Edison

by Edmund Morris

  He signed for the purchase of Glenmont on 10 January. Not wishing the pesky Mrs. Seyfert to place a lien on the property, he settled her suit for $6,134—more than twenty times his original debt to her husband. In another severance, he ordered a Newark florist to discontinue the placement of flowers on Mary’s grave. He treated his ninety-one-year-old father to a three-month tour of Europe. He wrote his real estate agents in Fort Myers to notify them he was coming there soon (without mentioning it would be on honeymoon) and expected that he and Mr. Gilliland would be able to move into their completed houses.*55 He dispatched two schooners loaded with heavy equipment for the laboratory, and when one of them was destroyed by lightning en route, he sent another with duplicate cargo. Looking further ahead, to the work he would be doing after settling into Glenmont, he doodled several elevations of his northern laboratory and conjoined works, massively built in beaux arts style around a quadrangle and anchored, to the right of its gates, by a library.336

  Ezra and Lillian Gilliland opted to go to Fort Myers in advance of the wedding, to prepare the compound for his arrival. They took Marion with them. Tom and William stayed in school.*56 On 20 February the Menlo Park “boys” gave the Old Man a stag party in New York at Delmonico’s. Three days later Batchelor, Johnson, Insull, and a few others entrained in a private car to Akron, where at three P.M. on the twenty-fourth Edison stood under a wishbone of roses in the parlor at Oak Place and waited for Mina to marry him.337

  Edison’s Magritte-like sketch of Mina as an airborne clock.

  TO LOVE AND TO CHERISH

  She made a glittering prize in white satin, with a diamond and pearl necklace he had bought for her. Heaps of other gifts of diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and silver were on display in the great room, arrayed around a column of solid onyx, capped with a gold capital, confirming (along with a bronze dog outside, garlanded for the occasion) that Edison had been accepted into the ranks of the nouveau riche. He made a stab at elegance in a black Prince Albert coat, but declined to wear gloves.338

  This omission was widely noted in the nation’s press. It served as a signal that for all his new wife’s social aspirations, he was still a man who worked with his hands. And his haste to leave for Florida that same evening indicated a desire to return to inventive engineering that was at least as urgent as sex. No sooner had they begun to pass through Georgia plantations than he figured out the mechanics of an automatic cotton picker, with air-blown depilatory spindles.339

  Peach trees bloomed on the approach to Florida. When “Mr. and Mrs. Edison” checked into the St. James Hotel in Jacksonville, Mina found herself the object of such avid public scrutiny that she was overcome with shyness. She took refuge in their room while her husband, used to fame, went sightseeing. Like many a young bride suffering the anticlimax of honeymoon, she found she had given herself to someone not wholly congenial. Her husband’s irreverence bothered her. Having knelt beside him before a white altar in her father’s house and heard him vow “to love and to cherish, till death do us part, according to God’s holy ordinance,” she hoped that he might be receptive to the Methodist Episcopal Church’s 223-page Doctrines and Discipline, a copy of which Lewis Miller had stuck in his coat pocket for light reading on the train. “He intends to study it well,” Mina wrote her mother, sounding doubtful. “He wanted to know the other day if I married him to convert him.”340

  Edison tried to make her understand that he needed hard evidence, or at least logical argument, to believe anything, and that religion was deficient in both respects. He had no wish to convert her to agnosticism and was willing to admit that he might be wrong to shrug at faith. But he could not help the way he felt: “Everyday life must be the convincing power.”341 On that, at least, they agreed.

