The Wizard of Menlo Park (11 page)

Members of the press, academics, investors—everyone made their own individual appeal for access to Edison. At the same time, he had nothing to show them that would withstand scrutiny. Edison’s position must have been uncomfortable, and all the more so because he had no close friend in whom he could confide. Stress may have played at least some role in a severe attack of neuralgia that kept him in bed on 23 October. Without being privy to a complete view of Edison’s predicament, Barker ascribed the attack to overindulgence in work. “Be regular about your meals and sleeping hours,” the amateur doctor advised, “or some day you will break down entirely.” Edison had a different theory about the cause of his malady: on seven successive nights he had looked too long into arc lights that he had set up. “I think electricity burned me,” he said. “I shall not repeat that trick.” When he recovered, he wore a floppy black sombrero in the lab for protection.

In the eyes of an entirely neutral party, the credit-reporting agency of R. G. Dun & Company, Edison was seen as “an untiring genius apt to run from one effort at invention to another without fully completing the work he is on.” His world renown was acknowledged; so, too, was a history of commercial disappointments: “the financial fruits seem to be mainly plucked by other hands.” The report summed up rather nicely Edison’s reputation and prospects:

Now claims to have solved the problem of furnishing cheap Electric light to dwellings & places where multitudes of single lights are required at less cost than gas. His claim is not yet demonstrated to be good, but if he is successful this time his ability to pay need not be questioned. He is reported to be a thoroughly honorable steady & industrious man. He must have some means but probably all his ready money is continually being planted in the expenses of his experimenting. It is impossible to Estimate his worth, or in fact to say that he has a class of assets valuable as a basis for credit.

Edison was not much interested in what a credit-reporting agency had to say about him, as he was not interested in obtaining commercial loans. When R. G. Dun wrote him a few years later for information about one of his companies, he scrawled some basic information in the margin as his reply, closing with “hope nobody will ever give us any credit.” What he sought were passive investors who would provide his laboratory with the funds necessary to make good on the breakthrough he had thought he had obtained in early September. He left negotiations to Grosvenor Lowrey, saying he did not care about the details, he simply needed money to “push the light rapidly.” In fact, he was in no position to do anything rapidly with the electric light; he first needed the money to make his incandescent filament durable.

Lowrey, in turn, told the senior executives at Western Union; Drexel, Morgan & Company; and his fellow law partners, all of whom wished to invest in Edison’s electric light venture, that “all serious difficulties have been overcome.” Lowrey knew just what to say to bring investors on board, letting them know that some refinement was still needed, but not letting them know so much that they were scared off. On 15 November, the newly formed Edison Electric Light Company gave Edison an advance royalty payment of $30,000, of which $25,000 was to go for work at the laboratory for “further necessary investigations and experiments” related to the light.

A few days later, some members of the company’s executive committee paid a visit to Menlo Park, and Lowrey did his best to convince Edison that such visits were helpful in making their expectations of progress more realistic. “It is all the better that they should see the rubbish and rejected devices of one sort and another,” Lowrey wrote Edison. When other company directors made another visit, Lowrey again labored to convince Edison that it was good that the backers had had “their imaginations somewhat tempered.” He wrote Edison: “They realize now that you are doing a man’s work upon a great problem and they think you have got the jug by the handle with a reasonable probability of carrying it safely to the well and bringing it back full.”

In a matter of just a few weeks, Edison had spent $19,000 of the $25,000 advance on a new laboratory building. When directors showed up at Menlo Park when the move was in progress, and Edison himself was not present to offer reassurance that all was well, the visitors saw “general dilapidation, ruin and havoc.” Lowrey met with the executive committee and shared with them what he later described to Edison as a “very good natured laugh over their disappointment at their visit.” Edison was fortunate that the committee members were so willing to tamp down their rising concern.

