By Edmund Morris

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Unquoted among all the panegyrics was the frankest of Edison’s self-appraisals, recorded some twenty years before: “Everything on earth depends on will. I never had an idea in my life. I’ve got no imagination. I never dream. My so-called inventions already existed in the environment – I took them out. I’ve created nothing. Nobody does. There’s no such thing as an idea being brain-born; everything comes from the outside. The industrious one coaxes it from the environment; the drone lets it lie there while he goes off to the baseball game. The ‘genius’ hangs around his laboratory day and night. If anything happens he’s there to catch it; if he wasn’t, it might happen just the same, only it would never be his.”

(Morris 2019, pp.12)

“Are you not perhaps setting a standard for others by means of your own accomplishments, and yet we have but one Edison in the United States?”

He was obliged to draft another 113, but they too ended up in newspapers across the country, under such headlines as “IF YOU CANNOT ANSWER THESE YOU’RE IGNORANT, EDISON SAYS.”

Harper’s Magazine accused him of indulging in “philallatopism,” or pedantic pleasure in exposing the ignorance of other people. But the questions, though difficult, were not condescending:

Which country drank the most tea before the war?
What is the first line of The Aeneid?
Where is the live center of a lathe?
Name two locks on the Panama Canal.
What is the weight of air in a room 20x30x10?
Who invented logarithms?
What state is the name of a famous violin maker?
How fast does sound travel per food per second?

The last item was too much even for Albert Einstein. Sounding defensive when it was put to him, the father of relativity said through an interpreter that he saw no point in cluttering his mind with data obtainable from any encyclopedia. “The value of a college education,” Einstein huffed, “is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.” 

Nicola Tesla, Einstein’s rival in popular “genius” rankings, agreed. “Edison attaches too great a value to mere memory.” A professor of psychology at Boston University wrote Edison to suggest that all college students were intelligent, to the extent that they had qualified for higher education. Any questionnaire designed to contradict this must therefore be incorrectly framed – if not an exercise in personal vanity. “Are you not perhaps setting a standard for others by means of your own accomplishments, and yet we have but one Edison in the United States?”

(Morris 2019, pp.31)

What was, in fact, about to happen was an upturn in the national economy, thanks to President Harding’s willingness to let the depression run its precipitous course. Prices were at last so low that money had regained its fair weight in gold. But the recovery was not yet apparent to Edison – nor for that matter to Harding, who on 12 July made an appeal to Congress to vote down a popular bill awarding bonuses to veterans. In words that could have been uttered in the boardroom at West Orange, the president spoke of “the unavoidable readjustment, the inevitable charge-off” consequent to any period of over expansion. Cost cutting was “the only sure way to normalcy.” Harding earned a standing ovation and widespread praise for his courage. The New York Times declared that he had risen above patronage politics and proved himself to be “President of the whole people.”

(Morris 2019, pp.33)

“Everything is becoming so complex, …so intricate, so involved, so mixed up.”

The trappings of wealth meant nothing to Edison. Were he not married to a woman who had been brought up rich and wished to stay that way, he would have been ready to plow every spare cent back into his business and live like a laborer. For a while in the 1890s he had done just that, crashing through more than $2 million, and he looked back on it as a period of acute happiness. His most urgent task now was to return Thomas A. Edison, Inc., to solvency. He had fired some seven thousand employees, and needed to cajole the rest into keeping it at the forefront of chemical and electronic technology.

Or more precisely, what he perceived to be the forefront, in an age of change that was fast leaving him behind. “Everything is becoming so complex,” he complained, “…so intricate, so involved, so mixed up.”

(Morris 2019, pp.36-37)

Such occasions were torture for Edison. He was repulsed by the overeating, tired of being told that he was an intellectual superman. His disclaimer that genius was “one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration,” had become a cliche, yet the Pioneers clung to it – except perhaps the few who could remember him when he had been young, and they even younger: Francis Jehl and William Hammer, witnesses to the night his first viable lightbulb had burned and burned and burned; Charles Clarke and John Lieb, who had helped him power up that first square mile of Manhattan in ‘82; and Sammy Insull, his former factotum, rigger now than everyone else in the room, with the exception of Henry Ford. 

(Morris 2019, pp.59)

Since 1912 he had tolerated Ford’s obsequiousness as interest on the corporate loans and battery orders that flowed his way from Dearborn. It had been less easy for him, in recent years, to accept leather-bound volumes of The International Jew, a series of antisemitic newspaper articles in which Ford felt impelled to warn Aryans against such threats as the “Jewish Plan to Split Society” and “Jewish Jazz – Moran Music.” Edison avoided embarrassment by having his staff noncommittal acknowledge receipt of the books for him. “I know very little about Mr. Ford’s efforts. I do not want to get into any controversy about the English Irish Germans or Jews – even Yankees.”