  “XYZ”

  If Mina was aware how much Edison’s creativity had diminished in the eighteen months since Mary’s death, she might have given herself inspirational credit for the volcano of ideas that erupted out of him as soon as they got to Fort Myers.342 His laboratory there—a plain prefabricated shed—was still not ready, and $16,000 worth of equipment had yet to be installed. But that did not stop him from filling six notebooks with enough drawings and specifications to keep a research team busy for the rest of the century. One or two sketches prefigured surrealism, such as a piano that produced speech instead of music by means of keys “playing” a rubber larynx, or a bust of Mina, bare-shouldered, hanging upside down from an airborne clock. But most of the entries were so precisely conceived, dated, and signed that it was clear he had set up a laboratory in his mind.343

  Notebook number one began with three images that on any other honeymoon might be considered phallic—

  —but for Edison were just variations on the endlessly fascinating theme of incandescent light. Before that day’s jotting was over, he had run eleven mental tests on carbonizing solutions, purified and desiccated “city gas” by passing it through tubes of finely divided copper, experimented with a foil balloon for long-distance electric signaling, and converted natural gas into lampblack. There followed, over the next six weeks, more than four hundred inventions, including fluid prisms, a phonographic siren, a motorized “cash carrier” for department stores, a metal fatigue detector, sonar depth sounders, a squirter of artificial silk, and a pneumatic device to suck turpentine out of trees.344 Amid this array of minor notions there emerged two concepts that he considered to be of major importance: an electromagnetic theory of gravitation (influenced by his readings of Faraday) and conversion of light or heat into electricity. The former made him see the solar system as one giant centrifugal dynamo, or in universal terms as a molecule among billions of others whirling in the cosmos. The latter derived from an idea that had tantalized him for years, that there existed in frequencies above and below the limits of human reception a type of energy so new he could only call it “xyz.” He sensed it again now, when he mentally projected beams of light or heat through liquids, or theorized an opposing relationship between the current in a condenser and the lines of force in a magnet. What was the signal-emitting train that he and Gilliland were working on but a giant condenser, “jumping” electrical energy through air, in defiance of the law of insulation? He drew, three-dimensionally, various ways a rotating, slotted cylinder could throw slices of light between the prongs of a magnet “straight and at right angles.” In his brain’s ear he heard a tone emitted by a rapidly spinning magnetized wheel, audible through an attached telephone as a kind of spectral music. “Now if this disturbance is created without the production of electricity or magnetism, then we have a new form of energy.”345

  The orthography of his notes at such times showed him being swept into a fever of excitement, careful script degenerating into a sprawl, as if his speculations were running ahead of the pencil in his hand.346 Edison was rushing into realms of thought where even pure scientists feared to tread, and he knew that he was unqualified, but as when arguing theology with Mina, he could not help himself.*57

  She in turn could not help feeling lost in the primitive environment of a riverside estate stripped of jungle growth and only partially replanted. The twin houses were attractive enough, in a raw-looking, just-carpentered way, and it was comforting to have Lillian Gilliland at hand to help her deal with Marion, but she looked askance at the cowboys and colored people—“nearly every one of the darkest shade,” she wrote home—that constituted the lower ranks of Floridian society. They were not what her schoolmates in Boston might call de notre monde.347

  Mina’s doubts about having married Edison were compounded by his incessant jocularity.348 She was devoid of humor herself and flinched at the way he teased both men and women, sometimes in a rough way that made her wonder what kind of language he used when closeted with men only. Just as hard to get used to was his need to control everyone and everything around him. Even so personal a task as planning the gardens around their winter home had to be executed to th
e last detail by himself:

  Edison’s plan for his Fort Myers estate, spring 1886. Laboratory to the left of the twin houses.

  Edison presented this design to their gardener/caretaker with fifteen hundred words of precise instructions, informing him that 280 boatloads of topsoil would be needed to cover the eight-acre riverside parcel four inches deep. He ordered ninety different fruit trees, including figs, mangoes, mulberries, alligator pears, plums, peaches, apricots, persimmons, and “as many orange trees of best variety as will go on end of the House plot.” There should also be a banana bed twenty feet square, a thousand pineapple plants, and a lemon hedge. (“If you cannot procure the regular Italian Lemon seed elsewhere…raise the slips yourself from seeds found in the lemon.”) He also authorized the purchase of eight tons of fertilizer: “We propose to have our ground the best manured in Florida….I think you should go back from the river & look for black muck fresh water muck….It evidently wants some fine decayed fibrous spongy matter like they are putting in the Coconut holes to hold the manure & prevent it going clear through to China.”349

