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83. Papers, 2.315–20, 281–82, 301; TE in Operator, 25 Nov. 1874.
84. George Barker to TE, 3 Nov. 1874, PTAE; “Edison and The Telegrapher,” Papers, 2.305–7. Ashley’s attacks on TE continued through May 1875.
85. Papers, 2.331, 369. The editors speculate that TE might have been musing invective to get back at James Ashley.
86. Papers, 2.360.
87. Papers, 2.364, 813, 361. This was the note that later became the property of Lucy Seyfert, and the cause of TE’s protracted legal squabble with her, described in Part Five.
88. Papers, 2.813, 801, 366, 341, 365; Israel, Edison, 102; William Orton to Joseph Stearns, 2 Dec. 1874. TE did, however, file four precautionary caveats on 4 Dec. 1874. See Papers, 2.347–60.
89. Papers, 2.364, 813, 801.
90. TE reminiscence, Papers, 2.780. The date of this visit is uncertain, but it probably occurred on or just before 30 Dec. 1874, the day Gould concluded his acquisition of the Automatic Company.
91. Phillips, Sketches Old and New, 186; Klein, Life of Gould, 216, 197–200; Israel, Edison, 102.
92. TE reminiscence, Papers, 2.780.
93. Papers, 2.788. The details of the transaction were more complex than TE chose to remember. See Papers, 2.378–79.
94. Israel, Edison, 102; Papers, 2.801.
95. Papers, 2.405, 407. Orton died on 22 April 1878, aged fifty-one.
96. Papers, 2.375, 382. There is a facsimile of Mary’s elaborate invitation card in Papers, 2.418.
97. Papers, 2.463. Harrington, ailing, sold TE’s automatic patents to Gould in Apr. 1875 and moved to England, leaving his partners much distressed. The territorial and patent wars between Western Union and A&P were resolved in a merger of both companies in 1877. Israel, Edison, 104.
98. Papers, 2.488; Israel, Edison, 104–5.
99. Papers, 2.493–94, 2.495, 500–502.
100. Papers, 2.502.
101. Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 10ff., 99; Papers, 2.561–62, 582; TE “Autographic Press” draft caveat in Papers, 586ff.; Israel, Edison, 106. DeGraaf, Edison and Innovation, notes the electric pen’s ancestry of today’s tattoo needle (16–17).
102. Charles to Tom Batchelor, 1 Sept. 1875, PTAE.
103. U.S. Patent 141,777; TE testimony in Speaking Telephone Interferences, 1.5, Litigation Series, PTAE, hereafter Telephone Interferences. A year later Elisha Gray adopted the same principle in his “musical telegraph.” It was the feature that distinguished his telephone design from (and above) Bell’s, when they both filed for patents on 14 Feb. 1876. See Seth Shulman, The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell‘s Secret (New York, 2009), for the possibly criminal consequences of this coincidence.
104. Papers, 2.581; TE caveat “Acoustic Telegraphy,” 22 Nov. 1875, Papers, 2.645.
105. Papers, 2.647; “Edison’s Discovery of a Supposed New Force,” Operator, Jan. 1876. TE sketched some of these scintillations, even recording their colors and “scents.” Papers, 2.689.
106. Papers, 2.494, 648.
107. Israel, Edison, 112; Arthur Kennelly interview, 19 May 1936, Biographical File, TENHP.
108. Addresses of William J. Hammer and Arthur Kennelly, Minutes of the 38th Meeting of the Association of Edison Illuminating Cos. (Oct. 1922), 397. See also the comments of Oliver Lodge in Francis Jehl, “Edison’s Contributions to Wireless,” Edison Monthly, Dec. 28, and Arthur Kennelly interview, 19 May 1936, Biographical File, TENHP. The latter described TE’s dark box as “the first piece of wireless apparatus in the world.” TE’s etheric force experiments in November and December 1875 are detailed in Papers, 2.646–702.
109. Israel, Edison, 130, states that TE studied Hermann von Helmholtz’s seminal On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music around this time. He cites as evidence TE’s copious marginalia in a copy of the July, 1875, English translation preserved as a family relic in ENHP. Contemporary references in the marginalia, however (to “Marconi the Receiver,” e.g.,) indicate that they were written in the 1890s, and possibly not until TE’s “Insomnia Squad” experiments in 1912. Patrick Feaster notes that as late as the spring of 1877, TE had little knowledge of Helmholtzian acoustic theory. “Speech Acoustics and the Keyboard Telephone: Rethinking Edison’s Discovery of the Phonograph Principle,” ARSC Journal 38.1 (2007), 16–17.
