The Wizard of Menlo Park (18 page)

Outside of New York, Edison Electric sold a smattering of central power systems to small towns, but these did not serve as showcases. The second plant opened was the one hastily built in Appleton, Wisconsin, by the licensee who made his riskiest investment decisions while fishing. It was the nation’s first hydropower plant, but lacked voltmeters, ammeters, lightning protection, and fuses. Its poorly insulated wires shorted out frequently; its managers were unacquainted with cost accounting and set rates below cost. Operating expenses were paid for by ongoing issuance of company stock.

Six months after the start of business at Pearl Street, Edison Electric had failed to convert its establishment of central service in New York into a base for a growing business that sold similar systems to other large cities. The only line of products that sold well were the ones that Edison disdained, the on-site power plants. The company had sold more than 330 plants, some of which were larger than those installed in central stations. Edison Electric’s backers, who had waited patiently for four years and were now eager to see a return on their investment, urged Edison to promote the product line that customers were most interested in, the on-site plants. Edison sought vindication of his belief that centralized power generation was superior to distributed generation, but he acknowledged that here, too, he needed help to make a success of the central-station business. He appointed his own personal secretary, twenty-three-year-old Samuel Insull, to take charge of the campaign. Insull had immigrated from England two years before to work for Edison, and his employer had come to view him as indispensable. In his new position, Insull quickly closed sales in small towns in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York.

For Edison’s grandly conceived central stations, this was as good as it would get, it appeared: success gained one sale at a time, each on an exceedingly modest scale. He had the patience for a long campaign, if it were technical in nature. But for the slow process of winning customers, he was not well suited temperamentally. He needed technical mysteries and skeptical onlookers and drama. He was an impatient spectator, as when he was invited to Boston to attend a special performance at the Bijou Theatre, marking the debut of its newly installed electric light system. In the course of installing the new lights the theater had taken the daring step of removing the backup system, its gas fixtures. Power was supplied by a neighboring printer, which had installed the largest on-site power plant in the country. The governor was in attendance, and Edison brought along his closest associates, including Johnson, Bergmann, and Insull, all of whom arrived in formal evening dress. The performance began and all seemed well at first. Then Edison noticed that the stage lights were growing progressively dimmer. He and Johnson left their seats to investigate. At the printer’s, they discovered that the boilerman had been absorbed in repairing a steam leak, neglecting the boiler fire. When other members of the Edison Electric delegation arrived to see what was the matter, they found Edison and Johnson shoveling coal into the firebox. When the fire was stoked, they picked up their swallow-tailed coats and high hats and returned for the remainder of the performance.

The grander the scale of Edison’s ambitions, and the greater the skepticism that he had had to overcome, the happier he had been. Once the electric light had been introduced, however, he found himself in a difficult position. How could he possibly sustain the pace of accomplishments of the previous five years? He could not shrug off the expectation that the Wizard of Menlo Park could accomplish anything. He was thirty-five years old, and the rest of his long life was devoted to attempts to make the inspiration that brought the phonograph and the electric light return.

CHAPTER SEVEN

STARTING ANEW

T
HE MAN WHOSE
public image was of a wizard who could conjure whatever he wished faced daily at home his actual powerlessness: He could not make his wife well. She was plagued by headaches, panic attacks, and severe fatigue. In the summer of 1884, she insisted that the family move from their New York apartment at Gramercy Park back to the family house at Menlo Park. She died there on 9 August 1884, at the age of twenty-nine, succumbing to what her doctor termed “congestion of the brain.”

Edison was not prepared. His daughter Marion would later recall the image of her father “shaking with grief, weeping and sobbing so he could hardly tell me that Mother had died in the night.” Mary’s mother, Margaret, had already become the principal care-providing adult for the three Edison children. After Mary’s death, the two younger boys, Tom and Will, did not spend time with their father, but their daughter Marion, who was now twelve, became Edison’s constant companion. He removed her from Madam Mears’s Madison Avenue French Academy and continued her education at home. The curriculum was simple: He had her read ten pages daily from an encyclopedia. This freed her to accompany her father on horse rides, or visits to the theater. She also attended board meetings of the Edison Electric Light Company and stayed with her father until the wee hours of the morning at Delmonico’s.

Professionally, Edison was drifting, without an all-consuming project to blot out everything but the work itself. The electric light no longer needed him, and he did not know what to do with himself. Mercifully, his floundering took place out of public view, as newspapers and magazines had swiftly lost interest in him. His boast that electric lighting would replace gas lighting in homes had been more credible before Pearl Street had begun its service on a modest scale. A book about prominent New Yorkers that appeared that year noted how swiftly his public image had flipped, from that of a prodigy to a failure, an illustration of “the fitfulness of the fever of fame.”