Feeling himself thus unsullied, he agreed to accept Ford and Firestone as partners in establishing an official “Edison Botanic Research Corporation” to seriously address the issue of American dependency on foreign rubber. 

(Morris 2019, pp.61)

“All things come to him who hustles while he waits.”

This reached a crescendo when Hoover, ignoring protocol, insisted that he take the seat of honor. Mina, seeing that her husband still looked pale, urged that the evening’s speeches begin immediately. The toastmast, Owen D. Young of General Electric, agreed and spoke of “the vitality of spirit … aided by a little phosphorus” that had gotten young Al Edison tossed off a train at Smith’s Creek depot nearly seventy years before. He compared it to the glow of radium, which touched off another ovation for Madame Curie. Walter Barstow, president of the Pioneers, informed the guests that just when Edison had illuminated the building they sat in, a memorial tower in New Jersey burst into light at the spot where he had defeated darkness in 1879. Barstow quoted the inscription on the tower’s base: “The light once lit shall never dim, / But through all time shall honor him.” Then to laughter, he added Edison’s favorite saying, “All things come to him who hustles while he waits.”

(Morris 2019, pp.85)

“A nitroglycerine bomb dropped from one of our modern airships will do more damage than whole days of fighting did in Napoleon’s time. In other words, invention has got beyond the thirst for blood; the power of science that has been let loose must overwhelm aggressive diplomacy.”

If every battle monument in Europe were inscribed with its true cost in blood and money, Edison said, there would be no new ones. However, there was now a deterrent that he believed would have the same moral effect: “fear of indiscriminate annihilation” brought about by the development of the flying machine. “A nitroglycerine bomb dropped from one of our modern airships will do more damage than whole days of fighting did in Napoleon’s time.” No sane political leader would ever contemplate such carnage. “In other words, invention has got beyond the thirst for blood; the power of science that has been let loose must overwhelm aggressive diplomacy.”

(Morris 2019, pp.123)

“I’m a Progressive, because I’m young at sixty-five. And this is a young man’s movement. There are a lot of people who die in the head before they are fifty. They’re the ones who get shocked if you propose anything that wasn’t going when they were boys.”

That period happened to coincide with the political rise of progressivism, a largely white, middle-class, moralistic, and proregulatory insurgency drawing strength from the liberal wings of both major parties. In the election year of 1912 the movement rated a capital P with the founding of an official Progressive Party by bolters from the GOP. Its leader and formidable candidate for a third term in the White House was Theodore Roosevelt, running on the one hand (to use his favorite phrase) against the Republican president, William Howard Taft, and on the other against Woodrow Wilson, Democratic governor of New Jersey. 

Edison had always been a loyal Republican, and with his ear so consistently jammed against phonograph grilles that fall, he might have been expected to pay little attention to the distant barking of ideological debate around the country. But he surprised the writer Will Irwin, while watching a trial of his A-6 battery on the Orange electric railway system, by declaring for Roosevelt. 

“I’m a Progressive, because I’m young at sixty-five,” he said. “And this is a young man’s movement. There are a lot of people who die in the head before they are fifty. They’re the ones who get shocked if you propose anything that wasn’t going when they were boys.”

(Morris 2019, pp.131)

Within twenty-four hours the word talkie entered the vernacular. There was a rush by entrepreneurs, including Edison’s conniving son William, to acquire Kinetophone exhibition rights.

The show continued with six more demonstration shorts: the “Miserere from Il Trovatore, a scene from Planquette’s operetta The Chimes of Normandy with clinking coins and carillons, the quarrel of Brutus and Cassius in Julius Caesar, and three comic sketches that restored Edison’s good humor. Afterward, however, he was cautious in accepting the congratulations of reporters. “No machine is perfect,” he said. “Man is not perfect.” Nevertheless he could not disguise his pride in achieving a synthesis of all his experiments in phonography and cinematography. He said that he had “arrived at a place where ‘the movies’ are also to be known as the ‘talkies.’”

Within twenty-four hours the word talkie entered the vernacular. There was a rush by entrepreneurs, including Edison’s conniving son William, to acquire Kinetophone exhibition rights. The Chicago financier John R. Dos Passos offered a down payment of $1 million for a controlling interest in the venture. His envoy was staggered when Edison “just laughed” at the certified check, saying that he intended to “operate the machines and market them himself.” The successful bidder, representing a combine of the nation’s three largest vaudeville networks, accepted these conditions and named itself the American Talking Pictures Company. It contracted with Edison to manufacture three hundred systems and produce a steady supply of features to feed them. A national release date was set for 17 February, much to Hutchinson’s dread. The press preview had gone well because the room was small and the operators were well trained. But he did not see how he could ensure synchronism when the cord linkage expanded to the huge proportions of theaters like the Colonial in New York, let alone persuade unionized projectionists to learn a complex new technology. “This entire apparatus is the most unsatisfactory product we have ever turned out,” he warned Edison. “I can see all sorts of trouble ahead.”