110. See Gall, “Edison: Managing Menlo Park”; quote in DeGraaf, Edison and Innovation, 22; Israel, Edison, 130.
111. Papers, 2.524, 526, 720, 723; TE Patent 141,777; Dyer and Martin, Edison, 176.
112. Papers, 2.629.
113. Israel, Edison, 123. There is a reproduction of the invitation to this party (calligraphed with an electric pen) in Papers, 2.769.
114. Gall, “Edison: Managing Menlo Park”; Josephson, Edison, 96.
115. Papers, 3.3.
116. Samuel Edison fathered three children by Mary Sharlow, whom he never married. “Edison, Miller, and Affiliated Families” in Jeffrey, Phonographs to U-Boats, 163.
117. George P. Lathrop, “Edison’s Father,” unidentified newspaper article, 20 Jan. 1894, TENHP.
118. Israel, Edison, 123; Vanderbilt, Edison, Chemist, 31.
119. “A Visit to Edison,” Philadelphia Weekly Times, 29 Apr. 1878; Josiah Reiff testified to TE’s need for ambient silence in Telephone Interferences, 1.274–78. Bell’s historic “Mr. Watson” telephone call had been made on 10 Mar. 1876.
120. See, e.g., TE Patent 198,087, “Telephonic Telegraph.”
121. U.S. Centennial Commission, List of Awards Made to the American Exhibitors, International Exhibition 1876 (Philadelphia, 1876), 79, 113; Israel, Edison, 125. Thomson was equally impressed with TE’s American automatic telegraph, which could send more than one thousand words a minute, ten times the speed “attained by the best of the other systems hitherto in use in America or any other part of the world.” Papers, 3.55.
122. Shulman, Telephone Gambit, 189–90; Edward Johnson to T. C. Martin, 21 Nov. 1908, TENHP.
123. Bucks County (PA) Gazette, 1 June 1876; TE to Frederick Royce, 29 May 1876, PTAE. There are no records in PTAE of TE attending the centennial, but the collection is sparse in its coverage of the early Menlo Park period.
124. Papers, 3.27–53, 46.
125. Israel, Edison, 131, 127; Papers, 3.64, 82–83; Israel, Edison, 131.
126. Papers, 3.229, 344, 172–73, 120, 359, 168, 312, 254–55; TE quoted 255.
127. Papers, 1.659 (“It was this instrument which gave me the idea for the phonograph”) and 3.250. Edison meant it to improve on the already impressive performance of his automatic telegraph, which on 5 Dec. 1876 transmitted President Grant’s 12,600-word annual message from Washington to New York in just over an hour. Jehl, Menlo Park Reminiscences, 77.
128. TE technical note NS7704ZC11, 8 Sept. 1877, PTAE; TE in Dyer and Martin, Edison, 206–7; TE Patent 213,554, “Automatic Telegraph.” See also Papers, 3.248–50.
129. Pretzer, Working at Inventing, 88; Papers, 3.257; Feaster, “Speech Acoustics,” 12–13. TE’s first official notice that he was intent on transmitting “spoken words regardless of musical key” was in his application for U.S. Patent 474,230 (27 Apr. 1877). He called this metal-diaphragm device a “phonetic or speaking telegraph.”
130. Papers, 3.257–88.
131. Papers, 3.300 (“We can get everything perfect except the lisps & hissing parts of speech such as ‘Sh’ in shall = get only .o in coach”); TE quoted in Israel, Edison, 132–33. See also Pretzer, Working at Inventing, 91.
132. Pretzer, Working at Inventing, 92–93; Papers, 3.518.
133. Papers, 3.361; Feaster, “Speech Acoustics,” 19. The author is indebted in the sections that follow to Feaster’s important article.
134. TE unbound notebook no. 11, 26 May 1877, 109 (signed and witnessed
by Batchelor).
135. The circuit-breaking tonewheel had been an essential part of TE’s acoustic telegraph designs in 1875 and 1876. Papers, 3.361–62; Feaster, “Speech Acoustics,” 20–21.
136. Feaster argues that at this stage, TE was still misinformed as to the oscillographic nature of acoustic recording, and that ironically, his ignorance allowed him to proceed without prejudice into development of the phonograph. “Speech Acoustics,” 36.
137. Ibid., 19–23.
138. Israel, Edison, 137; Papers, 3.435, 363; Journal of the Telegraph, 1 June 1877.
139. Papers, 3.379, 427–28; TE Patents 474,231 and 474,232; Charles to Tom Batchelor, 11 June 1877, PTAE; Operator, 15 June 1877.
140. TE Patent 203,014; Elisha Andrew to Gardiner Hubbard (Bell’s backer), 16 Jul. 1877, Papers, 3.435.
141. Charles Batchelor to Ezra Gilliland, 26 July 1877, Papers, 3.463.
142. Marshall, Recollections of Edison, 56.
143. Papers, 3.444.
144. TE interviewed in Talking Machine Journal, Sept. 1927; Feaster, “Speech Acoustics,” 22, 28, 24–25; TE, “The Perfected Phonograph,” North American Review, June 1888; Buffalo Evening News, 2 Aug. 1904; TE quoted in Minneapolis Star Tribune, 4 Mar. 1878; Dickson and Dickson, Life and Inventions, 122–23; TE in Dyer and Martin, Edison, 207; Tate, Edison’s Open Door, 115.