  Mina learned, like Mary before her, that she would never have the whole of her husband, nor even the best of the balance. Perhaps sensing her feelings of inadequacy, Edison asked her to copy and countersign many of the inventions in his notebooks. But the only experiment he permitted her to perform with him was an attempt to shock an oyster into opening its shell. They had to write it off as a “dead failure.”350

  BILLY, GEORGE, TOM, AND WILLIE

  Edison was in no hurry to resume normal life after his honeymoon ended in late April. He and Mina spent the early days of May in Akron before moving into their mansion—with apprehension on her part and false modesty on his. “It is a great deal too nice for me,” he told a reporter, “but”—touching Mina’s arm—“it isn’t half nice enough for my little wife here.”351

  Her problem was not its grandeur but the intimidating prospect of having to run such a large establishment, with many servants and three stepchildren looking to her for authority. Edison could be relied on not to supply that, once he was back at work full-time. Domesticity, including the balancing of household accounts, was a woman’s work. Her chances of civilizing him were about as slim as the Widow Douglas’s with Huck Finn, although for a while friends were amused to see that his pants were now pressed, his shoes shined, and his jacket buttons inserted into the correct holes.352

  Edison began to mind his own business again, moving decisively to punish a strike for union recognition and higher pay at the Edison Machine Works on 19 May. If the “communists” of New York City thought they could organize one of his shops, he was happy to move the entire plant to Schenectady, where Insull had providentially found an old locomotive factory. “Do it big, Sammy. Make it a big success,” he said. “Or a big failure.”353

  Insull took the word big to heart and established beside the Erie Canal the future world headquarters of General Electric.*58

  With him and John Kruesi gone, Edison was freer of corporate encumbrances than ever, and able to indulge his most consuming current interest, wireless telegraphy. The “jumping” train communications device he had developed with Gilliland the year before, now nicknamed the “grasshopper” system, was being tested with only partial success on the Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad. He had much more faith in an alternative device he had patented himself, the phonoplex. It gave depots along the track the ability to telegraph one another via multiple lines, without interfering with terminal communications. When in a moment of inspiration he devised a weighted diaphragm to enhance its acoustics, it performed so well along the Grand Trunk Railroad—the very route he had run as a newsboy—that his tester, Alfred Tate,*59 reported, “There is no ‘frying pan’ induction or ‘morse hash’ to drown the writing of the phone key.”354 Translated from telegraphese, that meant that the phonoplex sounded clear, with no crackly interference or blurring together of dots and dashes.

  The “grasshopper” system was eventually taken over by the Consolidated Railway Telegraph Company and never flourished, but the Edison phonoplex was adopted by the Baltimore & Ohio in July and became a staple on American railroads well into the next century.355

  That summer Edison transferred his laboratory from New York to the Lamp Company in East Newark, which was closer to home. He continued to involve Mina in his experimental work, taking her there as an assistant and—since she was being allowed into a man’s world—calling her by the pet nickname “Billy.” When on occasion Marion joined them, she was likewise “George.” In mid-August he joined Billy, George, Tom, Willie, and numerous Millers at Chautauqua, and basked for as long as he could stand it in what William James called its “unmitigated goodness.”356

  For the rest of Mina’s life this annual pilgrimage, plus churchgoing, was to offer her spiritual relief from her husband’s material preoccupations. Chautauqua, however, never quite alleviated her tendency to melancholy; nor did the sermons she heard at the 1886 assembly help her deal with the problem of a jealous stepdaughter. Marion, with adolescence coming on, could not adjust to being displaced from Edison’s affections by a woman only six and a half years older than herself. The boys were difficult too. Mina unloaded her angst in letters to her mother, who replied in comforting Chautauquese. “Try and love them and they will love you and Mr Edison will be perfectly happy.”357

  But Edison was so already. In October his good friend Gilliland joined him in East Newark for a new round of experiments, and Mina found her services there were no longer needed. About the same time, she became pregnant.358

