Edison

by Edmund Morris

  Parker compared sound to light, in that it could be collected at one point after reflecting off several surfaces, for greater intensity and focus. Under “Optics”—“the science that treats of light, of colors, and of vision”—he cautioned that nobody, not even Sir Isaac Newton, really knew what light was. Newton had supposed it to consist of minute particles streaming from source to viewer—the “corpuscular” theory. But the sound analog, if valid, implied that light also traveled in waves. Hence “the opinions of philosophers of the present day are inclining to the undulatory theory.” Whichever notion was true, light moved so fast that it effortlessly delineated any movement perceptible to the human eye. This posed the counterquestion, When is motion imperceptible? Parker’s answer was “When the velocity of a moving body [a distant freighter on Lake Huron, say] does not exceed twenty degrees in an hour.”38

  Oddly, he did not refer to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, although few boys Alva’s age were unfamiliar with the way a rapid series of still images drawn on flipped cards, or the drum of a zoetrope, seemed to move of their own accord. But there was a description on pages 245–46 of the magic lantern, with an illustration showing how it magnified and threw a glass slide’s colored image onto “a white surface prepared to receive it.”39

  All optical media, Parker wrote, were luminous, transparent, or translucent—and the dioptrical subcategory, exemplified by lenses, bent light beams to their will according to whether they were convex or concave. This led him to an extended discussion of the physiology of the eye, including accounts of its sensitivity to abrupt changes of light and darkness—useful to any young reader who might one day be asked by the U.S. Navy to improve the vision of “splash observers” in wartime.40

  The final sections of the book were devoted to “The Electro-Magnetic Telegraph” (with a useful Morse table that rendered Alva’s surname as • — •• •• ••• • • — •) and “Astronomy,” warning him that if he ever wanted to observe a total eclipse of the sun, it would last “little more than three minutes.”41

  TWO HUNDRED BOTTLES

  Before mastering some, or all, of the sciences Parker described, Alva at age eleven became a greengrocer—“marketing garden truck,” in the unglamorous phrase of the day. Sam Edison’s financial difficulties in the summer of 1857 were such that he had to grow and sell as much produce as the orchard and field around the house would supply. Thanks to the richness of Fort Gratiot’s soil, their bounty was copious.

  Sam Edison tilling his field at Fort Gratiot, date unknown.

  Alva took to the work with a will, plowing and planting eight acres of sweet corn, radishes, onions, parsnips, and beets: “I was very ambitious about this garden and worked very hard. My father had an old horse and wagon and with this we carried the vegetables to the town which was 1½ miles distant and sold them from door to door.” When, later in the season, pears and apples ripened in the orchard, Alva’s takings increased, and he was smart enough to hand them to his mother. In time he learned the fine art of packing figs in boxes with reinforced bottoms, suggesting more fruit than materialized in actual delivery.42

  He persevered in greengrocery through the following two summers, at one point doing so well that he was able to give Nancy $600.43 Whatever pocket money he kept for himself, he invested in a chemical laboratory in the cellar of the Edison house.

  Alva may have been motivated to equip this facility by Parker’s provocative insistence that chemistry had no part in natural philosophy, which was the study of the material world “as is.” Beyond physics, chemistry was the science that creatively investigated and “altered the natural arrangement of elements to bring about some condition that we desire.” In other words, it was an active rather than reactive application of mind to matter, in that respect more humanistic and challenging. He loved it from the start and was always happiest when he could retreat from the noise and fallibility of machines and privately mix powders. He once said that he wondered “how it was he did not become an analytical chemist instead of concentrating on electricity, for which he had at first no great inclination.”44

  His juvenile laboratory’s principal feature was an array of two hundred bottles, all labeled poison in a deliberate, and effective, ploy to dissuade anyone else from tampering with them. Aided sometimes by a friend, Joseph Clancy, he concocted many volatile compounds that Nancy worried might explode. He failed to blow out the cellar windows, but he did succeed in wrecking a corner of the old telegraph office downtown, burning several other boys in the process.45