Electric light had become more of a curiosity than an epoch-defining change. It was used to add novelty one evening to a parade sponsored by the Blaine-Logan presidential campaign of 1884. With Edison’s blessing, Edward Johnson and Charles Batchelor designed helmets equipped with lights that were worn by Edison Electric Light employees who marched down Madison Avenue on behalf of Blaine. Each marcher was connected by wires to a portable generating plant that accompanied the group, along with supporting coal and water carts for the steam engine.

In Philadelphia, the light-equipped helmets were put to another use when Edison’s company presented to the public the “Edison Darkey.” This was the name given in a caption in
Scientific American
to the African American men who were hired to hand out flyers at the 1884 Philadelphia Electrical Exhibition. They wore helmets that were wired to copper spikes on the heels of their shoes and drew power from electrified copper strips placed on the floor of the hall. One report said that they drew crowds of such size that their movement in the hall became impossible.

For a technology story to be interesting to the lay public, novelty was a prerequisite, and that became ever harder to supply. Longtime Edison associate William Hammer succeeded in garnering attention for a New Year’s Eve “electrical dinner” that he threw for guests at his home. Electricity was used throughout, beginning with invitations that had been written with an Edison electric pen. At Hammer’s house, the approach of a guest on the steps sent electrical signals that lit the veranda, rang the doorbell, and swung open the front door. Electricity supplied the power for self-operating bells, alarms, telephones, cigar lighters, phonographs, fans, musical instruments, and a lemonade pitcher equipped to deliver a nonlethal shock to the unwary person who picked it up, and other curiosities that served to give the house a haunted feel. “It seemed unsafe to sit down anywhere,” said one visitor. The party was intended to provide guests with a peek into the future, as if “they had been living half a century ahead of the new year.”

Even a good technology story, however, can never match the appeal of a good financial scandal. In 1885, John Roach, the shipbuilder who had worked with Edison to outfit the
Columbia,
tumbled into financial ruin and public humiliation. Roach had once been the preeminent shipbuilder in the country but had become overextended. It was he who later had leased to Edison the building in Lower Manhattan that Edison used to establish the Edison Machine Works. Edison was appalled by the callous mistreatment of Roach by his creditors. Roach was a fellow self-made man, who had been responsible for “feeding innumerable families,” and was deserving of respect, not persecution. Edison wrote privately, “For people who hound such men as these I would invent a special Hades. I would stricken [
sic
] them with the chronic sciatic neuralgia and cause them to wander forever stark naked with the arctic circle.”

Reading a headline such as “John Roach Embarrassed” in the
New York Times
must have given Edison a scare about his own situation. Just a year before, his own pinched finances had forced him to ask for Roach’s indulgence when Edison failed to pay rent on the Machine Works property. Edison blamed tardy payments from his foreign customers and his own costly experimental work. “I am desirous you should do me this favor,” he wrote Roach.

At the time of Roach’s financial collapse in 1885, one newspaper published rumors that Edison was himself financially hard-pressed. Neither Edison nor his associates deigned to publicly respond, but they did not need to. William Croffut, the reporter who had written many fawning articles about Edison over the years, wrote a piece claiming “personally to know that Mr. Edison is to-day what most people would call a rich man.”

The investors in Edison’s Electric Light Company, however, did not feel rich. They were grumbling that the price of the company’s shares had tumbled to levels that were a fifth or a sixth their peak value, attained when Edison’s electric light existed only as an announcement and long before it was introduced as reality. In 1885, three years after the start of service at Pearl Street, a director of the company who chose to remain anonymous complained to the
Philadelphia Press
that Edison insisted on taking an active part in the management of the company “although he is not a bit of a business man.” He gave an example of Edison’s poor judgment: Edison had proposed installing a new cable in Manhattan that would cost nearly $30,000 a mile, oblivious to the fact that Western Union had one with similar capacity in operation that had only cost $500 a mile. “If he would leave it to practical business men to make money out of it and stick to his inventions,” the director said, “the company would in time become very rich.”

For Edison, “sticking to his inventions” full-time would mean relinquishing control of Edison Electric, which was anathema. Managing his company did not engage him half as much as creating it, but he could not bring himself to let go of the captain’s chair. Edison’s intellectual interests, however, wandered from one minor project to the next. He had always done best when attempting something both entirely new and gargantuan in scale, but in the mid-1880s he could not find a suitable project. Around this time he asked his old friend Ezra Gilliland, who was a senior executive at the American Bell Telephone Company, what he should work on now that the electric light was “practically” out of his hands. Gilliland suggested that he return to the phonograph and make it “a practical instrument,” but Edison was unable to muster interest. An alternative area that Gilliland mentioned, train-based telegraphy, did not address a potential mass market of comparable size, but Gilliland had done work in this area himself and Edison leaped at the idea.