  FOR SHOCKING PURPOSES

  On 2 November the U.S. Patent Office issued one of its most unpronounceable patents to Károlyi Zipernowski, Ottó Bláthy, and Miksa Déri, of Budapest, for an induction coil transformer to provide the high voltages required to distribute alternating current economically over distances far beyond the limit of Edison’s direct current system.359 The device became popularly known as the “ZBD” transformer, and its power as “AC,” while Edison was positioned as the defender of “DC.” Thus began the competition that would develop, over time and in conspiratorial myth, into the “war of the currents” between Edison and an opponent always identified as Nicola Tesla but whose real name was George Westinghouse.360

  At first it was not so much war as a research effort by Edison to see if AC technology—which Frank Sprague predicted was “going to be a formidable rival to the system of direct supply”—could be integrated with his own. He had long been aware that DC power, suited as it was to a compact urban area like the First District of New York, was not suitable for long-distance transmission, because the farther it was extended, the thicker and costlier its copper conductors would have to be. His “three-wire” distribution system was an ingenious answer to that problem, but again best served a close-spread circuit. DC power flowed in one direction, steadily and at moderate voltage from dynamo to lamp. AC power zigzagged back and forth as it flashed along the surface of any wire, alternately swelling to maximum and dropping to zero pressure, forced by tranformers to as many as three thousand volts, then using magnetic induction to reduce them, transformer by transformer, to levels that would not melt a filament. It used little copper and went as far as any supplier needed to send it. Until the perfection of the ZBD, however, high-voltage AC had been too unsteady for reliability.*60 But the Hungarian transformer smoothed it out so effectively that Sprague warned Edward Johnson, president of the Edison Electric Light Company, “You cannot too soon take steps to prevent someone getting into the field ahead of you.”361

  Johnson accordingly bought American rights to the ZBD.362 It availed him little. Westinghouse had already formed his own eponymous Electric Company, financed an AC system in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and acquired an even more sophisticated transformer, recently designed by William Stanley. Meanwhile Edison, acting out of curiosity rather than combativenes
s, applied for nearly a dozen AC-related patents of his own. Experimenting with it gingerly, he convinced himself that the system’s invisible, flickering, trapped lightning was likely to kill careless utility workers, not to mention householders who tinkered with the wrong outlet or allowed the insulation around their feed wiring to fray. He summed up his findings and his feelings in a lengthy, highly technical memorandum to Johnson: “As the [back-and-forth] wave cannot start instantly and stop instantly…it will require 130 volts or thereabouts to produce the equivalent of 100, thus we have for shocking purposes a reversed intermitting current of unlimited amperes as far as the body is concerned (!) and [at] a difference of 260 volts it will certainly be unpleasant.”363

  ALL REFERENCES TO CRIBS

  Telling jokes coatless outside his East Newark facility, one icy day around the turn of the year, Edison contracted pleurisy and for many weeks lay dangerously ill.*61 It was the end of January before he could sit up in bed364 and attend to his first order of business in 1887: the purchase of fourteen acres of property at the corner of Valley Road and Lakeside Avenue in West Orange, about a mile from his home in Llewellyn Park.

  As soon as he was mobile again, he wanted to resume work at the lamp factory and develop a squirted-cellulose filament for the Edison lightbulb. He believed that if he could double the reach of his system by such advances, it would beat back the challenge of AC power. But his doctors insisted he recuperate further in Florida, sending him there so early in February that he was obliged to celebrate his fortieth birthday on the train. A press rumor that he had tuberculosis and would never return north flashed across the country. Edward Johnson attributed it to the Westinghouse Company. Edison’s recovery in Fort Myers was slow and complicated by an ear abscess that had to be lanced on 24 March. A reporter from The World found him a few days later at work in his wooden laboratory, healthy but harder of hearing. “He certainly was a sick man at one time,” Ezra Gilliland admitted. “The trouble somehow reached the heart, and it was found necessary several times to administer hypodermic injections of morphine.”365