  At some point in 1858 Alva hitched together enough lengths of stovepipe wire, along with old jars, nails, zinc, insulated copper coil, a Grove cell, and sprung brass keys, to put his laboratory in Morse communication with the Clancy house, one and a half miles away. With puberty looming (“Ma, I’m a bushel of wheat, I weigh eighty pounds”), it was his last childish indulgence before two sobering experiences transformed him into the beginnings of a man. One was a return to school—the Union School, in downtown Port Huron—possibly for only one eleven-week term. It flagged him as no more suited to the classroom than he had been twice before. The other was the mysterious trauma, whether medical, accidental, or in some other aspect pathological, that shut him off forever from ambient sound. No official record survives of what it was, if indeed any records were kept; by the time he was old enough to speak of his deafness without embarrassment, he did so without ever giving a convincing account of its cause. The casual admission he wrote at twenty-nine—“I haven’t heard a bird sing since I was twelve years old”—must stand in its simple poignancy as all that will ever be known of the matter.46

  If his dating was precise, Alva lost three-quarters of his hearing several months before the advent of puffing, whistling locomotives and clanking cars broke Fort Gratiot’s harmonious web of natural sounds. At any rate he was a child no longer when, in the late fall of 1859, he persuaded Nancy to let him ride the Grand Trunk Railway wherever its steam would take him, down the track to all the years ahead.

  *1 The word addled recurred so often in Edisonian lore that Alva himself claimed to have heard his teacher use it in conversation with an inspector, saying that there was no point in keeping the boy at school: “I was so hurt by this…that I burst out crying and went home and told my mother about it.” In his telling, Nancy waylaid the teacher and told him “that I had more brains than he himself.”

  *2 About $183,000 in today’s money.

  *3 An elaborate frontispiece showed “Electrical Telegraphic Communication” in action, with a frock-coated gentleman sending a message along wires that traversed hill, dale, and coastline to another gentleman checking it in printout and looking by no means pleased at the news it contained.

  *4 Parker explained elsewhere that “imponderable” meant “weightless.” With its opposite ponderable, it made up the two great classes of natural philosophy.

  EPILOGUE

  1931

  SEVENTY-TWO YEARS LATER, as Edison lay dying, it was suggested to President Hoover that the entire electrical system of the United States should be shut off for one minute on the night of his interment. But Hoover realized that such a gesture would immobilize the nation and quite possibly kill countless people. Nor would he countenance an alternative idea, that he order the extinction of all public lights at that moment. It was not only inconceivable, it was impossible that America could recapture, even for sixty seconds, the dark that had prevailed in 1847, when Thomas Alva Edison was born.1

  The president emphasized this in a statement dated 20 October. “The dependence of the country on electrical current for its life and health is itself a monument to Mr. Edison’s genius.” Acknowledging, however, that there was “a universal desire” to pay personal respect to the old man as a benefactor of humanity, he called on all private individuals and organizations to put out their lights from 10:00 to 10:01 P.M., Eastern time, the follo
wing evening—which turned out to be, appropriately, the anniversary of the night in 1879 when Edison achieved his first viable lamp.2

  He was buried at dusk in Rosedale Cemetery, Montclair, New Jersey. The sun went down behind Eagle Rock just as his coffin was lowered into the grave. Across the river in Manhattan, an immense crowd began to assemble along Broadway between Forty-second and Forty-third streets. At two minutes before ten, the CBS and NBC radio networks broadcast an advance reminder of Hoover’s call, some stations playing Haydn’s setting of the words of Genesis, darkness was upon the face of the deep.3 On the hour in Milan, Ohio, the town clock struck, and Edison’s birthplace went dark as the chimes continued to toll at six-second intervals. All lights in the White House were doused, including the big globes surrounding Executive Park, and large areas of the national capital and its suburbs followed suit. In New York Harbor, the torch held by the Statue of Liberty flickered out. Simultaneously the billboards and marquees of “the Great White Way” faded, and a hush descended on the crowd, which by now extended north into the Fifties. The absence of sound was more remarkable than that of light, because some small stores continued to glow. Not a vehicle moved in the entire theater district.4

