The Wizard of Menlo Park (12 page)

He did not foresee that the very day he was drawing up this somber assessment, Sunday, 21 October 1879, his laboratory colleague Charles Batchelor spent ten hours evacuating the air in a bulb with an untested filament, a carbonized sewing thread. That night, the bulb was placed on a test stand and the power was switched on. The bulb burned on and on, passing the twenty-four-hour mark. Bets were laid down, and the round-the-clock vigil continued for a second night. It stayed on into the afternoon of Tuesday, having performed admirably for more than forty hours, when Edison decided to end the endurance test under normal conditions and increased the voltage until the bulb turned into a ball of dazzling white, and then—pop—burned out.

In retrospect, those forty hours would be looked upon with fondness as the first successful test of a durable incandescent filament, a breakthrough, but the laboratory records at the time show a laconic reaction. Batchelor wrote without affect that “we made some very interesting experiments with cotton thread,” but he was also testing at the same time fishing line, paper, cardboard, and other materials. We might guess that Edison’s premature declaration of success with platinum the year before made everyone at the laboratory wary of committing the same mistake again.

Edison could not trumpet the promising results in public because he had maintained all along that the necessary technical innovation had been accomplished in short order at the beginning of the initiative. He did tell the
New York Times
in a story published on 21 October 1879 that “the electric light is perfected,” allowing that unspecified problems “which have been puzzling me” had now been solved. Francis Upton had already learned, however, that Edison used “perfect” as verb or adjective without regard for conventional definitions, and it was best not to be carried along by his optimism. Upton discounted Edison’s claim that the Edison Electric Light Company stock was now worth a thousand dollars a share. “He is always sanguine,” Upton wrote his father about Edison, “and his valuations are on his hopes more than on his realities.” A couple of weeks after seeing the cotton-thread bulb burn steadily, Upton’s spirits had fallen again. “Continual trouble” continued to dim the electric light’s prospects, as “we cannot make what we want.” He acknowledged, and mocked, his own disappointment when it appeared that he and his fellow experimenters would never “see the untold millions roll in upon Menlo Park that my hopes want to see.”

And then, in mid-November, the work in the laboratory produced new excitement, when carbonized paper, bent into the shape of a horseshoe, was tested as a filament and proved more durable than the cotton thread had. Finally, Upton said, “we now know we have something.” He could not yet say whether the economics of electric light would make it competitive against gaslight, but at least the laboratory had a working prototype. By the end of November, private trading of shares of the Edison Electric Light Company had sent the price upward to vertiginous heights. No one associated with Edison’s laboratory then foresaw that commercial introduction of the electric light would still be three long years away. Upton, however, did not have to wait to enjoy pointing out that Father had not known best, that in giving up less than $300 in wages at that point, Upton’s shares were already worth more than $10,000. He told his father, “I cannot help laughing when I think how timid you were at home.” Already forgotten were his own doubts about the venture that had left him depressed only a few days before.

CHAPTER FIVE

STAGECRAFT

D
ECEMBER
1879–J
ANUARY 1881

N
EWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES
had made Edison famous with portraits created with words, not cameras. Were Edison to leave his laboratory for a rare trip to New York City, he could do so without attracting attention to himself. Occasionally, on a Saturday night, Edison would go into the city with Francis Jehl, a young assistant, taking in lowbrow theater, or a boxing match, or a streetside phrenological exam. As the two strolled at leisure, taking in the sights of card hustlers, street vendors, and quack doctors, Edison “enjoyed being incognito,” Jehl recalled in his memoirs. It is indeed remarkable that Edison could move in public with such ease, at the very time that one New York paper asserted that the general public discussed at greater length the probable life span of Edison than most anyone else in the world, “outside the crowned heads.” Edison was in possession of “more inventions than any man living,” and was all of thirty-two years old.

When Edison announced the perfection of his electric light, one fan expressed a wish to meet the great man and got her wish. But then, Sarah Bernhardt always got her wish. Bernhardt, a French actress and singer, enjoyed a movie star’s celebrity decades before movies were invented (and when they did arrive, Bernhardt became the medium’s first star). In December 1879, as she completed a run of stage performances in New York, Bernhardt was only thirty-five and, like Edison, a prodigy in her profession. But having made her acting debut at the age of eighteen, she had much more experience than he in the management of celebrity and was quite expert in the art of drawing attention to herself. She moved with an entourage as large as a contemporary hip-hop star’s posse. The juxtaposition of Bernhardt and Edison exposed their differences: he, uncomfortable with celebrity; she, fully in her element.

