him closer to Marion than to either of his bewildered boys. At eleven and a half, she was old enough to feel another’s grief as well as her own. He took what consolation he could from her girlish company, addressing her as “Miss Marion Edison, sweetest of all.” In September “Grammach” Stilwell, Mary’s mother, looked after Tom and William at Menlo Park while Edison took Marion to the International Electrical Exhibition in Philadelphia. It was a grown-up treat for her before she went back to school in New York. There was a nice new apartment waiting for them on East Eighteenth Street. They would not live again in that stone house on Gramercy Park, with its pale blue satin furniture and mirrors full of memory.297

  Father and daughter made a touching duo as they toured the Philadelphia show hand in hand, gazing up at a Doric column of more than two thousand lamps that dazzlingly spelled out his name letter by letter over spirals of colored light. As if that were not apotheosis enough, an electrified bust of the inventor represented him at the moment of perfecting his first carbon bulb, with a halo of incandescence encircling his brow.298

  “As soon as I go the laboratory again I’m going to work on several new things,” he said to a reporter. “I haven’t been doing work on anything much but light.”299

  In an encounter that would pluck him from the slough of despond, he met an old colleague from his days as a wandering telegraph operator. Ezra Gilliland was a humorous, loose-mouthed electrician from upstate New York who had helped him promote his phonograph six years before. In the interim since then, Gilliland had married well, and was now working for the research arm of the American Bell Telephone Company in Boston. He had acquired a healthy paunch and a beach house on the North Shore.300

  Gilliland dabbled in invention and owned a share in several communications patents. When Edison asked him “what would be a good thing to take up next,” he suggested they collaborate on a long-distance telephone transmitter for American Bell. Edison was immediately interested, having himself, seven years before, invented the carbon button that made Bell telephones audible.*47 After returning to New York, he at once reverted to acoustic technology, and as early as 24 September executed a patent on a xylophone-like signal receiver that chimed at different pitches, depending on who was being called.301

  He felt at liberty to work for an outside client now, especially after Insull (who had gone into his own private depression over Mary’s death) succeeded in reorganizing the Electric Light Company in October as promised. Eaton was out as president, replaced by a more compliant Eugene Crowell; Edward Johnson was vice-president, and Lowrey dropped from the board.*48 The independence of the manufacturing shops was preserved, and the power of Drexel, Morgan to block innovation nullified. “I have got mine at last,” Insull exulted. Edison, less vindictively, expressed relief at being free of corporate restrictions. “I have worked eighteen and twenty hours a day for five years, and don’t want to see my work killed for want of proper pushing.” With Johnson in control of the Light Company and other Menlo Park alumni running the shops, he returned to the study of telecommunications, his once and future passion—and the best therapy imaginable for a man in mourning.302

  Edison and Gilliland cemented their professional relationship at the beginning of December with a joint application for a patent on the prevention of electromagnetic interference in speech transmission.303 For the rest of the winter they worked together in New York and Boston, staying in each other’s apartments and recapturing the intimacy that had linked them as youthful wire gypsies. It burgeoned with unusual speed, since Edison had a widower’s need for company at night. His new laboratory did not offer the rough camaraderie of the old, with only a couple of mechanics and a boy to join him for midnight lunches, if they could be persuaded to stay so late. Gilliland and his birdlike wife, Lillian, were childless. They compensated with many entertainments, to which the teenage daughters of their friends, many of them students in Boston’s private academies, were always welcome.304

  On 20 February 1885 Edison and Marion—delighted to play hooky from her own school in New York—set off with the Gillilands on a marathon railroad tour. They headed first for Adrian, Michigan, where Gilliland’s father lived and where Edison had worked as a sixteen-year-old night operator on the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railroad. A blizzard slowed their progress. The two men passed the time discussing a patent that Gilliland co-owned, for sending wireless telephone waves from a moving train by means of electromagnetic induction. They believed that the technique could be refined for telegraphy by using a vibrating reed to compress the dots and dashes of Morse code into rapid pulses—as many as 250,000 a second, Edison calculated—which would then be “jumped” to wires running alongside the track for transmission to stations along the line.305

  The idea grew in their minds as they proceeded south via Chicago and Cincinnati, where they had once worked together for Western Union, and where Edison had conducted his first experiments in multiple telegraphy. At the end of the month they attended an industrial fair in New Orleans before moving east into Florida. They installed Mrs. Gilliland and Marion in St. Augustine’s luxury hotel, the San Marco, then crossed over to the considerably wilder Gulf Coast. The tarpon fishing was said to be especially good off Punta Rassa, so they rented a sloop at Cedar Key and sailed south to that cow town on the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River. They checked into the Schultz Hotel, which was in all respects the opposite of the San Marco and therefore entirely to Edison’s taste.306

  One day he became curious about Fort Myers, a village twelve miles upstream, after hearing that bamboo grew seventy feet tall there. He still had a bamboo explorer on his payroll, scouting the world for splints, but had not thought of Florida as a possible sourc
e of supply. On 20 March he and Gilliland took the sloop and, leaving behind Punta Rassa’s miasma of fish parts and cattle dip, sailed inland into the fragrance of orange trees and fan palmettos blooming.307

  A white road of crushed oyster shells paralleled the left bank of the river, half-screened by live oaks, tamarinds, date palms, and native cinnamon. It was besplattered with dung, testifying to its function as a cattle conduit to the southern part of the state. At the head of the road Fort Myers came into view: a straggly settlement consisting of a few dozen houses, a tiny telegraph office, a drugstore, a hotel, a schoolhouse, a church, and that feature of all American outposts, a real estate office.

  Although the bamboo growing nearby at “Billy’s Creek” did not compare with Japanese madake for hardness, Edison was charmed enough with the little town to request a tour of a thirteen-acre riverfront property advertised for sale a mile down the white road. It was unfenced and overgrown, but the panorama of the river, one and a half miles wide, was magnificent. Before he sailed back to Punta Rassa the following day, he had contracted to buy it for $3,000.308