In short order the two men founded the Railway Telegraph and Telephone Company, and Edison tinkered in a small lab he set up on Avenue B. William Croffut obligingly offered “the Wizard Edison” the opportunity to publicly tout his latest enthusiasm without waiting to put laboratory work to a test in the real world. The article was based solely on one visit to Edison’s lab—and on what Edison said about his work, uncomplicated by independent verification. Pointing to a long board covered in tinfoil and suspended from the ceiling with ropes, Edison said that the device permitted him to “make electricity jump 35 feet through the air, carrying the message without spilling it.” The plan would be to install foil-covered boards lengthwise atop railcars so that telegrams could be sent and received by trains while passing by stations without stopping.

After Croffut’s puff piece appeared, Edison directed Samuel Insull to send Croffut fifty shares of the Railroad Telegraph company. Even judged by the looser journalistic ethics of that day, the gift was apparently deemed best delivered outside of the office (it was sent to Croffut’s home). In his note of thanks to Insull, Croffut wrote, “That’s what you wanted my private address for, is it, you rogue?” He asked Insull to pass on his appreciation to “Mr. Edison for his continual kindness.”

Edison had sent the shares with the message that they “may be worth something some day.” The new technology did not work well, however, and the company’s prospects diminished accordingly before “some day” could arrive. Put simply, the company was headed toward oblivion. Insull soon concluded that its prospective customers, the railroad companies, were unlikely to “adopt it with much of a ‘rush’” and tried to unload his own allocation of shares at a decent price, urging Edison to do the same.

The Railroad Telegraph did not occupy Edison the way that Pearl Street had in the years before service was launched in 1882. Now, nothing in his life did so. He wanted a wifely helpmate, and it is this that commanded his attention more than anything else the year following Mary’s death. Ezra Gilliland, and his wife, Lillian, would be a great help to Edison in this quest.

In February 1885, Edison had traveled to New Orleans to visit the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition. A world’s fair was a splendid place to show one’s wares, and Edison Electric had obtained the coveted contract to illuminate the fair’s main building, which covered thirty-three acres and was said to be the largest wooden structure in the world. While in New Orleans, thirty-eight-year-old Edison met nineteen-year-old Mina Miller, daughter of Lewis Miller, an Ohio industrialist whose agricultural machinery was on exhibit. Miss Miller had graduated from a Boston seminary the year before and while a student had been a frequent guest at the Gillilands’ home. (The circumstantial evidence suggests that Edison met the Millers, father and daughter, in New Orleans by the matchmaking designs of the Gillilands.)

The Gillilands had a summer house on the north shore of Boston Bay, which served as a place for Edison to try out a new sociable persona in the summer of 1885. Edison invited Insull, who was also single, to come up and join the group: “There is [
sic
] lots [of] pretty girls.” Edison himself had already fixed upon Miller as his choice for future wife, and Miller was spending the summer not on Boston Bay but with her parents at the Chautauqua Institution, on Chautauqua Lake, New York—the very place Edison had been scheduled in 1878 to present a talk before he canceled and fled on his trip west.

Chautauqua had been founded by two people. One was John Vincent, the insufferably self-important person who had pressed his uninvited opinions too hard on Edison in the early days of the phonograph. The other cofounder was Lewis Miller, Mina’s father. In 1885, Edison understood that Mina Miller was bound closely to Chautauqua, and he would have to make an appearance there during the summer program.

Edison spent the weeks preceding his first Chautauqua visit at the Gillilands’ to get comfortable with the new version of himself that he was trying on: a gregarious bon vivant, uninterested in work, filling summer days with frivolous entertainments such as boat rides, card games, and a variation of Truth or Dare for middle-aged participants. He seriously considered buying a yacht, before he came to the realization that his self-transformation was still incomplete—he recognized that he still lacked the ability to disregard the frightful expense.

One of the pastimes organized by the Gillilands was having the guests maintain individual diaries, which were to be passed around among the guests for the entertainment of the group. Edison was willing to go along, making entries for ten consecutive days in July 1885. The calligraphy is impeccable and the grammar without fault, suggesting the final version of writing had passed through at least one preliminary draft. The entries provide a window into what Thomas Edison wanted others—in particular, Mina Miller—to see as his inner feelings. The first entry established that Miller was the very first object of his thoughts upon waking that day; a later entry claimed that “it would stagger the mind of Raphael in a dream to imagine a being comparable to the Maid of Chautauqua.”

Edison reported that his daughter Marion invited him one day to toss a ball with her for the first game of catch he had played in his life. His receptiveness to new experiences extends to accepting the dress code of polite society—he wore a clean, starched white shirt, explaining that he submitted out of fear of the disapproval of Mrs. Gilliland. He picks up a book by Hawthorne but fails to be engaged, the reaction to be expected, he self-mockingly says, of a “literary barbarian.”