While Lowrey undertook the education of the company’s trustees, Edison continued to release little puff balls of news and anecdotes for the general public that were meaningless at best and outright misleading at worst. In his telling, work at the laboratory was going so well that he could not do anything, even clumsily dropping a tool, without improving his electric lightbulb. He claimed he had doubled the intensity of light in one of his platinum filaments after a screwdriver was accidentally dropped and bent it. From now on, he declared, he would make all of his filaments in the same misshapen form. Edison packaged this and other entertaining partial disclosures as if he were being candid to the point of being imprudent. “I have begun by taking the public into my confidence,” he told the public in December 1878, “and I don’t propose to keep from them anything I know, or propose to do, if I can help it.”

One blemish-free story was fed to the press for the public; another, more candid version went to the investors; and an uncensored version was provided only to his most senior, trusted employees. There were no financial conflicts-of-interest regulations in Edison’s era. In January 1879, when the Edison Electric Light Company issued 500 shares, there were only ten shareholders. One was Edison, who received 219 shares; but, significantly, one was Edwin Fox, of the
New York Herald,
and another was William Croffut, of the
New York Daily Graphic,
who received 8 and 5 shares respectively as gifts from Edison. Not having heard acknowledgment that Croffut had received his shares, Edison sent a follow-up note and received the following effusive reply:

My Dear Edison,

Yes! Bless you, yes, of course I got the five shares of stock and have been commercially ecstatic ever since. You are a brick. If I can do anything in the world for you at any time, order me up & I’ll go it alone.

The thank-you note that Fox sent to Edison treated the gift as recognition of past services rendered (it made Fox “truly sensible of the pleasing fact that my friendship is not unappreciated”), but he, too, served up fulsome flattery, closing with the wish that Edison continue in his “triumphal march to undying fame.”

Edison misled the general public, and, in more sophisticated fashion, the outside investors of the Edison Electric Light Company, not to effect a stock swindle but to buy precious time so that he could work his way out of the corner his premature boasts had backed him into. He did not confide to a diary or in letters how the discouraging results in the laboratory little resembled the daily miracles he publicly claimed or hinted at. But the mood in the lab is chronicled in the letters written home by one of Edison’s new hires, Francis Upton, a twenty-six-year-old physicist from Peabody, Massachusetts. Upton came from a background of privilege and formal academic training, different from Edison’s in every imaginable way. He had studied at Bowdoin College, in Maine, then at Princeton, and had done postgraduate work under Hermann von Helmholtz at Berlin University in Germany. Before being invited to Menlo Park, he had been a temporary subcontractor doing a patent search for Edison in the Astor Library in New York City. In November 1878, Edison offered him a permanent position, which Upton accepted without even knowing what he would be paid. Excited about the prospect of having his first real job, he wrote his father, “I cannot really believe that I am earning money.”

Upon arrival in Menlo Park, Upton was brought into Edison’s inner circle, even as he was referred to by some colleagues as “the mathematician” rather than by name. Edison, Batchelor, Upton, and three other assistants worked from 7:00
P.M
. to 7:00
A.M
.—a schedule necessitated by the well-intentioned visitors who made work during the day impossible. Edison complained that they would appear as a line of heads coming up the hill in the morning, “devour” his time, and then “pay for it with expressions of admiration.” When a tornado and fierce rain hit the area in early December, Edison and his staff were glad for the storm, as it kept the curious away for a day.

Upton arrived just at the moment when Edison was coming to the realization that he and his staff would never be able to make a durable electric light based on platinum. This conclusion, accepted most reluctantly, meant starting over. Alternative filament materials, which could reach incandescence without soon melting, all shared a similar vexing attribute: In the presence of oxygen, they oxidized, ruining the light. To prevent this, they had to be placed in a high vacuum that was difficult to achieve even with the best technology available at the time. It was the troublesome vacuum that Edison had thought he could avoid when he had rashly seized upon platinum as the “simple” solution.