  Midway through the fight program at the American Legion arena in Ybor City, Florida, gloves dropped and the audience stood in darkness as the gong sounded taps. In the movie houses of Reading, Pennsylvania, talkies stopped talking and the picture faded from the screen until nothing could be seen but the dim red glow of exit lights. The small city of Franklin, at the opposite end of the state, attempted a total blackout, but was foiled by a wash of autumn moonlight. Chicago skyscrapers lost their sparkle, and several high beacons turned off, posing a momentary threat to air traffic. Farms and villages in occluded parts of the country vanished like crystals dissolving in ink. The Pacific Gas & Electric Company doused all its lights in northern California. A strange hush obtained over urban areas on the West Coast. Pedestrians came to a halt as streets darkened. Men took off their hats, and women bowed their heads.5

  * * *

  —

  EDISON’S DEATH LEFT behind a legend so potent that it quickly grew to the dimensions of myth. For a quarter of a century he was deified in adulatory biographies and movies, to the mingled satisfaction and perplexity of his wife and children, none of whom could escape the stretch of his shadow. They tried to adjust to its inhibiting chill with varying degrees of success.6

  Mina Edison married again in 1935 to Edward Everett Hughes, a rich old businessman who persuaded her, before his own death in 1940, to enjoy the pleasures of cocktails (frowned on in Chautauqua) and world travel. She took his surname but was quick to jettison it upon resuming widowhood. For the last seven years of her life, which she divided between Glenmont and Seminole Lodge, she was again, imposingly, Mrs. Thomas Alva Edison.

  Tom died cuckolded and alone in a Massachusetts hotel room in 1935, allegedly of heart failure. William retained his coarse vitality to the end, patenting five radio devices and signal systems before his death in Wilmington, Delaware, two years later. Marion never remarried. She survived in Norwalk, Connecticut, mourning Tom and consoling herself with opera, until 1965. Charles ran the huge but atrophying conglomerate of Thomas A. Edison, Inc., until it was absorbed by the McGraw Electric Company in 1957. In wordly terms the most successful of Edison’s sons, he was appointed assistant secretary of the navy by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937, and was promoted to secretary before resigning in 1940 to campaign for the governorship of New Jersey. He served as governor for only one term, then returned to business and became, in wealthy old age, a crotchety red-baiter. Childless, like all his siblings except Madeleine, he died in 1969. She followed him ten years later, having produced four sons by John Sloane. Theodore was the last of the primary family to die, a scrupulously principled intellectual, conservationist, and—in old age—opponent of the Vietnam War. After his death in 1992 the name of Edison lingered only among descendants of the Sloane family. Of old Sam Edison’s lusty blood, no patrilineal trace remains.7

  * * *

  —

  ONE OF THE imponderables of a dying inventor’s coma is that watchers around the bed can never be sure what dreams of fact or imagination may be playing inside his motionless, white-haired skull. When he is, on top of everything, stone deaf, that makes his last consciousness even more private.8 But if Edison’s aural memory in October 1931 was capable of reaching back beyond his mysterious inner-ear ailment at age twelve, who knows but what he heard again the harmonious noises that made Fort Gratiot such a haven of natural sounds before the loud arrival of Grand Trunk Railroad trains: the tooting of bugles on the parade ground; and before that the spring chorus of skylark and blackbird and quail around the house in the grove; and before that the humming of Port Huron’s seven sawmills; and before that the crunch and thump of logs in the St. Clair River; and before that his mother’s voice calling “Alva” as she summoned him to his lessons; and earlier still, among school bells and church bells, the songs of shipyard workers he had memorized in Milan—his first recordings!—and farther, even subliminally back, whatever outside sounds penetrated the encompassing dark of his first nine months of life.