145. TE in Dyer and Martin, Edison, 207.
146. Ibid.
147. Transcript in George Gouraud Biographical Collection, TENHP.
148. Papers, 3.444. Previously, the word phonograph had meant a shorthand stenographer.
149. Patrick Feaster, “Perfectly Reproduced Slow or Fast”: A New Take on Edison’s First Playbook of Sound,” The Sound Box, Mar. 2011; Papers, 3.439 (facsimile).
150. Papers, 3.440. The first scholar to deduce the full significance of this document was Patrick Feaster, in “Speech Acoustics,” 25–26. See also Israel, Edison, 143 (facsimile). Feaster points out that the phonographic device, as sketched, would not have worked, because TE imagined the cylinder could be played back at a slow speed for a copyist to transcribe, making the sound unintelligible. “Neither Edison nor anyone else would yet have been in a position to know this.”
151. Charles Batchelor testimony, American Graphophone Company v. U.S. Phonograph Company et al., 586. For another version of this reminiscence, see Papers, 3.699–700.
152. Papers, 3.495. Coincidentally, the “phonograph” TE did design on 12 Aug. 1877 differed totally from the Kruesi model. It consisted of a resonating box with two diaphragm-needle attachments, one labled “spk” and the other “listen,” following the groove of a roll of paper tape unrolling beneath them. TE Technical Drawing NS7703B, Unbound Notes 1877, PTAE.
153. Allen Koenigsberg, Edison’s Cylinder Records, 1889–1912 (New York, 1987), xiii–xiv; Pretzer, Working at Inventing, 110; Papers, 3.446–47, 449–50. Israel, Edison, points out that TE devoted himself entirely to telephone improvements through October 1877, and did not return to phonograph development until November (139). But see also the cogent observation in Dyer and Martin, Edison, that around this time all TE’s “phonic” researches tended to blend in his head (198).
154. Charles Batchelor “The Invention of the Phonograph,” in Papers, 3.699.
155. See, e.g., Wilmington (DE) News-Journal, 1 Oct. 1877 (“This is no joke”).
156. Reprinted in Papers, 3.670–74.
157. Papers, 3.671 (facsimile), 672.
158. Papers, 3.674.
159. According to Newspapers.com, TE was called “Professor” five times in 1877, and 823 times in 1878.
160. Papers, 3.628, 4.140, 58–59, 133, 140; New York Tribune, 25 Mar. 1877; George Bliss to TE, 13 Apr. 1878, PTAE; St. Paul (MN) Globe, 3 Mar. 1878 (a widely reprinted article from the New York Sun); New York Daily Graphic, 10 Apr. 1878.
161. Papers, 4.197, 191.
162. TE’s letter was reproduced in facsimile in Daily Graphic on 16 May 1878.
163. Washington Evening Star, 19 Apr. 1878; Papers, 4.242–43; New York Tribune, 20 Apr. 1878.
164. Washington Evening Star, 19 Apr. 1878.
165. New York Tribune, 20 Apr. 1878.
166. Washington Evening Star, 19 Apr. 1878.
167. John Brisben Walker to TE, 26 Feb. 1924, TENHP; Philadelphia Inquirer, 20 Apr. 1878; Papers, 4.243, 863.
168. Feather River (Quincey, CA) Bulletin, 29 June 1878. This article is misdated as 29 Oct. 1877 at Newspapers.com. See also TE’s comments on Scott in Tate, Edison’s Open Door, 114–15.
169. Reproduced above.
170. TE Patent 200,521 was issued on 19 Feb. 1878.
171. Papers, 4.134, 3–4; Raymond E. Wile, “The Rise and Fall of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company, 1877–1880,” ts., ca. 1970s, TENHP.
172. Adrian Hope, “A Century of Recorded Sound,” New Scientist 22 (24 Dec. 1977).
173. Papers, 4.133, 862; Pretzer, Working at Inventing, 94–95.
174. TE in New York World, 23 Apr. 1878 (“Whenever I get to love a man, he dies right away. Lefferts went first, and now Orton’s gone too”); Israel, Edison, 157, 140; Papers, 4.78, 862.