Bernhardt’s original plan was to pay a visit to Menlo Park in the early evening of 4 December, after giving a matinee performance in New York City, her last before traveling to Boston the next day. The plan failed to account for the delays caused by her overly appreciative fans. When her carriage arrived at the theater before the performance, a crowd of autograph seekers was waiting; it took twenty-five minutes to get from carriage to stage door. After the third act of
La Dame aux Camilias,
her American audience insisted on seventeen curtain calls, and then after the final act, another twenty-nine. She dispatched her sister out the rear door of the theater where Bernhardt herself was expected, then snuck out the front unnoticed. On her own, it took an extra hour to return to her hotel. By the time she and her party were ready to depart, it was ten o’clock. The train was a local doing a milk run; it took hours to deliver them to Menlo Park.

Upon arrival at the depot near Edison’s lab, Bernhardt, her furs, and her retinue were loaded into carriages and headed up the hill to Edison’s house. It was 2:00
A.M
., and waiting for the visitors in the bitterly cold night were four men, two women, and a girl. Never having seen a photograph of Edison, Bernhardt felt a moment of panic: Which one was he? When she leaped out of the coach, she received a bouquet of flowers from Mrs. Edison, she presumed. But she still could not figure out which of the four men, all of whom moved closer to her, was Mr. Edison. Then she picked him out: he was the one blushing slightly, and in his eyes she saw traces of irritation. With a start, she realized that her visit was bothering him: “He saw in my visit only the banal curiosity of a foreigner drunk on publicity. He already foresaw the interviews the day after, and the stupid remarks that would be put in his mouth. He suffered in advance for the ignorant questions that I was going to put to him, and the explanations that politeness would force him to give me; and for a minute Thomas Edison disliked me.”

Bernhardt then called upon “the full force of my seductive power to conquer this wonderful shy scientist,” and in her memoirs claims that they were soon “the best friends in the world.” Her credibility on what she observed during the tour of the laboratory and dinner served afterward is shaky—she described Edison’s electric light as so dazzling as to create “an impression of full daylight.” What Edison recalled about the visit in the interviews late in his life that serve as his memoirs was Bernhardt’s interest in everything she saw; her long dress that one of Edison’s assistants was assigned to watch carefully so that it was not caught in a machine; and the cumbersome process of translating everything from English into French. Ultimately, Bernhardt chose to treat him the same way as a member of the general American public did, idealizing the person whom Bernhardt called “this King of Light.”

Two years before Bernhardt’s visit, Edison had begun his own career in stage business, when he had brought a single prop—his new phonograph—to the offices of
Scientific American
. He subsequently had favored the use of his Menlo Park laboratory as his preferred stage, and, with the professionalism of an actor in a Broadway hit, had performed the same play, with the phonograph as costar, hundreds of times. During the whole of 1879, Edison had built his presentation around the electric light, but short-lived bulbs could not be displayed for long, so the performances were brief and infrequent. With the cardboard filament proving to be longer lived, however, Edison had begun taking steps in preparation for a full demonstration to the general public when Sarah Bernhardt had paid her visit. By that time, he had illuminated the front rooms of his and Upton’s houses with electric light, utilizing the gaslight fixtures. Bernhardt’s visit, which went well, served to bolster everyone’s confidence and speed preparations for lighting up the laboratory and opening its doors again to the public.

A month before, in November 1879, one of Edison’s reporter-friends, Edwin Fox of the
New York Herald,
was given exclusive access to the laboratory and to Edison for two weeks, while forty bulbs and fixtures were being installed throughout the laboratory buildings. As a condition of giving access, Edison had asked Fox to embargo his story until the date that Edison would provide him, when tests and preparations were complete. Fox accepted the arrangement and worked on the story; Upton helped with revisions.

On Sunday, 21 December 1879, the
Herald
published “Edison’s Light,” catching Edison by surprise and infuriating him. The article was flattering in the extreme, however, describing the completed light as a “little globe of sunshine,” without giving off gases, smoke, or odors. It gave all credit to one person, Edison. But as Edison knew full well, the publication of an article reporting the “perfection” of the light would bring yet another onslaught of curious visitors, for which preparations were not complete. He also knew that his reputation, already damaged during the previous year, would be irreparably harmed if the public once again expected to see a durable light and was again disappointed. A
New York Herald
editorial, “Edison’s Eureka—the Electric Light at Last,” spoke of how the public’s faith in the Wizard of Menlo Park had grown “feeble” when silence had followed the announcement the previous year of Edison’s invention. Now, the newspaper said, Edison finally had the goods to make the gas companies quail. For Edison, receiving such highly visible support was helpful to the cause, but the timing was hardly ideal.