  For Pauline

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My principal debt for expert assistance with the research and writing of this biography is to Leonard DeGraaf, the chief archivist at Thomas Edison National Historical Park. I am also indebted to Paul Israel and Thomas E. Jeffrey, respectively editor and senior editor of the Papers of Thomas A. Edison project at Rutgers University. Aside from their general help, Messrs. DeGraaf and Jeffrey gave my manuscript a thorough scholarly review, as did my wife and fellow biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris. The scientific, technological, and medical portions of the text were scrutinized by Louis Carlat, associate editor of the Papers project, Dr. Carl M. Horner, laboratory consultant at Edison-Ford Winter Estates in Fort Myers, Florida, and Dr. Karen Chapel of Northville, Michigan. Dr. David Edison Sloane gave me privileged access to his collection of Edison family papers. I am profoundly grateful to all these generous and patient people, as well as to my past and present editors, Robert Loomis and Andy Ward, and to the other kindly souls listed below.

  Michele Albion; Marie Arana; David Ball; Pierson Ball; Konstantin Batygin; Antony Beaumont; Pamela A. Brunfelt; Sam Brylawski; Karen Chapel; Ned Comstock; Mike Cosden; Lee A. Craig; Anthony Davidowitz; Judy Davidowitz; Charles DeFanti; Dino Everett; ; Marc Greuther; Tom Griffith; George Herrick; Chris Hunter; Dodie Kazanjian; Georgianne Ensign Kent; Ginny Kilander; Clifford Laube; David Levesque; Richard Lindsey; Charles Macpherson; Stephen Morgan; John Novogrod; Harry Pennington; Kate Armour Reed; Alexandra Rimer; Benjamin M. Rosen; Donna Perrett Rosen; David Seubert; Walter Suskie; Rachel Weissenberger; George Willeman; Hiram P. Williams Jr.; and Lois Wolf.

  And finally, my gratitude to Scott Moyers, who first suggested I write a biography of Thomas Alva Edison.

  —E.M.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  The main published primary source for Edison studies is Rutgers University’s ongoing “The Papers of Thomas A. Edison” project (see Notes). There have been only two indispensable biographies, issued at opposite ends of the twentieth century: Edison: His Life and Inventions by Frank Dyer and T. C. Martin (1910) and Edison: A Life of Invention by Paul Israel (1998). The former, though reverential in tone, is fact-filled and contains many of Edison’s dictated reminiscences. The latter is scholarly, objective, and dense with technological and business detail, benefiting from the author’s long service as editor of the Edison Papers. Neither volume offers much coverage of the last decades of Edison’s life.

  The bibliography below confines itself to book sources of especial relevance to the text of this biography. All other sources, including individual manuscripts, oral histories, and periodicals, are cited passim in the Notes.

  ARCHIVES

  CHC Charles Hummel Collection, Wayne, NJ
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  COL Columbia Center for Oral History, Thomas Edison Project, Columbia University, NY

  DSP David E. E. Sloane Papers, Hamden, CT (private collection)

  EFW Edison-Ford Winter Estates, Fort Myers, FL

  FSP Frank J. Sprague Papers, New York Public Library, NY

  HFM Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, MI

  JDP Josephus Daniels Papers, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC

  PTAE The Papers of Thomas A. Edison (online edition offering digital access to collections of Edisonia in more than 140 public and private repositories)

  TENHP Thomas Edison National Historical Park, NJ

  BOOKS AND MONOGRAPHS CONCERNING EDISON

  The Papers of Thomas A. Edison (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1989–)

  Vol. 1: The Making of an Inventor, February 1847–June 1873. Edited by Reese V. Jenkins et al. 1989.

  Vol. 2: From Workshop to Laboratory, June 1873–March 1876. Edited by Robert A. Rosenberg et al. 1991.

  Vol. 3: Menlo Park: The Early Years, April 1876–December 1877. Edited by Paul Israel et al. 1994.

  Vol. 4: The Wizard of Menlo Park, 1878. Edited by Paul Israel et al. 1998.

  Vol. 5: Research and Development at Menlo Park, 1879–March 1881. Edited by Paul Israel et al. 2004.

  Vol. 6: Electrifying New York and Abroad, April 1881–March 1883. Edited by Paul Israel et al. 2007.