Contrary to his published avowal that he would be perfectly candid with the public about the progress on the electric light, Edison did not tell reporters that he had hit a dead end. Even when he decided to tell the Edison Electric Light investors in late January, he had Stockton Griffin, his secretary, go into New York to deliver the news. Edison had no patience for attending personally to the care and feeding of his backers; that was for minions like Griffin or his attorney, Grosvenor Lowrey, to take care of. The most striking thing about how the investors received the news was their meekness—no one demanded that Edison appear to explain his failure to secure the first principles for a working incandescent bulb. On 25 January 1879, when Lowrey visited the offices of Fabbri & Chauncey on the same day that Griffin had come and gone delivering the news that Edison had been forced to abandon the platinum filament, the Edison Electric shareholders gathered around Lowrey and jokingly asked him if he knew anybody who would want to buy their shares. Lowrey did what he was supposed to do, dispensing homilies as Edison himself did, saying that doubt and tribulation accompanied any great accomplishment, and “this was just the time when we must all stand by the inventor.”

The investors did stand by the inventor, which was important to young Francis Upton, who, like any new hire at a start-up that was in trouble, spent much time wondering if he had made a mistake. In late February, Upton, reasoned, “I am learning a great deal and nothing will be likely to take that from me,” even if the venture ran aground. At times like early March 1879, when Upton wrote his family marveling that he was actually paid $12 a week for labor that “does not seem like work but like study and I enjoy it,” he seemed younger than his twenty-six years. A few weeks later, however, he had worked up the courage to ask Edison for a raise. Edison ruled that out, but offered to provide him with the fees Edison would receive for publishing magazine articles if Upton would serve as the ghostwriter who would “dress his thoughts for the press.” Flattered, Upton accepted the offer.

In May, when Upton was visiting his home in Peabody, he heard about a mill owner in Lawrence who was unhappy about paying $30,000 a month for gas lighting and interested in trying Edison’s light in his mill. He wrote Edison excitedly, offering to investigate the opportunity, and doing the arithmetic for his employer: “Three or four hundred thousand dollars a year are not to be sneezed at.” Inexperience with the world of business must have contributed to Upton’s failure to see that he was working with the wrong numbers. The mill owner paid the gas company $30,000
yearly,
not monthly, Upton sheepishly had to inform Edison.

Upton’s value was revealed not in business development but in the experimental work in the laboratory. In early June 1879, Edison offered to provide his young assistant a 5 percent share of equity in the Edison Electric Light Company. Edison made his offer to his protégé on an either/or basis: salary
or
equity, not both. At the time, Upton had not yet married and was childless, but he knew his financial obligations would soon become considerable. He was engaged and would be married later that summer when his fiancée returned from travels in Europe. He could see that the electric light was “far from perfection,” and there was no way of predicting when it would ever be ready for commercial introduction. Edison had difficulty letting go of his original design based on platinum, which served only to delay the inevitable day when all of his focus could be trained on alternatives.

In writing about his quandary to his father, Upton preserves the jumble of conflicting feelings he had at that moment. On the one hand, he wondered if he should ask Edison for 7.5 percent of the company instead of 5 percent, as Edison was anything but stingy when making such allocations. On the other hand, it was generous of Edison to have offered 5 percent, without requiring any contribution from Upton other than forgoing wages of $600 a year. Upton wrote, “I think it is not becoming in me to try and jew him.”

Upton’s father urged him to choose the salary, but Upton elected in July 1879 to take the offer of a 5 percent share of the company. He reasoned that a salary was ultimately dependent on the success of the electric light anyway, so he might as well select the option that provided the largest potential gains. He immediately felt a freedom as “master of my own time,” free to come and go as he pleased, confident that Edison trusted him that “I should know what is best.” As time passed, however, uncertainty about Edison Electric’s prospects grew. On 19 October, he wrote home, “The electric light goes on very slowly.” It was impossible not to think about the fact that if it were to succeed, “the money will come in enormous amounts.” But if the efforts were to end in failure, Upton said he would be “contented with the experience I shall have, though of course very much disappointed at not having the money.”