The
Herald
article also made public all of the technical details that Edison’s many competitors in the incandescent light field could have hoped for. William Sawyer, for example, immediately fired off letters to the major newspapers, claiming that Edison was infringing on a number of his own patents. And when Edison was not infringing, Sawyer said, he was hawking technology that simply would not work. He dared Edison to run one of his bulbs three hours, explaining that even if Edison achieved a perfect vacuum inside the bulb, it would not last ten minutes. Edison returned the challenge, daring Sawyer to reach three hours with his own bulb. Sawyer responded by saying that the publicity that Edison was so skilled at generating for himself was a transparent ploy to raise money in the capital markets.

A conservative response to this provocation would have been for Edison to put off the demonstration until ready, placating newspapers with descriptions of the longevity of the latest bulbs built in the laboratory. At that time, Edison bragged that he had a bulb that had burned 108 hours; with assumptions that favored his case, he stretched this into a claim that this would provide a family with light for evening hours for twenty-four days. But stung by the skeptics and challengers who spoke up after the
Herald
article, Edison felt strongly that he now had to show, not tell. He responded with a public promise: In short order, no later than the end of that week, he would light up ten houses in Menlo Park with his electric light, and set up ten electric streetlamps.

When Egisto Fabbri, one of the directors of the Edison Electric Light Company, learned of Edison’s plan, he was aghast. On 26 December, Fabbri tried to find just the right tone to head off a premature demonstration. “I am much older than you are
and
a friend,” he wrote Edison, covering all angles, going on to suggest that it would be best if Edison were to first try out the electric lights, indoors and out, for one continuous week before inviting the public in. Fabbri made a good argument: “As long as you are trying private experiments, even before 50 people, partial failure, a mishap, would amount to nothing, but if you were to express yourself ready to give a public demonstration of what you considered a complete success, any disappointment would be extremely damaging, and probably more so than may appear to you as a scientific man.”

Edison was not accustomed to receiving suggestions from anyone, even key investors. He did not openly defy Fabbri, but instead of taking a week to carry out a nonpublic test, he devoted only one evening to the trial run. For a group of invited friends, he set up bulbs in the laboratory for a showing, from 6:00 to 10:00
P.M
. Each bulb gave about the same illumination as a gas jet, and there were no mishaps. The next night, on the twenty-eighth, uninvited strangers “of all classes” came to Menlo Park to see the light, said one newspaper account, and more arrived the next night. Those who “hold that Rome was built in a day” were disappointed that the lampposts that had been set up in a field as if they lined a real street still lacked electric lights, which awaited the arrival of another generator.

Two and then four more streetlamps were electrified. The boardinghouse of Edison’s neighbor Sarah Jordan was outfitted with lights and opened up to visitors. Just as quickly, the stream of tourists descending upon Menlo Park grew, with hundreds arriving in the daytime, even before nightfall. The laboratory itself was opened to the public, too. The number of people crowding into the limited space made work impossible; the laboratory assistants found themselves fully occupied answering questions, and trying to protect the equipment from damage. “Requests and notices not to touch or handle were unavailing,” said one report, and one of the best vacuum pumps was broken by some strangers who had given themselves permission to conduct their own experiments.

Edison was not, as his rival Sawyer charged, attempting just then to raise capital on Wall Street—the Edison Electric Light Company had been recapitalized just the previous month. But an incidental effect of placing his electric light in public view in Menlo Park was to excite the interest of traders. Company stock now was changing hands for $3,500 a share. Francis Upton received, and gladly accepted, an offer for five of his shares, at $5,000 a share, a tidy windfall for someone who had been paid $12 a week earlier in the year. The spike in prices did draw the censorious attention of the
New York Times,
which wrote in an editorial that “a suspicion arises that much of the appearance of success may be factitious and intended for stock-jobbing uses.”

On New Year’s Eve, extra trains were run to bring the curious to Menlo Park, and the laboratory added new stunts to the show. One bulb was submerged under water in a large glass jar, amazing onlookers with its ability to function. Across the room a lab assistant manually flicked one light on and off rapidly, as many times, it was claimed, as a household would switch a light on and off over the course of thirty years, and on it burned. Edison made himself available, putting on a performance on his own terms, wearing a rough suit of work clothes, and impressing the
New York Herald
as “a simple young man attired in the homeliest manner, using for his explanations not high sounding, technical terms, but the plainest and simplest language.”

The next day, however, on New Year’s, the numbers of visitors increased to the point that the crowd became unmanageable. The willingness of Edison to turn his laboratory into a public theater had succeeded, only too well. When he appeared, a shout, “There is Edison!” rang out, causing a surge of bodies in his direction. One report claimed that the crowds “more than once threatened to break down the timbers of the building,” a statement that may not have been hyperbole; the lab assistants were convinced that collapse was possible and hurried outside, bolstering the floor supports below with telegraph poles and lumber. Where the realm of science ended and that of entertainment began could no longer be distinguished, judging by the printed condemnation of the behavior of a minority of the visitors who “cared nothing for science, who regarded the laboratory as they would a circus.”