As far as Edison was concerned, that was Hutchison’s problem. Never having cared much for movies as entertainment, he had an overriding interest in adapting the medium – with or without sound – for education. Besides, he wanted to get back to the improvement of his disk records, which did not satisfy him and were still unavailable for general distribution. 

(Morris 2019, pp.139-140)

Edison surmised, as if he were monitoring an experiment, that some chemical vats on the fourth floor had burst. The resultant spill would have mixed nitric, hydrochloric, and sulfuric acids into an aqua regia solution, corrosive enough to crumble masonry. 

(Morris 2019, pp.166)

He needed all the profits it and his outlying chemical factories could rack up, since the fire insurance he carried paid our a mere $287,000 on a claim of $919,788.

Production of Blue Amberol cylinders resumed on the last day of December. Now more than ever, the Phonograph Division had to be the chief source of Edison’s wealth. He needed all the profits it and his outlying chemical factories could rack up, since the fire insurance he carried paid our a mere $287,000 on a claim of $919,788. Far from being downcast, he radiated energy and excitement as he rose to the challenge of full recovery in the new year. “I am sixty-seven. … I’ve been through a lot of things like this. It protects a man from being afflicted with ennui.”

[December 9, 1914]

(Morris 2019, pp.168-169)

“My private opinion is that most of them lack imagination.”

For the next year and a half, Edison labored on land and at sea to perfect thirty-nine new devices, systems, strategies, and tactics of defense. Some of his ideas, such as a mast extension that lofted lookouts dizzily high in the sky, were landlubberly enough to amuse naval scientists. But as long as a thing worked, he scoffed at their criticism: “My private opinion is that most of them lack imagination.” He saw the war as a contrast of technologies, not ideologies, and explored every notion that might help win it: a wireless telegraph message scrambler; a nocturnal telescope; cannon-fired steel mesh drapes to slow the momentum of enemy torpedoes; a turbine-headed shell that obviated the need for rifling; underwater coastal surveillance stations; a grease of Vaseline infused with zinc dust for rustproofing submarine guns; a silicate-of-soda fire extinguisher that glazed coal embers; and a water brake for quick trurns of ship. In a particularly exuberant flight of fancy, he even proposed the dispatch of a fleet of self-steering skiffs to mine Belgium’s Zeebrugge Harbor.*

*Edison’s inventive flow was such that he begged Daniels in April, “Please do not send on other people’s ideas. … I have more now than I could ever work out.”

(Morris 2019, pp.200)

“If Nature had intended to use lead in batteries for powering vehicles she would not have made it so heavy.” 

He refused to accept the shibboleth that lead, iron, and sulfuric acid were the only reagents that would ever generate enough current to move a car independently. It was “very beautiful in theory” but flawed in practice “because of the inherent destructive influence” of its liquid electrolyte. At best, the massing of six of eight lead-lined, hard rubber cells* per vehicle caused a 15 percent loss of efficiency. Maintaining anything like that ratio for long required more skill and patience than most “automobilists” possessed – not to mention strength in lifting dud units out, a job that usually required two men. “If Nature had intended to use lead in batteries for powering vehicles,” Edison declared, “she would not have made it so heavy.” 

* The words battery and cell are confused today to the point of interchangeability. In Edison’s time, a battery was a group of cells. 

(Morris 2019, pp.220)

Considerably less entertaining, if horridly more watchable, was Porter’s next feature, Electrocuting an Elephant. Filmed at Coney Island on 4 January 1903, it documented the last minutes of Topsy, a circus pachyderm of uncertain temper who had to be put away for killing three men in three months. The last had been a drunken trainer who thought it would be amusing to feed her a lighted cigarette butt. Nodding and swaying, she followed her handlers onto a pad electrified with six thousand volts of direct current and allowed them to strap her into place. For a few seconds she stood still, then white fumes billowed around her feet, and she toppled like a punctured airship. The camera held her in close-up as she lay on her side, until her left hind leg, stiffly extended, relaxed and sank.*

*Electrocuting an Elephant has given rise to an internet myth that Topsy was deliberately killed by Edison in order to demonstrate the lethal danger of alternating current as opposed to his own preferred direct current. Her death was on the contrary ordered by Luna Park officials, who originally wanted to hang her. They were persuaded instead to adopt the triple method of poisoning, strangulation, and electrocution, with the approval of the Society of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Edison had no part in the filming of the documentary, although it was issued under his trade name. For his role in the development of the electric chair, see Part Four. 