175. Papers, 4.181. Orton died on 22 April.
176. Papers, 4.243.
177. Israel, Edison, 141; Pretzer, Working at Inventing, 84.
178. Papers, 4.862. Edward Johnson remarked that Edison, “the Dam fool,” could have gotten £12,000 ($233,000) if he sold his carbon telephone to a British consortium. As it was, he included all his telephone patents in his deal with Western Union. The telegraph giant then tried to use them to batter the Bell Telephone Company into insolvency. Although this effort failed after many years of litigation back and forth, Western Union at last profited greatly by selling out to Bell. Papers, 4.178; Pretzer, Working at Inventing, 96.
179. DeGraaf, Edison and Innovation, 40–41; Papers, 4.259, 55, 260–62.
180. Papers, 4.260, 270. Although TE patented the tasimeter in Britain, he left it unprotected in the United States, on the grounds that he sought no royalties from “instruments of a purely scientific character.” Papers, 4.458.
181. Pretzer, Working at Inventing, 96–97; Papers, 4.88, 135, 282, 352ff., 265; TE interviewed in Daily Graphic, 4 May 1878.
182. Israel, Edison, 157; TE to William Preece, 19 May 1878, PTAE.
183. Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review, 1 July 1878; TE to Preece, 4 May 1878, PTAE; Israel, Edison, 158; Preece to TE, 22 May 1878, PTAE.
184. Israel, Edison, 158.
185. Ibid., 159; William Thomson to Preece, 12 June 1878, PTAE; TE to Henry Edmunds, Jr., 26 May 1878.
186. For a detailed account of the microphone controversy, see Israel, Edison, 158–60. It is extensively covered in Papers vol. 4, passim. Although at least one British journal, Engineering, deliberately suppressed data that supported Edison’s case, his reputation in Britain suffered as a result of bringing it. Late in the year Thomson criticized him for failing to acknowledge that he had overreacted. “There is no doubt he is an exceedingly ingenious inventor, and I should have thought he had it in him to rise above…the kind of puffing of which there has been so much.” Thomson to Preece, quoted in Papers, 4.677–78.
187. Papers, 4.368–72, 347. For the interest of scientific officials in the tasimeter, see Papers, 4.270.
188. Papers, 4.401.
189. Papers, 4.373
190. Papers, 4.376; New York World, 27 Aug. 1878; N. N. Craig (Western Union telegraph operator), “Looking for Thrills,” ts. memoir, 25, TENHP; TE reminiscing in Papers, 4.856. “Texas Jack,” alias John B. Omohundro, was a former army scout pursuing a theatrical career in 1878. See David Baron, American Eclipse: A Nation’s Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World (New York, 2017), loc. 1216. This book offers an
excellent account of the total eclipse of 1878.
191. New York Herald, 29 July 1878.
192. Laramie Daily Sentinel, 30 July 1878.
193. New York Herald, 29 July 1878; John A. Eddy, “Thomas A. Edison and Infra-Red Astronomy,” Journal of the History of Astronomy 3 (1972); Telegraphic Journal, 1 Aug. 1878; Papers, 4.435.
194. Laramie Daily Sentinel, 30 July 1878. The following account is largely based on the reporting of Edwin Fox, TE’s companion, in New York Herald, 30 July 1878.
195. Rebecca Hein, “Moon Shadows over Wyoming: The Solar Eclipse of 1878, 1889, and 1918,” Wyohistory.org, 29 June 2017; TE reminiscence in Dyer and Martin, Edison, 230; New York Herald, 30 July 1878; Papers, 4.435.
196. TE interviewed in New York World, 27 Aug.1878; TE, “On the Use of the Tasimeter for Measuring the Heat of the Stars and of the Sun’s Corona,” paper read to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 15 Aug. 1878, in Papers, 4.432–36; New York Herald, 30 July 1878.
197. Phil Roberts, “Edison, the Light Bulb, and the Eclipse of 1878,” 8 Nov. 2014, Wyohistory.org.
198. See Allerhand, Illustrated History, 40, 107, and passim.
199. TE, “The Beginnings of the Incandescent Lamp and Lighting System,” ts., 1926, HFM.
200. Dyer and Martin, Edison, 450; Papers, 5.232–34.
201. See Baron, American Eclipse for the mystical effect of a total eclipse on many observers (chap. 16).
202. Papers, 4.432–35; Stockton Griffin to TE, 5 Aug. 1878, PTAE.
203. Stockton Griffin to E. H. Brown, 20 Aug. 1878, PTAE; Papers, 4.441. TE declined to read three other papers, on his carbon button, carbon telephone, and a new “sonorous voltameter.” Barker presented them in his stead. Papers, 4.375.
204. New York Sun, 29 Aug. 1878.
205. Papers, 4.445.
206. TE notebook entry, 2 Feb. 1877, in Papers, 3.246; Israel, Edison, 165; Papers, 4.325.
207. Papers, 4.468, 867, 868.
208. “An acquaintance,” almost certainly Charles Frederick Chandler, another member of Barker’s party, quoted in Denver (CO) News, 5 July 1891.