(Morris 2019, pp.243-244)

The shapely undulations of Tom’s pen seemed to calm him down a little. He acknowledged that Edison had never done him any serious injury, “and you couldn’t if you wanted to – for I have injured myself too much to have anyone else do it.” He had rushed into his deal with Stilwell out of desperation, never having made one with his own father. There were, he confessed, some other name-selling contracts that Edison might find objectionable.* “My object in writing to you is to ascertain whether you are interested at all in their recovery – they are of course the only means by which I derive a living at present.”

* Edison was bothered throughout his career by the attempts of imitators and swindlers to sell products under his name. This explains his furious reaction when his own sons misused it. 

(Morris 2019, pp.245-246)

Edison showed some interest in Will’s design of a double-acting spark plug but could not help seeing it as a token of the new, unwelcome age of the gas-powered car. He sounded both worried and hopeful about the future when he lunched with an old friend, the artist and philosopher Elbert Hubbard. They were founder-members of the Jovian Society, a group of environmentalists promoting electricity as the clean energy of the future. Taking our a fresh cigar (“Just pass the matches, thank you!”), Edison launched into a polemic against other ignescent devices: 

Someday some fellow will invent a way of concentrating and storing sunshine to use instead of this old, absurd Prometheus scheme of fire. I’ll do the tick myself if someone doesn’t get at it. … 
This scheme of combustion in order to get power makes me sick to think of – it is so wasteful. … We should utilize natural forces and thus get all of our power. Sunshine is a form of energy, and the winds and the tides are manifestations of energy. Do we use them? Oh no; we burn up wood and coal, as renters burn up the front fence for fuel. We live like squatters, not as if we owned the property. There must surely come a time when heat and power will be stored in unlimited quantities in every community, all gathered by natural forces. Electricity ought to be as cheap as oxygen, for it cannot be destroyed. 
Now, I am not sure but that my new storage battery is the thing. 

(Morris 2019, pp.273)

The transfer of a personal library from one home to another is always, for an intellectual, a sign of irreversible change, and for an inventor, a transfer of test tubes and precision instruments amounts to the same thing. Edison accomplished both at the end of September 1882, taking a two-year lease on a gray stone townhouse at 25 Gramercy Park and opening a new laboratory on the top floor of the Bergmann factory at Avenue B and Seventeenth Street in Manhattan. For the time being he held on to his country house but said that “because of the women constantly bothering him,” he would henceforth operate out of New York.

(Morris 2019, pp.427)

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.* 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.”

* According to T.C. Martin, writing in the February 1894 issue of The Century Magazine, Edison wondered aloud if Tesla was a cannibal. 

(Morris 2019, pp.445-446)

“You cannot too soon take steps to prevent someone getting into the field ahead of you.”

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 transformers 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. 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.”

(Morris 2019, pp.471)

Earlier in the year Gov. David B. Hill, impressed by this argument, had signed a bill to abolish hanging as the state’s standard execution method, in favor of death by electricity – or electrocution, as it became known, to the distress of word purists. Few understood the implication of the decision better than Charles Batchelor, who nearly killed himself fixing a light on the Edison laboratory’s direct current system. Had the current been alternating, instead of flowing directly through him, he would unquestionably be dead at forty-two, mourned by all.* The savage sawing motion of AC, at hundreds of reversals a second, would have shredded every cell in his body. Or so Edison persuaded himself, on the basis of animal tests conducted on his own premises by Batchelor, Arthur Kennelly, and Harold P. Brown, an independent, passionate proponent of DC power.

* Experiments conducted in the 1970s confirmed what Edison had believed, but been unable to prove, in the 1880s: that AC current it two and a half to three times more lethal than DC. There is no evidence, however, that death by either is painless. 

(Morris 2019, pp.486)

All those who heard the miraculous machine in the ensuing months, from the president of the United States on down, reacted with equal disbelief. Since the dawn of humanity, religions had asserted without proof that the human soul would live on after the body rotted away. The human voice was a thing almost as unsubstantial as the soul, but it was a product of the body and therefore must die too – in fact, did die, evaporating like breath the moment each word, each phoneme was sounded. For that matter, even the notes of inanimate things – the tree falling in the wood, thunder rumbling, ice cracking – sounded once only, except if they were duplicated in shoes that themselves rapidly faded. 

(Morris 2019, pp.545)

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 worldly 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.

(Morris 2019, pp.633)

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References

Morris, Edmund. 2019. Edison. N.p.: Random House.

ISBN 978-0-8129-9311-0